‘Michael’ Wants to Start Something It Can’t Finish. Plus: ‘Mother Mary’ With David Lowery!

Sean and Amanda are joined by our music biopic correspondent, Yasi Salek, to unpack their complicated feelings on the highly anticipated musical biopic ‘Michael.’ Before diving into the movie, they quickly cover some movie news: most importantly, the ‘Miami Vice’ reboot getting a new title and a release date (1:51). Then, they break down all of the good, the bad, and the ugly with ‘Michael’ and highlight why the re-creation of Michael Jackson’s music feels deeply special but is ultimately inside of something hollow and uninteresting (10:31). Next, they discuss David Lowery’s new gothic fantasia musical, ‘Mother Mary,’ starring Anne Hathaway, which they praise for its beautiful filmmaking and nuanced and complicated portrayal of relationships, creativity, and fame (55:14). Finally, Lowery joins the show and explains why casting Hathaway and Michaela Coel was crucial to the movie’s success, how ‘The Green Knight’ helped him realize he wanted to work on something smaller in scale, and why making the movie felt like a supernatural experience (1:10:10). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: David Lowery and Yasi Salek Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Camera Operators: Sarah Reddy, Donald LoBianco, and Ryan Todd 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.

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessy.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about Michael and Mary. Today on the show, we are digging into two new music-related releases with our pal from band Splain, Yassir Salah. Hello.

• 0:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Hello.

• 0:28Sean Fennessey?

  The first movie is the Michael Jackson biopic, "Michael", which is directed by Antoine Fuqua and stars Jackson's nephew Jafar. The second is David Lowery's Gothic fantasia, "Mother Mary". It's an extended two-hander about a fictional pop star played by Anne Hathaway and her costume designer stylist played by Michaela Cole. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Lowery. Our conversation was recorded live at Vidiot's after a screening of the movie. "Mother Mary" is an incredibly audacious piece of work and demands to be discussed. We will do that here as well. This is David's fourth time on the show after coming by to discuss a ghost story. "The Old Man and the Gun" and "The Green Knight", he's one of my favorite directors to speak with, so stick around for that. Programming note: On Tuesday, I promised you that the Physical Media High Council will return, and I was not lying.

• 1:13Sean Fennessey?

  We are opening the Sacred Chamber and reconvening Tracy Letts, Timothy Hitmaker Simons, and Chris Ryan for a special council meeting, and we want to hear your questions. That's right, it's the first-ever High Council consultation. That's [email protected]. [email protected]. Want to hear about recent Blu-ray and 4K buys, gear used at our houses, shelf space concerns, anxiety about the news that Disney is shutting down their home entertainment division, gleeful excitement about the forthcoming new Fight Club 4K? It's all on the table. Email us and we'll dig into your questions. But first, we have some movie news right after this.

• 1:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Yossi, you're here to talk about news. I haven't prepared you for this at all. Have you looked at the document?

• 1:56Amanda Dobbins?

  It's fine.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I'm freestyling today.

• 1:57Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:58Amanda Dobbins?

  We will break the news to you.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And then you can react, you know, you can press the button live in real time.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  I want to raw dog the pod.

• 2:05Sean Fennessey?

  You're gonna have to channel the spirit of Chris Ryan right now for this first piece of news because it's very important.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm listening.

• 2:11Sean Fennessey?

  Miami Vice 85. This is a new movie.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Major.

• 2:14Sean Fennessey?

  That has been greenlit, starring Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler as Crockett and Tubbs, directed by Joseph Kaczynski, he of F1 and Top Gun Maverick. August 6th, 2027 for Universal. You say what?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Couldn't be more stoked. I, as Chris Ryan, would say that this is my comfort food. I know that Christopher Ryan comes to Miami Vice when he's feeling low.

• 2:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  And I, as Yossi, say that it fits really in with my new bubbling theory that the 80s are so bad. Because I really feel like so much of our childhood things are starting to come back. It's like clockwork, we're at that point, and this is only furthering my theory.

• 2:58Sean Fennessey?

  And we're gonna be talking about that later in this episode, I think. What do you think about Miami Vice?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  We should be a proper country.

• 3:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's also been reported that Joseph Kaczynski officially out for Top Gun Maverick 3, except that's not official. It's just, that's...

• 3:10Sean Fennessey?

  You don't want to believe that.

• 3:11Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what, that's what the streets are saying. That's what Matt Ballady is saying and what I'm hearing. So I mourn that slightly, but sure, I like it when Chris Ryan's happy. I like Michael B. Jordan. I like Austin Butler. I like Go Fast Boats Mojito, you know? So...

• 3:28Speaker 02

  It's a shirt.

• 3:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Individually and together. So, um, why not? Great.

• 3:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 3:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Happy birthday to me in 2027. Will we still be podcasting then?

• 3:38Sean Fennessey?

  Your birthday movie.

• 3:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  Will you still be alive? Who could ever say? Maybe this will be the last day.

• 3:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that'll be like episode 1100, so we'll still be going.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  I hope that's the last movie you ever see before you die.

• 3:50Sean Fennessey?

  That would be pretty disappointing.

• 3:51Amanda Dobbins?

  It'll be the Ringo movie because that's the last Beatles movie and then I'm out.

• 3:54Sean Fennessey?

  Presumably, this movie is set in 1985. Is that, is that a good choice?

• 3:59Amanda Dobbins?

  What if they're both born in 85?

• 4:02Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I love it.

• 4:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And then they're, that's, well, it's aging both of them up a bit.

• 4:05Sean Fennessey?

  Or they just graduated in high school in 85, you know? They're the class of 85.

• 4:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I feel like... I'd like to see some like fantasy time period 80s Miami again. I think it could be really cool. It could be done well.

• 4:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's just there's a whole show called Miami Vice set in the 1980s in Miami. Like, we got that. We saw that already.

• 4:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah, because it's illegal to make a movie out of a TV show that already existed.

• 4:29Sean Fennessey?

  Wouldn't it be funny if it was 21 Jump Street style? You know, that if it was just a pure meta-comedy about Miami Vice and MBJ was being asked to flex those comic muscles? That would be interesting, no?

• 4:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, is Austin Butler funny?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, is Austin Butler. He was kinda funny.

• 4:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't need him to be funny.

• 4:44Sean Fennessey?

  On purpose?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Well, no, he was kinda funny in the, in the caught stealing movie.

• 4:51Amanda Dobbins?

  That wasn't his fault, but that didn't land. Maybe he can be goofy funny, and if, if Austin Butler is, you know, of the Brad Pitt school. Brad Pitt can be funny, but it, it is a specific type of comedy.

• 5:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's gotta be in the right scenario.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  I mean, he's no Don Johnson.

• 5:07Sean Fennessey?

  This isn't gonna be a comedy. It's gonna be a guys holding guns, shooting people and trying to get cocaine off of a boat kind of a movie, I think.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Let's fucking go.

• 5:14Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of movies where two men are probably dealing with drugs, Paper Tiger was acquired by Neon. This is the new film from James Gray, and it is officially going to the Cannes Film Festival, which Amanda sent a very excited text message to me about this.

• 5:28Amanda Dobbins?

  That's right, because I will be there at the premiere. James doesn't know that yet, nor does anyone at Neon. I'm announcing it now. Don't have a ticket, because that, that site isn't open yet. I'm very excited to be attending the premiere of Paper Tiger in Cannes. I don't, we both, you know, love James Gray and his films. This was one where it was, we assumed that it would happen, and it was not in the initial festival lineup. But they worked everything out. I'm excited. Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Miles Teller.

• 5:56Sean Fennessey?

  Miles Teller.

• 5:56Amanda Dobbins?

  We'll be talking about again, Miles Teller.

• 5:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 6:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, so, so that'll be great.

• 6:01Sean Fennessey?

  I'm very hopeful. I'm very excited about that movie. Also announced at the Cannes Film Festival, a movie called Victorian Psycho, which is my nickname for you. Zachary Wagon has a new movie that I've heard great things about, stars Micah Monroe, Jason Isaacs, Thomason Mackenzie and Ruth Wilson. That's going to, in certain regard, at Cannes. Few more titles trickling in there. And now, Yasi, I'll tell you, I have a lot of anxiety about not being able to see enough stuff when we go to Cannes. I'm only really gonna be there for about six days.

• 6:29Amanda Dobbins?

  You're only one man.

• 6:30Sean Fennessey?

  I'm just one person, and I'm gonna try to go to four movies a day and really do it up. But now, now the invites are coming in.

• 6:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 6:36Sean Fennessey?

  Come have a drink, come do a thing.

• 6:38Amanda Dobbins?

  So am I gonna-

• 6:39Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not good at that stuff.

• 6:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Am I gonna have to start sending you calendar invites for the things I require you to attend?

• 6:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Non-movie-wise?

• 6:47Sean Fennessey?

  Cause you need a wingman?

• 6:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly.

• 6:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, cause you know, no one else is coming to take me to the proms. So it's kind of like, you know, it's my last resort.

• 6:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Whoops. So, but you denied my Cannes Film Festival, uh, Google Calendar invite a year ago. Look who's laughing now. But will you accept the invites that I sent you?

• 7:09Sean Fennessey?

  TBD.

• 7:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 7:10Sean Fennessey?

  You, you've attended a European Film Festival with Amanda. Any tips?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  I, I had a wonderful time. She's a gorgeous and perfect partner in crime to go to things with, as long as there's no delays or lines.

• 7:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Well, I don't do well with-

• 7:24Sean Fennessey?

  Not a fan of lines.

• 7:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and European administrators. I would not say, I don't like American administrators either. I haven't met an administrator that I like.

• 7:33Sean Fennessey?

  One of the few things you have in common with Hitler, I would say.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 7:36Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that he was big into administrators. They were, they were his.

• 7:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Amanda Dobbins?

  They were his enforcers.

• 7:42Sean Fennessey?

  He didn't like that.

• 7:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Um, no, we had a grand old time.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  We loved to have a drink.

• 7:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  We loved to have a pasta.

• 7:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was wonderful.

• 7:50Sean Fennessey?

  They have pasta in Cannes?

• 7:52Amanda Dobbins?

  No, food's gonna be interesting.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Everywhere.

• 7:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, you know, they have, yeah, they also have French food and hopefully some seafood because we're by the, have you noticed that many of our invites have been like water themed?

• 8:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I have.

• 8:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 8:04Sean Fennessey?

  Not really my ideal location.

• 8:06Amanda Dobbins?

  But can I tell you that, so the Mediterranean is not really like a sand forward beach environment.

• 8:11Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, rocks?

• 8:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Sean Fennessey?

  I like rocks.

• 8:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Rocks, and then, you know, or a little pier that we walk on-

• 8:16Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I love a pier.

• 8:17Amanda Dobbins?

  To the, you know, the floating vessel.

• 8:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, constructed wood.

• 8:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 8:20Sean Fennessey?

  One of my favorite things.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Maybe you might need a sunscreen sponsor? Something to think about.

• 8:24Sean Fennessey?

  I'll bring some.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:25Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what, actually, I'm getting there before you. I will honestly, just, I will go buy you. I'm going to the pharmacy the day that I land. I'm picking up my pass, then I'm going to the pharmacy, and I'm buying all of my toiletries for the week, and I'll get you some European sunscreen, which is in fact better than American sunscreen.

• 8:41Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding. All right, well, this has been very helpful. Um, a little bit more news before we dig into Michael. Curry Barker, who's the director of this new horror movie coming out in May called Obsession, was officially hired to direct and, I guess, write, in addition to J.T. Mulner, a reboot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There have been several reboots of these movies over the years, one of the seminal horror films ever made. Glenn Powell is also producing this movie, though it does not seem like he's starring.

• 9:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 9:08Sean Fennessey?

  And it's interesting. Barker is yet another guy who has come from YouTube. There's this huge wave of mostly horror filmmakers who are coming from YouTube and transitioning to making studio movies. Do you care about Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

• 9:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Not like a super horror movie at all, you know that about me.

• 9:24Sean Fennessey?

  Why is that?

• 9:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I don't know. There's some I like, like I loved Sleepaway Camp.

• 9:29Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, sure.

• 9:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that was one that was really formative for me. Carrie.

• 9:32Sean Fennessey?

  Very transgressive movie.

• 9:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Sean Fennessey?

  Quite an ending on that movie.

• 9:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. You know what it is? I think, much like Amanda, I don't like jump scares.

• 9:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, you find them annoying.

• 9:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I find them annoying.

• 9:41Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 9:42Amanda Dobbins?

  But I couldn't.

• 9:43Sean Fennessey?

  So you're out on this?

• 9:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. I'll see it if you, you make me, but otherwise, probably not.

• 9:49Sean Fennessey?

  I don't make anybody do anything. I just want to put that out there. I encourage activations.

• 9:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 9:54Sean Fennessey?

  You know, do you want to be a part of what's going on here? All you gotta do is go see a movie.

• 9:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I liked Strange Darling, which is J.T. Mulner's last film, but I prefer chainsaws in like a humorous context. There's a, there's a, there's a great chainsaw gag in the Minions footage that we saw that really cracked me up, you know, so we'll see, but I, I'm open. I, I like horror movies now, as you know, so maybe I'll also go see Victorian.

• 10:20Sean Fennessey?

  Our new Scream Queen.

• 10:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Darling. I love that. No, Victorian Psycho.

• 10:23Sean Fennessey?

  Victorian Psycho and, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• 10:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm very interested in Victorian Psycho, because that's one of the best film names I've ever heard in my life.

• 10:28Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible, yeah.

• 10:29Amanda Dobbins?

  You had me at hello on that one.

• 10:31Sean Fennessey?

  Shall we talk about music movies?

• 10:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's why we're here.

• 10:35Sean Fennessey?

  It's why we're here. So you, were you last here for the Bruce Springsteen film? Deliver Me From Nowhere?

• 10:41Amanda Dobbins?

  That's right.

• 10:42Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that that film would have been more successful, given what we're discussing today? If it were simply called Bruce?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Do you think that was the problem?

• 10:49Sean Fennessey?

  No, I'm not saying that was the problem, but would it have been more successful?

• 10:52Amanda Dobbins?

  One thing I was positing on the, on the drive over because we have all just seen Michael together at, at the Americana because my invitation got lost in the mail.

• 11:05Sean Fennessey?

  I was also not invited to a screening of Michael.

• 11:07Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know what happened, Lionsgate. It's okay.

• 11:10Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 11:11Amanda Dobbins?

  So we, we went to see it in, in, at the Dolby, one of the Dolby theaters in the Americana. And then we drove right here to record this. And I will say, I left the film Michael, got in my car for brutal traffic and immediately turned on Thriller, the album. And I was thinking that if, if they, if this movie were called Thriller and not Michael, and were actually the Springsteen approach of let's just tell the making of one great album, arguably the greatest pop album ever recorded, then could it fix at least some of the problems that we had in Michael, but at least as, as a text before we got to, you

• 11:56Amanda Dobbins?

  know, the larger, you know, pop culture nightmare?

• 11:59Sean Fennessey?

  I love, I think that's super insightful. I think that could have been a way to elide a lot of the major challenges of this movie.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  I don't think scope was the film's issue.

• 12:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's one of them for me. It's one of them. It's not the only problem, obviously.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  If they were gonna bring the same tone and lens to that version, it would still, I think, humbly not be that successful.

• 12:20Sean Fennessey?

  I, I agree with you, but I think it would have lightened the load. And when I think about what my issues are with this movie, which we will probably go into detail at great length, it's got nothing to do with thinking about how the music was made, thinking about how the music was made and then watching the music be performed. And so let's, let's use that as an entry point to the conversation, which is basically like, what does Michael Jackson mean to you? We're all roughly the same age. We all come from roughly similar backgrounds. We're pop culture and music addicts.

• 12:49Sean Fennessey?

  Amanda, what is your exposure to Michael Jackson? How do you think about him then, now?

• 12:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I just said that I think Thriller might be the greatest pop album ever recorded. And despite everything else, you know, that has happened since the early 80s, that could still be true. And I was just absolutely rocking out in my car on the way here and also rocking out during the moments that the songs are performed in the movie Michael. I mean, he was everywhere. And by the time we became sentient, he was, he already existed as Michael Jackson and was the most famous person in the world. And so I was always kind of catching up. Like Thriller has always existed in my consciousness. Billie Jean, Bad, all of those, like, and even Bad, right?

• 13:37Amanda Dobbins?

  So we came to a bit later, we were talking about how Dangerous is a very formative album for us, and that was 1991. We were all young. Michael, the film, does not make it to Dangerous in 1991. So, but like, I literally remember watching the countdown to the black or white video be premiered on MTV. I remember I was like, visiting like my aunt's, like, family friends.

• 14:03Sean Fennessey?

  It premiered on Fox, right? I remember it being a huge deal. Macaulay Culkin and who played his father in the, at the beginning of the video, I can't recall, very famous actor. Anyway.

• 14:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't remember either. I just remember that.

• 14:15Sean Fennessey?

  Was it after an episode of The Simpsons that it premiered?

• 14:17Amanda Dobbins?

  It could have been. I was with like, strange teenage boys that somehow, but we were like, because it was like, family friends and we were all together, but we were like, we actually have to talk each other, to each other for long enough to sit down and watch this cultural event. So, I mean, he's, he's larger than life, or he was. And then, you know, we can, we can or cannot talk about the next 20 to 30 years.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I'm, sorry, I can like barely speak because I podcasted for five and a half hours yesterday about Madonna, but it's related. What I'm gonna say, it's like, going back to that time, like, I don't remember a time in my life that I didn't know who those two people were, Madonna and Michael Jackson. And I think I leaned over to you during the film and I was like, I was like, it's impossible to overstate how important and famous and iconic Michael Jackson was to the global world. It's not, nobody's like that anymore. We don't have that anymore. Like, watching footage, even though, I think we can all agree, maybe it's not our favorite movie of the world, I was getting emotional at some of the pieces of watching the fans

• 15:25Speaker 02

  cry in his presence, because that was real.

• 15:28Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  And we don't have that anymore. That level of pop star, I would argue, doesn't, is not able to exist anymore. We don't live in that kind of culture.

• 15:37Sean Fennessey?

  I agree with you. Um, you know, I'm a little bit older than you, but I also was born into a world where Michael Jackson not only existed, but was already dominating. And I was talking to my brother, my brother just turned 40, and we were talking yesterday, and-

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Welcome, Kyle.

• 15:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Kyle, you're in now. Um, and we were talking about how my mom had Off the Wall on vinyl, Thriller in Bad on cassette, and Dangerous was a CD I got for Christmas. It was one of the first CDs I got. And that you could kind of track the arc of the way that popular music was consumed and sold through the lens of Michael. And Michael gets into this a little bit around the idea of MTV and his relationship to MTV, which we can talk about. But, um, to say that I loved his music would be wildly understating it. I just thought he was the absolute coolest person on earth. And this, doing the show actually, over the years, has been this series of confrontations with Marvel characters and Star Wars, and, you know, you're having a lot of these moments

• 16:42Sean Fennessey?

  of like, looking at things you loved as a younger person and having to watch them get remade, rebooted, reimagined. And this is a unique one, because it's a real person. This is not He-Man. Like, this is a guy who existed, who lived. And so the movie has this huge burden. Of recapturing what made Michael Jackson so special. And I would make the case that the movie does a pretty good job of that. And the performances and the way that the music is staged. It's like, kind of stunning. How well they live up to a person who seemed like a supernatural event that happened in our lives. But then also, there's all of this other psychological and actual chaos and fallout from his life.

• 17:27Sean Fennessey?

  And the movie is kind of, starts to take it on, but then never follows through for a variety of reasons. And it erodes all of that magic and all of that feeling that you were describing of feeling so like, moved. By watching other people, actors, be moved by an actor playing Michael Jackson. So it's, it's such a unique movie proposition in its way. And like, it's kind of a huge failure, but also, I did have fun at times.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Also worth seeing, uh, well, the Jafar Jackson performance.

• 17:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, that's, we should say both Michael Jackson performances. Cause there's also a young Michael Jackson, played by Giuliano Cruvvaldi.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Who's amazing.

• 18:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Who's amazing. But Jafar Jackson as Thriller Michael, it's uncanny how, how close he is to the, to what I remember in my head.

• 18:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's it.

• 18:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And so, they do an incredible job of recreating all of the images and video that we know and had access to. And it is, it is like, uh, in the acting, it's more of a surface level impression, which he, he speaks as he spoke at that time, from what I know from like, very short interviews. And then just amazing physical performances. And the, like, the dancing and the physicality is totally excellent. But it is only recreating what we, the public, knew. There is nothing below the surface. There is no, um, attempt to, or certainly achievement of like, revealing something about Michael Jackson.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  And we have access to that. By the way, the original's on YouTube.

• 19:06Amanda Dobbins?

  It does kind of feel like a recreation. And it's amazing that there was someone else recreating Michael Jackson performing to the level that he is because he's not around anymore. And it's, it's still rare electrifying stuff. But that's all it is. It's just a recreation of existing tape.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't want to be like the wicked witch of the coming to shit on music biopics all the time as my like official big pick correspondent role.

• 19:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  But the, I said this on the Bruce Springsteen one, the reason I'm, it makes me upset is because these people deserve a better piece of art made about them. They were important and monumental figures and artists and like if I were Michael Jackson, I would come back from the dead and haunt these people for doing this to me. Like, the main framing of the film is like, I meant to pity this person. Did you not feel that way?

• 19:57Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I would like to talk about that with you guys because there's so many things, there's so many competing forces of motivation, I think, behind the film. On the surface, it's very easy to say, one, this is an act of brand management by the estate to generate more cash flow against what we all know and love about Michael Jackson, which is his music, his performances, his history, right? We've seen a bunch of movies, you've appeared on podcasts with us, there are a lot of movies like this now that are just like, Queen happened, Elton John happened, this great artist happened.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I do think Freddie Mercury did come to haunt Rami Malek because as you know, right after he won the Oscar, he fell right off the stage and I think Freddie pushed him.

• 20:33Sean Fennessey?

  He, that may be true, but it also won him an Academy Award, so he-

• 20:36Speaker 02

  But I think Freddie pushed him right after, I'm just saying, and the career after has not been giving, so.

• 20:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. In addition to that, though-

• 20:44Amanda Dobbins?

  The amateur, you know, it's just not what we want.

• 20:46Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't work out, no.

• 20:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Third hour of Oppenheimer, you know? Like, they're stacking up.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Freddie Mercury up in heaven like this.

• 20:52Sean Fennessey?

  Again, the film did achieve great success.

• 20:54Amanda Dobbins?

  He has a clipboard-

• 20:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Amanda Dobbins?

  -in a basement somewhere.

• 20:57Sean Fennessey?

  The second thing this movie wants to do is, it wants to at least tell you that it's going to psychologize why Michael Jackson was the way that he was.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:09Sean Fennessey?

  It wants to show you the origin stories, it wants to show you his relationship to his father, his quick rise to fame, the way that he felt unbeautiful, unaccepted, misunderstood, and how that led him to so many different pathways through his life. But it also wants to shield the audience completely from everything that we think we know about Michael Jackson that is ugly, sad, or scary.

• 21:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Sean Fennessey?

  And that includes allegations of pedophilia. It includes allegations of drug abuse. It includes allegations of a bizarre series of surgeries and a strange lifestyle. There's no one, to your point about him being the most famous person, there's no one more covered, more explored in our culture than Michael Jackson. And so we all come to the table, assuming you're, I guess, above the age of 15, with a ton of preconceived feelings about this person. So the movie also wants to kind of like beat them back or ignore them, but also show you why they happened at the same time?

• 22:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And also provide their answer to it. You know, there's the, there's a scene where Michael Jackson is like, is in an onstage accident and he's very badly burned. And they have the Michael character saying, "I don't want drugs, no matter how much pain I am in." And because the doctor is suggesting Demerol, which Demerol has really helped me through some tough times. But listen, shout out Demerol. If nobody got me, Demerol got me.

• 22:37Sean Fennessey?

  Huge win for Demerol.

• 22:38Amanda Dobbins?

  You give birth and then, and then tell me whether you don't want some Demerol. But um, it's getting, it, parts of the movie are also trying to like get ahead of some of those things that we know. And like, Booth, explain how they happened, but also maybe shift blame slightly?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  They're trying to be like, hurt people, hurt people.

• 23:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 23:02Sean Fennessey?

  Which is true. Like, I think it's actually okay to acknowledge that the American success tragedy of Michael Jackson is not the story of an individuated person who hurt people. There's, it's a link in a dynastic chain of pain.

• 23:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I totally agree.

• 23:16Sean Fennessey?

  And that's, it's okay to understand that, but it's not okay to not clarify with nuance.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  That's what it is. It's not okay to flatten it into like the most basic.

• 23:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Airplane, also, I think, but to your. Point that we were saying earlier, how there was, or did we not bring this up on mic yet, sorry, if we haven't, that there was a third hour of this film.

• 23:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we should talk about that.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Which does change the hurt people, hurt people. It, to me, it gives it a little bit more like reason to exist if they were leading up to doing something with it.

• 23:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, forgive me for being glib about this, but the, this film ends in, I guess, 1987 or 1988.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Eighty-nine.

• 23:57Sean Fennessey?

  Eighty-nine.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:58Sean Fennessey?

  And after bad, and there's a suggestion that the, his story will continue.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  That's quite literally what the last card says. It says, "His story will continue."

• 24:07Sean Fennessey?

  And I'll tell you what I thought of after that was Wicked, uh, and Wicked Part Two. Because everybody said when Wicked came out, this is the good half, and then what's coming is not going to be as good. And that's kind of Michael in a nutshell, too, where we pretty much, we saw obviously some very challenging stuff in his childhood where he's abused by his father.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:23Sean Fennessey?

  Which then leads to a lot of his feelings and actions.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, Joseph Jackson, Joe Jackson is the main villain, quote unquote, of.

• 24:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Almost also a little cartoonish.

• 24:32Sean Fennessey?

  Very cartoonish.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  If hurt people hurt people, it applies to everybody.

• 24:35Sean Fennessey?

  That's, well, that's the thing is, there's no psychology of Joe Jackson. We don't understand him.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Why did he become like this?

• 24:40Sean Fennessey?

  I had the same thought, Yasi. It's a really, it's, I think that's important to talk about that, because you can't lean on those ideas and only make Michael Jackson this sort of centerpiece of light without understanding everybody else around him. And the movie doesn't really make an effort to understand anybody else around him.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Zero real figures, except for his best friend.

• 24:58Sean Fennessey?

  Bubbles.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Bubbles.

• 24:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we got some of Bubbles in the psychology.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Really emotive CGI acting.

• 25:02Amanda Dobbins?

  A lot of bubbles.

• 25:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it does turn into a Planet of the Apes movie for like eight minutes, which is a very strange choice.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Really made Better Man be like Fellini, to be honest. And I'm a Better Man truther, I know Jack Sanders is, brother. I think it's a great movie, but like, in comparison to this CGI monkey movie, it's like Steve McQueen.

• 25:21Sean Fennessey?

  Musical biopic monkey movie, yes, I'll give you that.

• 25:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Which, that is a movie you've been on this podcast for, that's like, pretty good. It's, and it's also a biopic-ish movie that you've been on this podcast for, that does not feature people writing important thematic ideas in a notebook and then double underline them.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Which they did like three times.

• 25:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Which happened again in this movie. After the Springsteen movie, I was like, I cannot believe this.

• 25:45Sean Fennessey?

  There are a number of moments throughout this film that commit a few walk hard sins.

• 25:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Sean Fennessey?

  And some of them are also just illogical steps in the story of Michael Jackson that if you care about his history, they'll just like pop out to you. There was, there's a moment early on in the movie when the Jackson Five have signed with Motown. And Michael is recording alone in a studio. His brothers are watching him in the control room. It's his brothers and his father and Barry Gordy, played by Lorenz Tate, is sitting at the engineers, you know, at the table at the, in front of the board. And it looks like Barry Gordy is running the session and there's no one else in the room. And he's like pushing all the buttons. It's like, did Barry Gordy run the session for the Jackson Five?

• 26:24Amanda Dobbins?

  You can't move your feet while you're singing.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  There was no engineer present that day. No. Shout out Lorenz Tate, though. Still so hot. Good for you, sir.

• 26:31Sean Fennessey?

  Very handsome. I actually hurt my heart a little bit when I saw him. I was like, oh, he got Lorenz Tate and me along in this Michael Jackson movie. God damn.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  I want to Lauren Har- is it Laura Harriers' part? Like, she's just like showed up to be hot and smokes eggs.

• 26:41Sean Fennessey?

  Well, she's Suzanne the Past, who's a very important person in the Michael Jackson story, the Motown story.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Not according to that film.

• 26:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Five lines.

• 26:47Sean Fennessey?

  She's just a gal who says that's, that's natural born talent, right?

• 26:50Amanda Dobbins?

  She does look very beautiful.

• 26:51Sean Fennessey?

  She is. She's very, very beautiful. She, like every other actor in this movie, with the exception of Coleman Domingo, and the two actors who play Michael Jackson, don't really have any depth whatsoever.

• 27:02Sean Fennessey?

  But it does feel like, it does feel, I felt at times like the movie was almost taunting us with the things that we know about Michael Jackson. There are several scenes where Michael Jackson is just with children in the movie.

• 27:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 27:11Sean Fennessey?

  And it's obviously trying to say, well, he felt a connection to and a warmth towards and a love for kids.

• 27:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he felt like a kid himself. The movie circles back to this many times. There are many cutaways to the book Peter Pan and his relationship to the idea of Peter Pan.

• 27:24Amanda Dobbins?

  So many, many, also just not even just to the book Peter Pan, but to the specific page welcoming you to Neverland.

• 27:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 27:31Amanda Dobbins?

  There is, you know, there are little Easter eggs of, oh, you know, you think you know this about Michael Jackson? Well, you know, here is like a tiny little stuffed chimpanzee before Bubbles does actually show up on the scene.

• 27:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 27:45Amanda Dobbins?

  It's crazy.

• 27:45Sean Fennessey?

  And it, you know, the movie believes it, the movie believes it is doing something. That is helping us better understand this person. But it's impossible to watch those moments and not think about the other way that you can perceive what's on screen. And that ugly and terrible feeling, given what at least has been reported and very credible people have come forward and talked about over the years. So the whole thing is just, it's just a mess. Like, it's just an emotional mess on screen.

• 28:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It totally is. Can we talk a little bit about what Yasi alluded to, which is that there was an ending that does address some of the allegations that was filmed? And so the movie was made with a different ending. And then because of legal reasons, that entire third act of the film was scrapped. They did reshoots, like a whole new ending. So I can't tell whether, what the scenes that you're talking about and all the Easter eggs, which I agree are just like, kind of galling as you're watching them and certainly completely like juxtaposed against just like the very fun performances of Michael Jackson on stage.

• 29:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You're like, you get real whiplash.

• 29:03Sean Fennessey?

  It pulls you right out of the movie.

• 29:05Amanda Dobbins?

  So, but I can't tell whether those were, were put there because they're written for like a different ending.

• 29:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's reasonable to assume.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I would assume so.

• 29:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But so it makes me wonder about the ending and what they think they're setting up.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  They are legally barred from.

• 29:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean reportedly, there was a lot about allegations and settlements that were made in the movie and that Michael is portrayed as having overcome these challenges in the third act of what was meant to be, I think, more like a three hour mega biopic.

• 29:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  And. The challenges of the.

• 29:38Sean Fennessey?

  Of those allegations, you know, and the, you know, the hit on his public reputation and so on and so forth, and him being exonerated in the, in the public eye. And what the filmmakers did not know is that there was a clause in the settlements that identified that the, those settlements and those, those. People who participated could not be portrayed in any kind of dramatized scenario.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Brilliant legal work on their lawyers.

• 30:01Sean Fennessey?

  So that's obviously a nightmarish fiasco for the studio, for the filmmakers. And they had to junk all of this stuff. So what this movie is now is effectively like a two hour prequel for the trials of Michael Jackson.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:15Sean Fennessey?

  And then the second film will be so much of the ugliness. Now, there's some ugliness in this first part of his life, obviously. He's got these really devastating issues with his father and he catches fire at one point.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  None of the ugliness comes from him.

• 30:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  That's the problem.

• 30:30Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. And I would imagine that most of it won't be, quote, "coming from him in the second half," assuming we get a second movie. And based on how well this movie is likely to do.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 30:39Sean Fennessey?

  I would imagine a second movie is going to happen. It will. This movie is already not being very well received, kind of critically. But I do think by fans of Michael Jackson, of which there are still millions and many of whom who do not care about those allegations.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:53Sean Fennessey?

  And either do not believe or disinterest in it.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  It's an A minus cinema score. So, you know, people are... To your point, like, the performances and the songs are incredible. Listen, the whole time I was thinking, I was like, man, you could have just strung together 12 music videos and I would have come to the theater and seen it and felt emotionally exactly the same way without laughing.

• 31:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, you said that all this stuff is still on YouTube. You could have just run another documentary and it wouldn't have generated as much money, but it would have been a similarly, like, exuberant movie-going experience. Because there is like, there's just real exuberance. You know, watching him, you know, watching the young actor who portrays young Michael singing Jackson 5 songs. And like, I turned to you, whatever, 20 minutes in. And I was like, these are just the best songs of all time.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Wall of Wallbangers, just absolutely. Also, like, shout out Michael Bush and Dennis Tompkins. Put some respect on their name, they're not mentioned. They were the costume designers for Michael Jackson for 25 years and created all those iconic looks that I was so excited to see on screen because they're... Crazy good.

• 31:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  What's the implication, by the way, that the glove comes from the vitiligo? Like, he started wearing the glove because he had the vitiligo?

• 32:00Sean Fennessey?

  I believe so.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 32:01Sean Fennessey?

  And the movie does really make a point of that as he sits down for his first nose job.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:08Sean Fennessey?

  That he also speaks to a nurse about the vitiligo that he's been

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:13Sean Fennessey?

  diagnosed with, which leads to his skin coloration changing and

• 32:17Speaker 02

  That's really the only

• 32:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's another thing that's like, okay, I guess we just have to accept

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Maybe there was more about that later as in the second, third hour when he gets whiter in skin tone?

• 32:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. They, they do have him in the, in the moment where he asks to be put on MTV more.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:36Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's explained to him, was that Mike Myers?

• 32:40Sean Fennessey?

  It was Mike Myers.

• 32:41Amanda Dobbins?

  By Mike Myers.

• 32:41Sean Fennessey?

  Playing Walter Yetnikoff.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  I did not recognize him.

• 32:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 32:44Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's kind of an homage to Bohemian Rhapsody where he played the same charac- not the same character, but that, you know, a studio chief.

• 32:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's explained that MTV just won't play black artists.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  That's actually a pretty accurate

• 32:55Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 32:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And the way it was done by him is actually pretty accurate. They have a point of having Michael Jackson say like, I'm a proud black artist and it's very important to me that, you know, I'd be on MTV.

• 33:06Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, so the nose, the nose job scene was interesting because that was really the only time where anything was coming from the Michael character. They have the doctor come in and say, like, are you sure you want this? You're a pretty handsome guy.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:20Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's like, no, I need symmetry. I need to be, I need to be perfect. And that is really kind of the only characterization I can think of besides he loves animals and

• 33:30Speaker 02

  He wants to be his own man.

• 33:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, he needs

• 33:33Speaker 02

  The entire script, one third of the script is him saying that.

• 33:37Amanda Dobbins?

  That's one of the things he underlines in The Notebook.

• 33:40Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think that there's, he's, he's such a A wide open field of human psychology. That there's so many things that you could explore and that we assume and we don't know because you didn't talk about these things, but you know, masculinity, daddy issues, male beauty, being a black American, being a famous person.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Being the famous person.

• 34:09Sean Fennessey?

  All of these things, I mean, he is the lodestar for all of these ideas in America over the last 75 years.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  He's one of the first examples of like excessive celebrity plastic surgery. Like I can't think before that, I mean, Jocelyn Wildson, seeing the cat lady, but like someone who was that famous, that famous that you watched go from one person to a completely different person?

• 34:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was happening in real time. It wasn't like, it was during the heyday of his success, also not kind of after the effect to try to.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  The movie did a good job, I think, even though they were very subtle, this is one of the only things they were very subtle about, where his nose did keep changing.

• 34:45Sean Fennessey?

  And his skin keeps changing too.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  And they don't, but I was like, nobody in your family, there's not one scene where like Tito is like, bro, you look kind of crazy.

• 34:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the one thing I really liked was there's, there's one moment in particular later in the film where Michael is being pressured to do the victory tour with the Jacksons by his father. And his father obviously does not have his best intentions at heart, but he says to him, do you really want to live in a world where no one ever doesn't say anything other than yes to you?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  And that was a really sincere moment where you're like, oh, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day, Joe Jackson.

• 35:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and you know, he's kind of psychologically manipulating his son by saying something that he knows will resonate with him, which then eventually leads to, of course, the victory tour transpiring. Way more time spent on the victory tour in this movie than I ever would have guessed, but it is portrayed as this kind of pivotal moment in his young adult life.

• 35:35Sean Fennessey?

  You know, there's a couple of other people who get some screen time that you pointed out, had maybe a bigger role than we expected. There's a man named Bill Bray.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Sure. Bill Bray is the third leader of this film.

• 35:45Sean Fennessey?

  He really is.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  He is in almost every scene, just in the background like this.

• 35:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, no, and every once in a while, he gets like a concerned close up because he's meant to communicate that there is at least someone looking out for Michael, someone who understands this, this special person and.

• 36:02Amanda Dobbins?

  The impossible situation he's been put in.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's meant to emote for us.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  That he was like the omniscient narrator somehow. Cause he was always kind of there. And I asked you during the, I was like, was, cause a lot of that stuff, like how, who knows what happened in those rooms? Did it come from that man? Like, did, you know, like?

• 36:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't believe it was actually based on like his autobiography or anything. He passed away in 2005. Michael spoke about Bill Bray as though he were his second father. He was his real protector. He was the person who in, for, I think, probably more than 20 years was at his side all the time. And so there is something interesting about there being one person who is proximate to all of this craziness. I like that idea. The movie is just like, it becomes like a Mr. Show sketch at a certain point where like the camera keeps like zooming in on Bill Bray's reaction.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  I couldn't stop laughing. I'd be like, oh, there he is in the mirror.

• 36:55Amanda Dobbins?

  But also it does answer one of your mid movie questions, which is who drove him home from the nose job?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  That's true. It was Bill Bray. Cause he just walked in the door and I was like, you can't drive after a nose job, sir.

• 37:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Is it a same day procedure?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You can go home afterwards? Oh, cool.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  I haven't had one, but.

• 37:09Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't had one either. Hasn't crossed my mind.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, you have a nice nose.

• 37:13Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's nice to be the same.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  What do you think? I could use a nose job?

• 37:15Sean Fennessey?

  No, not at all.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Is that what you were thinking?

• 37:16Sean Fennessey?

  I actually don't think anybody should get plastic surgery ever.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know about that.

• 37:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Yeah. Well, that's okay. Good job.

• 37:22Sean Fennessey?

  I think we're all beautiful.

• 37:23Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, that's exciting.

• 37:24Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't think people should be judged on the way that they look.

• 37:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. He says on Netflix.

• 37:28Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I would prefer to not be judged if I could help it.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  You were, you talk about Hollywood for a living.

• 37:33Sean Fennessey?

  But I try to not do that. I actually don't, I, not to, not to stand on my soapbox. I, if someone looks good, I like to say that they look good. But if somebody doesn't look good, I, I try to not talk about that. Because I find it's counterproductive.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Much like Michael Jackson, you're a bit of a saint. As was portrayed in this movie.

• 37:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  That's what really got my gall, I gotta say, where I was like. He's, are we, are we trying to canonize him? Because I think he-

• 37:59Sean Fennessey?

  But we already did, like a hundred times over.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  With the real story of his life is enough for him to be one of the most important and mythical figures of all time. And in fact, far more interesting and compelling if you, they showed another side to him.

• 38:16Sean Fennessey?

  And- What do you think that could have been, though? Like if, because, you know, the Paul Schrader biopic of Michael Jackson, I of course would love to see. No one's gonna let that happen in the Michael Jackson estate.

• 38:25Amanda Dobbins?

  No one's gonna let any of this happen, guys. You don't get the music. If you get, if you show a blemish of him, this is total imagery habilitations. The estate allowed them to do this as a partner in it and gave them the music. And so you have to follow what the estate says.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  It wouldn't have been a blockbuster, but I would genuinely have watched a musicless version where they grapple with, like, his actual psyche.

• 38:46Sean Fennessey?

  Like Jimmy By Your Side, that movie starring André 3000, where there were no Jimi Hendrix songs, but we watch him kind of have a relationship in 1967.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I missed that one.

• 38:55Sean Fennessey?

  That one, there's a reason only, why, there were no Hendrix songs in it? You can't do that.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  I know, it's, it's rough. The music, I don't think, I, like, just keep thinking back, I'm like, Nico 1988, which no one has seen on earth.

• 39:05Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen it.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  It's so good because they show a real person. They show every part of this person, who was complicated and challenging. And I know we're never gonna get that. I understand, I'm not stupid, but I wish there's some, it seems like they wanted to try.

• 39:24Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there's something so fascinating about the Bruce movie being such a failure, too, because the Bruce movie is a real effort to, like, show wounds, you know, to say, here's why I'm fucked up, and here's how I used art to work through it. And I'm flawed, and I made mistakes, and, you know, I left this girl behind, and-

• 39:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Kind of, but I left this composite girl behind.

• 39:44Sean Fennessey?

  I agree, I was gonna say, the movie's got a lot of flaws. It's just, it's like an effort to do that, and with-

• 39:49Amanda Dobbins?

  But still managed, and Springsteen was a part of it. And what is told, is told, even, you know- Like, how much depression can we go through? And like, how much weakness? And when are you allowed to look sad? And when are you allowed to, you know, be handsome and bruised? You know, when they're involved.

• 40:06Sean Fennessey?

  Everything is managed, though.

• 40:07Amanda Dobbins?

  I know that.

• 40:08Sean Fennessey?

  Like, how do we get to a place? We're never gonna get to this place, I guess, is the point. Is that we're never gonna get to a place where the same feeling that, near the end of the film, when Human Nature is performed, and all three of us are like, oh, my god.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Shout out Steve Porcaro of Toto.

• 40:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Toto.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Do you know that? Sorry, not to ban Splain for a second, but this is actually so interesting. Steve Porcaro of Toto also inadvertently invented the drum machine by suggesting to the engineer who created the Lynton drum machine that, like, has live drum sounds, that he should make that. And then he went and made it and has, like, one guy playing real drums on it, and it's on Thriller.

• 40:41Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Very interesting.

• 40:42Sean Fennessey?

  I would say a lot of the people who were participants in writing the music on Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Lit a race from.

• 40:50Sean Fennessey?

  Rod Temperton's name is mentioned in the movie, but we don't really see him. We see Quincy Jones mostly just genuflecting before Michael's talent from inside of a booth somewhere.

• 40:59Amanda Dobbins?

  We don't see his contribution. How about my girl who we don't see, who doesn't exist at all?

• 41:06Sean Fennessey?

  Janet Jackson is not present in this movie.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  It's Janet, if you're nasty. And she's like, it's nothing in this film, babe, that I'm sorry for you, or I'm happy for you, but I'm not reading all that.

• 41:15Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't you assume she just asked to be not included in this narrative?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  I actually heard a rumor that they did initially include her, and they had to cut her out.

• 41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Because she saw the film and was like, fuck, out of here.

• 41:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely not to, through her own lawyers, which I hope more power to her.

• 41:30Sean Fennessey?

  An unusual amount of Latoya in the movie, and weirdly no Janet Jackson. And we know Michael and Janet were very close.

• 41:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Quincy Jones is also no longer with us, so I wonder how much his estate had to say.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  His estate probably pretty powerful, I guess.

• 41:41Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's interesting that he was effectively not present for anything that wasn't about creativity.

• 41:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:46Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think probably makes sense from his estate's perspective. I- I don't, I'd love to know what Miles Teller was thinking.

• 41:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I do too.

• 41:55Sean Fennessey?

  I find this to be an odd choice.

• 41:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Very odd choice.

• 41:58Sean Fennessey?

  For a person who is like legitimately famous.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  And like a really good actor.

• 42:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 42:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And now we've learned, congratulations to Miles Teller on the sale of, what's it, high drink?

• 42:07Sean Fennessey?

  Long drink.

• 42:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Long drink.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, he made a huge amount of money. That did make it into my news cycle.

• 42:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:12Sean Fennessey?

  Three hundred and twenty-five million dollars. So some years ago, Amanda and Bobby Wagner came to my garage and we did a movie star liquor taste test. Not on video, just audio. And one Friday afternoon, we got super drunk on the pod.

• 42:26Amanda Dobbins?

  We weren't medium drunk.

• 42:27Sean Fennessey?

  We got medium drunk on the pod. I evaded jury duty on that podcast. And we, we tasted Long Drink. And you know what? I loved it.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  What is it?

• 42:35Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was great.

• 42:36Amanda Dobbins?

  It was sort of, it was not that different than a hard seltzer, but better.

• 42:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's a Finnish drink. It's a Finnish company.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 42:45Sean Fennessey?

  Is it, I want to say like, it's not tangerine, it's not cantaloupe, it's like-

• 42:48Speaker 02

  It's like Nordic White Claw or something?

• 42:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Sort of.

• 42:51Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's a fair way to describe it.

• 42:52Amanda Dobbins?

  To me, it tasted like Fresca, but hard Fresca.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Love Fresca.

• 42:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, who doesn't?

• 42:56Sean Fennessey?

  Very enjoyable. Anyhow, I imagine if he had sold the company before this movie went into production, he wouldn't have done this movie.

• 43:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Probably not.

• 43:02Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm sure he went in feeling like, I love Michael Jackson.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Maybe he's a major Michael Jackson fan. I'd love to be a part of this.

• 43:07Sean Fennessey?

  I get that, but he has like 11 lines of dialogue in the movie and mostly just like, looks confidently at Michael Jackson.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Are they allowed to read the script before they say yes to the part?

• 43:15Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I think so.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Okay, well then that's a questionable choice.

• 43:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I was thinking about this with every single actor in the movie because the script did change. And so what do you do? And they're like, oh, well, sorry, guys, can't use the third hour. Now you're gonna have to reshoot this.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Still, any, some of that script was so ham-fisted, so over the top.

• 43:32Sean Fennessey?

  We haven't, okay, so this is an interesting thing. So we haven't talked about the fact that John Logan wrote this movie. Who wrote Gladiator. And Antoine Fuqua, who has directed many hugely successful movies, including Training Day, directed this movie. I think for the most part-

• 43:48Sean Fennessey?

  The movie actually has like surprisingly solid pacing and I didn't, you said it felt very long to you. I didn't feel like it felt very long. Um, I think because every six minutes they're like, do you like this song? And so it had this similar feeling of Bohemian Rhapsody where I was like, this is actively terrible, but I don't want to leave. And that's a unique brand of movie.

• 44:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You're waiting for the next song. Everything that happens in between the songs or the montages of them recording songs. And by the way, a lot of silly things happen in those montages, but they're set to amazing music. But anything that is musicless and just dialogue and two quote unquote, characters speaking to each other to advance the quote unquote, plot is really dire.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  There are three lines in this movie that are repeated in different ways. You're either a winner or you're a loser. You gotta be perfect. And I want to cut my own path. You have to let him cut his own path. You can't cut your own path. That's the entire script.

• 44:45Sean Fennessey?

  I just, I need more for Neil Long. Really one of my first faves.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  She was good.

• 44:49Sean Fennessey?

  She's doing her best. I mean, that another person with no agency or character like she just likes to watch old movies with her son. That's her whole character.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Still alive. Michael Jackson's mother. Didn't you realize that they called her mother? That was a little jarring for me.

• 45:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Big Mike Pence vibes there. Yeah. It's a tricky one. I, um, what, what, what else do you want to say? I mean, we can talk through every single song performance if you want to.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  I think just one thing I want to say that, and I don't want to get ahead of going into the next film, but I do think like one through line for me is that like fame is a mental illness. I couldn't believe this more by each passing day. Fame should be in the DSM five. It is, you cannot overcome it. Even with the modicum of fame I have, you recognize that they MC, which makes a lot of sense. I'm mentally ill from it. I have brain damage from the like 2% famous podcaster that I am. It's not okay.

• 45:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's not, it's, it's definitely not healthy and whatever, uh, low grade version of it we experience.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  We're suffering as well.

• 45:49Sean Fennessey?

  It clearly has damaged all of us. And so.

• 45:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Imagine being.

• 45:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm sure you are.

• 45:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Thanks for the Negronis, everyone. Yeah, I love the free stuff. Don't, don't stop sending the free stuff.

• 45:57Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's, I think it's not hard to feel empathy for eight-year-old Michael Jackson being thrust into a world that he doesn't want to have any part of.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  I can feel empathy for adult Michael Jackson being so psychologically twisted that he makes, whatever the questionable choices were, that he does questionable things. I am willing to actually extend that level of grace because I think that that's a very true thing and it would ring true to people and especially his fans.

• 46:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. I know, but by the same token, you just, you can't equalize the whitewashing reputationally of the, you know, accusers of the allegations and how they would be feeling watching Michael Jackson's star once again be elevated onto 3, 3,500 screens and people like us having chills watching him perform music. The whole thing is, it's impossible to just like settle it in your mind.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  The documentary, did you see the documentary?

• 46:53Sean Fennessey?

  Leaving Neverland, yes.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  That I thought was brilliant in how it handled it. It left you being like, oh, you know, like, it wasn't like, it didn't have a point of view to the, that it was shoving down your throat. It was so good at kind of doing what I wish this film had done, which, which I guess, I can know they would never do that, but like you walked away and you were like, I don't know what to think, you know, like in some ways.

• 47:16Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like that film is pretty definitive at times. Yeah, but here's the thing, after I saw that movie, which I found to be extremely powerful and credible.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:25Sean Fennessey?

  I thought to myself, I'll never have the same relationship to Michael Jackson again. But the truth is that when I listen to these songs and when I watch sequences in this movie, I still feel like the kid who was eight years old who loved listening to Bad and who loved watching those music videos. And it's, there's something about this unbreakable connection to culture that we make at a young age that like, it can't change no matter what we learn. Like, you know, to this day, people, you know, ask me about Kanye West because like, I spent time with Kanye West in the 2000s and I, I loved his music more than anything. And they're like, well, how do you feel now asshole? And I'm like, I can't change how I felt at that time about him.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Well, you got asked about Woody Allen.

• 48:05Sean Fennessey?

  Same thing.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  To be definitively clear, I'm Didn't say I don't know what to think as I don't believe the accusers. That's not what I meant. It just was more that it was like, you see, you kind of are like, oh, God, I feel bad also for Michael Jackson.

• 48:17Sean Fennessey?

  The whole thing is just a nightmare.

• 48:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah. So what, what we're talking about, at least in terms of Michael Jackson's music and, you know, all the other complicated relationships. You know, it's the classic separating the art and the artist, which is very difficult. And can you do it? I don't know. And we'll continue, like, we will certainly wrestle with it on this podcast.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  It's a personal choice.

• 48:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but, but listen, that's just, that's something that you work on as a consumer of art. But that's not what this movie is asking us to do. This movie is about the artist, not the, and, and it's the artist creating the art. But this is quite literally a biopic about the artist. So I, it's, it's just kind of, it's glaring. It's not even the elephant in the room. It is just, it is completely omitted. And we know that actually from the making of the film itself, it's just a whole chapter of his life that is just missing. It's an incomplete movie.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  It's not even about the art, which is, I think, what, what that also got me. The whole time I was like, I want to know more than, fine, then tell me more about why, what's behind these songs.

• 49:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Why did you choose these looks? Like, what, what was your thinking around your presentation, around the songs you chose, around what you were trying to communicate when you wrote these lyrics? Like, I would have, there's none of that in the film either, except that he's like, I like to have the gang members teach me how to dance. This is a seawalk.

• 49:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I forgot about that until just now. That was so crazy. Remember?

• 49:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, that's based in fact, I don't know if it actually played out the way that it plays out in the movie.

• 49:42Amanda Dobbins?

  So he's alone in the studio. Well, he's alone in the studio, working on the tracklist for Thriller. And then he looks up to see a breaking news local segment, like about the gang violence in Los Angeles. Learns about that and then is led to, to hold this summit.

• 50:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Which, you know, I, maybe that's how he was learning about things. You know, he did live a, like a pretty.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  He didn't have X.com.

• 50:10Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true. He was not like out in the world a lot. It was a series of rooms for him.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Twister with bubbles, as we saw.

• 50:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that was sad.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  It was actually really sad.

• 50:20Sean Fennessey?

  I want to talk about one thing that I found interesting about Michael Jackson when I was younger. And that I still am interested in, in his music, that is in direct contrast to his public persona and the way that he spoke in interviews. Which is that his music. Especially from Thriller on, was extremely attitudinal and aggressive.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 50:40Sean Fennessey?

  And it was very, his vocal inflections, the phrasing in the lyric writing, the energy that he communicated as a vocalist was, could be angry, could be arrogant, could be very different from the very soft voiced man who you saw, who just talked about healing the world. And my favorite Michael Jackson song by far is Leave Me Alone, which is, I think it's the, I think it's the last song on Bad. It might be one of the last songs on Bad. And I was always fascinated by that video, which, you know,

• 51:14Speaker 02

  The bonus track.

• 51:15Sean Fennessey?

  The bonus track, featured the bones of the Elephant Man and the sort of like animation of moving through the circus mind of Michael Jackson, this kind of hall of mirrors that he has to endure as a famous person. It was written in response to all the wacko, jacko stuff and his relationship to Bubbles. And it's, it's one of the clearest evocations we have of his psychology and the way that he was responding to becoming a famous person. Leave Me Alone is not in the movie.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:39Sean Fennessey?

  And that, a whole persona, even the persona that you find in Beat It or in Billie Jean, where there's like, just this rage and this swagger and all of this stuff that was endemic to his music is not in the movie, is not explored about him as a person. And maybe he only used his art to explore those things. Maybe that was the only place where you found it. But as a fan of his, like, you could have the same attitude towards the world by loving his music that you could by listening to Nirvana. He actually was like a very singular, personal artist who wrote about how he was feeling about things and explored them in a musical style, in addition to also just being somebody who made 300 million people happy with the universality of his music.

• 52:21Sean Fennessey?

  And there's also none of that in this movie. There's no, there's no like, where did Billie Jean come from?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. Where's the, if he got angry, which he clearly had every cause to be,

• 52:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Why don't we never see him get angry? He only is sad and scared. He's sad, he's scared. He's sad, he's scared.

• 52:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And then he gets on stage.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  And then he gets on stage and says, I'm not doing this anymore.

• 52:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, but first, I mean, his, you know, his dancing and the choreography is also equally like forceful.

• 52:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, exactly.

• 52:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Like a complete contrast with the person that he is offstage, which is interesting. But once again, this movie

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Doesn't.

• 52:54Amanda Dobbins?

  is not interested in tension because

• 52:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Amanda Dobbins?

  it was made with legal handcuffs.

• 52:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's, I knew I would be a little bit flummoxed by this. Like, I knew the movie was likely to be not, quote unquote, "not good," right? That it was, there were gonna be dramatic sequences that were cringe-worthy, that there was gonna be performances that seemed over the top, that it was only gonna be serving at the altar of Michael's hagiography. But it's so much more challenging to me than Bohemian Rhapsody or Deliver Me From Nowhere because of the paradox of Michael Jackson, because of the incredible wonder that he instills and the anguish, I think, that he represents for a lot of people.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I had the chills during the movie. I'm just like, even being transported back to that place is really special. So, oh, we'll sing, I guess, if you like Michael Jackson.

• 53:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very relevant cultural artifact of modern Hollywood, for sure.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  You can remember what it was like when we had that level of pop star that moved that many people.

• 53:52Sean Fennessey?

  Is there any other thing you would have wanted to see? A song, a performance, a moment from his career that is not represented here? Obviously, pre-1990.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Well, that's hard because, you know, that cuts off Dangerous and also the Free Willy song, which, yeah, listen.

• 54:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, was that Heal the World?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  No, that's Will You Be There?

• 54:10Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  With the choir, come on. It's 91, but I would have wanted to see him attend the Oscars with Madonna. Because...

• 54:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Brooke Shields not included in this film. You know, a handful of the girlfriends, the friends, the people who attended things with him are not present in this. It really is like the boy in the bubble with bubbles. Like, that's how he's portrayed in the movie.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  I do think he was like an extremely lonely person, and they did get that across. And those were largely, like, I think, press-up people. But could have seen them.

• 54:42Amanda Dobbins?

  This episode is brought to you by Apple and AT&T. Scroll long enough and you'll hear it all. Miracle diets, fitness trends, you name it. But with iPhone and Apple Watch, you get meaningful insights from a very trusted source: your body. You can track sleep quality, cardio fitness, and more, then unpack all the information in the Health app on iPhone to get a picture of your overall health. These health insights are developed with clinical experts from start to finish. Find out more at apple.com/health. Apple Watch is not a medical device and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice.

• 55:14Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, should we pivot away from Michael?

• 55:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 55:16Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about Mother Mary. Fascinating movie, as you say, sort of similarly related in its portrayal of a major pop star going through a crisis with where we have some understanding of the origins of that crisis. This is the new movie from David Lowery starring Anne Hathaway, Michaela Cole, Hunter Schafer, FK, Twigs, a whole host of people, including my girl, Kaia Gerber. We'll get to that in a minute. The log line of the movie is, "Long buried wounds rise to the surface when iconic pop star Mother Mary reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer on the eve of her comeback performance." What did you think of this, Amanda?

• 55:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I like pop star movies, and this very much is, and I appreciated the attention to detail of creating this pop star world, which is, you know, what the movie is about. Anne Hathaway plays a pop star named Mother Mary, who has some Gaga, some Beyonce, a lot of Madonna. Definitely some Madonna. For sure. I mean, obviously, it's, you know, right there in the, in the title. And she has had a falling out with her creative director, essentially played by Michaela Cole. And it has all of those people, but it's really like a two-hander about how you create something and, and ownership and the relationship, the creative partnership.

• 56:37Amanda Dobbins?

  And I thought maybe just also about relationships and breakups in general. You know, there is something archetypal about what's going on here, but I, all of the, the pop star recreations, the performances, the songs, the dresses, the, the world that they create was really credible. And I thought interesting. And I thought about like, how much time Anne Hathaway must have spent. Preparing for this?

• 57:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Because it is, again, she is performing, she can obviously sing, but there is choreography. There is some even like non-performance choreography that she has to do that's amazing.

• 57:17Sean Fennessey?

  A lot, yeah.

• 57:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Incredible. So, I, you know, I like it when people go all in on, on something a little strange and also something that is in my interest set.

• 57:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What did you think, your chronicler of modern pop and rock iconography?

• 57:30Speaker 02

  I loved it. This movie is like very Yossi core, where I'm like, I love a movie where I get to have my own inputs on what it means. I think that that is a, if you're a person who likes a movie, um, explained in detail for you what they're saying, this is not a movie for you. Also, if you're a person who hates women, not a movie. You guys remember the Bechdel test?

• 57:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  There's not a single man in this film. I don't think, or if there is, they're not ever, they're not a character.

• 58:01Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think there's a single man.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Ever in my life, and I'm sure there are examples, and I'm sure you know them off the top of your head, but me personally, I don't think I've ever seen a film in my life that doesn't have one single man in it. Not to put my pink pussy hat right back on for the big picture.

• 58:16Sean Fennessey?

  You know what? I haven't thought about it that way, but that obviously is a big part of it. I think, and it's interesting too, because it is not a rah rah feminism movie, anyway.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  No, it's not about that.

• 58:25Sean Fennessey?

  It is much more about, I think, what Amanda is circling, which is like the nature of these creative relationships and partnerships and maybe even love relationships.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 58:32Sean Fennessey?

  And the ways in which they break and come back together. But then also, the movie is this phantasmagoric kind of ghost story in the second half. And sort of like, what is underpinning creativity? And where are ideas coming from? And what happens to people? Like, can you be spent? Can you be haunted by something and it allows you to not go forward with your creativity? When I talked to David at the video screening, which you guys were both at, I was basically like, and I never do this. I was like, what's this movie about?

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:59Sean Fennessey?

  Cause I did, I did, I agree with what you're saying about there being different inputs and different ways to read into it. And what I just said is like, that's my reading of it.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:05Sean Fennessey?

  But other people might see it as something different. Like, is this a queer romance? Is this like an existential dread movie about like, being at the end of your life or the end of your, you know, vitality? Like, there's a lot of- Different ways to read it.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Well.

• 59:17Sean Fennessey?

  And it's pretty cool as well.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  It's so like, it was just so beautiful and fun to watch, like so lush and gorgeous. And I loved like all the textures because it's about, it's partially about fashion.

• 59:29Amanda Dobbins?

  And like Michaela Cole is cutting fabric and they have actually good stuff. And we sit through so many movies about this, you know, world where, and, and just about worlds where visual representation is very important, which by the way is what cinema is. And, and people take shortcuts and this felt really lived in.

• 59:49Sean Fennessey?

  You mentioned that the, the costume designers from Michael Jackson are sort of like not mentioned in, in the Michael movie. And this movie obviously is about how there's always someone or many people behind these icons that we love.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  That's one of my central preoccupations. So that's another reason I think I really liked the movie. Like the idea of being, working in the service of another person's creativity. Because even though that is her creativity, the costume designer played by Michaela Cole, it is in the service of Mother Mary, right? And what kind of person you have to be to be okay with that? Because you won't get the credit. You never really, a manager, a publicist and, you know, a choreographer. These people are all in the service of someone else's light. And I thought that was dealt with really interesting. I thought the, the meta, using the red, actually it's really funny because there's, there's a line that I just remembered where I think Anne Hathaway is like, this is too many metaphors. And I was like, that's very funny that he put that in there.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  But like that red piece of silk or cloth or whatever, like can.

• 1:00:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I believe it was a puppet.

• 1:00:50Sean Fennessey?

  It is a puppet.

• 1:00:50Amanda Dobbins?

  David, yeah, David Lowery, what's up to my, to my puppet crew.

• 1:00:54Sean Fennessey?

  He's a puppet boy, just like me.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  It's got to move, it's got to move.

• 1:00:56Sean Fennessey?

  Puppet girl over here, yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  You'd rather a CGI bubbles? No, we want a puppet forever.

• 1:01:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's a movie about pageantry. You want it to be real, right?

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  But I found it like, again, a place that you can put anything. I was like, oh, this could be resentment. And it's leaving that one person's body and going into this can be ego, you know? And it's just like, there's, depending on your own idea of the world, like you were saying, or what you're interested in, it left a lot of room for you to play with it without being like, you, I didn't walk away being like, that movie didn't mean anything.

• 1:01:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Which is a risk, right?

• 1:01:30Sean Fennessey?

  It is. And look, I think the movie's been very divisive critically. There are people who are like, this is a huge miss, which I find with all of David's movies. They're super rewarding on second watch because you're not trying to figure out what's going on anymore. And you're kind of accepting it on its own terms. I had a chance to see this movie a long time ago and then I saw it again a second time in Vids. And I really enjoyed it even more the second time because I wasn't trying to like, because the first half of the film is very talky between these two characters. Yeah. Chamber piece. We don't really know their history. They're sort of like explicating without over enunciating their history. Right. And you're, you, it's hard to get your bearings a little bit, you know, it's a very stormy movie at first. And then it takes this huge leap in terms of the kind of Gothic ghost story elements in the second half.

• 1:02:15Sean Fennessey?

  So it's a lot to take in, but I, I, I very much agree with you. I mean, it's also true that I think in all of Lowry's movies, like, he asks a lot of his actors, he kind of asks them to put their ass on the line. Yeah. With really deep, weird, dramatic stuff. Like, I thought, I thought a lot about Rooney Mara in A Ghost Story in this movie, which is also a very brave and odd performance in a very sad movie. This is also a very sad movie. Casey Affleck in Ain't Them Body Saints, Dev Patel in The Green Knight, like, he kind, he asks actors to really expose themselves. Yeah. And Anne Hathaway has to be kind of ridiculous in this movie.

• 1:02:48Amanda Dobbins?

  She was incredible.

• 1:02:49Sean Fennessey?

  And she's, she's, she's, she's one of the few big stars who's like up for this kind of a thing. Right. Um, so yeah, I really enjoyed it and I, I think it's quite an accomplishment to be able to pull off that scale at what I imagine was not the biggest budget in the world. You think about a movie like Michael relative like a small movie like this. I don't know. I thought it was interesting.

• 1:03:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, it's, yeah, and stage it because they do stage a lot of the work in addition to that sort of chamber piece first half of it.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Also, I obviously love religious themes, which like you can't get around because the pop star is a religious coded.

• 1:03:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Pop star.

• 1:03:21Sean Fennessey?

  But that is, I mean, that is our idolatry now too, right? Is like, is Taylor Swift, that's our religion.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:03:26Sean Fennessey?

  And just being committed to those figures and worshiping at their altar.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  But it also is interesting to like, back to what Amanda was saying. It's like, I don't know if he meant to do this, but. I feel like it is like you also hearkens back to like Madonna, who was, I know I'm a little bit Madonna brained right now, but she was kind of arguably the first major pop star in this lineage. Like every pop star that we have now has come from her.

• 1:03:51Sean Fennessey?

  In her wake, yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, from her vagina. But she, her whole thing was the, all the Catholic imagery and grappling with Catholicism and God and guilt and stuff. So like having it echoed in this pop star. But then you can be like, I don't know, would that fly now? You know?

• 1:04:11Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if you could be successful in that same way.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  That was the one place I couldn't suspend disbelief where I was like, a pop star couldn't fill a stadium with these songs about the Holy Spirit.

• 1:04:20Amanda Dobbins?

  You're right. It's not that it wouldn't fly. It's that it would not be the level of controversy and attention that Madonna got. Like, we all remember, like, a prayer, you know?

• 1:04:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Who's the most successful pop star who pursues taboos?

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  I guess it probably used to be Lady Gaga.

• 1:04:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Maybe Nowlana, although her taboos are kind of different.

• 1:04:41Sean Fennessey?

  She's not a stadium artist, though.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:04:44Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like in the stadium or, I mean, you know, I guess Beyonce does, does do some, some transgressive things, you know, but.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  But I think it's back to the Michael thing. It's you, we don't have that anymore because the value proposition of pop stars now is, I'm just like you, you know? Whereas it used to be.

• 1:05:00Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not just pop stars. It's everything.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  I am so much.

• 1:05:02Sean Fennessey?

  Parasociality.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  You could never, I am my, I am a, look at me. Look at my jacket. Look at how I can moonwalk across. I am an alien. I am an angel.

• 1:05:11Sean Fennessey?

  I do miss that. I like that. I like Larger Than Life. I'm really interested in that.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  It inspires weeping people in the crowd. And I guess people do probably weep at Taylor Swift.

• 1:05:19Sean Fennessey?

  I think they definitely do, but it does feel different. It does feel.

• 1:05:23Amanda Dobbins?

  They also, you know, do friendship bracelets in between themselves and then take pictures. I didn't go. Everyone said it was a nice time.

• 1:05:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And David talked about how the reputation.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  It was the Eras Tour, I think.

• 1:05:34Sean Fennessey?

  The Eras Tour. No, no, no, but it's the No, it was a film.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  The concert film.

• 1:05:37Sean Fennessey?

  That was a huge inspiration for how they shot a lot of the pop star sequences.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  It's her darkest, uh, albums.

• 1:05:43Sean Fennessey?

  Is that true?

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Sean Fennessey?

  No, I'm not aware.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  I thought Michaela Cole was exceptional. She's, I love her. I want to see her more all the time. I love chewing gum. I think she's just like so talented.

• 1:05:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I

• 1:05:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Check out the Christopher's, right?

• 1:05:56Sean Fennessey?

  We just talked about the Christopher's too. It's weird. I felt like she was not, just not in a movie for several years and now she's in two movies in back to back weeks, which is quite fascinating. I think she's really interesting too, and she's really, she has a kind of flinty performance style that is very well suited to the repartee between the two of them.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. A bit like a play. Again, I love movies that the dialogue is like a play. That's a very Yasi.

• 1:06:15Sean Fennessey?

  Very much.

• 1:06:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Would you like to talk about, uh, your photo with Kaia Gerber?

• 1:06:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let's talk about it.

• 1:06:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:06:21Sean Fennessey?

  What would you like to know?

• 1:06:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I know everything. You maybe want to address people who are like, what's going on here?

• 1:06:28Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Um, so the three of us went to Vidiotz one night to watch Mother Mary and I spoke to David afterwards. Beforehand, Vidiotz, which is a wonderful nonprofit located in Eagle Rock, um, they do a photograph with the filmmaker in the video store, which is attached to the movie theater.

• 1:06:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's good Instagram content.

• 1:06:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's great Instagram content. Shout out to Vidiotz. Um, so there was going to be a photograph with David and they said, Sean, we want you to be a part of that photograph. And that's obviously a tradition that we've been doing here on this show where we take a photograph of the filmmaker. I was like, sure, that sounds like a good idea. And they were like, well, David's ready for you in the video store. Come on back. So I walked back to the video store, familiar space for me, somewhere I go frequently. I was just there Sunday with my daughter. And David's there and I spotted him and some, some folks who work in PR, I'm just chit chatting with and start walking towards David and then right to his left, Kaia Gerber. Who?

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Were you starstruck?

• 1:07:21Amanda Dobbins?

  It's as, um, as one of our, as someone on one of our group chats, probably, uh, Rob Mahoney, but I can't remember, said about the photo. It's the most, I don't know what to do with my hands pose of all time from Sean Fennessey. Just, and I just totally taken aback, right?

• 1:07:37Sean Fennessey?

  Here's a challenge.

• 1:07:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Speechless. You never see him speechless.

• 1:07:41Sean Fennessey?

  She, she, she, she is, yes.

• 1:07:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. She's an international supermodel.

• 1:07:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, that is our word that communicates light. I think luminous is probably better.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  So you're, you're not awestruck and by the beauty of women like myself and Amanda. It's only.

• 1:07:59Sean Fennessey?

  I think you will, are both beautiful and I'm very.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Save it. Thank you. But, you know.

• 1:08:05Sean Fennessey?

  No, I mean, it's, it goes beyond, there's a hot girl. It's like she, she has, you can see that she has a unique thing, right? That's her job. She's a, she's a professional model. She has the greatest genes in the universe.

• 1:08:14Amanda Dobbins?

  She's an aspiring.

• 1:08:15Sean Fennessey?

  The bigger challenge was the surprise. You know, like, I'm very comfortable.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  What would you have done to prepare a beta blocker?

• 1:08:21Sean Fennessey?

  I would have not gone. I would have not put myself in that situation. Nevertheless, she said, hey, Kaia, I'm.

• 1:08:28Sean Fennessey?

  Hey, Sean, I'm Kaia.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  You're back in that space right now and you can't speak in your time.

• 1:08:32Sean Fennessey?

  I'm feeling kind of close to Kaia. And she was very, very kind. And then they were like, let's take a photo. And I was like, Kaia's gonna be in the photo. I have to be in the photo at the same time. And then the decision had to be made. Do you touch Kaia Gerber? And I decided, no.

• 1:08:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Oh, you do one of those floating hands? The classic floating backhand?

• 1:08:46Amanda Dobbins?

  You haven't seen, the photo is really funny.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  You know, I didn't even notice. I screenshotted you and Kaia really big to make my phone back screen.

• 1:08:53Sean Fennessey?

  I'm in action figure pose because I'm like, I don't know what to do. I panicked, you know? And so I did that.

• 1:08:58Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what? In your defense, that happens most of the time that a photo is taken of you.

• 1:09:02Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 1:09:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And I'm just trying to.

• 1:09:04Sean Fennessey?

  But I'm like, I don't, you know.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  You're an ally.

• 1:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. What I don't want to do is violate in any way.

• 1:09:09Amanda Dobbins?

  She gave a lovely introduction with David before the film.

• 1:09:13Sean Fennessey?

  Chit chatting with her was lovely. She was super cool. And, you know, I wish her all the best and I hope we cross paths again one day, but not in photographic form.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  I thought the casting of the tertiary characters was, for lack of a better word, extremely cunty. And I loved it.

• 1:09:25Sean Fennessey?

  It, it was. It was, it was FK, Twigs.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Hunter Schafer.

• 1:09:28Sean Fennessey?

  Hunter Schafer, Kaia Gerber. There's more. Who else is in it?

• 1:09:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Alba Baptista is the Taylor Swift character. Who opens?

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  What is her last name? Sean?

• 1:09:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Clifford.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Clifford, who I love. From Fleabag fame, the sister from Fleabag with the bad haircut.

• 1:09:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, Jessica Brown Finley from, from Downton Abbey.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Incredible backing cast.

• 1:09:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You're, I think you're right that there's not a single man in this movie.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  And I, I'm sorry to have been struck. I literally just was like, I walked out and I was like, Bechdel test? Pass, bitch.

• 1:09:56Sean Fennessey?

  Great job.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Bechdel test found dead in a ditch after this film.

• 1:10:02Sean Fennessey?

  Any other closing thoughts? Michael, Mother Mary? Okay, let's go to my conversation with David Lowery.

• 1:10:11Sean Fennessey?

  Hi, everyone.

• 1:10:14Sean Fennessey?

  What'd you think?

• 1:10:19Sean Fennessey?

  Very easy movie to understand. Please help me in welcoming writer-director David Lowery.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  We like to let the credits play so that you can kind of like decompress a little bit.

• 1:10:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. This is my second time seeing it, and I wish I had more time to decompress, actually. So you mentioned you started writing this movie seven years ago.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Sean Fennessey?

  What was happening in your life that this came out of you?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  I was on the set of The Green Knight in Ireland, and there were a bunch of things. I had shot a scene with Dev Patel and Sean Harrison, was like, huh, doing a scene with two actors in one room is really fun. I hadn't really done much of that. And I was kind of thinking about just where I was like as a filmmaker, like what I wanted to do, what I had done, what I was anticipating doing, having a couple of long nights of the soul, dark nights of the soul. And then I also just got really, really, really sick.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  And I felt like my body was breaking open in weird ways, not to get too graphic. And I was like, I'm just gonna, rather than like lay awake, I couldn't sleep. And I was like, rather than lay awake in bed and not, and just stare at the ceiling, I'm gonna start writing about this. And I wrote it as a dialogue sort of between just me having a conversation with myself, but very, almost immediately, I'd been wanting to make a pop star movie for a long time. And I was like, okay, this is the perfect vehicle for my pop star movie. And, and so I wrote the scene where Mother Mary comes and asks Michaela for a dress. And then, and then it went off in other directions.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  And over the ensuing years and working on other movies, it gradually, you know, became, it's still autobiographical, but became separate for me and became what, you know, what ultimately manifested over the course of however long it took to make this, which was a long time as well.

• 1:12:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I want to hear about that. Your previous two films are very large in scale.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Sean Fennessey?

  And was there a conscious decision to say, I want to do something that feels more achievable, like more modest?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was really excited about doing something simple. And, and, but yet, I'm always, I mean, when I made A Ghost Story, it was also like one location, we're never going to leave. And I was like, but what if you went into the past? And that was a much smaller movie than this, but still like, we wound up having these huge, like wet effects came into all these digital CG cityscapes for us. And with this one, I really wanted to, I'd really fallen in love, like with that scene with Dev and Sean Harris, with like, working really intensely with actors, which was something I've always loved doing, but my movies are, had up to that point been, there were other things that took priority for me.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  And when I made Peter Pan and Wendy, which was really big and a really challenging movie in all sorts of ways, there was one scene in that movie that was, again, it was Jude Law and Everett Anderson. And I was like, we spent two days in one limited location and it was such a treat. And I just wanted to spend a few more days doing that. And didn't really think about how, you know, two days is great, but if you're doing it for 40 days, it starts to turn into something. Weird things start to occur. You start to live the movie in a really interesting way. And then it, as my movies tend to do, like they just, I reached a point in the script where

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  It could have stopped. It could have been the end. It could have been over. But I was like, I haven't seen this through all the way yet. I need to keep pushing. And, and that's where it got a little bit more maximalist.

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  You said you'd always wanted to make a pop star movie. Were there inspiration points? Were there people who you saw at certain stages of your life? Who you thought that's a, that's, that's a movie star as well as a pop star?

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  That's a great question. I, I really hadn't been to a,

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  like a stadium tour show up until when Lord was on tour with Melodrama. And that was when I realized I love stadium shows. Like that was, it was really, it was, it had a huge impact on me.

• 1:14:48Sean Fennessey?

  What was it you liked about them?

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Just being surrounded by that many people. I'd, you know, I'd been to see like Rob Zombie in high school. Hell, Billy Deluxe Tour. I'd been to stadium shows before, but something about.

• 1:15:03Sean Fennessey?

  This is kind of a living dead girl movie, actually.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  Something about going to see that type of spectacle surrounded by that many people. And specifically that type of music was really transformative for me. Prior to that, I'd, you know, made movies that dealt with folk music or had sort of a more of a, an old fashioned, classic Americana sensibility to them. But as I was making those, I was secretly also discovering that I really love pop music. And when we made Ain't Them Bodies Saints, I can't, I can't say this. We hid a certain song in the movie as many times as we could by compressing it into the gunshots you hear in the movie.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  Just because I was like, I, you know, I, I was, I've been listening to this song a lot. I really wanna, it's infecting me and I wanna, I wanna pay tribute. So we, we secreted it away into the movie.

• 1:16:05Sean Fennessey?

  And that song is called?

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  I'm never gonna say it.

• 1:16:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:16:10Sean Fennessey?

  How do you research a movie like this? Because it is very much about a pop star and about a person who feels somewhat reflective of some of the big icons that we see, but it's also about the flip side, the sort of, the support system, the creative shadow of someone like that. And I don't know a lot about that world, but it does feel realized, like it does feel true when I watch it. So how did you come to understand how that world works?

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  It started with watching a lot of documentaries and I'd say the two that were really instrumental to me were McQueen, the Alexander McQueen documentary. And it's not touched on that much in that film, but, but his relationship with Lady Gaga was something I had in mind, even Madonna and Gota, but that pairing of, of a performer and a designer was really potent to me. And, and then just watching every music documentary, basically, and seeing, just getting, just the idea of what it means to go on tour, something I've, I could never dream of doing.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  I, my hat's off to anyone who is capable of that, cause it is a true, it's, it's a superhuman feat. And I think the first one, maybe when we were shooting The Green Knight, Beyonce's Homecoming documentary came out and watching that was really, really impactful. And, and then the Taylor Swift Reputation documentary, which is, as a cinematic spectacle, really something else. Like, I really loved the way that was shot and we could barely scratch the surface of that, that scale with this film, but that was something we looked at a lot too. But just even watching all of those, you just get the sense, and then talking to musicians, like talking to people who do this and trying to get a sense of it, trying to understand what it's like.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  And not just the ardor and joy and, you know, of, of getting to go do this, uh, night after night, but also the creative collaborations that beget something like a stadium tour.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  Who was cast first, Michaela Cole or Anne Hathaway?

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  I sent it to Michaela first and then, but we wound up meeting after I'd already met Anne. And, and I saw, so Anne was cast first. So by the time I met with Michaela, we didn't really talk about, you know, I'd, I try to be agnostic when I'm casting movies, but I just like to send the script and see what people think of them. And, and I honestly think there's an incredible version of this movie where the roles are reversed. That would be just a completely different dynamic. But I did cast Anne first. And so then when I met Michaela and we were talking about it and we weren't even talking necessarily about her playing Sam. We were just talking about the script and talking about what she found meaningful in it,

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  which was really a big, like, I was so starstruck because I'm such a huge fan of hers. And to know that she found value in something I'd written, I was like, what's going on here? But the, as, as we were speaking, as we were talking about, you know, personal experiences that she could relate to within the script and the things that, where it came from for me, I really started to hear Sam's dialogue in her voice and almost instantly I was like, this has to happen. It has to be her.

• 1:19:28Sean Fennessey?

  You were saying you liked the idea of working with two actors and, you know, if they, if there's no chemistry between the two people that you cast, a movie like this can't work. And there's such a toxic chemistry between these two people. How do you make that happen in a movie without it making everybody go insane?

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  We might've gone insane.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's there in the script. So you know what you're signing up for. And I was very confident that no matter what the chemistry was, like, A, they're professional actors and we're going to come here and we're going to perform these scenes as they're written. And we're going to explore them and extrapolate from them and expand upon them and, and something will emerge from that. But also like, I just want to see the two of them in a room together. And it could have been anything and I would have been, we can work with this. I would have, I would have known we could work with it. But it really was like a really interesting process of. I mean, you hear about this with other movies, but like you start living it. It really becomes every day you're going there and and we shot not entirely in sequence,

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  but we tried at least for the first three weeks we were in sequence. And we were really, I think, had a plan and we knew what we were doing. We had rehearsed the first act of the movie very, very thoroughly and and we were sticking to that plan and it was all working according to plan. And then at a certain point, we started to feel things more deeply. And there are fewer words in the movie at a certain point. You start you start like exploring in a different way. And at that point, it really became an almost supernatural experience making this. And I don't know if that comes through in the movie, but we felt while we were making it, we were we were like, what are we conjuring here? This is so it felt sometimes incredibly beautiful, sometimes incredibly painful.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  Sometimes it felt evil, like we were we were summoning something terrible and we were like, oh, no, what's what's going to happen at the end of the day? Tell me a moment when you were conjuring something evil.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  There was there was a moment after Anne has told her story and they're sitting there and she asks, oh, no, after Mother Mary's told her story and and she asks Sam if she believes her and Sam clearly doesn't, but knows she needs to address this and is going to invite her up and remeasure her. And I remember Anne saying, I'm afraid to speak the words right now because there's something inside of me that might come out when I open my mouth and it might hurt all of us.

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  And maybe that was a metaphor. This is a movie full of metaphors. Maybe it was literal and Michaela knelt down at her side. I didn't quite know what to say. I was like, I was like, this has never happened to me. And then Michaela knelt down at her side and just took her hand and said, I love you and I trust you and it's I you can you can say the words. And that was one of those moments was just like in that moment, it sounds almost like

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  Like something I wrote, but it also like describing it doesn't really capture like how intense that moment was. And I remember the crew was all gathering around being like watching us as we're all just working through this moment. They're like, what is happening? And then the other thing, when they're in that circle, it was, you know, there's the scene where they do this breathing exercise and they just breathe. And it's one of my favorite things in movies is to watch people breathe and fall into that pattern. And we would do that before every single take and really get ourselves into that space. And it really felt like we were entering some weird zone for, and that scene was scheduled for, I think, two days and we probably shot it for seven days, which is

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  an insane thing to say out loud because we just kept, I really wanted this to be a film where if anyone felt that something was wrong or that we were going down a wrong path, we would stop and course correct. And, and that sequence, we were, we were always refining it, trying to find for them, the, the performance, like where they were, where the characters were. For me, that's one of the most visually, there's a lot going on visually in that sequence and finding the right visual language for it. And we, you know, we're constantly exploring within the parameters of this tiny little circle on the floor.

• 1:23:51Sean Fennessey?

  I remember vividly talking about completely re-editing The Green Knight during COVID and just changing the tempo and even maybe some of the meaning of that movie by having free time on your hands and changing it. It seems like this movie similarly had a kind of ongoing redefinition.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  I would, if it wasn't opening next week, I would still probably be like doing stuff. But the, like with The Green Knight, it wasn't that I recut, like I didn't change what the movie was. I just gave myself time to take some time away from it and then was able to Tease out that meaning more effectively. And that really did involve changing the tempo. That was the big thing, just changing the pace of it. And with this movie, I, I watched it like December 31st of last year or 2024 and was like, this is the best thing I'll ever do. I'm done, not gonna touch it.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  And then showed it to some people and realized, okay, maybe I'm not done, you know? And, and that happened repeatedly. I go, I was just like, I'd be like, okay, I've crushed it. And then I'd watch it with an audience and be like, oh, it's not, it's not, they're not getting what I want them to get out of it. And then a lot of it was me just consistently, cause I edited it as well. It was just like, what else can I do? And that's the same thing I do with the writing. Like this movie could have ended at various points, like the Michaela's monologue was at one point, the ending of the movie, where she talks about that final performance. And I was like, no, there's more to find, there's more to extract, there's more to dig out of this. And with the editing process, it was the same thing where I was always like, I don't know what it is, but there's more.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  I'm not through with this yet. There's more I can get out of it. And because of delays with strikes and, and other things, we had the luxury of continuously just digging back in and, and pushing.

• 1:25:50Sean Fennessey?

  It's something that makes filmmaking such a unique art form to me, which is that unlike a painter or even a songwriter, you can kind of show a work in progress and take notes and feedback and change it based on things that people say to you. And I feel like you have to really evacuate your own ego to let that happen. Like, is that something that you would do on every movie where you really want to hear what people think of what you've done so far?

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  I wish that I could just be like, I made the movie I want and I'm done. And maybe I should try that. I don't know, but I would, I would still go through that process on my own. I love hearing what people think of it and I love showing it to people because I believe that's, you know, a movie is a living thing and it really needs to engage with the organism that is the audience. But I want.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  So much of it is self imposed, where I just like, I hear what people say, then I have to not look at it for a while, because I don't want to just answer those notes. I want to hear those notes, let those notes sort of like simmer and on a very low boil, and then take what I need from them. But it really is informative for me to just like, am I achieving what I set out to do? And sometimes I have like, you know, kind of an idea of what I set out to do. With a movie like this, like 10 years from now, I'll still be trying to figure out what I was trying to do. Like, I know what I was trying to do, but I'm going to learn more about it as I discuss it now, as it makes its way out into the world.

• 1:27:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know better, but there is a part of me that wants to just look you in the eyes and say, what does this movie mean?

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  I'm not going to say it, because I want everyone to just go see the movie again.

• 1:27:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  But Michaela literally says what the movie's about in the first 20 minutes. Like, she like lays it very like clearly on the table, and it's, that's what the movie's about.

• 1:27:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I also was thinking about, you know, this is the second time I've seen it now, and thinking about who are you between the two of them? And you indicated that you're both of them, that it's a conversation between yourself. But I'm wondering if maybe you had relationships creatively where you were Sam, or you were Mother Mary, and kind of how that informed some of the dynamic that you created between the two characters.

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  I haven't had specifically those relationships, but I have seen the way, because I work with the same people over and over again. And you see the way in which relationships can ebb and flow from one project to the next, and the way in which those collaborations can be really, really intense in a way that can sometimes almost seem dangerous. And that's a beautiful thing. I really love that. I've thankfully never had one that has gone this way. But I could see, I could project and imagine what would happen. It definitely was also, though, like, there was a scene in the movie at one point where they explicitly referenced Disney movies.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  And I was like, I love making Disney movies. That's one of my favorite things. And I also love making movies like A Ghost Story or like this. And it's like, every now and then, most of the time, those two sides of me live in perfect harmony. But every now and then, I'm just like, what the heck is going on? And when I started writing this, I was having one of those moments.

• 1:28:57Sean Fennessey?

  The biggest potential pitfall for a movie like this is just getting the music wrong. If you get the music wrong, also, the movie will not work. And I find the songs in the movie to be very credible. And they're like living in a weird liminal range between a bunch of different active and past pop stars. So how do you know that you're getting the right songs? How do you cast the right people to write those songs to make this a legible world?

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  Charlie was the first person I met. And I had been a fan of her music and was, and her documentary and like, but I didn't, you know, had not been thinking about her specifically while writing this. But the thing that I knew was that like, the music I listened to while writing this movie was one thing. That was the tone of the movie. But the character of Mother Mary needed to be something very different. And talking to Charlie was like, oh, like you could bring that to this film. And you're brilliant, you're amazing, please, please bring that to this film. And then collaborating with Jack and her to create the songs was a real learning experience for me.

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  Like, I've never been lucky enough to sit, I've known a lot of musicians, but to just sit and watch these, these, it was like alchemy, like watching them conjure it out of thin air. It was incredible. And I have to give an immense amount of credit then to Annie, who had to perform them. We had written a couple of the songs early on and I shared them with her. And she liked them, but she was like, I don't know how to make these mine. And I was like, well, of course, these have to be yours. You have to go on stage and sing them as if you wrote them. They have to feel like they're coming from you. And that process, I think, was what really took them to the next level. Because the songs were great, they were always great, the rough demos were incredible.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  But the thing that really made them hum in that ineffable way was what Annie brought to it. And she just- We know she can sing. She's an incredible singer, but to sing in this way was really, it was a new muscle for her to learn. And so she would go into the studio over and over and over again and just re-record these songs and was just constantly trying to get them a little better in a way that I couldn't even hear sometimes. Like, I would be like, "Sounds great. I love it. Top 10 hit, here we come." And she's like, "No, we're not. We don't quite have it." And sometimes it was changing lyrics. Sometimes it was like things that would work better for her, but more often it was just a feeling and a vibe. And she just kept pushing at it. And I owe so much to all of them, but also to her for not letting it rest.

• 1:31:30Sean Fennessey?

  There's also something in her performance that really jumps out, which is both when she's onstage performing and also when she's just in the kind of chamber setting. She has a very explicit posture and personal choreography, the way that her hands move, the way that her body moves. And I'm curious how much of that is written in the script, how much when she's making hand gestures to communicate with her lack of language in that sequence with Michaela. Is that, is that all there? Is that something you guys are figuring out when you're working on the scene?

• 1:32:00Speaker 03

  Some of it, like the hand gestures was all there. That was something in the script that, um, it was a long story, but due to my love of Anna Karenina, it's like a vague, I stole it from, and I didn't even steal it. It's like, anyway, love Anna Karenina. Um, not, I love the movie too, but the book, novel. Um, the-

• 1:32:19Sean Fennessey?

  Novel?

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  Apparently.

• 1:32:21Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  The, but she came to set with so much of that already worked out. And that was truly what one of those, I remember when we made Ain't the Body Saints, Rooney didn't want to, like, let me hear her accent until day one. And I was nervous because like, it's a, it's a thing. And then she did. And I was like, "Oh, this is perfect. Why was I scared? You're an incredible actor. You're going to nail this." And with, with Annie, she had done so much work into the, in the physicality, not just of the performance stuff, which was a whole other thing, but just the way that she carries herself, the way that she holds things within, the way she uses her hands, and the few times where she would let- The pop star flair pop through, like when she snaps her fingers, like every now and then

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  that would pop through, very, in a very calibrated sense, but everything else was so, she'd worked through, like, I think, every gesture in advance. And it was so incredible to see, because I, again, we'd rehearsed it, but it wasn't until we got to set that I really saw how much thought she had given to the physicality. We'd, we put so much emphasis on the dancing, like that was, she had a pop star boot camp, our choreographer was working with her three months before we started shooting. And then for a year afterwards, because we shot most of the concert sequences much later. And it was incredible to see her, not only her commitment, but the way in which that commitment paid off and what

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  she would found that she was able to do. And so we were always focused on that. We were focused on the dance, focused on the expressiveness that she could, she could, you know, summon up. But then all of the stuff that was less expressive was what was a beautiful surprise to me on set.

• 1:34:02Sean Fennessey?

  How did you execute the concert sequences and make them seem as though they were happening in a stadium environment?

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  What we, I don't, I'm sure there's a million ways to do this. And what we kind of figured out for us was that we just had to put on a stadium concert show, tour, like not tour, just one, five nights, five nights of Mother Mary. And we did it in Bonn, Germany, where we could get a stadium for a week, or two or three weeks. And we, I mean, hired people who do this for a living. And I was like, this is a whole art form unto itself that I would, I have no idea how, like, I can talk about how to light a set. How to light a stadium is insane. And thankfully, Rena Yang, who was one of the cinematographers

• 1:34:54Speaker 03

  in this film, she had a lot of experience with that. So she kind of held my hand through all that. But just putting that on, we, you know, Danny, our choreographer, was really instrumental in helping us make it feel real. Our production designer Francesco did tons of research into how to do this, but we were really just like, this is not a movie anymore. We're just putting on a concert and filming it. And we would just play the same song, you know, 30 times every night. But it was like, that was, and we had, you know, 500 people, which in a stadium is nothing. That's, you know, the front row, but it was enough for Annie to be able to communicate with the crowd and to feel like she was performing to someone and to engage with them. And I will, my hat's off to all of our incredible background talent in Germany because they,

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  they gave it their all every single night.

• 1:35:41Sean Fennessey?

  I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about the phantasmagoric aspects of the story. Was it always an essential part of the story? Or did this start as something that was more stripped down between two people and then evolve into something that became more ghostly and spiritual?

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  I would say that it always started with a sense, like it was from the very beginning, had this Gothic quality to it, whether it's, you know, I was definitely thinking about Rebecca when she pulls up to the house, you know, and-

• 1:36:11Sean Fennessey?

  Little thunder and lightning crash.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And, and then as I tend to do, I just like remove the tethers of reality and start to explore the, the themes in a more phantasmagoric way. And I, I tried to hold back for as long as I could because I didn't want to just like instantly plunge headfirst into that. But at a certain point, you know, early on in the writing, I knew it was going to go in that direction. And I didn't know how far or what form it was going to take, but I'm really into phenomenology. And I really wanted this movie to feel like a phenomenological, phenomenological exchange between these characters.

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  And I wanted the ghost, which we tried to not even refer to too often as a ghost, to be, and just-

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Energy and emotion exchange between two people that takes form. That takes not human form, it takes some sort of form. And I like the idea of someone who sees something that they know is not literally real, but it feels real. And that's what phenomenology is. You have to assess it on the base of the emotional truth that the subject is experiencing. And so these are two people who are experiencing the same phenomenon that they know is probably not real, and yet it's real to them, and they have to reconcile that. And yeah, and so there's a ghost. The reference that I gave when we were trying to figure out what it would look like was the T-1000 at the end of Terminator 2, when it falls in the lava.

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  Because I love the idea of something that can't figure out what it needs to be. Like, it doesn't know what it needs to be. And I kept showing that sequence where it's like, look, he's turning into all the different forms. And so we tried to find our own version of that. And I've made a movie with a fabric ghost before. And it wasn't intentionally setting out to do that, but it just made sense for this film.

• 1:38:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and this is like an elegant elevation of a ghost story, in a way.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:38:15Sean Fennessey?

  You used puppets?

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  We got some puppets.

• 1:38:17Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you're a puppet guy.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  I love puppets.

• 1:38:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Talk about it. How'd you figure it out?

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  So we had, I knew it was gonna start with this weird sort of mass of bloody tissue. The whole tooth thing happened to me, but not the part with the ghost crawling out of my gums. I did have a wisdom tooth crack open. And that was a rod puppet. So we had like two or three rod puppets. I built it out of clay, or I made some clay maquettes. And then my friend Anell, who did the ghost from a ghost story, she made these little rod puppets with like bellows that would make it breathe for when Sam first sees it on the floor. And then I knew it needed to transform. And we, we went through so many iterations of what it would transform into, all involving fabric, but some of them were costumes, some of them were more like sculptures.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  And then I was looking, I was trying to just figure out a way to make this unique and, and truly like something that I'd never seen before. And I was just looking at YouTube and saw this artist named Daniel Wertschel, who does these sculptures with wind and fabric. They're just incredibly beautiful. They feel like they're choreographed, but they're not. It's just fabric moving. He has this custom air table that he uses. And so we reached out to him and asked him if he could collaborate with us in creating. And he does it like at scale, like these huge things. And we did a couple of those. We did some that were smaller. We used all sorts of different fabric. We had fabric that was like covered in gore, but just all these different forms.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  And, and then film photographed all of that and then composited that into the, into the other footage that we'd already shot. And it was, it was really incredible to just sit there for five. We did spend five days with a VFX unit, just filming fabric in the breeze. And it was really hypnotic.

• 1:40:08Sean Fennessey?

  Can you tell me what quantum entanglement is?

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, we could go really deep on this. It's when two particles share properties across time and space. So you could have like a, a, let's just say an atom. It's usually got to be smaller, an atom that is blue, let's say, and blue in a very specific way. And another atom on the other side of the universe has exactly that same color blue and they're virtually identical, and yet they have no sense of connection in a spatial way. And it's a phenomenon that was theorized and then eventually prove, proven, and it is one of the best metaphors for a relationship you could possibly hope to find.

• 1:40:50Sean Fennessey?

  And, and did you stumble upon it while writing this? Like, why did it become a hallmark for it?

• 1:40:57Speaker 03

  I had known about it for a while because I love quantum physics. I was working on, at one point, I was working on the Joe Dante movie Explores. I was working on a TV show adaptation of that. And completely destroyed my brain trying to research every aspect of quantum physics. And, and that show never happened, but it did give me a deep love for something I cannot wrap my head around. Like, I cannot explain it. I don't understand it. I'm terrible at math, but I love it. And, and so it worked its way in here very, very quickly.

• 1:41:40Sean Fennessey?

  I love how unpredictable your movies are. I literally could never imagine what you're going to do next. But I do like asking you, do you know what, like, have you started writing something? Or have you already made something?

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  I'm gonna knock on wood because we just, we're, we're in prep right now. So ideally, this one will hap, you know? This one is, God, I'm gonna just shoot myself in the foot. I'm like, this is a small film. I'm just gonna make a small film.

• 1:42:07Sean Fennessey?

  Mother Mary 2?

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's a very small film. But yeah, we'll be, we're underway on that right now.

• 1:42:14Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. David, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? You are a true cinephile.

• 1:42:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  The last great thing I saw was the Alamo Drafthouse showed Melancholia about two weeks ago, and I hadn't seen it in about 10 years. And it is, it's long been my favorite Von Trer movie, but it's better now than a, I was like, how have I been sleeping on this movie for 10 years? This is utterly incredible. I know you covered it last year.

• 1:42:47Sean Fennessey?

  We did, yeah.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  25 for 25. And I was so happy to just see it on the big screen.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  And then I also want to give a, that's an old movie, a new movie that I saw last year, but also repeatedly watched this year is The Testament of Ann Lee, which I just can't get enough of. Absolutely breathtaking movie. I can't stop listening to the soundtrack. It is, it is a movie that is quickly rising as one of my all-time favorites.

• 1:43:11Sean Fennessey?

  They would make an incredible double feature with Mother Mary 2. I mean, they're, they're a match made in heaven.

• 1:43:16Speaker 03

  I had not even thought about, but I'd love to go see that double feature.

• 1:43:20Sean Fennessey?

  Everybody give it up for David Lowery.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Thank you, everybody.

• 1:43:28Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you to David Lowery. Thanks to our friends at Vidiot. Thanks to Yasi Salek. Hey, you gonna come back for a truly great movie next time?

• 1:43:35Speaker 02

  I would hope so. I mean, I love this tradition of you sending me off to the theater to see sort of difficult.

• 1:43:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Paw Patrol 2 next for you. What do you want to do?

• 1:43:43Amanda Dobbins?

  What's on your radar?

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  I, Madonna's career. I've not been, is Madonna gonna be in a film anytime soon?

• 1:43:51Sean Fennessey?

  No, she, her biopic.

• 1:43:53Speaker 02

  Thank God.

• 1:43:53Sean Fennessey?

  Will not happen, but it will be portrayed as if it were real in the studio season two.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Because God is good, because we don't need anyone destroying her legacy like that.

• 1:44:01Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, take it up with Julia Garner.

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  I'll take a look at the coming releases.

• 1:44:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his production work on this episode and that live event. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for his production support. Next week, we are drafting again. We've actually already recorded it. It's a Star Wars movie draft.

• 1:44:17Amanda Dobbins?

  It was totally normal, and I had a perfect draft.

• 1:44:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, Amanda did very well. I yelled at Amanda. She yelled at me. Everybody else was chill. We'll see you then.