‘Tony’ and the Top 5 Coming-of-Age Movies, With Matt Johnson!

Well, there’s only one man to bring in to discuss Matt Johnson’s new biopic, ‘Tony,’ and that’s Anthony Bourdain aficionado Chris Ryan. Before diving into the movie, CR briefly gives a temperature check on the highly anticipated ‘Miami Vice’ sequel. Then, they unpack ‘Tony’ and highlight all of the reasons they found it to be deeply affecting. Later, they both share their top five “coming of age” movies of all time. Finally, Matt Johnson joins the show to tell Sean all of his secrets, because he likes him (his exact words). Johnson explains how Dominic Sessa convinced him to make the film despite his distaste for biopics in general, why he didn’t use any of his traditional filmmaking moves in the movie, and much more. (0:00) Intro (0:54) Chris Ryan joins the show! (2:07) ‘Miami Vice’ reboot temperature check (6:33) ‘Tony’ (33:00) The top five “coming of age” movies (1:00:47) Matt Johnson joins the show! Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Matt Johnson and Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh 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 Fantasy and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Tony. On today's episode, I'll be joined by Chris Ryan to discuss a new movie about a subject near and dear to his heart. Tony, it's the new docu-drama about the early days of chef, author, and TV trailblazer, Anthony Bourdain. The new film is co-written and directed by show favorite Matt Johnson. Matt returns to the show to talk about the task of taking on Bourdain's story and life after the success of his film Nirvana, the Band, the Show, the Movie. Matt is one of the greatest guests in the history of the show. Love hanging out with him, learning from him. You'll want to listen to our conversation. But first, let's talk to CR about Tony and the state of the world right now.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  I'm pro-football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story.

• 1:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:23Speaker 03

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

• 1:30Speaker 04

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• 1:50Speaker 02

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• 2:17Speaker 04

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• 2:23Speaker 05

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• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, CR, we're going to talk about Tony and our favorite coming-of-age films in this discussion.

• 2:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:53Sean Fennessey?

  You've been thinking about The Oval Office recently, and you have some thoughts you wanted to share. Fire away.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  About starting to measure the drapes for myself. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of talk out there.

• 3:02Sean Fennessey?

  Are you stepping in?

• 3:02Speaker 06

  How I could bring this country together.

• 3:04Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 3:05Speaker 06

  I don't know why I'm doing that.

• 3:06Sean Fennessey?

  Were you born in this nation?

• 3:08Speaker 06

  Uh, yes, I was.

• 3:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  I was born in Philadelphia. First generation in some ways, because my dad is from England.

• 3:15Sean Fennessey?

  So what generation was your mom?

• 3:17Speaker 06

  Third?

• 3:17Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, second. Second.

• 3:20Sean Fennessey?

  Better get this right if you're going to be grilled at the podium.

• 3:22Speaker 06

  I think by the time I run, all this stuff is going to be moved.

• 3:26Sean Fennessey?

  What's your platform? What do you stand for?

• 3:28Speaker 06

  Um, Paramount Plus for everyone.

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  Is this going to be a landman-centric platform?

• 3:34Speaker 06

  Every year, every year, we get two Michael Mann sequels or remakes. You know what I mean?

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 3:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  Even if the man is no longer with us, we just keep cranking him out?

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Thieving.

• 3:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:43Speaker 06

  Keep hunting men.

• 3:44Sean Fennessey?

  You said you wanted to consider conjuring some news, even though we're recording a few days early here. Is there anything that's been going on in the movie world that you can foresee?

• 3:53Speaker 06

  Well, I know that I'm on Monday's episode of The Big Picture, talking with you about the end of Oak Street with Mallory Rubin, and that we spoke extensively about X-Men casting.

• 4:00Sean Fennessey?

  We did.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Do you think that it's weird that Miami Vice 85 casting is as important to me as X-Men casting is?

• 4:07Sean Fennessey?

  No, but you know what? We've not had cause to discuss it on the show. In fact, I think that news hit while I was on vacation. Do you want to get into Miami Vice 85? How you're feeling about the idea of this thing existing?

• 4:17Speaker 06

  First of all, Warren Buffett, as we know, has retired.

• 4:22Sean Fennessey?

  As we know?

• 4:23Speaker 06

  But there's another oracle of Omaha.

• 4:25Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 4:26Speaker 06

  And it's me, because the Alden Ehrenreich stock, it never wavered.

• 4:31Sean Fennessey?

  You're not from Omaha.

• 4:32Speaker 06

  We never blink. When we commit, we commit.

• 4:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I was there with you on this one. I don't, you know, I was, I was there when Rules Don't Apply was released. I paid American currency to see that film.

• 4:44Speaker 06

  Did you watch Ironheart, though?

• 4:45Sean Fennessey?

  I did watch it. Was he in Ironheart?

• 4:47Speaker 06

  Only the Alden Ehrenreich scenes.

• 4:48Sean Fennessey?

  I know he's Obadiah Stain's son.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 4:50Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, although his lineage is kind of obscured for some of that series.

• 4:53Sean Fennessey?

  Was he introduced in Ironheart, a Stain's son?

• 4:57Speaker 06

  No, I think he's just like a guy, and then it kind of emerges. But yeah, he's in, it's only Ironheart only.

• 5:02Sean Fennessey?

  And will he, will he be in the Avengers films?

• 5:05Speaker 06

  Somehow, Alden Ehrenreich has returned in Doomsday, yeah.

• 5:09Sean Fennessey?

  Is he going to be a part of the MCU going forward?

• 5:11Speaker 06

  If they know what's good for them, if they want to catch a comet by the tail, yeah.

• 5:15Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, Ehrenreich, I think, is elite, obviously. Oppenheimer into weapons, you can't do better.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  I know.

• 5:21Sean Fennessey?

  So now, he's going to be the villain in Miami Vice 85?

• 5:24Speaker 06

  He's just a DEA agent. So we don't know what side he's on.

• 5:27Sean Fennessey?

  Is that the name of his character?

• 5:28Speaker 06

  Uh, it's DEA agent Mike something, I think, or Scott something.

• 5:32Sean Fennessey?

  You're, the amount of information you have is so poor in these updates.

• 5:36Speaker 06

  This is what having 75% of a story looks like, is when I'm like, I know he plays a DEA agent, I'm pretty sure it's Mike or Scott.

• 5:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, this is an extremely well-respected film podcast. I'd appreciate it if you could come prepared with these news updates.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  I happen to know firsthand that the only version of this film, Film Cup Podcast that people respect is when I'm on.

• 5:56Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 5:56Speaker 06

  No, not the only one.

• 5:57Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it is probably the most respected. I'll give you that. So the cast right now, as it stands, it's Michael B. Jordan, it's Austin Butler, it's, who's our female lead? It's, is it, is it, who is the female lead of this film?

• 6:10Speaker 06

  Well, there's a lot of rumors. Tubbs' girlfriend has been cast.

• 6:14Sean Fennessey?

  Is it Whitney Peake?

• 6:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 6:16Speaker 06

  And there's also talk that in the Daniel Roy script that Joseph Kaczynski is directing, that the importance of Crockett and Tubbs historically is going to be reversed. Obviously, Academy Award winner.

• 6:29Sean Fennessey?

  Is this actually happening?

• 6:30Speaker 06

  I'm, I know with interest that they have cast his love interest first.

• 6:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 6:34Speaker 06

  You know, um.

• 6:36Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I mean, Michael B. Jordan is the bigger star. He's a bigger star than Austin Butler. There's no doubt about it. Oscar winner.

• 6:41Speaker 06

  It's a big tent, you know?

• 6:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you think it's okay for Austin Butler to get in there, too? Okay.

• 6:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:48Sean Fennessey?

  Are you okay with this movie and Heat 2 existing in the same year?

• 6:52Speaker 06

  This is, we were, we were chatting about this a little bit last weekend, about the power of 28, and what's going to happen to this pod, what's going to happen to America, what's going to happen to the film-going populace when we have like a relatively lazy river of a 27, right? Like, we're going to be floating along.

• 7:08Sean Fennessey?

  Lot of franchise stuff, very kid-centric, I would say.

• 7:10Speaker 06

  We were talking sabbaticals already, you know?

• 7:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, maybe I'll take 27 off.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  26 for 26, 27 for 27, maybe?

• 7:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, maybe. And that'll be my 27 favorite episodes of The Big Picture.

• 7:21Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 7:21Sean Fennessey?

  And I'll be recapping them by myself.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  But 28 is so rich and so heavy with, with big titles.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  I, you know, it is very strange that the Michael Mann cult has turned into a legitimate fandom and is now on its, on the precipice of being a franchise.

• 7:38Sean Fennessey?

  Obviously, you've been driving a lot of that over the years, and, and we appreciate the work that you and Bill have been doing in that respect. Is there any chance that this is, if not an illusion, a bubble amongst men aged 37 to 59?

• 7:52Speaker 06

  We have to go higher than that, because we have to include Jerry Bruckheimer in that cohort.

• 7:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, he represents roughly 20 million Americans. No, seriously, like, I wonder if all this zest for 80s and 90s stuff.

• 8:04Speaker 06

  The reason why he became such a big deal is because of a younger generation of fans discovering things like Miami Vice, and Collateral, and Insider, and Manhunter, and, you know, you go to the screenings of these movies, albeit a small sample size in Los Angeles, and they're packed. They're packed, yeah.

• 8:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so, so both movies will make well over $500 million?

• 8:23Speaker 06

  I think so. This is the new obsession in backrooms.

• 8:25Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, cool. Would you like to speak about Tony?

• 8:28Speaker 06

  I would love to.

• 8:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so I needed you to be on this episode, because you are, you and Andy both are the biggest Anthony Bourdain fans. Allegiance that I have in my life. And this movie, on paper, I think is a little concerning. Biopics in general, challenging. Matt Johnson, a very exciting but daring filmmaker, I'll say, someone taking risks, and it's tricky to take a risk with someone that people hold very close to their heart.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:00Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is not just co-written by Johnson, also Matthew Miller, his producing partner, Todd Bartles and Lu Hao, who I think wrote an original version of the screenplay.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Like a blacklist script, right?

• 9:11Sean Fennessey?

  And it is kind of, sort of, based on Kitchen Confidential, the early chapters, though not really, and you can talk a little bit about that, too. It stars Dominic Sessa as Bourdain, Emilia Jones, Dagmar Adamczyk, Rich Summer, Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall, and Antonio Banderas. It is about a man in 1975, a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, who wants to be a writer but takes a summer job at a Cape Cod restaurant, learning under the tutelage of a Brazilian-born restaurateur. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, not necessarily your feelings on Bourdain, because there's an amazing episode of The Watch that you and Andy just released last two weeks ago, about your relationships to him and kind of what he represents to the culture at large, but. When you heard they were making a biopic, I'll, I'll tell you what, I remember when the documentary

• 9:56Sean Fennessey?

  was announced, you, you seemed even a little tight when that happened.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think when that happened, I was still sort of in, for lack of a better term, like a period of grieving about his, his death. So I have, you know, with, with Bourdain, with Tom Petty, with like artists that mean a lot to me. I think when they, when they pass, and especially when they pass tragically like those guys did, it takes a little while for me to get back into the art, just for the art's sake, rather than constantly thinking about how it echoes their passing. And I think I, when the documentary came out, I was like, I don't know, I, I just don't know if I want to participate in the, in the great sport of memorializing this guy, because the thing that I responded to so much in his work was

• 10:43Speaker 06

  it was so alive, you know, even if it was cynical and even if it was looking at, you know, great injustices of the world, or talking about how we needed to be better as people, like it still was so deeply romantic, with a capital R. And I'll tell you what, you can say whatever you want about the accuracy of this movie, the historical period detail, whether or not it's like, feels like a Bourdain movie per se, but this movie captures his combination of romanticism and cynicism so perfectly, and it has such a great soul to it. And I really, really loved Tony.

• 11:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I did too. And I found it to be shockingly and warmly old fashioned.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:28Sean Fennessey?

  And I, in talking to Matt, I told him like, this feels like a movie that Touchstone could have released in 1997, non-pejorative, you know, that there is something traditional about pitching a story this way, about a very successful person's earliest days. But there's a tonality to it. It is very warm, very funny, but not, I wouldn't say it sugarcoats some of the uglier components of this, the version of this person's persona. You know, Bourdain famously struggled quite a bit, very straight talking, at times quite acidic person, behind the scenes, you could tell, sometimes a little tough to work with.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:07Sean Fennessey?

  Challenging, but also very, very true to what he believed in. And it's interesting to try to craft a movie that represents that when he is playing, he's portrayed as a person who doesn't really know what he believes in, who's kind of, this is like an amazing portrait of a, of a person bullshitting, you know, who doesn't, who thinks he wants to be something and has no way of knowing how to get there. And in failing to get there, figures out who he's going to become. Dominic Sessa, what did you think of him?

• 12:32Speaker 06

  I thought he was remarkable, you know, and, and doesn't do a pantomime of Anthony Bourdain. In fact, and I don't really know outside of like, some of the sort of fashion choices, there's a, there's, you know, a moment where he's wearing like a leather jacket that feels like very Anthony Bourdain coded, but like, for the most part, I think, uh, excuse doing mimicry for capturing kind of a idea about a guy. I mean, this is the interesting thing about this movie is that I, I think it works just fine having nothing to do with Anthony Bourdain.

• 13:04Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 13:05Speaker 06

  There are a couple of echoes in some lines of dialogue or some images that obviously project forward to the person he would become and the, the figure he would become. But for the most part, if this was just Matt Johnson wanted to make a Richard Linklater Hollywood movie about a period of time that he was interested in, and I, and I, and a job he was interested in, I think there probably would be like 100% less interest in it, but there would be, it would be a good movie.

• 13:34Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree. There's a theory going around, and I'm, I didn't ask Matt about this, and I regret it, that they didn't want to reveal that this was an Anthony Bourdain movie.

• 13:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:45Sean Fennessey?

  That there was this idea that in very Matt Johnsonian fashion, they might try to promote and release, release this movie without marketing it.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  And in the last scene.

• 13:55Sean Fennessey?

  And then the final scene of the movie, he says his full name for the first time, and we see who he is. He's not Tony, he's Anthony Bourdain. And that's an interesting idea, like probably too clever by half, but I think that what you're describing sort of goes into the making, the conception of the movie is, you're probably not bringing too much of the Bourdain, you don't feel too haunted by the Bourdain experience as you're watching the movie. It's really just, it is a coming of age movie. It's a guy figuring out how he should be in, in the act of chasing a girl. Movies set in kitchens in restaurants are pretty hard.

• 14:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:29Sean Fennessey?

  Most of them are quite bad. I was surprised by how graceful and easy this one was, just in terms of the energy and camaraderie amongst the cooks in this kitchen, the, even the sense of like visual space, how we know where everyone belongs at any given time, where their stations are. It's a very modest space, the Banderas's characters restaurant, but to me, the movie is most alive, most fun, most 1997, when it's all of those chefs in the room, and Sessa is the butt of every joke, and they're giving each other shit. And it's interesting, cause like Bourdain did make hay of that a little bit in, in his writing. But the movie's just very, very, very funny in a way that you expect a Matt Johnson movie to be funny. There are other times where the movie's not very funny, where it's very reflective and sad.

• 15:14Sean Fennessey?

  What did you think about some of the kitchen aspects of it?

• 15:16Speaker 06

  I love the fact that this place, the flagship where the Bourdain characters cooking, you never really have to wonder whether or not like they're ever going to make the Michelin star meal. I mean, the whole point of this place is it does four things, and it's supposed to turn them over quickly. And we've all been in like beachside bar and grills like this where, you know, you just get the burger and then keep it moving. So when you take out the tweezer, can we make the perfect foie gras thing out of it, then it just entirely becomes, this is an action for actors to perform in order to communicate and, you

• 15:56Speaker 06

  know, communicate emotion, communicate character. So I, I love the fact that all of these guys cook in different ways that say so much about them, like especially the Leo Woodall character and the confidence with which he's shucking oysters, and the fact that he really only has to do this one thing, which is make six and six, or make, you know, mixed dozens in, it allows him to kind of just be the cool guy in the kitchen, because nothing is going wrong for him. He doesn't have a broiler, he doesn't have to wash a bunch of stuff, he doesn't have to do tickets, he's just doing his thing. On, you know, on the other hand, like Stavi's character is always kicking a giant flaming broiler and screaming at

• 16:38Speaker 06

  lobsters, and he's got the like really hard job in this kitchen.

• 16:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  So for me, it was like almost less of a food movie and more of a workplace movie.

• 16:47Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  And it really, really knows the workplace, and it really knows the geography of where these guys are standing. I know that Matt shot this like basically handheld with all these like incredible little fixes for how they were going to shoot some of this stuff. Um, yeah, I mean, to me, it was, it was way more of a summer movie and way more of a workplace comedy, or workplace dramedy than it was about like, this is the thing, the, the Proustian Madeline moment that made him realize he wanted to be a chef.

• 17:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the food looks pretty good, but it's not food porn at all.

• 17:16Speaker 06

  True.

• 17:17Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it is very much like, and you even have these moments where, I, I was wondering what you thought about this. Sessa's Bourdain at times slips into a kind of Bourdainian romance when he's describing things. It's like he's lunging for a kind of literary credibility and communicating about the experience of food. And it seems a little tryhard. And I, and there's some things very interesting to me about being so comfortable doing that in a movie that is, in theory, kind of venerating this person, but actually makes him seem, it seemed like it took Tony Bourdain 20, 30 years to figure out how to be poetic about food.

• 17:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I don't think he ever became that way about his own food. So he goes from this restaurant in Provincetown, he winds up going to CIA in, in New York City, is a very funny bit in the movie about whether the CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency or the Culinary Institute of America. He winds up working at Le Hal for a long time, up, up to being executive chef at that steakhouse in, in Midtown. And I was watching all these old episodes for the episode that me and Andy did of The Watch, and he's still in his 40s and 50s, going to other places, and he can't control himself. He's like, oh, I wish I was from San Sebastian and I would work in a tapas restaurant, and I would pour

• 18:39Speaker 06

  this sparkling light chocolina, and we would just stand here in the greatest seafood in the world. And everybody's just kind of like, well, yeah, I mean, this is, this is the neighborhood bar, you know?

• 18:48Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 18:49Speaker 06

  Or he's like, I wish that we would have a boucherie every Wednesday with all my friends in Cajun country. And they're like, yeah, this is kind of how it is. And he, I think he had this incredible passion and way of describing and communicate, communicating his excitement about food, but not necessarily his own food. You know what I mean? Like, he is good at cooking, obviously, and was like an amazing, amazingly important figure in America's culinary awakening, I think.

• 19:17Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 19:18Speaker 06

  But I don't know necessarily that Anthony Bourdain would be like, this is my signature dish, or that this is a kind of food that I introduced that no one had eaten like the way that Red Zepi or whoever has.

• 19:30Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. It's like you, you're a cultural ambassador. You don't, you don't make the stuff, but you make the stuff.

• 19:33Speaker 06

  That's right, man. Those who can't do, teach.

• 19:36Sean Fennessey?

  Very true. The movie is, first of all, it's, you know, an hour and 45 minutes, it flies by.

• 19:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:44Sean Fennessey?

  And it is a series of incidents, in, in the best way. The long arc of the movie is around Bourdain chasing a girl to Provincetown over the summer, played by Amelia Jones. And in doing so, also, you know, lying about getting a fellowship.

• 19:59Speaker 06

  He's stacking lies on all this stuff.

• 20:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, exactly. He's building up this idea of himself and who he is, and trying to figure out how to seduce this girl that he really likes. And.

• 20:07Speaker 06

  It's worth mentioning that Amelia plays Nancy Pekowski is her name.

• 20:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think so, yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 06

  Which was Bourdain's first wife.

• 20:13Sean Fennessey?

  Right. Um, and not, that, most of that doesn't really matter. I think it, like, most of what matters in the heart of the story is seeing moments of revelation for him. And some of them are sort of like very announced. For example, there's a sequence where Leo Woodall, who is on fucking fire in this movie.

• 20:31Speaker 06

  That's my Wolverine.

• 20:32Sean Fennessey?

  I, I mean, he, he would be incredible. He can, he can do anything he wants, as far as I'm concerned. Between Tuna and this, which is two completely different performance styles, two completely different shades of charisma, I'm all in on that guy. But in this movie, he plays, you know, the ghost of future-present, basically. Like, he's, he's like what could happen if you zag the wrong way.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  He plays a guy that every single man in America either knows or is.

• 20:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 06

  And you gotta hope, you gotta hope it's the former.

• 21:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  But it's like.

• 21:02Sean Fennessey?

  But nobody looks like that guy. It's just a lot of guys think they look like him. Like he is the dashing chowder head.

• 21:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:11Sean Fennessey?

  Which is like, maybe not even a real person. Like, maybe no one is that person.

• 21:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 21:15Sean Fennessey?

  But everyone thinks that they are when they're at a certain stage of their life. But for Bourdain's character, he's like an active cautionary tale. He observes him, you know, not just picking up girls quite easily, not just shucking those oysters in the way that you describe, but doing coke, scoring heroin, like getting high beachside and kind of like watching Sessa's character examine whether or not this would be a worthwhile path.

• 21:39Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 21:39Sean Fennessey?

  Is a fascinating, like emotional dynamic of the movie because it's very clear.

• 21:43Speaker 06

  Well, he's being an anthropologist, which Bourdain really was. And he's like, this is in me and my Stooges t-shirt and my beer drinking and my nunchucks. But this is the real thing. This is what it looks like if you go down that road. And this is what it happens when you're however old that guy is supposed to be, 25, 26. And he's like, what I, what my life is going to wind up being is I'm going to be the next guy hauling lobster cages and dealing smack on a, on a dock somewhere in Cape Cod.

• 22:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's a fascinating counterpoint to Van Deris, who, I mean, maybe he was the Leo Woodall of his day, but like, just one of my favorite screen presences of all time. And this is him so in the pocket of a thing that he's so great at, where he's so warm, so grounded. His voice is like fucking poetry to me. I love listening to him, just listening to him read dialogue. And this part, I think would be a shitty part, if not for a great actor, because it's such a base, the nice mentor guy. And he brings so much world experience.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  It's crazy.

• 22:46Sean Fennessey?

  Our relationship to him as an actor. Like, I loved him and I loved the two of them together in this movie.

• 22:50Speaker 06

  So there's basically a baton pass that happens midway through the film. The first half of it, once he gets from Provincetown, Sal takes him under his wing, the Leo Woodall character. They go out, he's, they start bar fights, they, they get into trouble. It's all this like, and then we do this, and then we do that. The movie has such an incredible, like punk rock energy at that point. What an amazing music supervision job.

• 23:14Sean Fennessey?

  Needle drops are insane.

• 23:15Speaker 06

  We'll talk about that in a minute. Sal, at some point, gets fired from the restaurant where they all work at for being late, but also for starting a fight with, with chef. And it's essentially a choice of, you know, is Tony gonna follow Sal into oblivion? Or is he gonna stick at the restaurant? He kind of sticks at the restaurant. And there's this moment about midway through the movie, a chef starts to, you know, educate Tony in the ways of not only a kitchen, but a relationship to craft and service and doing something well, which is something that often comes up in Bourdain's writing and television, where he's like, doing a simple thing really well. And so there's this, my favorite moment of the

• 23:58Speaker 06

  movie is when he gets Tony off the hammock that he's been staying in. They go into the kitchen and he, I guess dilutes salt water down to its sea salt crystals and strains tomatoes down to liquid. And they refill salt shakers with seawater salt and refill ketchup bottles with homemade ketchup. And it's like a two or three minute scene that could have been one to 10 seconds. And it just is supposed to reset the cardiac rhythm of the movie.

• 24:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  And it becomes about grace almost for, for about 40 minutes.

• 24:38Sean Fennessey?

  Quite literally, there's a strain of spirituality running through the movie where chef takes Tony to church.

• 24:43Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:44Sean Fennessey?

  And simultaneously, when he has this severe break with Sal, when they pick the fight, he says, you're the sin eater. And it is the sin eater and the shepherd. And they're kind of these two, this angel and the devil portrayal that like, it's, it's a very kind of linear, clear, structural device in the movie that is very simple, but very, very effective. And it's actually, it does a good job of like distracting you away from the Bourdainishness of the movie, where it's like, it's actually also about these people.

• 25:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's about the people that impact you, not just the person that you are, especially when what you are isn't really anything yet. I like, I like movies like that, that are not about people. And we'll talk about that with some of the coming of age stuff, like these kind of portraits of people in progress as opposed to completed. And the version of the movie that's like Bourdain at Laot, like making steak, that would just be boring to me.

• 25:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, there are all sorts of periods of his life that I think would be fun to evoke, like Lower East Side, 1980s or, or, yeah, like rough and tumble 90s restaurant life. But I, I think that there was something about, this is the first point where Bourdain starts to really self-mythologize. And even in the book and the quote card that's in the beginning of the film, he's like, I was just basically a snotty-nosed, loud-mouthed brat who needed to get his ass kicked. And I did. And that's what the movie is about. But it winds up becoming a little bit more about to what extent we all kind of shape

• 26:14Speaker 06

  our own character and to what extent people around us influence that. I mean, we could probably trade boring stories of throughout our lives, like, it's not, it doesn't have to be like, do heroin or become a world-renowned chef. It could be like, my college roommate really liked fish and he asked me if I wanted to go to a fish show. And I said, no thanks. And if I had gone to that fish show, like, am I sitting here?

• 26:36Sean Fennessey?

  No, I think about that all the time. I have so many formative experiences in high school of people that I met and looked up to in one direction or another. And if I had tried to more specifically mimic their lives, some things would have gone well and some things wouldn't have gone not so well. But it, it is a really great snapshot of a person, like you said, anthropologically, figuring out which road to go down. Now, it's interesting that like so much happens to Bourdain in the intervening 15, 20 years before he becomes this well-known figure. And so it does, it is a little tidy at times, the movie. I found the ending a little tidy.

• 27:10Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 27:10Sean Fennessey?

  Um, yeah. Where something, you know, very dramatic happens in the kitchen that shows that he's not ready for primetime effectively. And that despite all of his kind of yearnings for creativity and to show off for this girl and to show chef that he is, you know, evolving as a man because of all the things that chef has shown him, that he's not ready to do it. And then the film has this kind of like encomium final seven or eight minute sequence with a big fish bake near the end that felt also very touchstone, 1997 to me.

• 27:39Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 27:40Sean Fennessey?

  Where there needed to be like a degree of warmth to the way we went out, which I understand, and I think is very gratifying for audiences. It did feel, it felt a little Studio Notish to me.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  Perhaps. All the characters gather together and fist bump and, and the flagship is saved.

• 27:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, it's not so far afield from the way that, you know, Nirvana, the Band ends, where there's like restitution at the end, you know, like, we're, we're gonna be okay. But that was, that's the one thing in the movie that I felt a little soft on. I was amazed by the music choices. I was like, I feel like my dad, who was alive in 1975, picked the music, you know, like, there's a very, a level of that, like tasteful rock critic plus normie.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  Sure. Yeah.

• 28:26Sean Fennessey?

  Like music supervision here that is very, very good.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  It's hard to fuck up Calvary Cross, but when it hits in this movie.

• 28:34Sean Fennessey?

  On the boat, on the journey to Provincetown.

• 28:36Speaker 06

  And it also comes like in that 15 minutes into the film, the credits start moment, you're just like, fuck, man. Matt can really throw hard.

• 28:43Sean Fennessey?

  I know. It's such a great moment. And it does, it makes you, I remember when the trailer came out, you were like, I don't know, Spoon, what's this about? And, because they were like, Spoon is not, that's not Tony Bourdain.

• 28:52Speaker 06

  Well, I just did, if you were gonna make it, I was just like, who put the Spoon song in here? I also just shot this out. Like, I've got mixed feelings about the over music supervision of, of movies and TV shows in general, and how often I find that like, there will just be like, a random drop where I'm like, clearly this was like, we have a great relationship with Universal Records who would love for us, I mean, you watch any YA show now, you're just like, every scene has three songs in it. The combination or the balance that Tony has between the music drops, the needle drops, and McCarron's score, which I think is beautiful.

• 29:28Sean Fennessey?

  It's so good.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  And.

• 29:29Sean Fennessey?

  Almost entirely piano, very simple.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  And like the different way the cues kind of change color when different moments are happening in the movie. There's the entire project of making this film and the way that they make it and the way that Baumann, Michael Baumann, the cinematographer, and Matt Johnson chose to shoot a lot of the conversational scenes, half blocked by the person who's the typical over the shoulder.

• 29:58Sean Fennessey?

  I noticed this as well. Yeah. The shadow.

• 30:01Speaker 06

  What do you think that was about? But I have, I mean, I have an idea, but what did, what did you think behind that choice?

• 30:07Sean Fennessey?

  I clocked this as well. Um, I don't know, and I wish I had asked Matt about it. I think some of it is the like, you're only talking to yourself quality of the movie.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  I, I, I think that's probably it. I also think there's a degree to which, like, when you're young especially, but in, maybe in no matter what point in your life, you're really only seeing one half of a person. And it's the half that they're showing you at any given moment. But I thought that it really hammered home the, sure, you can argue about the development of certain characters versus others in this film, but this is really a movie about how someone chooses to see people rather than what they're telling him and what they're showing him.

• 30:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 06

  You know, and this is so much of this is, you know, the way that the camera shoots Leo Woodall throughout the first half of this movie is like, this guy is James fucking Dean. He is the coolest thing. He can snap open a Zippo. He takes notches out of door frames where he takes girls to bed and then fills like a jar with them. He's the guy who can go out with no money in his pocket and have a night that lasts six hours long. That's who that guy is to him. And the way that they kind of are always behind half of the shoulder, I thought was, was brilliant. But it's an idea and it's an intention and it is a choice. And you do wonder how many Hollywood movies, although they don't make very many that are about just regular human beings like this anymore, but how many Hollywood

• 31:30Speaker 06

  movies, if they were made with the care and creativity and interest that this movie had, would be 75% better, 50% better. You know, like, this is a guy who's essentially like, he's like, what if John Cassavetes and Ron Howard made a movie together? And you're like, fuck.

• 31:45Sean Fennessey?

  That's exactly what it is.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  This is awesome.

• 31:46Sean Fennessey?

  No, I know. It's also like, it's good taste in terms of, you've got one really, really well-known person in this movie. And everybody else is like, we know who Stavi and Leo Woodall are, but most people don't know who they are. And this is like, part of the work is like, let's launch a new generation of exciting young people that can appear in movies, you know, like, we should put Amelia Jones in more movies. I, I really admire that. The movie does, I think, pair pretty neatly with BlackBerry about this kind of like unbridled ambition without much sense of purpose. And that's a core theme of a lot of the stuff that Johnson is doing. And I feel like, I tried to get to the bottom of it with him when we spoke, but.

• 32:27Sean Fennessey?

  He made it now. So now what do you do? And like, do you kind of have to confront that? Once you have crossed the threshold of no longer the scrappy underdog and into, well, I have some clout. I have some juice in my life. And a lot of the films and stuff that he's been doing is all about this kind of like outsiderdom. And you and Andy talked about this really interestingly, like Bourdain having to confront no longer being the punk rock guy banging on the door, trying to get in and being a guy who's establishment. And like, what does it mean to become establishment? You know, this movie stops just short of it in the best way possible by showing us, you know, Eric Repair at the end of the film.

• 33:05Speaker 06

  Very nice touch.

• 33:07Sean Fennessey?

  Bourdain's closest friend and a food icon as well. But I'm so curious to see where Matt goes. Like, I know some things that he's working on.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 33:17Sean Fennessey?

  But will there be like any pivot away from? Like, if you're making a Magic the Gathering movie, that's a huge outsider's story. There's nobody cool playing Magic the Gathering, you know?

• 33:25Speaker 06

  I think this happened to Tony. This is happening to Matt right now where the very thing that makes you so beloved by people becomes a liability. And so.

• 33:35Sean Fennessey?

  And yet this has never happened to you.

• 33:38Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know. I don't, well, life's long.

• 33:42Sean Fennessey?

  You were just tongue tied for a minute.

• 33:44Speaker 06

  I don't even know what you mean, but like, Matt Johnson's like, one of the attractive qualities is that if you put him on a Q and A and a post-screening chat, he might just be like, I hate that movie. Or, you know, I, or this thing sucks or whatever.

• 33:58Sean Fennessey?

  We talked about this, his edgelorddom and whether or not it can sustain.

• 34:01Speaker 06

  And Bourdain was notorious for writing a New Yorker article that was like, here are all the things that restaurants lie to you about. And then 20 years later, he's hosting The Taste and appearing on Top Chef and doing food and wine appearances to, you know, hustle American Airlines points or whatever. And it comes for all of us and you just have to learn to adapt. I think what I see in both of those guys is a formal inventiveness and attention to detail and love of process that I think will serve them both. That, you know, it's obviously served Tony very well in making multiple television shows of great, great interest.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  And Matt so far kind of being undefeated in terms of like, you really want to see this movie, man? Like, this is gonna, this is gonna light you up a little bit.

• 34:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's really impressive.

• 34:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think this slots in nicely with Coming of Age. You know, this is a big tent, these kinds of films. How did you think about it when I asked you to do a list?

• 35:03Speaker 06

  You know, I think the easiest way to look at it would just be like,

• 35:08Speaker 06

  you know, a life-changing moment for a young person. But I tried to look at this a little bit more from the perspective of how I think they framed Tony, which is, even though in no way does this character come off as innocent ever, a loss of innocence. And there are a couple of moments, I think, when he catches Sal shooting up, not catches, but when he watches Sal shoot up, there's obviously like a shadow that looms over Bourdain's future drug use, but also this character being confronted with like, eh, it's not, it's not listening to the Stooges anymore, is it?

• 35:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 06

  It's like, we're shooting heroin on a beach somewhere.

• 35:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  So I tried to look at films that were about that loss of innocence, not specifically drug use, but.

• 35:51Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't intentionally do that, but when I look at my list, that's the same story. And is that just the standard archetype for these stories? Cause if you don't have that loss of innocence, are they worth making in a way?

• 36:01Speaker 06

  Well, I don't, I mean, I think that it's about whether or not the person is seven years old or 25 years old, it's about introducing them to the real world, right? Or what happens outside of like the imaginary kingdom that they've built for themselves, that they've maybe, you know, protected themselves with. I also thought it was interesting with the movies that I picked, which I would fully admit are favorites rather than the best. There are four of them are from my childhood.

• 36:29Sean Fennessey?

  Same.

• 36:29Speaker 06

  And there's really nothing you can do about that.

• 36:32Sean Fennessey?

  But I think that that's okay. I would, I would, I'm quite curious to know what teenagers make of a movie like Tony. If it appeals in any way, it being a period piece, it being about a person that they probably just don't have much experience with. But it having a very winning movie star kind of performance at the center of it and a vibe that is like, this is the loser's version of cool. It is, it is like the almost famacy feeling of like, you can be, you can have a really exciting and cool life and not have to worry about being the coolest person alive.

• 37:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:05Sean Fennessey?

  And that's such a unique dynamic that I relate to for very obvious reasons.

• 37:09Speaker 06

  Such a tortured thing for young people to like, be told they need to decide what they're gonna do and have all these people in their lives giving them advice about what they shouldn't, shouldn't be doing. We didn't really remark upon it, but a lot of my favorite moments in this movie are not overly dogmatically pointed, big flashing lights, like this is the issue for this character.

• 37:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  His mother is never explicitly described as being tyrannical with her, with him. And has never really gotten, you know, we don't get into like the psychological background, but is just very difficult to please, I would say. And withholds a lot of approval and affirmation.

• 37:54Sean Fennessey?

  But you can see, there's something wonderful about the portrayal of the two parents, Rich Summer and Dagmar Adamancik. Like, she is incredibly intelligent and studied and particular. And he is very warm and over eager and excited.

• 38:11Sean Fennessey?

  You smash those two people together. I mean, Eileen and I talk about this all the time with Alice. Like, you constantly have these conversations about your kids where you're sort of like, there is this kind of 50/50 alchemy that happens in a person.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  Inside of them are two wolves.

• 38:23Sean Fennessey?

  Quite literally. And I'm sure you feel that way about your parents. I certainly do about mine. And I think to evoke that without announcing it is very impressive.

• 38:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:34Sean Fennessey?

  And cool storytelling. All right, let's do our lists.

• 38:37Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 38:37Sean Fennessey?

  So just hit me with five. Let's just, let's just have a sincere, direct, brief communication.

• 38:43Speaker 06

  Sure. Okay. My first one is a movie I've talked about on this podcast before, but My Own Private Idaho.

• 38:50Sean Fennessey?

  It came up this week on the rewatchables.

• 38:52Speaker 06

  It did.

• 38:53Sean Fennessey?

  Because we were speaking of Keanu.

• 38:54Speaker 06

  We keep trying to get Bill to go to Idaho.

• 38:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  Might be the last rewatchable.

• 39:00Sean Fennessey?

  Bill loves Good Will Hunting.

• 39:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:02Sean Fennessey?

  Is this the film that immediately precede? No, it's not. There's a couple in between Good Will Hunting and My Own Private Idaho from Gus.

• 39:07Speaker 06

  Right. This is the, in some ways, not the original, but like, it's, it's the original Coming of Age story from the original BS, Billy Shakespeare. And it is Gus Van Sant's reimagining of Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and 2, and Henry V, starring Keanu Reeves in River Phoenix. I don't even think I knew about Henry V or Henry IV when I saw this.

• 39:34Sean Fennessey?

  Definitely did not.

• 39:35Speaker 06

  I didn't know that Bob was Falstaff. I didn't know that, that this was following that arc. Because I was more into it as a underground, dreamlike road movie about two hustlers banging around the Pacific Northwest. And one of them is narcoleptic and the other is about to inherit a fortune when he turns 21. And so astonishing pair of, but really River Phoenix is kind of, this is if you want to know what, why people freak out about River Phoenix, watch My Own Private Idaho. And is so beautifully observed about two people who are kind of like in between childhood and adulthood. Trying to make sense of the world in a very finite period of time.

• 40:16Speaker 06

  And has this baked in sort of plot mechanic, which they get from Henry IV and Henry V, which is that when you're young, you will oftentimes become acutely aware that you are not on the same schedule as everybody else and you are not on the same road as everybody else. And there's something really sad about that when you're like, oh, man, like, we're not going to the same college, are we? Or, you know, me and my high school girlfriend, we're probably gonna break up. That's really weird. Or.

• 40:45Sean Fennessey?

  Not me.

• 40:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. But it doesn't leave you in your childhood. You know, you realize, it happens to you, it echoes throughout your life.

• 40:53Sean Fennessey?

  Happens all the time in adulthood now.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  And this movie captures that, this like, you know, these two, these two characters who are like, we're bonded forever, right? With Keanu's characters, just like, well, until I'm 21, you know, like.

• 41:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's so funny. I feel like this movie does a really good job of showing it through time. And it reminds me of a little bit, listening to you talk about seeing Pulp Fiction, where it's another movie where you're sort of like, oh, you can just do anything you want with a movie.

• 41:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:15Sean Fennessey?

  Like, you don't, it doesn't have to feel, the movie doesn't feel linear. It doesn't feel like it's happening in a specific set of days over time. It's just sort of like, then this thing happened, then this thing happened, then this thing happened. Was that a dream? Did that really happen?

• 41:27Speaker 06

  Did they really, like, are they hooking up with this person? Or is this something that he's imagining while he's in a, like a booth in some adult store? Like, just a, really, it changed my life when I saw it. I did not know movies could be like this.

• 41:40Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick. I picked a much more conventional movie for number five. I picked A Perfect World, which is Clint Eastwood's

• 41:47Sean Fennessey?

  road trip crime movie about an ex-convict played by Kevin Costner, who takes a young boy hostage in his attempt to get free while being chased by a, is he a federal marshal, played by Clint Eastwood?

• 42:00Speaker 06

  He's a Texas Ranger.

• 42:01Sean Fennessey?

  Texas Ranger.

• 42:04Sean Fennessey?

  And.

• 42:06Sean Fennessey?

  I think this is just an amazing, it's a very entertaining movie and a very beautifully shot movie. And it's in that, it's right in the sweet spot of Clint in the nineties, post-unforgiven, pre-Bridges of Madison County, when he's kind of like trying to do Americana in a serie, number of different ways. And this is like a real demythologizing of the American criminal story, but I think, I think the actor's name is, is it TJ Louter plays Buzz, the little kid? And I was probably about this kid's age when I saw this movie. And this kid sees a lot of stuff. He sees violence, he sees sex, he sees death. He sees things about human experience, interaction, emotion, that you wouldn't see if you just

• 42:51Sean Fennessey?

  spent your entire life in your mom's house. And it's a really amazing how frequently he pivots to showing the kid's perspective in this movie, despite Costner giving, I think, one of his great performances and one of his most charismatic performances. He's so exciting in this movie, so cool. But Eastwood didn't make a lot of movies about kids? This isn't really like something that he's very interested in historically? And so I find this to be like such a special movie. You know, there's plenty of stuff that is kind of nuts and bolts, Laura Dern and Clint Eastwood in a trailer chasing down this old, this convict. But the stuff between Butch and Buzz is so special to me. And so it popped into my mind when thinking of this prompt.

• 43:34Speaker 06

  I just remember this film so well for being the follow-up to Unforgiven and being kind of, I don't know, like the amnesiac to Kid A or something like that. Or like, you know, like you were like, I was so excited, you know, Unforgiven was such a huge movie for me and it took me so long to like, discover the rhythms of this and the sort of what it was trying to say. And maybe I was too young at the time to really understand it. It's one of those movies that you, I don't know, it's like watching Badlands or something where you're like, I think I get what this is about, but I don't really, I don't know if I'm going to really understand it for another 10 or 15 years.

• 44:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I saw this before Unforgiven and I probably, this is probably one of the first Clint Eastwood movies I saw in just this very small period of time, the age gap that you and I have, I think speaks to, this was, this was an HBO classic, you know, so it just was on TV all the time. And so you would pop in and it, for me, it felt like I was seeing very adult things at 11 or whatever, when the movie came out, that are so fascinating. It's also in the same year as In the Line of Fire. And it's like these really interesting portraits of kind of fading masculinity, both of them, like not being able to quite-

• 44:43Speaker 06

  And then he was done with that topic and moved on.

• 44:45Sean Fennessey?

  Oh no, it cropped up a few times more. His final film, of course, well, I guess his second to last film is Cry Macho. So it's something he's interested in. I hope Clint's doing okay. You think he's out there? Think he's listening?

• 44:57Speaker 06

  I think he's probably done making films.

• 45:00Sean Fennessey?

  I think he's 94?

• 45:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:02Sean Fennessey?

  So probably, but I mean, Jordan number two is two years ago.

• 45:04Speaker 06

  I mean, it's just unbelievable.

• 45:06Sean Fennessey?

  You see Jordan number two?

• 45:07Speaker 06

  I did.

• 45:08Sean Fennessey?

  Did you enjoy it?

• 45:09Speaker 06

  Opening night on HBO Max, I believe.

• 45:11Sean Fennessey?

  I see, yeah, that was a damn shame.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  My second film is Fresh, Boazir Keen's 1994 movie starring Sean Nelson and Samuel Jackson and Giancarlo Esposito about a young kid living in New York City, who is something of a chess prodigy or an emerging chess prodigy, but is also a drug runner. It's very much of the moment when there were a lot of films coming out of New York and LA made by young filmmakers about city stories. Whether it was like Nick Gomez with Laws of Gravity, Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes Brothers, just like a ton of movies that were very of the moment and looked like life at that moment.

• 45:54Speaker 06

  This is about a kid who learns chess from his estranged alcoholic father, one of my favorite Sam Jackson performances, and uses what he learns on the chessboard to rescue his sister. But is also about kids who are asked to grow up way too soon and being put into worlds of adult desire and adult violence when you're, when you don't quite understand it. And in some ways, very much part and parcel with A Perfect World.

• 46:21Sean Fennessey?

  Completely, or they're the same year, just about, right? 94, 94, 93, yeah. Yeah, they're very close. My number four is Fish Tank. It's one of the only semi-modern movies on our lists. Andrea Arnold's portrait of a teenage girl who feels adrift and outside, not unlike a Tony Bourdain type, who makes a surprising and ultimately very, very dangerous and ugly connection with her mother's boyfriend, who's played in the film by Michael Fassbender in a searing performance.

• 46:53Speaker 06

  Yes, this is, this is back on my hunger and shame shit.

• 46:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't know if we'll ever get this guy back as a performer.

• 47:01Speaker 06

  Let's just make the agency, brother.

• 47:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's, well, you haven't seen Hope yet, is what I'll say.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  I'm excited for that.

• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  It is maybe not exactly what you were expecting, but this is a, just a wildly intimate, dangerous seeming, very challenging movie that makes you question why the story specifically is being told. And then maybe like in a similar way to Tony even, that there's not like an easy solution to life experience, that like horrible things happen and you have to think about why they've happened and like what it means to be independent and have agency at a young point in your life versus being taken advantage of and exploited. Katie Jarvis in the movie is incredible in the lead part. Andrea Arnold-

• 47:45Speaker 06

  She kind of got big little lies for a while, right?

• 47:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, always really interested me. I was not super into her last film, Bird. Did you ever see that one?

• 47:54Speaker 06

  I saw that one.

• 47:55Sean Fennessey?

  That starred Barry Keoghan and is similarly about a young person in a kind of fantastical and ultimately dangerous world. And a lot of her stories are about that. You know, American Honey is sort of about that too. But just in it from a pure aesthetics perspective, like she captures being inside of these worlds like so, so well, these kind of like intimate, often English environments, that of people who are of virtually no means trying to get by. And then what is this kind of fallout from not having more? And yeah, so I would highly recommend this movie. Shot by Robbie Ryan, one of his earliest films. It's like, it's a beautiful and quite sad.

• 48:33Speaker 06

  I love Fish Tank. I'll throw in Breaking Away. There's Peter Yates's seventies movie about townies living in Bloomington, swimming at the quarry, you know, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives? And something that takes on outsized importance is a cycling race that comes to town where a series of like a group of Italian cyclists are going to compete in a race, as are some university students who do nothing but torment these guys and they torment them. And, you know, Yates is really one of the most underrated filmmakers probably of the last, what, 40 or 50 years.

• 49:13Speaker 06

  And he's, anyway, I would, I would wonder whether or not Matt Johnson's a fan, because there's-

• 49:21Sean Fennessey?

  Of this movie.

• 49:22Speaker 06

  Or of Yates's work in general, because I think they each bring like an incredible creative verve, no matter what the material is.

• 49:29Sean Fennessey?

  This is so different from all of his other movies, though. I mean, his movie, I feel like he makes typically, we did an episode of The Rewatchables about this movie. This is an amazing film. His movies are usually so conventionally entertaining and masculine and genre focused. So like Bullet, The Deep, Hot Rock-

• 49:49Speaker 06

  Outland?

• 49:50Sean Fennessey?

  Eddie Coyle, no, Outland is Peter Heim's. He made Krull.

• 49:57Speaker 06

  That's right, that's right.

• 49:58Sean Fennessey?

  Suspect, like a lot of these movies are like-

• 50:01Speaker 06

  Thrillers, yeah.

• 50:02Sean Fennessey?

  They're thrillers. They're like, they're, they're, you know, Tom Selleck is an innocent man in An Innocent Man. Like that's what he makes. And this movie is so sensitive.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:12Sean Fennessey?

  And sort of spiritual.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  It's kind of a sports movie, but barely, you know, it's kind of a Greasers versus Sosha's class war, but not totally. It's, it's very similar to Tony in that it's about a guy who is basically affecting the life that he wishes he could have by like putting on this Italian accent and wants to be an Italian cyclist, even though he and all his buddies are basically, you know, walking around in jean shorts all day long and like having milkshakes and wasting their lives. Just a really beautiful portrait of youth and maybe not super loss of innocence, but more just like learning that you're not always going to be young.

• 50:51Sean Fennessey?

  No, yeah, I think that's well put. My number three is Walkabout, which I just rewatched this year because it was part of the Odyssey's collection that I co-curated on the Criterion Channel. It's basically Nick Rogue's first movie. He co-directed Performance in 1970 with your boy Mick Jagger. But this movie is based on a 59 novel by James Vance Marshall, and it's about two very young kids, like 11 and seven, who are driven to the Australian outback by their father. And his intention, he tells them that they're going to take a picnic and his intention is to shoot and kill them. And he attempts to do so and he's unable to, and he turns the gun on himself and he

• 51:33Sean Fennessey?

  leaves them out in the, in the outback by themselves to fend for themselves over time.

• 51:37Speaker 06

  It's a feel-good movie.

• 51:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very harrowing opening and it's a very gorgeous middle. And it has some challenges as the story goes on. Jenny Agutter and Lucy and John are the two, are the sister and brother. And, you know, it's, I think it's probably the official, feels like the official kickoff of the Australian new wave. And you can hear a lot about that on the Blank Check series about Peter Weir, since he was a participant in that too. But this movie, which also stars David Gopel, who is the Aboriginal boy who sort of like saves them and shows them how to survive in this space, who went on to have a really interesting career as an actor as well. But, you know, this is a movie about-

• 52:21Sean Fennessey?

  It's metaphorical and literal at the same time.

• 52:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:24Sean Fennessey?

  It's a little bit like, well, playtime's over. This is what it would really be like when you have to go out into the world. And you can, you can project that onto, you graduated from college. You want to move to the big city. What are you going to do now? Or it could just play straight up as a very ethereal, magisterial thriller about two lost kids.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:41Sean Fennessey?

  But man, I couldn't believe how beautiful it was.

• 52:44Speaker 06

  It's one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen.

• 52:46Sean Fennessey?

  The photography is stunning in this movie. And it still has a lot of emotional power to it as well. And I probably hadn't seen it since film school. Like, I want to say it was like 30 something years since I'd seen it. And I really thought it was absolutely amazing. And

• 53:02Speaker 06

  I think it speaks to like, what's so powerful about this as a microgenre or subgenre of film is that it allows directors to really play with ideas of perspective and point of view. Because you're shooting this world from an emerging narrator, an emerging person's perspective. And I think Rogue does an incredible job of like, what would the fucking outback look like to these kids?

• 53:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This movie has a great end note, too. The way that it concludes the story is really kind of fascinating and beautiful. It's almost like, once you have an experience, you can never go back. And the way that you think about it, whether you've romanticized it or not, is also really interesting to me. That I think is also somewhat tied to Tony. Okay, what's number two for you?

• 53:44Speaker 06

  I picked two, which are two adaptations of Larry McMurtry books from his Tullia trilogy. One is HUD from 1963, which is based on Horsemen Pass By and then The Last Picture Show. So this is like McMurtry's basically fictionalized version of his own youth. And he would write lots of, uh, Bill Dung's Roman. To make a Tony joke. He would write a lot about his own life and in and out of Archer, Texas, and his adventures in Hollywood. One of my favorite coming of age novels ever written is All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers by Larry McMurtry.

• 54:25Speaker 06

  These are more 1950s, you know, set.

• 54:33Speaker 06

  Stories about a time in America that I think we would tell ourselves is when America was like safe and America was beautiful. And America was living up to all these ideas. And McMurtry is an incredible mythbuster. And he just goes into these things and he's like, it wasn't like this at all. It wasn't like what you think it was. The good old times, the good days were not that good. The bad days weren't that bad. HUD is slightly tweaked from the, the book in that it makes, it inverts certain characters. It makes certain characters bigger deals than they are in the book. But it's got my favorite Newman. It's got some of my favorite cinematography in any movie ever from James Wong Howe.

• 55:15Speaker 06

  Patricia Neal plays Alma, who's the housekeeper in this Brandon family, which is this, this ranching family in a small town in Texas. One of my, one of the great, great supporting turns in.

• 55:28Sean Fennessey?

  I think the movie doesn't work without her. Yeah, she's, she's unreal in this movie.

• 55:31Speaker 06

  It's a very difficult movie to watch in some ways. It is not going to make you think Paul Newman was like, you don't come away from that being like, man, I loved HUD.

• 55:38Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's very similar to Fish Tank. Where you've got a, a leading performance that is very powerful and charismatic, but a little evil. You know, that there is something that is very raw and dangerous.

• 55:50Speaker 06

  There's something broken about this kid. And, uh, but the real coming of age is, is, um, is this younger character named Norman? Who's trying to decide, you know, which path to take. Not unlike Tony, not unlike a lot of these movies where they, they are just sort of at a crossroads in their life. Last Picture Show probably doesn't need to be greatly expanded on. This is Peter Bogdanovich's film with Timothy Bottoms and, and Jeff Bridges and Sybil Shepherd. And, um, it's just one of those great, great, I, it's just one of the most amazing portraits of youth I've ever seen.

• 56:27Sean Fennessey?

  Both of these movies available in beautiful 4Ks on the Criterion Collection. I would encourage people to check them out. They've never looked better. Uh, I also picked two movies for number two, and they're, they're paired as well. And they're two movies that I've talked about many times on the show, so I don't need to go on about them at length. But they're Rushmore and The Squid and the Whale, which are just like Tony, two portraits of the artist as a phony young man. And they're, they're both, they seem to be, I guess this is somewhat unverified, but very autobiographical portraits of real stinkers. Guys who like really think they're hot shit and are really aspirational and really ambitious, but don't have the goods... dot, dot, dot, yet. And Rushmore is like a portrait of a wonderful, wonderfully sociopathic, failing teen

• 57:12Sean Fennessey?

  who wants to run everything and has a creative soul, but has no idea how to succeed. And even what it means to be a grown up. And The Squid and the Whale, you know, is about two different kids as their parents are going through a divorce. But the Jesse Eisenberg character in particular, who's sort of the lead of the movie, is a, I will say like very similar to Tony and a very familiar person to me. About a person who really wants to be praised and told is great at something, but has no ability to do anything interesting. And it's like figuring out what it actually means to be interesting in the process. And is pulling all the wrong things from all the wrong influences, parents included.

• 57:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:51Sean Fennessey?

  So that kind of speaks a little bit to that dynamic that they show of the parents in Tony, too. That, you know, Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney are so amazing in The Squid and the Whale. And they're both so frenzied and toxic in their own very specific parental ways. That is so immediately identifiable to me. So I love both of those movies very much. And I don't even know if the characters actually do come of age in the movie.

• 58:14Speaker 06

  No, I don't even know either.

• 58:15Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like Rushmore ends with this sort of like you put on the show exaltation. But I'm not sure that Max Fisher is made whole by that.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  Darjeeling as the sequel, where he comes of age.

• 58:27Sean Fennessey?

  Truly, truly. Um, okay, what's your number one?

• 58:30Speaker 06

  Uh, Stand By Me, which is like, I think the first time I really even was self-conscious about a coming of age movie. Just because the narration in this is so explicit. This is Rob Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's novella, The Body. Starts Will Wheaton and River Phoenix and Kiefer Sutherland, Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman. And to me, it's still like a note perfect movie about a bunch of kids, uh, spending a weekend camping in the woods who come across, who to go find a dead body that they have heard about, um, in the woods. And is just so beautifully, uh, rendered and is so perfectly pitched at like the, the tone

• 59:12Speaker 06

  of deep affection and also deep humor of, of childhood. And I think even, even if you didn't grow up in, in Maine in the 50s, you'll recognize like the, the beats of it. And it's just about like the, the joy and the terror that like can regularly confront you when you're a kid.

• 59:31Speaker 05

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• 1:00:56Sean Fennessey?

  Mine is similarly a movie about friendship amongst boys and the complications therein. Juice, Ernest Dickerson's movie that I've definitely talked about a lot on this show. That is about four kids growing up in Harlem, all of whom are aspiring to different things in their life. Focuses mostly on Q, who's played by Omar Epps, who is an aspiring DJ. And it's sort of like set right in the midst of this amazing moment in New York hip hop.

• 1:01:22Sean Fennessey?

  And Q gets to sort of like participate and show off. And like, you see the way in which he wants to be basically like the next Jam Esther J type of person. And he's entrenched with three other friends, played by Tupac, Khalil Kane and Jermaine Hopkins, who, you know, Pox's character Bishop is a legendary movie character and he is sort of the dark side. He is the Leo Woodall, he is the Sal, um, who potentially is luring Q down a very dark and troubling path. His other friends are more innocents. And this movie also, I think, has a real kind of Shakespearean quality to it, too, in terms of the arc of all the characters. Epps is a weird one, man. In 1992, I was like, Omar Epps is going to be like Jimmy Stewart.

• 1:02:05Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I really thought he was, I thought he was going to be a great American actor.

• 1:02:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and he's, he was just such an everyman to me. Obviously, like, I got really obsessed with the culture that this movie is about when I was a kid.

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  Did you ever get turntables?

• 1:02:18Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't. I mean, I didn't have money. Techniques are expensive.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  They're expensive.

• 1:02:21Sean Fennessey?

  I, somebody asked me in a, in a subscribe, uh, Substack chat, what would be the number one movie prop of all time? And I said Q's Techniques. That would be like a great thing to have on display in my home. But yeah, I love this movie. And I think so, so many times, coming of age, you think of them as like, uh, about your parents or about your siblings. But this is like, a lot of times this stuff is steeped in the friends you make and what paths you go down. I had some friends who were troubled, you know? And I hope they're okay. I don't really know many of them anymore, but, um.

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  I have them actually, right? Just outside the studio here. I've been doing a self-designed anti-dementia test or dementia test for myself, where I've just been putting on rap songs I haven't heard in 30 years and seeing if I can still rap them from memory.

• 1:03:08Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  And Know the Ledge is one of those. I won't do it now, but like, if you put Know the Ledge on, I would know all the lyrics. Did that with Can't Trust It, which I haven't listened to and.

• 1:03:17Sean Fennessey?

  I'm listening to a lot of Public Enemy lately. That's funny that you say that.

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. Uh, this has, gosh.

• 1:03:27Sean Fennessey?

  Trying to think of like, what's the best needle drop in this movie? Is it when they're going through the party and Cypress Hills playing?

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  It might be that. When does Naughty by Nature play?

• 1:03:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's right at the beginning, right? And it, it's Uptown Anthem, right? That's the naughty song? Yeah. Anyway, this is a beautiful movie. Uh, Ernest Dickerson made some cool films. This is his, I think this is his debut immediately after working with Spike on three or four films in a row. But I don't think he ever got back to these heights. Anyhow, Sierra, thanks for participating in this exercise.

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  Always.

• 1:03:58Sean Fennessey?

  Um, let's go now to my conversation with Matt Johnson.

• 1:04:06Sean Fennessey?

  Matt Johnson is back and now an icon of the show because you were also on the Canadian movie draft episode, which aired since this happened. So it's Matt month here on the pod.

• 1:04:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, your poor viewers. I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:04:16Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, you're doing great. Um, I wanted to start because last time you were formally on the show, Nirvana was just coming out.

• 1:04:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Sean Fennessey?

  And we talked, I loved it. I loved our conversation, but I'm curious how you feel about what it did when it went out into the world.

• 1:04:28Speaker 07

  It's odd because it happened so gradually. You gotta remember that it got finished and released at South by Southwest 2025. And Neon waited almost a calendar year before they released it. And so when I spoke with you crazily, it was right after I had finished shooting the Bourdain movie. But right as Nirvana the Band was kind of coming out, and even within that time, Jay and I had also toured most of the United States with the film. And the feeling that we both had was, oh, wow. Like a lot of Nirvana, the band fans found out about these screenings.

• 1:05:12Speaker 07

  And that's what we thought because they were all sold out and the energy was just completely insane.

• 1:05:16Sean Fennessey?

  I was at one of them in November in LA. Yeah.

• 1:05:17Speaker 07

  Okay. Yeah. And so, and so, and so our perspective of this.

• 1:05:20Sean Fennessey?

  It was like a rock concert too. And it was all the hardcore fans.

• 1:05:23Speaker 07

  My good friend from film school, Nico Pareda, who's extremely talented, well, he's prolific. I think he's made 10 features in Mexico, said that when he came out of the TIFF screening. I hadn't really seen him much since we were in undergrads, uh, since we were undergraduates. And he said, Matt, this was an odd experience for me. And I said, what, did you like the film? And he said, I don't know, but I felt like everybody else thought it was a music show or like a concert. Like that was not the feeling of watching a movie. And, um, Nico said a lot of, he was the first person ever cast me in a movie when we were in undergrad. And he gave me a huge boost of confidence. I really owe him because I was always so, so painfully shy. I never wanted to be on camera.

• 1:06:05Speaker 07

  I really was insecure about how I sounded, how I looked. And he, along with, believe it or not, Dan Levy, were co-stars.

• 1:06:14Sean Fennessey?

  From Schitt's Creek.

• 1:06:15Speaker 07

  From Schitt's Creek. We were co-stars in his undergrad film.

• 1:06:19Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding.

• 1:06:19Speaker 07

  And, uh, and yeah, he said a number of things that have really stuck with me. And, and anyway, him saying that it was like a rock concert really changed my perspective on it. And the point to this story is that we were, um, maybe it was because we were trying to humble ourselves, but we thought that it was all people who'd watched the TV show who are now watching the movie. And we've come to realize that, yeah, it, it had taken on a life of its own. And now, uh, it is completely out of control. I can't explain it. I have no idea.

• 1:06:51Sean Fennessey?

  Are you happy about it?

• 1:06:53Speaker 07

  Well, I'm so happy that people are connecting with it. And it seems to mean something to, to people. But it's strange because so much of my life has been me operating from a place of obscurity that I'm sure you can appreciate, that, that, that it is very difficult to be like, I'll use this metaphor. I find it so enjoyable and I feel like I have an opportunity to really do something interesting when I have to, uh, host an event or give a speech at a wedding. Or, um, uh, I, I, I did the eulogy at my uncle's funeral.

• 1:07:34Speaker 07

  This is going to sound morbid and maybe crass, but I like being in environments where people are expecting one thing. And then the way that I am naturally is like, whoa, like, like, oh, that's, it's funny that, that this person is doing this, whether it's any, any kind of public forum communication. And now I'm losing that ability. And I don't mean to do that literally, but I just mean that there's now an expectation of me that didn't exist before. And so it makes everything I do not harder, but, but I don't have the same trick that I can play, which is that nobody knows who I am.

• 1:08:13Speaker 07

  I'm this unassuming, seemingly dopey person that, that then can surprise you because your expectations were so low. And, and losing that.

• 1:08:23Sean Fennessey?

  I related this a lot.

• 1:08:24Speaker 07

  Of course, because it's a true gift.

• 1:08:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 07

  And it's given to us by our anonymity and also by, I think me being Canadian is, is a big part of it. But I thrived on it and it was a defense mechanism because I thought, okay, I, uh, I feel so much more comfortable having, uh, a very low expectation and then, and then playing with that low expectation because it means I can kind of play a Mott and Bailey game where I can back away if I stumble or embarrass myself. Uh, it's the way that we shoot movies, like Jay and I, or whoever I'm acting with can take huge risks, knowing that no matter what, the embarrassing stuff won't be there.

• 1:09:08Speaker 07

  And my way of transposing that into real life is I can set an expectation with people. And then if I don't meet that expectation, that's the joke. The joke is I'm not meeting that expectation. And so, and then we can all enjoy that. But now it's like, well, people meet me and they have a very clear expectation of how they want me to behave.

• 1:09:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's a wonderful segue to Tony because this is the first film that you don't appear in.

• 1:09:33Speaker 07

  Or, and also I'm not doing any of my tricks.

• 1:09:36Sean Fennessey?

  So do you think that that was a self-knowledge of trying to pull back from something that was happening even at that TIFF screening or, or even before that, where you felt like maybe you were becoming a little too well-known in that way or too seen?

• 1:09:50Speaker 07

  Okay. Yeah, no, you're giving me too much credit. I'll tell you, it was totally cynical. I'll tell you all my secrets since I like you. Um, so one, I knew I was about to make this Magic Card movie. And I looked in the mirror and I talked to my friends and I said, well, okay. They've decided to let you make the Magic Card movie. And you've never made a movie before, so you'd better go out and make one. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to make a movie where I don't get to do any of the things that I normally do, which are the same like Mott and Bailey tactics of, um, of hiding my own inability to make movies inside the movie itself, which is why in Tony, the camera never moves.

• 1:10:35Speaker 07

  I never zoom. I don't do any, I, I, I completely, I talked with Jared on the phone before I shot the movie. Um, uh, and, and because obviously rightfully so, he was like, so how are you planning to shoot this? And I was like, Jared, when people see this movie, they're going to think it was shot by a different Matt Johnson. Because all the stuff that we do, I'm, I'm intentionally not doing any of it. Because one, I'm very, like, I love David Lynch. I was very inspired by The Straight Story. I remember when as a kid, even hearing about that, being like, whoa, like, why did he do that?

• 1:11:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Speaker 07

  Like, we didn't have to. And I have, I don't pretend to understand is like the, the reasons behind it. I'm sure he's talked about it, but it, it, for me, it was like, okay. Can I do this without any of the things I normally have, without any of my friends with me? And really using only the tools of actors who I love and the words that I write. And obviously Michael Baumann is going to make everything look, our, our vision of it was, can we make this movie feel like you're turning pages in a book? As opposed to all my other films, which is like, you're there kinetically watching everything, spying on it. And any minute, you don't know what's going to happen. And so like the, like the beauty of, of turning pages in a paperback book, but I only had those tools.

• 1:11:56Speaker 07

  And that's it. And I thought, if I can do this, then maybe when I go to make much more standard movies, I'll be able to start integrating these two things together. But I wanted to start at zero. My editor, Bobby Upchurch, loves, I'm going to forget his name, but he, um, he's an American superstar director. He directed Mud and, um.

• 1:12:19Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, uh, David Gordon, not, not.

• 1:12:21Speaker 07

  It's not, but it's similar. It's a guy like David Gordon.

• 1:12:24Sean Fennessey?

  Jeff Nichols.

• 1:12:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, Jeff Nichols.

• 1:12:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Speaker 07

  So he's a huge Jeff Nichols fan and he will always show me Nichols movies. And, um, and I, I like various things about them. Um, but what Bobby loves to talk about is how Nichols, in every film, tries to teach himself a new tool. And so Bobby will show me, I think he showed me Mud and he was like, this is the movie where Nichols tried to teach himself how to use Steadicams. And, and it, when you watch somebody's filmography from that point of view, you go, oh, this is a clever guy. Like, using every single, uh, opportunity to make a film to try to master something. Because, I mean, as I'm often admitting, most of us have no idea what we're doing.

• 1:13:08Speaker 07

  And we're, we're just trying to react to the, to the movie as it's made. And so anyway, I tried to take a page out of his book and be like, okay, can I make a movie with nothing other than, as my professor, Amnon Bookminder, said, the shot and the cut?

• 1:13:24Sean Fennessey?

  I had Jeff on the show for Bike Riders and he is very insightful about the process of making movies.

• 1:13:29Speaker 07

  He must be.

• 1:13:30Sean Fennessey?

  Um, smart guy. I, I would, I would not have thought of you as a guy who would make a biopic. And I know that this is not a standard cradle to grave biopic, but it is still in a sense, a biopic. What was your perception of them before you decided to do this?

• 1:13:45Speaker 07

  Well, I've got a secret there too.

• 1:13:47Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:13:47Speaker 07

  And that's that.

• 1:13:50Speaker 07

  For a long time, I had been thinking about like how every single one of my movies, in some ways, I mean, I'm always in them and in some ways are like about me. Whether it's Nirvana, the band, or BlackBerry, it's like I'm, I'm trying to reflect myself and I'm making them autobiographical in a way, but I was, but I, I've never been able to do something that is, man, this is verging on the personal, but like I've never been able to make something that is sincerely about myself because it, it, because I'm in them and they're, they're so, I don't want to say goofy, but like my movies are about a, about a supersized persona that, that it's like my superhero identity in

• 1:14:34Speaker 07

  a way, but, but for me to make a movie that is really about what it was like for me as a kid and like what, like the types of stuff that, that I would maybe be more insecure about talking about, I was like, well, I could never make a movie like that. And the character's name is Matt Johnson and I'm in it like, like I just wouldn't be brave enough. And so I had been looking for an outlet to do a real autobiography and it was only when I met Dominic Sessa and had been pitched previously, this Bourdain film and, and, and had turned it down that I was like, oh, this, here it is.

• 1:15:14Speaker 07

  I can, I can smuggle an autobiography that is kind of half Dom's life and half my life and the places where that connects and, and we can kind of form a conspiracy with Anthony Bourdain and the parts of his childhood where it kind of lines up with the things that me and Dom agreed with and, and this is it. Like I, I sort of recognized the opportunity for what it was and, and then I was all in. And, and so, yes, this is the long way of answering your question of biopics are not interesting to me. There are some, some of them that I, that I like, but I actually can't think of any where I'm like, oh yeah,

• 1:15:58Speaker 07

  God, that really moved me. I think because in some ways they're, the original IP films like, like I suppose the best of them is Citizen Kane.

• 1:16:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 07

  As, as, as, as far as like biopics that I really love, but, but.

• 1:16:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, they're like some of the earliest best picture winners, like Life of Amiel Zola and films like that. Yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 07

  That's a perfect example.

• 1:16:23Sean Fennessey?

  And like Coal Miner's Daughter, there's like becomes a long tradition of it, but obviously this is very different, your approach. I think in, in all of your other films, but I can think of a moment in the dirties, I can think of a moment in BlackBerry and certainly in Nirvana that are kind of heartsick and a little sad and a little bit insecure.

• 1:16:40Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:16:41Sean Fennessey?

  And it feels like you made the whole plane out of that in this movie. You know what I mean? Like you took those little moments and you know what I'm saying? Like.

• 1:16:48Speaker 07

  Well, I was thinking about what, what, what I actually was like when I was that age and it is not the, what's the line in Dead Poets? I was not the towering mental giant you see before you. People would, I was on the beach and people would kick copies of Byron in my face. And, and I was a kind of arrogant, angry, really resentful, rude, like I was, I'm talking about when I'm like a teenager and of course, like I was still myself, but, but like I shudder at the way that I would try to get people to think I was good. And yeah, I thought, well, what if I miss make a movie where the character's only that and he's not trying to make a charming film about himself.

• 1:17:33Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's pretty brave. I mean, I wrote that this is a movie about thinking you have some big ideas about yourself and meaningful ambition when you have absolutely no sense of who you really are.

• 1:17:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. And, and also realizing that, that at, with what you have in your hand at that time, you are nothing.

• 1:17:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 07

  And, and all the potential that you may think you have, well, it doesn't even realize for Tony in this movie, right? Like it's, it's why I love the, the ending line so much between him and the person admitting him into the school, which I mean, I guess it, it would be a spoiler for me to bring up, but like he says the exact opposite of how he was behaving in the opening scene and he seems in some ways defanged and almost,

• 1:18:21Speaker 07

  well, he's gelded in a way at the end, and yet it's true strength. You know, you go, oh, wow. No, that's power. Good for you, kid.

• 1:18:29Sean Fennessey?

  I'm waiting for you to introduce yourself as Matthew Johnson at a screening. You know, that's how, that's how it will really happen. Um, the thing that, one of the things that I think works so wonderfully about the movie is the decision to effectively not explore Bourdain's mythos. Like not just not tell the later version of his story, but not even really, I think, work too hard to psychologize the specifics of his life.

• 1:18:51Speaker 07

  Oh, go ahead. You can tell me specifically what you mean because that's an interesting line of conversation.

• 1:18:55Sean Fennessey?

  You could very easily like looked at an episode of one of his television shows where he talks about something with this great depth and insight and then tried to kind of like work backwards to have a moment of realization in the movie and say like, well, if you saw episode 27, 27 of Parts Unknown.

• 1:19:10Speaker 07

  Exactly what you mean. I, I like, like make, give the movie like hyperlinks.

• 1:19:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And not like Easter egg-ing it, not really trying to gratify the many millennial men for whom Bourdain is a, you know, an icon. Like, and so the movie is called Tony and it is about a person named Anthony Bourdain and it seems very much like what happens in the earliest stages of that book, but it doesn't seem like you're bending over backwards to satisfy that audience either.

• 1:19:35Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:19:35Sean Fennessey?

  Which I just thought was a very, I don't know if it was a brave choice, but it was a really smart choice.

• 1:19:39Speaker 07

  Or some would say suicidal.

• 1:19:41Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'd like to hear about like.

• 1:19:43Speaker 07

  It was a suicidal choice.

• 1:19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Like, did you have to fight for that ability to do it that way?

• 1:19:47Speaker 07

  I gotta say, I, I was really surprised by how much authority I was given. And I mean authority, like, like I was given like an unbelievable amount of freedom in terms of telling this story. That stunned me because we originally were not working with the estate. Like when I first like hired Dom and said, okay, this is how we're making the movie. And, and then we started working with A24. There was no, there wasn't even an idea because I'm used to making movies like BlackBerry or this movie I'm making right now where it's the Wild West. It's like, I, I work with lawyers to make sure that I can tell these stories, not with the people whose lives I'm making the movies about. And, and

• 1:20:25Speaker 07

  so it was a real shock that after the estate got involved, they were so, I guess the term is open-handed with, with how they were letting us make this movie. But to be specific about like why or why not make it, the rude way of saying it is fan service. Like why not make the movie that way comes from my own history with the guy, which is that I knew him only vaguely as a media personality. And it's not like I had an opinion of him that was much different than my opinion of, you say Gordon Ramsay, you know, I mean, in

• 1:21:09Speaker 07

  the, in the, they're sort of at the same level in my, in my, in my mind. And I thought that that is something I could bring to this, which is that my own curiosity about this character, his legacy, what he means to people could be an entryway for audiences to maybe find the same things interesting about him, starting from nothing that I do. And I had learned from BlackBerry, another movie where I had no knowledge of telecommunications, cell phones, nothing, that, that, that is a decent recipe for, for an idiot like me, I should say, to, to, to be like, okay, well, I don't know anything, but these details about his life, I find fascinating and I can't explain why. And so maybe if I present

• 1:21:54Speaker 07

  those as honestly as I can, using things from my own and Dominic Sessa's own history to kind of fill in the gaps, maybe other people will find them interesting too.

• 1:22:04Sean Fennessey?

  Do you research a lot though? Like how did?

• 1:22:06Speaker 07

  Well, research is a broad term. So I read everything that he wrote and I moved to Provincetown and talked to all the people there who knew him when he was young.

• 1:22:14Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:14Speaker 07

  And that basically formed, that combined with the things that Dom and I were talking about, about things that we'd gone through, formed the basis of the screenplay. Like, like everything that the characters talk about, the interactions that they have are all coming from things that Bourdain had written about that I had then kind of double-checked with people who were there. Cause it's so funny. Like, I mean, it's all self-report, right? That's one of the great secrets of Anthony Bourdain. He's like, isn't my, isn't my life amazing according to me? According to me?

• 1:22:43Sean Fennessey?

  All you gotta do is be a good storyteller. You know this about yourself.

• 1:22:45Speaker 07

  No kidding. And, and look, I think this is another movie that doesn't, doesn't let facts get in the way of the truth because the, the idea that Bourdain himself is inflating these things that happen. I'll tell you a perfect example. So I get to Provincetown and Bourdain famously worked at two restaurants, one called The Flagship, which is now gone, has turned into like a $5 million Airbnb and, and the other, a place called Ciro and Sal's. So he worked in the kitchen there, starting, I, I think he was actually a line cook there. He was dishwashing at The Flagship, but the kid who washed dishes at Ciro and Sal's was a guy named Larry Luster. Turns out now Larry owns Ciro and Sal's. Okay?

• 1:23:28Speaker 07

  This is a, it's an unbelievable story, which I won't get into. They should make a movie about Larry and his family.

• 1:23:34Sean Fennessey?

  Like 50 years later.

• 1:23:35Speaker 07

  It's crazy.

• 1:23:36Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:23:37Speaker 07

  And he's still, he's still there. Now his kids, his sons are taking over the restaurant. So, and he was just a dishwasher who, who came there with his brothers because his brother worked at a, I think at air force or army base nearby. And he said, hey, this is a cool town. We should go work there for the summer. Anyway. I would talk with him about things like that famous story in Kitchen Confidential where Bourdain grabs the cast iron pan, burns it, it drops to the ground. Well, it's Larry's older brother is the guy in the book who picks it up barehanded, showing him the boils and blisters on his hand. And he's like, what are you talking like, you're such a baby that you can't do this? Larry and his brother together at dinner at the lobster pot tell me, that never happened. Are you insane? I would never grab a pot with my hand. Like,

• 1:24:22Speaker 07

  people come up to me all the time saying this story and I have to tell them all. I would never do that.

• 1:24:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:24:27Speaker 07

  It's psychotic. And in that is sort of the secret of the whole movie, right? It's like you're watching the story, the memories of a kid where, of course, it's true that he burned his hand and then somebody else picked it up and put it down and that showed him, I have a long way to go.

• 1:24:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Speaker 07

  But did it happen? Of course not.

• 1:24:49Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like it's such a great reflection of the fact that people with the biggest egos also have the deepest crevices of insecurities. So even when you're telling a story that is embarrassing for you, you have to exaggerate the effect in the storytelling.

• 1:25:01Speaker 07

  Well, hey, and I'm, it's just as guilty. I mean, it's what I find so relatable about it. And it's why when I'm sitting there at lunch with Dominic Sessa, with no interest at all in making a movie about Anthony Bourdain, within five sentences, I'm like, not only do I have to make this movie, but I know what it's about. And then, because really, well, Dom's a young guy, right? And he had, he'd really just made the holdovers and was sorting himself out and realizing, oh, I have a new, I have a new identity. Like, I have a whole new identity. And, and watching him reckon with that, but with this level

• 1:25:43Speaker 07

  of maturity and sensitivity and a total lack of ego, like, he's just speaking with me. I mean, I won't, I won't embarrass him by saying the specifics of what we're talking about. But I was like, if I, I said to Matt Miller, my producer, who was in at the lunch, I said, we could just start rolling tomorrow. Like, he's completely ready. I just need to shoot this guy in a close up, experiencing these things, and we have a movie.

• 1:26:09Sean Fennessey?

  Part of what's so wonderful, though, about his performance and the way that you've written the character is, you don't, you don't give him a lot. You don't give him a lot of cheap, easy wins for the first 100 minutes of the movie.

• 1:26:22Speaker 07

  No. In fact, he only loses.

• 1:26:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 07

  But, but he also gets all these kinds of false victories where he thinks he's won.

• 1:26:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Speaker 07

  Right? You know, like, how many times he lies and thinks he got away with it? Like, that's the whole movie.

• 1:26:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:33Speaker 07

  And like, he's like, yes, I did it. I lied, I lied to my mom. She believed me. Yes, I did it. I lied to Nancy and she thinks I'm here for writing fellowship. I lied my way into this kitchen. And, and he just keeps going down and down and down and down and down, thinking that he's going up and up and up and up.

• 1:26:47Sean Fennessey?

  One of the things that, you know, you mentioned that the film has some different formal stylistic moves than your other movies. But I also felt like, you know, it's quite contemplative and sad at times. And it also feels like if it was turned one degree to the right, it could just be New England Taxi Driver. You know, like, it could be like the villain origin story.

• 1:27:06Speaker 07

  Of course.

• 1:27:07Sean Fennessey?

  But where it lands ultimately is like, this felt like a movie that Touchstone Pictures could have released in 1997. I was like, this is like a very classical kind of Hollywood production.

• 1:27:16Speaker 07

  I take that as a huge compliment, because I was playing around with the idea of like old school story structure. I mean, I'd be, I mean, I'm sure people, this is obvious if you watch it, but I ripped the whole plot off of Pinocchio. Like, I'm essentially trying to remake Disney's Pinocchio, almost beat for beat. Like, if you line them up, you'll be like, oh, Jesus, you should be sued. But, but.

• 1:27:38Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's in the public domain at this point.

• 1:27:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, Pinocchio, I think I've got it. I don't know. I think, I think Disney changed a lot of shit to make it.

• 1:27:43Sean Fennessey?

  How old is their Pinocchio?

• 1:27:46Speaker 07

  I think it's 38.

• 1:27:47Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's the 30s, yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we'll delete this part of the show.

• 1:27:51Speaker 07

  No, no, no. Please, run it, run it. I'm not the copyright holder.

• 1:27:55Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think Josh Demaro is listening to this podcast?

• 1:27:57Speaker 07

  Probably.

• 1:27:58Sean Fennessey?

  You never know.

• 1:27:59Speaker 07

  But, but I, I was really trying to do a kind of like old school, 90s is exactly right. I mean, it's probably because I'm so awash in it after having finished Nirvana the Band. But, but trying to, to put a character through like, like a classic hero's journey and, and, and, and had I told you that story about, like, what I think the secret to writing movies is for me about, about the history of psychoanalysis? Have I taught you about this?

• 1:28:33Sean Fennessey?

  I think we talked about this off mic.

• 1:28:34Speaker 07

  Oh, really?

• 1:28:35Sean Fennessey?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:28:36Speaker 07

  I'll repeat it. And it's, I mean, if you, if you're a screenwriter listening to this and you find this useful, it really changed my life and I'll tell it as briefly as possible. And it's that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung sort of had two different approaches at dream analysis. And it was that the client comes in, tells you a dream. And Sigmund Freud would say, ah, interesting dream. Let's go down from that dream into your own biographical story. So what in the dream is representing things that happened with your mother, things that happened in your own life, like these things that happened to you specifically? It's telling us secrets about your own past that your subconscious is manifesting. And that's how we'll decode the dream and use it to, to help you. Whereas Carl Jung hears

• 1:29:18Speaker 07

  the exact same dream and goes up and says, okay, so what myth, what story, either from the Bible or, or Greek mythology, like, what does it map to? And then let's look at the story of the myth and it will tell you where you are in your own story.

• 1:29:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:33Speaker 07

  Right? And that, and that will provide the answer of where you need to go next. And I found that framing of movies so unbelievably powerful, like how I said, I just took Pinocchio as the myth and me and Dominic Sessa's biographical details as, as the Freudian side of it. And then in the middle, the dream is the movie.

• 1:29:53Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:54Speaker 07

  Right? Like, and, and, and the more I apply that filter to the things I'm doing, and it may just be like a shortcut for me to, to make it easier for me to understand, but I find it extremely powerful. Because if I get lost one way, I can go the other way to help figure out where I'm supposed to go.

• 1:30:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's so funny, because I feel like one of the, the recurring visual sonic motif of the movie is a person being abruptly awoken with splashed water and their dream ending.

• 1:30:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:26Sean Fennessey?

  So I'm sure that was, was that subconscious or the conscious speaking on the, on the, on the page?

• 1:30:30Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, how pretentious do you want me to be? I won't go there. I'll tell you, one of my favorite moments in the movie is when Dominic Sessa wakes up on his own. I really like that.

• 1:30:39Sean Fennessey?

  I do, too.

• 1:30:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Sean Fennessey?

  Another reason why I thought of the 90s a little bit while watching this movie in a good way is I am like a card carrying Antonio Banderas.

• 1:30:47Speaker 07

  Me, too. And he doesn't, he's never gotten the credit he deserves, because Hollywood basically said, okay, all right, we've got like, the prototypical, super charming killer. How many different ways can we, we're gonna make him like, like a warrior, we're gonna make him an assassin.

• 1:31:06Sean Fennessey?

  Desperado assassins, yes.

• 1:31:08Speaker 07

  Yeah. As, as Steve Buscemi says, the biggest Mexican you have ever seen in your life. Like, and I am sure, like, you grew up just loving this guy. And he has the Denzel Washington magic, which anything he says, doesn't matter what it is, every line, explication or not, you're just like, more.

• 1:31:26Sean Fennessey?

  It just sounds cool. He just, he just has the best voice. But then, for me, also, I, I mean, I loved him in, in the 90s, in Desperado, in Zorro. I loved all of those movies. And then getting a little older and seeing the Almiron films, and you're like, oh, wow, this is a very complex psychological performer as well. And I do feel like, you know, he's a little diserved over the last 10 or 15 years with the parts that he's getting.

• 1:31:48Speaker 07

  I agree completely.

• 1:31:49Sean Fennessey?

  But he's so fucking good in this movie.

• 1:31:50Speaker 07

  And I'm telling you, it's all him. I, I mean, I write all the, all the roles for the actors. And so originally, this guy was not a Roman Catholic, you know, like, like the details of him and what he has interests in basically became what the character is. And I do not mean to say he's playing himself, not at all. I mean, this, it goes without saying. But it was the synthesis between like, a kind of religious humility and this master chef kind of in hiding that, that kind of unlocked this character where everything

• 1:32:28Speaker 07

  he says and does, he, he just seems so intentional, but also so scared. Like, he doesn't, he, he so doesn't want to be caught showing off, but he's the most handsome, charming, graceful person in all of Provincetown.

• 1:32:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but he's also a really tragic ghost of future past figure in the movie in such an amazing way.

• 1:32:49Speaker 07

  Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people view the film and they're like, okay, so this is about Anthony Bourdain picking between a good mentor and a bad mentor. And I'm like, no way. Both of these men that he's looking at are total failures.

• 1:33:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 07

  But they're also unbelievable successes. And Bourdain has got to figure out, well, what of each of these guys am I going to keep? Because obviously, Antonio Banderas is playing a guy who you'd view as, okay, that's a good influence. But you look at his life, you know?

• 1:33:18Sean Fennessey?

  I, I was wondering about this, since this is, you know, your first film that is not made in the same style as the other films that you've made, and it's with these Hollywood actors. But it's an ensemble piece.

• 1:33:27Speaker 07

  Big time.

• 1:33:28Sean Fennessey?

  And, and Leo and Stav and, and Antonio and, and other actors as well. But they're just forces of nature charisma wise. You know, like Leo, like, almost walks away with the movie in the middle of it.

• 1:33:39Speaker 07

  Isn't it crazy?

• 1:33:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And like, and I've talked to people who've seen it and they feel the same way, right? So how do you, one, how do you basically make chemistry in a, in a situation like that where you've got a small number of actors, especially in those kitchen sequences? And two, how do you like, make sure that the movie is balanced enough in the favor of who you need it to be?

• 1:33:54Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, I'll answer the second question first, which is, I have no idea. Like, that's not something that Kurt, Bobby and I are conscious of really. Because we, I think like most filmgoers, just try to put the cool shit on screen. And if, and if Leo's doing the cool shit, we're like, okay, yeah, more, more, more, more, more.

• 1:34:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 07

  Uh, I think it kind of works itself out if, if the story is working. But in terms of getting people in a room to have fun with one another, that's, that is just the, the magic of casting. I, I kind of have a, a perspective on that. Well, I guess I should say it's more of a philosophy. It's like, I'm only gonna put people in my movies that I like. Because, because, well.

• 1:34:44Speaker 07

  When I'm, when I'm watching even just footage, when I'm watching any of my movies, I know something is wrong when I don't like one of the characters that I put in a movie. And I don't mean like I disagree with, I mean that I don't like, love them. Like when I'm watching, okay, when I'm watching Tony, I love everything Leo Woodall does. I love him. I want him to win. I look at Dominic Sessa, I love him. I want him to win. I want Antonio Banderas to win. I want Amelia Jones to win. Like, I love them. Like, I watched them and I could cry looking just at the vitality in their face as they're, as they are trying to get what they want. And so, like, the secret is, meet them there.

• 1:35:29Speaker 07

  Like, don't hire somebody to be in your movie who you do not feel that way about, because you can't fake it. And so long as everybody comes there and they, they recognize that you really do want the best for them, then they'll play, they'll play. Like, I mean, maybe you can make a mistake and who knows, like, maybe secretly Stavros and Leo Woodall hated one another, but no, they, they, they understand, okay, we're here and the, and the better we do, the better we're all gonna look. And everybody was on everybody's team. I also have raised the same age, all young in their career. And, and they had each other's back. We were, we were trapped in Cape Cod, man. Like, we were trapped.

• 1:36:10Sean Fennessey?

  What was, um, was there one thing you would do differently if you could do it again? Cause since you had not been in a situation like this before.

• 1:36:16Speaker 07

  I mean, there's hundreds of things I would do differently, but, but, but, I mean, my first time working in like, like the true American system, I was working with almost exclusively strangers. There's things that I had such a relaxed attitude about because I'm so used to, uh, like, my friends and I, almost in a kind of autopilot. Like, if you watch Nirvana, the band, you don't, like, it's so painfully obvious that the people who made this have, well, no regard for bureaucracy. I'll just say that. I'll just, I'll put, I'll put it that way. And, um, and so, and so, moving into, into a, into a system where, where things just were, needed to be done a certain way,

• 1:37:01Speaker 07

  and for good reason, took so much getting used to for me. But again, it gets back to this thing I brought up at the beginning, which is, I knew I needed to go through this. Like, I, I knew I needed to go through this, kind of with no, um, uh, safety net, because I was about to be thrown into like a 10 times, uh, more complicated situation, and I didn't want that to be the learning experience.

• 1:37:23Sean Fennessey?

  Just a little bit about choosing music.

• 1:37:25Speaker 07

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:37:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a lot, lot of classical needle drops, big needle drops.

• 1:37:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Sean Fennessey?

  Um, obviously Jay has score as well, which is really nice.

• 1:37:32Speaker 07

  I know, I love Jay's score. And he, he wrote the, those original piano cues so early, he was just watching footage, or like we, we always do. Kurt and Bobby will just send him dailies. And then it was, I think, the very first thing he sent me. I was like, oh yeah, you've created the subconscious of Anthony Bourdain. And that, the very first thing he wrote is in the movie. Like, he, he defined the tone instantly. But in terms of needle drops, this was the first time ever where, this is getting back to your hyperlinking question, where there is a personality behind, I tried to do this in BlackBerry a bit, although those guys were not really music fans. Um, where the personality that you're making the movie about has a relationship with music already.

• 1:38:12Speaker 07

  And so, the place that, that Kurt Bobby and I started was with Bourdain's playlists from this time. And he has lists of music that he, that he loves. But then there's also something very cool, which is that he obviously is the music supervisor of his TV show. And so, what we did, we, we just looked at every single one of the songs from this era that he put in his various shows, because clearly those mean something to him. And so, it was like this amazing, like, we have our pick. And so, like, the, the song that's first playing in the kitchen, when, I mean, I don't wanna spoil the music in there. Well, I mean, I guess I can talk about it. What the hell do people care?

• 1:38:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's okay.

• 1:38:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's okay. But, but, but Strawberry Letter is the song that he says, if he heard walking down the street, thinking about Province Town, he would just burst into tears. And it, and it just so happens to be the song that is playing almost in the background while he's in the kitchen for the very first time washing dishes, paying no attention to it. So, as many of these things that we could take from his own, uh, preference, we put in the movie. But then, and I, I have to give the credit in a way that I'm sure most people aren't used to hearing, the executive on this film from eight twenty-four, well, one of the executives, Noah Sacco, watched a cut of the movie and out of nowhere was like, you know, I really love classic rock from this era. Do you mind if I suggest a few songs?

• 1:39:35Speaker 07

  And the movie was basically done. I was like, of course, of course. He sent me three songs. Every single song is in the movie and one of them is the closing credits.

• 1:39:43Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding?

• 1:39:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, he just, it's, it's the only time in my life I've ever got, like, feedback from a studio or a financier that was like, oh wow, yeah.

• 1:39:51Sean Fennessey?

  A good note.

• 1:39:52Speaker 07

  They're, they're, they're like unbelievable notes.

• 1:39:55Sean Fennessey?

  That's great.

• 1:39:56Speaker 07

  That, that I got from them.

• 1:39:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I feel like you're in a very interesting moment in your life.

• 1:40:01Speaker 07

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 1:40:03Sean Fennessey?

  You are, uh, from afar in demand. And you just talked about how, you know, all, whatever your imposter syndrome or your anxieties or your, you know, defensiveness or all the things that you had as a young person, and I-

• 1:40:17Speaker 07

  It's now really being challenged.

• 1:40:18Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it, it kind of is Bourdain-ish, you know? Where in a certain, Bourdain kind of crosses a Rubicon as a public figure.

• 1:40:26Speaker 07

  I know. They, it's so funny what happens to him. They're like, okay, guess what? You're a famous writer now. And he looks in the mirror and goes, well, I didn't mean to do that.

• 1:40:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. But I think, I feel like you aspire to this, but also I'm curious to know like how you're handling it. Where like, I feel like you're on the minds of executives who wanna make big movies. You're, you're making The Magic movie. You're making other stuff.

• 1:40:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:40:47Sean Fennessey?

  Um, is it everything you ever hoped and dreamed? Are you happy?

• 1:40:50Speaker 07

  You know what? I think happiness is a bad metric, because, you know, I think happy means different things to different people. I, I'll say, I feel, I've never felt more proud that I can, um, I can, uh, I don't wanna say be a role model, but be like an example of, not how easy it is to be a filmmaker, but how you really don't need to be some kind of genius to do it. Right? Like, you can, you can be-

• 1:41:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's not helpful. People don't listen to you on this show and think this guy's not really smart. They think the opposite of that.

• 1:41:23Speaker 07

  Well, you know what Miles Davis says about this? Is that a genius is the person who's most like themselves. And, and that's a path anybody can take. And, and to take your point of what studio executives, et cetera, whatever that, that, that grouping of people really even means, what I find that anybody who wants me to make a movie for them or wants to talk about a project is interested in, they're all interested in the same thing, which is how I would do something. Right? Like, whatever it is that is me, which I don't, I even have trouble defining, how can that connect with the, uh, property they have or an IP or a story or whatever? And, and everybody has that. Like, every film student has that, because of course, there's only one of them.

• 1:42:08Speaker 07

  And so, for me, the, the challenge of my life was trying to figure out, and it's a work in progress, but like, like, what is it about my own specific circumstances as a kid, growing up where I did, and my interests being what they were? Like, what does that mean? And it's why all of my movies are constantly trying to reexamine that as much as possible and, and not necessarily change it, but like, like, keep getting closer and closer to it. Um, because it will be the journey of my life, as I'm sure it is with you, that, that-

• 1:42:43Sean Fennessey?

  Not the same, but I know, I appreciate you saying that. Um-

• 1:42:46Speaker 07

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:42:47Sean Fennessey?

  I, uh, I'm curious, what is a, what is the metric of success for a movie like Tony? Because it is, I feel like, you know, it's a, it's an American studio film.

• 1:42:58Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:58Sean Fennessey?

  You've got a rising young star, you've got a legend of Hollywood in the cast. Like, is it, is it, do you look at box office actively? Do you read the reviews of the film? Like, do you think about it any differently than your previous work?

• 1:43:10Speaker 07

  Uh, you know, every movie, I think I've told you this before, that, like, the great victory of every single movie is when you solve the story problems in the editing room. And Kurt Bobby and I go, oh my God, I can't believe we fixed this. And it never gets better than that. So, that, that, like, nothing ever even comes within like a, like arms' reach of that feeling. So, but you're asking specifically, like, obviously, like, almost to cynically look at, at the success of a film and, uh-

• 1:43:38Sean Fennessey?

  Practically, I think.

• 1:43:39Speaker 07

  But they're both the same, the same. I don't mean cynically negatively. I just mean in terms like the, yeah, the practical result of it.

• 1:43:43Sean Fennessey?

  You're making a product that is going into the marketplace as well, you know?

• 1:43:46Speaker 07

  Oh, definitely. And I, I do think that, that, that all my work is trying to, to be at the crossroads of, of, uh, like, what audiences actually do want to see. Like, I'm not, I, I'm, I'm making movies for people to watch and enjoy. And, um, and, uh, and so I do respect the idea that, that people are gonna go see this movie if they like it and they won't if they don't. I'm making a crude case for the, for the commercialization of film. Um, but, but I don't-

• 1:44:22Speaker 07

  I'll put it this way, let's say that this movie were released and critics were all like, oh my God, this is like a pathetic, navel gazing piece of garbage and nobody went to go see it. That still wouldn't change the feeling that I had when I watched it with my friends in the editing room being like, ah, we did it. So I, what I want is for really young people to watch it and feel like it's useful to them. In the same way that I felt that about Nirvana, the band and the dirties and all of these movies, even though I wasn't mature enough at the time to, to make

• 1:45:01Speaker 07

  that claim. But, but I want to keep making movies, hopefully to try to, well, so it's, it's so self aggrandizing to say, say, make the world better. But, but, but that's,

• 1:45:14Sean Fennessey?

  I think a good movie can do that.

• 1:45:15Speaker 07

  So do I.

• 1:45:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:16Speaker 07

  I, so do I. I think even like, like very small, independent, like seen by 5,000 people.

• 1:45:23Sean Fennessey?

  Really great.

• 1:45:24Speaker 07

  And, and I think that, that viewing them that way, in the same way that when I was in film school and you'd be up all night and you'd be like, oh my gosh, this, this movie that I'm making now is like the most important thing I've ever done in my life. That still animates me because I still think it's true that if you give something, everything that you have, and you really, really do try to make it great outside of, detached from your own ego, then it does make the world better. And I think that's true of every vocation, every job, this podcast, like the more you put into it, like if you really, really, really do great, you lift everybody. We all get lifted. And it's why we were talking before about criticism. I think film critics are a part of that. And it's why when people don't meet that standard,

• 1:46:08Speaker 07

  they, they're told, ah, I think that if you had thought about this movie more or worked harder or whatever, pick, pick your criticism, then it's not just that your movie would have been better. It's that the life of people everywhere would have been better. And that's a huge responsibility that a lot of people don't want to fess up to, that, that the actions that you take as an individual might affect the world in some small way. But of course it's true.

• 1:46:33Sean Fennessey?

  It is true. Um, you're feeling good about the state of movies. You came in and you said, it feels like something has happened.

• 1:46:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's like we're living for a renaissance and it's exclusively because of like people 25 and under. It's crazy.

• 1:46:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's awesome. I've been praying on this.

• 1:46:51Speaker 07

  It, it, it's like Letterboxd somehow. It's so bizarre that, that, that, that, that, it's, I won't even know that, I don't know that it's cool, but it's almost like, like it has, movies have become a new kind of collectible, you know? In the way that when I was young, we'd collect pogs. It's like, oh, you're, you're collecting the history of your own culture, which is, which is so, so crazy.

• 1:47:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great way to describe it.

• 1:47:23Speaker 07

  And, and

• 1:47:24Sean Fennessey?

  And that is what it is because you, people can see what you've watched.

• 1:47:27Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:47:27Sean Fennessey?

  And they can see what you have accomplished.

• 1:47:29Speaker 07

  And you literally create your own history. Yeah, of course, of course. And, and the closer you get to it, and, and of course people are like, oh, I want to watch like every weird idiosyncratic thing. And, and the, look, the challenge that everybody's going to have is you have to figure out what you like. That's hard. And it was so, it was becoming harder and harder as, uh, culture was becoming almost more rarified. Like, like with the internet, it was like people could get into all these weird niches and there was nothing that, that creative, created a collective, um, viewing experience. Like that's completely gone. And yet somehow it's been reformed where all of these niche interests are now coming together. It's like, no, we've all now seen these weird movies.

• 1:48:08Sean Fennessey?

  I have a strong feeling about this, which is that the homogenization of Hollywood movies between 2005 and 2020 led people, it led to like a kind of break with the contemporary culture and sent people back.

• 1:48:21Speaker 07

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:22Sean Fennessey?

  That they were like, I feel like I'm watching the same movie over and over again, but I know that this isn't the history of movies. What else has there been? And so once they got through every Fast movie and every Marvel movie and every Jurassic movie, all the franchises, they were like, there's more here. And it led to this unconscious collective realization of

• 1:48:41Speaker 07

  They wanted to go to the original texts. They went back to the original texts.

• 1:48:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And now the industry is, is following them in a way that I really love. Anyway, that's my hopeful outro. Um, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? You just got off a plane. Did you watch anything on the plane?

• 1:48:55Speaker 07

  I was so close to watching Roofman. Oh my gosh.

• 1:48:57Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I liked it.

• 1:48:58Speaker 07

  Of course. Well, C. N. Francis is one of my heroes.

• 1:49:00Sean Fennessey?

  He's so great.

• 1:49:01Speaker 07

  He's one of the few filmmakers that I, that I'd be afraid to meet. He's, he's one

• 1:49:04Sean Fennessey?

  He's a very nice guy.

• 1:49:05Speaker 07

  You know, I say this about

• 1:49:06Sean Fennessey?

  He's been on the pine, so.

• 1:49:07Speaker 07

  I say this about him, um, and very few others, but he knows secrets. And I don't know how he

• 1:49:16Sean Fennessey?

  He's a deep cat.

• 1:49:17Speaker 07

  I don't know how he knows them. Um, so I will say I almost watched Roofman. And so I, I'll, I'll say that's the last thing that I, that I watched, even though I didn't actually see it, because the, because the feeling of almost seeing it really filled me with a feeling of like, oh yeah, I'm going to watch a new C. N. Francis, because I love C. N. Francis. I love him.

• 1:49:35Sean Fennessey?

  That's, that, no one has ever answered that question in that way.

• 1:49:37Speaker 07

  Hegelian negation? Yeah.

• 1:49:40Sean Fennessey?

  Matt Johnson, you are the best. Thank you.

• 1:49:42Speaker 07

  I'm so happy to be here and I'll, I'll see you again.

• 1:49:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thank you to Matt. Thanks to Ciara. 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 drafting again, movie flops. You feel ready for this?

• 1:50:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. I don't like targeting flops, but we're gonna, we're gonna make it work.

• 1:50:03Sean Fennessey?

  You don't like targeting flops?

• 1:50:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. I want to celebrate the good qualities of movies, not their economic failures.

• 1:50:08Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that's not the only way we're grading flops.

• 1:50:11Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 1:50:13Sean Fennessey?

  See you then.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

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• 1:50:52Speaker 01

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