The Final Girl Film Canon and ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ With Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbinder, and Jane Schoenbrun!

Sean is joined by “mean pod guy” Adam Nayman to cover Jane Schoenbrun’s new sexy slasher flick ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. They celebrate what makes the movie so exciting and singular, and make the case for why it cements Schoenbrun as a crucially important and definitional millennial filmmaker. Then, they discuss what makes a great “final girl” and build the “final girl” film canon. Finally, Sean has a very special conversation with Schoenbrun, Einbinder, and Anderson where they dive deep into their film, shed light on the actual process behind making the movie, and explain why the project felt so special for each of them. (0:00) Intro (0:51) Adam Nayman joins the show! (1:38) ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ (44:07) The Final Girl Film Canon (1:04:11) Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbinder, and Jane Schoenbrun join the show! Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Jane Schoenbrun, Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, and Adam Nayman Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh It's on Prime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessy and this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about sex, death, and everything in between. On today's episode, we will be joined by Adam Nayman to discuss Jane Schoenbrun's new, blood-drenched, meta-slasher, sexual awakening, coming-of-age, satire, romance, drama film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Then Jane returns to the show with their stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson for an in-depth discussion of Camp Miasma, how it was made, their histories with horror, and a lot more. Needless to say, you will want to stick around for that discussion. But first, let's talk about that movie with Adam.

• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 02

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• 1:27Speaker 03

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• 2:20Speaker 04

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• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, me and pod guy, it's just me and you today. How are you feeling?

• 2:51Speaker 05

  I'm good. Welcome. Greetings from Toronto, where the Toronto Blue Jays are a game and a half back from the wild card as of this morning. I'm sure you're relentlessly paying attention to the Blue Jays playoff fortunes.

• 3:02Sean Fennessey?

  And you know, AL East, a lot of exciting stuff going on this year. The Red Sox tearing the cover off the ball, the Yankees falling back, as they always do in the late summer. You must be feeling great.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  Yesterday was the first day I heard someone talk about the Blue Jays in the wild. I was at a restaurant, having dinner before the screening of a house at End of Oak Street, and heard someone saying, "Oh, the Jays are good again." And I said, "All right, it's back."

• 3:28Speaker 05

  It's back. So yeah, that's what's going on here. The Jays are back.

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  I wish you no good fortune, as always. Um, let's talk about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, okay?

• 3:37Speaker 05

  Sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  So here's the deal. The movie is written and directed by Jane, as I mentioned. A lot of the crew from I Saw the TV Glow is back. Cinematographer Eric Yu, it's edited by Graham Mason, Alex G is back to provide a score. I'll give you a very brief snapshot synopsis of the story. We'll talk about the film somewhat in depth here, and it's opening wider and wider around the country and in North America over the next couple of weeks. But, um, so basically, it's a movie about a queer director making a slasher franchise sequel reboot, who becomes obsessed with casting the original film's final girl, and that leads both of the women into a journey of sex, death, and discovery. Why don't we talk a little bit about slashers before we

• 4:23Sean Fennessey?

  talk specifically about this movie? Do you like slasher movies, Adam?

• 4:27Speaker 05

  Very much. You know, I think that they are the, this is the psychic territory of, you know, VHS box art, and, you know, watching movies at a friend's house at night, and the anxiety over whether you should be watching this. Like, I very much want to versus, you know, should I? You're kind of looking over your shoulder as you're, as you're watching it. I mean, I know that the first couple of movies I tried to show to, like, a girl were horror movies, you know, slasher, you know, movies, movies or not.

• 4:57Sean Fennessey?

  Do you know what those movies were? I would love to know what those movies are that you tried to show.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  You know, one was a 17-hour documentary from the point of view of a Polish pigeon. You know, no, I mean, it's Halloween, right?

• 5:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Because you, you know, you're like, "It's Halloween, come over and watch Halloween." And you don't like learn that, there's no manual for that. It just feels very natural. It's scary, it's dark, there's a kind of a, there's something kind of pent up about it. And I think also that, you know, for me, and my cinephilia and Jane's cinephilia, I think are different, although there's some points of convergence in the movie, including some musical ones, too. If we don't do a, if we don't do a long talk about Cat and Crows, this is not a good podcast.

• 5:37Sean Fennessey?

  We shall, don't worry.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  We shall. I know. But I think that that's how I associate them. And I think that there's a way that doing that kind of domesticates them, or takes some of the threat out of it, or fetishizes it. But I also think that these are the themes that the movie's playing with, you know, actively. And play, I think, is a key word here. You know, that word gets used a lot in the script, and I think in talking about it, that idea of play, or playfulness, I think is important. Not that play can't be serious, right? But this is a playful homage.

• 6:12Sean Fennessey?

  Very much so.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  Playing also means using something, too. It's playing, it's using, it's repurposing, you know, to some extent, it's kind of like slamming, not action figures, but maybe like Funko Pops together, you know, in a way. So yeah, it's an interesting thing to talk about. But in terms of just slasher movies, do I like them? I mean, who doesn't, when they're done well? And like pizza, even when they're not good, they're like mostly okay.

• 6:37Sean Fennessey?

  Could not have said that better myself. I ask you that question because I wonder, do you need to love slashers to love this movie? Or is there an entry point into this film, which is very much interested in, maybe even obsessed by, the conventions and sensations that a slasher generates inside of people like me and you?

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Well, that's, I mean, it's a good question. I think there's a lot of things that wouldn't hurt with this movie. You know, I don't think it hurts to be generationally close to the filmmaker, because not only do you get the older frames of reference, but maybe that's your point of view on what's happened to horror, or to Hollywood, or to, you know, identity politics and representation in films. So like, you know, that helps. I don't think you have to love them. I do think that, I know some people in my life, including my wife, who are anxious about watching, because they're like, "It looks like there's a lot of blood in it." And I'm like, "There is, and it's great, but it's not scary." And that's not meant as a, as a put-down. I do think that this is not really a scary movie, but also as a satire, it's not like scary movie,

• 7:39Speaker 05

  because it doesn't have, it doesn't have contempt, or like just opportunism for what it's dealing with. It's very specific. And this is one of these times people misuse the word academic all the time. It's like, if you literally write about anything pop culturally in two sentences or more, people are like, "You're an academic," you know? But this movie is kind of academic, but, but, but, but playfully so. I think both the best thing you can say about it, and maybe some of the persuasive criticism against it, is it's so academic, that maybe it's cut off from those simple pleasures, the visceral pleasures you get from slasher movies. But then again, I think it makes those pleasures its subject, and I liked how it did it very much.

• 8:20Sean Fennessey?

  This is going to seem like a bold comparison, but, um, I just saw the film for a second time yesterday, and the second viewing reminded me a lot of my second viewing of The Odyssey, which is after I got my arms around the intention and strategy of the movie, and all of the things that it was trying to accomplish. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit more. And I think part of it is because Jane is biting off a lot here, and maybe that's some, that's one of the reasons why it's being accused of a kind of academia in its approach, because it's just got a lot of ideas on its mind. But it's also a wildly feeling movie, a very deep and sincere movie, I felt, even though it's got a lot of gags, and it's also got a lot of high-minded ideas about deconstructing genre, and also got a lot of ideas about satireizing

• 9:05Sean Fennessey?

  contemporary Hollywood. I thought it was a very, very emotional and visceral, not in the bloody sense, kind of a film. So while I think that some of those notes make sense, I should say, I think you and I both really, really loved this movie, and had a great time with it. And I find it interesting, because it does remind me of Jane's previous two films in only one way, which is that I couldn't really think of another movie that I thought was exactly like this movie. You know, you mentioned scary movie, you mentioned Halloween. In theory, this movie lives in between those two, but it doesn't at all. It generates a completely different kind of feeling inside me.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Well, the, well, the arc of the films is interesting, because, you know, self-induced hallucination is this doc that deals with Slender Man. I mean, that's the first real feature. There's also work for this omnibus film called Collective Unconscious, which is maybe for a deeper, deeper dive. But I mean, you know, self-induced hallucination, which I think is a great phrase for a lot of Jane's films, in some ways, you know? Like, sometimes you have a phrase from a filmmaker's career, a title, or a line of dialogue, you're like, "We'll be using that one." You know, I think that that one works. Like, that movie wasn't ahead of the curve on Slender Man. It was analyzing it after the fact, the phenomenon and the creepypasta. But that movie really is, I forget what year it is, it's like 2000 and whatever, like pre 2020, because World's Fair is 2021.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  But really just analyzing that idea of viral horror, creepypasta horror, participatory horror. I mean, Backrooms represents the mainstream cresting this phenomenon. But Jane was kind of really in on the ground floor with Self-Induced Hallucination and then with World's Fair, which I liked at the time because it had an element of surprise and because it was made so cheaply and ingeniously and with no recognizable actors. It had that element, not a found footage horror, but the same thing that great found footage horror has, which is just, this feels anonymous. This feels found, even if I didn't believe that any of it was real. It has that great urban legend creepypasta message form quality of like, do you believe in this stuff?

• 11:11Speaker 05

  And the arc, I think, that's fascinating is not just that idea of characters, of films that are increasingly explicit in that sense of the word about, you know, gender and transition, but also about media, where in World's Fair, it's, you know, like a girl vlogging, you know, on YouTube and then TV Glow is about a 90s TV show that sort of, you know, these kids who are obsessed with watching it. And now we've gotten to the point where you have a movie, but a creator, right? We've gone from viewers to fans to creators. And in that sense, Miasma kind of subsumes the previous movies into it. It has elements of all of them in it.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  But it's also different because one big difference, and I watched TV Glow the other night because my wife hadn't seen it and she really liked it. We had an interesting time watching it. I was reading about it again, both positive and negative reviews. That's a film that's so melancholy and so anxious and so, you know, fearful in certain ways. Miasma is so preoccupied with pleasure, not in an empty way, but it's very sweet, you know? I mean, it's quite literally sort of candy coated and I don't think it throws those fears or those anxieties away, and I don't think it's impersonal. But that's the big difference from the other work. It's not just that Miasma is not really trying to be scary. It's not really trying to be heavy. It's smart, but it's light.

• 12:35Sean Fennessey?

  I know what you mean.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  Not a put down at all, but it's light. And I think that the things it's about that are serious, it does in a very playful way. Or conversely, the playfulness is kind of booby trapped at times, like when we get to the Counting Crows scene, but we'll get there.

• 12:53Sean Fennessey?

  So I agree with you and the candy coated is particularly appealing. The TV Glow I really connected to because obviously I think you and I are similar in the same way as Jane in that a lot of media imprinted very hard on us at a very young age. And then we at times transposed ourselves onto that media and then sort of turned it into a meaningful part of our lives, if not the defining part of our professional lives. And there's a lot of shame and guilt kind of stitched into that story. And this movie is sort of the opposite, where we do in fact see Chris, the Hannah Einbinder character, at a very young age, consuming media, much the same way the Justice Smith character consumes media in TV Glow. But it's not shame, it's wonder.

• 13:38Sean Fennessey?

  And those two things are kind of tied together in some ways. And so Jane pivoting away from that and going towards this much more joyful approach in telling the story, plus all of this indulgence that is happening for the characters at first with candy and then with sex and then with this explosive corn syrupy blood as we go into the final third of the movie is, almost feels like an artist in real time getting happier. You know what I mean? I don't know if I could chart that in quite such clear terms, but it does feel like that's what's happening with Jane.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Well, there's these blocks. There's creative block, there's a social anxiety, there's romantic block, there's this kind of, you know, sexual frustration that, you know, has to be kind of, you know, surmounted. I mean, there's a degree to which this movie is playing a game of wish fulfillment. That plays out in a lot of the set pieces, you know, like commandeering the movies that you used to watch and now you get to make them and they can be how you want and about what you want. Or you project yourself inside of them or you can kind of pilot this fictional serial killer as a way to get rid of all the people who are frustrating you in your, in your life. Or, you know, the movie star that you've been crushing on your whole life, you know, is like inviting you in to hang out. But, you know, and we'll get there.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  But what's interesting is when you say you identified with the films and so did I, it's tricky because on the one hand, there is no shortage of movies that are made for the kind of cinephile demographic and which flatter them and cater to them. This is the post Tarantino phenomenon of like, you know, critics get turned into fanboys and to greater or lesser degrees, some artists do that and a lot of hacks do that. Jane's an artist. But also, we're kind of imperfect people to be talking about a movie like this because the points of identification and the points of difference are very significant. And yet that loops back around to the fact, I think I read an interview with Jane, I don't want to misquote, where they said, how many trans filmmakers in the United States

• 15:38Speaker 05

  have had the kind of releases and budgets that I've had? And it's like, the only one. So there's, there's actually a number of significant trans filmmakers in the film making cameos and Jane is in communication, not just with, you know, mainstream slasher signifiers and top 40 alt-rock, but with that, you know, artistic community and tradition. That's a wonderful thing that then on a mainstream film podcast or in mainstream outlets, it's being reviewed and looked at by critics for what their points of convergence are. Because those points of convergence are actually in some ways, and I'm saying something that a critic, Sam Brojen, wrote in reverse shot, they're profoundly uncool.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  I kind of like how uncool the reference points in this, in this movie are. They're actually not Vanguard, they're not hip, they're not elusive, they're Night Swimming and Long December and the Friday the 13th franchise. That's fascinating to me because that was not the language or the rhetoric around World's Fair. I guess what I'm saying is that some of the things that people are anxious about, which is here's this independent, you know, significant American trans filmmaker making stuff that seems too accessible to a wide audience. And I'm like, that accessibility and that discourse to me is potentially part of what's excellent about the film and excellent about its release.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  Also creates some elements of, you know, territorial reception and the question of, you know, you know, who is this movie for, who should it be for, who it's, you know, who it's supposed to be speaking to. I see it as such an expression of an individual filmmaker and their interests, which are not always easily compartmentalized, not always easily reconciled. That's a good thing for me. Whether that's exactly the kind of criticism that should be being written about it, you know, I don't think I'm a perfect audience for the film or a perfect, you know, person to be in conversation with Jane's taste, but I like it. And the parts that, and the parts that speak to me speak eloquently, you know?

• 17:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you're tapping into something that I thought about a lot during TV Glow as well. And I just don't think a perfect audience exists. I think any artist is going to have experiences that we're not going to fully understand. And so in an effort to represent how they're feeling, if you can at least create the sensation of universalizing that feeling, then you're just creating empathy for someone who's had a different life than you and someone who has got a different point of view than you. And this is, I think particularly two movies in a row that really aces that, that does that. And I think in many ways kind of transcends whatever narrow lane of conversation a movie like this might have been slotted into five years ago, 10 years ago, or if it were done a little bit differently.

• 18:28Sean Fennessey?

  And so I agree with you about the generational point. I've been thinking a lot about Jane. I asked Jane when they were here about just the, the kind of millennial pretext and the Counting Crows usage and a couple of the different aspects of it. And I think of Jane now in that same conversation that I've been having on the show with like Kugler, Damien Chazelle, Greta Gerwig, like there's a handful of people who I'm like, well, these are this kind of definitional millennial filmmakers. These are the people who, they all are having different experiences, they all have different kinds of movies that they want to make or that they're in love with from the past and are trying to iterate on. But this is kind of one more link in that chain in a really exciting way.

• 19:09Sean Fennessey?

  And I think it's interesting that they're as funny as they are sincere too. That's like the other thing that I really enjoy about this movie is it kind of...

• 19:21Sean Fennessey?

  Gear shifts pretty regularly from scene to scene, from madcap, almost like Zucker Brothers gags into pure slasher POV horror, back into these kind of, this kind of like deeply sincere, almost like Sundance coming of age tonality, you know, like it really is. And in some cases, you might think, well, that kind of whiplash doesn't work in telling a story. But I think in this movie, it's fantastically effective.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Well, there's another movie from this year that I also like. I mean, you made the comparison to The Odyssey. I make the comparison in a way to Matty's Secret, the John Early film, which I really like. I mean, that's still my favorite film of the year or close to it. And it's like, you put everything in quotes, but not to belittle it or to undermine it. Sincerity in and of itself doesn't, and you're not saying this, but you know, sincerity is not necessarily a positive quality in movies. There are a lot of movies that are sincerely awful, or sincerely smug, you know, or sincerely confused. I think you're right that the tone is elastic, but I mean, it's certainly not messy. And one of the things that I like about

• 20:37Speaker 05

  that idea of the stuff that's sort of in quotes is when Hannah Einbinder needs to give a kind of real performance, I think some of the monologue stuff mid film, you know, the quotes come off. And I think that on the other hand, the quotes around that big mid film slasher scene from the killer's point of view, you know, whirling around with the fake blood and all of these kids being kind of killed off. That's in quotes, but not in a, not in an ironic way. I mean, it's kind of a stunning scene to me. That idea that you can kind of have blood and guts and camera movement that are so obviously not of that period. People will watch that scene and sort of say, well, that's not how a movie

• 21:20Speaker 05

  from the eighties would look. And it's like, the movie knows that. And one reason that it knows that is because eventually the camera turns back around and it's not just the point of view of the killer, it's the face of the killer. And, you know, in a way, the face of the filmmaker, or that face of sort of control, you know. I like, I've read some reviews where people have said, oh, it's so obvious that, you know, the Chris character is supposed to be Jane Schommer's. Yes, it is obvious because the directorial credit is superimposed over the first time we see Hannah Einbinder in the film. But that doesn't mean that just because things are explicit, it doesn't mean that it's a total one to one ratio, or there aren't different interpretive avenues. Or just because it's a sweet film

• 22:00Speaker 05

  doesn't mean that it's not tough, or doesn't mean that it's not thoughtful. I think in some ways, the tough stuff and the alienating stuff is more buried in this movie. It's so out on the surface and so raw and world's fair. It's so on the surface in TV glow. Here, it's kind of buried under the candy a little bit, but like, that's what candy is for. You put razor blades in it on Halloween, you know. And I think that that's some of what this filmmaker is very good at.

• 22:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the sort of POV, big slasher set piece in the middle of it, which is, I guess, the most notable scene in the movie for a variety of reasons. So why do you think they made that decision to not replicate the feeling of a slasher kill scene and to create something that is like, a little bit more elevated, a little bit more colorful, a little bit more, I would say, video game influenced in terms of the POV filmmaking?

• 22:54Speaker 05

  You know what? It's funny. The better the filmmaker, the less inclined I am to know their intentions. It's bad filmmakers, I think, as a critic, where like, well, that's what they're trying for and they didn't do it. I mean, when I see a filmmaker I like, I try and describe, but I can't say for sure. And I thought that it's incompatible. I mean, that completely, again, kind of anodyne CG, not CGI, but you know, computer assisted fluidity, but of no place in an eighties movie, or an early nineties movie, I guess. I guess we should say the Camp Miasma series is kind of supposed to be located more in the nineties than the eighties, right? Or, and we also see in the opening series that it's gone through.

• 23:34Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's a blur. I think it's a variety of things, right? It is very much Friday the 13th, but it's also gone through some of the same paces as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and things like that.

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. But so let's just say, you know, the needle drop is an oldie to us now. It also never would have been on the soundtrack of a movie like that then. It's saying something about distance and time that doesn't even just have to do with horror movies, but I think just has to do with age. It's contrapuntal use of music, you know, it doesn't go with the killing, which is a sort of, you know, all the way back to Singing in the Rain and Clockwork Orange, or Stuck in the Middle with You, and Reservoir Dogs. I mean, it deliberately takes us out of the film within the film. It almost kind of takes us out of the film around the film, or the film around the film is mutating. I think

• 24:26Speaker 05

  it's daring us to sort of read it as cheap, or chintzy, or show offy. Again, I find the way that the camera, I've only watched the movie once, but the camera eventually whirls around and you see the killer's face underneath the mask. And you are suddenly brought back to what this filmmaker in the film, Chris, is anxious about, which is, you know, repurposing and in the process, you know, pink washing, this highly problematic, you know, transphobic slasher franchise that they grew up with and get off on, you know. And Schoenbrun's own anxieties in making this movie. I think anxiety is funny. I'm sure you would agree, you know, you're a fan of Albert Brooks, you know, you like, you know, Ari Aster, you

• 25:09Speaker 05

  know, Elaine May. I mean, anxiety is what's funny. So the anxiety and the humor of this movie are bound up together in a way that I think is very familiar, but also very precise. I do not love the showbiz satire in it. That feels like something you could get on a TV show or in other movies, you know, with the agent and that stuff. I mean, I think it's fine. What I love is when they get to the camp where Gillian Anderson's character, was it Billy, not Billy, not Billy, I was gonna say Billy Preston, that would be a very different movie, you know. And the idea that this kind of summer camp is just laid

• 25:52Speaker 05

  out for her now as this sort of primal scene, but then all they do is like, eat chicken nuggets and watch a movie. I like how small that is, but you know, within the context of the film, it feels very epic, you know. But, but, but, but it's, I mean, it's a chamber piece. And for a lot of it, it's a two-hander. And for a lot of it, it's almost kitting itself as a kind of softcore or a kind of fantasy roleplay situation. Again, lots going on, managed, I think, very smartly.

• 26:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, the movie is full of these great signposts. And some of it is briefly gratifying in that Tarantino way that you're describing. And some of it is a little bit more heavily meaningful. I think there's a lot of time and care put into things like watching Chris pour raisinettes into a popcorn bucket. And

• 26:48Speaker 05

  Which I know was at least one person's breaking point for the film. I saw a tweet where they said, I couldn't watch the movie after that. Who would put raisinettes in popcorn? Like, it's just the worst snack mix.

• 26:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow. I couldn't, could not disagree more. As a non-popcorn person, that's a way to make popcorn more tolerable for me. I really, I could have, I could have taken or left the Sarah Sherman agent stuff, but I did find that the Zoom call was eerily accurate and good. And I'll just say, I found it to be like, quite acid tinged in terms of like, some real life comps that the film is making. And I do, I'm not sure how much that will go over people's heads or how much they'll care about where it sits. But I do think it also serves a really good purpose, which is, that's a, it's a moment of Chris being able to kind of take a real agency in their career when they're defining how

• 27:44Sean Fennessey?

  they want to make the thing that they want in a moment when they should feel fearful that they're going to blow their chance. And instead, having this moment of catharsis and realization and carrying it through and just, you know, being weird in the way that they want to be weird, which I really, really enjoyed. And that is a counterpoint to that real sensual and sexual and emotional experience that Chris is having with Billy. Every time Chris and Billy are together and the kind of pod to do that they're having with one another, which is such a fascinating thing. Gillian and Hannah, I'm curious like what you thought about them. And, you know, Gillian is another one of these signposts in the film, obviously.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  Well, Gillian Anderson's a great actor, right? Like, really great. And if you watch, you know, The House of Mirth, you're like, that's a great actor. Or you watch Hannibal, you know, that's a great actor. And then on top of that, she's also, I don't know if the internet has doubled down and made it more apparent, or if it's made it less apparent just with time. I don't, I try not to spend that much time on these corners of the internet. But like, she's a real icon. I mean, everyone will say, this person is iconic, this person is iconic. This is like a pre-internet or early internet kind of sexual icon for boys, for girls, for everybody. And that

• 28:55Sean Fennessey?

  I asked her about this and she tried to be modest about it, but it was like, you know, we all know. We know what you represent. If you were born between 1972 and 1987, we know, we all know what you are.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, that show and its kind of fandom and the neo-cult aspect to The X-Files and the fact that it was a primetime hit, but beyond being a hit, it was, I mean, again, it's like a TV glow kind of show. Like Pink Opake, obviously, it's a little more mainstream. So she's being cast, but she's also being kind of deployed, you know, by the movie. But then she also has to give a performance within that. And I think that her performance obviously has echoes of the stage work that she's done. I wish I'd had a chance to see her in Streetcar Named Desire. I haven't. But I mean, this is someone with a real arsenal as an actor and a lot of technique. And you feel kind of all of that, you feel all of that technique. It's a very grand, very flamboyant performance. It's

• 29:53Speaker 05

  not just Anderson who's performing, it's The character is performing, an idea of Norma Desmond. You know, I mean, one bit I liked where people like, oh, the meanings of the movie are too explicit. They're going to compare it to Norma Desmond. And then they get there and she's like, yeah, I know, I'm a little like Norma Desmond. You know, it's like, the annotation has an annotation. No one deserves points for getting ahead of this movie's references. And I know for some people, that insulates the movie from like, real fear or real thorniness or real kind of alienation within horror, that when everything's a reference, nothing's actually scary. I mean, again, a critic I really like wrote this, which is it's easier to think of this not as a horror movie, but as a kind of stoner romantic comedy that, you know, is about

• 30:35Speaker 05

  the world of horror movies or it's sort of, you know, a movie about unblocking oneself sexually that kind of just happens to have that as an aphrodisiac or as a fetish object. She's not making, they're not making a horror movie. They could, and you know, we're all going to the world's fair, has some pretty good scares in it, but I don't think it's a horror movie. But as for Anne Binder, I mean, interesting actress. I don't watch hacks. I've heard she's very good. Obviously, the dynamic with her and Jean Smart on that show informs the casting here. She's also an extremely overtly political person. And sometimes that has no bearing on someone's performance on the right or on the left. And sometimes it's a function of casting.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  To me, that's a function of the casting here, too, you know? I like watching them together. I think they're very sweet together. I think that there's a real erotic, erotic and neurotic energy in both of those performances. And I enjoyed them, you know? It's a different kind of actor than Jane's worked with previously. Or experiment to the little within TV Glow, using actors' iconography, like Fred Durst is in I Saw the TV Glow. And when I watched it the other night, I was just like, what an amazing idea to have like Limp Bizkit as the face of kind of like, you know, paternal disapproval. You know, why are you watching a girl's show?

• 32:00Speaker 05

  You know, but, and you know, TV Glow does it with musicians, with Phoebe Bridgers and Caroline Polachek. So, yeah, I mean, Anderson is very well used. The two of them are very sweet on screen together. I think they're about very fine.

• 32:13Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think that idea that you hit on about the movie not being scary, which I had also on our list of topics of discussion is fascinating to me because, you know, as a certified slasherologist, most of the other slasherologists I know are not scared of these movies. They have memories of being scared of them when they were nine, when they saw them, which is a key component in this story. But no one sits down to watch Friday the 13th, Part Six, for the fourth time, worried about being scared of it. It's an emotional point of connection. And so the movie is very, very smart about this, I think.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  It is. I think the movies that are in this movie's DNA or that have come up in interviews, and again, with filmmakers, whether you like their work or not, you're trying not to put words in their mouth. So I don't want to misquote Jane, but I mean, a movie like Sleepaway Camp, which in some ways is kind of cheesy and dated and, you know, capital P problematic, whatever that means. I usually don't like that word as a way to talk about movies, but I like when people talk about that aspect of filmmaking, then I think it's fascinating. A movie like Sleepaway Camp or like a great example of Nightmare on Elm Street 2, which are movies that are maybe frightening to people or seductive to people in ways that either exceed their maker's conscious intentions or just that mix of extremity.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  I mean, the readings, the queer reading of Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is very famous and very popular. I think there's a whole documentary about it. I taught that film in a cult film course once where it's just like, is this actively, consciously an allegory for gay experience? Or did the filmmakers miss this? You say the same thing about Commando, frankly, you know? I think that you could. These are, these are the movies that they're not scary, but the guardrails aren't up, you know, or they feel like an unsafe space somehow. So that's something that this movie is about without doing it. The only time it starts to feel unsafe, and it's conceptually my favorite thing in the movie is when, and this isn't like a plot spoiler, but it's a talking point.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  So I hope people don't mind us talking about it, is when Chris is talking about how, what she gets off on in these movies is that idea that you're the voyeur and the victim at the same time. And this movie has not invented that idea, but it articulates it in a way that I quite like. And she's kind of ashamed that this is how she feels, that she wants to be the victim. But it's also very sort of liberating. And that's the kind of pleasure this movie is getting at. It's a little double edged and it very clearly belongs to Jane as well as to Chris.

• 34:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  That's what the whole movie is about.

• 34:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think that, and I think that's, that's perhaps the most critical scene in the movie, this idea of accepting and letting go and also being stalked and getting joy from that feeling of being stalked.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  And being seen by, and being seen by the camera. You know, this is a movie that-

• 35:07Sean Fennessey?

  In slow motion.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  In slow motion. Like, this is a movie that's sort of like, it's not just jokes about split diopter shots and tracking shots. It's sort of like, what a joy to be seen that way, which is tricky. And not everyone who's going to watch that movie is going to feel that way. I think for people who connect to those feelings, it will be very liberating.

• 35:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the movie's trying to have its cake and eat it too, with respect to the problematism that you're describing, because there's that great moment when Billy and Chris are watching Camp Miasma together and the reel is running. And Chris can't help but continue to turn to Billy and offer either details about filmmaking technique or noting moments of transphobia in the film. And every time that happens, Billy is like, shut up, and like rolling her eyes at this kind of millennial, Gen Z desire to constantly be noting the referentiality or the discourse around something as opposed to just letting it totally wash over you.

• 36:12Sean Fennessey?

  And so the movie also becomes this really interesting dialectic about what is the purpose of a movie like this, you know? And can you enjoy it without its externalities? Or is that actually a mistake to only consume culture in that way? And I think just portraying that in general is so exciting and so, so smartly done.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  Well, this is, this is now becoming, again, there are some people for whom just having a movie where tropes are mentioned in dialogue is just like a jump off the train point, you know? And some people have sort of invoked phrases with this movie that I invoke for other movies. So I guess everyone's palate is different, but they're like, you know, this is like epic bacon kind of humor and the, oh my God, you know, the kind of post Joss Whedon, you know, well, that just happened sort of stuff. I don't actually think that has much of a corollary in the text of the movie at all, but I think that I understand that tone. I also think that at this point, it's telling that talented and semi-talented horror people in a lot of mediums, their only subject is horror movies because there's such a proliferation of them. And in some ways, it's a safer space than dealing with reality.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  I believe in that too. I'm about halfway through this novel by Paul Tremblay called Horror Movie. I don't know if you've-

• 37:22Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't read it.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  Read it, which is about a kid who made in high school, a horror movie with a bunch of other kids that like never got released, like only two or three scenes ever got put on YouTube, and now a studio is trying to remake it. And it's uncanny how close his scenes meeting with the executives are to the scenes in Miasma. I think the two projects are completely independent of each other. My implication isn't that one takes from the other, but they're almost identical. It's like meeting with executives and the executives who think, yeah, we want to get that 90s feeling, but like remake it now and, you know, make it modern. I mean, this is the condition of a lot of modern horror making. And again, when we talked about the Counting Crows little death scene, you mentioned that the visual language in it.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  I mean, it is the visual language of elevated horror or an idea of elevated horror or an idea of an idea of elevated horror. I don't think this movie has much truck with that idea. It doesn't come out and openly say, I hate this shit because it's kind of doing that shit. But you'll notice it doesn't do it for the entire movie. I don't think Jane would be caught dead making that movie. And we don't have to say what that movie is, because I know you like some of these movies and I like some of these movies. And I think saying Backrooms or Obsession or any movie is just like, what's right or wrong with horror is a losing game.

• 38:41Sean Fennessey?

  It's just a movie.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  It is a movie. But I do think that this movie has a certain amount, if not of skepticism, then of wariness. It's like, I'll do this for a couple of minutes, but this is not really what I'm making, you know?

• 38:56Sean Fennessey?

  I do. It's a really interesting way to think about it.

• 39:00Sean Fennessey?

  Is there anything in general that, well, one thing that you tapped into that I thought was really interesting was that feeling of like, does this movie know what it's doing? And previous horror films, and I've thought about this a lot with obsession. I rewatched obsession this week and it was my first time seeing it since I saw it at a screening. And you know, there's a sequence near the end of the film where Nikki and Bear are sort of fighting and Bear has kind of reached his breaking point after Nikki has gone completely crazy. And he keeps asking her to be the real Nikki. And he's screaming at her and she starts screaming at him. And it's incredibly effective scene. And a scene that feels like

• 39:41Sean Fennessey?

  very wise about difficult romantic relationships reaching a breaking point. And you know, Curry Barker is 26 years old. I talked to him on the show. He's very smart and a nice guy, but if I was like, is this person, does this person have enough life experience to know how sophisticated this I'm reading this idea as, this sequence in this film? And I, this is true throughout all of horror. It's true in a lot of different genres, but it's especially true in horror movies. And you know, Sleepaway Camp does have a lot of sequences in that film where like, whoa, this seems, this movie, problematic though it may be, seems to kind of see the future about gender dynamics and a lot of other ideas that we're going to get into in the, in the next 30, 40 years of our existence. And this

• 40:22Sean Fennessey?

  movie is an attempt, I think, to almost like subvert that sensation by literalizing everything, by announcing everything that it's doing. And neither one nor the other is like better or worse. But I find it fascinating that they're both like sitting next to each other as signature moments in the genre right now.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  I mean, I, I think it is interesting too. And I'm, I'll say something about obsession, which we've never talked about on the pod. I wrote about it briefly on the Ringer when I did the, the year, mid-year thing. And I said, you know, this is, obsession is the movie of the year. I mean, like kind of derogatory. We're not necessarily complimentary. I'm not going to get you in trouble. You can like it as much as you want. I've Curry Barker on as many times as, you know, he's around. I, we've both watched movies for a long time. We've covered them for a long time. You and I are not exactly the same, but like we get along, right? We kind of know the terrain. I propose that obsession has generated the most deranged discourse of any American movie since I started doing this. And I think about 80% of that is the moment that we're in. And only 20% of it is the movie. It's

• 41:22Speaker 05

  a deranged moment. Deranged isn't even a good word. I know that. But it's, it's wild how intense and passionate and polarized and digressive and kind of fascinating what people are reading into or pulling out of or projecting onto this, on, on, onto this movie. And in a strange way, I'd say the difference between obsession and campy as I like campy and miasma exponentially more, you know, like much, much more. But I do think that obsession, having seen it now with an audience a couple of times, it makes people feel unsafe. And it is not because it is innovative. I'm going to say all the things it's not. It is not innovative. It is not inventive. It is not original. I don't

• 42:05Speaker 05

  think it's particularly responsible with what it's playing with. And it's certainly not a dissertation, you know, like Jane's movie gets an A plus, you know, I would say, I'd say, I'd say obsession is kind of incomplete. And yet, its hands are so dirty. It's really opening the can of worms. I'm not even giving it credit. I'm just saying.

• 42:27Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I am giving it credit. That's one of the reasons why I go to movies is to feel a little unsafe. So I, I know what you're saying. Like you're, you're, you're right to kind of like couch it in, in this space where we analyze things and we try to understand where they fit in the culture and are they politically sound? And all of that is true. And I think that movie's reaction that it has generated does feel, it's highly uncommon, is something I'll say. And

• 42:53Speaker 05

  It's, it's, it's highly uncommon. And it, it reminds me of if one movie had existed when Twitter was out. If Fatal Attraction had come out when Twitter existed, or if Twitter had existed for Fatal Attraction, it's not just the hetero pessimist thing or the like, you know, the, the rom-com into slasher trope things. It's like, could you imagine if Fatal Attraction had existed in Twitter era?

• 43:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think again, like that, that's a movie also that is about fraught gender dynamics and obsession and teenage sex and death and I can't be asma are about those things too, in very broad and different ways. And I think that's something that we still don't really know how to talk about. And one movie can kind of literalize the idea and another movie can kind of supernaturalize the idea. And that in either case, we feel like we have a lot to chew on. And no one's right. That's the unique thing that I think both of these movies like brought out of me of like, oh, I have a lot to learn. Like I'm still learning.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  There are these movies, they just, they kind of instantly belong to history and it just, it, it is what it is. You know, I, I happen to like the Blair Witch Project very much. And I kind of like Paranormal Activity. Like I'm mostly on the side of these kind of left field horror monowitz. And also what we have to see with obsession is what, what'll happen with Blair Witch or with Paranormal Activity, which is, is it repeatable? You know, in the case of those movies, it's sequelizable without being repeatable. I'm kind of like, what will, what will the obsession slop look like? Or what will the backroom, what will the backroom slop, slop, slop look like? But I do think that miasma will be, I hope not a footnote. I mean, I think it's a chapter. It's not an annotation.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  It's, it's a chapter in this same story. And you know, Jane, Jane's work is sort of its own, it's its own chapter in this moment. Because of course, I also can't remember a moment where horror was this mainstream in terms of like, normal people going to see it. Do you know how many people in my life who would not be caught dead going to horror movies? Like parents, friends, I say this about Canadian films earlier this year too, horror in Canadian, but like, they're just like seeing it as a normal person. Like my, my wife's parents were like, should we see obsession? And I was like, under no circumstances should you see obsession. But the fact that you kind of want to, you know, I love my in-laws. They go see The Odyssey. They don't go see obsession.

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  And they're, and they're, and they're thinking about it.

• 45:17Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's, it's, it's a really exciting time in that respect. And it's going to produce some, some lousy results, but maybe it's also going to inspire a lot of people to make some exciting stuff. It's, I want to, I do want to do, I want to talk more about Final Girls with you. And, and, because this movie is a real final girl piece of the puzzle. So we'll get into the final girl canon together right after this.

• 45:38Sean Fennessey?

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• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Adam, one thing, one movie that I revisited this week in writing about Final Girls was Smile 2. Did you see Smile 2?

• 47:14Speaker 05

  I quite liked Smile 2.

• 47:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, I, I thought you might. I'm not, I'm not as high on it maybe as you are, but I, there's a lot to admire about it. And I do feel like obsession is certainly grabbing quite a bit in terms of its mechanical decision-making from Smile 2, you know, the sound design, the way that the camera's moving, like

• 47:32Speaker 05

  It's taking, well, very much from the original Smile.

• 47:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  Right? Where it's just like, what if person stared at camera? Would that be scary? I guess so. And then

• 47:42Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  I'll never forget being at Smile with a bunch of friends. This was my Letterboxd review of it. And someone in the audience goes, she's gonna smile. And I just, like they were calling the finishing move at WrestleMania. Like, here it comes. She's gonna smile. It's gonna be great. It was really funny. Anyway, sorry, go on.

• 47:59Sean Fennessey?

  What's your favorite professional wrestling finisher?

• 48:01Speaker 05

  My favorite professional wrestling finisher? Oh, I mean, the, the, the Macho Man, big elbow.

• 48:07Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, no kidding. From the top rope.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  I was the sort of kid who like, I hated Hulk Hogan very much. And when I went to see

• 48:15Sean Fennessey?

  The most naming thing I can imagine, you hating Hulk Hogan.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Oh, he fucking sucks. He sucks. So you go to the, you go to the house show at Make-believe Gardens with my dad, who did not want to be there. And I was like, this guy's great. Macho Man's great. And like truly Hulk Hogan stealing his girlfriend and stuff. And I'm like, I still think that that angle is better. It's a great angle because like Hogan's a complete creep. We can talk about this another time.

• 48:36Sean Fennessey?

  We should do a wrestling pod, me and you. We should re-watch pay-per-views from the eighties and nineties and talk about them. I honestly would have the best time doing that. Elizabeth! No, but I got, I got a lot of macho in me.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Sorry. Go, go on. Back to, back to horror movies.

• 48:52Sean Fennessey?

  My favorite finisher is The Razor's Edge, which is one of the most cinematic of all finishers.

• 48:58Speaker 05

  One of the most cinematic of all characters. You know, do you know the, the Scarface story? You must, right?

• 49:02Sean Fennessey?

  No, what's the Scarface story?

• 49:03Speaker 05

  When Scott Hall supposedly auditioned to Vince McMahon, he's like, this is like Tony Montana and I'm doing Tony Montana. And it's like, great. Yeah, I love it. And then afterwards he's like, I do not know what Scarface is. You know, the, the, I'm like, was there then a period where he got very curious and went and watched all the De Palma movies? We'll never know. Sorry, go on.

• 49:20Sean Fennessey?

  I love the idea of Scott Hall watching De Palma's obsession. That would be intriguing.

• 49:25Speaker 05

  Oh, yes.

• 49:26Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Final Girls. Um, I think that there are a handful of them that are easily understood as canonical. You already mentioned Halloween being a movie you tried to show to a girl. I think we've all tried to show Halloween to a girl over the years. And Laurie Strode being the signature. There are a couple that come before that, that feel important. I don't really think of, you know, Carol Clover's essay about this idea.

• 49:53Sean Fennessey?

  Comes in the late eighties and it's primarily focused on seventies and eighties films. And so in that tradition, she identifies Jess Bradford from Black Christmas. She identifies Sally Hardisty from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She identifies Laurie Strode. I can't recall, does Ripley come up from Alien?

• 50:14Speaker 05

  I think, I think in scholarship around the original essay, I think Alien is like a lot of people's clever answer to that question.

• 50:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So what do you think about that?

• 50:24Speaker 05

  I mean, I think it fits. I think it's interesting that, very interesting in light of talking about Jane's work that in the original scripted Alien Ripley was a man. And they didn't really change much of the character for Weaver's performance, except for then when Ridley Scott has her stripped down to her underwear at the end. A great choice, by the way, because it's about vulnerability, right? I mean, it's, you couldn't be more, more vulnerable in that moment. Um, you know, then that kind of, you know, pressurizes it as a final girl discussion. I mean, I love.

• 50:53Sean Fennessey?

  One that's echoed in Teenage Sex and Death.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  Yes, it is echoed in Teenage Sex and Death, although Sigourney Weaver never like, you know, ran around. I mean, I think of Night of the Living Dead, where the first girl is also the final girl. You know, it's like, she's the first one we see kind of running around and, and that trope of being chased through the cemetery and losing her shoe and falling over. I mean, Camp Miasma has fun with that too. And Night of the Living Dead precedes a lot of these films. I mean, an interesting final girl, I don't think Carol Clover writes about them, but we talked about De Palma. It's funny to think of Carrie White as a load bearing character who is both the monster and the final girl at the same time.

• 51:33Sean Fennessey?

  I thought about asking about Carrie, if you thought Carrie fits the bill here. I mean, there's, you know, for those who don't know, final girl is a, is a trope that was developed by Clover, who is an academic film scholar. And it's about the final surviving female character in a horror film and what, what attributes that character frequently has. That character's frequently virginal, frequently sober, frequently, frequently brunette, frequently less bodacious than some of the other female stars of the film.

• 52:01Speaker 05

  Frequently, frequently sober, virginal.

• 52:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, all these things and.

• 52:06Speaker 05

  Like podcast listeners.

• 52:08Sean Fennessey?

  Truly. If you've been to our subreddit, you know, that's accurate. A lot of sober virgins there. I, I think it's been bent a little bit over time, the trope, but it's still pretty consistent. And one of the things that has struck me, and you can think, you can think about this through the lens of sixties and seventies and eighties horror films. But one of the things that has struck me is just the absolute wave of them that we've gotten in the last 10 or so years. And the way that horror films are sold so hard now on the female protagonist or, you know, the woman in peril in ways that are sometimes very self-aware and in other times that are just sort of like, you're kind of stock in trade, run of the mill horror studio movie. And so I'm really fascinated by that.

• 52:53Sean Fennessey?

  Like, you know, in the eighties, there's of course Nancy Thompson from Nightmare. There's Angela Baker from Sleepaway Camp, which kind of flips that on its head because of the shocking reveal of that film. There's, I think Kirsty Cotton from Hellraiser, I think is a really, really good one. And then we get into the nineties and we get Sidney Prescott and Gail Weathers we get. But then it's not until the 2010s, when I think things start to be turned on their head a bit. So I, I don't know. Do you think of them as kind of sectioned over time?

• 53:23Speaker 05

  I do. And I think one of the, one of the scenes we didn't talk about in Miasma is that opening scene. It shows the life cycle and the evolution of a franchise where it goes from like exploitation, you know, to just running on fumes to that idea of rebooting and repurposing across genres. Like that, this wonderful credit scene of Camp Miasma being sequelized and merchandised and made fan friendly and turned into a cartoon. And then becomes a collector's item and then they send them to space. I mean, that stuff's all very clever. I mean, that's the study of pop culture is the study of cycles and, you know, variation, surface, surface variations, variations on a theme.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  I mean, there's always going to be an interesting discourse around different kinds of aggression and vulnerability in horror movies. So are men de facto more aggressive or frightening or frustrated than, than women? No, but on screen, that trope has a kind of power. Are women inherently either more superficially vulnerable and, you know, more indomitable? Does, does, is there like an innocence or a, whether it's the innocence of virginity or the goodness in more recent films of being sexually active and killing them anyway? I mean, these are archetypes these movies sort of play with. Every so often you have one that plays with it sort of intelligently.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  You know, some people have compared Camp Miasma to the Joss Whedon film to, to, to Cabin in the Woods, which is an interesting comparison. That was one that I thought a little ahead of the curve was just popping the hood and elevating the horror, elevating it past the point of being scary. Elevating it into that realm of kind of dissertation or, or, or, or discourse. I mean, that's a movie that really goes for, as I recall, the final girl in that film. You see her being like stalked and brutalized and beaten up, and you see everyone watching her on their screens. Right? That's that idea of like implicating the viewer, which is what a lot of these movies like to do too. Brian De Palma, Brian De Palma used to do that without saying, I am implicating you, the viewer. But, you know, we can, we can talk about that another time.

• 55:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Cabin in the Woods, upon its release, I adored. And I think it was because we didn't quite have the language for the post scream, post, post-modern, you know, horror film. And I haven't looked at that in a long time. I'd be curious to know how I felt about it. But I also felt that that movie did something that a lot of the contemporary movies are doing pretty well too, which is that that movie at times was quite scary. You know, it was not actually, it didn't turn and look at you and wink at you. And in fact, it has this really chaotic third act that is, at, at times felt the way that I felt when I was 11 in the library, like reading a book. It was a collection of monster descriptions, but it also felt like watching a really violent and scary horror movie.

• 56:13Sean Fennessey?

  And I think of that movie very closely with Your Next, which is sort of like, um, Adam Wingard's movie. That is sort of feels like, what if Laurie Strode studied jujitsu before encountering Michael Myers? You know, that, like, what if, what if the, what if the final girl was stronger, tougher and meaner than the killer? Which I always, I really, really enjoy that idea. And there've been some films that like Ready or Not is kind of riffing on this at this point now too.

• 56:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. And even though it's only, and even though, I mean, the final girl also implies that there are people killed before them. But a movie like Revenge by Corley Fargey, she's like the only girl, right? She's the victim, she's killed, she's resurrected, she goes from the victim to sort of the, I mean, that one sort of coded as a kind of rape revenge movie. But I mean, again, it's a movie that plays with that sort of intelligently. I mean, there's movies like, um, you know, Jennifer's Body isn't quite a slasher film, but, you know, Diablo Cody's having fun playing with those tropes. You know, you mentioned the Ready or Not films, now the, the sequel, which features a, my, my obligatory mention of David Cronenberg. Good performance by David Cronenberg is the dying criminal patriarch in that Toronto shot film.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  But the final girl gets a sister in that movie. And the other one I like, I can't remember the character name, but I liked, it's a Jessica Roth in Happy Death Day.

• 57:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, she's terrific.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  Is, is, that's a very, it's almost great. I put it in the almost great category. There's things about it that don't quite work, but she's funny because she has the existential frustration of knowing she's the final girl. And having to just psych herself up time and time again, which is like, this is just going to keep happening to me. Very funny.

• 57:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think there's a few other movies in recent years too, that have done it really well. And, and they're more prestigious, for lack of a better word. I think Adelaide in, in Us is, fits the bill here very much. I think Danny in, in Midsummer really, really fits the bill. And the, both of them seem to be kind of like actively exploring what it means to be a final girl, even though those aren't pure slashers. Nuru from, from Prey also, Amber Midthunder's character, I think fits the bill well. And then I think that it kind of like.

• 58:30Sean Fennessey?

  It kind of, gosh, what's the word I'm looking for? It kind of like reaches the end of the road. It's like there's like a, there's like nowhere to go. The bridge is not finished with Maxine Minks and Pearl. That, that's where I'm like, okay, we have kind of gotten to the conclusive point of self referential riffing on rape revenge and slasher films. And we can go no further. And Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma attempts to kind of like rebuild the bridge. You know, it's like trying to, trying to finish the job.

• 59:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I remember back, back in, I mean, it's been a couple of years ago. I mean, I thought the way that the first X built itself, this sequel or kind of prequel out of nowhere with Pearl was pretty good.

• 59:14Sean Fennessey?

  It was amazing.

• 59:15Speaker 05

  I thought, I thought that was very efficient. Yeah, I mean, I wrote about Maxine or whatever it was for, for Ringer. I mean, I don't like that movie at all, but I mean, it is close in some ways to something like Miasma where it's not so much that its ideas are different. It's just that little matter that sometimes matters of, you know, form and execution and style and tone, which Miasma has, and I, I don't think that that one does. I mean, people really like Kato Flynn's final girl episode of Widow's Bay. Which I don't know if you've watched.

• 59:47Sean Fennessey?

  I have.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  The one where, the one where she's being pursued, which is very Miasma-ish too, where she's being pursued by like, I guess within the lore of the show, it's a serial killer, but it's also just a capital S K serial killer stand in. And, you know, all the things that happen, especially the idea of these movies that no one helps these women, but no one believes them and that no one opens their door and no one lets them in and the cops are useless. I mean, I don't love Widow's Bay, but that scene was, was good. And it was priceless when the thing was lying there dead and she just kept pointing the gun at it for like about five minutes in all these different rooms. I thought that was, that was really funny.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  But yeah, I mean, Miasma is obviously playing with this idea of a, of an, first of an it girl, you know, like the touted filmmaker. And then a kind of, you know, this frustrated girl where it's like, you know, not virginal by choice. You know, not, not, not virginal by choice. There's a block. And then the last 10, 15 minutes without being at all scary, re-stage that, the, the sex, the death, the chase, the catharsis, the confrontation, the victory, but in a very different way than, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's funny you, you mentioned that as an early final girl. You see, that's a movie where she seems to be the final girl by default because it's not a movie star and it's barely a character. She just happens to not die.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  But when she rides away on the back of that truck at the end, that's one of the greatest moments in any movie, not just horror movie, I mean, period. It's beautiful. Like that sense of survival was unbelievable. You can't top it, I don't think.

• 1:01:25Sean Fennessey?

  I was at a, my, my childhood rep house when I was on Long Island last week and introducing a movie, introducing a movie that we both love, Miller's Crossing. And they told me a story about running Texas Chainsaw at a midnight there and they had an original, they had a print. And right at that exact moment, when she jumps in the back of the truck and Leatherface is swinging the chainsaw, the print broke. And the, the movie had an abrupt ending and the lights came up too quickly and everyone was freaked out in the movie theater. And the idea that that movie, which is 50 plus years old, has, still has that power is so fascinating to me.

• 1:02:07Sean Fennessey?

  And it does get me thinking about kind of like, where can we even go with this trope, this genre, that the idea that this is the year of obsession and back rooms? And that, you know, Resident Evil is, is coming out in a month. And even though it's an adaptation of a video game from a major studio, I think there's a sense like, this has a chance to be a great movie.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  And is, is, is Austin Abrams, This Fall's final girl?

• 1:02:33Sean Fennessey?

  He, I think so.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  With Resident Evil and, and, and Whalefall?

• 1:02:37Sean Fennessey?

  And I haven't even gotten into all of that, which is, you know, obviously there have been quite, quite a few final boys in, in recent years as well. And that, that the gender dynamics there have been shifted quite a bit.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  Well, the, well, the greatest final boy is Bruce Campbell.

• 1:02:50Sean Fennessey?

  Of course, yes, Ash.

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, as, as Ash in the Evil Dead films, because he's very macho coded, but you know, then he's not.

• 1:02:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  And I really love the way, I mean, he's such, such a wonderful actor in those movies. The way he sort of sways between like total competence and just like shrieking cowardice is a gift that just keeps on, on, on giving. Can't, I can't think more fondly of an actor than Bruce Campbell. I hope he's okay.

• 1:03:15Sean Fennessey?

  Me too.

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  He's the best.

• 1:03:17Sean Fennessey?

  Any, any final thoughts, Adam?

• 1:03:19Speaker 05

  We didn't talk, we, we, we, we talked with the scene as opposed to the Counting Crows, uh, uh, needle drop, but you, but I mean, I love the cover of Night Swimming at the beginning. I can't not. I love R E M. It's a beautiful song. It's very well chosen because I mean, Night Swimming is very much, you know, summertime at Camp Miasma.

• 1:03:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's what Little Death is doing.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  What Little Death is doing, yeah. You know, and I, and we didn't even talk about the idea in the film, which again, some people find a little, little too declamatory or obvious, but like the hole in the movie where the movies, the hole in the lake where the movies come from.

• 1:03:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:03:54Speaker 05

  As a sort of thing about the mystery and the sort of submerged and subterranean nature of creativity. I love how they come out of that kind of Cronenbergian slit and they're already VHS tapes, you know? I mean, it'd be interesting to see if Jane makes something that doesn't ultimately not, not resort, that's not right, or, or lean on, but like maybe something that's not purely about the gaze of watching TV and seeing yourself on the screen. But on the other hand, you know, good and great filmmakers repeat themselves. I mean, that's sort of what, what one understanding about tourism is. So, um, one understanding, at least for critics, if not for filmmakers. I think at this point it's conscious. If they were to say, oh, I don't know, I'm doing that, that I wouldn't believe, you know?

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  There's also, I forgot to say about the final girl thing. One of the funniest things I ever interviewed someone about, when I talked to John Carpenter for The New Yorker, uh, and we were talking about the final girl and he's like, I don't know what that is. What is that? I'm like, oh, it's a, it's an essay by Carol Clover. He's like, okay, good. Now I know what that means. And, you know, moved on. I mean, he, much like almost anything, he has no, he, the only thing he had a lot of interest in, other than, you know, some of his own movies was NBA basketball. He's a great basketball fan. But I mean, a filmmaker like Carpenter is not doing this intentionally. Jane Schoenbrun's doing this very intentionally.

• 1:05:11Sean Fennessey?

  No question. I, I.

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  No question.

• 1:05:12Sean Fennessey?

  I think Jane, Jane has a novel and then a Netflix adaptation of Black Hole coming out. And so Black Hole is not, Black Hole is aware of, of genre tropes, but it is not about genre tropes. And so I'll be curious to see how, how much they modernize that graphic novel, because it's really old now. And I, I mean, I, I must've read it. Is, is it possible that it's like 20 years old? When did it come out? It, it's got to be 30 years old.

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head, but yeah, 30 years sounds, uh, 30 years sounds about right.

• 1:05:44Sean Fennessey?

  So that'll be interesting, but that's television. As far as films go, I don't know. I do feel like we're reaching a kind of endpoint because of that progression that you talked about from a, a vlogging to, to fandom, to, to creator.

• 1:06:01Speaker 05

  Well, we even, well, this year we even got, we got the haunted podcast movie.

• 1:06:05Sean Fennessey?

  Sure did, Undertone.

• 1:06:06Speaker 05

  The, the, the, the Canadian haunted podcast.

• 1:06:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Some are saying this has been the haunted podcast for many years.

• 1:06:12Speaker 05

  What, what, what if I had a podcast? Would that be, would that be of interest?

• 1:06:18Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you, it'd be scary. That'd be real scary.

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  It'd be scary. Who, who, who, who can say what's coming? But maybe, maybe, maybe that.

• 1:06:26Sean Fennessey?

  What an elegant, elegant tease.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  Wasn't that, wasn't, wasn't that, wasn't that subtle? Yeah.

• 1:06:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's, you'll be a podcaster yet, Adam.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  One, one, one day. I've been, I, I, what's the line? I've been, I've been taught by masters. Yeah. And it was great to have you in, uh, it was great to have you in Toronto.

• 1:06:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Thanks for having me. Um, thanks for having Amanda and Chris. What a year for Toronto. You guys are doing it. Blue Jays are back.

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  Back, game and a half back. Look at that perfect circle we just traced with the podcast.

• 1:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  You'll have to learn about this when you podcast.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's no, there's nowhere to go now. Um, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

• 1:07:01Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Adam. Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Jane, Hannah and Gillian.

• 1:07:10Sean Fennessey?

  So happy to have Jane Schoenbrun, Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson here to talk about this film. I, you're getting this question a lot, but I do need to hear from all three of you, the first horror film you've seen and, and whether or not it made you a lifelong fan. I think I know the answer to the second question for you, Jane, but where did you start?

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  First horror film that I saw, I think technically was my grandma's copy of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

• 1:07:36Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, is that a horror movie?

• 1:07:38Sean Fennessey?

  I think so.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  I, I watched it like it was a horror movie as I knew about Frankenstein. I was like, oh, this guy? And these goofballs. And they also had, um, Night of the Living Dead on VHS. So then I watched that. And so it was like dipping my toes further into the water. With your grandparents, like watched it live with your grandparents? I forget if I watched it live with them or I just like waited for them to leave the room and, and grabbed, grabbed the cassette.

• 1:08:03Sean Fennessey?

  Did you not have a lot of guardrails in terms of what you could watch as a kid?

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  No, I, I, I famously watched, um, with my parents at age like.

• 1:08:11Speaker 07

  I must have been eight or nine, the first episode of South Park, the first broadcast, like when it aired live. I was there. Whoa, history. Everyone who watched it started to ban.

• 1:08:24Speaker 07

  No, yeah, I was watching some nasty stuff from a very young age.

• 1:08:28Sean Fennessey?

  Hannah, what about you?

• 1:08:29Speaker 07

  Absolute freak. I would have, I think mine is Silent Hill.

• 1:08:33Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:08:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, I remember being so terrified. It's kind of a little girl's nightmare being separated from your mom and sort of like in a world filled with scary creatures and ghouls and.

• 1:08:47Sean Fennessey?

  Were you a gamer?

• 1:08:48Speaker 07

  No, I just, my, my, my mom showed it to me. She just is like a real horror head. She wanted to watch it. It came out in 2006. So I must have been in like, I think sixth grade or maybe fifth grade. And I was really scared. It freaked me out. But I actually revisited it because we've been having a lot of these kinds of conversations. And I rewatched it and I found it to be so beautiful. I think I more so identified with the perspective of the mom. And it's also just like beautiful filmmaking, actually. And it looks great. And I hear that for folks who are fans of the video game, it's a faithful adaptation.

• 1:09:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Did you stick with horror? Or were you, was that not really a genre for you growing up? Yeah?

• 1:09:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, I did. I wouldn't say I was all the way in, but I think it was one element of my media diet.

• 1:09:41Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Jillian, what about you?

• 1:09:46Speaker 07

  I've now told this story so many times, I'm slightly boring myself. But I.

• 1:09:50Sean Fennessey?

  You can lie to me if you want and tell a new story.

• 1:09:52Speaker 07

  No, but then I get myself into a world of pain. I had a bad trip at somebody else's house, somebody I didn't know very well when I was very young. And it was just some really, really strong marijuana. And, and they decided to put on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And I couldn't get out. I couldn't, like, if I went outside, it would have been dark. And I didn't know them real well. It was just a one room apartment. And so it was just, it was just horrific. And that was kind of the first and the last horror film I saw.

• 1:10:30Sean Fennessey?

  Really?

• 1:10:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Sean Fennessey?

  And so you don't, you don't have a huge relationship to it?

• 1:10:34Speaker 07

  No, I, I watch, I can watch the gruesomeest true crime stuff, but I can't watch horror. And even when my kids watch it in other, in other rooms, if I hear the sound or I hear some, I, I need to like plug my ears kind of thing. It's so strange. I get really triggered.

• 1:10:51Sean Fennessey?

  That's, it maybe explains a little bit about why you haven't been in a lot of movies like this. But I kind of wanted to ask you about that, Jane, too, in terms of how you found these two actors and maybe like what they, they represent to audiences? Was that a component? And how did you figure out who should be in the movie?

• 1:11:09Speaker 07

  Jillian made this great Instagram, Twitter post recently, where you were posting pictures of yourself from, from back in the day and, and then posting pictures of Hannah and how similar, like the energy is. And this is like, actually, I think something I was aware of when, when coming up with like a pairing. Yeah, there's something like, I mean, obviously, there's something psychosexual going on in this movie in general. But like, I just, I had this impulse that like, there's never been a, a like pairing of like two actors who are starring in like an erotic thriller of sorts that's been quite deranged in this

• 1:11:48Speaker 07

  style. There's just like, yeah, something about the two of them together, just immediately, like I knew, I knew it was going to be like, I think maybe because of how similar you seem in some ways, and you're very different people, knowing you well at this point. But at first I was just like, yeah, it felt mischievous in a way that I couldn't quite explain.

• 1:12:10Speaker 07

  I love that. And, and that was exciting. But no, I was a fan of, of both, of both of them. Obviously, Jillian, I grew up watching. It was very strange meeting Jillian for the first time because, yeah, I just like, I did spend like so much time with you when I was like eight years old, like really, like, I think probably like as much as my siblings. Like, I was so, yeah, I just, I lived, I lived in the screen, obviously. And, and so then meeting you and feeling like, oh, I kind of like, like, there's something like almost Pavlovian, you know, like, and not just like, oh, I've seen you in things, but like, I know you from like a past life or like childhood in some deep way. And, and

• 1:12:54Speaker 07

  then that familiarity, like now it's invisible to me because like very quickly, we just like started forming a connection as people. And, yeah, and you're, you're, you're so different than the roles, all of the roles I've seen you in. And that's what's so wonderful about like this performance and all of the others. But yeah, there is definitely like the iconography in the film that was in my head while writing it. And I was, I was thinking about Jillian while writing it of like, yeah, like somebody who, who, who we, when we see her will believe her as like this icon from like, you know, a past life or, or a past

• 1:13:33Speaker 07

  like franchise or something. But I think more than that, there is this like, yeah, there are very few actors who can like make the entrance that, that Jillian makes in this movie. And it has something to do, I think, with like, like the classical old Hollywood, like, just like glitter or something. There, there is something that is like, yeah, you can't fake that. And you can't like invent that on the fly. You know, you can't cast somebody that like, we've never seen before or never seen in that way. Like, there is just like this elegance that goes beyond like elegance that becomes like the dream that we've been enjoying in the cinema for 100 years. In, in, in just like the way Jillian

• 1:14:18Speaker 07

  inhabits space and, and physicality and the screen. And, and I knew that. And, and that moment when she does enter the movie, it's like, it is asking a lot to be earned, I think. And, and there are very few people in the world who could earn it like Jillian does. And Hannah, I was a fan of, through hacks, but I watched her standup special. I've talked about this before, too. She's heard me gush about it, but she's psycho. The way that she was like dancing with the camera in that special, I like went beyond, yeah, she's, she's great.

• 1:14:53Sean Fennessey?

  You're crazy.

• 1:14:53Speaker 07

  Like, she, she is a little crazy. Like, like, we've spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks in the back of like cars in random cities, getting ushered to screenings. And, and I'm like realizing more and more like how Gina Rollins Hannah is. Hannah is like. That's crazy. Hannah's, Hannah's a loon. And such a performer, but like, yeah, and like so like perennially caffeinated or something. And, and so such a natural performer. I feel like you are most comfortable performing in a way that is like a little deranged. And I saw that in your standup. And I was like, oh, I think that America needs to like learn a lot more about how deranged this person is.

• 1:15:37Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know how purposeful this was, but I'm curious to hear you guys react to this because it's sort of in the text of the movie, you know, like, we're being leveraged while we're watching the movie, thinking about like you as an icon of a certain kind of, you know, film and television, and you as a person, you know, you're basically starring in your first feature film, you're making your first, first big feature in the film. I don't know if that was an intention on your part, but how did you think about that? Did you see yourselves and your careers and your work going into these particular characters when you were making the movie?

• 1:16:13Speaker 07

  I mean, I, I understood from, from the standpoint of, of franchise and being in iconic space, whether that's because of, you know, X-Files being an iconic show, certain characters that I played having iconic status. And, you know, it's a common relationship that fans seem to have with the, with their, with their particularly female stars that

• 1:16:53Speaker 07

  they're enamored of, to refer to them as being icons or, you know, mothers or whatever those words are these days.

• 1:17:02Sean Fennessey?

  Are you getting that?

• 1:17:02Speaker 07

  They're bandied about in socials. And so, you know, not to poo poo it or shrug it off or whatever, because obviously it's a huge, you know, it's an honor and a privilege to even be categorized in that way. But it's, it's, so I, I got that aspect of it. I got the, the, the value of having someone with my history being, you know, playing Billy. And so I did understand that. But also, you know, the Sunset Boulevard reference, and

• 1:17:44Speaker 07

  even though I didn't want to play into that too much throughout the whole thing, there were certainly aspects throughout that were fun to play with, you know, not least in some of the costuming and stuff. So it was both. But it also became part of the, the joy and the fun and the comedy of it, you know, because she's so much more than that, that trope.

• 1:18:14Speaker 07

  And, and I think she, Billy, also plays with it. You know, she, she knows the power that she has. She knows what she's doing. She knows. So she's both very self-conscious and completely not self-conscious at the same time. And, and in there lies a kind of a naivete and an innocence with that, which I really liked. And so she feels, she feels much more complex than what you would expect from a character who represented that, I think. Yeah.

• 1:18:52Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like Chris is very self-conscious. And, and I don't know if any of your own self-consciousness went into being that character.

• 1:19:01Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I, and I think to your previous question as well, like, I think the consciousness of self, like, was I having sort of a meta-awareness of the fact that like, archetypally, I have similarities here. I think my work was to really try to forget all of those things and really tap into a completely different frequency. Like, I am so lone, slow, like Callie vibes. Like, and so I was just trying to be like, how can I? Go west, go east, for me. You know what I mean? Like, how can I embody this new frequency and only bring myself to it when it comes to like, the very deep and the emotional, when it comes to the intimate, you know, emotional truths that the film is trying to communicate?

• 1:19:46Speaker 07

  And especially via the character that I was playing. Like, I definitely think that the only times that I brought anything from,

• 1:19:54Speaker 07

  anything that was true for me in were in those intimate moments. And so I think I tried my best to really forget all of those other things. Because what I really, really was committed to trying to do was to feel like a different character and like a different person from myself. Yeah.

• 1:20:14Sean Fennessey?

  That feel like a big shift from what you've been doing on Hacks?

• 1:20:17Speaker 07

  Of course.

• 1:20:18Sean Fennessey?

  So how do you do that? Like, you've been doing this for a while. You know you're gonna transform. You're thinking about a new character. But it's still, it's a relatively big change if you're moving off of a comedy series that seemingly has elements of your own experiences in life.

• 1:20:31Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, well, first of all, like, the text is so rich. And so there's so much there for me to latch on to. Also, I spent a lot of time with Jane, who, you know, imbued some of their emotional truths into the material. But also, like, I was absorbing some mannerisms and things like that from Jane. And then also, just like, honestly, I was so shocked at how much wardrobe and costume, like, the frames, like, the specs, putting them bangs on. I was like, okay, new bitch in the building, you know? Like, I just, like, really, all of that stuff. Like, why wearing like, a long skirt and socks and those Mary Janes and like,

• 1:21:17Speaker 07

  three sweaters and just like, that is like, such a, you know, that is such a useful tool for me to tap into kind of the discomfort and the self-consciousness in those things that affect the physicality of the body itself. So it just, I kind of like, went with it. Like, I didn't understand that that was going to happen. I was kind of like, yeah, any day now, I'm gonna figure out what I'm doing here. And then we did the fittings and I was like, okay, this is different, you know? And yeah, like, the first time that I did those fittings, I was just starting to move around and look in the mirror. And like, my body was just changing. And my, the way I was holding myself was just changing. And I started to like, yeah, just feel it. It was super psychedelic, really cool.

• 1:22:01Sean Fennessey?

  Jane, last time we talked, I think we spent some time talking about tone. And I do feel like the tone of this movie is different from the previous two movies. Like, it is a very sincere, direct piece about sex and desire and some other things. But then it is, it feels like an active satire at the same time.

• 1:22:19Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 1:22:19Sean Fennessey?

  And that's really hard to pull off. So I'm curious, like, how you thought about making those two things fit together? But then maybe even more specifically, how you make actors get on the wavelength to hit that tone?

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was really scary. And something that I like, knew for me was like, at the absolute heart of the project. Like, I, I think it's like, a filmmaker's goal, at least for me, is to like, create a body of work that's like, representative of like, the full scope of like, how you experience the world and process things. And, and especially, I still think of myself as like, fairly early on in what I hope is like, a long filmography. I want each film to be like, surprising in some way. Or at least, like, even for myself, expanding the like, definition of what I'm allowed to do. And I think I'm like, pretty goofy and funny, you know?

• 1:23:11Speaker 04

  Like, and the first two films, like, obviously, like, those are films that came out of early transition and they're really intense. And I was like, my life was exploding around me. And I was like, I will capture the pain. And it's pure distilled form. And I didn't want to do that again, because I wasn't in a, I wasn't in the same place. It would have been unnatural, you know? Or like, it would have been this like, mining of a well of like, um, yeah. I, I think that I was actually really scared about this. But like, it was amazing to make something that I'm prouder of than anything I've made so far that like, didn't feel depleting in that way. Or that like, the, um, the good art doesn't have to equal,

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  like, ripping out your insides in front of the world. Um, even though a lot of the art that I like seems to be of that variety.

• 1:24:04Sean Fennessey?

  There's some ripping out of the insides in this movie, though.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. We did a little bit, we did a little bit of ripping out of some insides.

• 1:24:11Speaker 04

  No, I was like, I want a blood geyser in the first scene. And it's like, this is my like, line in the sand of like, um, if you are coming in expecting kind of like, a slow, sad, emo, uh, you know, like, dirge.

• 1:24:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then the other thing that was really scary was like, yeah, doing something that's like, unselfconsciously campy. And yeah, like, kind of like, fast-paced Whit Stillman kind of dialogue and, uh, stonery and, and just like, doing a lot of goofs and gags. I think you just risk like, really embarrassing yourself, you know? Like, a class clown who like, isn't funny. That was the fear. And being in rooms where people like, are enjoying the humor of the movie or like, feel that the perspective, like, that they can like, go along with it and have a good time has been so gratifying. Because it, yeah, it's just a huge part of who I am. And, um, and it did feel like, uh, yeah, like, freeing to, to be myself

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  in the movie in a way that like, I hadn't before. I, um, yeah, I, I remember really feeling on set like, liberated from some, some like, conception of myself post-TV glow of like, oh, I'm like, I'm the like, sad teen person, you know? Or like, this fear of that as the like, one-hit wonder or something of like, everything is defined by what that movie's tone was, because it was such a moment for me. And I, you know, and in general, making this movie and being like, oh, I feel so free making something completely different. And I'm looking at it and I'm realizing that like, I can have a long career of doing things that are surprising and different.

• 1:25:55Speaker 04

  Like, that was a really, yeah, it was like, five years of living in this reality of like, maybe every, maybe everything will sort of be in the shadow of that. And immediately with this one, I was like, no, I'm gonna have like, a whole life and career of making things that are completely different.

• 1:26:12Sean Fennessey?

  Forgive the simplicity of this, but how do you know you're doing it right when you're in a movie that doesn't really have a lot of comps? Like, I couldn't, there's not a ton of movies you can specifically explicitly compare this to. So when you're performing, you're obviously getting direction and you're having conversations. But I'm curious, like, how you know, is this too campy? Is it not campy enough? Is it funny enough?

• 1:26:33Speaker 07

  It's such a good question.

• 1:26:36Speaker 07

  I, uh, I mean, for me, over the years, I guess partly it's been trusting my instinct on things. I feel like there've been times where I've showed up with quite a bold choice.

• 1:26:54Speaker 07

  I remember with great expectations, uh, many years ago, I, I hadn't really even done her voice out loud to myself, let alone to anybody else, when I showed up on set the first day and spoke as her in front of the camera. And it only occurred to me after the fact, like, after we were done shooting, that the director could have said, what the fuck are you doing? It's just weird. Like, don't, this, no, no, let's try something else. And I, um, and I guess I've had a few instances like that where, you know, where, where, I was asked a question the other day on one of the things that we were doing.

• 1:27:39Speaker 07

  And one of the things that I said that I, I wouldn't have been prepared for as a drama student was the degree to which you're so often on your own when you're trying to put all this stuff together and work all this stuff out. Because so much of the time, you know, if you're doing television or you're doing a few episodes or something, or you're doing, you know, there's not necessarily that rehearsal period with directors or there's not necessarily, you know, you really kind of show up on the day and you're meant to go. And, you know, I've made some pretty bold choices over the years that may or may not have worked, but they could have, you know, really not.

• 1:28:21Speaker 07

  And, um, but I felt like, with Jane,

• 1:28:29Speaker 07

  I felt like from the moment we started talking about the project, that even though, um, I was, you know, in my head was keen on doing southern, in particular, southern. And even, uh, you know, the makeup choices with the twiggy eyes and, and all the different aspects, I could trust that they would find a way to gently tell me that it wasn't working, if it wasn't, or whether it was too much, or whether, you know? And so I felt in that instance that, um, that we'd have a dialogue and real communication about it. Whereas there's other things that I've done where, um,

• 1:29:11Speaker 07

  I, that, that level of trust or potential collaboration wasn't necessarily there. And it really was, it felt like it was winging it a lot more, which I think is a lot of what happens these days. There's a lot of really talented directors out there who aren't necessarily good at communicating with actors. They may be good at the visuals and they may be good at the technical aspects, but they're not, uh, also so knowledgeable about what is needed from every single scene, from the performers, that they know even how to communicate that. And that's quite a rare, um, talent in and of itself. And Jane certainly has that, or I found that.

• 1:29:51Sean Fennessey?

  What about for you, Hannah?

• 1:29:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know in Avatar where they take their braid and they connect it to the tree branch? And then they're able to kind of just like, download the truth?

• 1:30:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I know all about it. Thank you.

• 1:30:03Speaker 07

  So, so that's kind of what it's like for me. Me and Jane kind of just...

• 1:30:06Speaker 04

  Am I the tree?

• 1:30:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, of course. Yes, obviously.

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  I'm the tree from Avatar.

• 1:30:14Speaker 07

  Literally. It's just like, that sort of like, that's the connection. It's the connection, like, the script is kind of that, like, connection point. But also, like... We just had like a lot of deep and vulnerable conversations about the subject matter. And for me, my approach was just to be like, what is the reality here always? Like, just tapping into that, that's all I was concerned with. I think that like, scene to scene, you can sort of tell as you're moving through the work on the day, like what it's asking of you. That sort of ending is is far different from some of the more comedic beats, you know, but even in this Zoom call, which like is this comedic point in the film, like

• 1:30:59Speaker 07

  for Chris, that is dead, dead fucking serious. Like she has just had this crazy experience. She's coming like, you know what I mean? Like for the comedy, it has to be serious. And so I'm always approaching the work of like, what is real to this person? Like, no concern for the meta, sort of the, you know, the way that it's being perceived, just like staying in the reality of the thing.

• 1:31:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's great to hear you say that. It's the funniest scene in the movie. I assume that scene comes out of whatever water bottle tour you went on

• 1:31:29Sean Fennessey?

  period after the first or second film?

• 1:31:32Speaker 04

  I would, you know, I have been getting this question a lot and

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  one of the, I think like one of the earliest inspirations for this idea in the movie in general of like zombie IP, right? Of like, find the, find the like minority creator who who like pairs up to the material that like lets you resurrect the otherwise unresurrectible franchise. Was after World, like right after World's Fair, I was getting, I was getting like, like what happens after you premiere your like tiny little art film at Sundance and you happen to be trans is like, you just get like a slew of scripts written by cis people that like haven't been getting made about trans people. And they're like, oh, we got, we get you in here. But I also got submitted the Leprechaun reboot.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  And I was so amused by this because it's like, like a like something clicked in my brain where I was like, I think they're sending this to me because they think that like trans will cancel out.

• 1:32:33Speaker 04

  They're like, they're like, oh, if we got a trans director, like no one's going to ding us for making a Leprechaun movie.

• 1:32:38Sean Fennessey?

  The Irish Little Person movie?

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  Maybe that got me started thinking about this whole sort of like idea of like, um, yeah, like plugging up their holes of like, potential like cancellations on the internet or whatever from franchises. But yeah, no, it, I think it's just like, I, I tried to let what needs, like whatever, when you're making a movie, you know, and I work on these movies before I show it to anyone for, for like years often. It's like, um, you're just listening to your world, you know, and you're keeping your antenna up and you're letting in the things that are coming in and post TV glow or during TV glow, like,

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  yeah, there were a lot of Zoom meetings and being like the trans person in the room on those Zoom meetings and dealing with the social dynamics. And I'm, you know, like, I'm sensitive. I'm sensitive to power dynamics and to the thing that's unsaid in the room or on the Zoom. Yeah, that was like a big part of my life. It still is a big part of my life, like being trans in Hollywood and being in those spaces and being both like tokenized and also like having some like, yeah, like otherness that that is being like commodified or whatever and participating in that commodification and like seeing some of the worst men in the world do their thing.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it just like, it had to be in the movie because like I was a trans person trying to make another movie in Hollywood and, you know, it's like, it's pretty on the nose about it, but um, it would have felt a lot less truthful, especially, you know, especially because it's a movie that's like trying towards liberation. Or that's trying towards like some ideal of like free queer expression, right? This is what Hannah's character is like really questing towards in the movie is like, I want to make something that is like, as she says, beats Hollywood at its own game or is like, yeah, like free to express itself without the shackles of those men on those Zoom calls.

• 1:34:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:44Speaker 04

  And so like, in a sense, I was trying to do that. And I was also very aware that like, that's not possible entirely in this space because of like all of the other forces at play. And, and so it just like for the movie to feel honest to me, it needed to be a part of it.

• 1:35:00Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. It's like your confrontation with the Minotaur or something and you have to try to get past the Minotaur. This is like a much more practical question, but I was curious about this because Jane, you mentioned the, the geysers of blood. From a practical perspective, when you're working on a scene that has a lot of blood,

• 1:35:17Sean Fennessey?

  you have to reset. What happens? Like, do you have to just change wardrobe completely? Is the set being completely cleaned and re, I've never talked to anybody about this and I feel like this-

• 1:35:28Speaker 04

  Great. No, it's a great question.

• 1:35:29Sean Fennessey?

  So what happens?

• 1:35:30Speaker 07

  Depends on the budget. Yeah. So you know how in Avatar, there's

• 1:35:36Speaker 07

  no, uh, it's crazy for sure. I have, uh, personally, I have sensory issues. I have like sensitivity to certain sounds and sensations on my body. One of which is any liquid with any sort of fabric that is, um, like if there's water on me, let's say I'm out of the shower and I don't dry off properly and I put like a shirt on.

• 1:36:02Speaker 07

  Crawling, skin crawling, even if it's water. Okay. So I'm coming into the situation like, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna absolutely die and I'm passing away in real time. And so basically it was crazy. I was like sticky head to toe with the like blood that was on our faces. And then there was the tube, the side sort of tubing, which pumps the blood into my mouth that I'm choking on. But it's also spilling out of my mouth and filling the beds. The bed is, is soaking up with blood, like completely soaked. And there's, we didn't have a backup bed, I don't think. So I was-

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  And like that day, like they kept making these like really sloppy mistakes. I, it was like one of the only times that I got so protective of you and I realized how much you were suffering. I was like, Hannah is suffering.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  Reset that bed.

• 1:36:55Speaker 07

  You were literally mama bear. Okay. You were like, get away from my cub, literally. But, um, yeah, it was really crazy. It was really, yeah, we had to time like the blood filling up for me and then Gillian, the blood coming out of her mouth and spitting onto my face.

• 1:37:13Speaker 04

  There's like a guy under the bed with like a pump.

• 1:37:15Speaker 07

  He's just going, go. And it was, it was pretty cool though. The, the blood, they were mixing it up with a, um, drill.

• 1:37:23Speaker 07

  Just like, zzzing, like drill into a bucket of blood.

• 1:37:25Sean Fennessey?

  Driller killer. Yeah.

• 1:37:26Speaker 07

  Really crazy. But yeah.

• 1:37:28Sean Fennessey?

  So that sounds horrible. Honestly, that doesn't sound fun at all.

• 1:37:31Speaker 07

  It was most horrible. I will say this though, I've never felt more beautiful than when I was covered in blood.

• 1:37:36Sean Fennessey?

  Why?

• 1:37:37Speaker 07

  I just felt like it was, um, I, I don't know how to describe it. I just think that last split diopter shot with Gillian and I in blood is just like glorious and liberatory. And perhaps because on some level I'm realizing in real time that Jane expressed something to me about the gas station scene in the end where like, they were like, you know, like being visibly trans and moving through the world, like sometimes in certain areas or in certain settings, like, you know, there's that cutaway to that old guy who's like,

• 1:38:14Speaker 07

  you know what I mean? It's like, sometimes people look at me like I'm covered in blood, but like it is this moment where the characters are just in love and they don't care. And that was so meaningful to me. And so I think when I got into the blood, I was feeling like I was tapping into that acceptance and love and beauty and like all of the things that I feel like Jane has like walked this hard fought path to, to tap into and feel. And perhaps I made some association between what you shared with me and how it felt to be in the blood.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  You also look great.

• 1:38:46Speaker 07

  And also, honey, come on.

• 1:38:48Sean Fennessey?

  So I assume the film was not shot in sequence, but one thing that I love about it is it does really feel like the two of you are creating a genuinely intimate relationship over time across the movie. I was wondering like how much time you spent together before the movie or did you talk on set? How do you create the illusion of connecting?

• 1:39:11Speaker 07

  We had a few days before we started shooting, rehearsing. We had a, we read a couple of scenes over a couple of days. We chatted from time to time, but you've either got a connection or you don't. I mean, it's either there or it isn't, it feels like.

• 1:39:27Sean Fennessey?

  Do you try to withhold anything? When you're meeting someone early and you know, like what work you have to do?

• 1:39:33Speaker 07

  Not purposely. I don't feel like I do.

• 1:39:38Speaker 07

  I think we just both really thought a lot about what we were gonna do and like made our individual decisions about what we were gonna bring to the movie and like really did some deep and serious meditation on like how that progression should happen. And then in collaborating with Jane, kind of modulating that and steering it.

• 1:39:58Speaker 07

  I just think like the end product of this thing is like everybody having the same idea of what the movie is.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  And how that obviously and how that like, you know, hinges so much upon what happens between us. I think we just like.

• 1:40:13Speaker 07

  I think it was helpful that we started pretty much at the beginning, though, in the film. I think that, you know, whenever one can do that, it can only be helpful because so often you, you know, your first day is your death day or your divorce day. Or that's been my experience. But also, one thing I didn't realize beforehand, how, how much I would need to walk a fine line between,

• 1:40:46Speaker 07

  you know, I didn't want to be a predator. I didn't want to be creepy. I didn't want to make the first move. I didn't want to be too maternal, you know, all those things that, and there were so many scenes and opportunities to go one way or the other in that wouldn't have been beneficial to their journey together. And, and I suddenly realized that it was something that I really needed. It needed a lot of thought and care, and I hadn't anticipated that quite so much. I mean, I think I brought it up at some point, particularly in regards to the, our first kiss. And, you know, not even necessarily even wanting to lean in,

• 1:41:31Speaker 07

  but allowing her to take her, you know, to really be in her power at that moment and be the, the seducer. And, you know, and so I think because, because we were able to start at the very beginning of our relationship, there's a certain point where I'm kind of in the clear, in a sense, because we fall quite quickly after the, you know, after the first intimacy scenes, after the scene where I put the, we're smoking the joint and stuff. It feels like from that point on, it was safe to fall in love in a way.

• 1:42:14Speaker 07

  Or it's safe to show that, that I'm equally smitten and stuff. So it was, you know, it was, but yeah, and yeah.

• 1:42:25Speaker 04

  Well, and, and for me, it was, I, I, I got to know both of you guys individually in the lead up to it. And, but no, it wasn't until two or three days before production that we did the first rehearsals all together. And seeing you both like read, like we, we just read through a bunch of times, those, those early scenes where you're meeting each other. And, and I, I remember just being like, oh, this is the movie. Because it's like, it's, it's the accent that Jillian is doing. And it's, it's the like strangeness of the way that you're like playing each other a little bit at the beginning there. But it's just like, um, yeah, the disconnect and yeah, it's a very specific energy that you enter with that.

• 1:43:06Speaker 04

  Like I had a fuzzy picture of in my mind, but it was like only until I, I saw you both together that like, what the chemistry actually was, started to reveal itself. And then you're like, yeah, I also am glad we shot in the order we did because then it like, you, you let one thing inspire the other. Like I remember that first day when we were shooting the, like you guys getting ready to eat dinner together. And I was talking about this the other night to Jillian, like the, I feel like something opened up for me with the movie when I saw her like patting the chicken, you know, she's like putting so much chicken on this platter. And then she kind of is giving this very elegant, caring pad. And Eric was like, we gotta get a close up of that chicken pad. And I was like, totally agree.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  But I was like, yeah, there's like a freak, there's a weird kid energy to the film and the way they fall in love that I think is like very queer. And, and like, there's something of like equality in it too, right? It's like you're, you're looking for these signals in each other that you're like game, to just be like freaky, you know, and to do these like sort of, um, yeah, like, like, uh, like these mating rituals of like eating chicken or like enjoying dipping sauce or being like, go get scared in my room, like just like do it, like, like matching each other's freak in this way that.

• 1:44:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, but what I didn't realize until after I started talking about it in, you know, for these interviews is, is that those scenes couldn't have been played like foreplay scenes. The way that they worked was playing them straight up for what they, um, uh, you know, they were, it's an eating dinner scene. And even though there's a particular way that Jane wanted me to say, do you like dipping sauce? And et cetera, et cetera. And they had it in their head for me in terms of what worked was the juxtaposition between Billy's, um, uh, Billy's naivete and innocence,

• 1:45:06Speaker 07

  which I keep coming back to, you know, which leads to, you know, Mickey did that, you know? And the juxtaposition between that and Hannah's anxiety and nervousness and, and diatribe and et cetera, that those two, the two rhythms of that and, and speed of their, of how they exist in the world are the tension that actually makes their, their coming together more alive and more interesting in a way.

• 1:45:42Speaker 07

  And, and I think had I been playing too much, um, you know, that, that it was a seduction, I think that some of that might've been lost. And I didn't, I don't think I even realized that until after the back.

• 1:45:57Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:45:59Sean Fennessey?

  Hannah, did you feel like, in the same way we were talking about maybe some of your experiences mapped being seduced and being asked to be in such intimate settings in your first big movie? Did you bring some of those same anxieties to any of this experience?

• 1:46:14Speaker 07

  You know what? Um, I think I felt so much anxiety leading up. And then I think genuinely when we got to the island and Jane and I did our first rehearsal, I had so much relief. And after Jillian and I did the scene work together, it was like total relief. Like I just felt like, okay, this is like, I, I feel that the thing is working and it's here.

• 1:46:41Speaker 07

  I think that that really just was my work to keep up that anxiety and to just maintain that frequency for sure. I think like the intimate scenes, the thing is that like just, I don't know. Like I said, Jane and I did so much talking about what we had to portray there, but also the ways in which the thing that's being portrayed is true for us both.

• 1:47:12Speaker 07

  And it was through that that I felt genuinely like walking in confident to portray something that is incredibly familiar to me. So, um, yeah, I don't, I don't know that I was actually feeling any of that. I think it was kind of all, all of a sudden, acting, baby. Well, the minute, the minute Hannah walked out, you know, naked, but for her underwear

• 1:47:41Speaker 07

  in, uh, from the bathroom, there was such, she was completely spellbinding. Like she came out with such confidence and was radiating, um, a, a sexiness and an assuredness. And, and it's like, you couldn't take, you couldn't take your eyes off her.

• 1:48:02Speaker 04

  You guys are recording?

• 1:48:06Speaker 04

  The cameras are recording?

• 1:48:11Speaker 07

  No, but it's so true. I was completely bowled over.

• 1:48:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm trying not to say anything. It is like the buddy love and the nutty professor thing where you're like, oh, wow. It is like, there's a transformational, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:25Sean Fennessey?

  Who's more embarrassed, me or you right now?

• 1:48:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's all natural, man. It's cool. Acceptance, man.

• 1:48:36Sean Fennessey?

  Millennial question for you. I, I need to hear you talk about, uh, the Counting Crows needle drop. I, I think I need to hear like the, the exegesis on this.

• 1:48:49Speaker 04

  My, my second cousin was their guitar tech.

• 1:48:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow. What a connection.

• 1:48:55Speaker 07

  Did you know that? Have you heard that before? You're dropping this now?

• 1:48:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I went to see them when I was like 11 years old and, and, and went backstage and got their autograph on like a, on a glossy, you know, like on a, on a, on a promotional photo. And, uh,

• 1:49:09Sean Fennessey?

  Can you recreate Duritz's facial expression in that glossy?

• 1:49:12Speaker 04

  Um, I'm gonna pass it over to my actors for that one.

• 1:49:18Speaker 04

  Hannah, get, get in the, get in the hair chair for those dreads.

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  I love the Counting Crows. Yeah. I mean, they're in rotation. I had a big breakup in 2024. Um, I was like finished. I was getting ready to like, start really like making this movie. And I wrote the script for Night Swimming, another millennial banger. Maybe that's a Gen X banger.

• 1:49:42Sean Fennessey?

  We share it. Yeah, we share it. I claim it too.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  And, uh, and I would, yeah, for whatever reason, like during this breakup, I reached for, um, Recovering the Satellites, the second Counting Crows record, which I'd always liked, but never as much as August and Everything After. And I was just listening to it and I was in Spain at a festival and I was just sitting at coffee shops in Spain, like really angsty, listening to that record. And it felt like really good in its way. And then like something about Long December just like got stuck in there where I was like, oh my God, I think this might be a better choice than Night Swimming. And Night Swimming is like my favorite song. So I was like, that's crazy. I think it was, um, it's just, it is a perfect song, uh, but it's also, yeah, it's like a song about like. This year has been really long and really shitty and like maybe next year is going to be

• 1:50:30Speaker 04

  better. This kind of like hard won triumphant resilient kind of like becoming that is what that scene is about and in many ways is what the movie is about, but without that song and that tone and those na na na's, you know, it's like, it's all about the contrast between seeing like these geysers of blood and heads flying into the air and that and that kind of like piano vibe. Yeah. And I, somebody put me in touch with, with, with Adam Duritz and we texted a little bit and he said, I've always wanted Long December to be part of a killer Warner.

• 1:51:12Sean Fennessey?

  He literally got one though.

• 1:51:15Speaker 04

  No, he said that. I don't know if he's seen it yet, but I mean, no, I mean, I love The Counting Crows. I could go deep on The Counting Crows. Besides, you want to talk about it, you let me know.

• 1:51:25Sean Fennessey?

  I produced a documentary about them, so I know all that. Yeah, I did. Yeah.

• 1:51:28Speaker 04

  I've seen it. I've seen it.

• 1:51:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Complicated movie. Amazing career, fascinating guy.

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  I think he like, can I say one last thing about The Counting Crows?

• 1:51:37Sean Fennessey?

  Please do, of course.

• 1:51:38Speaker 04

  Well, like, cause I also like, like my band when I was like 15 was Bright Eyes. Like I loved Bright Eyes. And I think there's like a lineage of like, people that was like embarrassing to like if you were a boy. I think that this was sort of the vibe for Counting Crows was like they got, they got like post Nirvana, kind of like a lot of flack for not being like masculine or being like whiny or being like, like too pretty boy or something. I think it has a lot to do with gender, you know, or I think that like, there's like an earnestness and like an emotional forthrightness in that music and in Bright Eyes music that like is wonderful and I

• 1:52:22Speaker 04

  felt really embarrassed to like it during the years that I was growing up and liking it and yeah, deserving of some reclamation.

• 1:52:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Last, last couple of things here. I'm curious, will you make any more horror movies now that you've made one and you're, you're now part of the lineage of this history of film and you, in your first starring role, will you make more? I'm curious, like, cause Scream Queen and Final Girl, these are, these are also iconic delineations in, in movie and TV history. So I'm curious how you feel about them now, having made this.

• 1:52:56Speaker 07

  I, I had actually tried for a while. Jason Blum, I'd met him a couple of times and we tried to make a couple of different things over the years. So I haven't been against it. Also, you know, obviously a good portion of the X-Files was horror adjacent. And so I feel like it's in my bones, even though it's not something that I've been able to absorb as a viewer. I've been offered stuff over the years and, and sometimes, depending on what it is, sometimes it feels so

• 1:53:36Speaker 07

  dark. I just don't know if I can put myself in that place. And, but I'm not adverse to it. It's more of the, of the right thing coming along. And it was important to me that, that, that this

• 1:53:53Speaker 07

  had, it's so much more than, than just that and has so much depth and, and humor, obviously, that, and, and so this feels like a definite first, in a sense. If I was going to have a first, this would be the perfect first. And, but so I'm not, I'm not adverse to it.

• 1:54:17Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. What about you, Hannah?

• 1:54:18Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Speaker 07

  I'm totally down.

• 1:54:20Sean Fennessey?

  Line them up.

• 1:54:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, I don't know. I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of genre agnostic. Like I just like good shit, no matter what it is.

• 1:54:31Sean Fennessey?

  Makes sense. Okay. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? And you're not prepared for this.

• 1:54:39Speaker 04

  No, no, I'm happy to talk about the last great thing I've seen.

• 1:54:41Sean Fennessey?

  Who wants to go first? Jane, you want to go first?

• 1:54:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. The other night, like I've got it to hell. I got to LA. I had a night off. I looked and saw what was playing at the Regal and they were playing End of Evangelion.

• 1:54:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:01Speaker 04

  And so I got myself an extra large Icy and I planted down and that food, that fucking movie is so amazing. That's like one of the great films. And at the end of that movie, the last line is just disgusting. Somebody says disgusting. And that just like put me in the exact right mindset for this press tour week.

• 1:55:28Speaker 07

  I could go.

• 1:55:29Sean Fennessey?

  Go.

• 1:55:30Speaker 07

  I saw a film called Bouchera.

• 1:55:33Sean Fennessey?

  Tell me about it.

• 1:55:33Speaker 07

  It's an animated, sapphic, furry, trilingual, French Moroccan, very like small intimate family drama, dramedy perhaps. It's funny. It's an animation style I've never seen. It's really cool. There is this like, yeah, the visual world is like so intricate and like vivid and thought out and the style of the voiceover is incredibly casual as if there's no script.

• 1:56:10Speaker 07

  And it's super, it was super moving and sweet and romantic and funny. And it was unlike anything I've ever seen.

• 1:56:18Sean Fennessey?

  Where did you see it?

• 1:56:19Speaker 07

  Bouchera. Lemley? Landale?

• 1:56:20Sean Fennessey?

  In the theater. Okay. Cool. Gillian, what about you?

• 1:56:24Speaker 07

  The, the very, very last film I saw was The Invite.

• 1:56:28Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah. What did you like about it?

• 1:56:29Speaker 07

  Olivia Wilde's latest film. And I thought it was fantastic. I, I find her such a confident filmmaker and, and the, the complexity of the relationships and, you know, it's, it's on quite a consistent pitch throughout and yet you don't feel like you're participating in, in, in a scream fest and like, in, it's, it has a lot of undulations and all the characters are such, are so well played by all the actors and Ed Norton and Penelope Cruz are just so phenomenal and watchable. And I just thought it was fantastic.

• 1:57:12Sean Fennessey?

  Another movie that kind of glides between tone pretty comfortably in the same way as your movie. Hey, this was really nice. Jane, Hannah, Gillian, thank you so much for coming in.

• 1:57:21Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:57:22Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:57:24Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Jane, Hannah and Gillian. Thanks to Adam. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for his production support. Next week, we're going to Oak Street, all the way to the end of it. CR and Mallory Rubin will join me to discuss the new dinosaur thriller. We'll see you then.

• 1:57:59Speaker 06

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