Pod Insights Blank Check with Griffin & David Blood Simple with Ray Tintori & Jordan Fish About this episode Gather round, folks - it’s time to embark upon a journey through one of the most sterling filmographies in American cinema. Our Coen Brothers series - Pod Country for Old Cast - kicks off with Joel and Ethan’s remarkably assured 1984 debut Blood Simple. Coen experts and hosts of the To The White Sea podcast Ray Tintori and Jordan Fish join us to do some serious tablesetting for the odyssey ahead, offering some context that JJ didn’t even manage to dig up. Speaking of digging - Ben Hosley has some thoughts on the subject.
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Transcript 32,663 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Griffin Newman? David.
0:03 Speaker 01 Yep.
0:03 Griffin Newman? We did a live show.
0:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, remember?
0:05 Griffin Newman? Ranking Scorsese at the Bell House in Brooklyn. We did the definitive power ranking of Martin Scorsese things.
0:12 Speaker 01 Uh, it was so fun. Uh, it was very silly.
0:15 Griffin Newman? Ben and Marie were with us and they're with us right now.
0:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, hey.
0:18 Speaker 02 Hey, everyone, or should I say, oh?
0:20 Speaker 03 Oh.
0:22 Griffin Newman? And thanks to our friends at Dynasty Typewriter. It was livestreamed for the first time ever. But also, the replay is still up there, but only until October 30th.
0:31 Speaker 01 So just a few more days.
0:33 Griffin Newman? Yes.
0:33 Speaker 01 You can get it at dynasty.tv.
0:36 Griffin Newman? Dynasty.tv.
0:37 Speaker 01 It's $20. We had a blast and the Spreadmaster really got to work.
0:43 Griffin Newman? Oh, yeah. I was moving things around. Laptop was on.
0:46 Speaker 02 I don't know if I'd have seen you that happy.
0:48 Griffin Newman? You were thrilled. You were like a pick and share.
0:50 Speaker 01 I was locked in.
0:51 Griffin Newman? Yeah, very locked in and you were funny.
0:53 Speaker 01 Thank you. You were funny. You were also funny.
0:56 Griffin Newman? Oh, thank you.
0:57 Speaker 01 And if you want to see like, you know, Griffin's shine box on camera, it's the only way to see it.
1:02 Griffin Newman? You might see me shine Marie's shoes.
1:04 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you're into that sort of content.
1:07 Griffin Newman? If that gets you off.
1:09 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:10 Speaker 01 So once again, that's at dynasty.tv.
1:39 Griffin Newman? World is full of complainers and the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or Man of the Year. Something can go all wrong. Now, go on ahead. You know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help. Watch them fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That's the theory, anyway. But what I know about his podcasting and down here, you're on your own. It's a very hard voice to do.
2:07 David Sims? M M at Walsh. Yes, he was just look quiet. I feel M M Walsh is loud.
2:11 Griffin Newman? I think he's quiet in this.
2:13 David Sims? Well, I maybe I'm thinking of the ending, obviously.
2:15 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:16 David Sims? Where he is loud, but maybe he is quiet.
2:18 Griffin Newman? He's got this kind of, yeah.
2:19 David Sims? He's louder than I saw him on the West End stage once.
2:23 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:24 David Sims? In his, uh, it was later, it was sort of in his semi dotage.
2:28 Griffin Newman? Uh huh.
2:29 David Sims? Like M M Walsh was always a middle aged slash older guy in movies, right?
2:32 Griffin Newman? Correct.
2:33 David Sims? Classic like.
2:34 Griffin Newman? Was never young.
2:35 David Sims? Right. Um, but then, then he was like an old guy.
2:38 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:39 David Sims? Like for like a while.
2:40 Griffin Newman? He lived a very long time.
2:41 David Sims? Exactly.
2:42 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:43 David Sims? And he was in a West End production of Buried Child, the Sam Shepard play. And it's one of my favorite plays of all time.
2:49 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:50 David Sims? Which has like an old guy who basically just sits in a chair, the whole play going, right? And he was that great.
2:58 Griffin Newman? I was watching some of the stuff on the very good Criterion desk.
3:01 David Sims? Uh, yes.
3:01 Griffin Newman? And they talk about that they cast him. He's from Vermont.
3:04 David Sims? Is he really?
3:06 Griffin Newman? I believe he said.
3:07 David Sims? Let's find out.
3:07 Griffin Newman? Or no, Virginia, Virginia.
3:08 David Sims? Totally different place.
3:09 Griffin Newman? I know.
3:10 David Sims? Hold on. No, you're wrong. He's from Vermont.
3:13 Griffin Newman? I had it right the first time.
3:14 David Sims? Yes, you did.
3:15 Griffin Newman? Okay.
3:15 David Sims? He was raised in rural Swanton, Vermont, uh, which is in the top of Vermont.
3:21 Griffin Newman? He played a lot of southern guys.
3:23 David Sims? Northwest Vermont. Yes, he did.
3:25 Griffin Newman? And this is like.
3:26 David Sims? You think of him as like a southern.
3:28 Griffin Newman? Right.
3:28 David Sims? Sheriff.
3:29 Griffin Newman? This is what he was saying was just like, that's not my way of speaking. It's not how I was trained to speak. I like grew up around this very clipped, precise speech. And he was like, and I worked really hard to come up with the Texas accent for the character. And like, people really bought me as it. And then I watched the different interview on the desk with the Coen brothers. And it was with David Eggers and he was asking them about how they worked with actors. And they were like, we had never met this guy before until he showed up on set. It was the first time we were ever like meeting an actor who we had seen before. Like everyone else in this movie, we kind of were like meeting through auditions, right? And so we were so intimidated and he comes and he's like, guys, I'm excited to show you this. Here's my accent.
4:12 Griffin Newman? And he does it for them and they're like, we cannot understand a word he is saying. And we don't know how to talk to him. We are too intimidated to give him any note.
4:23 David Sims? I would be too intimidated to give that guy a note.
4:25 Griffin Newman? But his voice is so fascinating. I could not approximate it. But it's like this very drawly whisper.
4:33 Speaker 02 The musicality of it.
4:34 Griffin Newman? Yes.
4:34 Speaker 02 It almost sounds like that voice actor who's in the Disney Robin Hood at times, who plays like the sheriff's underling.
4:40 Griffin Newman? Yes. Yes. Who I in a previous episode misidentified as Slim Pickens, but it's not. It is.
4:46 David Sims? Let me find out for you. I'm guessing it is. Who plays who? Sorry?
4:52 Griffin Newman? He plays the.
4:53 David Sims? Like the side guy?
4:56 Griffin Newman? Yes.
4:56 Speaker 02 Kind of a wheezy, soft musical voice. That guy was in movies too. That that.
5:01 Griffin Newman? Pat Buttram.
5:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:04 David Sims? Pat Buttram played the sheriff of Nottingham.
5:07 Speaker 02 Did you guys see Straight Time, his performance in Straight Time? Cause I feel like that was their thing. Like they cast him off of that. And in that one, it's amazing because he's, he's a scary character who really messes up Dustin Hoffman's life, but he's so soft and he's, he's sweet. And I don't even know if he really is out of line. His, he's just doing his job and he's wearing leisure wear with like big lapels.
5:27 Speaker 03 He's like instrumentalizing his ability to be like a soft, kind of like unassuming, sort of like orderly person. And then like all of a sudden he like snaps into like, give me your arm. Let me see if you got any track marks, you know?
5:41 Griffin Newman? So they were both saying that was the performance that led to him, them writing the letter and trying to get him cast in this movie. Right? And it was just very fascinating watching the Rashomon of the two interviews and how he self mythologizes and how they talked about working with him. And it does feel like there was some like, if not active tension, a sort of like failure to communicate between the two parties, even though obviously it worked out great in the final product. And he was like, my dad was a cop and I got this role in Straight Time. And I felt like a lot of people would have villainized this character and I wanted to play him empathetically, like he's really trying to help this guy. He was like, I want to not make this character antagonistic at all.
6:23 Griffin Newman? And he felt good about what he was doing. And then you watch the final cut and he's like, half of this movie, I come off like a scary asshole. And then the Coens are like, hey, you know, we like how in that movie you keep switching between the two things. And he was basically like, that was a failure of me executing, what I tried to do that half the scenes felt like they got away from me or something. It's just very interesting to hear. This performance is so singular.
6:50 Griffin Newman? And it sounds like in a lot of ways, it kind of happened by accident.
6:53 David Sims? Is this, I think this is indisputably true, but I'll just say it anyway, be the M M at Walsh performance.
7:02 Griffin Newman? It's like-
7:02 David Sims? A man who gave 100 performances.
7:05 Griffin Newman? Right?
7:06 David Sims? Paris, Texas, you're saying that's the, the Harry Dean Stanton performance in a great tapestry of work.
7:12 Griffin Newman? He was basically saying that like, he carved out his career where for like 20 years, there were 10 guys where if you wanted three scenes and someone could lock horns with a movie star and they wouldn't try to upstage them, but they challenged them and get better work out of them. He was like, it was me, Charlie Durning, Harry Stanton. Like he listed the guys, right? And I feel like Paris Texas is that same thing where you're sort of like, wow, I didn't think you could build an emotional story around this guy as a leading man. And Blood Simple is obviously more of an ensemble piece. He won best actor at the Independent Spirit Awards, even though I would argue he is supporting in this.
7:48 David Sims? It's inarguable. He's supporting in this. That's kind of crazy.
7:50 Griffin Newman? He won best lead beating Griffin Dunn for After Hours, we were talking about right before.
7:55 David Sims? Uh, that's back when the indie spirits, you know, truly were indie spirited.
7:58 Griffin Newman? Yes.
7:59 David Sims? Um, but yes, the-
8:01 Griffin Newman? It was the first, it was the first indie spirits ever. And Scorsese and the Coens tie for director.
8:09 David Sims? Sure. Why not? After Hours won best feature.
8:12 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
8:13 David Sims? I do not see Griffin Dunn nominated.
8:15 Griffin Newman? That's even more insane. So who else was nominated?
8:16 David Sims? The nominees are Ruben Blades, Blades? I always say Blades.
8:21 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
8:22 David Sims? There's no accent in it.
8:23 Griffin Newman? Sure.
8:23 David Sims? And also means he has the coolest name in the history of actors. You guys like Ruben Blades?
8:29 Griffin Newman? You like saying Ruben Blades?
8:31 Speaker 03 I hate finding out that it's actually just pronounced Blade and not-
8:33 David Sims? I don't know if it's pronounced Bladies. I have no idea how to pronounce his name. And I'm so sorry for a film called Crossover Dreams, uh, that I have not really heard of. Tom Bauer for a film called Wild Rose. And Treat Williams in Smooth Talk, he is so good. Have you seen Smooth Talk?
8:51 Griffin Newman? Yes.
8:51 David Sims? God, he's amazing in that movie. That would be a worthy winner.
8:54 Griffin Newman? I'm just confounded by them not nominating Griffin Dunn. How does that happen?
8:57 David Sims? I don't know. They had like four nominees.
8:59 Griffin Newman? Okay.
9:00 David Sims? Three more from them. And they don't even, here's the thing, they don't even have featured actor or whatever. It's just male leads, female lead.
9:07 Griffin Newman? Right.
9:07 David Sims? So maybe it's just kind of like, we'll just nominate the performances we like. Cause Treat Williams is also kind of supporting.
9:12 Griffin Newman? Cause I feel like a supporting actress wins.
9:15 David Sims? This is a great way to kick off.
9:16 Griffin Newman? Actress that year. Right.
9:17 David Sims? You want me to bring it back?
9:18 Griffin Newman? Doesn't someone wins for Trip to Bountiful, but it's not Geraldine Page?
9:21 David Sims? A movie, of course, that I once described on this podcast as being like,
9:27 David Sims? I've never seen it. Geraldine Page won.
9:29 Griffin Newman? She did.
9:30 David Sims? For The Trip to Bountiful. The other nominees were Laura Dern for Smooth Talk, Rosanna Arquette for After Hours. This state of American independent film was really just like, we loved After Hours and Blood Simple.
9:40 Griffin Newman? We love After Hours in every category, but best lead actor, one of the most lead performance driven movies.
9:46 David Sims? GD.
9:46 Griffin Newman? Cause the whole movie is that also he's a griff.
9:48 David Sims? Yes. And Laurie Singer for the Alan Rudolph film Trouble in Mind, which I've never seen.
9:53 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
9:54 David Sims? With Keith Carried and Chris, Chris Topperson. But obviously it's a great movie. I have M M M.
10:00 Griffin Newman? Oh, you've never seen it, but it's obviously a great movie.
10:02 David Sims? It must be. I have M M M Walsh, say that five times fast, nominated for supporting actor though.
10:08 Griffin Newman? I think this is just the, his like most iconic role, right?
10:15 David Sims? Blade Runner. Trying to think of like competition.
10:18 Griffin Newman? But this is the thing. You could throw out a bunch of movies where you're like, M M M Walsh crushes in three scenes of that movie.
10:23 David Sims? Crushes a scene, yeah. The Jerk.
10:25 Griffin Newman? But this is the movie where his character is like larger.
10:28 David Sims? So that's why I think this is it.
10:29 Griffin Newman? Larger than life, I mean.
10:29 David Sims? The complexity of the character. It's the first fully inscrutable, very layered, very contrasting, very powerful, magnetic Coens character.
10:41 Griffin Newman? I think, I think that's very well said. And I think hearing them talk about how much they couldn't agree on the character, by mistake, it kind of helps them identify something that they will try to intentionally, by design, build into the characters and the performances from here on out. Because everyone else in this movie is a lot more straightforward. Not a bad way, right? But you watch it and you're just sort of like, you can't imagine the Coens placing a character as uncomplicated. As like, um, uh, not John Doll.
11:16 David Sims? John Getz.
11:17 Griffin Newman? Can John Getz, thank you.
11:18 David Sims? Although John Doll would have been good too.
11:20 Griffin Newman? Yes. But you know what I'm saying? Like the John Getz character feels so streamlined in a way. They would never kind of let it happen again.
11:29 Speaker 02 Well, Billy Bob Thornton in Man Who Wasn't There is a little bit of a play on the same thing. Like this guy, this very masculine cipher stuck in a noir story, but it's almost like they go so inside his brain.
11:40 David Sims? In that movie. Man wasn't there, you almost want more characters to say to him like, hey, hey, like anything, anyone awake in there? Like he's so flat.
11:47 Speaker 02 Well, it's also that.
11:48 David Sims? They make it into the joke.
11:49 Griffin Newman? Right, right. That's the bit. Exactly. Is like this guy looking more intense than anyone's ever looked, going on these long internal monologues while like cutting a child's hair. Versus like, uh, yeah, Getz is kind of doing something a lot simpler in a, in an effective way. I mean, the other, I, I just watching this, I was like, the two movies in their career, this feels most twinned with. Are weirdly No Country and Burn After Reading. It's like those two movies are the splits of the two things they're doing in this.
12:22 David Sims? The Burn After Reading, you mean because of the sort of cuckoldry and assassinations?
12:27 Griffin Newman? That it's another movie based on a thing they love, but I think these are the two clearest examples. A bunch of overconfident idiots having no idea that they don't know what's going on. Right? That everyone thinks they got control of the situation. Like what's fascinating about this movie is that like.
12:46 Griffin Newman? It avoids all the conversations that could clarify things and stop all the terrible things from happening.
12:51 David Sims? Sure.
12:52 Griffin Newman? And I saw someone point out that like.
12:53 David Sims? I think Far, Far, Fargo has that too.
12:56 Griffin Newman? It has that too.
12:57 David Sims? Fargo.
12:58 Griffin Newman? It has that too.
12:58 Speaker 02 It's not as much like unintentional crisscross, double cross.
13:02 David Sims? Not as much, but there are a couple of conversations in Fargo that would have helped things out.
13:06 Griffin Newman? Sure. But this, yes, yes, this has the thing where you're just like, there were a series of misunderstandings. Based around everyone thinking that they can hold the upper hand.
13:17 David Sims? Yes. Yeah.
13:17 Griffin Newman? And the fact that M M at Walsh never interacts with Getz or McDormand directly is the most interesting thing.
13:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, she kills him at the end. The final joke of the movie is she kills him and says, "I'm not afraid of you, Marty."
13:29 David Sims? Right.
13:30 Speaker 02 He's the only one who gets it. Like, the entire movie has been this Rube Goldberg mousetrap to get to that point, and he's the only character who sees it.
13:38 Speaker 03 They see his hat in his Volkswagen Beetle for like, one frame in the first scene of the movie. That's the only time that they have any type of like, an eye line match. Like, the only time that they ever see him throughout the whole film. And I think that's something that they're, the Coens are interested in, because also in No Country, like, you, Timothee Jones, like, never meets Brolin. And he never meets Sugar either.
14:03 Griffin Newman? And the second Brolin meets Sugar, the movie just jumps ahead, and it's like, conflict over, you know? This is a blank check with Christian and David.
14:11 David Sims? There we go.
14:11 Griffin Newman? It's a podcast about filmographies.
14:13 David Sims? Woo!
14:13 Griffin Newman? Directors who have massive success early on in their careers, such as being nominated for the first ever Independent Spirit Awards and winning Best Directors, given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want, and sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce. Baby, this is the beginning of a very long, but very exciting mini-series, as chosen by you, the listener, in our March Madness competition. We're talking about the Coen Brothers. The series is called Pod Country for Old Cas?
14:44 David Sims? I believe so.
14:45 Griffin Newman? I believe so.
14:45 David Sims? I was hoping you remembered.
14:46 Griffin Newman? I think I remembered correctly. This is our first episode in the series. We've recorded-
14:50 David Sims? We've recorded one before.
14:51 Griffin Newman? Yes. And today, we're talking about their debut film, Blood Simple. Joining us on the show, returning for the first time together, but dear friends of the show, family, I would say. I'd say family.
15:04 David Sims? Very much part of the blank check.
15:05 Griffin Newman? When I threw out having them on for this episode, David's response was, "They're family."
15:10 David Sims? Well, because-
15:10 Griffin Newman? He said, "Should we do guest lists?"
15:12 David Sims? Exactly. We often do the first episode with no guests, and then you were like, "Bye, but Ray and Jordan." And I was like, "Yeah, they don't count as guests in the same way. They're family. And when you're here, you're family."
15:24 Griffin Newman? We like to think of this podcast as the Olive Garden.
15:26 David Sims? That's, it is Olive Garden, right?
15:27 Speaker 02 You guys do have never-ending breadsticks.
15:29 Griffin Newman? We do. Which most of our guests don't call out.
15:32 David Sims? Would.
15:32 Griffin Newman? Considering how much we're spending.
15:35 David Sims? That would rock if that was true. Like that's the, it's in our rider is like, by the way, unlimited breadsticks have to be wherever we are.
15:43 Griffin Newman? They have to follow us. When I say never ending, I mean never ending. It doesn't end once I leave your restaurant.
15:49 Speaker 02 No, they just keep rolling out. You're like in there.
15:51 Griffin Newman? Yes.
15:52 Speaker 02 You actually have to eat them or it's a problem.
15:54 David Sims? Do any other chain, like fast casual chains, it's not fast casual, whatever you would call Olive Garden, maybe it is fast casual, I don't know, have like a tagline as ubiquitous as when you're here, your family?
16:07 Griffin Newman? No, I don't think so.
16:07 David Sims? Like those guys really did nail it with that.
16:09 Griffin Newman? But I'm loving it.
16:10 David Sims? No, that doesn't count. Like what's the Applebee's?
16:13 Griffin Newman? Have it your way. Eating good in the neighborhood?
16:16 David Sims? Well, he knows it.
16:17 Griffin Newman? I know all of them. You can keep asking me. We got the meats.
16:20 Speaker 02 I want my baby back ribs. It's pretty good.
16:22 David Sims? Chili's.
16:24 Griffin Newman? What is the?
16:24 David Sims? It's like one. Currently it is savor the moment.
16:27 Griffin Newman? Well, that sucks.
16:27 David Sims? I agree. This is what I'm saying. This is, this could be hard to get.
16:31 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
16:31 David Sims? Outbacks is like, it's always good in the outback. And I'm like, guys, try again. Come on.
16:35 Griffin Newman? Isn't there something outback steakhouse? What was the theme? The song, the jingle used to have a different line at the end of it. Outback Steakhouse.
16:44 Speaker 02 Well, there was the, um, who was that band of Montreal? The guy from of Montreal recorded a jingle for Outback Steakhouse, but then when people were like, why did you do this? This seems very commercial. He was like, I have no memory of, of agreeing to or recording.
17:00 Speaker 03 And the lyrics was, it was a re, it was a like redo of the lyrics of let's pretend we don't exist. And it's like, let's go out back tonight. You know, the world will still be here tomorrow.
17:10 Griffin Newman? That's good.
17:11 David Sims? That's good. I like that.
17:13 Griffin Newman? Let me say outright that our guests are Rayson, Tori and Jordan Fish.
17:17 David Sims? Welcome, fellas.
17:18 Griffin Newman? Excellent filmmakers, dear friends, family, but also.
17:22 Griffin Newman? Co-hosts of the To the White Sea Podcast, a years-long project you guys have been doing, perhaps coming back soon?
17:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, coming back this week.
17:30 Griffin Newman? Hey.
17:30 David Sims? Oh, like this week.
17:31 Griffin Newman? By the time you hear this.
17:32 David Sims? It records that we release. There you go.
17:36 Griffin Newman? We said it now. To the White Sea is like the great unmade Coens.
17:41 David Sims? We will talk about it, I'm sure, later in this mini-series. It is probably there. I mean, when I'm a teenage boy, and just think of that. What a fun kid that was.
17:50 Griffin Newman? We all like to think about it.
17:51 David Sims? Uh, reading my empire magazines. I was right on like, uh, To the White Sea. That's the great unproduced Coens movie. We're all waiting for To the White Sea.
18:01 Griffin Newman? And like Aina Kool being like, this might be the greatest screenplay I've ever read.
18:04 David Sims? Whoa.
18:05 Griffin Newman? Right.
18:05 David Sims? Brad Pitt walking to the White Sea?
18:09 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
18:09 David Sims? Possibly?
18:11 Griffin Newman? Gets very close to happening, falls apart, and then that basically directly leads into what is seen as like the Coens weirdest, woolly, fallow period before they have the No Country comeback.
18:23 David Sims? Right, right.
18:24 Griffin Newman? Yeah, they dust off, uh, Intolerable Cruelty, which is a script that they had written. Basically just to be like, we gotta make something, right? Like, I guess we'll direct this thing that had been a for-hire job. And then they did, uh, Lady Killer. Right. They do these two studio comedies back to back that I, in my memory, were kind of received by people as like, are the Coen brothers just trying to cash in now?
18:47 Speaker 02 It seemed like it was over forever.
18:48 Griffin Newman? It really felt like it was over forever in a way where, when No Country played at Cannes?
18:57 David Sims? No Country for Old Men?
18:58 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
18:59 David Sims? I don't know.
18:59 Griffin Newman? And people were like, you're never gonna believe this. It's good. There was this sense of almost astonishment of like, I guess we wrote those guys off too quickly.
19:07 David Sims? We'll get to that.
19:08 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
19:09 David Sims? But yes, there was a little bit of like, the fear of had they finally lost the shine in the No Country. Was it Cannes? Yes, can't couldn't remember if it was canned.
19:20 Griffin Newman? Um, but you guys have done this project that started when the Coen brothers sort of soft split and have been doing their solo projects of being able to like timestamp it and be like, here is the at this point, complete filmography of the Coens. Who knows if it ever resumes as a team through the prism of this unmade movie and going through the script and doing a sort of radio play version of the script, and which of course, you had me play the Brad Pitt role.
19:46 Speaker 03 Had to.
19:47 Griffin Newman? Obvious casting.
19:49 Speaker 02 A beautiful nuanced performance.
19:50 Griffin Newman? Thank you.
19:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:51 David Sims? He really does do a wonderful job.
19:54 Griffin Newman? Um, but then also using that to sort of like thematically go through the Coens and talk about different recurring themes. The big point here is that you guys have been so deep in the trenches, doing so much research, going through fucking personal archives and micro fish and reading and watching everything that we said, what a great opportunity to have them on for the first Coens episode. Coast off of all the work they've already done for the last couple of years and create a really good reason to fire JJ.
20:19 David Sims? Let's fire his ass.
20:20 Griffin Newman? Let's fire JJ harder than we've ever fired JJ before.
20:23 David Sims? Well, all I want to say is that when I go to-
20:25 Griffin Newman? You look at his dossier and you laugh.
20:27 David Sims? When I go to a restaurant, I want legendary food and legendary service.
20:32 Griffin Newman? Okay, you're asking me to guess, you're doing the reverse.
20:34 David Sims? I am.
20:35 Griffin Newman? Legendary food, legendary-
20:37 David Sims? Service.
20:37 Griffin Newman? The service is legendary.
20:40 David Sims? Now, having been to this restaurant, uh, which I enjoy.
20:42 Griffin Newman? Uh huh.
20:43 David Sims? I remember the service being particularly interesting, it was fine.
20:45 Speaker 03 Medieval times would work.
20:47 Griffin Newman? That would be-
20:48 David Sims? Medieval times makes sense in terms of legendary.
20:51 Griffin Newman? It'd be incredible, but it's not.
20:53 Speaker 02 No, Michael Jordan Steakhouse?
20:55 David Sims? That would be great, but I have to imagine the service there is awful.
20:57 Griffin Newman? I have to assume this is a sit down chain?
20:59 David Sims? Yeah.
21:00 Griffin Newman? How, how wide is it?
21:03 Griffin Newman? This isn't like the Paul.
21:04 David Sims? One of the biggest sit down chains.
21:05 Griffin Newman? One of the biggest, it's one, it's a Ruby Tuesdays?
21:07 David Sims? Growing.
21:08 Griffin Newman? Growing, is it Ruby Tuesdays?
21:09 David Sims? No, I don't think so.
21:12 Griffin Newman? Well, you, you should know, you're the one quizzing me. It's growing.
21:16 David Sims? What does Ruby Tuesdays sell?
21:17 Griffin Newman? Steak.
21:18 David Sims? Cool.
21:19 Griffin Newman? It's not Red Lobster.
21:22 David Sims? I'm gonna abandon this in a second. Ruby Tuesday slogan is fun between the buns.
21:28 Griffin Newman? This one is.
21:29 David Sims? Not joking. That supposedly is their slogan.
21:32 Griffin Newman? I feel like they're more steak than sandwich, though. It's not like Hillstone Group, is it?
21:35 David Sims? No, I don't know.
21:36 Griffin Newman? It's growing.
21:38 David Sims? It's just so weird that they were like, let's name our song after that, like lovely emotional song by the Rolling Stones. Like, who listens to Ruby Tuesday and is like, I'm hungry? You know, it's like, it's a good song, but it's this sort of like sweet sad song.
21:51 Griffin Newman? If I can circle back to the jungle I was trying to remember was, let's do out back tonight. It was the opposite. It's leading in. Okay, but legendary service, growing chain.
22:01 David Sims? Yeah.
22:01 Griffin Newman? On the upswing.
22:02 David Sims? I believe I read in an article by my colleague, Yasmin Tyag, the great Yasmin, that it is the fastest growing sit down chain in America right now.
22:09 Griffin Newman? But it's been around for a while. It's just having an upswing?
22:11 David Sims? Yeah, I'm gonna wrap this up.
22:13 Griffin Newman? Sure.
22:14 David Sims? Texas Roadhouse.
22:16 Griffin Newman? Oh, was never gonna guess that.
22:17 Speaker 02 That's so topical.
22:18 Griffin Newman? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a real Texas Roadhouse of a movie.
22:21 Speaker 02 It'd be the main set.
22:24 David Sims? We are talking about Blood Simple, the Coens' first movie, directed, of course, by Joel Cohen and not Ethan Cohen. I'm gonna do that bit until no, uh, Lady.
22:32 Griffin Newman? Ladykillers.
22:32 David Sims? Right.
22:33 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
22:34 David Sims? Which is set in Texas. Uh, and is a rather stripped down neo noir. Did you detect, Griffin, that this film is a bit of a neo noir?
22:43 Griffin Newman? You know what, David?
22:43 David Sims? You know, there's noirs, but they're black and white and Humphrey Bogart is there. But then there's the neo noirs.
22:48 Griffin Newman? David, I know that you are the film critic by trade, and I'm not trying to one up you, but here's some observation I made while rewatching the film. I'd almost call it a neon noir because of how much goddamn neon lighting there is in this picture.
23:00 Speaker 02 It's a neon boot.
23:02 Griffin Newman? It's a neon boot.
23:02 Speaker 02 That's the name of the bar.
23:04 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
23:04 Speaker 02 Similar to tech noir.
23:05 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
23:06 Speaker 02 The film kind of announces.
23:08 Griffin Newman? We get it.
23:08 Speaker 02 Itself with the bar.
23:09 Griffin Newman? Yes.
23:10 David Sims? Um, so here we are, um, the Coen Brothers. Griffin, I'll start with you, but I'm gonna ask everyone. So Ben, you might have to steal Jordan's mic. Ben's here too, of course. When did you first get on board with the Brothers Coen, those Minnesota Jews?
23:27 Griffin Newman? It's a good question. When I first got on board, I'm trying to
23:29 David Sims? Because, yeah. If you're a cine ass at the age that we are. Yeah. Teenage film fan. Yeah. Sort of mid to late 90s. The Coens are dominant in terms of like, that's a, that's a director you find quickly. I feel like. Right. As you're growing up.
23:43 Griffin Newman? I feel like I was told from a very young age about their importance.
23:48 David Sims? Right.
23:49 Griffin Newman? I'll, I'll build to a story briefly. Yep. It's synagogue, please. But then try to think, my parents tried to show me Raising Arizona when I was fairly young. And I put my foot down and said, I don't get it. It's not funny. And then I feel like a couple of years later, Washington was like, I get it now.
24:06 David Sims? Quite funny, actually.
24:07 Griffin Newman? I was simply.
24:08 David Sims? Pretty winning movie. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
24:10 Griffin Newman? But I was maybe a little too young to watch it. I feel like Oh Brother must have been the first one I actually saw in theaters.
24:16 David Sims? I think it's the same for me. I think it has to be. I definitely, The Big Lebowski was rated 18 in Britain. I guess because of like toe severance. I don't really know why else. I mean, there's a lot of F words in that movie. No, Britain, in Britain, you really only get an 18 for really extreme violence or any sexual violence. If you say shag, then they, they're like, oh, we're all hot and bothered. No, I mean, like, God bless the British rating system. Like 18 really is supposed to signify like, this is a really, really violent movie.
24:45 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
24:45 David Sims? Not so much like, oh, you might see a Willie.
24:49 Griffin Newman? Can you say, can you circle back and repeat 18 because of toe severance?
24:54 David Sims? It was rated like 18, I think because of like the toe severance.
24:57 Griffin Newman? Stiller and Tarantino working on a picture together?
24:59 David Sims? Wow. Really good. An Apple series, actually.
25:02 Griffin Newman? Oh, okay.
25:04 David Sims? Uh, anyway, so yeah, I think the first film I would have seen in theaters is Oh Brother, We're Out There. I would have been about 14 and I loved it. I'm just trying to remember if I would have seen any of the other ones before then, maybe Raising Arizona? The first time I was aware of the Coens is when Frances McDormand won the Oscar for Fargo.
25:23 Griffin Newman? This, I was gonna say, it probably seemed for me, yeah.
25:26 David Sims? And my mom was like, oh, well, yeah, she was gonna win. And I was like, oh, really? Like, you know, like my mom was like, oh yeah, she had to win. Um, and I was like, why? And she was just like, I don't know, man. Look at the clip. Like she's a pregnant cop. It's just crazy. I'd never seen anything like that.
25:43 Griffin Newman? She did a really funny walk to the stage. Do you remember McDormand's walk for her first of three best actress wins? But she's not doing the like, oh my God thing. She does this sort of like. It's almost a postmodern sashay of playing being too cocky.
25:59 David Sims? Wow. And Nicolas Cage is giving her the Oscar. So that's a fun group.
26:03 Griffin Newman? I think you're right that I.
26:05 David Sims? And but like, so the clips from Fargo, and that's in the year that English Patient is dominating the Oscars.
26:09 Griffin Newman? So that's the first year I watched the Oscars live.
26:11 David Sims? And English Patient seems like a movie that wins Oscars to me where I'm like, yeah, it's set in the past and it's all orange. And there's like, you know, war and important things happening. And then they're like Fargo. And I'm like, what's that? My mom's like, oh God, it's hard to describe, you know, this is so, and it looked so different.
26:28 Griffin Newman? Even before her winning, the way they cut Billy, Mr. Crystal into the Fargo clips in the opening montage. I think I had that same reaction of what is this movie? Like they were doing her puking on the side of the road.
26:42 David Sims? It is a strut. God damn. She looks like she's about to like push Cage off the stage.
26:47 Griffin Newman? It just felt like.
26:48 David Sims? She looks like she's entering the wrestling, she's doing like an elbow, a shoulder thing. Yeah.
26:53 Griffin Newman? It burned into my memory.
26:54 David Sims? She's so hot.
26:55 Griffin Newman? But I also, I feel like it to your point, like.
26:59 David Sims? Oh, and a standing O.
27:00 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
27:01 David Sims? All the big ones. Jim Carrey, Geoffrey Rush, Kevin Spacey.
27:04 Griffin Newman? I met this party.
27:05 David Sims? Yeah.
27:06 Griffin Newman? That my parents had brought me to, and there was that same feeling of like, this was undeniable. This is her night. She's getting it. This is an anointment thing. And to a certain degree, also like an anointment night for the Coens, right? And I think I'm absorbing this context around me. But also in the Billy Crystal fucking montage, you're like, I get the bits for the other ones. English Patient looks really serious and Billy Crystal's coming in and doing something silly. Fargo was the only one where I was like, this almost has a crystal tone to begin with? There are already jokes in this movie? But it's also violent.
27:38 David Sims? What did you do for Secrets and Lies?
27:40 Griffin Newman? That's a really good question.
27:42 David Sims? Now I gotta rewatch those Oscars.
27:44 Griffin Newman? My parents met at the Deauville Film Festival in the north of France, where my grandmother used to work. And I then it was.
27:55 David Sims? For listeners, is the French Film Festival that asks, what if we watched American movies in France?
27:59 Griffin Newman? Correct.
28:01 David Sims? It is, that's what it is.
28:02 Griffin Newman? I will say, with as much respect as I can put on it, it is a festival that basically has no reason to exist anymore.
28:08 David Sims? Except to create you.
28:09 Griffin Newman? Back in the day, it made more sense. Well, that, but that's why I'm saying it no longer has a reason to exist. I've been made one time, and that's one time too many. We don't need another one. Every year, that, that festival is creating more Griffin. This is a problem. It's unsustainable. We're flooding the economy. It was basically in an era where movies did not have global distribution, were sold off more piecemeal, even big studio films were often being released by like local distributors. And it was basically like this fulcrum point between the big summer blockbusters and what were going to be the more serious fall movies, where the studios and independent films all went there and it was like this one-shot final leg of a press tour.
28:53 Griffin Newman? Bring all your stars to the north of France to a beach and have them promote the movie and get enough buzz that maybe then you're able to sell off the smaller European rights to these other films or use it as a launching pad before there were kind of global press tours. It was like a way to trick stars into having a vacation and doing one last batch of interviews or whatever. My parents meet there. My grandmother worked there for many years. I, I was trying to do the math on this. I think it probably would have been the second or third year my parents had then, after they met here, would go every year.
29:25 David Sims? Sure. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
29:26 Griffin Newman? Basically for their anniversary, right? It is either the place where Blood Simple premiered or the second festival. IMDb lists something slightly earlier in the summer.
29:38 David Sims? The USA Film Festival.
29:39 Griffin Newman? Which I cannot find any.
29:40 David Sims? Well, the USA Film Festival was the Sundance, the progenitor to the Sundance Film Festival.
29:46 Griffin Newman? But it by all accounts premieres at Sundance the following January.
29:50 David Sims? Did it premiere there?
29:51 Griffin Newman? Deauville would have been, or I'm sorry, not.
29:53 David Sims? Yeah, it doesn't premiere there.
29:54 Griffin Newman? It plays at Sundance the following January.
29:56 David Sims? Correct. It had already done Deauville, TIFF and New York.
29:59 Griffin Newman? Was it Toronto like a big turning point for the?
30:02 David Sims? Yes. It's the, it's early in Toronto's shift from sort of the festival of festivals, which is what it used to be too, like. The powerhouse.
30:09 Griffin Newman? Doville happens like one week before Toronto, which is another thing that has killed that festival as like Toronto and Venice have gotten even bigger. But it possibly was the first place it played and at least it was the second. And my parents and their friend Susan, who was their best friend in the early eighties, uh, would tell me all the time when I was growing up, them being there, looking through the like, um, brochure of all the movies and being like, the Coen brothers? There's an noir film by Joel and Ethan Coen?
30:45 David Sims? Hey guys, we made a noir movie.
30:47 Griffin Newman? Basically, and seeing these like guys walk around and for like five days, this being their joke of like, yeah, we should go see Blood Simple. And then they went to see it and were just like, holy fucking shit.
30:58 David Sims? It is one of the most.
31:00 Griffin Newman? I think it's one of the most profound movie going experiences my parents ever had because they were like, we're mocking the idea of these guys and how shitty this sounds on paper. Why have two Minnesota Jews made like a Texas neo noir? And then seeing it being like, who the fuck are these guys immediately? So I also grew up with that where my parents would constantly just talk about the experience of like a thing that basically no one ever got ever again, of like going into a Coen Brothers movie without any reputation. Cause right after this, it starts their run of basically playing this movie, playing festivals for like over a year and just building momentum.
31:35 David Sims? And movies don't really do that anymore.
31:36 Griffin Newman? They don't.
31:37 David Sims? So it looks like Billy started off with a Yoda scene.
31:42 David Sims? Cause it was like Empire Strikes Back.
31:44 Griffin Newman? It was the re-release.
31:45 David Sims? Uh huh. And then he's, he's doing, he's on the phone with Jerry Maguire. He's shirtless.
31:48 Griffin Newman? Uh huh.
31:49 David Sims? And I mean to stun anyone here.
31:50 Griffin Newman? He's telling the show.
31:51 David Sims? And then he, then he switches phones to talk to Brenda Blethyn.
31:55 Griffin Newman? Funny.
31:55 David Sims? In Secrets and Lies.
31:56 Griffin Newman? Okay.
31:57 David Sims? You know, and she's like, oh.
32:00 Griffin Newman? She's telling some of the secrets and some of the lies.
32:02 David Sims? Right. And then he's getting a hug from Armin Muellerstahl in Shine.
32:06 Griffin Newman? For shine.
32:07 David Sims? Then we got Fargo.
32:08 Griffin Newman? Uh huh.
32:08 David Sims? Uh, he's got his, he's got the cop outfit on.
32:12 Griffin Newman? She's cute.
32:12 David Sims? Uh, then he's talking to Buscemi.
32:14 Griffin Newman? Okay.
32:15 David Sims? Then he's back to Cruz in the locker room.
32:17 Griffin Newman? Okay.
32:18 David Sims? You know, help me help you. Silence scene. Yeah, they did that scene. Then they have him. He's in the cave in the English Patient with Kristen Scott Thomas. And then the thing I remember the most, they do the plane crash from English Patient, but it's Letterman going like, you know, Oprah Uma, which is funny.
32:39 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
32:40 David Sims? Got to bring it back.
32:40 Griffin Newman? And then he comes.
32:40 Speaker 02 My parents had to lean in and go, he did a bad job.
32:43 David Sims? It was it's what he did last year. I saw the Letterman Oscars. Anyway, Blood Simple, it is one of the most undeniable debuts in film history, I would say, where you're like, well, these guys surely have made 20 movies.
32:58 Griffin Newman? Yep.
32:59 David Sims? To make something this like honed and precise and like sort of confident. And instead it's like, no, they're a couple of squirrely youngsters.
33:08 Griffin Newman? And yet I feel like when asked, they continue, they forever say, this is obviously our worst movie. It's clumsy and amateurish.
33:17 David Sims? They say that?
33:17 Griffin Newman? Yes.
33:18 Speaker 02 They rag on it endlessly. When they did the director's cut re-release, it was shorter.
33:22 Griffin Newman? Yes.
33:22 Speaker 02 Because they were like, it was badly edited the first time.
33:25 David Sims? Yeah.
33:25 Speaker 02 By them, obviously.
33:26 Griffin Newman? Right. They view it as like, well, that's the last time we're not going to get everything right because we were still learning.
33:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's a great moment when they're going through like shot by shot with Sonnenfeld, where they were like, uh, uh, Getz is sitting in a chair at on the set of the apartment that the two lovers sort of on the run moved into. And he's just like sitting in a chair and like the wall is sort of like grayish blue and he's wearing a grayish blue denim shirt. And I think Joel just stares at the shot and is like, that wall is something that we're not going to be doing again.
34:07 David Sims? Wow. Ray, Jordan, your Coens experience, maybe you have covered this on the podcast a little bit, but I don't.
34:15 Speaker 03 I'm trying to figure it out because Hud Sucker was a big deal in my house.
34:21 David Sims? Okay.
34:22 Speaker 03 My mom's friend Sheila had one of the cable boxes where you could like, where she got all the channels.
34:27 David Sims? Sure.
34:27 Speaker 03 Uh, and then she would tape movies off of HBO and give them to my mom in the mid 90s.
34:33 David Sims? Shout out to Sheila.
34:34 Speaker 03 Yeah. And.
34:37 David Sims? Hud Sucker.
34:38 Speaker 03 And Hud Sucker was a movie that we would, we would watch a lot.
34:41 Griffin Newman? That was the first one you think you saw?
34:43 Speaker 03 So, but I also saw-
34:44 David Sims? The closest thing to a family friendly movie they made.
34:47 Speaker 03 But I also saw Fargo in theaters and was like really blown away by it. And I remember just like feeling like it was the first adult movie going experience in a theater that I'd had in a, in a very distinct way, like just walking out of it being like, I can't breathe, you know, like I've been holding my breath the last 30 minutes of this movie.
35:06 David Sims? I'm going to argue you were too young for Fargo in theaters, Jordan. You're probably a couple of years older than me, right?
35:10 Speaker 03 But still.
35:12 Griffin Newman? I was, I was, I was a minor.
35:14 David Sims? I was 10 when that movie came out. And it was rated 18 again. Geez. Maybe also because of the severance. Leg severance.
35:23 Griffin Newman? Fuck, who's a leg fetishist?
35:24 Speaker 03 But the thing is, I'm not sure, again, I'm not sure like which one of them we would watch, which I like, I watched first. And I also don't think I knew that it was the same directors. I knew, I know that when, I know that when Lebowski came out, I knew that was the next movie after Fargo and I was excited to see that in theaters. And I saw like, I'm like moving forward, I feel like coming into the city to see a Coen Brothers movie a week or two before it went wide was like a big part of like my early New York City experiences. Cause I like grew up right outside the city.
35:52 Griffin Newman? Yeah. To, to see the early platform release.
35:57 Speaker 03 Of, yeah, like Oh Brother or whatever. Yeah.
36:00 Griffin Newman? Yeah. Cause I, I think I was so aware of how much my parents revered them that even when like there was a new Coen movie coming out, like Lebowski, I was absorbing the sense of like, people seem cooler on this one. Then saw a brother in theater, which makes sense as like their most family friendly movie since Hud Sucker. And then after that, I think pretty quickly, like watched every one of their movies on DVD or started that project and then would go see every one that came out. Here's another thing about them. For a very long time, they were once a year, guys. They were like clockwork.
36:35 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
36:35 David Sims? Uh, yeah.
36:36 Griffin Newman? Where if you're a budding cinephile, it's really easy to be like, I can lash onto these guys. What's the next Coen movie? I'm filling in the backlog and I'm like looking forward to the future.
36:46 David Sims? I would say they're kind of once every couple of years. Uh, in terms of like the spacing between their movies. Yeah, they were very, very reliably working, uh, all the way up to.
36:59 Speaker 05 I guess.
37:01 David Sims? Mid 2000s, really?
37:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, like, it's really.
37:04 David Sims? 2010s, really?
37:05 Speaker 05 Even then, it's like, it's True Grit, Inside Lewandowski's Davis Hell Caesar Scruggs. That's four movies in that decade, each of them about three years apart. Like, it's like, you know, they, they, they worked very consistently.
37:17 Griffin Newman? That's, look, when they announced that they're, they're sabbatical from working together, I feel like that was the number one thing cited.
37:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
37:26 Griffin Newman? Was just like, Ethan feels burned out.
37:28 Speaker 05 It's been a lot.
37:29 David Sims? Right, and they would have side projects, they'd release fiction, they would do some stage stuff, like, it's like, yeah, they were busy. One of them should make a video game.
37:36 Griffin Newman? Yeah, it's a great idea.
37:37 David Sims? Thanks.
37:37 Griffin Newman? Ray, your history with the cons?
37:40 Speaker 02 Uh, I remember the, like, the Roma Pizza on 7th Avenue in the 90s was just a shrine to the career of John Turturro. It was just all signed John Turturro stuff, so I remember the Barton Fink poster in there, seeing that as a little kid, and my parents being like, this is a movie about a guy who can't write and is being attacked by a mosquito. So I thought the whole movie was just him v mosquito. And then I remember seeing Hot Sugar Proxy in a movie theater in LA, and my parents being like, wow, they blew it.
38:07 Speaker 05 Right, you know, the, the general consensus on that one.
38:09 Speaker 02 I mean, and like, that being like, an out of body experience, seeing that as a little kid, it's so heightened and cartoonish and the whole hula hoops. I remember like, all that stuff, like, the, you know, for kids, like, that totally landed on me as like, an elementary school kid. Best joke I ever heard.
38:24 Speaker 05 Right, right.
38:25 Speaker 02 And then, yeah, Saw Fargo in the movie theater with my mom and my sister. We were both super young, but it was like, just a cultural event.
38:34 Speaker 02 And I think it was like, it was post pulp fiction, and there was a sense that like, well, we can take them to this, like, we can't take them to pulp fiction, but we can take them to Fargo.
38:42 Griffin Newman? Fiction created a new bar of what isn't child appropriate, which then sort of on a curve made Fargo seem like more quaint. I mean, it's also, it's like, right, Fargo does have this weird amount of like Looney Tunes energy, and as violent as it gets, it's sort of a comedy of manners in the same way, yeah.
39:02 Speaker 02 It's a cultural portrait of, of like, a particular type of.
39:06 David Sims? Like a particular part of Minnesota, like.
39:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, but just just became obsessed with that saw a preview of Big Lebowski. Also, everyone at Big Lebowski was like, that sucked. Like at the first screening and people were like, why wasn't that like Fargo?
39:17 David Sims? People don't remember that.
39:19 Griffin Newman? I have this very distinct memory of like going over to dinner with my parents and my siblings to their friends, a couple with a young kid. We were all like eating pizza together or whatever. And they had just seen Big Lebowski and were just like, we are befuddled. Like, what are they doing? Why did they blow it in the same way as Hudsucker of like, everyone just took them seriously? And now they're doing some weird lark?
39:47 David Sims? I remember at the time, there were like one to two critics in Britain who were like, I kinda liked Lebowski, like, like, and they were saying it in this way of like, I know this is crazy, but I actually think there's some stuff to that. Well, you know, like, and within really just three or four years, it had completely turned around.
40:06 Speaker 02 I mean, it was like the DVD, like.
40:08 David Sims? Yes, the supernova thing, right? But like that run of Lebowski to Oh Brother, to Man Who Wasn't There, you know, like, it's not like they were out of critical favor exactly, but there it was kind of like, huh? Not, not another Fargo in these guys, huh? Like.
40:23 Speaker 02 I remember seeing this in the theaters for the first time. The re-release, Blood Simple.
40:28 David Sims? 2000, I think, right?
40:29 Speaker 02 2000, the shorter version with the music that wasn't on the VHS put back in. I saw it at the quad in an empty theater, just me, Joel Schumacher and Joel Schumacher's assistant.
40:41 Griffin Newman? Wow.
40:42 Speaker 02 The big three.
40:43 David Sims? Incredible.
40:45 Griffin Newman? Well, Joel's got to keep their tabs on other Joel's. They got to know what the Joel's are cooking.
40:50 David Sims? One of the nicest directors I ever met, Joel Schumacher.
40:52 Griffin Newman? I've told the story many times of him.
40:54 David Sims? He was, he was not so kind to you.
40:57 Griffin Newman? I asked him, I asked him for a direction on how to play a scene in a fourth fucking callback I had for him. And he said, I think acting is a lot like fucking, where if you're asking for help for how to do it, you're probably doing it wrong.
41:12 David Sims? And you're like, I do that all the time.
41:13 Griffin Newman? That's what I said. He didn't think it was funny.
41:15 Speaker 02 His hair looked incredible.
41:16 Griffin Newman? His hair was unbelievable.
41:18 David Sims? He had really amazing hair.
41:19 Griffin Newman? Yes.
41:24 Griffin Newman? David.
41:25 Speaker 05 Hmm.
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42:46 Griffin Newman? David?
42:46 Speaker 05 Yes?
42:47 Griffin Newman? He lurks in shadow. He slips into dreams. He casts no reflection. Audible presents Bram Stoker's Dracula, a new full cast audio thriller starring Ella Purnell as Mina Harker, Jonathan Bailey as Dracula, and an A-list cast, including Maggie Gyllenhaal as Van Helsing, Amy Lou Wood as Lucy, David Johnson as Dr. Seward, and many more. That is an all-star cast.
43:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, this new full cast thriller locks Mina Harker in a battle of minds with the Count. When Mina's fiance, Jonathan Harker, Louis Partridge, vanishes in Transylvania, Mina pieces together letters, diary entries, and chilling testimony to hunt the predator stalking those she loves, only to discover Dracula's already hunting her.
43:27 Griffin Newman? Joined by the enigmatic Van Helsing, Mina and a small fearless band race against time to stop this ancient terror. Using her intellect, her resolve, and a gift for drawing the unseen lines between clues, Mina may just hold the key to bring down the Count if he hasn't already found his way inside her mind.
43:43 David Sims? Featuring a haunting original score by Elon Eschery and a spatial dolby Atmos sound design, Audible's Dracula invites you to welcome literature's most shadowy figure into your home. Feel the terror of being haunted and the thrill of the hunt. Don't miss this year's best new audio thriller, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Audible's new full cast original adaptation, written by Robin Ahern, now on Audible. Listen to The Darkness. Go to audible.com/listen to Dracula.
44:18 Griffin Newman? David!
44:18 David Sims? Yes?
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45:38 Griffin Newman? I was thinking that I probably saw this for the first time on the DVD release after the director's cut re-release, which means I've never seen A, the longer version.
45:50 David Sims? Yeah.
45:51 Griffin Newman? Which I feel like is totally out of circulation now, or B, the VHS version of the longer version.
45:56 David Sims? How much longer is the longer?
45:58 Griffin Newman? Three minutes?
45:58 David Sims? Okay.
45:59 Griffin Newman? Yeah, but it's not just like they cut one scene out. They like tighten sequences and change shots and, but it's three minutes shorter. But the others, the VHS version uses Neil Diamond, "I'm a Believer."
46:10 David Sims? Yeah, which is a great song.
46:11 Griffin Newman? It's the same old song.
46:12 David Sims? Yeah, quite haunting.
46:13 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
46:14 David Sims? I remember that re-release. I was sort of vaguely aware of the movie. I'm becoming vaguely aware of the Coen Brothers and all that. And the poster, obviously, for the re-release was the shovel. And I was like, so is the, I would, I confused this movie and another debut by a crimey filmmaker, Danny Boyle, "Shallow Grave."
46:30 Griffin Newman? Oh, sure.
46:30 David Sims? Right. Where I was like, man, in the 90s or whatever, like back in the day, people, right, we're digging shallow graves, like. Yeah, Casino also. Casino. I mean, I just remember.
46:40 Griffin Newman? Mystery Man. The Ratchet Shovel movies.
46:43 David Sims? Yeah. And hey, that's Willie Mitch Macy.
46:46 Griffin Newman? Well, hang on.
46:46 David Sims? Cohen's favorite.
46:47 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
46:49 David Sims? Blood Simple. I'm gonna read from the dossier. Joel Daniel Cohen was born November 29th, 1953, a Thanksgiving boy. A plump Thanksgiving turkey.
47:01 Griffin Newman? You think he was plump?
47:02 David Sims? No, I'm sure he came out a string bean.
47:04 Griffin Newman? He looks like fucking Spike from Peanuts. I know I invoked Spike recently on some other episode. I was trying to explain Spike to Ben, but I was watching all these fucking special features last night and I was like, who does Joel Cohen look like? And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. Now he looks like Spike.
47:18 David Sims? Yes. So he was born in 1953.
47:24 David Sims? Ethan Jesse Cohen arrives in this world, 1950, September 21st, 1957. They have an older sister, Debbie, Deborah. Dad Edward was a professor at economics at the University of Minnesota. And they grew up in Minneapolis, right? Edward was born in the US, but he actually grew up overseas.
47:48 David Sims? His grandfather, Victor.
47:50 Griffin Newman? Okay.
47:50 David Sims? So Joel, so Edward's father.
47:52 Griffin Newman? Mm-hmm.
47:52 David Sims? Was a barrister of the ins of court in London, of course. Order.
47:59 David Sims? See, I For the listeners at home, David is wearing a powdered wig. Yep. Uh, I remember when he retired, uh, my grandparents went to live in Hove, which is a seaside town next to Brighton, I can tell you exclusively. JJ didn't look it up. Fire. For him. Yep. Uh, and we used to live in there. My father actually lived, grew up in London. I think he lived in Croydon, Pearlie is a neighborhood in Croydon, which is sort of South London suburbs. Um, and he had very British tastes in movies. They would watch all the Ealing comedies and things like that. Cohen's mother Rena is a professor of art history at St. Cloud State University, uh, which is another Twin Cities place.
48:36 David Sims? They're Ashkenazi Jews. They're from Poland, Russia, you know, Edward was in the army. You must be looking at the wrong dossier. We're talking the Cohen brothers now. They are Jewish. I will tell you this now exclusively revealed to you that the coins are Minnesota Jews.
48:50 Speaker 03 The directors of True Grit.
48:54 David Sims? Edward was in the army, uh, during World War II, uh, and they were raised relatively traditionally moderately strict. We of course will be wrestling with something and I'm sure you guys have wrestled with a little bit, uh, when you did your podcast. The Cohen's are a little taciturn, not huge on kind of discussing their motivations and interests. They'll do a lot of interviews. It's not like they don't do press.
49:22 Speaker 03 We would like to gently debunk.
49:24 David Sims? Okay, go do it.
49:26 Speaker 03 I would say that they're not film professors.
49:28 David Sims? No.
49:28 Speaker 03 You know, of their own work, but they've been pretty forthcoming over the years. I mean, there's many.
49:33 David Sims? You guys have been delving through too. Like you've been. You've been so.
49:36 Speaker 03 I think it's interesting that there's this, uh, received wisdom about them that they're like, won't explain their movies like kind of on the same level as David Lynch. Or something where it's like, no, I'm not telling you anything. And it's like, I think it's mainly just because they sort of embed jokes and sarcasm into their answers a lot of the time. Like.
49:54 David Sims? They're Jewish. This is interesting.
49:57 Speaker 03 That's yeah. Yes, go on. Like, like in the, in the preface to this book, like they, they give some advice to writers where they say, keep going until, until the work is boring to you. And then that's when you know to stop because it's, it's the sort of arena of the amateur who, who doesn't have the imagination to quit, uh, who keeps going and going. And then like, the question would be is like, is that a completely, is that completely sincere advice? Or are they fucking with the reader? You know? Uh, but I do think that they, you know, they'll get on a Blu-ray and go through all of Blood Simple with Barry Seinfeld, like shot by shot by shot, talking about how they made it, what they were going for. So.
50:38 Griffin Newman? Our buddy Sean Fantasy of the big picture was talking on some recent episode, but it was somewhere in the transition period, coming out of Oscar season and going into 2025 movie preview, where he was comparing, he was comparing Brady Corbey to Paul Thomas Anderson, right? And he was saying like, as we're getting out of this Oscar season, the thing I think that everyone's exhausted with is Brady Corbey, like explaining the themes of his movie 8,000 times. And he was putting that in contrast to Paul Thomas Anderson, who never explains his movies at all. That when he goes and does press and he'll do long form interviews, he will talk and he'll talk openly about stuff. But the thing he doesn't want to tell
51:21 Griffin Newman? you at all is how to read his movie versus Brady Corbey being like, here's everything and this is exactly how it intended, right? And he was like, it's the thing that makes sense because Paul Thomas Anderson was totally like that when he started out. He was like such an early DVD commentary guy, such an early, I'm telling you all my ambitions for this and how I want it to be received. And I'm speaking of the frustration of the elements that are misunderstood and all that sort of stuff. And he's like, it makes sense if you're a certain kind of film nerd and you grow up like loving movies and then studying their construction and then like learning how to analyze them more deeply, that your greatest dream is to make a movie that people can read as deeply as you've read other films.
52:02 Griffin Newman? And when these guys get the chance where they're finally in that sort of spotlight, it's very hard for them to resist the temptation to start that conversation themselves, which ultimately doesn't do the movie that much of a favor. And most guys learn to, as time goes on, back off and get a little more elusive. And what do you say versus what don't you say? I think what is unique about the Coens is like, they have consistently been in sort of like old master phase from the beginning. There was no point in time where you're reading clumsy interviews with them where they're kind of exposing themselves.
52:35 Speaker 03 I wonder, I wonder if we'll dig up anything more.
52:37 Griffin Newman? Like, they have been from the beginning. And I think that's the difference is a lot of times when we do this show and JJ's digging through, you know, like, the quotes from the first couple of movies.
52:49 Speaker 03 He's digging through the shallow grave of quotes from the early films.
52:52 Griffin Newman? He's digging, he's putting the shovel on the ground. Sometimes you're like, oh, it's a lot easier to find more information in the earlier stages of their career where they like, haven't been as media trained, right? And they're like, less guarded. And also they're willing to talk about these things like 25 years later with more distance. And the Coens like, recut their own movie and have spoken extensively about this film. And it's not like they've disowned it or tried to make a mystery box around it.
53:17 Speaker 03 And they didn't massively recut it, sorry to just to jump in.
53:20 Griffin Newman? Yeah, yeah.
53:20 Speaker 03 They just, they tweaked it. They tightened it up. They didn't cut whole scenes or put whole scenes in that were.
53:25 Griffin Newman? It's this fascinating balance of them being like, yeah, we're like a little embarrassed by this, but we're also not distancing ourselves from it. Right? And I was watching one of these things on the Criterion Disc and they just said, the thing that they always say, which I think some people think they are using this to throw people off their scent, I believe with them it's genuine. And they were talking about their sense of structure. And Ethan said like, I don't know what a three act structure is. Like, he makes a joke of like, I've heard rumors of this and I've never seen it myself. Right? And he's like, I never think about that stuff at all. I think we've watched so many things and read so many things that to some degree, we've internalized some innate sense of structure, but we never do that consciously.
54:08 Griffin Newman? And then Joel says something to the effect of, our basic writing process is, let's come with enough ideas that excite us that we're ready to start writing. Then we start writing and we're like, I guess it'd be cool if this happened next. And then they go, wow, feels like about time to wrap things up. That they like, tend to write straight through from beginning to end, once they just have enough ideas percolating and they're not thinking consciously about how to design these things like Swiss watches with the intent of people pulling them apart later.
54:38 Speaker 03 That's hard to believe.
54:39 Griffin Newman? It is because their movies are so good and tight.
54:42 Speaker 03 And they are very Swiss watch like as well. Like they're.
54:46 David Sims? That's why I don't believe them. I think, I'm not calling them liars.
54:50 Speaker 02 I feel like the, the big story we always heard is in Lewin Davis, there's this part where he's driving past Akron. And there's like an off ramp to go to Akron where he knows, he's just found out his son is living, who he's never met. And they were like, we were writing it and we were like, oh, the off ramp for Akron's coming up. Is Lewin gonna take it? And they were like, no, no, no, he doesn't take it. And just as they were writing, they decided like that whole section of the movie is not gonna happen.
55:14 David Sims? Right.
55:14 Griffin Newman? Like they're.
55:15 David Sims? I love that.
55:16 Griffin Newman? They're not idiot savants, but the way they talk about their.
55:18 David Sims? Sometimes present themselves a little bit as.
55:20 Griffin Newman? It's maddening where you're like, are you guys just perfect instincts? How is that possible? And then they'll talk about how prepared they are in terms of shooting.
55:29 David Sims? Right. They have an excellent reputation throughout Hollywood.
55:33 Griffin Newman? Right.
55:33 David Sims? For being incredibly good, uh, on time, under budget, all that kind of stuff, like very, very.
55:37 Griffin Newman? But also that they're like, right, very disciplined, very storyboard.
55:41 David Sims? Two headed director.
55:41 Griffin Newman? Right. They're like, we see other directors who get the kind of buzz from showing up on set and not totally knowing what you're gonna do. And that sort of pressure inspires them and that's our nightmare. And we'll change the plan if something isn't working, but we wanna come to this set knowing exactly how it should work. In contrast to the script seemingly coming out of just like, I don't know. It just like flows out of us and we ask ourselves the questions like, should he take the off ramp? And then we just go from there.
56:09 Speaker 03 Another good, uh, story in a similar vein is, uh, they wrote all of Fargo up until, uh, Steve Buscemi's character is quote, humping the escort. And then could not figure out what would happen next and like basically put it in a drawer for, you know, six months or a year or something.
56:28 David Sims? Which certainly, that does seem to be sometimes part of their process. Like when they hit a wall, they don't ram into the wall. They're just kinda like, okay.
56:35 Griffin Newman? If it's not coming to us, then we have to put it aside until it makes sense.
56:38 Speaker 02 They wrote Barton, I think, I think in the middle of trying to write Miller's Crossing. And I said that that was kind of the.
56:43 David Sims? With Miller's Crossing.
56:44 Speaker 02 The birth almost of a new process where it was like, instead of trying to create a mousetrap, contraption type script. It was like, this is one idea that just came out. Yeah.
56:54 David Sims? Now, right. I don't know if you know this, but the Coens grew up in a kind of a boring suburban part of Minnesota called St. Louis Park. And Ethan said, I like this quote a lot. And this is a classic Ethan Coen quote to me. It was the suburbs, you know? I cannot think of a single seminal childhood event.
57:14 Speaker 02 I relate to that so much.
57:15 David Sims? Right. Someone's like, come on, tell me something from your childhood that might inform like clearly your lot, your work is informed by your adolescence sometime. And he's just like, yeah, I can't think of anything. 18 years blank. Joel says, Bob Dylan got out of Minnesota in early age and you can see why.
57:33 David Sims? These guys are really roasting Minnesota. They don't live there, right? They live in LA, I want to say.
57:38 Griffin Newman? No, they live in New York.
57:39 David Sims? I don't know.
57:41 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
57:41 David Sims? Bi-coastal.
57:42 Griffin Newman? Okay. I feel like they're more New York, though, right?
57:45 David Sims? Maybe.
57:46 Griffin Newman? I don't know. Where are the winds blow?
57:48 Speaker 02 Recommend everyone check out Pedro Coens Instagram page if you want.
57:51 David Sims? I used to be on Pedro's. He was so, cause he was like, he's, is he a bodybuilder? A model or he's sort of like an aspiring kind of.
58:00 Speaker 02 He's living the life.
58:01 David Sims? He is living. That is the thing. Yeah. I remember Katie Rich, our mutual friend.
58:05 Griffin Newman? This is son of Joel and Francis.
58:07 David Sims? Yes. Katie Rich was the one who got me into Pedro McDormand Coens great Instagram years ago. Anyway, um, so, uh, when the Coen brothers are growing up, they watch a lot of movies. Ethan, we saw a lot of Tarzan movies and Steve Rea's muscle movies. Cool. Uh, they liked comedies, you know, kind of like British farce comedies.
58:31 Griffin Newman? Boeing, Boeing.
58:32 David Sims? Boeing, Boeing.
58:33 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
58:33 David Sims? Which is a great play and a kind of an okay movie. Bob Hope movies, Jerry Lewis movies, Tony Curtis. Uh, they like Doris Day movies. They like Pillow Talk. Uh, we didn't realize we were watching crap is what Joel says. Like they just love movies. Uh, they get their hands on a super eight camera. They remade a lot of bad Hollywood movies. Uh, their most successful in their memory are Cornell Wild's Naked Prey and Autopremature's Advice and Consent. Uh, they said they didn't really understand, they would edit in camera, obviously. They didn't realize they could edit film physically by cutting it up and stuff.
59:09 Speaker 02 Uh, I'm not gonna read all of this.
59:11 Speaker 03 They also made a movie called Henry Kissinger, Man on the Move.
59:13 Griffin Newman? I was gonna say, so they, they bring that up at the Oscars when they win for No Country. I forget which of their three acceptance speeches.
59:20 Speaker 03 My guess is directing, if I.
59:22 Griffin Newman? Yeah, but they say like, when we were kids, we'd run around in the backyard with briefcases and make movies like Henry Kissinger, Man on the Move. And what's weird to us is that what we're doing now still feels exactly the same as that. And I do think that's part of their secret and it's a benefit to being a team and a team that knows each other so well and can communicate like wordlessly and has a shared reference base and interest base. And they always talk about watching movies together and reading books together and like being in tandem like that. Is that to some degree, I think they're trying to retain the purity of when they made movies as children and, and would just be like, what's interesting enough to us to be worth the effort of pulling together costumes?
1:00:05 Speaker 02 There's a lot of play acting, like when they talk about.
1:00:07 Griffin Newman? And don't question it. Yeah.
1:00:09 Speaker 02 People describing seeing them write the script, it's just the two of them. One's playing one character, one's playing the other and they're just doing scenes together. When they talk about storyboarding it, they're getting up with their storyboard artist, J. Todd Anderson, all acting out the scenes.
1:00:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, when we interviewed J. Todd, he said that the reason he got the job, or one of the reasons he got the job, storyboarding Raising Arizona is because he was willing to act out the drawing with them.
1:00:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, and there's even in this movie, there's like 40 to 50 shots, which are literally just starring the Coen Brothers shot by Barry Sonnenfeld. There are, there's so many pickup shots in this movie, down to like that little drip of water, that's the very last shot of the movie, all the burial scenes, these, uh, the fight scene out in the lawn, there, there was a lot of like.
1:00:51 Speaker 03 Just like boots on the ground, yeah.
1:00:52 Speaker 02 Stuff in this movie.
1:00:54 Griffin Newman? Well, obviously I imagine the dossier is gonna get to this, but like their meeting Raimi is so humongous.
1:01:01 Speaker 02 Okay, well, right, okay, let me hit the gas on the dossier.
1:01:04 Griffin Newman? Okay.
1:01:04 Speaker 02 Okay, just cause, you know, this is a big episode.
1:01:07 Griffin Newman? But that's like a real Raimi filmmaking principle thing of just like, just get the shot.
1:01:12 Speaker 02 Uh, they go to Bard College at Simon's Rock for a minute, which is a sort of hippie early college where you can get in when you're 16 years old, but then Joel goes to NYU, uh, and studies film there. I wanted to keep making movies and that was an easy school to get into, he says. Uh, another description of the time at NYU is our professors weren't famous directors. They'd made a career essentially in teaching.
1:01:33 David Sims? Uh, Joel, I was ciphered there. I sat in the back of the room with an insane grin on my face. That's all funny. I do think like my mom has friends who, one friend in particular, who would always say like, I went to NYU back when it was bad. You know, like NYU only became kind of the like insane powerhouse that became in like the nineties. It suddenly was cooler to want to go to New York for university.
1:01:55 Speaker 03 Also needed a couple of generations of successful graduates.
1:01:59 David Sims? And then the film school, right?
1:02:00 Speaker 03 There's a track record there. Right.
1:02:02 David Sims? And he does, Joel makes a short film there called Soundings, which is about a deaf person whose girlfriend fantasizes about someone else while she's making love to him. Have you guys seen Soundings?
1:02:14 Speaker 03 That is not viewable?
1:02:15 Speaker 02 Never even heard of it. Yeah. Yeah, this was new to me, reading about it.
1:02:19 Speaker 03 Well, JJ just got rehired. I gotta tell you.
1:02:22 David Sims? Then Joel went to a graduate film program at the University of Texas in Austin. And he married somebody and then got separated soon after and left the program after just a semester. Ethan went to Princeton and studied philosophy. Okay, King.
1:02:38 Speaker 03 Our comrade Melissa Tuckman, uh, who has some affiliation with Princeton has put in a request for Ethan Cohen's thesis on Wittgenstein. So in three to four months, we may be able to, to read it from the archives.
1:02:53 David Sims? That sounds fun. Um, it's 45 pages. It's the longest thing he wrote before the blood simple script.
1:03:00 Speaker 02 That's crazy.
1:03:01 Speaker 03 Well, that's like academic writing, you know?
1:03:04 David Sims? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff about college. I'm going to move on.
1:03:07 Speaker 03 JJ's fired again.
1:03:08 David Sims? Yeah, they wrote their first scripts together while still enrolled in rural school, a movie they've written that was never produced was called Coast to Coast, which was sort of a screwball comedy. Ethan, for the plot details here, it had 28 Einsteins in it. The red Chinese were cloning Albert Einstein. Okay. And then after they graduate, they moved to New York City. And, uh, they feel like this is when they actually start to get to know each other. Like obviously three years difference when you're a kid is big by now. They're both grown up and they become real pals, apparently. And, um, Joel works as an assistant editor for Edna Ruth Paul. Ethan works at a temp agency as a typist. You were telling me, Ray, I think the data entry.
1:03:51 Speaker 02 Data entry at Mises.
1:03:52 David Sims? Eventually, maybe, right. And then Joel starts work on Sam Raimi's film, The Evil Dead. As an assistant editor, he'd been fired from another movie called Nightmare. And they, he says that Evil Dead's obviously an inspiration. A lot of stuff in her film, like the camera running up the front lawn is, is Raimi. Inspired. Raimi's first impression of the Coens. Edna, our editor, says, you gotta read these guys' scripts. And I go, oh, God. You know, Joel's Brothers was just a statistical accountant at Macy's at the time, and I thought it was probably gonna be awful. And then I read it. And I thought, wow, these guys know how to write scripts. Okay. Thank you, Sam. Really interesting.
1:04:30 Griffin Newman? Hey, I think it's interesting.
1:04:31 David Sims? It is interesting.
1:04:32 Griffin Newman? What I think is interesting about, uh, thinking of that moment in time.
1:04:35 David Sims? Yes.
1:04:35 Griffin Newman? Is like Joel has successfully started getting work in the industry.
1:04:39 David Sims? He's doing film work.
1:04:40 Griffin Newman? He's bottom of the totem pole editing the lowest budget horror movies, but he is employed working on films. And then he's got this mystery brother with this day job who they keep saying like they write scripts together. Who on, on their face, I think were received the way my parents received the idea of like, who the fuck are these guys making a neon noir?
1:05:03 Griffin Newman? But, but Raimi was one of the first to sort of like give him the shot, read it, notice that they were good.
1:05:11 David Sims? Yes.
1:05:11 Griffin Newman? And then I think what they're getting from Raimi in such a huge way is like, this guy just went out and fucking did it.
1:05:16 David Sims? That's the thing. He had financed his movies by like bothering dentists in Detroit or wherever it is that Sam Raimi did. And they were like, well, we could probably do that.
1:05:23 Griffin Newman? Right. Like, can you get like 60 financiers who each are contributing less than $10,000? And if you can just keep knocking on doors, you might have enough to make a movie.
1:05:33 David Sims? Now, Raimi had essentially made a short film called Within the Woods. That was his proof of concept. They decide to do something similar. So over three days, they shoot sort of a trailer for Blood Simple.
1:05:43 Griffin Newman? Right.
1:05:44 David Sims? They rent a camera.
1:05:45 Griffin Newman? Did you watch this, David?
1:05:46 David Sims? Yes, I did.
1:05:47 Griffin Newman? You guys, I'm sure.
1:05:48 David Sims? Legendary.
1:05:48 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:05:49 David Sims? Yeah.
1:05:49 Griffin Newman? It's basically.
1:05:50 David Sims? And of course, most famously, Bruce Campbell is in it.
1:05:53 Griffin Newman? He's playing the M M Walsh. Analog or is he a Hadea?
1:05:58 Speaker 02 He's playing Marty.
1:05:59 David Sims? Yeah, he's playing the Dan Hadea.
1:06:00 Speaker 02 But in it, it almost seems like they have the visor character because the guy who's playing the guest character has this like long fur codon.
1:06:07 David Sims? He's a cowboy.
1:06:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:06:08 David Sims? He's like much more of a cowboy. Like he's got, kind of looks like the cowboy in Mulholland Drive.
1:06:13 Speaker 02 Seriously?
1:06:14 David Sims? Yeah.
1:06:14 Griffin Newman? You basically, um, Monte Montgomery, you basically don't see actors' faces in this. They were like, our thing is rather than make a proof of concept short film, let's make a trailer as if we have made the finished film. Because correctly, they were like, no one wants to read shit. Both like people in the industry and dentists who will maybe give me a couple thousand dollars don't want to read shit. They said they had the script and only one guy actually read it, who was a urologist and he handed them back the script and it was covered in blood.
1:06:44 Speaker 02 I think he invested though.
1:06:45 Griffin Newman? He did. He did invest. But he was like, if you say to people like, hey, can I show you something? And we showed up with a 16 millimeter projector. They shot the trailer on 35,
1:06:57 Griffin Newman? but then they like knocked it down to 16 so that it was in a format that was easy enough to then like prop up and show people.
1:07:02 Speaker 02 Super cool because you can walk in with a little 60 millimeter projector that's like a suitcase, like, like a little briefcase.
1:07:07 Griffin Newman? And we're like, this will just get people's attention. And they would like book screening rooms in New York City and they were like, well, we know you usually charge by two hour blocks. How much can we get 15 minutes for? And then just like funnel people in and out and show them this thing. The trailer is even more Raimi than the final movie.
1:07:26 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:07:27 Griffin Newman? But they talk so much about, I mean, AI.
1:07:29 David Sims? It's got the shovel. It's got the bullet holes through the wall.
1:07:33 Griffin Newman? Right, the Raimi cam.
1:07:35 David Sims? But I mean, it has images that are gonna be, you know, pivotal to the feature.
1:07:41 Griffin Newman? You don't really see any actors' faces because they hadn't cast people. But they're like showing you some of the images they have in their head and then they're doing kind of crazier Raimi camera work. And what's also interesting is it, it feels more horror than the final film. And they talked about like, Raimi was their model of this working, but we also saw other people getting to make horror movies at this number. It felt like the easiest way to get a little bit of money was horror was seen as a safer return on investment that didn't cost a lot. And so they're finding this midpoint in their mind between like, we're interested in like Dashiell Hammett type stuff. Can we like find a way to mash that up with horror that will trick people into giving us money?
1:08:20 Speaker 02 The final image of the trailer is the moon looms up and turns red.
1:08:26 David Sims? It's pretty cool. The tagline, just to clarify, is Julian, whatever. What's the last name? Come on.
1:08:36 Griffin Newman? They might have changed his name in the.
1:08:37 David Sims? No, it is Julian Marty thought he'd hired the murder, thought he'd hired the murder of his wife. When in Texas, you get what you pay for. Blood sample. Anyway, they do, and Sonnenfeld's obviously involved, raise about half a million dollars, which is pretty crazy. They say the movie eventually ended up costing about quarter, three quarters of a million dollars. Back in the day, to be clear, it was fucking hard to fund the tiniest movie because film shit is so expensive and you can't just put things on an iPhone or whatever. You know, they raised some movie money in New York, as you know, the screening room thing you were just talking about. And
1:09:18 David Sims? they wanted to make an entertaining movie. Like this trailer is for an entertaining movie. It's not like we're going to make an art film. It's like, we're going to make a fucking thriller.
1:09:28 Griffin Newman? This Eggers talk, he kept asking them where it came from, and they were just truly like reverse engineered from what feels like the easiest to get financing for, what feels like the easiest to sell people and actually going to see in theaters, what gives us the greatest chance of return on investment. And they were like, our two overriding goals were make our first movie, just knock down that door and have made a film was one. And two was not fuck it up to a degree that we can maybe get to make a second film. But this like, isn't coming out of any burning, like, we had the most incredible idea for a story, or this is something we want to say. It's what's so fascinating about this
1:10:09 Griffin Newman? movie is that they were just sort of like, trying to find the midpoint between what interested them and what they thought would work as a calling card.
1:10:18 David Sims? Now, I would say this film is coming out during a neo noir boom. I don't know if you guys would agree with that. They're very conscious of body heat while they're prepping this movie.
1:10:27 Speaker 03 That makes sense.
1:10:28 David Sims? Things that they thought were kind of cheesy in body heat that they wanted to avoid.
1:10:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, they didn't want like halation filters on the lenses.
1:10:35 David Sims? Right.
1:10:36 Speaker 03 Like really sharp.
1:10:37 David Sims? Right, yeah, because body heat, um, it's kind of a sweaty movie. Have you guys picked up on this with that one? It's kind of got this kind of like sweaty sexy thing going on.
1:10:45 Griffin Newman? Was a result of the body heat.
1:10:47 David Sims? So hot.
1:10:48 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:10:48 David Sims? Um, and you know, the, the Bob Raffelson postman always rings twice remake, which is like, to me, the epitome of kind of a bad neo noir, no offense to it, where it's kind of just like, you know, that kind of like sexy noir? What if they like fuck and we see it?
1:11:04 Griffin Newman? Right.
1:11:04 David Sims? And it's kind of, you know what? Sometimes things should be left to the imagination. Like that's the magic of noir, right? Um, but there's lots of good noir and there's like Thief and then there's stuff like Blade Runner, you know, that is sort of adjacent or whatever. But they are like, we're not really inspired by those kinds of movies. We're more inspired by like the literature that that those kinds of movies are inspired by. So James M. Kane is obviously the number one guy. They reference for Blood Simple, obviously guys like Chandler and Hammett as well, but Kane is the big thing, but they're not making a whodunit, like many a noir obviously has that as the driving plot thing there. Just making a double cross movie, I guess.
1:11:44 Speaker 03 Although in some sense, there is a whodunit aspect to it, just because the characters are so confused.
1:11:49 David Sims? The characters definitely do not know whodun pretty much anything in this movie.
1:11:53 Griffin Newman? It's not a whodunit, it's a what happened.
1:11:55 David Sims? Yeah.
1:11:56 Griffin Newman? Right?
1:11:56 David Sims? What the fuck is going on?
1:11:57 Griffin Newman? It's everyone trying to make sense of what's happening around them and then coming to the wrong conclusions about what they think led to that.
1:12:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's actually, it's the exact opposite of a whodunit.
1:12:07 Griffin Newman? Right.
1:12:07 Speaker 03 Like you know who did it and they don't.
1:12:10 Griffin Newman? But you don't understand what they did or why. And everyone's just reacting.
1:12:14 David Sims? So James M. Kane, just to be clear, wrote a postman always rings twice. Um, anyway, um, so they make this movie.
1:12:22 Griffin Newman? Oh, wow. Okay.
1:12:24 David Sims? M M Walsh was in written, it was written for him, you know, they'd seen him in straight time. And
1:12:32 Griffin Newman? He said he was, um, he'd gotten to a fight with his reps shortly before this. Cause he found out about some other projects that had been offered to him that they passed on without telling him. So he said, any single thing that comes in for me, you have to send it to me immediately. I want to make the decision, but it's one of those things where like the timing is perfect for this script to hit his eyes. A month earlier, he never would have seen it. And maybe two months later, he would have been like, actually you can start filtering shit again. But it's like, right at the time where he's like, any single thing that comes in the mailbox for me, I'm looking at. And he just says like, why not? Like truly who?
1:13:17 David Sims? He's like, why not? He says they were horrible at directing actors because they never worked with actors before. A way he puts it that I think is really funny is Joel would be like, why don't you look over there? And then he'd be like, why am I looking over there? And they'd be like, just humor me, just fucking look over there. You know, like they weren't good at like talking.
1:13:32 Griffin Newman? I'm humoring you by being in this picture.
1:13:35 David Sims? Pretty much.
1:13:36 Griffin Newman? He insisted that they pay him in cash because he thought the checks would bounce.
1:13:39 David Sims? Movie is just to humor you, he said. Um, it's just funny. It's so Coens or whatever. It's so like for them to be like, I hope we can get Emmett Walsh. Like that's, that's the coup for them.
1:13:51 Griffin Newman? Totally, but he's, he's being paid in a hundred dollar bills. Most of the money you see him waving around in the movie is his salary for the movie. Where he was just like, A, I'm taking cash because I don't think these guys are good for it unless I have it in hand. And B, I don't want to leave the cash they're giving me in my hotel room because I'm worried that the staff will steal it.
1:14:12 David Sims? Sonnenfeld having no filter was like, you were paying him four grand a week. So then you have to imagine by like week three, he's walking around with 12 grand in cash.
1:14:21 Griffin Newman? But you see it, you can see the outline of like bills all over his wardrobe. He's wearing his entire salary in every shot of this movie.
1:14:32 David Sims? So Fran McDormand is in the film and Joel Cohen, I don't know if you guys know that actually ends up marrying her. They have a long relationship. You guys aware? Okay.
1:14:43 Griffin Newman? Can we double check that?
1:14:44 David Sims? And he was looking to go to a lot of theater, trying to find people who are interesting. He sees Holly Hunter in a play called Crimes of the Heart.
1:14:53 David Sims? And they want Holly Hunter.
1:14:56 Speaker 03 Good taste.
1:14:57 David Sims? Yeah. And of course they'll end up working with her.
1:14:59 Griffin Newman? She's on the phone.
1:15:00 David Sims? She's on the phone.
1:15:01 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:15:01 David Sims? You might notice her voice. She's got a bit of a distinctive twang. And she's like, I'm doing another play. I can't do your dumb movie.
1:15:10 Griffin Newman? But you know who you should look at.
1:15:11 David Sims? But I am roommates with Fran. They were living in the Bronx. Make me a movie about Holly and Fran in the Bronx, by the way.
1:15:17 Griffin Newman? And?
1:15:18 David Sims? And Kathy Bates.
1:15:19 Griffin Newman? The third roommate.
1:15:21 David Sims? And Fran had barely done anything. Dan Hedaya.
1:15:25 Griffin Newman? Hedaya? Hedaya. I always say Hedaya.
1:15:27 David Sims? I got it right. Just came in and they were like, yep.
1:15:31 David Sims? Ethan says, quote, "You know it when you see it." Joel, I don't think we could have imagined the quality that Dan would have brought to it. I don't know where Dan Hedaya is in his career then.
1:15:40 Speaker 03 I think Cheers is in 84. I think 84 is a big year.
1:15:43 Griffin Newman? Right. It's like all about to start happening.
1:15:46 David Sims? Yeah, because he's in Buckaroo Banzai the same year as Blood and Bull. And he'd just been in The Hunger. I mean, like, he's a guy who plays a lot of cops. Like, hello, Jordan. You don't have to raise your hand. You can just interrupt us. We just talk all the time.
1:16:00 Griffin Newman? We interrupt each other.
1:16:01 David Sims? Yes.
1:16:02 Speaker 03 They have said also that they wrote this character with Martin Scorsese in mind.
1:16:08 Griffin Newman? Interesting.
1:16:09 Speaker 03 Like, if you imagine like this, his entire character being an extrapolation of
1:16:14 Griffin Newman? The Taxi Driver.
1:16:14 Speaker 03 Scorsese's character in Taxi Driver.
1:16:17 Griffin Newman? I, Hedaya is my favorite performance in this movie. I think he is.
1:16:22 David Sims? Really fucking good.
1:16:24 Griffin Newman? I find it to be like.
1:16:26 David Sims? I mean, Emma Walsh is awesome.
1:16:28 Griffin Newman? He's awesome.
1:16:29 David Sims? It's an iconic work.
1:16:30 Griffin Newman? That's the, right. Iconic is the thing, but I'm like, and no disrespect, no backhand to Emma Walsh. I think what Hedaya is doing in this is so fascinating. I find it so deeply affecting. His performance that truly haunts me.
1:16:46 Speaker 03 And he's on the ground and he's crawling around like, I think we were, we watched it like on a big screen at Ray's office and it was just like-
1:16:54 David Sims? Go off big screen, Ray. All right.
1:16:57 Speaker 03 I think Ray just turned to me and was like, what he's doing right now is so incredible.
1:17:01 David Sims? Incredible.
1:17:01 Speaker 03 Just like how wounded he is, like how pathetic he is.
1:17:04 David Sims? But at the same time, he's like an animal. And I don't mean that in like, uh, what like, I mean, he's got a hairy chest. Okay, fine. But you know, like, there's something just sort of like primal about him.
1:17:15 Speaker 03 There's like taxidermyed animals, yeah, taxidermy. There's taxidermyed animals all over his house. And he has a dog. Like, there is something like, there's, it's an association with him.
1:17:26 David Sims? The Speedo shot or the, the still photo.
1:17:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:17:30 Griffin Newman? What do you mean Speedo? He is wearing a two-piece wool, black wool bodysuit.
1:17:35 Speaker 03 He's wearing one of those old fashioned bathing suits that's like, covers your whole body.
1:17:39 Griffin Newman? Just made out of Brillo pads.
1:17:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:17:42 Griffin Newman? Um, we just did Clueless very recently on this podcast. And Amy Heckerling said, her whole thought was, I want to cast someone who would usually play a hitman as Cher's father, right? It is like the inverse of this. This guy seems so intense and so menacing and so criminal to have him play like a sweetheart lawyer, but speaking with that level of gruffness and intensity to his daughter will be very funny. Hadea just looks intense when he shows up, right? It's not just his physical appearance, but also like his energy, literally his eyes and everything. Shears this same year, he's just like, come here, ah, Carla, come on, like yelling everything.
1:18:20 Speaker 03 Speaking of criminal, his performance in Dick as, as Richard Nixon, criminally overlooked.
1:18:26 Griffin Newman? Yeah, I was gonna say, I hope you weren't accusing him of being a criminal because he tells you that he is not a crook, in fact, in that movie. Rewatching it this time, I had the specific thought of what is interesting about Hadea, both- The character as written and his performance is that it's sort of an anti Sidney Greenstreet, right? Where it's like, here is the guy in the prime position of power within the structure of this movie. This is a very small movie with a very tight cast and the most capital anyone has is owning this bar. And also having someone legally tied to them in marriage, right? And yet, from the beginning, this guy has no effect on everyone around him.
1:19:04 Speaker 02 It's true.
1:19:05 Griffin Newman? He holds the power. He does, undeniably. And yet, everyone's like, shut up. Fuck you. Fuck off. Right? Like, no one respects him. No one takes him seriously. And also, he like, the failed attempt to pick up the woman at the bar.
1:19:23 Speaker 02 Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything he does kind of fails.
1:19:26 Griffin Newman? It fails. Right. It's like, here's a guy who actually, it's not that he's Sidney Greenstreet in his mind. It's that he is technically occupying that role. And yet, he is so uncomfortable in his own skin. He is so self-loathing. He is so sensitive, really, right? Like, everything like hits him. That he cannot like sell the confidence of his actual position in a way that makes other people allergic to him. Like, people are grossed out by him.
1:19:53 Speaker 02 That scene is a lot longer in the shooting script. And, and he like, he's like, hey, do you want to go see the Oilers and the Rams at the Astrodome with me? And like Maurice comes by and he's like, just give me the usual. And Maurice brings him a glass of milk and he's like, no, come on. And then like Maurice goes to pour out the glass of milk in the sink. He's like, no, pour it back in the bottle. It's just extended. Almost like a Mikey and Nicky's kind of scene.
1:20:17 Griffin Newman? What's also that he clearly goes like, I know how a guy like me is supposed to act. He walks into the bar and then just goes up to a woman and basically says like, you're fucking me now. And he cannot sell it.
1:20:31 Griffin Newman? And she just goes like, no, thank you. And he takes a second stab at it where he's like, I don't think you understood what I was saying. And she's like, yeah, I'm not interested. And you can see him short circuiting that he doesn't know how to like, handle this. And yet this is probably every fucking night of his life, right? Like this kind of archetype of like, the gangster with the wife who hates him, who he finds out is having an affair. And it like, sends him into a spiral of jealousy. Where the, there is always the like, yeah, but this guy's fucking everybody. He's not angry that his wife is disloyal to him because he believes in the sanctity of marriage. He's just jealous in a way that he can't control. And this guy's even more pathetic where it's like, he wishes he was fucking other people. And he can't pull it off.
1:21:15 Griffin Newman? So part of it is just like, I'm jealous and possessive and also, I can't make anyone else fall for me. I tricked this one woman.
1:21:23 David Sims? Right. He's the most small time version of, right, like, yeah, he tricked one woman, yes.
1:21:28 Griffin Newman? So then M M Walsh says that when he got the script, he was like, oh, is this my chance to do a Sydney Green Street thing?
1:21:34 David Sims? Right.
1:21:35 Griffin Newman? So he reads the character as like, well, I'm in sort of like, middle aged. I'm like, probably going to transition the latest start. Like, I need to start thinking about who I want to be on screen in my 60s and 70s. Is this a chance to sort of do this? And it's the opposite where it's like, can you like, have a guy who on the outside seems like Buffalo Bob from like, the Howdy Doody Show? Is dressed like the man in the yellow hat, right? But like, inside, he secretly is this kind of like menacing heavy. And so you have these two guys circling each other who both have this disconnect between how they read to other people. And their actual power within their lives. And Hadea is just like, so sad. It is such a sustained, like controlled.
1:22:18 David Sims? Angry sad.
1:22:18 Griffin Newman? Coiled. Energy.
1:22:19 David Sims? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:22:20 Griffin Newman? It is my favorite moment in this entire film is just him having to walk past the like, lover's rock. Lineup of teenagers all laughing at him.
1:22:31 David Sims? Incredible.
1:22:32 Griffin Newman? With his finger in like the little sling. Yeah.
1:22:35 David Sims? And they notice it and they bully him.
1:22:37 Griffin Newman? Right. And you're just like, there's so much in the inherent dynamics of like, why is Emmett Walsh asking this guy who's about to hire him to do a hit to meet him at like the teen make out point? And Emmett Walsh with his Beatles somehow is like able to at least get these kids to humor him. This woman's like this young girl's talking to him for 30 seconds. And like the second Dan Hedaya enters the space, everyone's like, what's your, shut the fuck up. Fuck you.
1:23:06 David Sims? He's a bit off putting. As much as I love Dan Hedaya, the actor, if I met this character, I might not want to hang out with him.
1:23:14 Griffin Newman? But it's, it's the like, it's the, the anger and the sadness and the fact that he's not able to even like, cover it up with bluster. He is uncomfortable because you're just like, Jesus Christ, this guy's an open wound. And it's all ugly.
1:23:28 David Sims? We haven't mentioned John Getz yet. Uh, what do we think of John? I know, but like we haven't really, uh, this is one of his earliest performances, obviously. And he does not go on to fame in the same way as everyone else, but he's a pretty reliable working actor. We talked about on social network even where it's like, he's become a pretty reliable older, you know, older guy.
1:23:47 Griffin Newman? Great. Yeah. But it is funny because he's, um, right. He is ostensibly the lead of this movie.
1:23:55 David Sims? Uh, yes, sort of, although it's sort of as a cipher.
1:23:58 Speaker 02 I think his highest points are like post burying Marty the morning, that look on his face like, oh my God, I've just buried someone alive. Like he's very, very good at conveying that feeling. But I feel like if you look at Roland in No Country For Old Men, you just see like, okay, what is this like? Like a masculine guy, but like with, you know, uh, some charisma, you know, with some like Burt Reynolds charisma added to it.
1:24:25 Griffin Newman? They are obviously, uh, you know, they have the benefit of starting with Cormac McCarthy book on No Country. But you, it, it's why I kept thinking about that movie while watching this one is like, By that point, 20 years later, they know how to make the guy at the center interesting, even when it is this kind of blank slate tack turn, like, right?
1:24:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, cuz I didn't notice until the rewatch for this that like that first scene is them telling each other that they have an attraction. Like, that's the beginning of their relationship is the first scene. That's the first time they hook up when he takes a photograph of them. And I don't feel like you feel that through the, like, the way they're behaving towards each other.
1:25:04 Speaker 03 And it's important for the setup of the movie to know that they are tentative around each other.
1:25:09 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:25:09 Speaker 03 So it's like, yeah.
1:25:10 Griffin Newman? He just inherently doesn't have leading man energy. And I don't say that in a negative way. There are movies I think of, like One From The Heart, where like, casting Frederick Forrest is like a disaster, because you're like, he needs to be in the Harry Dean Stanton role, and this guy trying to play leading man is like throwing the entire movie off its axis. And like, Getz is not like that at all. It feels probably like they wanted that out of him, where it's like, part of the intrigue for them is placing just some guy in the middle of a movie like this, who is not carrying himself like a noir leading man. The part of it is that this is the one guy who like halfway through is like, what the fuck have I gotten myself into? I don't want to be in
1:25:51 Griffin Newman? this film. But they also said, like, a big thing about this movie that makes it such a miracle, and the way you were saying, David, of like, where the fuck did this guy, these guys come from? How is this not their 15th film? Is that they basically establish their key crew all from film one, right? Like, they have Skip Levesey, and they have Sonnenfeld, and they have Carter Burwell, and they have Frances McDormand.
1:26:16 Speaker 02 Wonderful score, like, perfect Carter Burwell, minimalist theme, like, that you can't shake.
1:26:20 Speaker 03 So melodic.
1:26:21 Griffin Newman? They find so much of the team, like, right there from the beginning. And Skip Levesey, who's their, like, incredible sound artist, and works on every one of their films.
1:26:31 Speaker 03 And who has a pretty cool name, let's just say.
1:26:33 Griffin Newman? Phenomenal names. Uh, he is maybe the most established of everyone they're working with.
1:26:38 Speaker 03 He brings in Carter Burwell.
1:26:39 Griffin Newman? Right. Yeah. He knows Carter Burwell just as like a music friend.
1:26:43 Speaker 03 Is this just one of those?
1:26:44 Speaker 02 Music, half animation.
1:26:45 Griffin Newman? Right, right.
1:26:46 Speaker 03 Is it like everyone's coming aboard and the more people that get added are kind of like, oh, these guys seem to know what they're doing. Hey, come aboard, Ray. No.
1:26:54 Griffin Newman? Everyone's like surprised it turns out as well as.
1:26:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. Okay. Everyone is kind of like, all right, maybe this is just a dumb lark that, you know, we're doing.
1:27:01 Griffin Newman? Cause Leaf says like working on big movies in lower positions, but he like actually has some stature as a sound guy, if not being the lead, like.
1:27:10 Speaker 03 Right. He, he's got a resume.
1:27:12 Griffin Newman? Right. He had a little more of a like, I thought the script was interesting. It's worth taking a chance on these guys. I think the Carter Burwell thing is like, this guy's smart. Maybe I can like throw him a bone. I think they might get along well.
1:27:24 Speaker 02 Carter Burwell was doing animation and he was in this band called Thick Pigeon. I went and listened to the Thick Pigeon, Thick Pigeon album that he recorded in the middle of doing this score.
1:27:33 Speaker 03 Thick Pigeon.
1:27:34 Speaker 02 Just like with like guys from New Order and just really like an experimental. He said he just wrote all of the melodies off of watching 20 minutes of the film. And basically they tried to hire, I think, three other people first, and then they came back to him. Yeah.
1:27:48 Speaker 03 I mean, he showed up with that melody. I can't imagine, you know, like. It's interesting though, because the, the, the music he made is like, oh, like what I listened to was a lot more like monotonous and intentionally atonal than his film scoring work, which is really very appealing, like so melodic.
1:28:06 Griffin Newman? They did this sort of like bake off audition thing, right? They asked him to come in with some stuff. He came in with like 10 different pieces. The melodic piano thing was one of them. But there was more electronic stuff and more conventional thriller score stuff. And they were like, we like that. Can we work on that more? And he gave them a bunch of stuff. He was just like, there was an traditional spotting section. I was like watching a cut and they were sort of like, I guess that's 60 seconds we need there. I gave him a bunch of stuff and they re-edited it and placed the music in different places than I had intended. And he was like, I was angry at them. I was too inexperienced to actually get upset about it. But if that. Had happened to me on a studio film, I probably would have made a bigger stink in a way that would have killed my entire career.
1:28:51 Griffin Newman? Versus like trusting them long enough to see that it ultimately worked out in everyone's favor. But it feels like everyone's relationship to them was like that. And M M Walsh was like, I don't know what these fucking guys are doing. Um, but the thing skip leaves they said was like, reading the script, it was so sparse. It was like so tight. There is like no emotion in it whatsoever in the way the characters are written. And he's like, any sort of emotional nuance in that film is what the actors brought to it. Like there was kind of nothing on paper for Fran's character. And she came in and filled all this stuff and it feels like it teaches them this lesson of like, A, we gotta give actors room to work. And like fill in those gaps. That strikes me as a thing that so much, so many young directors have to figure out. Totally. How to actually work with actors.
1:29:36 Griffin Newman? And then, so they're seeing like, oh my God, she's finding stuff where we didn't give it to her. And then they said about John Getz, they were like, we watched the movie now and they're like, wow, we were doing him no favors. We gave him nothing to play. The character is basically just an audience surrogate in a thriller, which means he needs to be behind the eight ball. He has no idea what's going on. The whole movie is watching him walk into rooms silently and trying to figure stuff out. And they were like, we think he's really good. And as time goes on, we're more and more grateful for the favor he gave us of like doing that well. In a way that informed us that we need to actually give actors more playable things from now here on out.
1:30:13 Speaker 03 He, he also has a really big challenge in like the last third of the movie because they set up this idea that Yuri says to Abby, uh, stay away from Ray. He's gone crazy. And so it's a challenge for the actor because he's got to seem completely bewildered. Trying to reach out to her, trying to protect her from like whatever sort of like unclear threat there is. But also he has to play it in a way where he's giving her the like crazy hooks to grab on to where she can misread one of his signals and be like, oh, actually he might be the person who wants to kill me. So like, that's tough. That's, that's, I would imagine that that's really hard.
1:30:53 Griffin Newman? And I think what he does very smart. Is rather than playing like a movie version of crazy, he is playing the sort of slow burn shock of having killed a guy and watching a guy die, right? Like there's some sort of like delayed trauma bomb happening within him that is just making him seem a little unhinged.
1:31:10 Speaker 02 And the big thing he's playing is, you know, Marty early on goes like, at a certain point, she's going to say to you, like, I'm not doing anything funny. And it's like, when she says that to him, that's the moment that he stops trusting her. They lose faith in each other, basically.
1:31:24 Griffin Newman? But I mean, our beloved producer, Ben Hosley, always talks about, it was not on mic as much in this episode.
1:31:31 Speaker 01 We don't have enough microphones.
1:31:33 Griffin Newman? Adjust the microphone over to Jordan. But Ben, you love to talk about the, the Bag Full of Money movie that makes you think, if I were in this, I'd do everything right and I'd end up owning an island, right?
1:31:43 Speaker 02 Right. So you hire an assassin in this movie. Like, I would hire a good assassin who would do his job and then we would shake hands and part ways.
1:31:50 Speaker 01 I mean, I would hire this guy.
1:31:52 Speaker 02 You don't want to hire me? I can't do either. You don't want to hire like Porky?
1:31:56 Speaker 01 As soon as I saw like four flies on his face, I'd be like, no, thank you.
1:32:03 Griffin Newman? The movies that I feel like you often point to, often point to and say, I would know how to do this better, are the things like A Simple Plan, where like a very kind of like, all American, button down, milquetoast guy, starts, like, his morals slip away. He starts losing perspective and judgment, getting caught up in his own, like, how do I maintain this? How do I hold on to this? Now you're killing more people and all this sort of shit, right? And you're like, I would just be normal.
1:32:32 Speaker 01 Cool as cucumber.
1:32:33 Griffin Newman? John Getz in this feels like the opposite, where you're like so used to the movies like this, making people get into this like Walter White-esque, slipping into a like morass of evil to, to hold on to what they have. And instead, this guy, the more things get bad around him, the more he's just like, oh, fuck, I hate this. I hate being here, right? Like, he's fucked up too deeply to, to ever fix it. But he's not doubling down on it and making it worse in a certain way. Obviously, he kills Dana Daya, right? But like, the last 20 minutes, he's just sort of like, I don't know what the fuck to do anymore.
1:33:14 David Sims? Why does Visser do what he did, do what he do?
1:33:19 Griffin Newman? Because Dan Hadé insulted him.
1:33:21 David Sims? Yeah, because Dan Hadé is just a pain in the ass.
1:33:23 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:33:23 David Sims? Because I mean, like, it's just a lot of trouble in the 80s to be photoshopping. That's all I'm saying.
1:33:27 Griffin Newman? Yeah, he has to do that by hand.
1:33:29 David Sims? Manual Photoshop, like drawing little blood stains on people.
1:33:32 Speaker 01 He might even used his own blood.
1:33:34 David Sims? That's, yeah, maybe he did. Because like this is a movie where nobody's like, hey, this is why I'm doing this, by the way. Not that I need anyone to do that. I don't want that. You know, I don't want some monologue, villainous monologue or whatever.
1:33:48 Griffin Newman? And the first time I saw it, I remember being confused when Getz shows up again, where I was like, I thought they were dead.
1:33:53 David Sims? Right.
1:33:54 Griffin Newman? Where I fell for his photo.
1:33:56 David Sims? Right, yeah. Ben, before you hand the mic back, I forgot to ask you, your, your Coen Brothers thing.
1:34:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:02 David Sims? Yeah, where your first Coen Brothers guys.
1:34:04 Speaker 01 They are filmmakers my dad really loved.
1:34:07 Griffin Newman? That checks out.
1:34:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:09 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:34:09 Speaker 01 Like Fargo was a favorite of his.
1:34:11 Griffin Newman? This, look, all of us being like 80s, 90s kids, it checks out that we all have the same story, which is my parents told me these guys were important.
1:34:20 Speaker 01 Absolutely. The Coens were one of those filmmakers that they did talk about.
1:34:25 Griffin Newman? Because also they're like, quote unquote, serious movies that are entertaining and funny. Like as much as they were seen as like, these guys are high artists and this is like highfalutin shit. On the other hand, it's like, it's silly and it's exciting.
1:34:42 Griffin Newman? David?
1:34:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:43 Griffin Newman? This episode is brought to you by XYZ Films and the acclaimed new documentary Capturing Bigfoot. On October 20th, 1967, Roger Patterson captured 59 seconds of film showing a creature walking through the Northern California woods. I wonder if you can log that on Letterboxd?
1:35:00 David Sims? It is an iconic video.
1:35:02 Griffin Newman? Footage that became the most analyzed and debated in history. 59 years later, a reel of 16 millimeter film discovered in a safe changes everything. Capturing Bigfoot reveals the untold story behind the world's greatest mystery, told for the first time by Patterson's own son and the people who were there. This is a story about family legacy, broken friendships, and how far people will go to protect a city.
1:35:24 David Sims? Of course, you got the classic, what they call Patterson Gimlin film everyone knows of Bigfoot out in the woods, like the famous Bigfoot picture. This has other stuff shot by him that no one's ever seen. That's what makes this movie different.
1:35:36 Griffin Newman? But we're also talking brand new 4K scans of the original film taken from the Patterson family archives that some historians have called the best rendering of the footage ever seen.
1:35:45 David Sims? I feel like we've all seen that footage as like grainy.
1:35:48 Griffin Newman? Yes.
1:35:48 David Sims? You know, that you see, you know, whatever, you see it in a documentary for two seconds, but this is restoring it and making it look much more clear.
1:35:55 Griffin Newman? There's also a companion podcast, the Capturing Bigfoot Podcast, which goes deeper into the legend and lore of Bigfoot and the Patterson Gimlin film, featuring weekly episodes with experts in cryptozoology, urban legends, and filmmaking.
1:36:09 David Sims? I'm something of an expert in cryptozoology.
1:36:11 Griffin Newman? Well, of course, yes, but that's more of a hobby.
1:36:14 David Sims? Yeah, this podcast, Capturing Bigfoot Podcast is hosted by the director of the film, Mark Evans, and it's available for free on YouTube and Spotify with exclusive episodes and content available on Patreon to members of the Capturing Bigfoot Society.
1:36:29 Griffin Newman? Capturing Bigfoot is now available to rent or own on Amazon Prime Video. Learn more about Capturing Bigfoot at capturingbigfoot.com.
1:36:44 Griffin Newman? Here's the basic plot overview of this movie, because it's not like it's told out of order. It's not like a Mento-style obfuscation, but they just withhold certain information from you at certain times. As much as it is like following into the basic thriller playbook of like, the audience needs to be a step ahead of the character, so the tension comes from us knowing the thing that they don't know and being worried about how it's going to go down. This movie does withhold key bits of information from the audience as well, so it takes a while to figure out even what has gone wrong. But John Getz is having an affair with Frances McDormand, who is married to Dan Hedaya, who is a pathetic
1:37:25 Griffin Newman? man who owns a bar. She wants to leave him for her. He has hired a private eye who has found photos of them sleeping together. In a fit of rage, I think spurred on even more by the fact that he cannot fuck anyone else, that he's the man, let's say, the man is rizless.
1:37:43 Griffin Newman? There is an astonishing lack of riz in this guy. Decides to put a hit out on the two of them to get his ultimate revenge.
1:37:53 Griffin Newman? He makes this mistake of sort of lightly mocking M M at Walsh, who tries to present himself as almost like the Andy Griffith show version of a private eye assassin. Right? Like he's couching everything in this sort of like folksy cuteness. So when Hadea takes a swipe at him, you assume is this guy so kind of oblivious and good natured that it's just bouncing right off of him. Instead, he breaks into their home, takes a photo of them sleeping and manually, basically hand tilt tins it.
1:38:28 Speaker 03 He photoshops it in the literal, original meaning of the.
1:38:32 Griffin Newman? Yes, to make it look like he has murdered them in bed, that there are blood shots on the sheets. Which then his plan is to then just rob Hadea, take all his money, which he knows the location of when he goes to get paid.
1:38:48 Speaker 03 He also steals Abby's gun, which is basically a frame. He's doing that to frame her and.
1:38:56 Speaker 02 That'll tie it all up essentially. It's like this was a lover's quarrel. That's what happened here.
1:39:01 Griffin Newman? But when you're asking why he does it, it's like the ego is bruised. He has the line later where he repeats the thing that Hadea said to him about like looking dumb or something like that.
1:39:10 Speaker 03 He says now it looks stupid, which I've watched the movie a few times. I don't think that Hadea ever actually calls him.
1:39:16 Speaker 02 No, no, Visser is the one who says, you look like an idiot or you're, I think you're an idiot. My read on it is he just thinks that Marty is not trustworthy, that this is not a good guy to keep a secret with. And so it's actually cleaner to take the money from him, frame the lovers and leave. And then it's a totally tied up.
1:39:34 Griffin Newman? But also.
1:39:35 Speaker 03 And they have no idea who he is.
1:39:36 Griffin Newman? Like where Hadea in that car scene isn't like. Flat out insulting him, but he is doing snarky under his breath, Trit. And he's giving him an attitude that is clearly, I think you're dumb and I'm smart.
1:39:48 Speaker 02 He's treating him like shit. I mean, he like, when he gives him the money, he pushes across the table with his boot.
1:39:53 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:39:54 Speaker 02 You know, and he is like, don't come for me.
1:39:56 Griffin Newman? But it's also, it's the no country. It's the Fargo thing. It's the like, all this for a little money that they're obsessed with, which is like, the promise of such a small amount of money can make people lose their fucking minds. Where you're just like, this is absolutely not worth it.
1:40:13 Speaker 03 The other thing too is, uh, I'm not, I don't think this is the point where, where Visser fully decides to do it, but it might be the moment that makes him, uh, cross the threshold is when, uh, Hadea says, I put a call in and the less you need to know about it, the better. And at that point, if I'm putting myself in the detective's mind, I'm thinking, oh, he, he's involved with the mob. He got funding from somebody who now understands the workings of this situation, which is, which is funny too, because what he actually did is he put in a call to Murius being like, you stole the money from the safe.
1:40:50 Griffin Newman? Right. It's, yeah, it's one of those things where watching it the first time, you think, is there a bigger conspiracy going on here? That's slowly going to get unfurled. And instead you realize this guy just made too big of a play. Right. Was just sort of like, I don't trust this dude. And I guess I could make five times as much money if I just kill him. And I think my plan is foolproof and no one will see through it.
1:41:13 Speaker 03 Don't hire a hitman.
1:41:14 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:41:15 Speaker 03 Because like, you know, they're, they kill people.
1:41:19 Griffin Newman? They do.
1:41:19 Speaker 03 So they could kill you.
1:41:21 Griffin Newman? This is interesting take, David.
1:41:22 Speaker 03 You know what I mean? Like they're already comfortable killing people for no particular reason.
1:41:27 Speaker 02 This is very similar to the beat in No Country 2, where they go out to visit the scene of the firefight. And Sugar just shoots those two guys that have hired him. And you're like, why? Why is this movie about this hitman suddenly about a hitman who's going total chaos mode?
1:41:41 Speaker 03 And I always forget that he kills those two guys. Although the interesting thing about Visser is he doesn't really come off as that. Psychopathic, like when you realize that they that he didn't actually kill them and he and he did this fake frame job photos, it sort of feels like, oh, this is a guy who will choose the sort of more weasely fake out path as opposed to like actually just pick up a gun and shoot somebody, but then he immediately picks up a gun and shoots Marty.
1:42:13 Griffin Newman? Right. And and the other big mistake he makes is thinking that he's dead, right? Which is another thing that coincip was like a big animating idea for them in this movie. And I think it comes a lot out of Joel. Editing horror films, watching what Raimi's doing, seeing that like grow as its own sort of cottage industry of the 80s horror films and whatever. In the in the early part of the decade was he was like, all these movies presented like killing people is like one move and it's done. And obviously, sometimes you shoot someone point blank in the head and they like fall down and it's over. But even some of the like trailers and marketing materials for this movie use the tagline of like, death takes a lot longer than you'd think.
1:42:53 Griffin Newman? Or something like that, that that was their big set piece idea was like, can you have a guy who thinks that he's closed off? The loose end and killed a guy, but in reality, it's 15 minutes of the movie that are going to have to silently play out with like, fuck, this is taking longer than I thought.
1:43:11 Speaker 03 I think there's some versions of this movie that have an opening title card that talks about like a quote from like Hemingway or something about like how hard it is to kill somebody.
1:43:21 David Sims? Actually, easy, shoot him right in the head, bang.
1:43:23 Griffin Newman? Which I'm sure you guys know this, but the opening M M at Walsh narration, which I butchered, was not in the script. They had him having the final line at the end of the movie. They put it together and they were like, feels like it kind of needs something at the beginning. And he was like, we just wrote that. We just came up with something. We brought him in to do ADR. Handed him two pages of paper. He read it cold one time. And I think part of it was that like, they don't tend to make movies with conventional narrative structures where you're following one character the entire time. They're so into ensembles and they're so into sort of the arc of the movie is the incident, rather than you following one
1:44:08 Griffin Newman? character through incidents. It's like, how does this incident progress and affect everyone around it? And Carter Burwell, when he lands on this like piano melody, they go, oh, fuck. All these scenes of characters in silence, and we have this movie that already has these open spaces and people looking and listening and considering. If we're playing the same theme across all these characters, it does start to bring them together. It like unifies them in a mood and a feeling. And I think they have the same thought of like, if we put M M Wolf saying something at the beginning, what it is is almost irrelevant. It starts to bookend it and frame it a little bit more as this guy's worldview. Roger Ebert, when this film came out, not to put Hozley on blast again, but this is, I think, what is
1:44:53 Griffin Newman? the most potent idea in this movie. He said, "A lot has been written about the visual style of Blood Simple, but I think the appeal of this movie is more elementary. It keys into three common nightmares. One, you clean and clean, but there's still blood all over the place."
1:45:06 David Sims? A Shakespearean nightmare.
1:45:08 Griffin Newman? Two, you know you have committed a murder, but you're still not sure quite how or why.
1:45:14 David Sims? That is really true. That's great. Right. That you're like, I think he's dead, and I think someone did it, but I don't know where the body is or what happened. Classic Ebert observation.
1:45:23 Griffin Newman? And three, you know you have forgotten a small detail that will eventually get you into a lot of trouble.
1:45:28 David Sims? You're obsessively overthinking, like, but did this, you know? Yes. The lighter, yeah. I mean, the viscera leaving is lighter. It's like.
1:45:36 Griffin Newman? Now, Ebert saying those are the three common universal nightmares, seems to imply that we all think about killing people all the time.
1:45:44 David Sims? Oh, gosh.
1:45:45 Griffin Newman? But what I actually think he's saying in a Hozley way is that we all watch movies like this and start to think, could we pull it off?
1:45:53 David Sims? And it's just about deceit, right? Even if it's not murder, right? Where you're just like, could I weave a web of lies? Could I get away with something?
1:46:02 Griffin Newman? Can I end up with an island?
1:46:03 David Sims? And what would happen and how would I do it? And where would it start to go wrong?
1:46:06 Griffin Newman? And it's the postmodern riff of this movie is like, okay, this is how it actually would go down. Everything would just kind of be sloppy and meaningless.
1:46:13 David Sims? Because like in a Coen Brothers movie like Blood Simple, you should, you could watch this and be like, well, all of these characters are essentially kind of worthless. It's not like these are lovable characters. So what do I care what happens to them? Let them all, you know, shoot each other. And instead you're like with them. You're not exactly rooting for characters always, but like, you're kind of just like, you're in that experience that you're talking about of like, huh? What would I do? And huh? Like, what would happen next if I, you know, whatever, like?
1:46:47 Griffin Newman? It's a movie designed, knowing that audiences watch these types of movies that way. And when they're skipping over information, it's taking advantage of the fact where it's like placing you in his headspace of, I don't know why I just killed a guy. You know, you have gets walk into the office, see Hadea there, step on a gun. Think mistakenly that he's the one who just shot him, when in fact he has been lying there bleeding out in a chair. And it's just like, everything spirals off of that.
1:47:15 Speaker 03 I think just one thing that I would just want to say about like, like all the performances in the movie is that. I think something that's generous about the movie and possibly like related to the fact that it was their first movie where they wanted to give. Kind of juicy roles to everybody is, I really do think that there's moments in this movie where every, every character feels like they're the main character. Like more, more so than I think any of the Coens other movies.
1:47:42 Griffin Newman? Although I do think that is kind of a thing that carries through her for most of their career.
1:47:48 David Sims? Fargo kind of has three leads and, you know, sort of three support, like, right? Like there, it's like, you could argue, well, McDormand's the lead. Yeah, sure. But she's not in a lot of the movie and she kind of shows up late.
1:47:58 Griffin Newman? You could argue the same with no country.
1:47:59 David Sims? Well, Macy's the lead. Well, Macy vanishes from the movie. It's the braid. They love the braid.
1:48:04 Speaker 03 You can also.
1:48:04 Griffin Newman? Three stranded braid.
1:48:05 David Sims? Three lines. Yeah. Well, actually, Buscemi's the lead, like Buscemi's actually maybe in more of the movie than you think he is or what, you know? Yeah, exactly.
1:48:13 Speaker 03 I would just say though, that like Marty coming back for an extremely extended dream sequence where he has this strange, almost touching heart to heart. Like menacing slash touching heart to heart. Like that feels like a little bit like.
1:48:28 Speaker 03 Are you like, why are you bringing this character back? You know, it's like-
1:48:30 David Sims? The shot of the blood like out of a bucket, like hitting the floor is so good.
1:48:35 Speaker 03 It's hitting, it's hitting every part. It is actually, yeah, you're right about that though. Like that's giving, it's giving one extra crazy horror thriller moment that the movie maybe needed.
1:48:44 David Sims? Yeah, it's a good pop for the movie energy wise, and it's a good reminder of the thing you're talking about. The sort of the guilty frenzy that builds up.
1:48:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:48:54 David Sims? Yes.
1:48:54 Speaker 03 Yes, Griffin.
1:48:55 Griffin Newman? No, I just, I, yeah, I saw that Ebert review and it hit me very hard where I'm like, I do think that is-
1:49:00 David Sims? He's fucking good at that. Boiling something down like that.
1:49:03 Griffin Newman? But also the, the admitting, we all think about this, right? Like part of the buy-in of this movie isn't that we all sit around plotting murder, but we all like Ben, read a noir novel or watch a movie or whatever, and think about how you would handle it. And this is like a movie in which the people inside of it are trying to act like people in a movie, and they can't get it right. They're sort of like, I know my role in this story and I just have to do this and it will all work out.
1:49:32 Speaker 02 There's also just a doomed, it's like, once you have the affair, it's like, once you start a relationship where you threw someone else under the bus at the beginning of the relationship, like they're never going to trust each other. And that's the thing, like when, when he comes to see Marty, he's like, one day she's going to say, I'm not doing anything funny. And then when she has the dream, you know, they're saying, I love you. And he's like, you know, you're just saying it because you're scared. And that's what Ray says to her at the end. It's just their relationship is haunted in a kind of Final Destination way. From the beginning, they like, they did, they touched the monkey paw, you know?
1:50:02 Speaker 03 Pidaya is totally in their heads. He's gotten into both of their heads.
1:50:07 David Sims? He's in my head too.
1:50:09 Griffin Newman? And my heart.
1:50:10 David Sims? Okay.
1:50:12 David Sims? So what else do we discover before the iconic famous ending of this film? Which I feel like is the most famous part of the movie?
1:50:22 Speaker 02 I think the two most famous parts, the tour de force performances, that there's the 20 minute burial scene.
1:50:28 David Sims? The burial scene.
1:50:28 Speaker 02 The ending. I feel like those are the standout.
1:50:30 Griffin Newman? There's no dialogue other than the radio.
1:50:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:50:33 Griffin Newman? There's like 15 continuous minutes that play out without any of the primary characters speaking.
1:50:39 David Sims? Yeah.
1:50:40 Griffin Newman? That is just kind of process.
1:50:41 David Sims? And that's what, when you watch this movie, you're like, yes, this is a Coen Brothers movie. It's about people on the edge and sort of idiot criminality spiraling out of control. But then at the same time, we're like, it barely has any dialogue. Like, it doesn't have that kind of, the flourishes we associate with them later in their career.
1:50:58 Griffin Newman? It basically only has five characters. The only guy we haven't mentioned is Sam Art Williams, who plays Maurice, I think is incredibly good in this.
1:51:05 David Sims? He's great.
1:51:05 Griffin Newman? And is kind of the one neutral party in this movie.
1:51:08 David Sims? I was gonna say, you keep wondering whether he's gonna break in a direction he kind of doesn't.
1:51:12 Speaker 02 Almost every scene of his in the script is cut in half. And the movie ends with an action sequence where he fights, uh, Julian, he fights the dog.
1:51:21 Griffin Newman? That's how it's written?
1:51:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, he fights the dog in the room with the beige billiard table and he fights it with a, with a cue.
1:51:28 Griffin Newman? That's fascinating, because it feels like in the final product, his function is to remind you, like, these people are all caught up in some shit that is kind of in their heads, right? Is like a weird combination of like anger and like lust and jealousy and paranoia that's animating all of them. And he's just like a guy clocking in and clocking out and doing his job.
1:51:50 David Sims? Yeah, he's like, he's, he's the uninvolved.
1:51:52 Griffin Newman? These characters exist in a real world, like this world is not inherently evil. They're making decisions.
1:51:58 David Sims? This movie is not funny. Now, I'm not saying it doesn't have funny moments. And there is that dark, dark black humor of the Coens, like there. But like, again, you don't watch this movie and see Raising Arizona coming.
1:52:11 Griffin Newman? No, it's a wild swing.
1:52:13 David Sims? Right. Uh, and you don't see, but like Fargo is an interesting contrast to this movie in that it is so funny. It has a luminously heroic character in the middle of it.
1:52:25 Griffin Newman? Like pure good.
1:52:26 David Sims? Right.
1:52:26 Griffin Newman? Right.
1:52:27 David Sims? And like nonetheless has so much, you know, what common DNA. It's just like the arc of their career is interesting to think about. And it is interesting to think of them watching this movie and being like, oh, boy. Like, you know, because it's like Stanley Kubrick made Fear and Desire. And you're like, nice try, Stanley, like maybe take another cut, you know, right? Uh, whereas the Coen Brothers are treating this like their fear and desire where they're like, this is so amateurish. Like, that's crazy.
1:52:55 Speaker 02 Please, Jordan.
1:52:56 Speaker 03 Well, the only thing I would add is that like the Coens have different modes that they're in, and you see it throughout their career. So like, there's definitely movies like Fargo where dialogue and, and character interactions and funny voices is like a, a big part of the meal that they're serving up. But then if you watch No Country, which is probably in the, like, in the long run, the movie they're going to be most remembered for.
1:53:16 Speaker 02 It's a great question. I think about it a lot.
1:53:18 Speaker 03 Very little dialogue. Obviously, there, there are, there are memorable dialogue scenes, but huge stretches of that movie is just like a guy putting gear together in order to trick somebody else or do like cat and mouse stuff in a hotel room and like.
1:53:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. And the script, I mean, to the white sea is nothing but that opening stuff from No Country or the 20 minute silent sequences where you're just watching almost like dialogue scenes are happening silently between objects and a person's face, watching them build one version of a thing.
1:53:45 Griffin Newman? Which I, I think they are better at than any other filmmakers alive.
1:53:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. And you can read it in the script. It's like that whole scene where he's cleaning up the, the murder scene. It's all like, you know, he tries the windbreaker and it says, this isn't going to work. And then it's like, he adds the towel. It's like, this is going to work. It's all like, step forward, step backwards. It's very trackable.
1:54:03 Griffin Newman? Silent conversations with objects is a great way of putting it where I'm like, No Country is one of the best, like shot reverse shot between human face and inanimate thing movies I have ever seen, where you understand exactly what they're thinking and what they're looking to do. But I, I remember Wes Anderson always talks about on Bottle Rocket, how he would lose certain arguments, not even arguments, but like producer, line producer, you know, first lady, whoever comes along, go like, Wes, we're running behind schedule. We have to move on. Or we don't have time to prep this. We just need to shoot this, rather than holding up and waiting for the wall to be finished, you know, painted the right color or whatever it is. And
1:54:47 Griffin Newman? he's like, I watched that movie and it drives me crazy and it causes me physical pain that I, all I see are the things that I like conceded at the final moment as good enough. And he's like, it makes me so physically, viscerally uncomfortable that I made this commitment to myself from that movie of just like, I am never letting something film until it's ready ever again. Like, I do not want to have a single second, any of my movies that irritates me in this way, where I feel like I didn't get what I wanted versus owning the mistakes of misjudgment, but executing it in the way you had it in your head. And I think Blood Simple is like a little similar for them, where they just look at it and they were like, from this moment on, we were just never gonna let anyone make us move on.
1:55:33 Speaker 03 But on the other hand, like, something that they talk about in their sort of like,
1:55:38 Speaker 03 let's say contemporary, or like, when they hit their stride, is that part of the process is, as much as the movie is storyboarded to all hell, and like, you know, every single moment is storyboarded, that's not what the actors are looking at. So when the actors get to set, they block the scenes. And like, the way Deacon describes it is, describes it is, and yet somehow, the blocking ends up being exactly like the storyboards.
1:56:02 Griffin Newman? Right.
1:56:03 Speaker 03 But, I will say, maybe that's something they learned from this, where they're like,
1:56:07 Griffin Newman? Possibly.
1:56:09 Speaker 03 The performances feel too chopped up, or it's, or it's like, it's not giving the actors room to breathe?
1:56:14 Griffin Newman? I don't know if you guys found this, but that the storyboard artist they hired kept drawing the Frances McDormand character naked, so she kept asking to see the storyboards. And they were like, uh, we just really go off of whatever you want, because they were so embarrassed. Obviously, they start dating like, right after this. But, the last shot of this movie, with M M at Walt's POV of the dripping of the faucet, right? You notice, if you watch it closely, that they have to replay the shot backwards.
1:56:46 Speaker 03 Joel refers to it as rock and rolling, that frame. He said, we had to rock and roll that frame.
1:56:52 Griffin Newman? They just didn't get a long enough. Like shot of it.
1:56:55 Speaker 02 They basically just make the drip go like to the left and then to the right and to left to right and then it drops. And they do the same thing when, when he shoots a day, actually, they, they do an optical to make him just like totally freeze for a second longer.
1:57:07 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:57:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:57:08 Griffin Newman? But there's stuff like that where I wonder if that came out of necessity.
1:57:12 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:57:12 Griffin Newman? We don't have the piece we need in the edits. So how do we like fudge it to make it work?
1:57:17 David Sims? It's hard to direct a drip.
1:57:18 Griffin Newman? Totally. But that probably drives them insane now versus like today, they would just be like, we spent three months figuring out how to film the drip before we got set.
1:57:28 David Sims? And there's lots of stuff like that in, in Barton Fink with like drains and drips.
1:57:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:57:32 David Sims? I mean, the, the famous drain shot that Robert Deacon, Deacon makes fun of them for, which we talked about on that episode.
1:57:37 Speaker 02 Oh, as this, uh, series goes on, you gotta check out the Deacon's website. Every single film, he publishes his lighting plans and you can really, really understand what he's doing. I know this is not a Deacon's film, but as the show goes on, you gotta get into the, you know, just the department heads, uh, Jane Muskie, Dennis Gassner, Jess Gonchar, just like the transition from their production designers, their DPs. It's so trackable with their movies because they, they'll go through phases with like a production designer or they'll go through phases with a DP. But yeah, get so excited for the Deacon stuff.
1:58:13 Griffin Newman? It is crazy that they only made three films with Sonnenfeld because it feels so impactful that these three guys like all started together. And then Sonnenfeld obviously figures out how to take the style he develops with them and puts it on to like the biggest studio comedies imaginable. And then they sort of transmute it into something new with Deacons and the other DPs they work with later.
1:58:34 David Sims? But like Sonnenfeld is such a designer, but I don't feel like his style with the Coens is ever quite as immaculate in the blockbuster. I mean, I guess he's still, he's got a lot of the rushing, you know, camera stuff.
1:58:48 Griffin Newman? But also the like, the big wide angle lens.
1:58:52 David Sims? Yeah. And really good sense.
1:58:54 Speaker 02 He had a lot more money to throw around too, for most of his movies too.
1:58:56 David Sims? Was there a lot of money in Men in Black? Was that, Wild West? That was an indie, right? That, that one they made.
1:59:01 Griffin Newman? The notorious thing about Sonnenfeld is on his studio movies, his direction is always slower, flatter.
1:59:08 David Sims? Are you serious?
1:59:09 Griffin Newman? Yeah, cuz it's like this thing that they developed with the Coens of like, can you develop this visual style where if you have a compelling actor in the middle of the frame, the least they're doing on this wide of a lens will end up amplifying.
1:59:22 David Sims? Like, The Addams Family has Raul, Julia, and Christopher Lloyd in a like, not slower or flatter competition, almost, right? You know what I mean? Like-
1:59:30 Griffin Newman? I guess Men in Black is like, the height of that for him, where it's like, telling Tommy Lee Jones to do nothing.
1:59:35 David Sims? Which is awesome and works, and Tommy Lee Jones is what the hell is happening to me? And then he sees the movie and he's like, oh, I get it.
1:59:40 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
1:59:42 David Sims? Uh, although Tommy Lee Jones is the Gene Hackman style actor where he's like, yeah, I hated making the movie and thought the guy was an idiot, then I watched it and I was like, oh, it was pretty good.
1:59:49 Griffin Newman? Well, I think they had this, they like, developed this style together where no matter how seriously the thing was being played at the center, things feel a little funny and off. There is like, some innate black humor just to the actual lensing of these movies that then Sonnenfeld carries over onto movies that are more explicitly funny, which then makes it less funny as his career goes on. Like, when you watch fucking Nine Lives, and it's a Kevin Spacey talking cat movie that's shot like this.
2:00:19 David Sims? Normal movie, I bet.
2:00:20 Griffin Newman? Right. Now you're like, well, we're just in like, bug nuts world.
2:00:23 David Sims? Right. Um, yeah, the ending, uh, is rocks, uh, and it is funny. It's so, so intense in the theater. I've seen this movie in the theater, like, you are like, truly, truly gripping your seat, and then him laughing, being like, oh, he didn't even know who you were fucking shooting, like-
2:00:41 Griffin Newman? Right.
2:00:41 David Sims? Rocks.
2:00:42 Griffin Newman? It's meaningless.
2:00:42 David Sims? Yes.
2:00:43 Speaker 03 And also, uh, Emma Walsh cracking up as he's dying. Like, it's just a great character detail, like, early on, when, uh, Hadea Marty says, like, I know what rock to turn over to find you. He loses it and he says, that's very good.
2:01:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. What rocks a turnover? Good one.
2:01:03 Speaker 02 Does he blow out the mic on that? It sounds like.
2:01:06 Speaker 03 He's blowing it. He's blowing it a lot. And, and then at the end, when she says, I'm not afraid of you, Marty, he like, he has to get that last line in where he says, uh, I'll, what does he say? Like ma'am, I'll be sure to tell him if I see him.
2:01:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:01:21 David Sims? Yes.
2:01:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:01:22 David Sims? Yeah.
2:01:22 Speaker 02 But just great.
2:01:23 Griffin Newman? The image of she has pinned his gloved hand with the knife, right? That has crossed over into her room on the windowsill. All other parts of his body are still outside of her view on the other side. She's like, aware of this guy here, just by his bloody pinned writhing hand. And then he's shooting through the wall. And this weird like, here's a physical reminder of the guy who you're fighting with. Only through one anonymous appendage. And then the sense of danger that is like leaking through on the other side. And this like weird like hackling laugh.
2:01:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. And just this like showmanship, it really does end with a sequence that feels like Terminator or Halloween. It has that great like final girl feeling. And also just the, the ending is like someone who's wounded, who can't see you, who's shooting at you. It's like so hard for her to know, should I go to the left or should I go to the right?
2:02:14 Speaker 03 He could shoot in any direction through one of those walls.
2:02:16 Speaker 02 Yeah. And what's so great about the visual is that they, they put individual lights on each bullet hole.
2:02:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:02:22 Speaker 02 Pointing in different directions. So it looks like the, basically like the light is the trail of where the bullet went, which makes no sense based off of how light works. But it's a perfect kind of Looney Tunes, like just escalation.
2:02:37 Griffin Newman? It's like swords going into like a magician's trunk.
2:02:40 David Sims? And that will carry over to Raising Arizona, like that, that energy does.
2:02:45 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:02:45 David Sims? Recur. Oh, hey, Ben.
2:02:48 Griffin Newman? Ben's leaning in. You're just deep in thought.
2:02:50 David Sims? Ben's kind of doing a neighbor and home improvement thing over his.
2:02:52 Griffin Newman? Well.
2:02:52 David Sims? Right now. Wilson.
2:02:54 Speaker 01 I've been on the record, I love dirt.
2:02:56 Griffin Newman? Mm hmm. This could be a good series for you, by the way.
2:02:58 Speaker 01 Poof, I know.
2:03:00 Griffin Newman? Lot of dirty bags of money.
2:03:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Um, if you're digging at night, something really fucked up is happening.
2:03:07 David Sims? Yeah.
2:03:08 Speaker 01 If you're digging in the dark.
2:03:10 Griffin Newman? This is why he's our finest film.
2:03:11 David Sims? A hundred percent.
2:03:13 Griffin Newman? Two guests, I need to hold back. I pass the mic over to Jordan. I don't need to enter the conversation. And you're just sitting there like this has to be shared and is a thought we would never get to in eight hours. But what a profound statement. You are right. Has there ever been a good night dig?
2:03:28 Speaker 01 No, no. I mean, unless, yeah, maybe you're like really desperate to make a shelter.
2:03:35 Griffin Newman? Well, yeah, this is what I'd say. It doesn't have to be nefarious.
2:03:39 Speaker 01 Right.
2:03:39 Griffin Newman? But if you're doing benevolent night digging, your life's in a bad place, right? Like, there's a reason they literally call it the graveyard shift. Like, the worst kind of working position you can imagine is you are being paid to dig graves at night. And you're like, look, I, this is a job.
2:04:00 Griffin Newman? Whatever, I gotta pay the rent, but yet this, this is the least desirable
2:04:07 Griffin Newman? job anyone could possibly have, right? So you're, you're either trying to get away with a crime. Something's gone horribly wrong, like you're trying to get out of a jam, an existential jam, a threat. Or you, you just, you've got bad options.
2:04:21 Speaker 01 Or you're like a woodchuck.
2:04:25 Speaker 01 I suppose if you're a woodchuck.
2:04:27 Griffin Newman? He came up with the one exception to his own rule.
2:04:32 Speaker 01 But it's, it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty limited.
2:04:34 Griffin Newman? It's pretty bad.
2:04:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. Um, have, have you guys, I, we're all, I know we're all like, grew up in the city for the most part. Have you ever dug?
2:04:46 David Sims? So your question, why would I have ever been digging? I don't think I've ever really dug.
2:04:50 Griffin Newman? No.
2:04:50 David Sims? Why would I be digging? What would I dig?
2:04:53 Griffin Newman? I played dig.
2:04:53 David Sims? I know you buried some genes, Ben. I'm aware that you did.
2:04:56 Griffin Newman? We're very aware.
2:04:57 David Sims? Come up on the show. And I've dug a lot of holes in my life. Why? Putting in fence posts. Sure. Never had to put in a fence post, never had anywhere to put a fence. Helping my dad garden, planting a shrub. So I've done that. I think of that as that's, that's pretty, that's little dig. But you're, you're. With a little, the little trowel. But I'm talking big boy. I've maybe helped my grandma. Slamming down with your boot. Yeah. I've chopped wood. Yeah. Have I done much digging? I don't know. Ray?
2:05:29 Speaker 01 No experience.
2:05:30 David Sims? Shakes his head.
2:05:31 Speaker 01 No.
2:05:31 David Sims? Jordan?
2:05:32 Speaker 03 Every year, my dad and I and whoever's happens to be around before the Passover.
2:05:37 David Sims? Bernie Fish?
2:05:38 Speaker 03 Yes, we go out to the side of the house and we dig up some horseradish, which will then.
2:05:43 David Sims? The horseradish for at the Passover.
2:05:45 Speaker 03 The bitter herb.
2:05:46 David Sims? Yeah. Wow.
2:05:48 Speaker 03 Like around 4pm.
2:05:49 Griffin Newman? Okay. So right before Sunday.
2:05:51 David Sims? An evening dig.
2:05:52 Griffin Newman? You've got to get.
2:05:52 Speaker 03 An evening dig, but not a true night dig.
2:05:54 Griffin Newman? No.
2:05:54 Speaker 03 I could imagine though, something messed up happening and having to do the dig at night.
2:05:59 Griffin Newman? Be, it'd be a bad sign. Yeah.
2:06:01 Speaker 01 Anyway, that was just a little dig corner. I, I, that's all I had.
2:06:05 Griffin Newman? Okay. Well, it was invaluable.
2:06:09 David Sims? I'm going to tell you a little about the release of the film. So Emmett Walsh, of course, says the film had a huge impact on his career. His price went up like five times. He says, I was the guy everyone wanted.
2:06:24 David Sims? Here's a funny call. At one point, he gets a call from Joel Cohen saying, hey, M, I guess you call him M?
2:06:32 Griffin Newman? They say that, that when they met him, they didn't know how to address him. And they were like, is he M? Is he Emmett or is he?
2:06:37 David Sims? Same as Michael Emmett Walsh, to be clear. But they called him M.
2:06:43 David Sims? Can you blow smoke rings? And he was like, I guess he tried. He made himself sick. He wasn't a smoker, tried, tried to, he didn't really do it. And they were like, don't worry, we came up with a little machine for it. And.
2:06:55 Griffin Newman? He tells a different story in the Criterion thing.
2:06:57 David Sims? But then when they shoot the scene.
2:06:59 Griffin Newman? Yeah, okay.
2:07:00 David Sims? No, here's, the, the machine didn't work.
2:07:03 Griffin Newman? Yes.
2:07:03 David Sims? And so a little prop girl was like, I grew up with four older brothers in the bar and give me a cigar. I can do it. And she starts beautiful, like blowing beautiful smoke rings. And then she starts bar.
2:07:15 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:07:15 Speaker 03 Because the cars are pretty disgusting to anyone, but especially a little girl.
2:07:20 Griffin Newman? And Walt throws that out as like, that's the movies right there. Like a 20 year old puking after getting to do big screen cigar smoke rings.
2:07:28 Speaker 02 A cruise spotlight, they had a overqualified key grip on this movie who they said was like a LA guy who had moved to Austin because he was afraid of the big one earthquake happening in LA. And he was doing sheet rock and he was so bored. But basically they were like, we have this small movie, but we had like a big A-list key grip. So all those like flying, like when the camera moves over the drunk guy at the bar.
2:07:52 Griffin Newman? I was gonna say.
2:07:52 Speaker 02 All the kind of animated flying camera stuff is just like, they have this extra muscle behind them. That is out of size with the scale of the movie they're making.
2:08:00 Speaker 03 Being able to boom your camera up, I'll just say.
2:08:03 Griffin Newman? Yes.
2:08:04 Speaker 03 Is a big deal.
2:08:05 Griffin Newman? I feel like that shot in particular, and that camera move of jumping over the drunk is like the moment where I have to imagine people at film festivals, like my parents, but also this fucking year long run of them doing like a global tour of this movie. The moment where every screening people lean forward and go, who the fuck are these guys?
2:08:24 Speaker 02 But also that's the moment where all the pieces have been set on the playing board. And then it's, he's going back to the bar and she's like, don't go back to the bar. And he goes back. So it's like, everything is set up. And I almost feel like that moment is being like, you know, this mousetrap is perfect. And the camera is just like moving over it. They don't want to disturb a hair.
2:08:41 Griffin Newman? It's just such a funny flourish with so much personality. And yet, if you're seeing it at a film festival and you're probably someone who works in film or studies it immensely, the second that shot happens, he goes, fuck, that's complicated. The fact that these guys would take the time to set that up when you, it just kind of feels like something to make themselves laugh, immediately tells you a ton about them.
2:09:07 David Sims? Film was shot over the course of eight weeks, I haven't mentioned that, in Texas. Now, Joel had spent a little time in Texas because he went to UT, but I think just a little bit of time, but they kind of loved it as a sort of swerve from the urban feel of most noir.
2:09:25 Speaker 02 I mean, this is a thing they're always saying is like, these are just genre films. We're working in well-established genres, but we're just trying to make things off the hump and specific all the time. So they're just like, this is the opposite of rainy New York. So it's a great place to do a noir.
2:09:41 David Sims? Now, Joel is credited on this film as the director. Ethan's credited as the producer, largely due to DJ regulations. We talk about this a little bit on our Barton Fink episode, which is with someone who has run into these DJ regulations. They do become an established DJ duo by the time of The Ladykillers. JJ points out that the Farrelly brothers did this quickly. I do think sometimes you can just do, and my guess is they just didn't bother to sort of like make the effort to be like, hey, can we be, you know, right? They just kind of settled.
2:10:12 Griffin Newman? They got rejected at first and then I was, we're like, I guess we won't get approved. And their ongoing success probably made it easier for other siblings like the Wachowskis and the Farrellys and whoever to hit the ground running and get approved the first time out.
2:10:25 David Sims? They say, Joel, they joke like, oh, Joel's taller. That's why he was director, but they seriously say that the credits don't really reflect the collaboration and Ethan does plenty of the directorial stuff and Joel does plenty of the production stuff, you know, whatever, like.
2:10:41 Griffin Newman? Everyone who works with them calls them the two-headed director. They're like, it is the most bizarre symbiotic.
2:10:46 Speaker 02 I'm a two-person school of fish, like they move simultaneously.
2:10:50 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:10:50 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, it's funny that with driveway dolls, like as soon as you get into the interviews with Ethan and Trisha Cook, like they'll just be like, yeah, we co-directed it. Like just funny that they're like recapitulating that exact thing, like.
2:11:06 Speaker 03 Having the credit be a little bit wrong.
2:11:08 Griffin Newman? So here's another thing we'll get into in the Barton Fink episode, not to tip the hand too much, but it sounds like if you successfully get the DGA to approve the idea that you are a true team, that's not a thing that can be untangled and retangled.
2:11:21 Speaker 03 Yes, you're not allowed to flip it on and off.
2:11:23 Griffin Newman? Make a new team now.
2:11:25 David Sims? So Barry did throw up a lot. I think you referenced that briefly, right? Cause you've been throwing up a lot, not to call you out.
2:11:34 David Sims? Similarly, out of nerves, right? Like Barry was very nervous, but obviously the film does turn out to be pretty good. They were very inspired visually by The Conformist.
2:11:46 Speaker 03 Oh.
2:11:47 David Sims? And The American Friend, right? Which is a great movie.
2:11:50 Speaker 03 That movie is so well shot.
2:11:51 Speaker 02 They also said they had a LaserDisc on location, a LaserDisc player, and they had just seen Road Warrior. So they were watching Road Warrior on LaserDisc.
2:11:59 Griffin Newman? They talk about Road Warrior a lot. That's one of their like evergreen biggest inspirations of just like, this is just pure filmmaking, right?
2:12:06 Speaker 03 Yeah. I don't know if George Miller broke through for like the American public, like as a name at that point, but you just see this time again, like with James Cameron or any, any action director at that time, just being like, I want to do what George Miller is doing. Like, it's just like, it truly was your favorite director's favorite director at that moment.
2:12:25 David Sims? Um, they have this film. No one wants to release it. Every studio is happy to watch it. Um, because there really aren't a lot of like independent 35 millimeter films. Like, you know what I mean? Like this is still an unusual American product. There's not much of an indie scene. Everyone sees it and is basically, how would I sell this? Like, this is like an art film about murderers.
2:12:47 Griffin Newman? And it has no stars.
2:12:48 David Sims? Right.
2:12:49 Griffin Newman? Right. And it's like pitch black. Yeah.
2:12:51 David Sims? Yes. Uh, and at one point they meet with the Crown International Pictures, Mark Tenser, and he liked it, but he had no money. And he said, don't worry about my screwing you. I don't have time to screw you. And Sam Raimi, they went to Sam Raimi and they were like, should we do this? And he said, yeah, in six months, he's going to come back to you and say, hey, I found the time.
2:13:14 Griffin Newman? An incredibly good line.
2:13:15 David Sims? Good, good, good line by old Raimi.
2:13:18 Griffin Newman? Probably a good call. I mean, I don't know, but interesting, interesting little like possible.
2:13:25 David Sims? That's could have been how it went. Instead, it goes into Tiff and Circle Films, which directs, distributes their first three movies.
2:13:33 Griffin Newman? Which had started out as like a bunch of different theater owners.
2:13:38 David Sims? Ben Baron Holt's.
2:13:40 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:13:40 David Sims? Is into it. And so they said it was the, he said it was the debut film that impressed him most since Eraserhead. Speaking of people we recently covered, and then it went to New York, which was a really, really big deal back in the day. Not that the New York Film Festival isn't a big deal now, but I feel like it used to have a more primo place on the festival calendar. Whereas now New York is more like, yeah, you know, stuff's already been at Venice until you're right. And it's like getting here.
2:14:06 Griffin Newman? Well, that's the thing that's really changed is the like.
2:14:09 David Sims? The internet has flattened this. Yeah.
2:14:12 Griffin Newman? Festivals wanting premieres and exclusives. The idea of a movie like this playing at festivals for over a year. And each festival not being possessive of like, well, that's damaged goods because this other place got to it first. That, right. It was like prominence in terms of like the headiness of the, the jury or the selection committee or whatever. Versus like, this film is either good or bad based on what festival it's premiering at relative to, which is the best launching pad for an Oscar campaign.
2:14:42 David Sims? Yeah.
2:14:43 Griffin Newman? Right? Like now New York Film Festival has become like, these are movies that already are pre-approved, basically by and large.
2:14:50 David Sims? After the New York Film Festival premiere, Janet Maslin of the New York Times, one of its film critics, gives a good review. That back in the day is just huge. Obviously that's important now, but back in the day, very important. Goes to Sundance, early Sundance, nonetheless, won the grand jury prize there, which only helps its buzz. Pauline Kael took a big shit on it as she did to any movie released post 1980 essentially, but Roger Ebert was a huge fan. And it made movie, made money, like decent money. I think it made about $2 million, which is obviously.
2:15:26 David Sims? A big return on investment for the investors and everyone basically likes it except for Joel, who says it's pretty damn bad. And Sonnenfeld agrees, the pacing too slow. I could have shot it better. These days we do it for 10 times the price and it would be 8% better. That's kind of a funny line from Sonnenfeld. He knows he's actually a little, being a little silly criticizing it. Like he's not, it's not like Sonnenfeld's like, oh yeah, the guy who made RV would have a better take on this.
2:15:53 Speaker 03 And they don't, they don't hate it. They don't, it's not like, there's a lot of directors.
2:15:57 David Sims? They have affection.
2:15:58 Griffin Newman? They're sort of like, oh, it's like, cute. We didn't know what we were doing. Yeah.
2:16:01 Speaker 03 Could I, could I just real quick, like the Pauline Kael pan is interesting just because her main take without the benefit of, of, you know, being able to read the future is it seems like these guys are just trying to make this movie as a calling card to make studio films.
2:16:19 David Sims? Yes. She's like, this is too derivative. Like it's like, I can see all of the influence.
2:16:23 Speaker 03 And I just think it's interesting in terms of thinking forward of like what, where the Coens are going to go because as much as they are making films that are extremely to their own standards, they also do make movies that are commercially minded and like audience minded.
2:16:39 David Sims? Yes. They don't. It's a great way to think about it. It's like, they make challenging movies, but even Barton Fink, which I think of as maybe their most challenging movie of pretty much that they ever made in a way, like their artiest movie. And we, I am also thinking of it because we already did this episode, is incredibly watchable and put, you know, like has velocity, even though it's about a guy sitting in a fucking room going crazy. And like, I remember watching as a teenager and being like, wow, this is heady. And I watch it now and I still think it's so brilliant, but I was like, damn, this thing moves like thunderballs. I love it.
2:17:17 Speaker 03 It kind of reminds me of like 90s, uh, re-listening to 90s albums where you're like, oh yeah, this was so stripped back. And now you listen to it now and you're like, wow, that was extremely produced.
2:17:27 David Sims? Yes, right.
2:17:27 Speaker 03 Like.
2:17:28 Speaker 02 There's a thing that Carter Burwell talks about, like him and Skip working together on this movie, kind of establishing a thing, which was like, we need to let the audience know by what we're doing with the sound. That this movie isn't one thing or the other. It's not just this harsh, dark thriller. It's not just a comedy. And I do think they established that in this first movie is like, you're not going to be able to pin down exactly what this is, but you're going to be entertained.
2:17:50 Griffin Newman? They get even better at it when, as their career progresses. And I also think their most beloved movies are the ones that find the like perfect balance between those tones. But it is my favorite thing about them that they always like, in the most dramatic scenes, will find a way to put in something funny. And the funniest scenes, find a way to put in something that's like very terrifying and heartbreaking.
2:18:13 Speaker 02 They also talk a lot, just process wise, like they will take things to a point where it gets more locked down and they will walk it back.
2:18:20 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:18:20 Speaker 02 That it like, there's.
2:18:21 Griffin Newman? That's interesting.
2:18:22 Speaker 02 In Barton Fink, they were like, there was a scene in the script where you, like, there's a point in the movie where it's pretty clear you're going into his fantasy. But then there was a beat, almost like in Brazil, where you go outside of his fantasy and you see what's really happening to Barton. And they were like, that just locks it down too much. That makes it resolved. And if you just leave it more enigmatic, then it's something that stays alive in the audience's head.
2:18:46 Griffin Newman? Right. I was trying to find, there was one review they were talking about that they remember hitting really hard. That basically described the movie as having all the depth of a resume.
2:18:55 Speaker 02 And the soul of a Bloomingdale's window.
2:18:57 Griffin Newman? You know, okay, but I was trying to remember whose review that was.
2:19:00 Speaker 02 Is that Kale?
2:19:00 Griffin Newman? No.
2:19:01 Speaker 02 It's just Joel saying, I loved this review.
2:19:03 Griffin Newman? Yeah, it wasn't Kale. Kale says, Blood Simple has no sense of what we normally think of as, quote, reality and has no connections with, quote, experience. And then she says at the end, nobody in the movie making team or in the audience is committed to anything. Nothing is being risked except the million and a half. She's doubling the budget, but this is like, this was the strike against them. And then I found Rosenbaum did a. Piece like 15 years later, 20 years later, explaining why he still thinks he's right about blood simple being shitty. And he wrote, remains mired in a smart alecky film school sensibility. Like this was the whole thing that everyone threw at them when they didn't like them is like, we get it. You guys are clever. You're smart. You've watched movies. You know how to move the camera. You have nothing to say about humanity.
2:19:48 David Sims? You don't think there's anything personal about this film about a marriage falling apart? That Joel wrote while his marriage was falling apart.
2:19:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, set in Austin, Texas. Like, I think they're sincere filmmakers. I think they're incredibly sincere filmmakers.
2:20:00 David Sims? I think this is where their rep that I was referencing is Tassie or whatever. It's like, you do have to think a little around their jokey ness and their kind of like straightforwardness to dig into like, yeah, actually, right. These guys are not just kind of like, I don't know, we just sort of sit down and write the movie. Who cares? Like, I'm like, no, you're motivated by your own feelings and the conversations. Like, I don't think they just sit down and they're like, what if a guy's name was Barton Fink? Oh, good idea. Where, where, when would he have lived? I don't know, the 40s? Okay, let's keep going, you know?
2:20:28 Griffin Newman? I guess there's this weird balance to me of them feeling like incredibly earnest nihilists, if that makes sense. Like, there is a, a real emotional sincerity to them being fascinated by this question of like, is this truly all meaningless? And so often their movies are built around that. These characters doing these, like, making these decisions that make zero sense in pursuit of a thing that's maybe going to ruin their whole fucking life. Um, and I think that got written off as being condescending and just like, they don't care. This is all them like shaking up an ant farm and like laughing at stupid characters doing stupid things, um, which combined with their just like technical proficiency and craft is just like, okay, so these guys are just like jerking
2:21:13 Griffin Newman? off. They're just like torturing characters and showing me that they're good at making movies, which like over time, I, I think people calm down, but we, we also have been talking about anytime a young filmmaker is like very quickly anointed as not just, this is a good movie, but this might be a major voice. There is like 30% of the community that immediately needs to be like, false idol, fuck you. I need to take them down. We cannot immediately like, put them into the firmament.
2:21:46 Griffin Newman? Sure. Do you guys have anything else you want to say?
2:21:47 Speaker 03 I mean, I just want to say, like, for some reason, the scene that's coming to mind to sort of respond to what you just said is the scene at the end of True Grit where Rooster just carries
2:22:02 Speaker 03 carries Hailee Steinfeld for like, you know, the whole way. And it's like hallucinogenic and it's just like-
2:22:06 Griffin Newman? Maybe their most nakedly emotional movie.
2:22:09 Speaker 03 Maybe.
2:22:10 David Sims? Yeah.
2:22:10 Speaker 03 And then, and then, but then at the end of it too, like where, um, you know, where she doesn't actually get to see him later, like, it's just, it's hard for me to imagine anybody seeing that and being like, these guys don't have like a sense of like heart.
2:22:24 Griffin Newman? Well, that seems so emotional that in the movie ends with her being like a bitter woman who has never gotten over these events and the film basically cuts off mid-sentence.
2:22:32 Speaker 03 Sure. Yeah. No, they're, they're aware of, of audience expectations and not necessarily wanting to give people like the Hollywood ending, so to speak.
2:22:40 Griffin Newman? But that is also their only blockbuster. That movie was so fucking massive and it is-
2:22:47 David Sims? Especially by their scene.
2:22:48 Griffin Newman? Yeah, but also by anyone's standards. It's like a fucking $160 million grossing, like adult Western that we made like 300 worldwide.
2:22:58 David Sims? Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not, yes, I'm not disputing.
2:23:00 Griffin Newman? And it clearly is that there was like a level of emotion in that that people connected with more on top of everything else.
2:23:07 Griffin Newman? Box office game?
2:23:08 David Sims? Um, so this film came out 18th of January, 1985, right after Sundance, I guess. It does not open in the top five. Number one at the box office is a film we've covered. Um, an action comedy.
2:23:23 Griffin Newman? Action comedy.
2:23:24 David Sims? It's been out for a couple of months.
2:23:25 Griffin Newman? Okay. So that's Beverly Hills Cop.
2:23:26 David Sims? Beverly Hills Cop! Do you guys like Beverly Hills Cop?
2:23:30 Speaker 02 Love it.
2:23:30 Griffin Newman? The best.
2:23:30 David Sims? Pretty good.
2:23:32 Griffin Newman? Wait, which came out at Christmas? So this is now like-
2:23:34 David Sims? Late January.
2:23:35 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:23:35 David Sims? Been out for about eight weeks. It's made $122 million.
2:23:38 Griffin Newman? Yeah. It's front on the table.
2:23:39 David Sims? No complaints.
2:23:39 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:23:40 David Sims? Number two at the box office has been out for about three months. It was a Halloween release.
2:23:46 Griffin Newman? Interesting.
2:23:46 David Sims? It's fitting. It's- Horror genre.
2:23:48 Griffin Newman? Okay, horror in quotes and air quotes.
2:23:50 David Sims? No, no, no, it's a horror film.
2:23:52 Griffin Newman? Then put those quotes away.
2:23:53 David Sims? One of the most iconic horror films ever made. Kind of helps launch.
2:23:57 Griffin Newman? For.
2:23:57 David Sims? A studio.
2:23:58 Griffin Newman? Is it The House That Freddy Built?
2:24:00 David Sims? That's right.
2:24:01 Griffin Newman? And the picture is called A Nightmare on Elm Street?
2:24:03 David Sims? Yes.
2:24:03 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:24:04 David Sims? The original Wes Craven.
2:24:05 Griffin Newman? Wes, Wes Craven. Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street.
2:24:08 David Sims? Elm Street. Do you guys like that movie?
2:24:12 Speaker 02 I like it. I met him one time and he claimed that he did all his writing dirt while he was asleep in lucid dreams. He was like, during the day, I have errands to do and I have a family and I have stuff to do. So I just go to sleep, start a lucid dream, build the world of the film around me, hang out in it for like six hours. I wake up, I write everything down in like 15 minutes and then I have stuff to do all day.
2:24:33 Griffin Newman? So is Freddy ghostwriting his movies? This motherfucker went to sleep. Freddy Krueger just starts typing away with those fucking knife fingers. And then he wakes up and he's just like, oh yeah, something came to me.
2:24:45 David Sims? Freddy Krueger is real.
2:24:46 Griffin Newman? Freddy Krueger is real. He was looking to get in the pictures. He invaded Wes Craven's dreams.
2:24:51 Speaker 02 Must be hard for him to type on the typewriter.
2:24:53 Griffin Newman? Yeah. Do you think he only uses the other hand?
2:24:56 David Sims? I love that film very much. I think it's very scary and very, very cool.
2:25:00 Griffin Newman? And you like Freddy Krueger as a person. You endorse his personal life.
2:25:03 David Sims? Freddy Krueger.
2:25:04 Griffin Newman? Freddy Krueger.
2:25:05 David Sims? It's an interesting film.
2:25:09 David Sims? In terms of this, the franchise it spawns, a lot of it is not there. Right? Like the sort of the jokey-ness of Freddy, the like, sort of like, kind of buzzbe- like the musical sequence kind of vibe of a lot of the kills in the later movies.
2:25:26 Griffin Newman? I like both two and three more.
2:25:29 David Sims? Sure. I like two and three a lot. I think one is more scary and impressive.
2:25:35 Griffin Newman? Yeah, yeah. And then, right, when you get to, I like the whole series, but when you get to, to four or five, you're like in goofballs McGillicuddy Town.
2:25:44 David Sims? Yes.
2:25:44 Griffin Newman? Right.
2:25:47 David Sims? Nightmare on Elm Street is number two. Number three, the box office is. A we've we've mentioned it before. I feel like we've probably done a box office around this period because I remember this one. It's a drama with two big stars, an Oscar winner and a younger male star who's he's he's pretty big at this point.
2:26:05 Griffin Newman? It's not loose cannons.
2:26:06 David Sims? No, and I don't even know what that is.
2:26:08 Griffin Newman? That was a big swing. If I'd been right, it would have been impressive.
2:26:10 David Sims? Uh, what's loose cannons?
2:26:12 Griffin Newman? Gene Hackman and Dan Aykroyd.
2:26:14 David Sims? Oh, that's right. No, that's 1990. That film. This film is 1984.
2:26:20 Griffin Newman? Bigger bigger Oscar winning star, like an older star. Old?
2:26:25 David Sims? No.
2:26:26 Griffin Newman? No, just older.
2:26:26 David Sims? No, no. The Oscar winner.
2:26:30 Griffin Newman? Is a stakeout?
2:26:31 David Sims? No, no. The Oscar winner might be throwing you a little bit. The Oscar winner is a lady.
2:26:35 Griffin Newman? The Oscar winner is a lady.
2:26:37 David Sims? Um, and the the man, well, he's in a film we just discussed. Uh, there's a Cohen influence.
2:26:45 Griffin Newman? He's in a Cohen influence and the man is the younger star?
2:26:49 David Sims? Yeah, well, I feel like that. Yes, he is. Yes, he's eight years younger than her or seven years. Yeah.
2:26:58 Griffin Newman? She's won an Oscar. He hasn't.
2:27:00 David Sims? No, he's kind of at the start of his big run as an American movie star. He's, you know,
2:27:07 David Sims? like, um, he's just emerging in America is a big deal. This is not a really big remembered movie, but, uh, the Oscar winner does get a, uh, best actress nomination.
2:27:18 Griffin Newman? For this film?
2:27:19 David Sims? For this film. She's already won one, but she gets another nom because she's a big actress. Like, she's a really respected actress.
2:27:25 Griffin Newman? Jessica Lange?
2:27:26 David Sims? No, no.
2:27:28 Griffin Newman? No, I'm.
2:27:29 David Sims? But that's a good guess.
2:27:30 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:27:30 David Sims? Like someone who like racked up like six noms, you know, over the career.
2:27:34 Griffin Newman? Yeah, like Diane Keaton.
2:27:35 David Sims? No.
2:27:36 Griffin Newman? But I'm getting close. It's not Merrill, obviously.
2:27:38 David Sims? No. I agree on being, uh, this film was shot by Vilmas Jigmond.
2:27:43 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:27:44 David Sims? Uh, it's the director is one of those guys who made
2:27:51 Griffin Newman? Movies?
2:27:51 David Sims? Big movies, but I feel like is not as respected an auteur these days.
2:27:55 Griffin Newman? Like a Mark Riedel or higher?
2:27:57 David Sims? Well, when you say Mark Riedel, you've really nailed it in that it is Mark.
2:28:01 Griffin Newman? It is Mark Riedel. So in fact.
2:28:04 David Sims? So it's like a perfect comp for him in a way.
2:28:06 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:28:06 David Sims? It's him.
2:28:07 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:28:07 Speaker 03 Looking for a Mark Riedel type.
2:28:09 David Sims? It's kind of like, right. Yeah. They were kind of, when they made this movie, they were like, could we get Mark Riedel or a type? And they're like, oh, we could just get him.
2:28:15 Griffin Newman? So he's kind of Riedel-esque.
2:28:16 David Sims? Yeah, he's Riedel.
2:28:18 Griffin Newman? He's Riedelian in his work.
2:28:21 Griffin Newman? Um, okay. It's a Mark Riedel picture with an actress. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Um.
2:28:28 David Sims? Fuck.
2:28:29 Griffin Newman? 19.
2:28:29 David Sims? All right. I'm gonna give this.
2:28:30 Griffin Newman? No, no, you have to give me one more. Who's the distributor of the picture?
2:28:34 David Sims? Uh, the distributor.
2:28:35 Griffin Newman? What this unlocked.
2:28:35 David Sims? Universal.
2:28:36 Griffin Newman? It's a universal Mark Riedel picture where the actress has an Oscar. The lead man is eight years younger. Is it a romance?
2:28:43 David Sims? I think it is a, it's sort of like a, a drama, you know, about like bad shit happening to working people in America.
2:28:54 Griffin Newman? Oh, fuck. Uh, oh.
2:28:56 David Sims? But, uh, I think, I'm not, I don't think it's a period piece. It might be. I don't know. I'll never watch it.
2:29:05 Griffin Newman? You'll never watch it?
2:29:06 David Sims? Well, it's, I'd never say never, but it's not high on my.
2:29:09 Griffin Newman? Give me one of the two actors.
2:29:10 David Sims? Sissy Spacek is the actress.
2:29:13 Speaker 03 Coal miner's daughter?
2:29:14 David Sims? Nope. That's the movie she of course won.
2:29:16 Griffin Newman? Won for. It's not Raggedy Man.
2:29:18 David Sims? No.
2:29:18 Griffin Newman? No, cause that's fucking, uh, of course, uh, that was her husband. That was Jack Fisk. It's Mark Riedel. Sissy Spacek. She's older. The guy's, the guy's popping. The guy's, the guy's, he's the beginning of.
2:29:30 David Sims? Hot. Now he's a bit problematic.
2:29:35 Griffin Newman? It's not Mel Gibson.
2:29:35 David Sims? It sure is Mel Gibson.
2:29:37 Griffin Newman? Sissy Spacek, Mel Gibson, Mark Riedel?
2:29:39 David Sims? Yep. The film is called The River.
2:29:44 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:29:46 Griffin Newman? Yeah, I know what you're talking about. The second you say it, I picture the poster in my head.
2:29:49 David Sims? It's like they're in a river. They're like, ah, this fucking river.
2:29:52 Griffin Newman? To get there. I could have done that for five hours and I wasn't gonna get to the river.
2:29:56 David Sims? Farmers and it's like about flooding.
2:29:59 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:30:00 David Sims? Like the Tennessee Valley.
2:30:01 Griffin Newman? You're right. That's like a video box I remember seeing, being like, wow, that looks serious.
2:30:05 David Sims? And like, it, right. It's just like, it seems very serious.
2:30:08 Griffin Newman? It seems very.
2:30:09 David Sims? And like the, um, the tagline is like an epic love story of today. I mean, unsurprisingly, it was a huge flop. I mean, I think it was like relatively well received. It's like his.
2:30:20 Griffin Newman? Yeah, this poster is like him saving her from the river.
2:30:23 David Sims? Right. It's his follow-up to On Golden Pond. So like he had juice.
2:30:27 Griffin Newman? That was huge.
2:30:28 David Sims? It was huge. The pond, but like, he was like pond. What about a river?
2:30:34 David Sims? This one is moving.
2:30:35 Griffin Newman? He cracked his knuckles and he was like, hold my pond.
2:30:38 David Sims? Yeah, but not a movie that's remembered. It's just one of those things like, like I'm saying, like, I'm like, am I ever gonna watch The River?
2:30:45 Griffin Newman? No, you're right. You know what? In fact, I actually think you will never watch.
2:30:48 David Sims? Probably not.
2:30:49 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:30:49 David Sims? Uh, number four.
2:30:51 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:30:53 David Sims? At the box office is not a movie I know. I know the stars. Um, it's a rom com directed by a legendary comedic director who made a lot of movies with this guy, the star.
2:31:05 Griffin Newman? Is it a Carl Ryan or Steve Martin movie?
2:31:06 David Sims? No.
2:31:08 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:31:08 David Sims? But although people got mad at us for not mentioning Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid during our Johnny Dangerously episode. And I didn't think about the fact that those movies came out around the same time and probably did kinda cancel.
2:31:18 Griffin Newman? Sorry for making a big deal out of that.
2:31:19 David Sims? Yeah. Is that you?
2:31:20 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:31:20 David Sims? Apologies.
2:31:20 Griffin Newman? My alt.
2:31:21 David Sims? You jerk.
2:31:23 Griffin Newman? Uh, okay, wait, so this is a different director and star work together a lot.
2:31:29 David Sims? Yeah, they work together a lot. This guy is a big comic star of this era, but he exists in many eras.
2:31:36 Griffin Newman? He's in many eras?
2:31:37 David Sims? He's having like, he has a hot eighties.
2:31:40 Griffin Newman? Is it George Burns?
2:31:41 David Sims? No, but who else has like a really hot eighties?
2:31:44 Griffin Newman? Who booms in the eighties? Is it Rodney?
2:31:46 David Sims? No, we love him though.
2:31:47 Griffin Newman? But is it a, is it a man of an advanced age?
2:31:51 David Sims? He's a little older, but no.
2:31:52 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:31:53 David Sims? I'll tell you what he's not advanced in, height.
2:31:57 Griffin Newman? Okay, so it is Dudley Moore?
2:31:58 David Sims? There you go.
2:31:59 Griffin Newman? And it's a Blake Edwards movie?
2:32:00 David Sims? That's right.
2:32:01 Griffin Newman? And is it, it's not, um, the one with him and Daryl Hannah?
2:32:06 David Sims? Uh, no. What's that one?
2:32:08 Griffin Newman? I think it's always called, it's called Crazy People or something like that.
2:32:11 David Sims? Sounds like a great title.
2:32:12 Griffin Newman? Okay, so it's not, it's not ten, obviously.
2:32:15 David Sims? No.
2:32:15 Griffin Newman? It's after that.
2:32:16 David Sims? Yes, it is.
2:32:18 Griffin Newman? And this one, is it Mickey and Maude?
2:32:19 David Sims? Mickey and Maude.
2:32:21 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:32:22 David Sims? And who are Mickey and Maude?
2:32:23 Griffin Newman? Well, he is Mickey?
2:32:25 David Sims? Nope, he's neither.
2:32:26 Griffin Newman? Okay, this movie sounds good.
2:32:28 David Sims? It's got two ladies.
2:32:31 David Sims? One of whom has been on this podcast. Amy Irving? Amy Irving. Okay. Is Maud. Who's, who's Mickey? Anne Ryan King. Oh, of course. The legendary denser. Yes. Yeah, I don't know much about it. And what's Dudley Moore doing? He's, uh, he's an overworked tabloid reporter. Great. Happily married to Mickey. Okay. Uh, and then he interviews a young cellist, Maud. I feel like- And starts to have an affair. Dudley Moore has this huge eighties that were like a series of comedies mostly predicated on- This guy fucks. This guy might be getting a dangerous amount of pussy.
2:33:07 David Sims? Right? Like all of it was just like- Hello? And then everyone's like, let me at you. He can't stop. Um, absolutely. This was Anne Rankin's last acting role in a film. Wow. Uh, it's been remade in Bollywood a couple of times, or in India, I would say, maybe not always in Bollywood. Um, and, uh, yeah, not a movie. It was a box office system. The poster is him marrying both of them. Hey, only Dudley. Number five at the box office, this has been a great box office game, is, um, it's a teen movie, I think. Okay. You're not very familiar. You don't sound certain. I've never seen it. Oh, right. It has a bit of a, uh, bit odd trivial part of film history. It was the first ever PG 13. Huh.
2:33:52 David Sims? Everyone always says Temple of Doom and all that. But they're the ones that inspired- Now, it was not the first released, cause that I believe is Red Dawn, but it was the first- Forget the rating. Yes. Um, it's a team picture. Which distributor? The distributor, of course, is 20th Century Fox. I find folks at 20th Century Fox. Okay, and it's a- It's from an very established comedy director, made a zillion movies, kind of a Blake Edwards type. Kind of Blake Edwards type. Just a comic director who made a ton of movies. Yeah. But he would make, this guy would make more of your emotional comedies. Comedies with heart. Yeah. He probably described it as like, comedy should have hot. He probably like yell it.
2:34:31 Griffin Newman? It's not Herbert Ross.
2:34:32 David Sims? No.
2:34:32 Griffin Newman? It's not Gary Marshall.
2:34:33 David Sims? It is Gary Marshall.
2:34:34 Griffin Newman? It is Gary Marshall. Is it the Flamingo Kid?
2:34:36 David Sims? It's Matt Dillon as the Flamingo Kid.
2:34:38 Griffin Newman? People like that one a lot. I've never seen it.
2:34:40 David Sims? It's about a working class boy who works at a beach resort and learns valuable life lessons.
2:34:44 Griffin Newman? Hey, learn some lessons.
2:34:45 David Sims? I might stun you to learn that Hector Elizondo appears.
2:34:49 Griffin Newman? Wait a second. Security? How did this guy end up on set?
2:34:54 David Sims? Uh, you've also got.
2:34:55 Griffin Newman? Surely he wasn't invited.
2:34:56 David Sims? Richard Crenna.
2:34:57 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:34:57 David Sims? Uh, and, uh, Jessica Walter.
2:35:00 Griffin Newman? Hmm.
2:35:01 David Sims? It's fun.
2:35:01 Griffin Newman? Sounds fun.
2:35:03 David Sims? I don't really know much about it.
2:35:04 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:35:05 David Sims? Anyone ever seen The Flamingo Kid?
2:35:07 Griffin Newman? He's like a cabana boy?
2:35:09 David Sims? Yeah, he works at a resort.
2:35:10 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:35:11 David Sims? That's, uh, the box office game. The rest of the 10 is A Passage to India, new this week.
2:35:18 Griffin Newman? Sure. What have you done lately?
2:35:19 David Sims? Uh, I forget when we referenced that story, but it's somewhere.
2:35:24 Griffin Newman? Oh, get ready. It's a call forward. It happens in three episodes.
2:35:26 David Sims? Um, a film called That's Dancing, which was a compilation of dancing in film.
2:35:31 Griffin Newman? Okay.
2:35:32 David Sims? Um, Protocol, it's a Goldie Hawn movie.
2:35:36 Griffin Newman? Yes, that's, it's, well.
2:35:38 David Sims? A Herbert Ross.
2:35:39 Griffin Newman? Yes.
2:35:40 David Sims? Uh, in which she's.
2:35:42 Griffin Newman? She's become a cop?
2:35:43 David Sims? It's like a DC thing. She like stops an assassination attempt or something.
2:35:48 Griffin Newman? Great. Yeah.
2:35:49 David Sims? Uh, Starman, which we've covered, and the, uh, the famous bomb, the cotton cloth.
2:35:55 Griffin Newman? Oh, sure. It is great that Goldie Hawn just had her thing carved out for like 15 years where it's like, Goldie shouldn't be here.
2:36:02 David Sims? I'm a dumbass.
2:36:05 Griffin Newman? This is the last place you want her. And yep, she's gonna kind of figure it out.
2:36:09 David Sims? Blood Simple.
2:36:10 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:36:10 David Sims? Uh, an auspicious beginning to a great career for the Coen Brothers.
2:36:14 Griffin Newman? Are there things that you guys want to seed in our heads to think about as men who have been deep diving for several years now into their work as we go on this journey chronologically?
2:36:26 David Sims? Well, I think we've touched on a lot of it over the course of this conversation. Um, like the first episode we did was about opening monologues and that's certainly here. Uh, and then the second episode we did, uh, was called The Meticulous Montage, which you could also call like a methodical montage, which is definitely.
2:36:45 Speaker 03 A big part of this movie and a big part of many of their movies.
2:36:48 Griffin Newman? It is fascinating how much it does feel like all the pieces are here. Like, we kept comparing this to other films and their filmography, and you're just sort of like, all the interests, all the obsessions, right? All the stylistic flourishes.
2:37:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I think the goal is, is like, some interview where they're like, why are your movies so violent? And Ethan was like, you mean dramatic, right?
2:37:09 Griffin Newman? Right, right.
2:37:10 Speaker 02 And they're just like, we want to make this dramatic, we want to make it specific. Anytime that someone's like, what are the themes underneath this? What are you trying to say about society or America? They're like, no, no, no, we're Americans. We're expressing our American-ness through trying to make a film that's very specific and very dramatic.
2:37:28 Griffin Newman? They talked about this in that Eggers interview where they were like, foreign critics, especially in Europe, tend to have hugely political readings of our movies. And it is transparently just that we do not think we have enough of an understanding to set a movie in any other country but the one we've lived our entire lives in. And here, it's not viewed as some overarching statement about our country and our culture. But there, it is always taken that way. And there being any other country.
2:37:58 Speaker 03 And when they tried to write Gambit, it was just a complete, you know?
2:38:02 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:38:02 Speaker 03 Nah, I don't actually stand by that. I think there's a lot more going on in that movie.
2:38:06 Speaker 02 Also, I think, I think to look out for, when we talked to their storyboard artist, he was like, it's basically two things at all times. It's either surprise or suspense. Like, we're just toggling back and forth between those, and that's, that's basically the whole thing.
2:38:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think, if you, if you're watching their movies and you're, and you're just watching like, or suspense versus surprise, or moments where suspense turns to surprise, I think you can get a lot out of it. I, I kind of just want to do the, the thing about the gun, though. I, I kind of just want to like, walk through the thing that I figured out yesterday.
2:38:35 Griffin Newman? Say this, can you say this? Will you please say this?
2:38:38 Speaker 03 So we, I've watched the movie a few times, and I only put it all together on the very last viewing I did. Which is just that, early on in the movie, they go to Marty's house, the two, Abby and Ray, and she goes there to pick up bullets from a box that fit the gun that he gave her. And so she finds exactly three bullets that she puts into her gun, which has, is a six shooter. So, and then when Visser steals the gun from their house, he checks the barrel, and you see that there's three empty chambers, and then three bullets. When Visser shoots Marty, he shoots one bullet.
2:39:19 Griffin Newman? Sure.
2:39:20 Speaker 03 When Ray hits the gun,
2:39:25 Speaker 03 a bullet goes off.
2:39:26 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:39:27 Speaker 03 Then when Marty clicks the gun, when he's getting buried,
2:39:32 Speaker 03 he clicks it three times and the last click is like right as Ray is taking the gun out of his hands, like very gently and in a way that the Coens describe it as like the Michelangelo Sistine Chapel shot of like God and man touching their hands. But like, if you, if you track that, you realize that by the end of the movie, when Abby takes Visser out, and she doesn't even know this, she had exactly one bullet left in the chamber, in the, in the revolver. It's just, it's just like a great example though of like, sort of the, the intricacies and the details of the plot that could actually like make the movie a lot more thrilling. Cause like,
2:40:14 Speaker 03 when I figured that out, I realized like Ray has no idea that he's, like, he seems pretty, he thinks the gun's empty.
2:40:20 Griffin Newman? Right.
2:40:21 Speaker 03 But when you're watching, you're like, oh, if Hade had gotten one more shot off, like he would have.
2:40:26 Griffin Newman? But that's also right. Like as meticulous as these things are, they're also sort of about how meaningless these things are. Like it is absolute happenstance that he doesn't get shot by Hade in that moment because he doesn't know that he's grabbing a still loaded gun from him. And that McDormand doesn't know that she only has one shot to actually hit the guy.
2:40:47 Speaker 03 Right. And it's a mistake on his part also to not check the gun.
2:40:51 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:40:51 Speaker 03 Like several times throughout the movie.
2:40:53 Griffin Newman? What was the other point you said you wanted us to tee you up? Well,
2:40:56 Speaker 03 Oh, no, no, we don't have to.
2:40:57 Griffin Newman? We're not gonna do it?
2:40:58 Speaker 03 No, we're not gonna do it.
2:40:59 Speaker 02 But no, these are beautifully made poetic movies and they're made with a, a level of care that, I mean, me and Jordan have just found, like basically every episode of our show, we do two pages of the To the Y C script, which is just like $200 million action film. But every two pages, you can be like, Okay, what's going on in these two pages? And then pull out scenes from other Coen Brothers films. And like, everything tracks. Like, every detail is there on purpose. There's never like, a story about their shoot where they're like, "Oh yeah, we shot with this other actor for a long time." Or "We shot for two weeks and we threw all this stuff out." They're just, these are intentionally made films. All their collaborators are really teed up to do good work with them always.
2:41:37 Griffin Newman? They never talk about a feeling of misstepping on any film past this. Like, regardless of what the public perception was, they're never like, "We had this idea and then we got into the edit and it didn't work, so we had to cut this whole thing out."
2:41:49 Speaker 02 That's what I'm saying. I think you can just hold these things up to the light and even examine different movies against each other and the themes, even though they're like, "We did a lot of this very instinctually." Like, when they talk about their process, they're not like, "Oh, we went and made notes on all these James M. Cain books." And we're like, "Oh, let's make a master document where we can synthesize." They were like, "We read all those books at the same time." And then we just kept talking about them forever until we were able to instinctually kind of write in a James M. Cain mode. But just all of that intention together adds up to these films that just track. That just every piece is in its place for a purpose.
2:42:24 Griffin Newman? That I think will lead to five months of exciting conversation here on Black. No, these are, we were very excited that they won because it's just like, "Great, all of these movies are fun to talk about."
2:42:36 Speaker 02 They're the best. Can I just say that? Like, I just, the premise of my life is that they're the best. You know, these are the best directors.
2:42:43 Griffin Newman? I like every one of their movies.
2:42:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:42:45 Griffin Newman? I find every one of their movies interesting to talk about, to watch, to think about.
2:42:50 Speaker 02 And to watch endlessly. Like, the rewatch value of these things, it's like, every single time I've done a rewatch of all their movies, it's a completely different experience.
2:42:58 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:42:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:43:00 Griffin Newman? Excited to do it. Thank you guys for being here. Thank you for kicking this voyage off on a good note.
2:43:05 Speaker 02 Thank you so much for having us.
2:43:07 Griffin Newman? Of course.
2:43:07 Speaker 02 Such a pleasure.
2:43:07 Griffin Newman? Hey, you guys are family. To the White Sea.
2:43:11 Speaker 02 To the White Sea, new episodes coming out. Everyone, check this out. This is like, the most bonkers Bonanza action movie they ever wrote. And we're going through it.
2:43:19 Griffin Newman? But as you said, you'll like
2:43:21 Speaker 02 Appreciating detail.
2:43:22 Griffin Newman? Jump into something in that script and be like, what is the recurring motif of the big guy and a little guy? In Coen Brothers movies?
2:43:29 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, there's a similar.
2:43:30 Griffin Newman? Building an episode out of like these elements, right? What is the through line across the career?
2:43:35 Speaker 02 We did a whole episode on distant fathers. We did an episode on sneaking around, an episode on teamwork. Yeah.
2:43:41 Speaker 03 Act breaks. What is it? Why, why, why do you sort of intuitively make this jump from act one to act two?
2:43:51 Griffin Newman? David and I have Coen Brothers, big guy, little guy energy.
2:43:55 Speaker 03 Sure.
2:43:56 Griffin Newman? Yeah. Coen Brothers also kind of have Coen Brothers, big guy, little guy energy.
2:44:00 Speaker 02 Well, that's they said Joel got to direct because he was the bigger guy.
2:44:02 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:44:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:44:03 Griffin Newman? Yeah. Uh, you and Jordan are basically the same height, so it falls apart there.
2:44:07 Speaker 03 Ray's, Ray's got a few inches on me.
2:44:09 Griffin Newman? Really?
2:44:09 Speaker 03 Let's just be completely transparent.
2:44:11 Griffin Newman? You do, you do a mini think. You got a little hair height working for you.
2:44:15 Speaker 02 I was saying.
2:44:16 Speaker 03 A little eraser head.
2:44:16 Speaker 02 When me and Jordan directed the Porches video, we based our storyboards off of the Blood Simple storyboard.
2:44:22 Griffin Newman? Really?
2:44:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, we did, which is each, each page, we had a little drawing of the frame and then we had a bird's eye view of the set and where the camera is going to go and where the actors went. Like, we love these guys. We really, we model our craft off of them on almost a daily basis.
2:44:35 Griffin Newman? Such a good job on the Porches video, but now I'm thinking, did we miss an opportunity by not having that video end with Ben discovering a bag of money under the porch? And it's spiraling out into a 90 minute narrative.
2:44:45 Speaker 03 Fuck, that would have been a nice payoff.
2:44:47 Speaker 02 Maybe that's our fundraising trailer, what we already made.
2:44:50 Griffin Newman? Yeah, there we go.
2:44:50 Speaker 03 Sure. Okay. Yeah, let's talk offline.
2:44:53 Griffin Newman? Uh, thank you guys for being here. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Tune in next week for Raising Arizona.
2:45:04 Speaker 03 Yep.
2:45:04 Griffin Newman? It is wild that's their second, like as wild as it is that this is their.
2:45:07 Speaker 02 It's a master stroke.
2:45:09 Griffin Newman? Yeah.
2:45:09 Speaker 02 To go Raising Arizona, your second film.
2:45:11 Griffin Newman? Yes.
2:45:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:45:11 Griffin Newman? Right. They, they go, right. They, they go to Hollywood, basically. They try to make a, a commercial studio picture.
2:45:18 Speaker 03 It, it has everything that this movie doesn't have. Yeah. So many ways.
2:45:21 Griffin Newman? Right. It's the counterpoint that then the rest of their career is like toggling between those two modes, usually within the same movie. So yeah, tune in next week, uh, for that. And as always, David, what's the email you're currently reading?
2:45:35 David Sims? I'm not reading an email.
2:45:36 Griffin Newman? You look very deeply in thought of whatever's on your screen.
2:45:39 David Sims? I've just, I'm seeing bring her back tonight. And I was just like, what's that about? So I brought it up.
2:45:45 Speaker 02 We give a shout out this weekend. We're all going to Ben's wedding.
2:45:48 Griffin Newman? Oh, hey.
2:45:49 David Sims? That's true.
2:45:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, get married.
2:45:57 Griffin Newman? Ben, because I've horribly set up.
2:46:00 David Sims? Let's be done.
2:46:01 Griffin Newman? Then we have to end the show.
2:46:02 David Sims? This has let's be done energy.
2:46:04 Griffin Newman? This is what I'm saying. What I'm saying is because I have mangled this setup and we need to end on something strong. Ben, is there anything you want to say on the record, your last episode as an unmarried man?
2:46:19 Speaker 01 Uh, fuck, I don't, um, hmm. I had a lot of, I was up to a lot of nonsense and that was really fun. Do I remember a lot of it? No. But damn, did I shine bright as hell as a fucked up guy. And I'm glad that I made it this far and I met someone who really is great. Love can be, love can happen to you.
2:46:46 Speaker 02 Feel that in the bottom of my heart. It's beautiful.
2:46:48 Griffin Newman? Beautiful words, Ben. Love can happen.
2:46:58 Speaker 01 Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hostly. Our creative producer is Marie Bardi Salinas and our associate producer is A.J. McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by A.J. McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by J.J. Birch. Our theme song is by Lain Montgomery and the Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minnick. Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit. Join our Patreon Blank Check special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.
2:47:43 Speaker 01 Follow us on social at Blank Check Pod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.
2:47:54 Griffin Newman? World is full of complainers. No, that's not it. That was to Michael Jackson.
Previous Vamps with Caroline Framke Next Raising Arizona with John Hodgman Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated