The Best Movies About Filmmakers, and ‘Boorman and the Devil’

On today’s show, Sean is joined by Tracy Letts to cover a new documentary, ‘Boorman and the Devil,' which tells the fascinating tale of director John Boorman and his misbegotten ‘Exorcist’ sequel. They discuss the film at length as well as use it as a springboard to discuss what a director actually does on set, as well as share their favorite documentaries and scripted movies about filmmakers. (0:00) ‘Halloween’ double feature in San Francisco! (1:05) Intro (2:10) ‘Boorman and the Devil’, why ‘The Exorcist II’ doesn’t work, and John Boorman’s legacy (43:30) Demythologizing the director myth and the best documentaries about directors (1:28:37) Scripted films about real directors Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Tracy Letts Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Last week, we shared the exciting news that we're coming to San Francisco next month for a live show on October 21st. And you were all just as excited as us because you sold that out. So we figured we'd make the most of our time in the Bay Area and screen some movies while we're there.

• 0:19Sean Fennessey?

  You can join us at the Balboa Theater on Tuesday, October 20th at 6:00 PM for a double feature. We'll be screening the original Halloween and then, one of my favorites, Halloween III: Season of the Witch and discussing both movies in between. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, September 24th, at noon Pacific at balboa movies.com. Again, we'll be screening and discussing Halloween and Halloween III on Tuesday, October 20th, at the Balboa in San Francisco. Tickets go on sale September 24th at noon Pacific. More information will be at balboa movies.com soon.

• 0:52Amanda Dobbins?

  We hope to see you there.

• 1:05Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey and this is the Big Pictureate Conversation Show about Pazuzu, that voodoo that you do so well. On today's episode, Tracy Letts and I will discuss the new documentary, Boorman and the Devil, which tells the fascinating tale of director John Boorman and his misbegotten Exorcist sequel, The Heretic, which also serves as a portrait of an uncompromising and utterly unique artist. It's one of my favorite kinds of documentaries and a rich topic for both of us. Then Tracy and I will dig into other docs and other films that explore the life and work of film directors. We'll jump into it right after this. This episode is presented by State Farm. You know the feeling, long day, good meal, you finally sit down and now you're just staring at your screen. Slasher, rom-com, period

• 1:47Sean Fennessey?

  drama, psychological thriller? But some decisions don't have to be that hard. State Farm is here to help. Like when you choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan. Bundling, just another way to save with the Personal Price Plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

• 2:10Speaker 02

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• 2:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Letts, you're here.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41Sean Fennessey?

  What's up?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Hey, how you doing?

• 2:42Sean Fennessey?

  Welcome back.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Nice to be back.

• 2:44Sean Fennessey?

  We saw each other at the Telluride Film Festival.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  We did.

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  We were, we were, I was a civilian there. You were a celebrated artist. You were a man being feted.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Well, I was with my wife, who was being feted.

• 2:57Sean Fennessey?

  What was, what were you being feted for?

• 2:59Speaker 03

  A movie that Carrie and I made called The Liberation, which had its premiere at Telluride.

• 3:06Sean Fennessey?

  And was that the number one thing that you were flagged down in the street about while you were at Telluride?

• 3:11Speaker 03

  No. The number one thing I was flagged down in the street about was being third chair on this podcast. Many people, many, many more people than I can.

• 3:21Sean Fennessey?

  Was it mostly men? Were there women involved in this as well?

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Men and women.

• 3:25Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:26Sean Fennessey?

  What age range are we talking about here?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Mostly younger than me.

• 3:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Maybe all younger than me.

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. How does it feel to be discovered for this and not all of the actual good work you've done?

• 3:36Speaker 03

  It feels just.

• 3:38Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. We have an interesting assignment today.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:43Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, you're, you're out here because we have a long-in-the-works Gene Hackman Hall of Fame episode coming soon.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:49Sean Fennessey?

  But we wanted to do something else. And this documentary hit the festival scene and has been much talked about in the cinephile worlds for a while. But Boorman and the Devil is finally out in the world. It's, I think, spreading across the country as we speak.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I see. I wasn't sure of the release.

• 4:03Sean Fennessey?

  It opened on Labor Day weekend, and I think it is going from city to city. David Kittredge directed this movie. And as I said, it's a, it's a newish kind of documentary about a film where they're exploring not just the life and work of an artist, but specifically a movie that is not a great big fat success. And a movie like this, I think, would have been inconceivable 40 years ago. Why would you spend lots of money and time and effort and the, the free moments of artists talking about something that most people don't like and isn't a success? So let's start with The Exorcist II. Okay? Just because I want to know, did you see it when it was released? What was your relationship to it before you

• 4:46Sean Fennessey?

  watched this movie? What do you make of there being an entire documentary about a movie that most people don't care for?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  I avoided Exorcist II for a long time. I remember my older brother and friends going to see it in movie theaters. And I, I remember him coming back from seeing it and saying, that's the worst goddamn thing I've ever seen. He couldn't believe it. He, I remember him narrating portions of the movie to me and like, would you believe that? He, he just found it so ridiculous. Only in the last few years did I realize that my brother had never seen The Exorcist, had missed The Exorcist, and only watched The Exorcist five or six years ago.

• 5:27Sean Fennessey?

  Kidding?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  And was blown away. It was like, I had no, he had avoided it after Exorcist II, assuming that Exorcist II was just, you know, the continuation of more shit from The Exorcist I. And then he went back and he watched The Exorcist and like, that's a freaking masterpiece. How, how have I gone this long without seeing it?

• 5:47Sean Fennessey?

  What, what would compel you to go see The Exorcist II, having not seen The Exorcist?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Probably just going out with buddies. I mean, it was high school or whatever.

• 5:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  And I had a kind of reverse thing, where I saw The Exorcist early in film-going life and had avoided The Exorcist II for most of my life because of my brother's reaction to it. I also recall, you know, the, the med vets had a book about, about turkeys, about famous Hollywood bombs. And I remember this book, and I think The Exorcist II was maybe second all time on their list to Plan 9 from Outer Space.

• 6:30Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  And I, and some, actually, very funny writing about the movie. Just what a ridiculous venture Exorcist II was. So I only watched Exorcist II for the first time in preparation for this podcast.

• 6:44Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  I had never seen it before.

• 6:45Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  So I come to it very fresh.

• 6:48Sean Fennessey?

  That's really interesting. I definitely knew that it was a turkey, and I probably didn't see it until, I don't know, 15 years ago, kind of filling out the slate of, whoa, what filmmaker, what's their filmography, what are these unusual movies in history? It's not the kind of thing that they show you in film class. It's not the kind of thing that was prominently displayed in your local video store because it had such a bad reputation. But we're in this time now where, and we've talked about this with a lot of our physical media episodes, films that were considered unimportant or even disastrous now have a comfortable home in the future of cinephilia. Like, they're, everything is revived. Everything is reclaimed.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:25Sean Fennessey?

  And this one is such an interesting example of that because you've got a lot of really decorated, thoughtful people working on this movie. This is not Plan 9 from Outer Space.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 7:34Sean Fennessey?

  This is not some junky exploitation movie. This is a big time Warner Brothers film that cost a lot of money with a lot of serious people connected to it. I do remember watching it 15 years ago and not liking it and not getting it. And maybe understanding and appreciating some of its ambition, but probably feeling in my heart the same thing that your brother, or maybe at least your brother's friends who saw the original Exorcist felt, which is, this isn't The Exorcist. Like, this has nothing to do, really, other than Linda Blair with what I enjoyed about the first film.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:06Sean Fennessey?

  But the movie poses this really interesting idea, which is, should all sequels, should all connective art just gratify the same impulses that the original gave us? How, how do you think about that?

• 8:20Speaker 03

  I, I don't know that there's a, any hard and fast rule about it. We, we should be able to do whatever the hell we want to do. I, I think there is something kind of artistically bankrupt about revisiting a thing. Does the story really need continuation?

• 8:42Speaker 03

  The end of The Godfather kind of tells us what's going to happen to Michael.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Now, Godfather 2 gives us what does happen to Michael, but we understand at the end of Godfather, from a, from a character perspective, he, he's already lost at the end of The Godfather. He's already lost to this, to the dark side. The interesting part of Godfather Part Two, from a story perspective, is Vito's story, right? We go, the, the prequel part of Godfather Part Two. So I, I think usually, and we'll talk more about Mr. Friedkin, because of course, he made the original Exorcist, and he made the original French Connection, which we're going to talk about French Connection one and two on our Hackman pod.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  I think that Mr. Friedkin considered the idea of a sequel completely bankrupt, just completely, just a soulless money grab.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Just purely for, just artists saying, come on, we can get, we can make some more money off of this. That's the reason to do this.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  So do you ever need to continue the story? Now, Boorman says in the documentary, I, I wasn't looking to continue the story. I didn't want to continue the story. He didn't even want to call it Exorcist Two, right? That was a late breaking marketing decision to even call it Exorcist Two.

• 10:11Sean Fennessey?

  It is kind of strange for that to have been late breaking. Like, you'd imagine that that was part of the deal from sign on, right?

• 10:17Speaker 03

  That I would think that somebody at Warner Brothers was going, come on, you know, when this comes out, it's gonna be called Exorcist Two.

• 10:24Sean Fennessey?

  That's just not good business.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 10:26Sean Fennessey?

  But it's interesting, because Boorman was approached to direct the original Exorcist, right? And then he turned it down, or so he says. And he turned it down at a really interesting time in his career where he, let's talk about him, because we've not had reason to really discuss his work at all, I don't think, on this show. And he's a really, really interesting filmmaker, who's probably best known for Deliverance, which is the film that sort of more or less put him on the map. He'd made some films in England in the 60s. He made a film with Dave Clark, Five. He very memorably made Point Blank, which kind of redefines a certain kind of noir crime movie, adds a layer of kind of abstraction and artistic style to it. But Deliverance is like, you can kind of do whatever you want after that. He's approached-

• 11:11Speaker 03

  A blank check.

• 11:12Sean Fennessey?

  A blank check, truly.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:14Sean Fennessey?

  And he cashes his check right away on Zardoz.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:18Sean Fennessey?

  Which, you know, Zardoz remains one of my, one of my physical media grills. I still don't have a copy of Zardoz.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Really?

• 11:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And there's a Twilight Time and an Arrow edition, and they're both like $500 on eBay.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  They are. That's news to me. I, I bought that Zardoz hot off the presses from Arrow. It's very good.

• 11:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I wish I had it. If you've not seen Zardoz, I would encourage people to check out. Very unusual movie. Actually, kind of puts the Heretic to shame in terms of its oddity and strangeness. And so Sean Connery's science fiction fantasia of sorts about two sort of like warring tribes, and which side Connery's character will land on. He memorably wearing a, a mankini-

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:59Sean Fennessey?

  -in the film, looking quite, quite strong.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Thick. He looks thick, doesn't he?

• 12:05Sean Fennessey?

  In more ways than one.

• 12:08Sean Fennessey?

  And a bizarre movie that was not a huge success, that was quite memorable in terms of cult classics. And you'd think that after something like that happened, that he would be asked to take a step back from commercial cinema. But John Calley from Warner Brothers sought him out to make The Exorcist Two. And what he's chosen to do with it is so strange. How would you describe The Exorcist Two in terms of its relationship to the first film?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Well, it's hard to, I mean, I think it is awful. I, I just do think it's an awful, awful film.

• 12:41Sean Fennessey?

  It does not work.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  It doesn't work.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  First and foremost, it's not scary. There's not a moment in it that is genuinely frightening, or even suspenseful, really. It is not a scary film.

• 12:57Sean Fennessey?

  And coming on the heels of the original, which I think has a claim for scariest film ever made.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so there is a bit of hubris there on Mr. Boorman's part to think, I'm going to make a sequel to the scariest movie ever made, and there's not going to be anything scary in it.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  And I'm going to be able to get away with that. I, I don't know why anybody thought they were going to be able to get away with that. I don't know why anybody would look at the script on the page and think, oh, well, that's scary. That gives me a shiver. It doesn't. It's just not scary. And it, it just doesn't work. And Richard Burton is, I, I don't know what he's doing. I mean, the documentary reveals that he maybe was not completely, maybe he was just cashing a paycheck and just kind of playing the, the Burton hits and relying on his voice to get him through. But it's a pretty, it's a pretty dreadful performance.

• 13:55Sean Fennessey?

  He's terrible, yes. When will you enter your Burton era?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm there, baby. I'm there.

• 14:02Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think so. Not like this.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  He was, you know, he was, he was a very severe alcoholic, and he was drinking to great success while they were making this film. And it, it feels like it, and not, not in a way that is firing up his creative imagination, just in a way that's making him very sodden and sweaty and, and just, it's, he's not, he's not a, he's not a compelling lead for this film.

• 14:29Sean Fennessey?

  No, he seems somewhat checked out during much of the movie, which is a movie that you probably shouldn't be checked out in, because it is, it is meant to be this kind of ecstatic intellectual exploration of some ideas that maybe are underneath The Exorcist. And Boorman's whole pitch on the film was, the original film is this sort of bleak and destitute exploration of like a loss of faith and like a, the, you know, the depravity in our culture and a lot of other rich ideas. And this movie is meant to be more hopeful, and more about transcendence and the flip side of The Exorcist's story.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  He even says at some point that The Exorcist, the original, is about torturing a child, which is just ridiculous. That's not what The Exorcist is about. The fact is that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Boorman just had such wildly different aesthetics, just a different approach to, well, different things that interested them, right? I mean, one of the things that's so terrifying about The Exorcist is it's presented in this,

• 15:31Speaker 03

  well, Mr. Friedkin was a documentarian first and foremost, so it is intensely realistic. Everybody is playing the absolute realism of this. That's why the scenes at the doctor's office, you always forget about this before you watch The Exorcist, when she goes, she does what any mother would do. I'm gonna run every possible physical test to see what's going on with my daughter. And all of that is presented with great realism, heavily researched. Billy researched the hell out of everything. He would have, he would have talked to all of the doctors who were running those tests. What are you looking for? What are you trying to find? So-

• 16:10Sean Fennessey?

  I'm haunted by, is it like the needle in the back during the spinal tap is just awful?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so what happens when something supernatural occurs against this extremely realistic backdrop? It's scary as hell. Boorman isn't interested, that's not his, it's not his aesthetic at all. He's interested in flights of fantasy. He's interested in symbols.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  There's deep symbology in Zardoz, and he's interested in legend.

• 16:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, myth, transcendence, all this stuff. That's, that's all, and all of his movies have that. Even Deliverance, which is a fairly boots-on-the-ground movie for him, is still about lost masculinity, the transition of a generation, like big, big thematic ideas that are not meant to be realistic, that are meant to be very elevated, which I could, I could kind of see the thinking of the executives who wanted to hire him for that. But he brings such a specific point of view, and he seems pretty unwavering about the kind of movie that he wants to make. And it's just all the wrong movie for The Exorcist. But is there a world where you can dispense with that idea? Because the movie sort of attempts, the documentary sort of attempts to interrogate this. Can we just throw The Exorcist out?

• 17:31Sean Fennessey?

  And can we look at The Heretic as its own thing? As its own idea, as its own experiment? There are a lot of incredible, kind of physical filmmaking strategies in this movie that are really interesting to learn about. The ghost glass, for example, is one of them that is explored, you know, the synchronizer and the way that that's used in the movie. Like, can you find value in these other things, even though it seems like a total rejection of an all-time classic that like, people still love to this day in the original Exorcist movie?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  So let's pretend The Exorcist was never made. There is no movie called The Exorcist. There's only The Heretic. It's still a terrible movie. And the synchronizer still looks fucking stupid.

• 18:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  It still looks-

• 18:16Sean Fennessey?

  Looks like a tape recorder with a light on it. Yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  It still looks really stupid. And the ghost glass, it, it's a fine technique, and I understand it was sophisticated, a sophisticated use of it, as the documentary shows us. But it's not used well. I mean, it's not used to, to good, it's not impactful. And in fact, it looks, again, kind of stupid, kind of cheesy. It just doesn't work.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  There are so many things about this movie that just don't work.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  James Earl Jones just doesn't work. There's imagery in here that's like, what am I looking at? What were they thinking? What did they think the impact on an audience was gonna be?

• 19:03Sean Fennessey?

  What about the bug perspective?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Look, I like the idea of we're trying to get at something about the hive mind and a locust could be scary, but the way it's shot is not scary. It's a little cheesy. I mean, let's face it, it just doesn't work. I will say, I was quite struck by the influence Exorcist II must have had on Italian horror. There's a whole world of Italian horror that seems to borrow pretty heavily from this movie, from Exorcist II.

• 19:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well, what specifically are you thinking of?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Well, I'm thinking about the climax of Exorcist II primarily.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  The kind of grand operatic gestures of the house breaking apart and the plagues of locusts and screaming into the wind, which happens a lot.

• 19:58Sean Fennessey?

  Fulci and the later Argento movies.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  The Argento mother trilogy, right? And all that kind of stuff. It's almost like these Italian filmmakers are horror nerds and they went to the video store and Exorcist was checked out. So they just checked out Exorcist II and said, that's it. That's the shit. That's what we want to do.

• 20:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's really funny. There's definitely something to that. And it's, that's a little ironic because one of the reasons why this movie was made, and the documentary does a nice job of showing you this, is that in the aftermath of The Exorcist, there were all these copycats, you know, like Abby, like Mario Bava's Lisa and the devil, movies that are effectively just remaking in a different milieu, The Exorcist.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:37Sean Fennessey?

  And so Warner Brothers realizes like, shoot, we gotta, we gotta get on the gravy train here where there's money on the floor. The one thing that struck me, and I wish Callie was alive to talk about this, is it just seemed like they left Boorman alone. It doesn't seem like anybody fucked with him on this movie.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:54Sean Fennessey?

  Which is maybe just a product of an utterly unique moment in movie history, where we are at the tail end, really, of this time where a major auteur, a big kind of ideas filmmaker, has been given a large budget on property that is very valuable and not been messed with. And this film is, you know, it's 77. It comes out right around the same time as Star Wars.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:22Sean Fennessey?

  Right around the same time as Sorcerer, another famous, you know, bomb at the box office that Friedkin makes that year. There's this great segment in the documentary where, shoot, Jeff Canoe, the film director who was working as a trailer editor at the time, said he cut both the trailer for The Heretic and Sorcerer at the same time and that they would run next to each other and both, neither movie worked.

• 21:44Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't know that this could ever happen again, this specifically. I think that there can be bad sequels. I think that there can be sequels that go way far afield of the original intention. In fact, The Exorcist is, as a franchise, is the home of one of the more interesting sequel stories ever, where you've got an Exorcist prequel that was directed by two different men, in Paul Schrader and Rennie Harland, some 25 years later. But this specifically, where you've got what otherwise seems like a very classy movie that has a ton of money behind it, and no one came to the set and said, what the fuck are you doing?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Well, it was probably, you know, the documentary talks a bit about some of the other Hollywood disasters in which, in which directors were really given free rein and given a lot of money, and some of them went way over time and some of them went way over budget. And so, right after Heaven's Gate, which we acknowledge is kind of the end of new Hollywood, all of that starts getting pulled back and it really becomes the time of the executive and of the studio. And as far as I'm concerned, it's why 80s and 90s filmmaking, studio filmmaking starts to go in the shitter, because you can watch some of those movies from that period and go, that's not a filmmaker making that decision. That's a studio, that's a studio note.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  That's why that movie is ending that way, in a way that doesn't make any sense. That's just a studio note.

• 23:09Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Because I think you're right. I think they weren't paying attention to what Boorman was doing, because I know, I think they thought, we've got the sequel to The Exorcist, it's directed by an acknowledged master. We've got Richard Burton, we've got the little girl from the first movie. We've got Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher.

• 23:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Max Von Sydow's back.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Max Von Sydow's back.

• 23:34Sean Fennessey?

  James Earl Jones, Oscar nominee.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  James Earl Jones, take your hands off the wheel, he's got it.

• 23:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  But you would think somebody is like looking at the dailies going.

• 23:41Sean Fennessey?

  Well, this is, I bring this up with Amanda all the time on this show, where I'm like, it's very easy to mock studio executives and say that these people don't know shit about art and they're ruining everything all the time. Sometimes you do need a person with a little bit of critical distance. And so there are good executives and bad executives, just like there are good directors and bad directors. And Callie is one of those people, I keep saying his name because he is widely seen as one of the good guys of the Hollywood story, for the most part. I'm sure some people had bad experiences with him, but he had taste, he always brought on a lot of interesting projects. He was in a seat of power during a glory period for Hollywood filmmaking. And this just kind of seems like negligence to me. And it's really interesting because sometimes there's something wonderful about letting

• 24:26Sean Fennessey?

  an artist just go full bore on something and spend the money and pursue their dreams. And I think that's ultimately what's at the heart of this documentary is, this is a person with a singular point of view, and he somehow, right time, right place, right work ethic, right collaborators, created this huge body of work that is so unusual. Boorman in general, like, do you consider yourself a big fan of his work? Do you feel like?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I really do. I mean, I think there's the top, let's talk British filmmakers for a second. There's the, there's the foundational directors, Hitchcock, Michael Powell, David Lean, Chaplin, I mean, I suppose Chaplin and Kubrick, we're always gonna have, even Hitchcock, we're always gonna have a discussion, are they English, are they American?

• 25:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Carol Reed, there's a few more.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Carol Reed, yeah. Those are the real foundational names. And then there's, I think, a second tier of just acknowledged great British directors.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Mike Lee, Boorman, Peter, whom I think enough, give me a last name, Peter.

• 25:41Sean Fennessey?

  Peter Yates.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  We've talked about him on this.

• 25:42Sean Fennessey?

  Peter Yates.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:44Sean Fennessey?

  Peter Yates, yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  There's a.

• 25:46Sean Fennessey?

  There's also like, there's, Boorman is coming right in the aftermath of the Tony Richardson, Carol Rice, like kitchen sink group of filmmakers, and he's right behind them. And he, but he comes in, you know, in that Dave Clark Five movie, grafting off of Beatlemania, you know? And, and he's a little bit more of a fine artist. And that movie is really interesting because it's, it's basically a satire of what it's, what it is, you know? It's about how a band can kind of get sucked into the corporate machine, media machine, and become kind of a parody of itself. So he's always got, there's always a little extra spit, I would say, on every movie that he makes. But his filmography is all over the place.

• 26:30Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I'm still a little incomplete on his movies. I haven't seen everything he's ever made.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  I haven't either, but if it were just Point Blank and Deliverance, I mean, he's, he's in that second tier. That alone puts him in that second tier.

• 26:44Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Because those are, I mean, Deliverance is a five-star freaking masterpiece, man. That's an unbelievable movie. I showed it to the nanny, who, you know, again, I've mentioned her on this show, she's, what, 35 years old and she's an artist, she's an actor. She'd never seen it, never heard of it.

• 27:04Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Didn't know anything about it.

• 27:06Sean Fennessey?

  I do feel that it is a little, the last 15 years, it has fallen away a little bit as an acknowledged all-time classic. It doesn't mean it's like lost its power in any way, but it doesn't feel like, when I was a kid, it was one of those movies that was like, you have to see this movie if you want to have a complete understanding of the American cinema. I don't know why it's fallen away a little bit, but what did she make of it?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  She was blown away. She was like, why do I not know about this movie? This is, it's an extraordinary film.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  I heard Mr. Tarantino talking about it recently, feeling that the ending was fucked up, that had they not cast James Dickey, the author of the book on which it's based, as the sheriff, they, they might have had a more suspenseful third act as the sheriff is trying to investigate what happened on the river. But I actually, I disagree with Mr. Tarantino on this. I think Boorman is going for bigger game than that. I think that Boorman and Dickey together are trying to talk about bigger things than just the suspense story, but rather masculinity and myth, right? They're getting into all of that mythic stuff.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And there's a shot in that movie where John Voight, after what's happened on the river, and he's re-entering civilization. And he's going into this dinner, and this extraordinary dinner, played with some, clearly some non-actors and Ned Beatty around a table. And it seems to me like Voight passes through like three different screens to get from outside to inside, to re-enter into civilized society. Like, the shot is set up in a way that you keep seeing him walking through these screen doors. It's remarkable.

• 28:53Sean Fennessey?

  Such a big visual idea to communicate, yes, how he has to go, how to find his way back to where he was based on what he had experienced.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's Deliverance, if you haven't seen Deliverance, people, if you haven't seen, please see Deliverance. It's, Deliverance is great.

• 29:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's interesting you bring up Voight, because Voight was the actor that he wanted, that Boorman wanted for the Burton part.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  It's a much better movie.

• 29:17Sean Fennessey?

  Probably works a lot better. And the whole thing is that Burton's character being older, this is cited in the documentary, it's absolutely true. It just makes less sense, you know, his sort of, his struggle with faith at that time is just less logical than it would be if he were 30 years old.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:34Sean Fennessey?

  As Voight was at the time. Also, Voight.

• 29:38Sean Fennessey?

  People forget that Voight was unbelievable, that he was, he was maybe the best actor in the world for about three years there.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  He's helped us forget.

• 29:46Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I know. Well, he did, he did get that bill passed, though, didn't he? Didn't he get that Trump bill passed? And that was, that was the one thing he's done.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  He was an extraordinary actor, and he's extraordinary in Deliverance. Burt Reynolds' best performance.

• 29:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Uh, both Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox, discovered by Boorman, working in the theater in Washington, DC, making their film debuts in Deliverance. It's remarkable. And Ned Beatty then immediately becomes a really important part of New Hollywood, right? Some of the movies he makes during that time, All the President's Men Network, it just goes on and on.

• 30:18Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny, I read, um, Conclusions, which is one of Boorman's books. He wrote two, two books. It's more of his, Conclusions is more of his memoir slash a series of kind of personal essays about his time making movies. And he had some really interesting ideas about Reynolds. Because he said that there are actors who want to go inside, and there are actors who want to stay outside, and that Burton never wanted to go inside.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:47Sean Fennessey?

  That he was very comfortable staying on the surface, which, if you look at his filmography, you can kind of tell that. And Deliverance is one of the very few movies that asks him to really struggle with the self. And that Voight is obviously the opposite. That Voight is the, was, in the seventies, was the ultimate internal.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:03Sean Fennessey?

  Explorer.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:05Sean Fennessey?

  But he's like lamenting Reynolds' version of stardom. And so it is interesting that the movies that he makes in the aftermath of that, I would say his, they're thematically strong, but I don't know that he asks his actors to do quite the same thing.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:20Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like Zardas and, and The Heretic, and then Excalibur, which is his kind of great return to form.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:25Sean Fennessey?

  After, um, The Heretic fails. Those are big genre movies. And so I, I think I'm always a little bit confused by his filmography. Cause like, I failed to mention Hell in the Pacific, which is also a really interesting movie he made, which is also a kind of war between men, um, Toshiro Mafune and Lee Marvin, um, that he makes immediately after Point Blank.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Which is, it's great, by the way, and it's also great now in, in our world of widescreen TVs, as well as physical media, that we can finally see Hell in the Pacific, the way it was meant to be seen. You know, when I grew up, Hell in the Pacific was always shown in pan and scan versions, in which Toshiro Mafune and Lee Marvin are placed on opposite sides of the screen, on purpose, right? They're on the opposite side of this Panavision screen, and so the pan and scan is deciding which one of them you're gonna look at, as opposed to seeing them opposite each other.

• 32:17Sean Fennessey?

  You're never seeing them together.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. That kind of breaks the whole idea of the movie, right?

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Exactly does, and it's really fine movies, really good.

• 32:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and, and even his work in the eighties and nineties is quite fascinating, when, um, speaking of Tarantino, when he and Roger Avery were on the show years ago now, we did a 1987 draft, and Avery took Hope and Glory, his film, which is a very personal autobiographical film that Boorman made, um, about his youth growing up in England. And Avery went on at length about how much Boorman matters to him, and how he's his single favorite filmmaker. His thoughts are really interesting. And that might've been the time when I think it turned over in my head that I should dig into his work a little bit more. But The Heretic is, it sticks out in this filmography. It feels like it shouldn't have happened. It's just such a, and the movie kind of circles that idea.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:08Sean Fennessey?

  But he doesn't regret it. He's, I think he's happy with the film, right? Is that where we basically get to?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  I don't know that he's happy with the film. And I don't want to say that he's blaming the audience. He, what, what he seems to suggest is that he simply misjudged expectations. And again, there is some hubris in that. Like, well, I decided not to do The First Exorcist, and it's a massive hit, like an unbelievable hit. And yet he also didn't like the movie. But did he really not like the movie? Or did he just, was it sour grapes? I mean, and is that why he decides to take on Exorcist 2? Is there some hubris in that? I'll show him how it's done.

• 33:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Uh, so I don't know if he likes the film or not. I, I do think, and we'll probably talk about this with Hackman, too. I do think that artists should be judged on their successes and not their failures.

• 34:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, what makes you say that? That's interesting.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Well, it, sometimes it takes a failure to get to a success. You know, we, we don't, uh, we don't.

• 34:19Sean Fennessey?

  Spoken like an artist. Who doesn't want to be judged on their failures.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  We don't, we don't say about Rod Carew, you know? He, he made outs, uh, point six, six times at bat, you know? We, we talk about the amazing Rod Carew because how often he hit the ball.

• 34:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Uh, it's hard to make a good movie. It's hard to make good movies. It's hard to make good anything. It's hard to make a good meal. It's hard to make a, a, a good piece of art by yourself. It's certainly hard to make a good piece of art in collaboration with a lot of other people. It's very difficult.

• 34:54Sean Fennessey?

  Do you feel that filmmakers should be judged in the same way that we judge baseball players in terms of success?

• 35:01Speaker 03

  No, I don't, but, you know, come on, we're on the Ringer Podcast Network. We talk, I'm wearing my Cubs hat.

• 35:07Sean Fennessey?

  Three out of 10 films, though, I think is not a terrible batting average.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  I don't either.

• 35:11Sean Fennessey?

  If they're, if you've got a hit.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Look, I don't think one out of 10 is, is, if you've got, if you make one great movie and you make nine, so it took you nine bad movies to get to the one great one?

• 35:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. One of the things that's wonderful, wonderful about the documentary is, you know, Louise Fletcher spoke for the film, um, Linda Blair speaks for the, speaks during the film, um, a lot of his collaborators, a lot of people who worked behind the scenes on the film, Roscoe, Roscoe Pallenberger, his co-conspirator and a, and a curious figure in movie history, speaks for the film. Most people working on this movie seem to think this is not going well. That this is not what I'd hoped it would be. There's some regret and confusion about the approach. When you're on a movie, and the movie is not working, does everyone know? Do you know?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  No, I, I don't. I mean, maybe others do, and I've never been in anything like Exorcist 2.

• 36:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  So I don't, but I can't necessarily tell. Uh, you, you know, some of the movies we'll talk about, not just Exorcist 2, but some of these other examples, I mean, shit is going down, right? People are, people are going to the hospital, or, you know, uh, days, they're falling behind days, or actors aren't coming to the set. Brando doesn't know his lines, or, uh, Burton is drunk. I mean, there's shit going down. I haven't seen a lot of that.

• 36:39Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  So maybe if I were in a movie where shit was going down like that, I'd say, well, this thing, it doesn't seem to be going well. But again, you never know. Sometime, I mean, Apocalypse Now is a freaking masterpiece, so just because it's not going well, doesn't mean you're not making a great thing.

• 36:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's absolutely true.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  So do you disagree with the idea that artists should only be judged by their successes?

• 37:04Sean Fennessey?

  I do disagree with it, yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Really?

• 37:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Meaning, you think they should be?

• 37:08Sean Fennessey?

  I think all their work should be explored.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  I'm not saying it shouldn't be explored. I just, I, I think, generally speaking, I think people who listen to the show know

• 37:18Sean Fennessey?

  that I don't like to spend too much time on films that don't work, and that I, I'm one of those people that truly believes pulling off a movie is borderline miraculous because of how challenging it is, especially now. Um, but, and I do think what you said is true, which is that the, the failures tend to inform the successes, but the failures are, are, are meaningful, especially when it comes to high-level filmmakers and high-level actors, which is what we spend a lot of time talking about on this show. Because they have agency, they have the ability to make choices. And sometimes those choices lead them to very bad work, and we should talk about why the work doesn't work. Like, I, I.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  I, I'm not saying you shouldn't.

• 38:02Sean Fennessey?

  I, I do, I think you should be judged on it, I do. I do, I do think you should be, not, I don't have to judge you harshly, but I'm not gonna put you in that, and send you to The Hague, but, yeah, I think, I think it's important to understand, let me, I'm trying to think about what's a good example. This has been a year of, uh, Steven Spielberg, for me. You know, I've spent a little bit of time with him on the show, and I'm thinking about his work a lot, and I look at a movie like The BFG, and I'm just like, why? What, what, how, we should understand, like, that, why that movie doesn't work, and why he chose it at that time, and was it a mixture of fascination and cynicism, and what informed some of those things? I think that's valuable to the discussion of people's work. We'll talk about it with Hackman. I mean, he took movies for money, you know?

• 38:43Sean Fennessey?

  And, and, and those movies, he talks about in the press, I knew I did the wrong thing because I took it for money. So I do think that kind of matters, and I think what it helps to do is, it helps unflatten the history of movies. If everything is only the great work, then we don't understand why things don't work. So.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Look, I'm not, I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't, uh, pay attention to the bad movies, we shouldn't discuss them, we shouldn't discuss why an artist fucked up by making something bad, or what was going on with that person. I just mean in the sort of final estimation.

• 39:19Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Of John Boorman, I'm gonna, you know, when I give the eulogy at John Boorman's funeral, I'm not gonna talk about Exorcist 2.

• 39:27Sean Fennessey?

  Will, will you be invited?

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Almost, I'm, I'm gonna have my own service at my house.

• 39:35Sean Fennessey?

  Boorman is still with us.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:38Sean Fennessey?

  He's 93 years young.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  I think he stopped working finally, or stopped trying to work.

• 39:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  I think he's done.

• 39:45Sean Fennessey?

  It does seem like the last few years has been a significant slowdown for him. In this film, I think, believe he was filmed a few years ago for this documentary, which has been in the works for a very long time.

• 39:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's an interesting question that you're posing there. And I think maybe part of my bucking against it is that I already know that what you said is true, which is that when the obituary comes out, forget about the funeral, when the obituary comes out, there'll be hardly any time spent on the things that didn't work.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:12Sean Fennessey?

  Actually, it's the job of movie podcasters to talk about some of the things that don't

• 40:16Speaker 03

  There'll be a paragraph saying, and his career did hit a couple of bumps with Exorcist 2, considered one of the worst movies ever made, or whatever the hell.

• 40:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  But ultimately, what they're gonna do is they're gonna celebrate Point Blank, which we haven't really talked about. I mean, Parker adaptations have come up a few times as we've talked, because we talked about it on the Duval podcast, we're gonna talk about it again.

• 40:38Sean Fennessey?

  Just on a new one, yes.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Hackman podcast.

• 40:39Sean Fennessey?

  One of the best things I watched for that episode.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  So, you know, the, but Point Blank is an absolute great crime movie and, and a game changer of a crime movie. It's, it's sort of prismatic view of Los Angeles, oh, man, it's a great LA movie.

• 41:00Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  It's a great LA movie.

• 41:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that, just that image of him moving through the airport, which is still extant, yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Every time I walk through that airport, I think about Point Blank.

• 41:08Sean Fennessey?

  It makes you feel like an Angelino to be in that space. Yeah, I think he's, he's obviously a great artist. I still have to see, I haven't seen many of these films from the 2000s. I haven't seen In My Country or The Tiger's Tale, or, you know, he was working all the way up until 2014, making movies.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Right. Have you seen Taylor of Panama?

• 41:26Sean Fennessey?

  I have, yes.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Which I quite like.

• 41:27Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty good, yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  I think it's pretty good.

• 41:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's Geoffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  And Jamie Lee Curtis. It's a John le Carré adaptation, and I think it's a really good spy movie. I think they changed the ending in the 11th hour.

• 41:46Sean Fennessey?

  Of the novel?

• 41:46Speaker 03

  No, I think they shot a different ending.

• 41:48Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  And in fact, you can even see it on the special feature of Taylor of Panama.

• 41:53Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a character, well, spoiler alert, Taylor of Panama, the Geoffrey Rush character kills Pierce Brosnan, and they changed that ending.

• 42:07Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of your studio notes for happier endings.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, there you go.

• 42:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, the credited screenwriters on that film are John le Carré, Andrew Davies, and John Boorman. So maybe that tells you a little something.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  But it's a really terrific movie. And A Hope and Glory is a, is a, is a great, is a, is kind of an essential part of his filmography, I think, in that he, he suddenly goes in a whole new direction to, to, to make something so autobiographical and self-reflective and warm. It's a very warm film.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  It's not overly nostalgic. It is nostalgic, but I don't think overly so, not too sentimental. A really beautiful movie. So there's great work throughout the filmography.

• 42:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm quite fond of The General as well, which is the Irish crime movie that he made with Brendan Gleeson in a reunion with Jon Voight in the late 90s about Martin Cahill, who's this kind of infamous Irish figure who found himself at kind of the epicenter of a lot of the struggles throughout that country in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. So, yeah, he's got a ton of great movies. The doc in general, I think, is pretty cool. The one thing that I wanted to, and I would recommend anybody who's just likes podcasts like this, I mean, the documentary is just like catnip, you know?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Well, that's the exact word I was gonna use. I mean, if you're a baggage handler, or you're a rodeo clown, or you're a detective, maybe you're not gonna enjoy that movie. But if you're a film dork, you have to see Boorman and the Devil. It is made for dudes like us.

• 43:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes, and I'm just so delighted. Do you, do you subscribe at all to the so bad it's good theory of movies?

• 43:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 43:53Sean Fennessey?

  I don't either. I think that's total bullshit.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  If it's bad, it's...

• 43:56Sean Fennessey?

  This is why we're friends.

• 43:59Sean Fennessey?

  Before we talk about some other documentaries about directors, of which there are a great many, I was hoping you could demythologize the director for us. This is a very auteur-focused kind of show. Most of the guests on the show are filmmakers. I tend to see movie history through the prism of the, the driving artist. Not all of it, obviously, a lot of, all films are collaborative, but that's, that's my interest set.

• 44:28Sean Fennessey?

  But that's not always the case, and I'm, I'm wondering how you think about your life working in movies, and specifically, like, what the directors, tell me what the director's job is.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Well, again, with Duval and Hackman, who had pretty contentious relationships with a lot of directors, they came from a world where both of them sort of, I mean, first of all, their theater roots, but then a lot of TV before they started making films. And I think that they just came from a world where the director's job was to know where to put the camera and to stage the action. And then everything else was up to the actor. And they were gonna give the director their best take first time out, and then everything else was just a technical adjustment. But this business of a director coming in and saying, okay, now, why don't we try one

• 45:22Speaker 03

  where you've got a little, a lot of variations for the editing room, or getting into the psychology of the character, those dudes didn't have much patience for that. Now, I grew up in theater, where psychological realism is our bread and butter, and I very much wanna have a conversation with a director. I ask for notes. I want notes. I wanna have that dialogue with the director. So directors, they work in different ways. They're, they're, they're, they're not all cut from the same cloth, and they all have different interests, different skillsets, different mindset about their approach to the work. I'm always fascinated by directors, and in fact, the hardest thing about working in

• 46:07Speaker 03

  TV is that if you're working on a series, multiple directors come in to direct the series. And that, that dialogue I have with the director has to change from one director to another is the hardest thing about TV for me, because I want to be involved in that dialogue.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Director's job is to, is to make the movie, is to get the movie made, and to get their vision on the screen. And as an actor, I just feel like I'm there to help them facilitate that. What's the best way to tell the story?

• 46:40Sean Fennessey?

  Have you ever been on a movie where the director didn't speak to the actors or wasn't good at speaking to the actors?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been on movies where the director was not good at speaking to actors. In fact, we just did a panel at Telluride where they asked for, they were, we were talking primarily about the difference between acting for stage and acting for film, and they said, what advice would you give, you know, young? I said, well, if you're a young director, my advice would be to take an acting class, or do a play, or, you know, just get some experience about what an actor's job is. Because a lot of times, you're dealing with guys, men and women, who have come up through the business thinking purely visually and technically about how to, how to get their, their pictures on the screen, but they don't necessarily know how to communicate their

• 47:29Speaker 03

  ideas to an actor. Some are better than others.

• 47:32Sean Fennessey?

  Does a director need to be charismatic?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 47:36Sean Fennessey?

  Are they frequently?

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. But they don't need to be.

• 47:41Sean Fennessey?

  Can there be a good film without a good director?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Well, that's a, that's a good question, in that I suppose you could have a bad director with a really good script.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  I don't know that I've seen that. I don't know that I've, I don't know that I could point to a movie where I thought, well, that director was terrible, but that movie turned out all right. I don't know that I have a lot of those experiences.

• 48:05Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think the way that the directorial POV is valorized in places like this and elsewhere is right?

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:13Sean Fennessey?

  Should be done?

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think the director is the, is the author of the, I believe in the auteur theory, and I...

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Believe in the theory. I believe that the, I believe that the director is responsible for the film ultimately.

• 48:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  And some of these failures that we'll talk about, uh, you guys talked about some on the, your bombs, uh, podcast. Uh, I mean, the director has to answer for those.

• 48:43Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  I, I, I think ultimately that a mo-, uh, a mo-, a movie like, uh, Boorman and the Devil, as well as The Ghosts of Peter Sellers. This is a movie we can talk about in terms of the, these other documentaries. This is a movie about, uh, the director, Peter Meadak, who, uh, directed a, after the huge success of The Ruling Class, which is an absolute great film starring Peter Sellers, uh, starring Peter O'Toole. He then got a chance to work with Peter Sellers on a pirate comedy. Uh, and it was just a debacle. And there's, Meadak himself has gone back to make a documentary about what that experience meant to him. And

• 49:29Speaker 03

  I think one of the things that Meadak confronts in that documentary, and one of the things that Boorman is confronting in, just in this conversation is maybe they have more responsibility for the failure than they ever, that they, maybe the initial impulse of an artist is to say, well, that went wrong and that went wrong and that person fucked that up and this, these are the things that, as opposed to saying, maybe it was me. Maybe I just fucked some things up. Maybe it wasn't the fact that Peter Sellers was a goddamn madman or that Richard Burton was drunk.

• 50:03Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that's where Meadak gets to at the end of the movie?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  He should. I, I do think so. I do think he's owning some responsibility for it.

• 50:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's weird because a lot of the behavior that Sellers, that Sellers is accused of in the film is something that you hear about Sellers on many movies. And yet he's a part of many beloved classics in the 50s, 60s and 70s. So it's one of those things where sometimes if you can't rise to the occasion of a difficult star or a difficult circumstance, like, you know, one of them, you've already mentioned Apocalypse Now. I think Apocalypse Now, um, Hearts of Darkness and Burden of Dreams are probably the two, the Alpha and the Omega of the onset, everything is going wrong crisis documentary.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:49Sean Fennessey?

  And those two, the two, two, two great films, you know, I like Apocalypse Now more than Fitzcarraldo, but Fitzcarraldo, great film. Um, we're just talking about Herzog because he's got a movie going into the Criterion Collection. And those are two movies where the filmmaker is at the center of it. It, it feels as though that there's a madness inside of them, obviously, but it does feel like they do feel the burden, the weight, the, the sense of impending failure that is coming at them.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:17Sean Fennessey?

  And I guess they're able to withstand it or transcend it or whatever, but it makes those movies so compelling because you know, on the other side, there's something good. You know, it's not, whereas there are other movies that explore this idea where things are not so good. Do you have a preference in terms of which kind of story like this you want to see?

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Well, let, let me say, first of all, if you want to be a director, you know that the buck stops with you.

• 51:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Ultimately. So for both Herzog and Coppola, and let's, let me just be clear about what we're talking about. So Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now, and there's a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now that his wife, Eleanor Coppola, made called Hearts of Darkness. And Werner Herzog made the movie Fitzcarraldo, and there's a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo called, uh,

• 52:07Sean Fennessey?

  Burden of Dreams.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Burden of Dreams.

• 52:08Sean Fennessey?

  Directed by Les Blank.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Les Blank directed Burden of Dreams. Uh, you know, those are both guys who, they knew what the job was. They took that on. They said from the beginning, yeah, the buck stops with me. I want to be the, a movie director. You know that that's the gig. You want to be the one who's ultimately responsible. So when shit is going wrong, yeah, you take it on. You can't just sit there pointing your fingers at everybody else and saying, it's all your fault that this thing is fucked up. And you hear a lot of Coppola on the Hearts of Darkness documentary saying, no, it's me. I'm a failure. I'm failing.

• 52:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Pretty compelling.

• 52:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. There is this rise in covering proper failures, I'd say. Um, that, that wasn't as common in the, in the 60s and 70s and 80s with these documentaries, but now you do see more movies that are akin to, well, there's a very interesting one about a movie that was never made called, uh, Yodorowsky's Dune, which is about Alejandro Yodorowsky attempting to adapt to.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  I haven't seen the doc.

• 53:12Sean Fennessey?

  I, so I love the movie. It's all about the kind of, not unlike Boorman's ideas about the heretic, this kind of fantasia of concepts that he wants to bring from the Frank Herbert novel to the screen, which if he were to pull it off, would have been, could have been magical, but were also impossible and like speak to the inability to actually realize a dream. But then, you know, like there's a movie that I really enjoy. It isn't so much a making of so much as it, it is about the cult of movies, which is called Best Worst Movie. Have you ever seen the movie Troll 2?

• 53:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 53:50Sean Fennessey?

  Troll 2, when I was a kid, was on HBO all the time. It was frequently on television when I would get home from school. And it's meant to be a sequel to a horror film called Troll.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I remember the video covers in the video store.

• 54:03Sean Fennessey?

  Only as far as I know Troll 2 is not actually a sequel to Troll. It is a movie that I think was meant to be called Goblin. And it's about goblins. And it takes place in a town called Nilbog, which is Goblin spelled backwards. And

• 54:17Speaker 03

  There's your first problem.

• 54:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And the movie is just a, you know, it's, it's a fiasco. It's a really, it's a terrible movie, but it's a very lovable movie. It's a very lovable failure. And it went on to build this huge cult. And this movie, Best Worst Movie, is about falling in love with something that doesn't work and appreciating what doesn't work about it. And I think that this is a movie that kind of shifted the axis of what we expect from these kinds of movies. I, it's a, it's a small documentary that not many people have seen, but I also think it kind of shifted our brain chemistry on what we should be expecting. Cause there are a great many movies. There are two different movies about Hayao Miyazaki and his career and his filmmaking style. One is called, um, Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which is about Studio Ghibli. The other is Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron,

• 55:01Sean Fennessey?

  which came out when, um, The Boy and the Heron came out a few years ago. There's, you know, Ingmar Bergman makes a movie, which is about winter light. Um, then there's Lost in La Mancha, which is Terry Gilliam fucking up a Don Quixote movie, or Lost Souls, the Richard Stanley film about the making of Island of Doctor Moreau. Like, there's this cottage industry of this guy fucked up. Here's how interesting that is, which I find to be an interesting turn in movie history. What do you, what do you make of that?

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they're also kind of what ifs, right? They're all sort of what, what if, uh, this gone a little bit differently? What, what if Richard Stanley had been allowed to finish his movie? Uh, would Island of Doctor Moreau had been any better? Uh,

• 55:46Sean Fennessey?

  Probably not.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Who, who decided that putting Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer in a movie together on an island was a good idea?

• 55:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think Stanley was at least a, a part of that decision making.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Again, he's an eager young filmmaker who's getting a chance to work with big movie stars, and that's the thing that's going to make his movie go.

• 56:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  But nobody ever says to him, no, you're never going to get your movie made with these guys. These guys are maniacs and it's just not going to happen. You can maybe deal with one maniac. You sure as hell can't deal with two.

• 56:17Sean Fennessey?

  Have you ever been in an environment where there were forces like that that were making things difficult to make it work?

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Not really.

• 56:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  You know, I remember when we were making The Post and I asked Meryl Streep, Meryl freaking Streep, the same questions, like, have you ever seen this? And she was like, nah, not really. It's not really common. That's probably why we make movies about it because it happens so uncommonly.

• 56:44Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  I mean,

• 56:45Sean Fennessey?

  See, I think that a lot of people like, I think a lot of people listening to this would think that there's this shadow world of all this untold truth.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know. You know, I was just working with Matt Johnson in Canada, working on his film, and he gave me a note about something, uh, we were doing. And I said, okay. And he looked at me strangely and started laughing. And I said, what? What, what is it? And he said, you just, you don't know how insecure most actors are. He said, you, you, the, you take that in stride. And Carrie and I always take this back to each other. It's like, are people really that badly behaved? If, if they are, we don't see it. That's not us. It's just not my experience. And, and as far, as long as I'm bringing up Meryl Streep, as long as I'm dropping that name, I will tell you that she's, she's a, she's

• 57:37Speaker 03

  just an actor, working real hard, trying to remember her lines, trying, you know? She's deeply experienced and a great actress, obviously, but she's just, she's at work, doing her job. There's nothing, you, there's no, it's not interesting in a way. There's nothing interesting about it.

• 57:55Sean Fennessey?

  So there is no shadow world.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  There is a shadow world. I haven't experienced, there's a shadow world with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando. I haven't experienced it.

• 58:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  I do think a lot of times, right? We, our business can be self policing. We start to go, ah, it's not worth it. It's not worth it to hire that guy. Is he good? Yeah, he's really good. He's really compelling. He's also a giant pain in the ass and he doesn't come to the set and he, and he, uh, throws fits with the director. And so sometimes you, you go, is it worth it? Is it not worth it? Is it worth to get the performance out of them? I, I don't know.

• 58:29Sean Fennessey?

  What about if you're having a hard time? Is the director the first person that you go to?

• 58:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 58:35Sean Fennessey?

  What do you say?

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Having a hard time. I don't understand this. Help me with this.

• 58:40Sean Fennessey?

  Did they ever get defensive?

• 58:43Speaker 03

  If they do, it doesn't manifest as pure defensiveness.

• 58:48Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Normally, they see it as their job to help. And I'm, I'm not a guy who asks for help unless I need it, so.

• 58:58Sean Fennessey?

  You've never asked me for help whilst potting.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  Oh, will you help me right now?

• 59:03Sean Fennessey?

  No, you're doing great. You don't need my help. Would you rather watch a movie, a documentary about an individual film and a filmmaker making that film, or a documentary about a filmmaker's entire body of work?

• 59:13Speaker 03

  That's a good question, because, you know, in the physical media world, we have a lot of what we call special features.

• 59:21Sean Fennessey?

  Are we in the physical media world? This is sort of like the shadow world, but it exists.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  On our discs, our beloved Blu-rays and DVDs, they're often special features.

• 59:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  And quite often, those special features contain, well, a lot of it is propaganda about the making of the movie, right? It's publicity material.

• 59:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  That, that we create while making a movie. And it's about the making of the movie, and it's all very.

• 59:48Sean Fennessey?

  Polished.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  Very polished, and you would think there are no problems. Now, on a Criterion disc, I believe that Ingmar Bergman makes a movie is actually contained, maybe in the trilogy and his, in the.

• 1:00:03Sean Fennessey?

  Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and I can't remember what the third is.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  The Silence?

• 1:00:07Sean Fennessey?

  The Silence, yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  And I think he made Winter Light and The Silence in the same year.

• 1:00:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't want to get away from your original question.

• 1:00:17Sean Fennessey?

  Continue your Bergman point, though.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Well, the Bergman point is that, that was a remarkable year for Ingmar Bergman. He made Winter Light and Silence. He directed, I believe, four plays at the National Theater, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the Swedish premiere. He was just in an incredibly fecund part of his life and career. And the, the making, the documentary shows him in the making of Winter Light. There's, he, he's not some mad monk. He, it's very workmanlike. He's very much just a guy who's accomplishing, he's in the flow.

• 1:00:56Sean Fennessey?

  Famously always liked to be working, Bergman.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  And he is, he's clearly just in the flow, and he's able to answer questions pretty effectively. Again, I talked to Matt Johnson about this, because I was just working with him. I said, seems like you're in the flow, right now, in your life, right? Seems like things are going well. And it's like, you get in these places as an artist, where suddenly you're just kind of tapped in, and you, you, you have access to a lot of things, and things are flowing for you in a really good way.

• 1:01:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, how wonderful of you to compare Matt Johnson to Ingmar Bergman.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  You're welcome, Matt.

• 1:01:31Sean Fennessey?

  Good luck, Matt.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  But anyway, it's, that documentary is a little dry. It's not for everybody, it's for hardcore.

• 1:01:38Sean Fennessey?

  I think procedurally, though, it's very interesting, because you get to see him literally doing his job. And there's just not a lot of examples of that. There are not a lot of, there are, there's a lot of EPKs, and there are some good special features. And, and special features for me, probably more so commentaries than the actual making of documentaries, but some making of documentaries were really portals of curiosity that got me, I think, to the place where I am with my film fandom. And listening to PTA talk about who he was stealing from on commentaries expanded my mind. And then seeing, is it, is it That Moment, the Magnolia making of documentary? Which is, I don't know if you've ever seen that before, but it's about a 45-minute film,

• 1:02:23Sean Fennessey?

  and it shows a lot of very intimate moments, not quite on set, but in the surrounding moments while making a movie, that I found to be really revelatory. But those are few and far between, where you feel like the bonus material is an artistic act. Most of the time, it feels like it's something that is just made in support of a product.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:43Sean Fennessey?

  But answer the question, would you rather watch a documentary about a filmmaker and their work, or a documentary about the making of one movie?

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Well, I'd, I'd rather watch a good documentary, regardless of the topic. You know, Boorman and the Devil is catnip, I don't, for us, in doing what we do, I don't know that it's a great documentary. You know, it's mostly heads and clips, and.

• 1:03:12Sean Fennessey?

  Some animated recreations.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Some animated recreations to try to just, like, keep things moving and get out of the heads and clips world.

• 1:03:17Sean Fennessey?

  I find it's a little faux-zippy at times, in a way that I didn't really think it needed to be.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Right. But ultimately, where it lands, the idea that Boorman himself supports the idea, and a couple of the talking heads do too, Karen Kusama and Bill Jaberry, they make the point in there, say, look, I'd rather see a big swing.

• 1:03:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Right? I'd rather see an artist taking a big swing and failing than just see commercial shit, right? Just cranking out more commercial shit.

• 1:03:50Sean Fennessey?

  Lead the weapon for.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I wholly support that idea, and I think the documentary supports that idea. It doesn't make Exorcist 2 any better, in my mind. By the way, we didn't mention the Ennio Morricone score, which I think is remarkable score. I mean, you talked about the fact that Exorcist 2 does have some, these are not, it's not Plan 9, right? That there are real, real artists making this thing. William Frecker writes the cinematographer, and Morricone with the score. I mean, there, there's stuff going on in the movie.

• 1:04:24Sean Fennessey?

  But the, the score is a really good example of a filmmaker making a decision, which is that Morricone turns in a score, and Boorman asks him to remove a component of the score.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Sean Fennessey?

  So that it only gives you this incredible erratic, unusual, upsetting feeling, because he's removed something that is more melodic from the original score. That's a great choice, that's a great artistic choice that makes it very memorable.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Sean Fennessey?

  And, so again, like, even though the movie doesn't totally work, it's kind of similar to your question about how should you grade an artist's career? You know, how, what should they be, what standard should they be held to? Because I do think, sometimes when you pull a movie apart, and I find this with a lot of contemporary releases, like, a contemporary release will come out, and you'll text me, and you'll be like, that movie wasn't good, what are you talking about?

• 1:05:11Sean Fennessey?

  And I, I, I'm looking for things to appreciate or admire. Like, I think in order to enjoy this job, I actually can't go in with the expectation that everything is going to not be as good as The Exorcist. That would be, that would make my life terrible.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  I admire that about you. And I told you, too, when we were in Telluride, I, I'm trying to get out of this thing of just like, right, we all have the same grading system for a movie. It's like, well, oh, well, that clearly didn't work, because, you know, we all jump on them. Well, it's like, why don't we embrace a world wherein some, some things don't conform,

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  don't conform to, to, to the norm, right?

• 1:05:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's, you're a video podcaster now. That's, that was, you just crossed the threshold from audio to video. Well done.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  For those listening at home, I referenced my T-shirt, which is Bertolucci's The Conformist.

• 1:06:09Sean Fennessey?

  Are there any full-life director documentaries that you like?

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Let me consult my maps and charts, vamp for a second.

• 1:06:19Sean Fennessey?

  So I, I mean, this is really kind of my favorite thing, you know? Hanging out with my daughter, seeing a new movie I love for the first time, and then it's kind of this, is, there's just a two-hour movie, and it's just about a director's whole career, and it's just lots of smart people talking about their movies. Is, is it the most sophisticated work of art? No. Is it usually a great documentary? No. Does it show us, is it truly revealing about the human soul and the act of creativity? Probably not. And yet, a very happy place for me is a movie like Howl, which is just two hours of

• 1:07:00Sean Fennessey?

  people talking about Hal Ashby, who he was, what he did, the work he made, clips from his films. I just find that tremendously satisfying. And I think some of it is because, I obviously, my favorite period in cinema history is a time when I was not alive. And so I am always trying to get to a place that I never got to experience. And I felt that very young, watching the AFI 100 Years, 100 Movies specials, and learning about what my checklist ought to be, and getting obsessed with this stuff. And we're, we're still not totally in the place where we're getting documentaries made about filmmakers, whose movies I was seeing in movie theaters. But that's about to start.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Sean Fennessey?

  We are about to get to the place where, you know, Tarantino is very venerated, probably the most venerated from that generation, and there have been some things about him, but they're not quite on the level of what we're talking about here. But, you know, your Finchers, and your Soderberghs, and your PTAs, and your Sofia Coppolas, like, those people are all kind of entering their 50s and 60s, when they start to be, they're concretized as part of the canon. And when you get into the canon, you get a two-hour documentary about you. But that's different. I mean, a lot of the time, when we've talked about on drafts and done these halls of fame together, you're like, I, I saw this movie in theaters, for a lot of these people. Does that change your relationship to watching some of these docs?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  I'm sure it does, I'm sure it does. Certainly, to, to get any sort of peek behind the curtain is always titillating, you know, right? It's always, that's always exciting to see.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  But again, the quality of the doc goes a long way, the quality of the documentary itself. And Hearts of Darkness, I mean, I think for me, the documentary has to be some, about something more than just the thing it's about, right? There has to be a bigger idea at play.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  American Movie, which is just one of my favorite movies.

• 1:09:01Sean Fennessey?

  Me too.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  Is not just about a failed B-movie being made for no money, Z-movie being made for no money in Wisconsin. It's got much bigger ideas at work, directed by Chris Smith, about the filmmaker Mark Borschard from Wisconsin. And some big ideas about family, and found family, and friendship, and.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Arts, the, the, the American artist.

• 1:09:36Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, there are a lot of big ideas at play. So do I, do I enjoy watching things about the, the films and filmmakers that I love? Yeah, I love it, but give me a well-made documentary any day of the week. If you haven't seen American movie. Beautiful, heartbreaking and hilarious.

• 1:09:55Sean Fennessey?

  A great one. I worked with Chris Smith a couple of years ago and I was, I fanned out.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Sean Fennessey?

  An American movie.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Um. Uh, filmmaker docs, uh, George Stevens, A Filmmaker's Journey. In the, in the world of like, uh, heads and clips documentaries. This is a mighty good one. Available in 4K.

• 1:10:13Sean Fennessey?

  Why do you think that happened?

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:10:16Sean Fennessey?

  I, when I saw that they made that, when Warner made that a 4K, I was like, of all the things to restore and upgrade this, which I, even the origins of that film. I'm like this, it, it's a very polished, shiny object. And is it directed by his son? I think it is directed by his son, George Stevens, Jr. And, um, I love George, I love George Stevens' films. Um, and, but I, I found that to be a bit strange that it was upgraded. But a very good movie that is a kind of, you know, an encomium of a, of a great director's work and kind of shows you a little bit of kind of what the director does in that period in time in American movies. And I think answers a, a cool question, which is everyone's working in the studio system at the time that he is.

• 1:10:57Sean Fennessey?

  There's not really an independent film scene, certainly in Hollywood, California in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. So why is he better than other people?

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  That's a good question. I don't know that, I don't know that he is.

• 1:11:11Sean Fennessey?

  But, and, and the movie like kind of tries to explore that, but it's like, is it taste? Does he understand something about the American character? Does he understand his body of work as telling a broader story? Yes and no?

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  I guess, I mean, do you rank him as high as John Ford or, uh, Howard Hawks?

• 1:11:30Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, he made significantly fewer films than those guys.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:11:32Sean Fennessey?

  So it's, but his, his, his highs, right? I mean, he made Shane and Giant and these huge epic, you know, classic American stories that I think are definitional to their genres.

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  So. Do I rank him as high? I don't know. No, but like John, there's still 20 John Ford movies I haven't seen.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Have you seen the, the Bogdanovich documentary directed by John Ford?

• 1:11:59Sean Fennessey?

  I have, yes, I own it on DVD. Um, and I, I do love it because it is a portrait of an artist in, in resistance.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:13Sean Fennessey?

  Cause Ford is at least performing disinterest and participating in a documentary with Bogdanovich.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Which Bogdanovich clearly loves, right? He's, he finds that idea very funny. But it's also notable for interviews with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda. Very informal, uh, style interviews, sort of, you get the impression in their backyard.

• 1:12:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  I mean, they bothered to, to glue on their toupees, but they, not much more than that to go out in the backyard and record their.

• 1:12:44Sean Fennessey?

  Did you glue yours on today?

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  No, that's why I'm wearing my Cubs hat.

• 1:12:51Sean Fennessey?

  Do you do a Jimmy Stewart?

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  You mean impersonation?

• 1:12:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Just in my essence.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  I had, I had a director once tell me I was the next Jimmy Stewart. Turned out not to be true.

• 1:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding.

• 1:13:06Sean Fennessey?

  What year was that?

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  Long time ago. Turned out not to be true.

• 1:13:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think at this stage in your life, you do combine that very specific effervescence of

• 1:13:23Sean Fennessey?

  bemused curmudgeon.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  All right, I'll take that.

• 1:13:28Sean Fennessey?

  That is a zone of Stewart that I quite like. You know, Stewart, when he is younger, he's very crabby.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Sean Fennessey?

  And then he's older, he's like a little more, a little more slower, a little more avuncular.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Oh, you do a little Jimmy Stewart?

• 1:13:38Sean Fennessey?

  Little Jimmy, yeah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Anyway, that doc is very, um, wow, it's striking to see those guys just talking about Ford.

• 1:13:46Sean Fennessey?

  And, yeah. I remember the Stewart interviews, like, he's like on a lawn somewhere, is it on the studio lot or something? And it's very up close to him. Yeah, I haven't seen this movie in a long time, but going through my Bogdanovich obsession in the 2000s, I definitely went out and bought it.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  And unfortunately Bogdanovich went in and kind of upgraded the movie, right? There's the movie he made in the early seventies.

• 1:14:04Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if I've, maybe you've only seen the upgraded version.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  Then he made, uh, he went back into it in the eighties with some video interviews, uh, which are not as on point as, as those people. So as a doc, I don't know that it's wholly successful, but I mean, just, just, just the clips from the Ford movies are pretty staggering.

• 1:14:22Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he's a really important figure, Bogdanovich, in this thing that we're describing because he is one of the people who I think turned directors into kind of like baseball trading cards, you know, the, the, the books that he wrote and the way that he wrote about these filmmakers in magazines and the way that he befriended them and sought them out and then cast them in his films and talked about their work in, in the press all the time and, you know, talked about Hawks and talked about Ford and talked about, um, people like Alan Dwan, you know, like these film, Raul Walsh, who, you know, who were yeoman filmmakers working in the studio system. And then he created a kind of mythology around them, which I think leads to like the kind of brain that I have about some of this stuff, which is like completism and organization

• 1:15:05Sean Fennessey?

  in the sense that, you know, Bogdanovich reviewed every movie he ever saw on a index card and he saved those index cards. And some of those cards were converted into some of the books that he wrote. And there is something really interesting about him, you know, he really only made one filmmaker doc like that. He made a couple of other documentaries, he made one about Tom Petty that's quite good.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um, but that movie, it's almost like he's racing to make a movie about Ford before he dies.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Sean Fennessey?

  You know, and not a lot of filmmakers agree to do that. You know, Friedkin, we didn't talk about Friedkin's relationship to, um, The Exorcist Two. He is featured in this documentary in a memorable little segment.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  He hated it. He hated it and he held Boorman in some contempt for making it.

• 1:15:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  I, I'm comfortable saying that. I don't feel like I'm betraying a trust. Because he's on the record saying it. And I really do feel that, that Billy just thought people were, people were cashing in on the thing he had made.

• 1:16:05Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  And I, I, I think he found that, uh, detestable.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

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• 1:18:27Speaker 02

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• 1:18:30Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen Friedkin Uncut?

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it. I wasn't, they asked me to do an interview for it and I didn't do it.

• 1:18:39Sean Fennessey?

  Was there a reason for that?

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  I don't remember.

• 1:18:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  There's not, it's not, I don't have a.

• 1:18:44Sean Fennessey?

  Is this a shadow world thing?

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  It's not a shadow world.

• 1:18:47Sean Fennessey?

  You can tell me. It's just us.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  I just, I, I don't know that I was, I don't know why I wasn't comfortable with it.

• 1:18:55Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't say it's the greatest documentary in the world, but it, it again just satisfies this thing where I just want to hear William Friedkin speaking for two hours and telling stories and being ornery about things. And, you know, he's famously very ornery.

• 1:19:11Sean Fennessey?

  He, he retells that story of a, the premiere screening of Exorcist Two, where people are watching the film and they're becoming increasingly unhappy with the movie and realizing it is not really a very good sequel to The Exorcist. And then some guy turns around and points to executives in the audience and says, these are the people responsible for this movie. And Friedkin kind of relished that story. And he tells stories like that throughout Friedkin Uncut.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  He also tells the story, right, of, he was at a, in a, in a post-production lab, probably working on Sorcerer, and somebody said, hey, we've got Exorcist Two in the room next door, do you want to come over and see some of it? And he claims that, as a bit of a lark, he went over and he sat down and he watched 10 minutes of it and he found it incomprehensible and insulting. You know, and he left. And I, I think that's probably one of the things that fuels Boorman saying, well, The Exorcist was about a little girl being tortured. You know, I, I don't think there was any love lost. Directors are the most competitive people in, of any of the, the jobs I've encountered in the business.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  They're, and they're very competitive and they don't want to give it up for each other.

• 1:20:20Sean Fennessey?

  That's interesting. Um.

• 1:20:24Sean Fennessey?

  I'm quite fond of De Palma.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  Haven't seen it.

• 1:20:27Sean Fennessey?

  I think you should.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:20:30Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you why. It's what I think every great director should be forced to do. I think if you decide to do this job, there should be a writ in the contract with the DGA to be a member of that that union. It says, when you reach 70 years old, you must sit down and you must speak one by one about each film you've made.

• 1:20:55Sean Fennessey?

  Cause that's what De Palma is. It's just, it's Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow with their cameras affixed on De Palma's face. No other interviews, going movie by movie through his entire career. And it is, it is, it's my, it's my nightlight. It's my, my, my greatest comfort. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big bowl of Oreos for me. Really, really enjoyable piece of work. You, you're a De Palma fan, are you not?

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  I mean, because I believe that we should judge an artist based on their successes and not their failures. Yes.

• 1:21:37Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. What would you say is De Palma's greatest success?

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Carrie.

• 1:21:42Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel about Carrie being remade as a television series?

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  I'm against it.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  No, I shouldn't say that. I'm, I should say, I won't watch it.

• 1:21:52Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I think I'm gonna have to watch it as a king completist.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  You are not a king completist.

• 1:21:59Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Come on. There's, you haven't seen all the Stephen King things, have you? Have you seen all the Stephen King things?

• 1:22:06Sean Fennessey?

  I think so.

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  Have you seen both TV versions of The Stand or Three version?

• 1:22:11Sean Fennessey?

  Of course. Are you kidding me? One of my favorite novels of all time.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  And you've seen both TV adaptations. Oh, I touched the mic, sorry.

• 1:22:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes, I've seen both TV adaptations. I watched the second TV adaptation during COVID. It's just absolutely bereft, devastated.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Did they remake The Shining as a TV thing?

• 1:22:29Sean Fennessey?

  They did with Stephen Weber.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Have you seen that?

• 1:22:30Sean Fennessey?

  Of course I have. I, Stephen King is foundational for me as a person. I, it completely turned my light on.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:22:40Sean Fennessey?

  His novels and then, and when I-

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  I take it back, you are a Stephen King completist.

• 1:22:44Sean Fennessey?

  Well, why, why are we talking about Stephen King? I can't even recall. Oh, Carrie, yes, of course. Um.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  That's my favorite De Palma. Should, should it be another one? Am I forgetting something?

• 1:22:54Sean Fennessey?

  No, but you're, you know,

• 1:22:58Sean Fennessey?

  you are intrigued by perversion. And so I was expecting, fair to say?

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  Who isn't? Is what I'd say.

• 1:23:08Sean Fennessey?

  And I would, you know, I would have thought Blowout or, or, or Body Double or, or, you know, Dressed to Kill or?

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  I like all those. I think I'd give it to Carrie before.

• 1:23:20Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel about Scarface?

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  Not as fond of it as the others.

• 1:23:26Sean Fennessey?

  This has been good.

• 1:23:28Sean Fennessey?

  What else did you watch for this?

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Well,

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which is the documentary about Orson Welles. I think it's made for Netflix, actually.

• 1:23:42Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  About the making of The Other Side of the Wind and Orson Welles' last movie. Incompleted, incompleted at the time of his death and then completed many years later.

• 1:23:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  Well, I am a Welles completist and, and I think he's one of the few really great American, I mean, genius American artists. I shouldn't say few, I'm sure there are plenty. He, he's one of my faves. As maddening as he is and as frustrating as you might find him both as a viewer and apparently as collaborators found him as a person. He's also just, he's a genius, you know, so.

• 1:24:32Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen that movie in some years. I did have Morgan Neville on this show to talk about it. And can you remind me of how it's organized and like what is revealed?

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  It's not, or it's organized in a very chaotic way. I think meant to reflect the kind of chaos of production beginning, production being canceled, going back to revisit a movie, something that's already been shot, going back to, to view Welles's history.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  Heads and clips, all of that stuff is in there, but it's, it's put together in a very chaotic way. It's a bit of a mosaic, which the picture starts to emerge of this artist.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Whatever, whatever Welles is doing, whatever that mad world is and the, and the people that he pulled into that world, including John Huston, right?

• 1:25:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Speaker 03

  A big part of this, the, the lead in this movie and Peter Bogdanovich again.

• 1:25:28Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think it's important? I asked you if it's important for a director to be charismatic. Do you think it's important for a director to be charismatic to be an interesting subject of one of these movies?

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I don't, I don't want to see a movie about some boring technician putting together a film. I don't know that I would find that interesting. But I have to say, most, most director, not all directors are charismatic, but a lot of them I've worked with are. James Mangold, who I adore, is very charismatic guy. You know, he chomps a big cigar and he screams on the set and he gets into big fights with his DP.

• 1:26:07Sean Fennessey?

  Old school movie maker, yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  It feels very old school and really gives the impression of a guy who's like come up through the ranks. Like he used to be a gaffer and then he got a job as an AD. And that's not his background at all. His dad was an important visual artist from upstate New York and he went to school at Cal Arts and was, Alexander McKendrick was his mentor.

• 1:26:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  So he's a, he's an art school dude, but he's, he is that, he is a larger than life character and very charismatic on the set. And very exacting.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  The good ones are pretty exacting about what they're getting.

• 1:26:44Sean Fennessey?

  There are a number of other movies like this that I really enjoy that I'll briefly cite. And most of them are of the Talking Head, Director Speaks variety. For example, Billy Wilder Speaks is an example of this, which I think is very entertaining. By Sidney Lumet is one we talked about when we did, when we did a Lumet episode a few years ago. There's one about John Milius, there's one about Nora Ephron. The Beaches of Agnes is sort of this kind of a movie with Agnes Varda.

• 1:27:12Sean Fennessey?

  I just watched a bit last night of Lightning Over Water. Have you seen that before? The Vim Venders Nicholas Ray movie, where Nicholas Ray, at the end of his life, Vim Venders comes to stay with him and they have a kind of, kind of, kind of a pas de deux about whether or not Nick Ray can make one more movie before Vim Venders goes off to make Hammett. There's a really interesting-

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Cause Nicholas Ray is in American Friend, is he not? So is it documentary made around that time?

• 1:27:42Sean Fennessey?

  Around that, I think it's just shortly after that.

• 1:27:46Sean Fennessey?

  That's a very interesting movie that I think reveals a director near the end of their life, but is not showing them doing the work really, but still like it shows the engine inside of Ray's mind of wanting to continue, wanting to work, no matter what.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  I don't know this at all, I should watch that.

• 1:28:00Sean Fennessey?

  Very, very good films on the Criterion Channel right now that I would recommend people check out. Okay, before we move on to scripted films.

• 1:28:07Speaker 03

  Before we move on, two more to talk about. Hitchcock True Foe. If you're, there are documentaries about Orson Welles. There are documentaries about Alfred Hitchcock. You talked about documentaries about whole careers. They're out there. Magician is the one about Orson Welles. Are they good? Are they?

• 1:28:29Sean Fennessey?

  Comprehensive, but a little dry.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hitchcock True Foe is about a very specific moment. Ken Jones, right? Ken Jones made the documentary. That's definitely worth seeing.

• 1:28:41Sean Fennessey?

  One of my favorite things about that film is that Ken Jones has enlisted five or six of the best working filmmakers to talk about the impact that book and conversation and Hitchcock's work had on them. And if you watch it, you can see the ways in which the Finchers and James Grays of the world have integrated what they learned from just reading a book into their actual work, which is something that I think a lot of people do with a lot of movies like this, is they watch these things and they learn. They, or at least they think they're learning about how things are made.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  Right. And isn't there a documentary about, is there a documentary purely about the shower scene?

• 1:29:16Sean Fennessey?

  There is, 7852.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 1:29:20Sean Fennessey?

  Which is, I think, great fun.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  I've seen it.

• 1:29:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Alexander O. Philippe is the name of the filmmaker and he's made a number of movies about these very specific moments in movie history. His most recent one is called Chain Reactions, which is four different people reflecting on their relationship with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But I, I, I enjoy all of his movies. I think they all have something, he made one about Alien. He made another one about, oh, a terrific one that I really enjoyed about David Lynch's relationship to The Wizard of Oz. And I think those are all worth seeking out. They're not quite explorations of filmmakers. They're really more about film grammar and film ideas, but those are a good shout.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  And then Five Came Back. I know this is made for TV. It is in fact, it was kind of mini-series.

• 1:30:15Sean Fennessey?

  An adaptation of Mark Harris's book, yes.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  Mark Harris's terrific book about five filmmakers who were, five great American filmmakers who were tasked with documenting World War II. And the impact that that had on their lives and careers moving forward. And the impact was not small, as you might imagine.

• 1:30:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  On those fellows. And each director is assigned a different director, contemporary director. You might be able to pull that up. Spielberg, does William Wyler. Do you have it in front of you?

• 1:30:56Sean Fennessey?

  I do not.

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  Paul Greengrass.

• 1:31:01Sean Fennessey?

  Francis Ford Coppola has John Huston. Guillermo del Toro has Frank Capra. Paul Greengrass has John Ford and Lawrence Kasdan has George Stevens.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Sean Fennessey?

  The aforementioned.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  It's, it's on your Netflix app.

• 1:31:13Sean Fennessey?

  Which are three episodes, it's fairly conquerable.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  It's, it's really, it's really compelling stuff.

• 1:31:21Sean Fennessey?

  Anything else?

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:31:23Sean Fennessey?

  Making movies about directors is an interesting fetish. Very rarely commercially successful as a conceit. People do sometimes want to see movies about Hollywood. They even sometimes want to see movies about the making of a movie, but the, a movie about a film director is an unusual thing.

• 1:31:45Sean Fennessey?

  Do you like them?

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Well, I like White Hunter Black Heart.

• 1:31:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  Very much, which is Clint Eastwood's movie about John Huston and the making of The African Queen. Now, names are changed, right? He's not actually playing a character named John Huston.

• 1:32:03Sean Fennessey?

  No, but he is performing as though he is John Huston.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  He's doing a John Huston impersonation. It may or may not work for you.

• 1:32:12Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's one of his, if not his, most underrated movie. It is a movie that is not very widely seen.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:18Sean Fennessey?

  And is in that interesting late eighties, early nineties period where he's kind of fishing around pre-unforgiven.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:32:26Sean Fennessey?

  Where you've got Heartbreak Ridge and Bird. And I think this movie comes after Bird, around that time.

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Sean Fennessey?

  And it's an interesting, it's a, it's a cool film. I like it. And he, it's, he's giving a performance, he's not doing Clint.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Right. He's playing, I guess, maybe what he remembers of John Huston. And it's about making the, of the African Queen and primarily about trying to shoot an elephant while in Africa, making The African Queen. It's a really good movie. You know, Warner Brothers has released and re-released and re-released all of these. Usually when there's a physical media, a change in the physical media market, some of the first stuff to get out there is Eastwood stuff. Because men tend to drive the physical media market. And therefore they put these Eastwood movies out there.

• 1:33:19Sean Fennessey?

  Dirty Harry, à la Josie Wales.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  Those are always some of the first things on a new format. For some reason, they have not done this with White Hunter Black Heart.

• 1:33:27Sean Fennessey?

  Only on DVD.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  They've not given it any, any respect. It's really compelling movie.

• 1:33:32Sean Fennessey?

  Whenever I say something is underseen or underrated, it usually means it doesn't have a 4K. That's, that's the synonym for that.

• 1:33:41Sean Fennessey?

  You know, there is a different strain of this kind of movie. All That Jazz is an interesting movie about a film director.

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's a self-portrait, thinly veiled, I guess, not even thinly veiled, barely. Why did he even change the name of the character from Bob Fosse? We'll never know.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:33:58Sean Fennessey?

  But Bob Fosse's story effectively about himself entering the creative depth, the creative death throes, I would say.

• 1:34:09Sean Fennessey?

  That is in part also about working on the stage, right? And is not totally about filmmaking, but does feel like a portrait of a film director. It's one of the best movies ever made, but I feel like it's maybe not considered a movie about a director. Is that, what do you think?

• 1:34:25Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, his film directing is seen in, in All That Jazz as a kind of sideline.

• 1:34:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Right? It's not, it doesn't have his focus. He's mainly a Broadway guy.

• 1:34:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  And mainly a dancer. And that's what the film mostly concerns itself with. This movie thing is like a, a thing that keeps like bothering him on the schedule. That he has to keep going in and working on Lenny.

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  Lenny here is not Lenny Bruce. They've changed that to a different comedian. He's played by Cliff Gorman, who played the role of Lenny in the Broadway production on which the movie Lenny is based. The great Cliff Gorman.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we could go on and on about All That Jazz, but it's a great portrait of an artist and, and a, a kind of self, self-destructive slash self-destructive drive of Bob Fosse in particular.

• 1:35:22Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so I've got, I haven't, I've not mentioned this to anyone, I'm just gonna do it live on the show right now.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:35:28Sean Fennessey?

  So, it's not, it's really not a revelation at all, so settle down. Two years ago, to celebrate Altman's centenary, we did an episode about his career. We had a program on the Criterion Channel celebrating his work. This year, Abel Ferrara turns 75, did his films on the channel, talked about it on the show. Next year, there's two candidates in my mind for who I'm interested in spending a lot of time on. One of them is Bob Fosse, who would have, would turn 100 next year. And the other is Ken Russell.

• 1:36:04Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm just, I'm always looking for excuses to, to repel into the.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  Why, why Ken Russell? Does he have a?

• 1:36:10Sean Fennessey?

  He would have turned 100.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  I see.

• 1:36:12Sean Fennessey?

  Next year. So those are the two people who's, now Bob Fosse has a relatively modest film career. I think he directed only six films.

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, really short.

• 1:36:19Sean Fennessey?

  Did a choreography on maybe five or six

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Sean Fennessey?

  proper Hollywood films, like Pajama Game, stuff like that.

• 1:36:27Sean Fennessey?

  So that would be an easier package to, to conquer. Ken Russell, a lot to put your arms around, a lot of movies.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  Well, but still, it's not, it's what, 40?

• 1:36:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's a lot.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  Well, I've been doing Hackman and Duval, it doesn't sound like a lot to me.

• 1:36:41Sean Fennessey?

  That's very true. I find the director packages are different because you have to, it's more, it's more studied. The actors are, you can watch a bad movie and just look at what they're doing and reflect on that.

• 1:36:53Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't know, what do you think would be more, more interesting to spend time on?

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  Look, I'm, I'm just doing my duty as the third chair of this podcast.

• 1:36:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'm asking your opinion as the third chair.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  If I had a vote, it would be Ken Russell.

• 1:37:06Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, you, you have a vote, I guess.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  I mean, because I.

• 1:37:09Sean Fennessey?

  You're a person in my life.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  Because I, because I judge an artist based on their successes and not their failures.

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

  They, they both have some unbelievable successes.

• 1:37:25Sean Fennessey?

  Lot more, I don't, I don't know if Ken Russell has failures so much as unrealized dreams. You know, I mean, everything is a swing. Every movie he makes is a swing, which is fascinating.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  Well, he and Gorman.

• 1:37:37Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of similar.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  Kind of cut from the same cloth in that regard. And Ken Russell certainly belongs in that second tier, along with Gorman.

• 1:37:44Sean Fennessey?

  He does.

• 1:37:47Sean Fennessey?

  You know, there are some other more standard Hollywood versions of what we're describing. There's, there's Chaplin, a movie about Charlie Chaplin. There's Gods and Monsters, you know, which is about James Whale at the, near the end of his life. There's a Hitchcock biopic starring Anthony Hopkins.

• 1:38:04Speaker 03

  Isn't there a Hitchcock biopic with Toby Jones?

• 1:38:07Sean Fennessey?

  Jones as well. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:10Sean Fennessey?

  There is Ed Wood.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:38:16Sean Fennessey?

  There's Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, which is sort of about the origins of arriving at directing. Have you ever seen The Disaster Artist?

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:38:25Sean Fennessey?

  You know what that is?

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Do you know what the film The Room is?

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes. Now I know what you're talking about.

• 1:38:31Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen The Room?

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  I haven't seen The Room.

• 1:38:34Sean Fennessey?

  You never participated in that?

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  I never, that was not, that was not, that ain't me, man.

• 1:38:40Sean Fennessey?

  Is it because you feel you're above that?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  Didn't we just talk about movies that's so bad that they're good? That's the way The Room sounds to me.

• 1:38:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's an, it enters a different stratosphere of so bad it's good. It might be the ur so bad it's good, but it's also, it's cult is an act of community, I would say.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Are you suggesting that I should see The Room?

• 1:39:05Sean Fennessey?

  Not alone.

• 1:39:08Sean Fennessey?

  For this podcast on video.

• 1:39:13Sean Fennessey?

  I think that would be a confusing experience.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Room watch party, room, what do you call it? Watch.

• 1:39:18Sean Fennessey?

  Watch along?

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  Room watch along?

• 1:39:20Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think you'd totally get the effect by having us nattering at you during it. But I, maybe you and Carrie and the nanny.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  Could watch The Room? Is it on physical media, The Room?

• 1:39:31Sean Fennessey?

  I assume so.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  You don't own it?

• 1:39:33Sean Fennessey?

  I don't own it, no. To me, it's only meant to be seen in a movie theater with a lot of people while holding plastic spoons.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Throwing toast at the screen sort of thing? There is an interactivity?

• 1:39:42Sean Fennessey?

  There is, yeah. It is, I think it is the millennial Rocky Horror, but it's a much less interesting movie than Rocky Horror. The Disaster Artist is about the making of the movie.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Right, with.

• 1:39:55Sean Fennessey?

  James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, a number of other people.

• 1:40:01Sean Fennessey?

  I think a pretty interesting movie that came out right around the time when

• 1:40:04Speaker 03

  Who made that movie?

• 1:40:04Sean Fennessey?

  James Franco directed it. And right around the time when he was kind of deleted from our culture.

• 1:40:11Sean Fennessey?

  Anything else? Any other movies like to see you enjoy?

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Oh, you also mentioned Nouvelle Vague.

• 1:40:17Sean Fennessey?

  Nouvelle Vague, of course, just came out.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  I actually haven't seen yet.

• 1:40:23Sean Fennessey?

  More, a movie that I enjoyed more about that crew of directors and the, and the relationship that some of them had to the older French masters. The making of Breathless stuff I found a little bit less compelling personally.

• 1:40:37Speaker 03

  I'll mention one more movie that doesn't belong on any of these lists. I've mentioned it on this podcast before, and that's The Stuntman, starring Peter O'Toole.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  You know, there is a, there's a kind of myth about the film director. And certainly The Stuntman explores the myth of, of the film director.

• 1:40:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Speaker 03

  It's what'll, it's a picture of a film director a lot of us see when we talk about film directors. So I think it's worth seeing, just, just for a little context, even though it's not based on any one person necessarily.

• 1:41:09Sean Fennessey?

  You mentioned Wells earlier and how you're a completist. Does that mean you've seen Mank and RKO 281 and me and Orson Welles?

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  I have.

• 1:41:18Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Seen them all. And I like them to varying degrees.

• 1:41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. It's interesting how frequently he has been portrayed.

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  He's tough to get your arms around in every sense.

• 1:41:33Sean Fennessey?

  It's true. Yeah. And he also appears, well, he's famously the inspiration for the brain from Pinky and the Brain. Are you familiar with Pinky and the Brain?

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  Vaguely.

• 1:41:44Sean Fennessey?

  Animated series?

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think he would have been interested when it debuted.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  I was in a play about Orson Welles.

• 1:41:50Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah? What was it called?

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  Called Orson's Shadow, written by the actor Austin Pendleton.

• 1:41:55Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  It's about a moment in Wells's life when Laurence Olivier, who was starting the National Theater, hired Orson Welles to direct Olivier in a production of Rhinoceros by Ionesco. And Olivier was going to appear in it with his then-girlfriend, Joan Plowright, even though he was still married to Vivian Leigh. And I played Ken Tynan, the critic, Kenneth Tynan, who Olivier very smartly pulled into the fold when he was starting the National Theater, knowing that having a critic on his side was a good thing.

• 1:42:36Sean Fennessey?

  I can't wait to be compromised in that way.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  And Tynan was friends with Wells and sort of bartered the introduction between them. And they fought bitterly and Olivier fired him off of the production. And so it's a play about that. It's a beautiful play. And it's really about some of what we're talking about here, that Olivier was very much a traditionalist and was very concerned with the way he was going to appear and had a lot of insecurity.

• 1:43:05Sean Fennessey?

  Why did he hire a buccaneering maverick like Orson Welles to direct his play?

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  Because he knew it was a good idea, but he couldn't ultimately submit to Wells's

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  genius and irascibility.

• 1:43:22Sean Fennessey?

  Do you see yourself as more of a Wells or an Olivier?

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  I don't see myself as worthy of that question.

• 1:43:30Sean Fennessey?

  I was hoping you would take the bait on that one.

• 1:43:33Sean Fennessey?

  Is there anything else you'd like to say about these, these films, these worlds, the way that directors are portrayed on screen?

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  I hope that people check out this, I hope that the people who are into this and have listened this far in the discussion will check out Boorman and the Devil. It's great fun. And it may be even more fun if you watch Exorcist II shortly before watching Boorman and the Devil. I mean, look, I think Exorcist II is just, as I said at the beginning, I think it's awful. But I, if you're a film fan, I think you should see it.

• 1:44:08Sean Fennessey?

  It's a worthy curiosity. And I think in all likelihood, when the movie is over, if you watch Exorcist II first, the thing you will ask yourself is what the hell happened here? And the movie explores that. So it's a useful companion.

• 1:44:24Sean Fennessey?

  All right, Tracy, where can we find you? What are you doing?

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

  I'm, you know, third chair of the Big Picture Podcast and occasional third chair of the Blank Check Podcast.

• 1:44:33Sean Fennessey?

  Congrats on the Taxi Driver episode. Greatly enjoyed that.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:44:38Sean Fennessey?

  There was a discussion on the Midnight Boys Podcast, which is another pod we have here at The Ringer, about the third chair situation. Chris Ryan was a guest on that show. Van is one of the co-hosts of that show.

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:44:49Sean Fennessey?

  And there was some discussion about the third chairs teaming up to make a show called Third Chair as an offshoot or as a separate enterprise, perhaps. Your thoughts?

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  When you're losing, you extend your hand and say, why don't we all join up together?

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  I mean, here's the thing, it's so over. Once Van entered the conversation, it was really over, right? I mean, I accused Chris last time we were on here of being W. But now that he and Van are chopping it up with Lioness? I mean, are you kidding? He's not W. Those guys are Lyndon LaRouche and Pat Buchanan.

• 1:45:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thank you, Tracy Lance. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for production support. We'll be back later this week to discuss Robert Pattinson in the film Primetime. We'll see you then.