‘Primetime’ Is a Robert Pattinson Transformation and the Nightmare Media Movie of Our Time, With Lance Oppenheim!

Why don’t you take a seat and sit back, because on today’s show, Sean and Amanda discuss one of their most anticipated films of the year: ‘Primetime,’ starring Robert Pattinson. Before diving in, they briefly share their overall feelings with the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger looking likely to go through, and preview an exciting weekend at the movies. Then, they break down the new film from Lance Oppenheim and sing its praises by identifying it as one of the most exciting movies of the year. Finally, Oppenheim joins Sean to explore the difficulties of transitioning from documentary to narrative film, how he first discovered Chris Hansen as a kid and found him endlessly fascinating, and shares a handful of films that ultimately inspired Pattinson’s performance. (0:00) Intro (1:37) Paramount merger feelings and looking forward to an exciting weekend at the movies (10:00) ‘Primetime’ (31:56) SPOILER WARNING (53:11) Opening weekend cultural, critical, and box office expectations (1:00:33) Amanda’s (very brief) ‘La Bola Negra’ thoughts (1:03:00) Lance Oppenheim joins the show! Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Lance Oppenheim 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.

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture at Conversation show about primetime. Today on the show, we are digging into the new Robert Pattinson starring paranoid satire horror thriller that portrays Chris Hansen, host of To Catch a Predator, as a load star for our modern crisis of conspiratorial narcissism. The movie is a dark twitchy portrait of a media culture gone horribly wrong and also kind of funny. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Lance Oppenheim, the filmmaker making his scripted feature debut with Primetime. Lance is best known for his documentaries. He last appeared on the show in 2024. He's having an amazing year between primetime and his forthcoming Elizabeth Holmes doc with Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything. This conversation is entirely about primetime and his transition to fiction storytelling, and it's a great one. Lance might be the smartest young filmmaker on the planet right now.

• 0:59Sean Fennessey?

  Stick around for it, but first, some movie news 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 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.

• 1:35Speaker 02

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• 2:02Speaker 03

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

• 2:07Speaker 04

  This little light of mine, in the dark, found a hopeful sign.

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• 3:01Speaker 05

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• 3:07Amanda Dobbins?

  This is surprise movie news. This is breaking movie news.

• 3:10Sean Fennessey?

  It's not.

• 3:11Amanda Dobbins?

  We're Sean Finacy.

• 3:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's more movie feelings, okay?

• 3:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:14Sean Fennessey?

  I want to share with you some feelings I'm having.

• 3:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, great. Oh, God. This is why you didn't tell me ahead of time.

• 3:20Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that's not true. That's not true.

• 3:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I've been in a screening that drove here, so I don't know any news that happened, but instead, did you have a breakdown?

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 3:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you have a, like, an epiphany?

• 3:31Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 3:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 3:33Sean Fennessey?

  I think I'm incapable of either of those things at this stage in my life. I'm trying to stay even right now, here in 2026. I've done a pretty good job, I think.

• 3:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Sean Fennessey?

  I have been feeling a bit low about the Paramount merger.

• 3:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 3:46Sean Fennessey?

  And my lowness was lowered when word that Elon Musk was maybe going to be a part of the investment in Paramount, because this is a $110 billion acquisition, and David Ellison and co. need money, and there's going to be a lot of debt. And I was, you know, I'm not happy about the merger. I'm not happy that Warner Brothers is no longer a standalone movie studio and television studio, and I've got a lot of concerns about it. But, you know, I've been trying to block it out and trying to, I knew that this was going to happen, and forge ahead.

• 4:17Amanda Dobbins?

  There's nothing that we can do, and all of the business planners said to us, okay, well, if Paramount doesn't buy Warner Brothers, then another company has to, because it was built to be sold, and what AT&T did, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we, as MBAs, along with our other credentials here, said, okay, sure.

• 4:36Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I thought back on a few times. We were at a Christmas party in December, and we were having a conversation with Matt Bellany, our colleague here on the Ringer Podcast Network, and he was like, it's going to be Paramount. You know, like, just, it's going to be Paramount, just accept it. And even he, over the last, whatever, nine months, has wavered and toggled, and we had the Netflix moment, and a lot of things went back and forth and back and forth, but deep down, I think, everybody, especially the cynics, were like, it's going to be Paramount. And so, you know, we are where we are with that. I'm trying to push those feelings aside.

• 5:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 5:09Sean Fennessey?

  Because this is a movie podcast, right?

• 5:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 5:11Sean Fennessey?

  And we find ourselves on one of the, like, the great kinds of movie weekends, where, like, a bunch of different movies are coming out, and it seems like some of them might actually do well.

• 5:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And you're most excited about Paramount's Heart of the Beast.

• 5:25Sean Fennessey?

  Well, they have a film coming out.

• 5:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you seen Paramount's Heart of the Beast?

• 5:29Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't.

• 5:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Nor have I.

• 5:31Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't. In fact, it's the only movie that I'll list here, I guess one of two movies that I'll list here that I have not yet seen, but having seen a bunch of these movies already, almost all of which we will talk about on Monday's episode.

• 5:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 5:42Sean Fennessey?

  I'm like, this is working. Like, it is, like, we're rebuilding it.

• 5:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it's going to take time, but it's going pretty well. And this has obviously been a very exciting year for those of us who love movies and go into the movies. And so, in addition to primetime, which we'll talk about at length here, we also have, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, I'm kind of excited tomorrow morning to go see Avengers: Endgame Encore, a movie I've always liked, in fact, I've loved.

• 6:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Sean Fennessey?

  And they've added eight minutes to the film.

• 6:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, no.

• 6:10Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm going to watch those eight minutes as well as the original film.

• 6:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, inside the film?

• 6:14Sean Fennessey?

  I believe so.

• 6:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Or appended to the end of it?

• 6:16Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I don't know.

• 6:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 6:18Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen it yet, but that's happening, and I'll be able to experience for the very first time Infinity Vision.

• 6:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 6:24Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a new format that the Marvel and Disney Corporation are introducing to us, which I think is just the Dolby Room.

• 6:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 6:31Sean Fennessey?

  But...

• 6:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Which you actually, you prefer, you know, the IMAX to the Dolby Room.

• 6:35Sean Fennessey?

  I do, but I like the Dolby Room.

• 6:37Amanda Dobbins?

  You do?

• 6:38Sean Fennessey?

  I do.

• 6:39Amanda Dobbins?

  No regular formats for you, so they did find you with Infinity Vision.

• 6:43Sean Fennessey?

  I watched the film this morning in regular format, and I'm not allowed to reveal what it is, but I did. What did you watch this morning? Can you reveal it?

• 6:50Amanda Dobbins?

  La Bule and Egra.

• 6:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. We can talk about that offline. I don't know if I'm embargoed.

• 6:55Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I don't think so. It's already premiered at festivals, but...

• 6:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure, yeah. You saw it, like, four months ago, but I don't know.

• 7:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 7:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you want to spoil it, or do you want to do Oscar, you know, save it for the next Oscars thing?

• 7:06Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I'm intrigued either way.

• 7:10Amanda Dobbins?

  You thought you were surprising me, and now the tables have turned.

• 7:13Sean Fennessey?

  Well, let's come back to La Bule and Egra for a second, because I have to turn that over in my mind while speaking to you. A vamp mind thought? Is that something I can do simultaneously?

• 7:22Amanda Dobbins?

  So Avengers: Endgame, would you like me to read the rest of the movies that are coming out this weekend in my movie voice?

• 7:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure.

• 7:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, starring Mahershala Ali, a recent guest on One More Question.

• 7:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 7:32Amanda Dobbins?

  With someone named Zach Baron.

• 7:33Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 7:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I haven't seen this yet. I'm going, tomorrow I'm doing a double header of Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, and then Heart of the Beast.

• 7:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 7:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Back to back.

• 7:41Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, very masculine afternoon for you.

• 7:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that's a one note I have here.

• 7:44Sean Fennessey?

  Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, which I loved, is one for the dads.

• 7:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that's, I mean, I learned that.

• 7:51Sean Fennessey?

  Just giving you a heads up.

• 7:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I did listen to Zach's entire interview with Mahershala Ali, which was also one for the dads, but you know what? For the parents, it expands.

• 7:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a beautiful thing.

• 8:01Sean Fennessey?

  So that movie is coming out.

• 8:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, Forgotten Island, which I'm going to take knocks to this weekend.

• 8:05Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, you've got a lot of movies coming up. This is the new DreamWorks animated film.

• 8:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I do my job, you know?

• 8:10Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 8:11Amanda Dobbins?

  So, let's see. Resident Evil: Week 2.

• 8:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 8:15Amanda Dobbins?

  The Weight: Week 2. I have also seen The Weight.

• 8:17Sean Fennessey?

  You've seen The Weight.

• 8:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I have seen The Weight.

• 8:19Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, great.

• 8:20Amanda Dobbins?

  There we go.

• 8:21Sean Fennessey?

  This is exciting.

• 8:22Amanda Dobbins?

  And The History of Concrete expands. I have also seen The History of Concrete.

• 8:24Sean Fennessey?

  This is John Wilson's feature documentary debut.

• 8:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, so it is a dudes' rock week at the movie theaters, but that's okay, because sometimes dudes are allowed to rock.

• 8:33Sean Fennessey?

  Well, Forgotten Island is a film about girls.

• 8:35Amanda Dobbins?

  That's wonderful.

• 8:37Sean Fennessey?

  About young girls thinking about what's coming next for them, as they become not a girl, but not yet women.

• 8:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Beautiful.

• 8:45Sean Fennessey?

  As Brittany once eloquently compared.

• 8:47Amanda Dobbins?

  She did.

• 8:48Sean Fennessey?

  And I guess I'm feeling pretty, I'm like, this is cool.

• 8:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Sean Fennessey?

  We've got an autodidact, high-level, you know, indie art house movie with a big movie star. We've got an old-school movie star doing kind of a late-period, you know, like a movie that, like, Robert Mitchum might have made, or Robert Redford might have made in later stages of their career.

• 9:07Amanda Dobbins?

  With a dog.

• 9:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, with a dog. We've got an animated movie, we've got a, this is, as Zach pointed out in his conversation with Mahershala, only the second time he's ever been the proper lead of a movie, which is kind of fascinating, because if you had asked me how many movies has he let out, I'd say, I don't know, five or six, and then I would have tried to name them, and then wouldn't have been able to come up with them.

• 9:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, there's a gap there.

• 9:28Sean Fennessey?

  There's a gap there. Yeah, so there's just a lot of cool stuff happening, so I'm trying to push it down.

• 9:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so you're trying to, you're trying to embrace the positive?

• 9:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, I'm trying to love movies.

• 9:37Amanda Dobbins?

  And block out Elon Musk investing in Paramount. You haven't seen Musk, the documentary, yet.

• 9:43Sean Fennessey?

  I have.

• 9:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I have.

• 9:45Sean Fennessey?

  You have, yeah.

• 9:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Sean Fennessey?

  And did that make you feel better about him?

• 9:48Amanda Dobbins?

  It's like, it's already outdated now.

• 9:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Amanda Dobbins?

  But it does place, I would say the second half of the documentary emphasizes the way in which he has become an unlikely and terrifying media mogul, so this doesn't...

• 10:03Sean Fennessey?

  Tracks onto that.

• 10:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but it doesn't make me feel a lot better. That was the half that I needed to sneak the Negroni into the movie for. No, I'm sorry, it was a Campari Spritz.

• 10:12Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. You snuck a Campari Spritz into your screening of the four-hour Musk documentary.

• 10:17Amanda Dobbins?

  To the intermission, like, post-intermission.

• 10:19Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, there's an intermission?

• 10:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. Also, in a water bottle, remember? Yes, thank you, yeah.

• 10:23Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Oh, like Poland Spring style, where you, like, made a screwdriver?

• 10:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, no, they gave it to me, and then they were like, you can't take it into the movies, so then I drank my water, poured it in the water bottle.

• 10:34Sean Fennessey?

  Pink water?

• 10:35Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I drank all of the water.

• 10:36Sean Fennessey?

  No, but like, in the water bottle, it looked like it was pink water?

• 10:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yes, I had pink water, sure. I added electrolytes, obviously, and then...

• 10:46Amanda Dobbins?

  By the way, the Italians are not asking. The Italians don't care. Everyone who works at the Venice Film Festival is very, very chill this year. They were nice about it, except for the people with machine guns. And then, I mean, Europeans, just weird hats and machine guns.

• 11:00Sean Fennessey?

  They love machine guns.

• 11:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And then, and I took the potato chips in, too.

• 11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 11:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Because I knew I would need it for the last two hours of what's going on with Elon Musk.

• 11:09Sean Fennessey?

  Is coming out October 9th.

• 11:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Sean Fennessey?

  That's the same day as the social reckoning.

• 11:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't know if we're gonna be able to stitch those two together, but they are, they do feel very related.

• 11:18Amanda Dobbins?

  They are stitched together, and they are both, well, we haven't even seen the social reckoning.

• 11:22Sean Fennessey?

  We have not.

• 11:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Just trailers, but they are all somewhat related to the movie that we're about to discuss.

• 11:28Sean Fennessey?

  You're absolutely right about that. And that's an elegant segue.

• 11:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you.

• 11:30Sean Fennessey?

  To primetime. Let's talk about it.

• 11:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Sean Fennessey?

  So, as I said, directed by Lance Oppenheim, Joan Singh is the writer. It's based on a 2007 Esquire piece by Luke Ditchridge called Tonight on Deadline, This Man Will Die. The movie stars Pattinson naturally as Hanson, Merritt Weaver, Skylar Gazondo, Matthew Mayer, Phoebe Bridgers, and many other amusing, would you call them stunt castings?

• 11:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 11:57Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of signpost signals, memory joggers dotted throughout the movie. The story is as follows. It's told through the experience of Hanson, producers and the young actors who participated in the series To Catch a Predator. Primetime tracks the turbulent behind the scenes production of the mid 2000s reality television sensation. Before we get into your thoughts on the film.

• 12:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Sean Fennessey?

  Did you watch To Catch a Predator? I forget.

• 12:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't, because this was right when I graduated from college.

• 12:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 12:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And so, I'm fluent in all of the pop culture that this movie lovingly and also accusingly recreates in equal measure. Shout out Fergie. And the only woman I think.

• 12:38Sean Fennessey?

  I've got her in my notes here.

• 12:39Amanda Dobbins?

  The only woman that I think my husband would leave me for. And, but, but I wasn't like watching TV at that point, you know, because I don't know if I had my cable set up yet. Not in like a I'm too cool for cable sort of way, but in the I'm 22 and broke and in New York sort of way.

• 12:55Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 12:56Amanda Dobbins?

  So, no, I know it as I think most people do, which is as a pop culture phenomenon, and really like as one of the first memes that gets handed down over the internet over the ages.

• 13:09Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. The show, I guess for anyone who is not familiar with the show or has not figured out what it is from watching the trailers of this movie, was a sort of gotcha journalism program in which potential child predators, you know, sexual deviants were lured into particular circumstances and came to homes that were kind of set arranged. And actors who were playing teenagers, grown adult actors who were playing teenagers, invited them into the home and acted as the person that they had been communicating with online. And then, as that scenario would play out, the actor would disappear and the host, Chris Hansen, who had a longtime NBC News journalist, would appear and confront

• 13:55Sean Fennessey?

  these predators and interrogate them on camera. And frequently, most segments would end with those predators racing out of the home.

• 14:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 14:05Sean Fennessey?

  And being arrested.

• 14:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's as deranged as it sounds. And it, I've seen it before. It is, it was, it's a fascinating text.

• 14:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Sean Fennessey?

  And I do think that the movie very smartly locates it as indicative of a lot of where our culture was headed.

• 14:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 14:21Sean Fennessey?

  But it wasn't the, it wasn't the only thing, you know, it wasn't the only indicator of like, a kind of broken society. But the fact that we were sort of like cheering on these scenarios was quite strange.

• 14:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, this is way after Cops, the TV show, and America's Most Wanted, the TV show. And we did grow up with law enforcement as entertainment. And even the type of footage that is recreated in primetime of, like not, it wasn't body cams, but surveillance footage and chase footage, and you know, the OJ chase being another.

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  True.

• 14:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Just like very, like, it was embedded in the pop, embedded in pop culture. And I guess this is an era where things were just kind of like heightened. Cops was never,

• 15:10Amanda Dobbins?

  was it on primetime? I don't imagine it as primetime. I imagined it as sort of like a, like a serial, not a.

• 15:17Sean Fennessey?

  I can't quite remember, but I mean, it was on Fox when I was a kid.

• 15:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Sean Fennessey?

  And it may have aired at 10:00 PM.

• 15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 15:24Sean Fennessey?

  And Fox didn't really have 10:00 PM primetime programming for a stretch. So like, they would program from 8:00 to 10:00.

• 15:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 15:31Sean Fennessey?

  And then whatever was happening at 10:00, maybe they had the news and then Cops after that, which was a little different than, say, NBC, which would program till 11:00. I think that's when it aired. But it was, it was, I mean, it was among the most popular shows of that period.

• 15:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 15:42Sean Fennessey?

  There's an amazing podcast series that came out some years ago about the history of Cops. And there's, in addition to those kinds of law enforcement, reality TV shows that we were weaned on as kids, this was also the time of Punkt, and Jackass, and Borat, and Ali G, and this kind of intersection between kind of antic mayhem and candid camera style gotcha programming colliding with, you know, the real life circumstances that are portrayed in this movie.

• 16:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I'll throw one more thing in. This was also the era and the network of The Apprentice.

• 16:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 16:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Which was again about taking, yeah, local news and really giving it a major platform. And, and now we are living in the consequence of that platform.

• 16:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I think this movie is interested in the ramifications of all of that and is using this movie, as I said, as kind of the portal to some of that. So what'd you think of the movie?

• 16:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I really, really dug it. I saw it in Venice at the premiere and really liked it. And, you know, that was a very buzzy premiere, so there were all the American press, everyone was fighting for a ticket. But it was kind of funny to watch it with an Italian crowd who didn't really have the same reference. And for example, I don't think they know who Jeff Zucker is. And why would you if you're Italian? I hope you're living a blessed and free life, or at least that's not part of your issues. And then.

• 17:10Sean Fennessey?

  This is a very American text.

• 17:11Amanda Dobbins?

  It's incredibly American. So it's funny that it was in Venice. And then I got the chance to re-watch it this week. And there was, there was stuff that I hadn't noticed that's like things that also played differently after a couple of weeks of being back at home, like, and back to school saturated in our crazy weird media ecosystem. So I think it's really smart. I think it is very audacious in both, you know, some of like the actual formal techniques, but also frankly, just putting Robert Pattinson's crazy weird performance at the middle of this. And I just am so taken with the Pattinson of it all. It is so out there.

• 17:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's the first.

• 17:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Sean Fennessey?

  Bullet point I made here.

• 17:55Amanda Dobbins?

  It is wild.

• 17:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, it's a really interesting document to me, because the movie is being sold and marketed.

• 18:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Sean Fennessey?

  Very specifically as Robert Pattinson is Chris Hansen. And about two thirds of the movie is that. It is like a descent into madness media movie, of which there are a great many. When I was talking to Lance, he cited Ace in the Hole as one of his favorite movies. There's a lot of movies that we can talk about at the end of this discussion that this is working in a tradition of. And I would say the movie is not particularly revelatory, but its accuracy and interest in the details of this time, of this kind of culture, and then also creating a setup to let a great star and actor have fun like this.

• 18:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Sean Fennessey?

  Let it rip, so to speak.

• 18:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 18:39Sean Fennessey?

  Is incredibly entertaining and engaging and fascinating and fun, and quite dark and quite sad. And, you know, I saw the movie again last night.

• 18:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Sean Fennessey?

  Because I moderated a Q and A with Lance.

• 18:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And so you saw it with an American crowd.

• 18:51Sean Fennessey?

  I saw it with a big, big crowd at the Director's Village Theater. And there were a lot of laughs in the room.

• 18:57Amanda Dobbins?

  It's funny.

• 18:58Sean Fennessey?

  And there was an interesting thing about, is it okay to laugh at this? And I think it's the, it was almost a meta-commentary on our feelings about the show How to Catch a Predator.

• 19:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:07Sean Fennessey?

  Which is like, were you allowed to laugh at that show? And was that show funny on purpose? Or was it, did it become this kind of arch text that we felt like some removed from, even though there's something deeply sad about whatever's happening on that show at any given time?

• 19:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 19:22Sean Fennessey?

  And so I could feel, you know, there are certain moments where Pattinson is being just like hysterical and really like going for it, going over the top. There are other moments where Skylar Gazondo, for example, has like very funny line readings. There's incident that feels very funny to us, even though it's perverse.

• 19:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. But they're, you know, they're playing it both ways, even within the film. And some characters react with shock. And then there's a cut to control room where everyone is like, huh. And it was like a great reaction shot moment. All of the control shot moments in this, in this movie, both like stand in for the audience and then judge the audience at the same time in a very clever way. And once again, are also just like memes waiting to happen.

• 20:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So few movies like this are about actual, real, living people. But Chris Hansen, of course, is still alive.

• 20:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Sean Fennessey?

  And is, is interacting with this movie in some ways, although apparently he still hasn't seen it. Pattinson is doing something fascinating, because the vocal timbre, the mannerisms, the like crusader demon quality that Hanson had.

• 20:23Amanda Dobbins?

  The physicality.

• 20:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, is so perfectly matched.

• 20:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Sean Fennessey?

  It is, it is, you know, snapshot accurate, but it's also extremely heightened. There's been a lot of talk about Dracula being a big influence on this performance. And, you know, from the opening moments when we see him opening a curtain.

• 20:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Sean Fennessey?

  He has this kind of devilish pose to him that is really fascinating. And it goes for both behind the scenes and in front of the camera, that he never totally seems like a person who knows who he is. He only kind of understands himself as this public persona.

• 20:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. I thought you were just gonna end that sentence as, he never totally seems like a person. And you do watch the character of Chris Hansen going in and out of the performance of, you know, the crusader that he is in front of the camera versus the, the sort of dad, though he doesn't really try in his personal life at all. And another interesting thing about this movie is how everyone in it is a complete failure outside of the confines of the control room or this, this movie set, which is possibly true of many TV crews, but like definitely true of many people that we know.

• 21:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 21:34Amanda Dobbins?

  In, in all types of industries.

• 21:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 21:36Amanda Dobbins?

  And you, you see, there's, there's a remove, there's like a distance to the performance itself from like, basically humanity, which, which, which I think is genius and is obviously just incredibly engaging to watch, because you don't know what he's gonna do. And he does really random stuff and communicates pretty quickly that he is going for it with a capital G. But it is also interesting, kind of in what ultimately the movie wants to say about Chris Hansen and/or these programs and/or.

• 22:14Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, how we understand other people through a screen? And can you? And or is it just constantly like, is everyone a predator in its own way? Which certainly the Chris Hansen character is.

• 22:27Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I rewatched it with my wife this week. And we had a really long and complicated conversation about what the responsibility of the producers of this show actually was and the notions of entrapment and what they're drawing out of people. Which the movie I thought was actually, the second time I watched it, I thought was even more incisive about that question in ways that maybe I wasn't thinking about as I was trying to get my bearings, because the movie is extremely stylish and has a fascinating visual framework where it's clearly, you know, Lance said it's shot on, I think, 25 different formats. And it's clearly gone through this pretty rigorous post-process to give it a kind of like, sort of a psychotronic, hyper colorful, but also grainy look that is, I guess, shot

• 23:10Sean Fennessey?

  on digital, but then in the, in the post-process makes it look more like the TV show at times. It makes it look more like your computer screen and things that you watched in the 2000s, like.

• 23:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Looks, makes it look more like, like a, you know, sleazy nightclub, like, just don't go there environment at moments.

• 23:26Sean Fennessey?

  Something you're not supposed to be seeing.

• 23:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so the movie itself has this very powerful effect. But then when you, when you revisit the work, like, it is textually about the ugliness, really, I think, of this, this production. And the fact that, I think that's such an astute point you made, which is that these people are so good at their jobs. And what does that mean to be so good at your job? And then to only, like, to turn your whole life over to that.

• 23:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Sean Fennessey?

  And what, and not really have the distance to examine what it is that you're contributing to the world and actually to delude yourself into thinking, I'm really making a difference. Because that's something that Hansen is kind of constantly promoting to himself and to everyone who works for him and to this figure of Dan Plum, played by Gisondo, who like comes into this world. And, you know, you can sense because of the, the acuity of his performance that like, this is not right, but he's an out of work actor and he really wants the gig.

• 24:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Sean Fennessey?

  And he loves acting. And so he throws himself wholeheartedly into the work, knowing that what they're doing on the show is, there's something wrong about it.

• 24:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And he has, he has like a friend character who is calling and checking in and is also an aspiring actor.

• 24:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, the hysterical Eric Ray.

• 24:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, so, so funny. I mean, the best line deliveries of, of the year so far.

• 24:46Sean Fennessey?

  But he's also hysterical in Matty's Secret. He plays Matty's husband.

• 24:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, incredible.

• 24:49Sean Fennessey?

  He's such a funny actor.

• 24:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's calling and he's like making jokes about, making jokes about the content, not taking any of it seriously. And then is also just telling the Dan character all the time, like, but like, you're barely in it and it doesn't really count and you're not acting. So the, this Gisondo character is both, like, the conscience stand-in and trying to figure out, what am I doing? And is, am I a good person or a bad person? Is this, are we doing the right thing? Are we helping? Are we hurting? But also doesn't even, like, has his own motivations and then even those aren't really fulfilled.

• 25:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, the nice thing, I think, about this movie that does point out the ugliness around certainly this show and kind of like the types of people that tend to gravitate towards it is that, like, no one really learns their lesson. You know, like, no one actually, they do learn that, like, bad things happen, but it doesn't, it's, it's not moralizing.

• 25:53Sean Fennessey?

  No, there's a devastating Merritt Weaver line at the, near the very end of the movie that, that I think speaks to.

• 25:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Sean Fennessey?

  The lack of conscience of a lot of the people that are working on it.

• 26:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Sean Fennessey?

  A few more things about Pattinson. Because we've been talking about him all year. I mean, he's, he, he and Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland and Zendaya are, they're the story of movies this year, which is like something we'd been suggesting was going to happen on this show for like 10 years and then it happened. And obviously Pattinson and Anne Hathaway have had long careers now, but for all four of those people to be hitting in big movies is interesting. This one, I think, is probably his boldest act. Like, it's the, it's the most, because it's not a supporting part. It's a huge choice. It's the kind of part that if another, if an actor did it in the 90s, you'd hear a lot of annoying stories about what they did on set.

• 26:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 26:40Sean Fennessey?

  And you don't hear about that. He doesn't seem like, he's like, I'm in character and being difficult and obnoxious. It just seems like he makes big choices. He works with filmmakers who want him to make, make big choices. And it's interesting, too, to watch somebody at this stage of his career play like a decaying egotist. You know, that's really what Hansen is, is like somebody who never quite got to, say, the Stone Phillips level. And Stone Phillips is used very amusingly in this movie as the counterpoint, a real serious journalist. And, and, and Chris can't quite get there.

• 27:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Sean Fennessey?

  And so the only thing he can do is kind of lean even deeper into this deeply malevolent kind of work that he's doing, that he also thinks is very important and powerful.

• 27:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Or has convinced himself is very important and powerful.

• 27:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 27:26Amanda Dobbins?

  And the, you know, there is a lot of the character mythologizing or self-mythologizing and, and talking about the importance of the show within the movie, but it's never really quite clear what of that is actually true or real or just in his own psychodrama that's being made real to us.

• 27:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, he, like, it is, it is a person who is having a breakdown in real time. And that is Robert Pattinson's interpretation of this role, but the way that he has the breakdown is just not how any actor would play it.

• 27:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's true, but do you think that the breakdown is like, let's just, because this is not literally Chris Hansen, but in some ways it is. And is it possible that his life is just a continued breakdown? You know, that the, the eccentricity that is on display, there's also on display on the show when you watch it with the halting phrasing and the sort of dramatic line readings and the oddity of his media presence. You know, you, you pointed out some of the great stuff that he does throughout this movie, which feels really odd.

• 28:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Sean Fennessey?

  But I could also see Chris Hansen doing some of these things, you know?

• 28:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, the, the bulletproof vest that he wears is used to great comedic effect as, and I will say, Pat, the only thing where Pattinson doesn't have it spot on with Chris Hansen is that they have, they've cut his hair, they've put him in the quarter zip, which I almost wore, actually, for this episode. He's got the clothes, he, he looks very much like him, but he still is also Robert Pattinson and is like incredibly handsome. And so he's there in a bulletproof, bulletproof vest that like accentuates his waist just so, you know? And then it's just like lying on the floor or like lounging by an indoor pool.

• 29:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 29:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And the, the, the production design on this is very excellent in recreating the, like, those types of early 2000s McMansion, like aspirational houses.

• 29:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 29:22Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and, and also the weird lighting found therein.

• 29:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Lance was really funny, just identifying how weird the set decoration of any To Catch a Predator set was, where you have a bar in the middle of a living room that was floating and disconnected to anything.

• 29:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Also, always a kitchen island.

• 29:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 29:38Amanda Dobbins?

  So there, there needed to be, I guess, some sort of gathering space visually. That's very funny. But yeah, so he lies down in a bulletproof vest a lot, lots of like weird, funny faces and, and, you know, and, and noises. And, and, and bodily movements. The part where he's brushing his teeth and like throws his back out, it's really, he doesn't actually throw his back out, he just is almost like he's taken over by some sort of demon.

• 30:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 30:05Amanda Dobbins?

  There is an otherworldly quality, I guess, to what he is bringing to Chris Hansen.

• 30:09Sean Fennessey?

  No, I feel like every single person in the production of the show, as depicted in the film, is possessed.

• 30:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Sean Fennessey?

  They're possessed by something. And I think it's just desperation for success, which is, I think, the most powerful.

• 30:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Sean Fennessey?

  Big note, which is that this is kind of what everyone decided that they wanted, which is like, I'm doing something important and everyone should see what it is. And he is this.

• 30:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Who could relate to that?

• 30:32Sean Fennessey?

  No, I'm, trust me, we're all guilty, you know, especially those of us who have cameras in front of our faces. One thing that I love, love about the movie is what an amazing snapshot it is of junky mid-aughts culture.

• 30:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:43Sean Fennessey?

  And there are so many different things. You know, you mentioned Fergie. One of the first things we hear in the movie is Ferg, is it London Bridge?

• 30:50Amanda Dobbins?

  It's London Bridge.

• 30:51Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, To Catch a Predator, of course, and even the primetime rating wars that are like depicted as per Jeff Zucker moving.

• 30:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 30:58Sean Fennessey?

  Shows around a schedule board, like that, the quaintness of that now, you know?

• 31:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And ultimately, when they go, when they get the primetime slot, they're going up against Lost.

• 31:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And Lost is referenced frequently. You know, the film, I think, also using some of Oppenheimer's kind of archival strategy is kind of cutting back and forth between moments from Lost or moments from Inside the Actor's Studio, where we see Billy Bob Thornton transforming. There's a lot, you know, the whole movie is about this kind of, the idea of transformation, both for Dan Plum, the actor, and for Hansen himself. AOL Instant Messenger?

• 31:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Sean Fennessey?

  And that, that, that vocal chime that you'd hear when you'd get a new message and like waiting for someone to hit you on, on AIM?

• 31:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Sean Fennessey?

  The, the musical Rent?

• 31:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 31:41Sean Fennessey?

  You know, that's, that's certainly.

• 31:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Please, really, it's, it's used to effect.

• 31:46Sean Fennessey?

  It is. You know, at a certain point in the film, and we're not really spoiling the movie quite yet, because it's not the kind of movie where you're like waiting to find out, act to act, what is going to happen. It's, it is a descent, but it isn't a movie that is, has like plot beats per se, but it does have a series of incidents that further explain the crisis of the characters. But there's fear of a National Enquirer expose.

• 32:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Sean Fennessey?

  Which, once upon a time.

• 32:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 32:15Sean Fennessey?

  Was such a big and loud thing that could happen to a public person.

• 32:20Amanda Dobbins?

  John Edwards.

• 32:21Sean Fennessey?

  And was he among the last people who really fell victim to that thing? Because that, you know, of course, we have TMZ now and we just have like Dumois and we just have getting canceled. We have all these, you know, after effects of the National Enquirer, but the, the idea of Chris Hansen potentially being canceled by the National Enquirer. But then, one of my favorite scenes in the movie is him searching for himself on the National Enquirer website.

• 32:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's not found, but the search results that are found, Paris Hilton, what else?

• 32:49Sean Fennessey?

  I can't remember the other ones, yeah.

• 32:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Paris Hilton featuring prominently.

• 32:52Sean Fennessey?

  All, all memorable.

• 32:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Sean Fennessey?

  Like, again, junky aughts culture stuff. You know, there's, there's a lot more. Phoebe Bridgers, who is one of the stars of this movie, in a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and then explaining to Bokeem Woodbine's sheriff character what Nine Inch Nails is.

• 33:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Sean Fennessey?

  Counting Crows Miami, playing while searching the National Enquirer website, which is like, you know, album cut from the 2002 album Hard Candy.

• 33:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Sean Fennessey?

  Jonathan Lipnicki?

• 33:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't clock it the first time. I didn't clock it until, yeah.

• 33:25Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, let's just put a spoiler warning around the rest of this conversation. We've given you 30 minutes of discussion here. Everything we'll talk about now is deep into spoiler territory. My apologies to Lucas in the booth who hasn't had a chance to see this movie yet. Because the movie is about showing a series of setups on To Catch a Predator, we see a lot of different kinds of faces. And the faces that you see, I would say, are not usually the kinds of faces you would even see in a movie. And that was true of the show, too. Tony Revolori, great actor, who you've seen in Wes Anderson movies, the Spider-Man films. He's the first Predator who's caught. And if you've seen the trailer, you've seen his face as the person. Later in the movie, there's a young man who comes over, who I think his name is Crazy Frog 93.

• 34:06Sean Fennessey?

  And it's Jonathan Lipnicki, who played the little boy in Jerry Maguire. Bees and Dogs and Smell Fear.

• 34:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the human head weighs eight pounds. You know, all the stuff that my daughter is saying to me now, the fun facts that she's learning. Yesterday, she was like, um, soil has nutrients and dirt doesn't.

• 34:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I didn't know that.

• 34:27Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, oh, that's a fucking Jerry Maguire moment. Thank you for sharing that.

• 34:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Knox came home and was like, we got a pet snake at the classroom and it's cold blooded. I was like, wow, okay, there you go.

• 34:39Sean Fennessey?

  I think they're all cold blooded, all snakes.

• 34:41Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I didn't know he knew that that existed.

• 34:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's learning. Anyway, Lipnicki plays one of the Predators. And first of all, it's very charming and amusing and then whips his dick out.

• 34:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yep.

• 34:55Sean Fennessey?

  In like a genuine, like shock laugh. Yes.

• 34:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, which is where the shock. And that's when, and then so the Skylar Gazondo character, who is like, this is his first decoy moment, reacts like pretty humanly, like with fear and shock as, you know, he's, he's being confronted with the whipped cream and the dick. And then everyone, and it cuts to everyone in the booths. And they're all just like still and they're just like, huh. And they don't laugh, but they see the humor.

• 35:28Sean Fennessey?

  They know they have gold, you know, they have something great for their show. And obviously, Dan, Decoy Dan, as he's come to be known, is traumatized by this, you know, this thing. And again, like, there's something very, very funny about using Jonathan Lipnicki in a part like this and asking him to do it and him thinking, this is a great idea. This is a great part for me to take.

• 35:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Sean Fennessey?

  And tells us a lot about kind of how like how we process culture and what position we put young people into in the business and what position we're putting Skylar Gazondo's character into, who is an adult, but is playing a child. The whole thing is this kind of like, um, it's like nine mirrors facing each other at the same time and asking you like, how do you really look?

• 36:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Sean Fennessey?

  And I love all the choices like that about it. I mean, there's other specific ones, like Creed Bratton appears in the film from The Office in one very memorable scene that takes place on an airplane. Even using Bokeem Woodbine in general, I think, who we think of as maybe like a more memorable figure from 2000s movie and TV culture.

• 36:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, Anna Faris for that matter, who plays Chris Hansen's wife.

• 36:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And so the movie just constantly has you thinking about that time. And maybe that's just beneficial for us as people who really came of age at that time. But it's something that I really like about it. And I marvel that Lance, who I think is only 30, I'm like, how do you even know about all this stuff?

• 36:42Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, I did the math. So he would have been 10. So, but then you think about like, what was handed down to you when you were 10? And then also, this is, this is just before iPhones. This is just before, like, we had the internet, we had email, we had instant messenger. So, you know, how these things get handed down and preserved and like what you've seen and what, what you remember and what life it takes on, you know, as it is, is interesting. And, and the movie is a little bit about that, at least as much about how this time period does connect to the sad, miserable world we live in right now.

• 37:21Sean Fennessey?

  No question. It almost feels like the end of the innocence. Like, that's almost the idea of the movie is that once we realized we could start doing this stuff, once we realized we could literally start doing the things that were considered high satire in network, that it was all over, that like officially the dominoes had all fallen and we were sitting in this new era. And it's also, I think, a great movie about making TV. And not just the process by which they go about making the show, but, um, you know, the idea that that's really all there is, that you like to find yourself by it. At a certain point in the movie, Chris Hansen kind of takes Decoy Dan under his wing and they start literally having this father-son-esque bond.

• 38:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they're playing catch.

• 38:03Sean Fennessey?

  They literally have a catch. Interesting to watch Pattinson throw the ball. It seemed like, it seemed like he kind of knew what he was doing.

• 38:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 38:13Sean Fennessey?

  His release was like a little too quick. I know, but he's British. So he didn't grow up playing baseball, more than likely.

• 38:19Amanda Dobbins?

  They play cricket, so I think they throw the ball differently.

• 38:22Sean Fennessey?

  You think Robert Pattinson plays cricket?

• 38:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure that he has interacted with it before.

• 38:27Sean Fennessey?

  That's more of a bounce, right? The ball is bouncing.

• 38:29Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, this is where I'm at over my skis. I like, don't actually know.

• 38:32Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you were coming to his defense with cricket.

• 38:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I did see people playing cricket on the beach this summer, which is very weird.

• 38:39Sean Fennessey?

  How do you play cricket on the beach?

• 38:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. They just had the bats and the things, okay.

• 38:44Sean Fennessey?

  Balls don't bounce on sand.

• 38:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, they had the cricket bats. They were, and they were British. So they were talking about it.

• 38:51Speaker 06

  Maybe they were playing on like the sidewalk, like the closed off area just for walking pedestrians.

• 38:54Amanda Dobbins?

  So you think no British person has ever thrown a ball?

• 38:57Sean Fennessey?

  That's, no, I wouldn't say that. There's a, as far as I know, a very low percentage of British people in Major League Baseball.

• 39:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Did we ever hear from anyone about how you pronounce the lion in Lion?

• 39:06Speaker 06

  We got lots of feedback on Instagram, to which I say, I can't understand when you type this as an Instagram comment.

• 39:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so they didn't, there's no like rhymes with?

• 39:15Speaker 06

  Lots of people apparently said Sean was correct in his pronunciation, which I don't even remember.

• 39:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, I'd like a rhymes with, okay, not Sean's correct.

• 39:23Speaker 06

  I'll get that for next episode.

• 39:25Amanda Dobbins?

  He said it four different ways. So what we're learning is that British people don't listen to this podcast and don't know how to throw balls.

• 39:32Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not saying that specifically. I thought Pattinson acquitted himself pretty well, given the circumstances. And then Skylar Gazondo, throwing the ball back to him, couldn't throw. What we don't know is whether or not Skylar actually knows how to throw a ball and didn't.

• 39:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 39:48Sean Fennessey?

  Or was he just portraying Dan as a kid who didn't grow up playing baseball?

• 39:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I read it as the latter.

• 39:55Sean Fennessey?

  Because you're a very generous person.

• 39:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's because he's a good actor and the rest of the performance is remarkable and so locked in and so specific. And it is also, I mean, he is the emotion of the movie. He is like the only person with any sort of emotional intelligence or, you know.

• 40:13Sean Fennessey?

  And external life from the world of the making of the show. We do see Hanson with his family, but even then he feels like an alien removed from the situation.

• 40:20Amanda Dobbins?

  We see him showing his young children the most recent clip of Dateline NBC in which he catches predators.

• 40:28Sean Fennessey?

  This is me showing Alice you on the show, being like, look at how she's getting this fit off.

• 40:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you do that?

• 40:34Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 40:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Every time the boys look at my phone and see you, they say, Sean, Sean talking. Well, they're happy to see you, so you don't have to turn it into something mean.

• 40:41Sean Fennessey?

  One of the nice things in our life is that my daughter loves you and your boys love me. It's very special and important.

• 40:47Amanda Dobbins?

  It's very nice. So, but Skylar Gazondo is like, he's also playing like counter to Pattinson within the context of the movie. It's, it's like not quite a two-hander, but.

• 41:00Sean Fennessey?

  The movie's power shifts at times. When I got to the end of the movie the second time, I was like, this is kind of Skylar Gazondo's movie.

• 41:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, this is why I walked out and I was like, can you run him in leading?

• 41:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And Pattinson in supporting? And I don't think you can, and I know you don't think you can because you hate category fraud of any time. I think it's just like a make, you know, paint your own picture as, you know, make the world fit to your needs.

• 41:22Sean Fennessey?

  They're, if you're being completely honest, they're probably co-leads, which is something that the, the awards complex doesn't really enjoy. But, you know, Skylar Gazondo gets a real outer life and Hanson only seems to have an inner life. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's Gazondo who's character, maybe it's Dan who has the inner life. And we see him kind of in crisis reckoning with it. Whereas, and, and at times, I mean, one of my very favorite sequences in the movie is in one of the late scenarios that has been set up, once they've moved down to Texas, where Hanson is having kind of a meltdown.

• 41:53Amanda Dobbins?

  That's when he's in the bulletproof vest on the floor.

• 41:54Sean Fennessey?

  Lying on the floor.

• 41:55Amanda Dobbins?

  And Mary Weaver's screaming at him.

• 41:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and, and a Predator arrives at the door and Dan welcomes him in. And mid-conversation, he transforms into Chris Hansen.

• 42:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Unbelievable.

• 42:06Sean Fennessey?

  And this was one of the moments last night that got a very big laugh because it's a kind of like, whoa.

• 42:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's so interesting that it got a, that's, I, that is a really heartbreaking scene to me.

• 42:17Sean Fennessey?

  I think the movie is operating in this

• 42:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Sean Fennessey?

  in that like binary the whole time where it feels really sad and really funny. And it speaks to a little bit of like this issue with some things happening in repertory cinema right now where people are laughing at David Lynch movies at times where like they feel so uncomfortable or there's like an awkwardness in the sadness. And this movie feels like it's kind of channeling a similar energy where you don't almost don't know what to do with yourself.

• 42:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, there is that moment in the scene. So that scene also that basically everyone has been, the word is out on Craigslist and the address has been revealed. And so they think no one's coming. And that's why Chris Hansen is rolling around on the floor whining and being like, it's not about the money. And the mayor we hear says, it is about the money, which is just, is great writing and true. But so someone hasn't gotten the memo. And then it's revealed that this person is disabled and is like, I don't get out much. And so there's like a real sadness to the way they're portraying this person who is, you know, clearly there for upsetting things.

• 43:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and the way that you, and Skylar Gazando's as Dan is responding to all of that and telegraphing all of that in emotion. And kind of, you can see him doing the math in his head, which is again, amazing acting. And then you watch him stay. So all of that, to me, is just like very, very sad and complicated. At the end of that scene, he does like run out of things to say.

• 43:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 43:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And like basically forgets his line.

• 43:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 43:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And I guess that that is, that's like the release valve for the scene and also being played for comedy.

• 43:56Sean Fennessey?

  That isn't what had people laughing. It was him nailing the qual, it was one, his kind of physical transformation where his, he rises and his posture becomes stiff and his vocal tone changes. And he is doing Pattinson doing Hanson. And you're right that there is something really sad about that, that almost like he's put up his defense mechanism. Because as he's processing the sadness and like, the movie drew this out of me while I was watching it, which is the men who are coming over to do these things are disturbed, right? Like there's something very sad and, and dark and painful about those desires and the things that they would do to, to helpless people, helpless children.

• 44:36Sean Fennessey?

  But the movie also keeps suggesting that these men keep being like drawn out of their own privacy. They're being lured into these scenarios and that who knows what anyone would do under, if this scenario did not arise, but actually making an effort to pull them out of their privacy is its own form of destruction that is like very unhealthy and, and dark. And there's no like clean way of understanding the morality of this in any direction. But what they're doing is also not right. And you can feel Dan like at war with himself in that scene.

• 45:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 45:10Sean Fennessey?

  Thinking about that very feeling of like, this guy probably should have just stayed in his house. And if he had just stayed in his house, things would have been a little bit different, at least tonight. And I, I really like a movie that would provoke me to think about what that actually means and not have to have a thunderous opinion about what it actually does mean. You know what I mean?

• 45:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, it starts the conversation and the questioning. And then also because it is not handing you on a platter. Here is what we think about this particular show, which was released in 2006 to whatever. Then you can also extrapolate it beyond this particular situation.

• 45:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 45:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And into what does this say about how TV is made, how we all consume culture, how we relate to, you know, what we see on a screen, what should be exposed, what like, what is justice, et cetera, et cetera.

• 45:58Sean Fennessey?

  The other pathway that it takes you down in the aftermath of that sequence is that Hanson and the crew are in search because of ratings of The Whale, of a big get, of finding someone.

• 46:10Amanda Dobbins?

  That's right.

• 46:10Sean Fennessey?

  Who will represent a real like declaration of power, taking someone down from inside the power structure of the world.

• 46:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's because Lost has polar bears.

• 46:20Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. They're fighting against Lost. And did you watch Lost when it was on television?

• 46:24Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 46:24Sean Fennessey?

  You, you never saw it?

• 46:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I saw parts of it and I think I did see the last episode of my friend Stephanie, tall Stephanie.

• 46:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know Stephanie.

• 46:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Was like, she and her now husband were like very into it. So they got, I got updates from them.

• 46:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 46:38Amanda Dobbins?

  But even then it was sort of like, you know, they were having like a watch along every week and doing, and you know, I don't.

• 46:43Sean Fennessey?

  Watch alongs in my home.

• 46:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And you know, I just don't watch TV in that way.

• 46:47Sean Fennessey?

  Even then, even with a show like that.

• 46:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Even then.

• 46:50Sean Fennessey?

  First three and a half seasons of that show, four seasons of that show.

• 46:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Sean Fennessey?

  Cooking, unbelievable television.

• 46:56Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what everyone says.

• 46:58Sean Fennessey?

  And it's, it's well represented here, but this attempt to draw out The Whale, Matthew Marr plays this character Xavier, who's sort of the chief enticer. He's a person who goes online and looks for people who are trying to engage in these activities. And he's trying to draw out someone that he believes to be, based on his own research online, a person within the government in some way. And, you know, we can talk about what happens because it, it effectively forms the ending of the movie. But I thought, again, this was kind of an insightful way of drawing out a lot of the conspiracy minded pursuits that we have in our culture now. You know, that we have QAnon and we have January 6th events and we have birther conspiracies. And we have all these things over the last 10, 15 years of our national political culture

• 47:42Sean Fennessey?

  that are all about like, they're not really telling you what's going on. And these guys delude themselves in this moment into this exact scenario. Like they are a little micro version of this thing that we live with every day now in such a smart way.

• 47:54Amanda Dobbins?

  This scene that when that character is first introducing the concept of The Whale. And then Chris, the Chris Hansen character goes, so the president? And then they all, there's just like, I mean, that is perfect comedy. And sometimes this movie really is just like, look at these, these bozos.

• 48:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 48:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's, it made me laugh.

• 48:15Sean Fennessey?

  But in fact, it is, I guess, is it a county ju, or it's a district's attorney who's running for county judge. Who's played by Alex Winter, the great Alex Winter, who like Lance is a documentarian as well. And the movie's final act is fascinating. And I, it didn't occur to me until last night or two nights ago that it's, it's Zero Dark Thirty. You know, like the pursuit and the, with the night vision and the weaponry and mounting cameras on guns.

• 48:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Sean Fennessey?

  And this idea of taking someone down being as much spectacle as it is justice. And I thought it was really effective. The first time around, I don't think I quite, I don't know if I didn't get it, but I don't know if I quite locked in on what it was trying to accomplish because it is immediately preceded by this tale of traveling to India and the history of Pattinson's character's bracelet.

• 49:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 49:07Sean Fennessey?

  This idea of the monster, you know, that he's in pursuit of this ancient mythological demon that's kind of haunting the world. And I think I was a little hung up on that instead of the

• 49:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 49:18Sean Fennessey?

  like real sadness at the heart of this movie.

• 49:22Sean Fennessey?

  What did you think about the ending?

• 49:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, there's also that, the scene in between, which is when they team up with the law enforcement because the Alex Winter character is, the DA is, has realized that he's given up too too much information. And so he's deleting all his profiles. And so, you know, it's that very classic,

• 49:45Amanda Dobbins?

  everything's on the line, but they have to like, they gotta break their routine. You know, they can't follow protocol anymore. They gotta get wild. They gotta do, you know, they gotta push the lines. And everyone's in a room together. Pattinson has just like an incredible moment when the Dan Plum character is on the phone setting the final bait. And it's just, I mean, it's all physical acting where he just points, but he does like a full arch down to the crotch area.

• 50:14Sean Fennessey?

  I believe he says cock.

• 50:15Amanda Dobbins?

  And then he says cock. And then they, they go to a wide shot, like a Renaissance painting with Pattinson, like standing there with his arm arched just though. It's really, really very beautiful.

• 50:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I appreciated that editing choice. And so, and it's kind of like everybody crossing into the darkness. Right? And then, and everybody, and even the Dan Plum character, he knows what's happening as he does it. And there's kind of like this sad sigh of like, okay, fine.

• 50:49Sean Fennessey?

  The, the, the Dan character prior to that is having a intimate conversation, but not a sexual conversation with Alex Winter's character, the, the district's attorney. And he's just talking about things that he likes, you know? They're, he's talking about Australia and going to a place that he really enjoys and musicals and.

• 51:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Vegemite.

• 51:09Sean Fennessey?

  Vegemite, right. Do you like Vegemite? And.

• 51:14Sean Fennessey?

  The movie has a complicated relationship with empathy, I would say, that it doesn't actually know who deserves it, if anyone.

• 51:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 51:21Sean Fennessey?

  And there's a, there's a reading of the movie that's like this fucking sad person, sitting in his house ostensibly representative of justice, has been like drawn, his like, his darkest desires have been drawn and made public. And of course, the movie ends dramatically with the decision that he makes because of the guilt and fear and shame and all the things of what he actually hasn't followed through on, leads him to take his life.

• 51:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 51:48Sean Fennessey?

  And then we're kind of confronted with all these people, all these police officers, all these television producers and cameramen, and this host, and this actor, and they're all observing the aftermath of this. And Merritt Weaver's character is like, I think I can make this work.

• 52:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Sean Fennessey?

  And this is like, we can make this work on TV for an episode of our TV show. This guy just died. This guy just killed himself. You know, it's not, this isn't pure docudrama. It's totally a heightened escalation of whatever was transpiring during the production of a show like this. But it also feels totally credible to me.

• 52:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of course, that these people are so wrapped up in their own mania that the Merritt Weaver moment right before that is that she's being courted for another job at ABC because of their success, and she goes back and forth with it. And then, right before this raid, after she's been like, I need cameras on the guns, but before everything goes tragically wrong, she calls the rival network, she calls ABC, and she's like, I decided that I don't want to, and just saying something fun. And that's, and that's the only answer, which is just beautiful and hilarious to me. But that these people are really, really so

• 53:05Amanda Dobbins?

  wrapped up in what they're doing and don't exist outside of it and have convinced themselves, whether it's for some moral crusading on the part of the Chris Hansen character, or whether it's just, this is like, what's success and I'm the best at my job, the Merritt Weaver character.

• 53:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Kind of the dark evil flip side of broadcast news.

• 53:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. Yeah. And then it ends with the same way that it begins with the Chris Hansen character in, in almost like a trance state, just repeating the chat logs over and over again, like rehearsing them, but also like becoming them, not in a sexual way, but just in the like, that this has taken over his entire.

• 53:46Sean Fennessey?

  Well, then he has the most chilling line from the entire movie, which is, what would have happened if I wasn't here?

• 53:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Sean Fennessey?

  Which is something that he would say to, you know, potential predators as a signal of his power, and then obviously represents the impact that he had on somebody taking their own life. And yeah. Really fascinating movie and feels, God, if I was 13, this would have been my favorite movie of all time. I would have been like, this is just absolutely searing. And I've seen a lot of movies like this and I love movies like this. So it's very much in my wheelhouse. I'm really, really interested to see how it goes into the culture because like even talking to Lance, it's similar to what Zach Craig said on the show earlier this week, where he was like, movies are made of movies. And you can see that Lance is making movies out of movies and that he's constantly thinking about things that he likes, feelings that he had while he's watching things and porting them in.

• 54:35Sean Fennessey?

  And some of them are as clear as like, this kind of reminds me of Zero Dark Thirty. And some of them are more oblique than that. But I am interested to see if this is a movie that a lot of young people see and they're like, I've never seen a movie like this before. Like, you know what I mean? Like something so dark and cynical and unforgiving, but also kind of funny and, and, and featuring a big movie star, you know what I mean? Like a movie like this can be quite powerful for a young audience.

• 54:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally. And, and for a young audience who maybe doesn't have the, the back history of the actual show, or, you know, hasn't lived with the idea of Chris Hansen for 20 years, they can kind of go in as a blank slate. I'm curious for people who remember the show or people who have been sold this movie by, hey, it's Robert Pattinson being Chris Hansen. And, you know, more of the types of people embodied by Creed Bratton in this movie. And or like, there's a, there's a robust spinoff culture of this still going.

• 55:33Sean Fennessey?

  No doubt.

• 55:33Amanda Dobbins?

  On YouTube.

• 55:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Hanson's still doing it himself.

• 55:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. So you start to wonder like, what kind of audiences is this going to attract? And do people know what they're going to see, which is exciting.

• 55:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I wonder how much of it will be looked at as like a time capsule piece versus something that feels really resonant today. Because it's, it's so, it's making great efforts to be a time capsule piece.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  I think this is a real Gen Z movie.

• 55:58Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I know you loved it. So what makes you say that?

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Well, Amanda was asking, oh, I'm curious how Lance discovered it. And for me personally, I'm five years younger. I vividly have memories of watching my mom on the living room couch, watching To Catch a Predator. And what would you do, John Canionis, when he arrived? I fucking died and ascended into heaven. But I think it's a real Gen Z movie because, not to spoil the whole conversation you have with Lance, but like, he talks about when he first discovered him, he's kind of like a superhero. Like, when you're young and you're viewing it and you don't kind of have like the ability to understand what's really going on. And as you grow up, five years, 10 years, 15 years later, you have like a totally different relationship and understanding to him as a person, what the show was attempting at large. I think it's really going to resonate with younger audiences.

• 56:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's funny, being in my mid twenties when the show was really on and popping, like, I thought it was quite strange and not, I was not interested in spending any time with it, you know? Like, I was very aware of it because it was so popular. But there was no part of me that was like, we got to check it out this week. Maybe that's my own interests, but I, I thought it was odd. But I could see what you're saying, Jack.

• 57:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Same. But, but also I don't really watch a lot of reality TV now.

• 57:05Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 57:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And this movie, this movie does, and this moment in culture like does anticipate all of the things that we consume now and the, and the, and the different ways that we consume them. I mean, this is the, this is when it all like met together, you know? And now you have all of your network reality shows, you have your YouTube, you have like your social media, you have everything but AOL Instant Messenger.

• 57:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You miss that?

• 57:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm. I mean, I, listen, when I was on it, I was thriving, you know? Like, that was a great medium for me. I just absolutely.

• 57:38Sean Fennessey?

  Because you were so charming and clever?

• 57:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 57:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 57:42Amanda Dobbins?

  But, you know, it's fine. Now we just have text messages. So I'm great. I'm posting. I'm living my life.

• 57:49Sean Fennessey?

  I don't want to explore, aim with you anymore.

• 57:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Away messages? Yes, of course.

• 57:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, of course. Certainly. Me as well. I, it feels like maybe this movie is going to do really well over this weekend, which I find quite fascinating.

• 58:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah. So I think the young crowd, plus the people who are like, hey, Chris Hansen, I know who that is. And then they don't know what they've gotten themselves into. So CinemaScore will be interesting.

• 58:14Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 58:15Amanda Dobbins?

  But I don't care.

• 58:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's a dark and grimy movie.

• 58:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Sean Fennessey?

  And at times it feels like a horror movie.

• 58:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 58:20Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I definitely don't care about CinemaScore. It's, it's, it's, commercial prospects fascinate me because as we've been saying about Pattinson in the last six months or so, like, this is what you're supposed to do when you're him.

• 58:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Sean Fennessey?

  You're, dude, absolutely. Do Dune Part Three. Do the Batman Part Two. Absolutely. I'm on board with that. Good projects for IP, good filmmakers, gonna watch them. Excited, really excited about both of those movies.

• 58:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Do the Odyssey.

• 58:44Sean Fennessey?

  Do the Odyssey. It's Nolan. You gotta do it. Supporting part makes sense. But like also this, also this, like this movie only exists probably because Robert Pattinson wanted to do it. It probably doesn't happen if not for him. And so, or at least not at this scale. And so if he's able to draw people out, the same way he drew people out for the drama, it does like, it cleaves open a little bit of new terrain. And then what you see is like, I was listening to the Mahershala conversation too.

• 59:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:10Sean Fennessey?

  And he's like, uh, you have to do it yourself. I like that part a lot. And Zach referenced talking to Pattinson about this, where he was like, you think you like achieve something and everyone's going to start calling you and be like, here's all the good projects with the good filmmakers.

• 59:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:26Sean Fennessey?

  But in fact, what Pattinson does is he's like very curious, watches a lot of movies, and then seeks out potential collaborators and like connects with people who have ideas for movies.

• 59:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 59:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's like what Paul Newman did, you know, like you have to do that if you want to go to the next level and be great. And also, I think elevate the intellectual capacity of the moviegoing audience.

• 59:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 59:47Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I mean?

• 59:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. That does require taste, curiosity and work. Like there is, there is a lot of work in that as well. And so not everybody can do it, but it's cool that we have someone as talented as Pattinson, who does clearly want to do it.

• 1:00:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I like that a lot.

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• 1:01:22Sean Fennessey?

  You think it's going to make money?

• 1:01:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope so. I mean, I don't think it's, you know, going to make, well, do I think it'll make more money than the Avengers Endgame release?

• 1:01:32Sean Fennessey?

  I would be stunned if it did. It's, the whole box office.

• 1:01:36Amanda Dobbins?

  How much is an infinity vision ticket these days?

• 1:01:39Sean Fennessey?

  $97. No, I'm just.

• 1:01:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, really?

• 1:01:42Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's like in LA, probably 23 bucks, something like that.

• 1:01:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So it's the same that I paid for my sneak preview screening of Verity.

• 1:01:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Did you get one of those?

• 1:01:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I got one of those for Wednesday night. Yasi's going with me because you'll be on a plane.

• 1:01:55Sean Fennessey?

  I'll be seeing it solo in New York at the Lincoln Center AMC.

• 1:01:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Well.

• 1:01:59Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Lincoln Plaza AMC.

• 1:02:00Amanda Dobbins?

  That has its pleasures as well.

• 1:02:01Sean Fennessey?

  I love that place. Yeah. I wish I didn't have to go up nine floors to see a movie there, but otherwise I love that place.

• 1:02:06Amanda Dobbins?

  You have to do that at the Alamo and you never complain.

• 1:02:08Sean Fennessey?

  You're right. But that's in my car. That's a totally different story.

• 1:02:11Amanda Dobbins?

  No, then there are more escalators with no, no windows anywhere and, you know, and bad food. It's fine.

• 1:02:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's fine. Um, awards?

• 1:02:24Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, I stand by what we said on Best Picture rankings, which is that I think it is honestly just a little too out there, parenthesis, complimentary for Best Picture.

• 1:02:38Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:02:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I think Skylar Gazando in Supporting Actor has a real chance. And then I wonder if Pattinson gets supporting for Odyssey and then they're in the category together.

• 1:02:52Sean Fennessey?

  That'd be cute.

• 1:02:53Amanda Dobbins?

  But not in the, you know, they're both leads in this. And I like the.

• 1:02:58Sean Fennessey?

  What's going on in Best Supporting Actor these days?

• 1:03:00Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a great question.

• 1:03:01Sean Fennessey?

  I don't really know what that race looks like. Sam Rockwell, right? He's in there.

• 1:03:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's gotta be an automatic. He's wonderful.

• 1:03:07Sean Fennessey?

  Leguizamo also in the Odyssey, right?

• 1:03:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 1:03:11Sean Fennessey?

  Giamatti.

• 1:03:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Haven't seen it yet.

• 1:03:15Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm, Ed Norton.

• 1:03:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I would really like that to happen.

• 1:03:19Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm. Okay, let's talk about La Bola Negra very quickly. Guitarica de la Fuente.

• 1:03:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Sean Fennessey?

  Who is one of the stars of the film.

• 1:03:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:03:27Sean Fennessey?

  Is a potential contender.

• 1:03:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Which, yeah, which guy?

• 1:03:32Sean Fennessey?

  He's the guy from the first story.

• 1:03:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, the, hold on. I'm just.

• 1:03:42Sean Fennessey?

  Let's not even spoil.

• 1:03:43Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, I'm just Googling the cast. Uh, yeah, that guy. Eyelashes.

• 1:03:51Sean Fennessey?

  If that's what you want to call him.

• 1:03:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, among them, but they are.

• 1:03:53Sean Fennessey?

  He's a very beautiful man.

• 1:03:54Amanda Dobbins?

  They're incredible eyelashes.

• 1:03:56Sean Fennessey?

  A beautiful Spanish actor.

• 1:03:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so he's in it for supporting?

• 1:04:00Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. I think they're all gonna go into supporting in that movie.

• 1:04:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think that what Netflix should do is gather as many of the the men cast in this movie, like with speaking roles without them, just gather as many as you can and just take them from place to place for five months.

• 1:04:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And then people will be like, woo, the La Bola Negra.

• 1:04:20Sean Fennessey?

  The filmmakers are also beautiful.

• 1:04:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I know, I know. That's what it's, so, okay, in front of and behind the screen.

• 1:04:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Amanda Dobbins?

  That's great. Um.

• 1:04:28Sean Fennessey?

  Did you like La Bola Negra?

• 1:04:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I did, very much. Yeah, it's kind of undeniable. I mean, you know, like, I have, there, I can't wait to talk about it with you and I can't wait for other people to see it. And I hope that, I'm glad it's getting a large theatrical run because seeing it big.

• 1:04:41Sean Fennessey?

  Gotta see it on a big screen.

• 1:04:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I sat in the very front row, so it could be as big as possible.

• 1:04:44Sean Fennessey?

  Gotta see it on a big screen.

• 1:04:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but yeah, I was just, there were so many times and I was like, wow, I can't believe that this is happening.

• 1:04:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a.

• 1:04:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  At times, it is a real wow of a movie.

• 1:04:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:56Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay, I'm relieved to hear you say that in some ways. Uh.

• 1:05:02Amanda Dobbins?

  You thought I wasn't gonna like it? No, but you know what?

• 1:05:06Sean Fennessey?

  You'll, you'll zag sometimes.

• 1:05:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Every once in a while, I zag. I mean, again, like, there are some, there are some funny choices that.

• 1:05:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't wait to discuss.

• 1:05:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a perfect movie by any means, but it is, it can be a real wow at times. Um, any, any closing thoughts on Primetime?

• 1:05:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Excited for people to see it. I'm excited to see Lance Oppenheim's other movie, which you did not discuss during this.

• 1:05:27Sean Fennessey?

  No, he briefly mentions You Can See Everything, which is the, the Holmes doc. And we'll just have a whole episode about that movie, which is coming out on October 16th, and that'll be fun. Maybe Lance will come back, you know, you never know.

• 1:05:38Amanda Dobbins?

  That would be great.

• 1:05:38Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay, let's, speaking of, let's go to my conversation now with Lance Oppenheim.

• 1:05:48Sean Fennessey?

  Lance Oppenheim is back. What's up, buddy?

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  Hey, man, this is great.

• 1:05:51Sean Fennessey?

  Congratulations.

• 1:05:52Speaker 06

  An honor, an honor to be here.

• 1:05:54Sean Fennessey?

  You're at the absolute center of movie culture for the next few weeks. How are you feeling?

• 1:05:57Speaker 06

  Uh, crazy.

• 1:05:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 06

  Insane, hoping I don't fuck everything up. But no, this is great. And this is, you know, as, as you know, my favorite podcast, I listen religiously.

• 1:06:08Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you, Lance.

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  So I have like a parasocial relationship with you and Amanda. It's okay. Don't worry about it. I'll keep it private for me.

• 1:06:15Sean Fennessey?

  Please try to, yes. This is about you. This is not about me. Um, I don't remember when you were last on the show, if we talked about whether or not making feature films was always the goal. And if we did, forgive me, but like, I kind of want to hear a little bit about, because you've spent the last six, seven years working on documentary, and now you are pivoting into a realm of documentary that is clearly scripted and an imagined feature world. So was this like on the roadmap along the way?

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  It's a good question. I mean, yes and no. I've, I, I've always liked narrative films. I've always liked documentaries. I've always liked movies that mix the two, like Close Up, Abba's Kierstami, and F for Fake Horse and Walls. Like, I've always been interested in that experience. I've also liked with the documentaries I've made, in some ways, I also, like, at least the ones before Primetime, they sort of feel to me almost like the intention was to make like human drama feel like Hollywood drama and use a lot of the same narrative techniques that exist in fiction films, but apply them to like the world of nonfiction, which is what used to, that used to be more commonplace, like in the 60s, even like the Maisels. Even Frederick Weisman would consider himself like not a documentary filmmaker, but just as a filmmaker.

• 1:07:29Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  Um, but a little bit, I guess, like, this thing came about in such an organic way. And I always was interested in seeing what would happen if I could take the same people I normally work with, like my DP, David Bolan, and my editor, Dan Garber, and my composer, Ari Bluzin, and have like my pod, my band of collaborators and like, you know, make something. But now I guess it's like, this is such a stupid way to think about it. But I, I go both ways. I'm like, I'm like bisexual for documentaries and movies, even though I'm a, I'm a heterosexual married man. But I, I go, yeah, I'm, I'm interested in wherever, wherever the juice is, you know?

• 1:08:04Sean Fennessey?

  Was it hard to convince people to let you make a scripted film? Because I think that even if you're bisexual for both, most, like, executives and people who think about the movie business can't see that they, there's overlap, you know, that there's like a demarcation structurally in, in the business and even in the art form, that you don't see a lot of crossover. And I was thinking about, you know, Barbara Koppel has made one scripted film, and Earl Morris has made one scripted film. Like, there have not been a lot of transitions from great film, great film documentarians. So did you encounter any challenges? Like, what was it like trying to make that shift?

• 1:08:37Speaker 06

  Years before this one, yes. I remember there was another film I was like attempting to get off the ground at one point that I think people, I had just made Some Kind of Heaven, I hadn't made Sperm World or Ren Faire yet. And I remember it was a little bit, there was a lot more pushback and a lot of like, okay, if you're gonna make it this way, you have to work within this framework. And here's the, you know, production designer, the DP. And I was like, no, no, no, no, I gotta make this my own way. So I kind of, I didn't do that. But with this project, I think a large part of it goes back to like, you know, it was Rob, who produced this movie. And, and we connected over, you know, a different project. We were gonna make a documentary together. And then I showed him a cameo video that my wife got me of Chris Hansen congratulating me on this. I'll tell you about it. But congratulating

• 1:09:20Speaker 06

  me on the release of Sperm World, this is like 2024, well before I ever got the screenplay or anything for this. I even didn't know, I didn't ever knew this movie existed. Um, but we bonded and we were talking a lot about other movies, like Ivan's Ecstasy and kind of, like, he's a very adventurous film goer and kind of voracious film watcher. Um, and so anyway, having him on my side was helpful. And in some ways, you know, like, I think 824 was very, I'd been, I'd known a lot of people there. I used to work there. I was an intern for Noah Sacco and Ali Hirding, like, in, I think, 2014. Um, and I would keep in touch with everybody over the years and just be like, look, I'm making documentaries, but it's like Sperm World, it's not just a movie about guys jerking off in a cup. It's

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  like, there's more to it than that. It's, it's, it's, it's about the depths of the, you know, the complexity of the human soul. And people would be like, okay, okay. But then there are people like you would come along and I'd be able to come on your show and talk about the movies or the show, Ren Faire. And, and I think that actually helped a lot, too, is the perception of them not being just kind of narrowly in one zone. And I do think there is like a marketplace now, much more so than like many years ago, you know, people want documentary experiences. Every actor I've ever met is obsessed with documentaries. Most narrative filmmakers I know are obsessed with documentaries. Most, like, narrative filmmakers I love, like, they're, you know, yeah, of course, there's, there's a few people who only made one narrative film, but I think about Herzog, Bennett Miller,

• 1:10:47Speaker 06

  you know, he came, made The Cruise, Sarah Polley, she kind of has made so many great ones. Michael Apted, who made the 7-Up series, you know, he directed James, like, which Bond movies? He did, he did like two or three of them, I think.

• 1:10:58Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, God, Tomorrow Will Never Die?

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, we'll look that up later. Kubrick, um, you know, he, he, he had his hand in some, you know, John Huston. There's, I feel like there's actually a fairly rich world between those things.

• 1:11:13Sean Fennessey?

  You're right, you're right.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  And even like the Safthys and Josh and Benny, they, them, you know, kind of also laying down the groundwork. So.

• 1:11:19Sean Fennessey?

  I really got hooked on them with Lenny Cook. That was the movie of theirs.

• 1:11:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, Lenny Cook's fucking amazing. It's an incredible, incredible film.

• 1:11:25Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's true. I, I think it's, um, I think it's because a lot of the filmmakers that you just noted, maybe, maybe they didn't totally start in feature films, but we associate them most with feature films. We don't associate them with documentaries. But the thing about this movie that is so interesting is that while it is not documentary, and I, I guess, would you even describe it as docudrama is an interesting question because of the way that it is based on a piece of journalism, but it is heightened in the same way that your documentary films are heightened. And it is kind of outsized emotionally and even in the incidents that are portrayed. So how do you think about that in terms of representing the truth versus what's real?

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  Well, I feel like, you know, it's, I'm always interested in like the creative expression of, it's like the, of, of, of reality, right? And that's like nonfiction. I always found the non and nonfiction to be a very reductive term, because all nonfiction, you know, in, in some ways, at least, like, every great documentary, there is a structure, there is, like, most documentarians credit their editors as, as, as writers, because you're, you're shaping, you know, a story out of reality, unless something actually does happen in, in front of you and unfolds. So I, I, I mean, to me, I, I would have, I wanted to make something that felt like, sort of like, almost like the contact high I experienced from watching this television show as a kid, To Catch a Predator, which, to me.

• 1:12:47Speaker 06

  Me is like one of the great experiments in mixing truth and fiction and artifice and reality like, you know, the way Chris Hansen, like it could have just been a very dry investigative news show into this, like the darkest subject matter of all time. But instead he innovated and he hired these adult actors to pretend to be children and he like found these suburban houses that looked like they were out of blue velvet, but then he like, you know, um, I don't know, he, he like started moving the furniture around until everything looked like it was like beamed in from Mars, like the bar floating into the, in the middle of a living room and these props, like the pepperoni pizzas and the sweet tea and the cookies.

• 1:13:29Speaker 06

  All that stuff would collide with like a very high stakes real situation. So as a kid, I was always interested in almost the like, the theatricality of it, the darkness, the darkest expressions of human behavior mixed with this almost like surrealist, um, let the levity that would come from Chris and the way he would perform, you know, when, when he, when he'd be dismantling somebody's life on camera. Um, and I saw the show like, you know, I name checked, uh, you know, after fake and close up, I saw the show before I ever saw any, any great documentary that would, or, you know, kind of hybrid movie that was mixing those things. So I think it really was the first experience I ever had seeing something that mixed those two things and

• 1:14:08Sean Fennessey?

  How old were you when you first saw it?

• 1:14:10Speaker 06

  I think I was like 11, 11 years old and I, I remember discovering it, uh, through South Park because I saw that, that great episodes where everyone keeps, you know, yeah, uh, they keep seeing Chris Hansen and they can't stop committing suicide. That was like the, I remember just being like, who is this guy? And he was portrayed on the show as this man with like almost mystical powers. And when I finally watched the show, I was like, damn, he kind of does have mystical powers. He has this like, um, this, this, almost this way of being that like he's, he's the grand, like grand master of this reality he has created in this constructed manufactured, uh, worlds. And I was always thinking about what that would, what would that do to you if you experienced that on everyday

• 1:14:52Speaker 06

  basis? And like, you know, I love Jacob's ladder and I kept thinking, you know, it'd be so interesting to do like a descent into madness movie that's, you know, more or less defined and driven by like the emotional toll that the darkness would take on somebody. So I liked that part of it and I knew if I made something like this, I'd have to do something that was like stranger than stranger than fiction. I couldn't just do the like, you know, the classic docudrama or biopic. I don't think that was what like a Joan saying who wrote the script and Rob and I were interested in, we wanted to make like a fever dream, um, that felt closer to the experience of watching the show.

• 1:15:29Sean Fennessey?

  Right. The, being 11 and watching the show. Like honestly, what did you make of it at that time? Like, did you feel like he was a crusading figure? Did you feel like he was this kind of like dark vampiric grand master? Like, did you have a sense really of, and e- even of what, what was being actually portrayed? Because, you know, part of the wonder of the movie is the wow, this was actually what the show was. And this was on prime time and millions of people were truly invested in watching it. And part of it is, um, the sense that it probably took a person who had that sense of theatricality and narcissism to pull it off in the first place. So like, when you were a kid, did you think like this is a heroic act that this man is contributing?

• 1:16:12Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, I think so. I remember being really confused. I was like, is this like, I loved like Cribs and Punkts, you know, on MTV. And I was like, is this a prank show? And then, you know, I started watching more of it and I was like, no, I think this is like a news program. And I started learning who Mike Wallace was. And it's like, okay, I guess this is like sort of closer to that. But there was something almost like carnival-esque or like the circus, it felt like that where Chris Hansen was a ring, the ringleader of it. I definitely thought as a kid that like, he felt like such like a badass and almost his like one, one liners and these catchphrases he came up with were like Tony Montana and Scarface. And there was this kind of like, um, yeah, he was doing a

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  really heroic thing, um, in this kind of bigger than life, supersized sort of way. He felt like a superhero to me. So I think it was only until later. I mean, obviously as I, as I got older, I was thinking about like, you know, it was so weird that that was so funny. Like it's such a fucked up show. It's such a, these men are so fucked up. They're so scared. There's disturbed. I mean, there's a lot of really disturbing behavior that's like, you know, that these people that come into his house are trying to do. Um, but I kept thinking about how like the artifice of it was so, um, odd and sometimes like funny to me, just like even the way the decoys would act. Um, did not seem like, you know, like a 30 year old actor attempting to be like a 12 year old is like, that doesn't make

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  any, it doesn't really make any sense. It's almost like a fun house or like a, this sort of hull of mirrors thing going on. But it really wasn't until I got that cameo from my, when my wife got me, you know, in 2024, that was, that was the first time something really crystallized for me where I was like, you know, because in the video he, he congratulated me on sperm world. He said he'd check it out. I don't think he ever did, but that's okay. I won't blame him.

• 1:17:55Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe he will now.

• 1:17:56Speaker 06

  Maybe he will now. Um, then he asked me to have a seat and then he started plugging all of these like different, uh, new, new investigations he was doing. And I, I thought like, man, this is the guy I grew up with, who I thought was this crusader, but now he's almost like this kind of, he's embraced this strange, hyper performative version of himself. It's almost like he had seen all the memes that existed and the cultural mythology that had kind of, you know, grown out from underneath him. And he's attempting to adopt it and bring it into the new investigations he does. And that felt really, um, strange to me. And I started watching more of the cameos because some of them are public. And he called in one, one of them, he called the guy a certified flex

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  offender. Um, and I remember just being like, man, this is so crazy. You could pay him like $35 and like he's gonna, he'll pretend that you're like a child's predator or something. Like there's something that seems so, um, odd about this and, and confusing. Like what would it be like to be Chris Hansen where you have to essentially code switch all the time between being, yeah, like a, you know, someone that is essentially like a vigilante who's doing this, doing the work of, you know, of, of, of getting these really fucked up people off the streets. Or being a guy who's basically like P T Barnum and like a circus entertainer or, you know, someone who, um, has fun and kind of makes jokes about sort of the whole enterprise and is sort of in on the joke of how people see him.

• 1:19:21Sean Fennessey?

  There's a third leg of that discussion though, too, which is explored somewhat in your, in your film, which is sort of the role of television journalism and the way that there's like a certain band of television journalists that you kind of get filed away into not as serious as Stone Phillips. And I really enjoy the Stone Phillips quality of the movie. Um, but that, that sort of like, the suggestion that at least in the world of the movie, that this kind of destroys him in a way, because he's not quite at the mountaintop of credibility or prestige. And so then he's sort of forced to embrace the thing that you're good at, which is I think actually quite a relatable thing. And I'm really interested in this in terms of what Pattinson is doing in his performance and,

• 1:20:02Sean Fennessey?

  and how you guys talked about the character and how you are directing the actors because Hanson seems like a, like a nut bar. I think most people will be like, this is just a crazy person. But there's like a little shred of empathy for him. That's like, he kind of got himself into this position. There's a level of success where he's being told that he's great and doing something important. You have that incredible scene in the film where Creed Bratton is talking to him on the airplane and he's, you can feel Pattinson kind of like reckoning with his own success and his own, like what his responsibility in the world is. And it's this mixture of joy and pride and, and doubt and, and disregard for the self that I, I just thought was really, really interesting.

• 1:20:43Sean Fennessey?

  So like, how do you think about portraying him then? Where it's like, he does seem like kind of a ghoul at times in the movie, but at other times you're like, well, he got himself trapped in this lifestyle and there's no way out based on what he wants for his life.

• 1:20:55Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, we, the thing that we had that, that, you know, I mean, we, we were able to sort of look at the man as he exists today. And not just that, but also all of the media that he has continued to create and have that inform, uh, the portrait. And even, I mean, it's really interesting. Like right now, his reaction to the movie, I don't think he's still seen it. Um, but you know, the 24 attempted to screen it for him. He didn't sign this, uh, like fairly standard NDA. He went on Fox News, which he had, had planned that night, talked to Jesse Waters about it. Jesse Walters, Waters?

• 1:21:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think Waters.

• 1:21:30Speaker 06

  Waters? Okay, there we go.

• 1:21:32Sean Fennessey?

  He can be the subject of your next film.

• 1:21:34Speaker 06

  There's something very interesting to me, even the way that he has sort of responded to the film. At first, before that, I saw videos of him at Crime Con and he was, uh, he was like, you, you know, you may think I'm Robert Pattinson, but I'm actually Chris Hansen. So that he was having fun with it. And then over time, it's, it's basically because it's entered this now, like now it's in this moral register where he's essentially, um, you know, tying this to sort of a larger critique of how Hollywood goes about making things. And that's really interesting to me. And in a lot of ways it rhymes, I think with a lot of the things we were thinking about when we were, you know, writing the movie. And when I was talking with Rob about the movie, when, when, you know, one of the big interviews that we were thinking about too, is when, uh, um, Chris Hansen went on

• 1:22:18Speaker 06

  Conan O'Brien's late night show. And, you know, you could tell that Conan is attempting to sort of like, how do I talk to this guy who's, you know, like doing really serious journalistic work, but like I'm, I'm making a late night show that has jokes in it. And you see Chris sort of respond to it by also making jokes about himself and, you know, the, the guys who, you know, eat the cookie when he talks to them, that sort of thing. Um, I mean, to me, it was always like, I, I never wanted to make something that felt like, like a hit piece or anything like that. I really have a lot of respect for Chris. And I, again, I come into this as like a fan of his show and, and mystified by, by him. I think seeing the cameos and seeing just like the way in which he engages

• 1:22:59Speaker 06

  with his fans, um, I felt like I was actually seeing in those videos, like an actual, like maybe who the real person was, who in one breath could be a crusader, could be a vigilante, could be an entertainer, could be, um, you know, uh, on cameo next to Mark McGrath, uh, you know, from Sugar Ray. Or whatever. And I thought that was really interesting and he seems like not ashamed of it. He seems almost like emboldened by it. And you know, for me, I think when I think about Chris, I also think like, you know, he wasn't just doing To Catch a Predator for his entire career. He had done a many, many other, in many cases, Emmy award winning like segments. You know, he reported on nine 11, he did something about white boy Rick. He, I mean, the list goes on and on, Oklahoma City bomber.

• 1:23:42Speaker 06

  Like he, he was there for, he was basically the guy that you wouldn't want to see on TV when something bad happened because, you know, you'd see him associate. It's like something terrible would have happened and he would have been there.

• 1:23:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but he's like this canary in the coal mine for America's purient interest. You know, that there's this idea that the thing that makes him most famous is his, his theatrical quality in terms of exploring this show, like building this show, which then tells us, you know, and it does feel like that is very much at the forefront of the idea of the movie is like, this kind of shows us a portal to where we're headed over time in terms of what we want from our entertainment. And, you know, it's, it has been talked about quite a bit and, and dramatized in movies before, you know, going back to Facing the Crowd and Network. And there are a lot of movies that are kind of about how there's this always this figure at the center of our media culture, who is like loudly yelling at us about what we really want. And they're usually right.

• 1:24:36Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious, like, how much did you think about those movies in the past? Or like, do they intersect at all with what you're trying to portray about? Cause it's a movie that's set in the past, but also feels very much about now.

• 1:24:46Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, my, my favorite movie of all time is Ace in the Hole, the Billy Wilder movie. And I remember seeing that as a kid, thinking like, ah, man, this is like, I was so inspired. I just wanted to get up out of my seat and just go and try and make something that, you know, attempted to touch that. So it's always in the back of my, my mind, that movie and Kirk Douglas in it.

• 1:25:05Sean Fennessey?

  He's a real analog for Pattinson's performance, too.

• 1:25:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's funny. I remember like trying to show that to Rob throughout the making of it. And he's just like, I don't want to watch that. And I was like, why? And he's just like, cause I have other, I have other things to do. So we would, we would watch other movies. Like I remember with Rob, we watched Sexy Beasts together. I showed it, you know, he's, he, I'm obsessed with Demon Lover, the Olivia Sayers film. We were obsessed with Scarface. Jerry Maguire was another one. A lot of Oliver Stone movies too, just like Natural Born Killers, U-Turn. Michael Bay's movies even, like Pain and Gain, that was another one. You know, we were interested in just like, what are, what are other movies? Body Double.

• 1:25:41Sean Fennessey?

  These are all like narcissistic mania movies, though, you know, they're all like the collapse of the self.

• 1:25:46Speaker 06

  The collapse of the self. I think also like the sent into madness movies like Jacob's Ladder. Like I was really, the thing that I would talk to Rob a lot about was like, how do you essentially, you know, like it's, it's sort of a conceptual performance. You're playing not, you're not playing the real Chris Hansen. I don't know if the real Chris Hansen exists anymore. I think the man has become the meme at this point. So you have to play every version of Chris Hansen that's ever existed. And in a way, it almost has to be like a media collage of not just Chris from To Catch a Predator or Predator Raw, or Hanson versus Predator, or Take Down with Chris Hansen. Where, you know, you name all the investigations, which we all watched together. You have to play also the parodies of Chris Hansen. You have to play the, the, the Chris Hansen that went on, you know, with, with Conan O'Brien during the Emmys.

• 1:26:29Speaker 06

  And, and, or on 30 Rock. Like you have to play the guy that's also sort of aware of where he's going.

• 1:26:35Speaker 06

  And I think he did it. And he also stitched a lot of humanity of himself into the character. Like, I think one of the reasons maybe Rob was so drawn to it, I don't want to psychoanalyze him. He should do that himself. But I, I, I think a lot like, you know, he, he was living at the Oakwood Apartment complex, I think like circa 2007, 2008. He first discovered this show through a meme from a friend from the UK. It was pilot season, he was striking out. And then, you know, he became this like internationally world famous person at Once Twilight. I remember he talked about going to Comic Con and suddenly it was like his life had completely changed overnight. And there was a, there was this kind of a narrative that was starting to exist around him of who he should be and how,

• 1:27:19Speaker 06

  how he should act in, in, in life and fans that have, you know, ideas of him. And the, the, the idea of like a person versus the persona, I think, became very familiar to Rob. So there, maybe a part of him wanting to do this was to like get in communion with that idea. I do remember like the second week of shooting, I, I, I thought like he had done so much. I, I felt like Rob in the character, like I was seeing Rob. And I thought that was really interesting, even though it was like in this very kind of like refracted way. And he's like, how do you think we're doing? And I was like, I think we're doing good. And he's like, what do you think I'm doing? And I'm like, well, you definitely are doing Chris Hansen. But I think you're also doing Jerry Maguire and Dracula. And I'm like, are you aware that you're doing that? And he's like, no, no.

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  I was just like, okay, it's fine. Let's just keep going with it. And I felt like that actually was like perfect for what, what the movie needed to be. And I think ultimately like the movie needed to be something too, that was, you know, I didn't want it to be like glib. I actually did really want it to be like a, like a, almost like an institutional portrait of all these people that were inside the apparatus when the show was becoming very successful. And all of them were dealing with the pressure of turning this like very, like the darkest thing ever into a commercial object. And how did that affect them? Like spiritually, psychologically? What happens when you spend like 24 hours, you know, 24 seven? You spend more time with like child predators than you do with your own family. Like that has to affect you somehow.

• 1:28:48Speaker 06

  And I know Rob, the last thing I'll say, I'm talking way too much, forgive me. He went on, he, we were like during the research phase, he listened to Theo Von's interview with Chris Hansen on his podcast. And Theo Von asked him a question that was like, how do you deal with like the darkness? And Chris Hansen responded, I just bury, bury it all, like all the way down. And he talked about how he didn't have a therapist and he just kind of deal, like he has his own way of processing it. That was a huge thing for us because we heard that and we were like, that's really interesting. That's ultimately like, there's, there's, there's a real mystery around how, how someone could do this. You can't experience the horror that he's experienced and not be a changed person. So that was like always the kind of haunting or hovering over the movie.

• 1:29:33Speaker 06

  And we knew the film had a sort of touch on that, almost like the way Rob plays him has to almost be like a guy that's possesses some sort of like post-traumatic stress. And it's like, it affects his physicality and where, where he goes and how he does stuff.

• 1:29:49Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious for you, the meaningful, like structural, literal differences between making something like Ren Faire and making something like this. Like, does it feel when you're on set completely different because the scale of the production? Or because you're directing actors as opposed to talking to real people from whom you're trying to get interesting conversation material? Like how, literally, how did it feel different for you?

• 1:30:12Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, the one, when you're making a documentary, it's almost like the screenplay is, is life, right? So it's like, I'm, I'm seeing things. I get to know people really well. You spend a lot of time, you have a lot more time, like hundreds of days. Primetime was like a 30 day shoot. Ren Faire was like 130 days, you know? With this, with, with, with primetime, the, the real challenge was like, how do you keep this alive? And how do you, how do I not just show up and just shoot like lines off a page? Like, you know, the script was, was really great and always had the, the tone was there. And we really worked hard to sculpt that together, Joan and I. But, you know, he, he did so much great work with it. To me, it was like, let's, how do, how do I keep this fresh and alive and exciting?

• 1:30:53Speaker 06

  And so part of it ended up coming, you know, just like, maybe, I, I was definitely prepared, but I had a, my son was born five days before the shoot started. My cinematographer, David Boland, who shot Sperm World, some kind of heaven. I've been working with him since I was 17. You know, he shot listed the movie more or less in isolation while I was, while I was dealing, you know, with, with my newborn son. I got to set and I was like, I don't want to shot list anything. Let's just throw that away. I want the actors to come in. I don't want to do any rehearsals. I, I don't want to know how Rob's going to play this. I don't know. I don't want to know how Skylar or Merritt or Phoebe or, I don't, I want to just get there. And I want, I want to block it with as minimal sort of like performance as possible. I just want to know where they're going to go.

• 1:31:36Speaker 06

  And then I really want to just make space for us to, to really get in, in concert with them, with that, with the performers. And that was a really, I think that was the way we sort of reclaimed the experience. And, you know, there was like so many different moments that I just could not predict what, what would happen. A Rob going and doing the mouthwash and spitting it out in the sink like that. Like, I remember just thinking like, I just needed to create space for everybody. And I want to treat everyone as much as they allow me to, as, as almost like a documentary subject. I'll talk with them exhaustively before we get there about what I think it is. And then I want them to show me things. And then also just shooting it like with, you know, we shot with like 20 camera format.

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  So that drove the production nuts. I feel like everyone was looking at me like I was Tommy Wiseau or something. But it was really great and it did, it did keep things super fresh. And I think for the performers, just like it was really, it, it just created so much like chaos constantly. And that's what I would tell the crew and the, the production I had. I'd be like, we're making a movie about people, about a production that is like spiraling out of control. We can't fake that. We have to sort of like live it a little bit too.

• 1:32:46Sean Fennessey?

  That's hurt soggy in right there. That's really fascinating that you have the confidence to go in and not only tear apart some plan, but like kind of go in blind and say, let's see what happens. I think that's really fascinating. The other thing that is interesting, and we, we talked about this a little bit when I saw you in Colorado. We've talked so much about Chris Hansen, but the movie does sort of shift in terms of who it's about and whose perspective is more centered as the movie goes on. And Skylar's character becomes almost like the perspectival character by the end of the movie. And I'm kind of curious, like, did it always start out that way? How did it evolve as you were making the movie too?

• 1:33:25Speaker 06

  Well, I always loved that that character in the Esquire article that this is like very loosely, you know, based from. The article was about, it was largely centered in the perspective of like a 20 year old actor who had no idea, was just wanting to be in things, couldn't land any parts, showed up on the set of Catch Predator and very quickly realized what they had gotten themselves into and attempted to kind of keep up with it, just because there could have been an opportunity. But then by the end was just like devastated by the whole experience and hollowed, you know, like spiritually corrupted a little bit. So I always loved that perspective. And I felt like, you know, this is a movie

• 1:34:05Speaker 06

  about like essentially turning like darkness into, into something fun or entertainment. That's what they were doing.

• 1:34:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 06

  And I was like, I need to find the humanity here. I need to find someone that could essentially save the film from just being like, I don't know, just, just like totally ink black. It needed to have something, some, some sort of light to it. You know, so I would talk with a Joan about like, we love, you know, Wall Street, the Gordon Gekko Bud Fox relationship. Bud Fox is really the main character of, of Wall Street. And I was sort of like, that's kind of a fun Trojan horse for this movie where, you know, it is like a three-hander between Rob, you know, Chris Hansen, Merritt Weaver's character, Andy, and Dan, Skylar's character, Decoy Dan. But I liked that, that like, that, that relationship between, you

• 1:34:56Speaker 06

  know, Chris and Dan. There were so many parts to it that felt like gravitational. I also loved the stunt man. And I felt like that was another kind of interesting, like, you know, I don't know. Yeah, this, this sort of dynamic between these two people that have disparate ambitions. And Skylar was just like, I, I remember when I first read the scripts, I like, I, I just, you know, it changed, but I just, I saw Skylar, it was like the afterimage of all Skylar Gazando's performances were in my head when I read it. And I felt like he was, I just was like, I need to make this for him. I like, he is born for this part. And he's been in movies and TV shows since he was like six years old. I knew that he was going to have a way into this that was going to be like documentary

• 1:35:41Speaker 06

  like in a way where, you know, he could, he could sort of bring his own experiences to the, to the movie. And he did, like, he didn't just do it on the page or just, you know, as an actor. He, like, the ending of the movie, the last scene of the movie was born from a conversation I had with him, like, almost a year into, you know, deep into production, post-production. We were editing it. The movie ended a different way prior to that. And I was like, I want this to have, I don't want this to be pure nihilistic. I want it to be like positively nihilistic, if that makes sense.

• 1:36:11Sean Fennessey?

  No, that's exactly where you hit. That's exactly how it feels. That's so interesting to hear you say that. Then you have these other like, small but very notable choices. For example, you know, you mentioned Phoebe Bridgers is in the film, operating in a similar fashion to Decoy Dan. Jonathan Lembicki shows up.

• 1:36:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Sean Fennessey?

  Jeff Zucker shows up. Like, these kind of like signals to those of us who might notice, who might recognize. You mentioned Jerry Maguire. That's, I maybe didn't put together that that's part of the click there. But can you talk about like how to balance making that a good artistic choice versus just like jingling keys in front of somebody's face and how you consider it?

• 1:36:45Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I look for, I think partially, I was like, this is a movie about, it's like, it's 20 years ago, 2006. It's like, things look different than, that was, you know, I'm a, I'm a zillennial, if that's what, is that a real term? I was, I'm 96.

• 1:37:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01Speaker 06

  Like, my favorite movie outside of Ace in the Hole is Vanilla Sky.

• 1:37:04Sean Fennessey?

  I know. I love that about you.

• 1:37:05Speaker 06

  I'm attracted to this period. These are my favorite movies.

• 1:37:08Sean Fennessey?

  I gotta tell you, I was here with Zach Craig yesterday, and we were talking about you. And he was like, that guy's favorite movie is Vanilla Sky. How crazy is that?

• 1:37:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, you couldn't believe it.

• 1:37:16Sean Fennessey?

  First met, that was one of the first things you said to me. You're like, one of my favorite movies is Vanilla Sky. I also love Vanilla Sky.

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  It was fucking, thank God, man. It's like, it's the, yeah, it's like, I know if I can get along with somebody if they like, if they love that movie. It's David, my DP and my, it's, it's our, it's both of our favorite films.

• 1:37:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's really great. It's really, I don't know if it's misunderstood so much as like, there's a collective of us that like, we get it.

• 1:37:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. I know. It's like, at this point, it's been in culture for long enough. But I do think it's like, I actually, weirdly, even parts of that movie are maybe spiritually in this too, of just like a film that kind of straddles a lot of different genres and it refuses to kind of exist in one of them. But no, I mean, you know, I think about that time period, there's so many amazing actors that have been not left behind, like they've been doing great work for a while. But like Jonathan is somebody who, you know, was a child actor and also, you know, when I met him, he had sort of been like, I don't know if I want to keep acting. He was doing an acting school. He was interested in producing. But he's like, I have fallen out of love, fallen out of love with, with, with just doing it. And I haven't really gotten any interesting parts that have come my way. Alex Winter,

• 1:38:19Speaker 06

  an amazing actor, also a great documentary filmmaker too. And I was just like, you know, Creed Bratton, I've always, I remember watching The Office, thinking like, how has this guy not been, I remember like hearing Nicholas Winding Ref and talk about Albert Brooks when he saw him in Lost in America and thinking about how he'd be a great villain for Drive. And I was like, how has no one made Creed into like, you know, he's sort of a sinister presence?

• 1:38:41Sean Fennessey?

  Totally.

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  So I kept thinking about all these people that I've always just kind of like bookmarked. Jessica Hect, who's so amazing in Sideways, like broke my heart, billion pieces, also has been, was in Friends. And I hate to admit it, but I was more of a Friends guy than Seinfeld growing up.

• 1:38:54Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. Wow. You are a zillennial. Yeah.

• 1:38:56Speaker 06

  And, you know, just like, so many little pieces like that. I mean, ultimately, it was like, I didn't want to just do stunt cast after stunt cast. I wanted to like meet people and just see if I, you know, could get along with them and access something.

• 1:39:07Sean Fennessey?

  But it makes us feel something as the viewer, you know? Like, there's an association and you don't totally know what that association is. Some of it is more overt than others, but Jessica Hect is a great example of like, this does remind me of broadcast television from the 1990s. You know, like, that's a very powerful tool to use that is somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious.

• 1:39:26Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And like, you know, I love just being able to like, every person just had, they would bring like baggage of every character they'd played before and just the texture of like knowing what that time was like. And Bokeem Woodburn, another person who just was like, so incredible. And I, you know, I think Matthew Mayer, another person who was just, like, every person that came in, I knew, I don't know if Rob knew it as much. I think when he, I remember when he first saw the, like, the first cut of the movie, he was like, wow, I didn't realize this is an ensemble movie. But to me, I was always making an ensemble movie. And I always knew that like, the only way for this to work was to basically have, like, there's a line in Chris Hansen's book, protecting your children from online enemies already in your home. But I've, I've been so deep into this shit for so long. I just, I know, I know.

• 1:40:11Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a very elegant title.

• 1:40:12Speaker 06

  I've always loved the title of it. But he has this, this description about like the production being like a clown car with all these different personalities. And he just said, he said that if there was a television crew following them, it would feel like Real Worlds. Or I think he, it was, he, yeah, it was Real World.

• 1:40:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  So I took that to heart. And I was like, I really need to make sure that almost every person in this movie is almost cut from like a different reality, you know, and, and has like their own relationship to reality. And I think could sort of enhance this sort of, this, this like, whatever, whatever we ended up doing, like the network, you know, version of like a circus nightmare. Like, that was, I felt like what the atmosphere was like that they had created. But everyone brought something so special to it. And I think that was, I really want, like, I sat down with everybody. I had my time with each person. I got to know them and I got to ask them questions about their lives and pull that into the, into the character, into the script. Merritt Weaver was like very gracious with

• 1:41:12Speaker 06

  that. And we talked a lot about that, just like, what's it like to be somebody, her character, who is just on the road all the time and gives all of herself to this thing? And like, what does she have when she comes home? She only has the show. So, you know, there was a lot of like working our way around everything and trying to push more of people's own lives into the characters too.

• 1:41:34Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you have another documentary coming out soon, but I'm curious, like, is the intention to focus mostly on feature films? Like, do you think you'll toggle back and forth? Like, what, how are you thinking about what you're going to do after this?

• 1:41:48Speaker 06

  Man, I just wanna like get through this and survive. I, I, I, um, and just make sure these films have their own, you know, respective lives that they deserve. But I, I think, yeah, definitely. I, I, I wanna keep my just like eyes and ears and, you know, spirit, spirit open to whichever the wind, way the, the wind blows. Like this film came about in such a random way. You Can See Everything with Nathan came about in such a random way. I got to work with like my two heroes, Rob, who I've been obsessed with forever, and Nathan, who like, you know, I've seen every episode like multiple times of Nathan for you. And I got to make both of these projects with the same cinematographer, David Bolin, the same composer, Ari Belusian, uh, same producers, Abby Rowe, my wife,

• 1:42:32Speaker 06

  and, and Christian Vasquez, who's been working with me since film school.

• 1:42:36Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:37Speaker 06

  Um, I got, I had such an amazing experience, like doing it with the same bands, that I kind of am like, whatever we all collectively do together, I know it will be good, hopefully. But I definitely wanna keep doing, like, I, I think personally, I find documentaries more, um, maybe spiritually like enriching, because, um, I just like being in different worlds. I like being in places that I am like a complete outsider. And I, and in a way, it almost feels like I'm like watching a movie in real time, because I just have to be so present. I can't think about myself or my problems or anything else.

• 1:43:18Speaker 06

  I just have to be so like fucking inside something else.

• 1:43:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Speaker 06

  And I met my wife making Ren Faire, and you know, we have a child now from it. So it's like, I, I, there's, the, the experiences of making documentaries so formative. With Nathan, I feel like he became like my best friend. I don't know if he would say so of me, I hope he would. But I, I definitely feel like he is, uh, for me. And that's a great experience. Uh, uh, you know, narrative films, I think because this one ended up actually taking a life that was similar in some ways to a documentary, like we shot so much material for this movie. The script was longer, the first cut was like almost three hours, then the second cut was 80 minutes. I freaked a lot of people out, uh, doing that. But I, but the experience of editing it with Daniel Garber, who's like a brilliant, brilliant editor, he, you know,

• 1:44:08Speaker 06

  because we come from making documentaries, it felt like a very documentary-like edit. And the edit, the 824 graciously, because I was making both films at the same time, they, they let me basically have like a long post-production on this, on primetime. And we, we edited for almost like a year and six months, which is just very long compared to how a normal independent, not independent, but like, you know, the size of our movie. Usually it's like, I don't know, 12 weeks, if you're lucky. So, um, I don't know. I, I, I loved that part of it. I loved being able to sort of like find my way and keep the voice alive and keep like the collaborations going with all these people, and then invite new people in the mix. Um, like my great production designer, Alex DeGrolando, and costume designer, Alex Bovard.

• 1:44:51Speaker 06

  I had so many like amazing, amazing craftspeople work on this thing with, so, I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:44:57Sean Fennessey?

  What, will you, will, will there be anything specific that you'll bring from making a feature to doing a doc now? Cause I already felt like, and we talked about this a couple of years ago, like,

• 1:45:07Sean Fennessey?

  I could never tell how much you like had your thumb on the scale when I'm watching the docs, you know? And you know what I mean by that? Like, I just don't know how much, and I didn't think you were manipulating the truth, but manipulating the scenario to kind of discomfort us around what it is that we're watching. And it felt like the movie, that this film is like a literalization of that feeling. Like, it's almost like you took that idea of what you'd been exploring in docs and pursued an avenue in a fictionalized story to think through that. So then, either in a physical production sense or intellectually, like what are you bringing back to documentary after this?

• 1:45:40Speaker 06

  That's a good question.

• 1:45:44Speaker 06

  You know, I, I guess like, because I was making The You Can See Everything at the same time, and that movie was so different than like any other film I've made before. And like Nathan really challenged me to work in a different way, and I challenged him to work in a different way too. I felt like, like we blew everything up in a way. Like I didn't, usually with the documentaries I'd made prior to that one, and even on primetime, like, you know, I used, I used to just shoot one camera and just like David or Nate Hertzellers, who shot Ren Faire, we would just cover things in such a kind of crazy way, where it was like just pure instincts guiding everything. That couldn't, that didn't work for You Can See Everything. That was like, we, we needed to make that much more, um, observational

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  and, and really like as close to just true verite as, as much as possible. So, you know, I think on, on like a doc, again, if I, if I, you know, when, when I go back and do it, I, I, I like, I feel like I, I know a little bit more now about, you know, how to, I guess, like, hopefully create something that feels like emotional IMAX or something. It's like before, I was always trying to do that.

• 1:46:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 06

  I wanted to like make, on some kind of heaven, I was so inspired by like Douglas Sirk's movies and like I was in Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life. I, I loved the like, the Hollywood movies at that time. And I was like, oh, what if you just did that in that world?

• 1:47:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, a Technicolor documentary.

• 1:47:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And now I'm like, I think I could probably execute on some of those ideas a little better and, um, and, and bring people in that also aren't, you know, cut like in documentaries, uh, in, into the fold on that too. But I don't know, I'm, I'm also like, part of the thing that's just so fun about documentaries, it's, it's almost like athletic a little bit. You just have, it's like, you're just operating on pure instinct as long as your body can sort of take, like you, you know. When I work with this, like the small crew that I normally work with, we'll shoot for like 14, 16 hours a day, and then we'll wake up like at sunrise to catch the sunrise the next morning. Like we, we're really chasing something. We're in pursuit of like, you know, whatever the movie gods can give us that day.

• 1:47:51Speaker 06

  And on fiction, it was like harder to access, but when, when we did access it within the circus of, you know, like a crew of 150 people or whatever, it felt really satisfying. Like that whole rainstorm sequence in primetime was so complicated. And David was gonna kill me, my DP, cause he's like, this is not the place we could just like fucking find things. Like, there's like, there's like a water tower that's wasting so much water. It's like, there's like three of them. We have like, like a crazy light, lightning rig, like we, we have to sort of plan things out. And, um, we sort of did, but we also didn't. And, and I remember just like, there was a few moments that, that felt so satisfying, in like a, in, in, in a really ecstatic way.

• 1:48:35Speaker 06

  Like anytime something really beautiful happens, David and I always, he'll turn to me and he'll just be like, he'll like raise his eyebrows. And I'll be like, yes. So it's like, it's like the, that's what we've been chasing, you know? It's like a drug.

• 1:48:49Sean Fennessey?

  Lance, uh, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen?

• 1:48:56Speaker 06

  I, um, I just watched John Travolta's Michael, not the Michael Jackson movie, but John Travolta's Michael.

• 1:49:02Sean Fennessey?

  The Nora Ephron film?

• 1:49:03Speaker 06

  The Nora Ephron film.

• 1:49:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:49:05Speaker 06

  And then I double whammied it with Phenomenon, cause I, I forgot that both of these movies came out the same year.

• 1:49:11Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, I do wanna hear your thoughts on those movies, but this does lead to a follow-up question within that, which is, you know, you're, you're a bit younger than I am. You're more than 10 years younger than I am. And yet you have a unique interest and access to a lot of the culture that I grew up watching. So why do you have so much interest and knowledge about 90s and early aughts popular culture, given your age?

• 1:49:36Speaker 06

  Well, I'm, I, I feel very like, um, I, like, everything that was pre 9/11. I obviously, I remember 9/11, I remember where I was. My, my, my parents took me out of school, but it felt like such a, like a nightmare, like a, like a never-ending nightmare for, for weeks. And just like this hangover that was on my parents and my teachers at school. And it's always interesting to access things that happened before that. Like there was more optimism maybe in the air. And it's like the, the era where like the internet was also a friendlier place. You could go to like a cyber cafe, or go to like one of the, you'd be, you know, like, Elan, you know, the fact that that existed. So, you know, there's something that maybe is like, I, I, I grew up with some of that. Like I grew up with Dial-Up.

• 1:50:20Speaker 06

  But I, but it's, I also grew up listening to like Stronger by Kanye West on my, on my iPod Touch. So like, that, that in some ways is closer to me than like, you know, I, than Phenomenon, than, or than Michael, which I think came out in 1996.

• 1:50:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 06

  And I also just liked the movie stars of that time period. And I like the way the movies looked. And it's like, things just felt a little richer. Michael is such a weird, it's one of the weirdest movies I think I've ever seen in my life. If anyone is out there, you should, I'm looking at the camera, go watch that Michael movie. I feel like it's, I don't know what I've, I don't know what to make of it. I'm like,

• 1:50:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's so strange that he made both of those movies in succession too.

• 1:50:56Speaker 06

  He's playing Angel in both movies.

• 1:50:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:58Speaker 06

  And both movies made over like 120 million dollars.

• 1:51:01Sean Fennessey?

  It was in the aftermath of the Pulp Fiction return.

• 1:51:03Speaker 06

  I was trying to figure out like, yeah, no, it's weird that he, he like cashed in the goodwill he got from Pulp Fiction to play two different types of angels. I mean, Phenomenon reminded me of like Limitless. Michael was like, I saw that movie Bright, that David Ayer movie, like a long, from a while ago.

• 1:51:18Sean Fennessey?

  Will Smith?

• 1:51:18Speaker 06

  And I was trying to figure out, like, does Michael exist inside a universe similar to that? Where like angels are commonplace? Because if you remember, William Hurt's character is like, I, I need to go write about an angel. And his boss is like, yes. And I'm like, is his boss saying yes because he thinks it's like stupid? Or does he think yes because angels do? And that, that question was in the movie for me the entire time, and I could not figure out what, well, I, I don't think I have emerged. I haven't talked to anyone who's seen it. So I'm like, you know, except for my wife.

• 1:51:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yet another filmmaker who appears on this show, who maybe should just be a movie podcaster, cause that's the kind of thing, time, thing we spend talking about a lot on the show.

• 1:51:53Speaker 06

  Well, what is it? Do you remember? Do you have an answer?

• 1:51:55Sean Fennessey?

  Whether or not that the world is populated by angels and we know of them, but they're rare, they're like a bald eagles or something?

• 1:52:00Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:52:00Sean Fennessey?

  Um, yeah, I'll buy that. I'll buy that that's, I literally have not seen Michael since 1996. And I remember thinking it was fine. But you know what? I'm glad you liked it.

• 1:52:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you. I'm glad I did too. It's like, it's taking up so much mental real estate. I guess it's better that than other things.

• 1:52:14Sean Fennessey?

  Lance, congrats, man. You're at the center of movie culture. This is awesome.

• 1:52:17Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:17Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks for doing the show, dude.

• 1:52:18Speaker 06

  Thanks, man.

• 1:52:24Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Lance, thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for his production support. As I indicated, next week, a grab bag of films. Avengers: Endgame Encore, I'm going. Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Heart of the Beast, Forgotten Island, The Weight, The History of Concrete.

• 1:52:45Sean Fennessey?

  The thing I wanna talk with you about is, are old movies in movie theaters potentially more powerful than non-event movies? And if that tells us anything about what's going on?

• 1:52:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, interesting. So like, non-rep division?

• 1:53:02Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 1:53:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Sean Fennessey?

  What AMC and Regal and Cinemark and big chains are programming a lot of old movies now. Aniversaries, one-off weekend events. And these movies are as much a part of the movie-going experience as all these new releases.

• 1:53:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm, I'm thinking through that, so I'll ask you to do the same on Monday.

• 1:53:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:53:25Sean Fennessey?

  We'll see you then.