‘Marty Supreme’ Is the Moment, With Josh Safdie!

Sean and Amanda dream big on today’s show because they’re breaking down one of their most anticipated movies of the year with Josh Safdie’s ‘Marty Supreme,’ starring Timothée Chalamet. They make the case for why it’s one of the best movies of the year, celebrate its relentless and propulsive filmmaking style, and highlight their favorite individual scenes from the movie (1:31). Then, Sean is joined by Safdie to discuss the intense pressure he faced following the success of ‘Uncut Gems,’ why Chalamet’s personal ambition and drive made him perfect for the lead role of Marty, and work through whether or not this is a “chapter closing” type of movie for Safdie as a director (1:00:26). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Josh Safdie Producers: Jack Sanders and Jacob Cornett Shopping. Streaming. Celebrating. It’s on Prime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:14Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 0:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:16Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture at Conversation show about Marty Supreme. Today on the show, we are diving deep into one of the year's very best movies, the Timothy Chalamet starring ping pong period piece, Marty Supreme. Later in this episode, I'll have a long, deep, fantastic conversation with Josh Safdie. He's the co-writer, co-editor and director of this magical movie. Josh has been coming on this show since we started doing this show in 2017. He was here with his brother Benny for good time. He's been on it many times since. Always one of the most engaging, intelligent, fun guests we have. He's also a diehard Knicks fan, so we really appreciate him in many ways. Things are going great for the Knicks. Did you know that?

• 0:53Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 0:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's very exciting.

• 0:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You've mostly been tweeting about the Mets, so I haven't really clocked in on the Knicks.

• 0:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Marty Supreme goes from a Mets game to a Knicks game in magical ways. And we'll get into that as we talk about the film, and we will do so right after this.

• 1:09Amanda Dobbins?

  This episode of The Big Picture is presented by Amazon Prime. You know how in every great holiday movie, there's that last minute scramble to make it all come together? From gifts to hosting essentials, Prime's fast shipping is always there for you during the holidays, especially when it's last minute and just can't wait. So if you need fast, free delivery that saves the day, it's on Prime. Head to amazon.com/prime to shop now.

• 1:32Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Amanda, this movie was number two

• 1:35Amanda Dobbins?

  It was.

• 1:35Sean Fennessey?

  on your top five movies of the year list.

• 1:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Dream big. Dream big. That's me writing it in orange script.

• 1:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, you're just doing marketing now.

• 1:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Sean Fennessey?

  You're not even

• 1:46Amanda Dobbins?

  That's fine. I saw the movie on my own in October. I was like, that movie's dynamite. Put it on number two on my list, having only seen it the once, saw it again yesterday. This movie rules. I am amped. I am wearing a sequin shirt for this movie. It's not really sequin. It's more like shiny metallic.

• 2:06Sean Fennessey?

  Shimmering, yeah.

• 2:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I bought this in Paris because I too dream big. So I, this, I just, this is, I mean, One Battle is the movie of the year, but this is really a close second for me. I find this movie joyous and wild and electric, and it made me cry the second time, and it's

• 2:27Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, it is another like real meeting point for the two of us. It's just what we want to see in the movies. But for two and a half hours yesterday, I felt young again. And I would like to thank Timothy Chalamet and Josh Safdie for that.

• 2:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let's put some fencing around the movie. So as I said, directed by Josh, co-written with Ronald Bronstein, also co-edited with Ronald Bronstein, who's been one of their collaborators for a long time. It's once again shot by Darius Kanji, the legend who's shot multiple movies this year, including Mickey 17 and Eddington. This is his third film of the year. Scores by Daniel Lopaten, we will definitely discuss that.

• 3:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Release the score, A24. What is this out on December 25th? Come on. If I'm marketing, you market too. Release the score.

• 3:14Sean Fennessey?

  There are no tracks available at the moment we are recording it. Movie stars Timothy Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa Azian, Kevin O'Leary, Tyler, the creator, Tyler Okonma, Abel Ferrara and Fran Drescher. If you haven't heard of what this story is about, I'll give you a brief snapshot. Marty Supreme follows the ambitious, fast-talking NYC hustler Marty Mouser in 1950s New York as he navigates a chaotic life of petty crime affairs and a secret pregnancy, all while pursuing world championship glory in table tennis, blending real-life inspiration from ping-pong legend Marty Reisman with fictionalized chaos focusing on Marty's self-obsession and his unconventional path to greatness. I thought we could talk, start there.

• 3:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 3:59Sean Fennessey?

  We've just recorded another podcast that isn't out yet about a film that tracks ambition and obsession. You know what I'm referring to?

• 4:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I do, yes. I had to think about it for a moment. We are at the point in the year where we need like the poster board with what city we're on. Like, you know?

• 4:16Sean Fennessey?

  Claire Danes is, yeah, exactly.

• 4:18Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but you know, like, you know, when people are doing tour dates and they're like, you know, hello Omaha, but I need like what date it is? Just on a Love Actually poster board from Jack?

• 4:27Sean Fennessey?

  We are in the midst of the 12 episodes in six days recording schedule.

• 4:31Amanda Dobbins?

  That is a great movie about ambition and the dark side and the corrosive nature of.

• 4:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Men and America, all at once.

• 4:43Sean Fennessey?

  So this movie is also about that.

• 4:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Sort of. Yeah, it is.

• 4:47Sean Fennessey?

  So Marty is this lower middle-class kid, living in New York, a Jewish kid, living in the tenements with his mom. He's in his seemingly early twenties.

• 4:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Sean Fennessey?

  And trying to break free. He's working in a shoe store and he's trying to pursue his dream, which is to be not just a, an accomplished ping pong player, because you get the sense from the movie that he already is that, but to be a world famous, successful person.

• 5:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  A person who is acknowledged as great.

• 5:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:14Sean Fennessey?

  And I find that historically, you like rank, that like rankles you a little bit, like these kinds of guys.

• 5:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that the movie is designed to make this guy rankle you.

• 5:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. He, I, I guess he does. He doesn't rankle me for a second. And so you, I, you've identified this as a movie about ambition, which it certainly is. But I, you know, what he's trying to do is make like the outside match the inside and the rest of the world catch up with what's inside him. And this is an incredible movie about confidence to me.

• 5:43Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, you can't have one without the other, but there is, there's a specific nature,

• 5:52Amanda Dobbins?

  a specific thing about the nature of this confidence that is like only possible in the young. And this movie is really located at a, like a bridge in time moment that like opening credits announce it to you very clearly, like what's about to happen.

• 6:07Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:08Amanda Dobbins?

  And, but it's, it's, and it's not like a one crazy night movie, but it is sort of a five crazy nights movie um, over the course of a year before someone has to grow up. And so to me, it is delusional, but recognizable confidence that I found endearing as opposed to annoying, even though this person is obviously making really stupid decisions. And there are lives on the line, but in, in a, in a lighthearted, everything is gonna be okay sort of way. And I guess like the, the conclusion of the movie does really inform that.

• 6:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think.

• 6:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Both like, but not like the literal conclusion, but just that things, spoiler alert, and we will be spoiling Marty Supreme.

• 6:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, in full.

• 6:58Amanda Dobbins?

  But broadly, like things work out.

• 7:00Sean Fennessey?

  Broadly, they do. The ways in which they work out is interesting, I think, say a lot. The one thing that struck me watching this movie, I've now seen this movie three times, actually, is by shifting to a period piece.

• 7:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Sean Fennessey?

  After Uncut Gems and Good Time, which are both contemporarily set, in fact, all of their movies are contemporarily set, the Safdie brothers. The movie is able to more easily shift into this kind of like fantasia, dream nightmare state, as opposed to when you're closely following the events of Howard Ratner and he's walking around modern 2019 New York City.

• 7:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 7:33Sean Fennessey?

  That anxiety that you feel, that everyone felt, that everyone continues to point at and say that that is definitional about their filmmaking style, feels like an anxiety in your life, and it makes you uncomfortable. In this movie, it feels like you're reading an old book about a crazy kid.

• 7:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that that changes the energy of the kind of movie that it is. Like, it is certainly a part of this succession of stories that Safdie has been making. And I'm not sure if elevation is the right word. I'm not sure if it's like better than, but it is different. It does feel really unique for a variety of reasons. You know, we said it's set in the 50s, but the music cues are all from the 1980s.

• 8:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Sean Fennessey?

  The score is inspired by the 1980s, and the energy of the cutting, and even the lighting style of the movie, feels like the 2020s.

• 8:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:25Sean Fennessey?

  And so you have this mishmash, and so bringing to the table that latter energy is Timothy Chalamet, who's a very modern star.

• 8:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Sean Fennessey?

  And who, like, the way we understand him and the confidence that you're talking about, he's marketing that right now, and we've been talking about it on the show. But even before he was doing that, when you saw him promoting A Complete Unknown, or when you saw him promoting Dune, or Wonka, or any of these movies, he's doing white boy swag, you know, like, he's doing...

• 8:52Amanda Dobbins?

  The swag is unbelievable and self-contained.

• 8:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, like, and it is... I think this, the filmmaking in this movie is incredible, but you can't do it without this performance, which is someone channeling someone else and, you know, going through the world and going through a lot of different experiences. And like, you know, Timothy Chalamet has had many lives before this, but to my knowledge, was not a table tennis star before this moment. So, and he's, you know, every once in a while you can see a double, but like, he's playing tennis, like ping pong. It's like very physical.

• 9:28Sean Fennessey?

  Oh yeah. This is a sports movie. Straight up. Straight up.

• 9:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. But the movie is also built around that singular Timothy Chalamet. And it is like a very new or current type of like modern movie star, but there just is something impenetrably confident and poised about him that is like, has to be seen to be believed. It's amazing.

• 9:57Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great. Impressions, reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title and more. So cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just

• 10:38Sean Fennessey?

  go to LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply. It doesn't have that. Metatextual self-awareness, though, that I find that a lot of people have now. You know, where they're sort of like super conscious of their image.

• 10:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:57Sean Fennessey?

  You know, they're for for people in their 30s and 40s, there's a lot of like ironic shell around everything that they experience. Marty Mauser is confronting the day every day.

• 11:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Sean Fennessey?

  Right? He is like ferocious in his attempts to be recognized and seen and to get what he feels he deserves. Which is a very distinct. And like, it's it's pretty rare. It's pretty rare amongst stars. It's pretty rare in terms of performance style. And it's it's very rare in characters. Like, it's hard to build a movie around a character like this who, at the drop of a hat, will make a very abrasive Holocaust joke. You know, who will very willingly, you know.

• 11:36Amanda Dobbins?

  They just like the pause, the gasp that you heard and the nervous chuckle in my theater yesterday. And like, people still did laugh, but it that's quite a moment.

• 11:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I was trying to think about who this character reminded me of, who this performance reminded me of a little bit. And the closest I could come is it sort of feels like a mashup between Paul Newman and Hud.

• 11:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:58Sean Fennessey?

  Who's like a real bastard in that movie.

• 12:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Sean Fennessey?

  But it's impossible to take your eyes off him and all the women in the movie can't take their eyes off of him. And and Rupert Pupkin from King of Comedy. And obviously, a classic New York movie. And so a guy who's got such a willful belief in himself and his comedy and his destiny that he will go to insane ends to accomplish it. And interestingly, in both of those cases, but especially with Rupert Pupkin, when you get to the end of King of Comedy and he's doing his stand up on TV, you're like, this isn't bad. Like, it's not great, but it's not embarrassing. And Marty, similarly, he's greater than Rupert Pupkin is, but this movie is trying to like, show you that. Just because you're good at something doesn't mean

• 12:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Sean Fennessey?

  it's the purpose of your life, but there's not really anything wrong with going for it either. You know, I find that takeaway to be really fascinating. I, you know, I, I read a lot of personal New York hustler, like you gotta absolutely kill yourself to succeed energy. Like I feel that in all of the Safdie movies, but this one especially. And so I think I'm citing Robert De Niro and Paul Noon here on purpose. I'm like, this is a, this is rare air for an actor to conjure that feeling.

• 13:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Sitting in the movie yesterday, I had a different combo spring to mind, but mine was, it was Pacino instead of De Niro. It was like very young Pacino from like that like coiled, like waiting to attack and also just like very wiry and like extremely hot.

• 13:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 13:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and I was, I was just like, I was just like, this is just like a small, incredibly hot man, you know, like wiry, uh, but so powerful, uh, combined with Ad Rock, just like a, just like an incredibly cool, confident, Jewish, like Brooklyn icon. Who, you know, can get away with saying things he shouldn't and is just like floating, floating on, on charm and vibes. And I mean, Ad, Ad Rock has always been like a, you know, a locus point for both of us.

• 13:51Sean Fennessey?

  One of our guys.

• 13:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:53Sean Fennessey?

  He really is one of our guys.

• 13:54Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, he is for us, like the guys want to be him, like girls want to be with him.

• 13:57Sean Fennessey?

  Very much. I'm on the record about that as well.

• 13:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, so that's a compliment. Um, but you know, I think it's telling that in both of them, we're having to combine people because it is something.

• 14:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's a big performance.

• 14:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Sean Fennessey?

  It's a big performance and at a time when he's been giving a lot of big performances. And I totally agree with what you said, which is the, the movie doesn't work if you don't have somebody at the center of it that can do this. Obviously like I, these two people, Josh and uh, Shal may have been wanting to work together for a long time. Then Josh talked a little bit about that in our conversation. And they're a really nice meeting point. Um, as two New Yorkers, really like that's, there, there is a very specific energy about the city and the movie is attempting to capture that energy in like, the style of the movie is interesting because it's, it is quite long. It's two and a half hours and it's very episodic.

• 14:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:43Sean Fennessey?

  Now Marty's mission is clear. He is trying to win the table tennis championship. And then after losing it in the first act of the movie, avenge his loss.

• 14:52Amanda Dobbins?

  He's trying to win the British Open. Of table tennis.

• 14:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 14:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and then he's-

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  Is it not the world championship?

• 14:57Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's the British Open, it's, yeah, and they're at Wembley.

• 15:00Sean Fennessey?

  Got it.

• 15:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And then they, the world championship is being held in Tokyo.

• 15:05Sean Fennessey?

  Got it. Um, and so because of that,

• 15:10Sean Fennessey?

  a lot has to happen. A lot transpires between those two, these two big sports movie tent poles.

• 15:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Sean Fennessey?

  And that's really what it is. Like, the movie, um, well, let's, how much do you want to talk about the in- individual incidents of the film?

• 15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, they are filled with so many, like, you know, one or two scene performances that are so memorable. It's funny, I, I went to see this movie yesterday, as I said, got home. My three-year-old at the dinner table, who's like, learning about movies, was like, hey, mama, what, you know, how was your work? I said, well, I went to see a movie. And he said, can you tell me what happened in it?

• 15:45Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 15:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And so then I did. And it was, it was a very rich text. I highlighted some things, but you know-

• 15:51Sean Fennessey?

  This 25-year-old banged out Gwyneth Paltrow in the shower. It's incredible.

• 15:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I think what I said was, and then he met Gwyneth Paltrow, and she found a diamond necklace, and there was a lot about table tennis. And then I had to explain what table tennis was. There was a dog. At one point, he took a bath. You know, so I was, I was, uh, you know, bringing it down to a three-year-old's level.

• 16:13Sean Fennessey?

  There was a dog.

• 16:14Amanda Dobbins?

  But there was.

• 16:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But, you know, you could just, like, keep turning the pages. It was, I've seen people call it Dickens-esque in a way.

• 16:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but there is sort of a, I, but you can't not acknowledge all of the-

• 16:27Sean Fennessey?

  Dickens-esque but not Dickensian, if that makes sense.

• 16:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 16:29Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I mean?

• 16:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Even, yes.

• 16:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think that, um, a lot happens in the movie. And even just trying to sit down to write down all of the things that happened was challenging. I think there's a, a variety of reasons for that, right? Like, the cutting style in the film is very fast and hard. It's cut very specifically to the music.

• 16:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:52Sean Fennessey?

  The, uh, the, like, onslaught of images is very intense, and there are very high highs emotionally in the movie that can then, like, make it hard to sink back into the movie sometimes, where you have a big, you know, table tennis showdown, or you have a big romantic moment where the music swells and you've got these two characters locked in, or a violent encounter, or an explosion, or just like a hustling moment at the, at the, um, at the tables in a bowling alley, that- Makes the movie feel like a jumble, you know? Like the-

• 17:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Sort of. Yeah, I thi- yes, I guess. Or it's, it's certainly episodic and it's certainly like things that you're, you know, checking off before you can get to the final point. But I, I just kind of feel that Marty, as Timothee, Timothee Chalamet as Marty is, is holding it all together.

• 17:38Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree. Um, I also think that with that collision of music and that style, this movie and Uncut Gems especially have a kind of like cosmic jazz feeling where you're like, was this teleported in from another planet? Like, it feels just a little bit different than most conventional movies. You know, you're, there, it has a, a specific kind of energy and that word anxiety keeps getting used to describe it. I'm not sure if that's the right word. I'm trying to figure out what the right word is to describe their cinema.

• 18:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Sean Fennessey?

  But it is not, it, it isn't like watching A Complete Unknown, right? Which also has a really great Timothee Chalamet performance at the center of it. Really well-made movie, very, very good filmmaker, good performances all around. But there is a kind of like-

• 18:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It's unyielding. There are no breaks between activities.

• 18:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, okay, that's a good one.

• 18:26Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, and I'm a person who typically likes breaks between activities, but they just-

• 18:30Sean Fennessey?

  You like a nap. You like to lay down.

• 18:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm, I'm one of the world's great nappers. Um, but they, yeah, they just keep going. They keep amping it up, you know?

• 18:39Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay. Well, what, what are your favorite scenes in this movie? What sequences really jump out when you think back on it?

• 18:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, okay. Starting at the beginning. Well, with the, the entrance of Odessa as Zion as, as Rachel. And that queue right into the opening credits, which are hilarious and-

• 19:07Sean Fennessey?

  I did ask if it's an homage to Look Who's Talking.

• 19:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And what did he say?

• 19:09Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you'll have to listen to the interview.

• 19:12Amanda Dobbins?

  That's called being a content maker. Um, yeah, and the forever young music cue. And then the children's choir version. And it's just really, really funny. And I was laughing and, you know, the, the opening credits are an announcement of they, they're not dissimilar to the Uncut Gems credits. But they're like, this is going to be, you know, different and, and weird. And also that this is a movie about, there's going to be a baby at the end of this. So.

• 19:45Sean Fennessey?

  But I did not feel that coming at all.

• 19:47Amanda Dobbins?

  You didn't.

• 19:47Sean Fennessey?

  When I watched the movie the first time. The first time I watched this movie. And I, I watched the opening credit sequence and I was like, this is very funny. I understand completely what they're communicating. You know, Rachel and Marty are having an affair and they're having a baby together. And later, when Rachel shows up in the movie and she's pregnant, you're like, oh, that's Marty's baby. You believe all those things.

• 20:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Sean Fennessey?

  But the movie's conclusion, I did not see.

• 20:08Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I didn't see that either.

• 20:10Sean Fennessey?

  And that's like a testament to the strength of the movie that like, it keeps you on the rails. And you don't, at least I didn't know how they were going to.

• 20:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't.

• 20:17Sean Fennessey?

  Put a bow on it.

• 20:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't know emotionally where it was going.

• 20:20Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 20:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Um, but, but, but so that opening sequence, I mean, I just, it's, you know, when you're laughing and smiling up at the screen all at once. It's like a very particular, you feel seen and that kicks in for me immediately. So, all right, do you want to do the next one?

• 20:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the shoe store robbery where Lloyd is at the safe and is held at gunpoint. And then that very quickly transitions like in a flash.

• 20:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Sean Fennessey?

  To going to London and finding himself in like basically the barracks where they're all staying together. All the tennis, table tennis performers are staying together. And that whole sequence is moved so quickly where we get into the first matches. We get into him confronting Pico Iyer. We get into, you know, who's playing the table tennis leader, the leader of the ITTA.

• 21:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Sean Fennessey?

  And then deciding to go into the Ritz. And then he's being interviewed at the restaurant in the Ritz.

• 21:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 21:14Sean Fennessey?

  And then Gwyneth Paltrow comes in. And then we cut to him upstairs calling Gwyneth Paltrow on the phone.

• 21:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Standing on the phone, drinking with like a empty glass of orange juice.

• 21:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, wearing the hotel robe.

• 21:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Standing on the bed, yeah.

• 21:24Sean Fennessey?

  And immediately beginning, all of those actions, all of this, all of these matches. We get introduced to Kletzky, his friend, the Hungarian, who was at Auschwitz. We get introduced to Endo, the Japanese future champion. We get introduced to K. Stone, this former 1930s movie star who's now married and retired and living with a pen magnate played by Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. Like, the movie is just so freaking propulsive in that moment. And there are a handful of stretches like this where lots of action happens in 10, 15, 20 minute intervals. And really like, is all very charming and involving and very fun.

• 22:02Amanda Dobbins?

  The Gwyneth Paltrow stuff, I think is great. And she's really, really good. But the first scene between Marty and Kay is on the phone. And you see Marty at the beginning on the phone, but then you're just mostly watching her react to him. But his phone voice acting is so funny. And the final line before she hangs up, it's just when he says, "That sounds boring." And she's like, "Okay," and hangs on the phone, just absolutely dying. It's so, so good. But that's just, that's unseen.

• 22:35Sean Fennessey?

  I said this to a friend last night, too. It's, I hope that this is.

• 22:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Was the friend my husband?

• 22:40Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, maybe it was. I hope this is taken in the right way. It's nice to see Gwyneth Paltrow trying.

• 22:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Sean Fennessey?

  Like, she becomes this character. And she's extremely famous and she doesn't really act anymore. And except when she's in Marvel movies, she forgets about. And it is nice to see her engaged. And the two of them, they have like a very strong chemistry. The movie is very Oedipal.

• 23:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Sean Fennessey?

  And this theme of Kay's character, who lost her son in the war and who is attracted to this young boy who would be her son's age, and his fierce determination. I'm sure he's attracted to her, but there's also something about like, she was a movie star. And that's like a signpost in my quest to greatness.

• 23:18Amanda Dobbins?

  He doesn't know who she is until all the journalists who are interviewing him stop looking at him and look at her instead. And the camera kind of follows her walking down and then switches to him and everyone watching her.

• 23:28Sean Fennessey?

  There's something really funny in the meta text of both, you know, not just Timothy Chalamet, the young actor attempting to become great. And we watch a movie in which his character attempts to become great, but Gwyneth Paltrow, who has spent her life kind of tolerating man, boy actors in her personal life, now doing the same with the new man, boy hero star actor.

• 23:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And you know, Kay is also a former movie star who stopped acting. And in this case, it's because she married a pen salesman, which is just an incredible, not salesman, I should say, he owns the pen company. But like, you know, what a stand in for the lead singer of Coldplay and has been doing other things and like comes back to to the end is a little bit.

• 24:09Sean Fennessey?

  She's making her comeback in the movie the same way Gwyneth Paltrow is making her comeback.

• 24:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's negotiating what she was versus what she is now and what her appeal is to people, which I'm sure I, you know, I think it's cool that Gwyneth said yes to the role.

• 24:20Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. There's just a tremendous amount of cleverness in this. The same could be said for, I think Fran Drescher playing the Jewish mother figure in Timmy's life and who is like nagging and who is also kind of a hustler. And you can see that he has inherited some of her mentality, the way that she, you know, lies and kvetches about when she has to go to the hospital because she's dying. And Marty is also a person who's constantly creating these circumstances of dishonesty to get the things that he wants. And the movie has a lot of really little like character details that inform why the people are the way that they are throughout.

• 24:50Amanda Dobbins?

  But they also, it just, it moves so fast through them, you know? So it's not, it doesn't belabor anything. It is just like detailed and thought through and keeps going.

• 25:00Sean Fennessey?

  There's a, there's a benefit to seeing it a second time for this reason. Um, not that it's, you know, you couldn't pick up on everything, but because there is just so much information being conveyed, it's helpful.

• 25:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's sort of connected to this period of the movie. I also just think the dinner at the Ritz where Kletzky and Marty are talking. And then Marty offers to buy dinner for Kay and Milton. And then Milton, played by Kevin O'Leary, comes over to the table, which then leads to this very tense exchange where we see Marty really unafraid to offend. And he laughs in his face, Kevin O'Leary's face, when he reveals that his son has died in the war. And then Kletzky tells the story about the honey.

• 25:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Sean Fennessey?

  When he, after, while defusing bombs during World War II.

• 25:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And but then the honey shot flashback goes straight into Kay walking. It's like a very fluid movement from the devouring of the honey into Kay walking into Marty's suite.

• 25:57Sean Fennessey?

  Devour the honey. Yes, exactly. Exactly. A lot of fun little stuff like this.

• 26:00Amanda Dobbins?

  She looks great.

• 26:01Sean Fennessey?

  Beautiful. Knocking on the royal suite.

• 26:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, you know, she's got the fur coat. Yeah.

• 26:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Sean Fennessey?

  I will say that the first battle between Endo and Marty, one, it like, there's a conventionality to the movie. That's a very conventional setup for a hero character in a movie, where you need to get absolutely smoked in the first act, so that we can then get invested and you win. Even though Marty is like, right on the edge of unlikable. And the sore loserdom that he shows after he gets fucking waxed by Endo. And the way that he's like, once calling for, you know, a rematch immediately afterwards.

• 26:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Sean Fennessey?

  And him grousing about joining the Globetrotters and then eventually joining the Globetrotters. Like, the movie is consistently forcing you. And not just in that like 70s movie way.

• 26:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Playing against the seal, huh?

• 26:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, the seal is good.

• 26:50Amanda Dobbins?

  It's good, but I mean, that's like a pretty conventional, listen, you know.

• 26:54Sean Fennessey?

  The Red Panda of their day.

• 26:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Movies are good. And I didn't, I didn't know about Red Panda until she came back this year. And then my entire family just sat transfixed, like, baby, toddler, husband, were just staring at the.

• 27:08Sean Fennessey?

  It's a whole thing.

• 27:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's amazing stuff. I know, it's incredible, it works. But there is also something conventional about it. The movie gives you enough movie candy or movie familiarity to then get real rowdy.

• 27:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's really funny. I mean, you'll hear a little bit from Josh about how much of this is based on real events and real stories and things that he learned over time. Because of that level of specificity, like, so much of this has to be based in experiences. When Marty returns to America.

• 27:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm. So we're just like, fully just recapping all the scenes that we want. No, no, I know, but I just wanted to acknowledge, like, I'm with you. And I did a version of this last night, but I just want to acknowledge, we're just like, this is another awesome thing. And this, yeah.

• 27:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think it's just like a helpful way.

• 27:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Sean Fennessey?

  To celebrate what I like, because it's revealing, it reveals the choices that are made.

• 27:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 27:58Sean Fennessey?

  In the filmmaking that I think are very clever. For example, like from the honey to the honey pot, like that thing.

• 28:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 28:04Sean Fennessey?

  There's so much like slickness in the writing and the editing.

• 28:07Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm on board. I just, I did think that we needed to, because also, I, you're, you're going through the list, but I want everyone to know that I also like these scenes. It's not just you being like, I like all of these scenes and.

• 28:19Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no, it's for reasons. It's for structural and character based reasons. And I think like, the movie needs to continue to reveal character for you to continue to get invested.

• 28:30Sean Fennessey?

  When they come back to America, again, there's this, you know, insane stretch where, you know, he goes back home. His mother sort of half receives him.

• 28:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:41Sean Fennessey?

  He does give her the piece of the pyramid, which is another like, kind of amazingly deep thing that is definitely connected to Uncut Gems and this idea of sort of like your origins and, you know, what you've built and where you're from and what you're worth and what your destiny is. It's a movie about destiny, right? But then that leads to them needing to, you know, he needs to raise money. So he goes to the hotel.

• 29:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, because.

• 29:06Sean Fennessey?

  So that he and Tyler can go play ping pong and make more money. Because his, yeah, his uncle has taken the money back that he made from his quest with the Globetrotters. That whole scene with the old cop and, and his uncle, Razzo Sloman, is like, out of like a 1930s Laurel and Hardy movie, you know, like, it's so silly and so dopey in the way that it's told. Then Abel Ferrara shows up in the hotel and he's got a dog and the dog had an accident. It smells like shit and then they're checking into these hotel rooms. The bath falls through the ceiling.

• 29:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Very exciting.

• 29:39Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy, like, that, that is the most Uncut Gems-y moment in the movie to me, where it's like, what the fuck just happened?

• 29:45Sean Fennessey?

  And so there's just like all this crazy incident that keeps happening that eventually leads to them going to the bowling alley.

• 29:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I don't know if you saw Ethan Hawke's son playing one of the participants in the bowling alley sequence. And then a bunch of other guys with these crazy faces. There's so many different people who pop up in the movie who like maybe you've seen before or you haven't seen before, they look familiar to you. They're so distinct. The Safdie's so good at casting memorable people.

• 30:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 30:10Sean Fennessey?

  You know, that that's a huge part of making a movie.

• 30:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And in unexpected ways. It took me to my second viewing to realize that Rachel's husband is Emery Cohen.

• 30:17Sean Fennessey?

  It is indeed.

• 30:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And I was like, that's Emery Cohen?

• 30:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know.

• 30:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Being terrible in Brooklyn? That's not my Emery Cohen.

• 30:24Sean Fennessey?

  Likewise, the guy who eventually gets Abel Ferrara's dog in his big white house is Pendelec, the famed magician, who I definitely did not clock the first time I watched it because he's unrecognizable.

• 30:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Sean Fennessey?

  But you know, even the idea of casting someone like Abel Ferrara, who's this famed New York filmmaker, who's very well known for making these really kind of gritty New York crime dramas that have this also like a twinge of cosmic incident to them and a really like a hard bitten look at the city and the way that people are incredibly violent. He plays an incredibly violent and brutal character in this movie is really fascinating. I don't know, what other sequences are memorable to you or the jump out?

• 31:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Somewhere in the middle of the hustling, I think it's after the bowling alley before the Pendelec house.

• 31:11Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, it's after the bowling alley and it's the Tyler, the creator character and Marty are, they've, they've made it away from their hustle and they're trying to get to a gas station and they both get out of the car and are dancing along the side of car, you know, and it's one of those where it's like, ooh, like I'm a boy with a camera. Look what I can do with the camera, but also it's so beautiful. The, the performances are great.

• 31:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Amanda Dobbins?

  It's.

• 31:38Sean Fennessey?

  I think they're dancing to the fat man by Fats Domino.

• 31:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, really magic, just kind of a serendipitous moment of.

• 31:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Like of pure charm.

• 31:47Sean Fennessey?

  What did you think of Tyler in the movie?

• 31:49Amanda Dobbins?

  That is very funny.

• 31:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's pretty good, pretty believable as his buddy, as his close friend who also he can't trust and who will fuck him over. And all of these guys, Dion, his friend, who is helping him design, the ping pong balls also gets kind of screwed, but also he's so insanely encouraging to Dion. It's like, it is that hustler thing where it's like, you did this, man? You did this? Man, like, and he's talking about how, to his father about how he believes in him and the, you know, like Road Runner energy that Marty has throughout the movie is really fascinating.

• 32:17Amanda Dobbins?

  But, and also the, the way that each of those characters relates to Marty and he relates back, like when the Tyler character drops him off back at another pool hall, or a table, tenement hall, ping pong hall, I don't know. Um, and Marty's just like, I love you, I'm sorry, I'll buy you a new cab, don't worry about it. And Tyler's like, just like, get out of my car, man. And there's like, the resignation and the, you know, Marty's full of shit, you know, they really got screwed over, but there's, you know, it's gonna be okay. Like, and I just remember that from being in your twenties and just being like, let's just not like, talk about this anymore.

• 32:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 32:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And then when the Rachel character and the, uh, the ping pong ball entrepreneur, like, the second time they go to the apartment and there's the confrontation and they start yelling at each other. And Marty's like, don't talk to him like that. He's one of my favorite people on earth, don't talk to her like that. And he's just like, trying to manipulate the situation, keep everything on the rails and also be like, no, but I love you both. And it's just, I think it's incredibly funny.

• 33:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I agree. There's a series of moments that are like that. Um, okay.

• 33:30Sean Fennessey?

  I kinda wanna jump to Japan near the end. Um, should we talk about Kevin O'Leary first?

• 33:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so something interesting about this. So Kevin O'Leary, who candidly, not a person I was super familiar with before this movie. I've seen Shark Tank, I know about Mr. Wonderful. I didn't really know about his reputation as a Canadian, as somebody who had like said, Canada should be annexed by Donald Trump. He's a very controversial guy.

• 33:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Ah, okay, I did not know about that. I'm, we're learning about that in real time.

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  In a certain sector of, uh, of the internet, this guy is like Satan.

• 34:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 34:06Sean Fennessey?

  So his casting is somewhat controversial in the movie. Josh talked about this a bit in the interview, you can be listening to people talk about it. He's not an actor, not a trained actor.

• 34:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Sean Fennessey?

  And he is, he is the real heavy of the movie. He is, you know, Abel Ferrara is in part one of the villains, but he is the true villain of the film. And he's like shockingly good in the movie, I thought.

• 34:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Incredible.

• 34:26Sean Fennessey?

  His presence is, is, is really impressive. And he is up against this, you know, this whirlwind character played by one of the best young actors in Hollywood. And pretty consistently is holding his own and even eating him at times in the movie.

• 34:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Sean Fennessey?

  Figuratively, if not literally. And...

• 34:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, literally, he's doing some other things.

• 34:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And it's, I, I was just, I was impressed. Like, I, you know, I think many people will say, I regret to inform you that Kevin O'Leary is good in this movie, but he is good in this movie.

• 34:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, his face is right for it as, and there is just, there are a lot of shots of him grinning in like a very, just irritating shit eating, like I have you, I'm a rich guy way. I do think, I didn't, I'm just learning about some of his political views, but I'm not surprised. You know, it, it matches the face, we're using that energy.

• 35:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, all these things that we're talking about, this idea of casting Gwyneth and having the echoes of her real life experience, it's the same conception with someone like Kevin O'Leary, putting him in this. It's the same thing with Abel Ferrara, putting him in as like a menacing, dangerous New York semi-gangster walking the streets. Like, he's, they're using real life associations to drive emotion, which I think is very smart.

• 35:39Amanda Dobbins?

  But he is also, this is, it's a very chatty movie. There's a lot of people talking past each other. It is set in New York and not everyone would be able to keep up with that. So you gotta, you know, he spits back at Marty, so, whenever necessary. So I guess in this one case, you have to hand it to him. What are you handing to him, really? That he's amazing as someone who says-

• 36:05Sean Fennessey?

  He gives a good performance.

• 36:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And has one of like the great hilarious moments of this movie. A speech in Japan, but it is, you know, he's not the hero.

• 36:15Sean Fennessey?

  He's definitely not the hero.

• 36:18Sean Fennessey?

  Eventually Marty is able to convince Milton in the aftermath of Kay's disastrous Broadway return to the stage.

• 36:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Fred Heckenberger showing up for-

• 36:31Sean Fennessey?

  There's so many of those. We can do the entire list of people who show up for five minutes of the movie. I mean, David Babbitt and Fred Heckenberger in that sequence.

• 36:37Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true. Also, credit to Gwyneth's bad southern accent, which, you know, it's, which is supposed to be bad.

• 36:44Sean Fennessey?

  Hard to believe she got bad reviews for that performance, Kay Stone.

• 36:48Sean Fennessey?

  He prostrates himself before Milton and allows him to paddle him so that he can get on his plane and eventually agrees to participate in this exhibition that he's pitched earlier in the film.

• 36:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 36:57Sean Fennessey?

  When they have a lunch in France earlier in the movie. And he makes his way to Japan because he needs money and because he needs to get to Tokyo to participate in the tournament.

• 37:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Because he has, he needs money because he has to pay off his Ritz bill.

• 37:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 37:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So that he is allowed to be back in the tournament.

• 37:15Sean Fennessey?

  And so when I, when I say that this is a great movie about being an idiot in your twenties, this is something that you do in your twenties. Maybe not Jack Sanders, right? Very responsible, very thoughtful man, works very hard, keeps his head down, doesn't just fly to Japan on a whim without knowing what's really going on. But when Marty gets to Japan, he realizes pretty quickly that he is not invited to participate in the tournament.

• 37:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Sean Fennessey?

  He's only there for the exhibition.

• 37:36Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, it's his Francis Ha, what time did Puss in Boots start moment?

• 37:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 37:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The ITTA is, wants nothing to do with him because of the way that he has acted throughout the film towards them. And so he, all he has left is this showdown with Endo and-

• 37:55Sean Fennessey?

  I thought this entire stretch was just thrilling. And it's really hard, like 40 years after the peak of American sports dramas, to create a sports drama scenario in which like I'm really invested and I really want to know what happens. And I really want to see this character win, but how, the ways in which he might win, and unsure. You know, I've had a couple of people tell me that they thought that the CGI and the ping pong stuff didn't work for them. I really didn't feel that. I felt like it.

• 38:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I didn't notice at all.

• 38:21Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't feel like I was like, this is definitely what's happening, like they're playing this exact, you know. I didn't feel as though there wasn't computer assistance in the execution of it, but it didn't take me out of any of the sport of it.

• 38:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree. You know, as I mentioned, I think there are a couple of times where you can see that it's not Timmy. If you're, but if you're looking closely, and for the most part, it's filmed energetically. And the crowd and the spectators are used very well. It communicates like what's happening in the match pretty clearly without, without much dialogue. And then, I mean, I cried twice in this movie. And the first time is when, is after the second match and Timmy's reaction to the second match. And I like cried in a pure, you know, someone like finally wins their gold medal, sort of.

• 39:09Sean Fennessey?

  Exultation, a league of their own style, like damn.

• 39:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Like we're carrying the bobsled across, you know, in whatever sort of way. I was very moved by, and, and like Timmy's reaction, like when he, when he finally hits is beautiful.

• 39:24Sean Fennessey?

  It is. And it's like, it is kind of like corn pone, American drama stuff.

• 39:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:29Sean Fennessey?

  The movie is very stylized, very funny, very abrasive, very intense.

• 39:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 39:34Sean Fennessey?

  But this is a pretty conventional, what feels like a closing segment. Now, it is preceded, as you said, by a fascinating moment in the movie. Where Milton gets up out of his seat where he's watching the exhibition that he is paying for, for his pen company in an effort to sell more pens in Japan in the aftermath of World War II, where the travel ban has been lifted and American business is coming back into Japan. People, Japanese can travel back to the United States. And he sees that Marty, after throwing one match and demanding a rematch to make it real, is actually has a chance to beat Endo and that this would really damage this Rockwell Pen Company's fortunes during this exhibition. He goes backstage and you wrote down what he said. What he goes backstage and he confronts Marty and what does he say?

• 40:19Amanda Dobbins?

  He says, "Let me explain to you. I was born in 1601. I'm a vampire. I've been around forever." And there's some other stuff. And then he ends with, "You'll never be happy. You will never be happy." And there's no context, no explanation. He just makes that speech and then Marty goes back out and wins the damn match.

• 40:43Sean Fennessey?

  Now, there's layers to this specifically. We talked, I talked, I talked with Josh about this a little bit. I do know a little bit more about it. But the non sequitur, like allegorical metaphorical power of like this guy manifesting himself into Satan, into the immortality of capitalism, power, class, you know, the how someone like Marty will never be able to pull himself up and become what he truly wants to be. That feeling that people feel when they're going for something and they fail and they're like, "When am I ever going to be able to be who I want to be?" And letting someone literalize it, it is jarring in the movie. There is like a gasp weirdness to, "I'm a vampire. I was born in 1601."

• 41:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but in, but in like an amazed chuckle, at least for me. It's weird, but I was just like, "Okay, you're just, you're going for it." And in it, you know, there is a moment of being like, "Wait, is he seri-" you know, not, "Is he serious?", but what's going on here?

• 41:45Sean Fennessey?

  What does this mean?

• 41:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And by the end of the speech, you understand that it's like a- A very, like a strange, provoking illustration of that thing of like, of Marty's running up against something, he's always gonna be running up against something. He is never gonna quite crack through and it's because there's this guy who's a vampire, who was born in 1901. You know, it's like, we are not quite literalizing the evil, but we're stating it.

• 42:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, close to. He does succeed, he does hitch a ride home on a G.I.'s plane.

• 42:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Sean Fennessey?

  And when he gets home, he goes straight to the hospital, right? Because he learns that Rachel's in-

• 42:27Amanda Dobbins?

  He has gone to Japan straight from the hospital.

• 42:30Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 42:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Sean Fennessey?

  Right, because he's left Rachel there after their showdown at Pendelets House, which is a very exciting and intense shootout, by the way. And, and some of the best practical filmmaking that I think Safdie has done in the past. And when they get to the hospital, he races in and sees that people are waiting because Rachel has given birth. He races to go see Rachel. He grabs her by the hand, he says, like, "I'll never leave your side." I don't know specifically what he says.

• 42:58Amanda Dobbins?

  He's like, "Go back to sleep, I'm saying, like, I'll be here. I'm not going anywhere, I love you."

• 43:02Sean Fennessey?

  And then he goes to meet his son. And I, if you don't have a kid, this maybe doesn't make as much sense emotionally, but if you have a kid, and Josh talked about this too, the moment that you meet your kid for the first time is an absolute steamroller. It is like, it is the most "everything is different now" thing that at least has happened to me. And the movie knows that, and this is very much a movie about everything that happened to me in my life, not me personally, but the me of the movie, until this happened, and how everything after that will be different. And when he meets his son, and he locks eyes with his son who's crying and is unhappy-

• 43:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, it's, the beautiful thing about it is that, like, it is that moment that you're saying, but it is still also staged with the Safdie sense of humor and flair. And so, this is the 1950s, so they're all in a nursery, which is just means like, they're all in a sealed wall, and it's rows of babies just crying. And God bless the like, the, the nurse in the nursery. He was just like sitting at her desk, ignoring like 15 babies crying.

• 44:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 44:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And, you know, she brings the baby over and the rest of the babies are crying throughout.

• 44:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 44:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And then, and I mean, Timmy's unbelievable in this scene and he just is overcome with emotion immediately. And, you know, as we saw in Call Me By Your Name, any movie that just ends on

• 44:32Sean Fennessey?

  His face crying.

• 44:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Crying into a screen, like.

• 44:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It feels like a callback to that in some ways.

• 44:36Amanda Dobbins?

  He is one of the few guys that, that can do it.

• 44:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and he really does it. And he communicates that moment of transition of just,

• 44:46Amanda Dobbins?

  and like of growing up, kind of, which to me in a lot of ways is, is what this, this movie is about.

• 44:50Sean Fennessey?

  Hundred percent.

• 44:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And, but, so he's, he's doing all the emotion, but then like, they do give the baby a close up of just looking at, at Marty, like, what's wrong with you? It's really, and it's like a longer close up. Great baby acting.

• 45:08Sean Fennessey?

  It is great baby acting, yeah.

• 45:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and the music cue is, uh, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which hits immediately and, you know, is in keeping with the rest of the, the eighties score, but like, you and I both know what the first line of that song is, like 10 seconds before it's playing. So then I was crying again. It's wonderful. It's incredible. I was amazed by how sweet it is.

• 45:32Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I totally agree. Uh, welcome to the world.

• 45:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Welcome to your life. I thought, welcome to.

• 45:40Sean Fennessey?

  Your life. There's, there's no turning back. Which is incredibly powerful and kind of funny and very sincere.

• 45:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And it goes on for a long time. Yeah.

• 45:51Sean Fennessey?

  You know, very heartfelt in a, in a movie that is like, often a bit, a bit bitter and a bit fast. It, the movie stops.

• 45:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Sean Fennessey?

  And.

• 46:02Sean Fennessey?

  I am annoyed that they're using this song in the marketing for this movie. I don't know why you would make this incredible needle drop.

• 46:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 46:09Sean Fennessey?

  And the same goes for Forever Young in the first trailer. Where I'm like, these are two like sledgehammer needle drops that are so smart. And there's a couple of other really good ones. There's a New Order one, a Peter Gabriel one. There's a Public Image Limited one, like all 80s songs that give the film a really interesting character. And one of the readings that I have read of the movie is that the way that we're seeing the movie is we're seeing Marty tell the story of his life to his son as he's grown up in the 1980s, in a way. So he's almost like using the energy of that time to communicate that story. There's something else in the kind of the writing of the script that supports that, but I don't really want to talk about that. It's not helpful for this conversation. So I really love that, those specific decisions.

• 46:53Sean Fennessey?

  I wish that those songs were held back because I saw the movie before I saw any of the marketing.

• 46:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 46:58Sean Fennessey?

  And when that needle drop hit, I was just like, oh. Just hit me really, really hard. For the exact reason that you said, when you hear those words to that song, you see the look on his face.

• 47:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:08Sean Fennessey?

  And you hear the baby screaming, and then you cut to the credits and you can still hear the baby screaming, which is also kind of what life is like after that happens.

• 47:14Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really, really, the baby screaming is one of the great sound decisions in this. It's really funny.

• 47:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's very clever.

• 47:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I just, it's lovely.

• 47:24Sean Fennessey?

  It's wonderful.

• 47:24Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, the first time that I saw it, you and I talked a little bit about like, we really, we loved it. We like instantly loved it, but it's, it has a lot in common with Uncut Gems. You know, they're like of a cloth, both energetically, and they are about guys having jump a lot of hurdles to try to get to something.

• 47:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And one has a happy ending and one has a less happy ending.

• 47:54Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think the first time I saw it, we talked about it and I was like, well, I guess it's like a little softer and like, maybe I, maybe I respect Uncut Gems more for like going for the, for the jugular, for like telling the truth. And we're obviously marks for this. We have young children. But I I left the second viewing of Marty Supreme being like, wow, this is like, your heart cracks open in a beautiful way at the end of it.

• 48:19Sean Fennessey?

  So funny. I feel like just like one battle after another, we had the flip experience, though, where you saw it one way the first time and then differently the other time. And I and I was flipped where the first time I was super emotional about Marty Supreme. And then the second time I was like, this movie is so funny.

• 48:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I also think it's really, really funny. Like, I was laughing like throughout.

• 48:39Amanda Dobbins?

  But yeah, but there is a warrant to it. It is. It's not quite a companion piece to One Battle After Another, but they are very much in conversation. And I think that there is a like, an open heartedness to both of them that I find very moving. I you know, it's like, I think it's great that dads love being dads. I like, I mean, I mean that genuinely. I'm just like, this is really sweet.

• 49:02Sean Fennessey?

  Cultural change.

• 49:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you guys figured that out.

• 49:04Sean Fennessey?

  2025.

• 49:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's really, it's nice.

• 49:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, warms my heart.

• 49:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it is nice.

• 49:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Do you think this movie is going to be a success?

• 49:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I have absolutely no idea.

• 49:18Sean Fennessey?

  I don't either.

• 49:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I really hope so. They they are trying very hard. Timmy is trying very hard. I mean, what is success, right?

• 49:26Sean Fennessey?

  Can it make $100 million domestically?

• 49:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think so.

• 49:31Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Can it make $75 million domestically?

• 49:36Amanda Dobbins?

  I have no idea. I don't think so. Maybe it can make 50.

• 49:40Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Think it will play overseas?

• 49:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope so. You know.

• 49:46Sean Fennessey?

  One thing, one thing that's really.

• 49:48Amanda Dobbins?

  It's allegedly set in various locations around the world.

• 49:53Sean Fennessey?

  So I'm curious for Jack's point of view on this. A Complete Unknown made $75 million in the US, $65 million overseas, made $140 million.

• 50:02Sean Fennessey?

  Timothy Chalamet obviously worked hard to promote that film. I would say he's working harder to promote.

• 50:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, because he knows what's on the line.

• 50:09Sean Fennessey?

  He's making more appearances. We've talked before about how this is a real test of his star power. It is a movie that.

• 50:17Sean Fennessey?

  I think is in the, you know, Josh is kind of, he's a little younger than we are, but not much.

• 50:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Sean Fennessey?

  And it does hit a bullseye for people in their 30s, 40s and 50s, looking back on a period in their lives.

• 50:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm wondering how, and Jack, I know this wasn't your favorite movie of all time. Do you think people in their 20s will click with this movie?

• 50:41Speaker 02

  I think so. Um, I know a lot of people who've already seen it closer to my age, who liked it more than me. Um, I'm a little nervous about the Chalamet stuff, the promotion. I think he's starting to push people a little over the edge, which has me a little bit nervous. But I think it can connect 100 million domestic, I'd say very unlikely. There was something I think that came out today in Deadline that like Marty Supreme broke the record for most pre-sales or something like that, for whatever it's worth. I think there's good energy. And I think young people will show up. How much I have reservations.

• 51:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I met some very kind listeners of the podcast yesterday at my, at my, at my first screening.

• 51:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Did you go to Burbank?

• 51:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I was at the Burbank 16 and I was.

• 51:31Sean Fennessey?

  What up?

• 51:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, four young men of Jack's age, you know, I don't mean to, at my radar for how old people are. You're all, you know, 25 to me and I'm rooting for all of you. But they seemed younger than me and they seemed more in like the, the Timmy demo than the parent demo.

• 51:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And they all seemed to like it.

• 51:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 51:53Amanda Dobbins?

  One young man was just like, that's, that was amazing. I'm gobsmacked. And then the others, I just.

• 51:57Sean Fennessey?

  It's very funny to hear you say young man.

• 51:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, he's, well, they're, they're, they all introduced themselves. They're very polite.

• 52:03Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 52:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and then the others, I just like, gave them a thumbs up as I left and they thumbs up back. So I think that means they liked it. Yeah.

• 52:12Sean Fennessey?

  There's only two films this year.

• 52:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Sean Fennessey?

  That are original.

• 52:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:17Sean Fennessey?

  That have cracked 100 million dollars domestically. Do you know what they are? You probably figure them out off the top of your head.

• 52:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Can I? Okay. I'm thinking hard. Um.

• 52:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Does regretting you count?

• 52:28Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's not over 100 million.

• 52:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Where is it?

• 52:31Sean Fennessey?

  Regretting you, that's a good question. It's probably gonna be more like 50, 49.

• 52:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so Sinners and One Battle After Another.

• 52:37Sean Fennessey?

  Sinners, One Battle After Another, did not crack 100.

• 52:40Amanda Dobbins?

  In domestic?

• 52:41Sean Fennessey?

  71, domestic. It's like, it's 140, international.

• 52:45Amanda Dobbins?

  International, okay, alright.

• 52:47Sean Fennessey?

  And again, the other one. I guess there's two more technically, but one of them I don't really think of as original.

• 52:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Weapons?

• 52:52Sean Fennessey?

  Weapons is the other one. And then the other one I was thinking of is F1.

• 52:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm.

• 52:55Sean Fennessey?

  Which is, it's very much hinging on a brand. So that would be a real challenge. Getting to 70, I think, is a W. Because that means, in theory, you're getting to 70 internationally. I don't know, it's not the future of movies is not riding on this, but the future of a certain kind of movie is riding on this in some ways.

• 53:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And 824 really splashed out for this.

• 53:15Sean Fennessey?

  They did.

• 53:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And they have had bigger ambitions this year that have been, you know, stops and starts.

• 53:23Sean Fennessey?

  Stymied.

• 53:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, so this, this would be good.

• 53:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, this is their big movie.

• 53:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Box Office Theory has the tracking 36 to 57, that's low to high, domestic. If you had to guess, if we, if we split the difference and set the line at 45, if we're putting our town caps on.

• 53:43Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I think 50 would be fine. If there, if it's 36, that's rough.

• 53:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Sean Fennessey?

  That's rough. You don't want to be at 36. It's Christmas and there's also not a lot out for adults like this in the world. You know, there, there's...

• 53:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Sean Fennessey?

  You know, especially because a couple of movies we're gonna talk about in an episode that's, we're recording right after this, is like, I don't think those movies are really gonna hit for grownups. So, but 36 would be rough. That means you're opening at like, 16? And then limping over six weeks to that number? I don't know, that would, that would not be good.

• 54:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm, I'm hopeful also that there'll be a word of mouth, that there will be a, you know, a, he's, he has been wisely targeting people who are not typically...

• 54:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, 824 movie bros.

• 54:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, like the, just the Kardashian Jenners have just really been in the mix. And that's, I think that's great for them and-

• 54:40Sean Fennessey?

  He was doing the London tour and going on a bunch of the popular BBC shows.

• 54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Sean Fennessey?

  Doing, you know, wrestling podcasts, like he's just doing stuff.

• 54:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Susan Boyle, Susan Boyle getting a jacket. I love him so much.

• 54:50Sean Fennessey?

  That was great. That was really funny.

• 54:51Amanda Dobbins?

  He's just, he's the one true poster. He's, I just, Marty Hauser absolutely would have destroyed my life if I were 25.

• 54:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I believe that.

• 54:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I just, it's, but it was like almost invigorating to feel that again, you know? It's, this is a powerful movie.

• 55:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think, you know, we've not talked about Odessa Azian too much, but she was, on my first screening was the real surprise of the movie. I was familiar with her, but I don't know if I really had a relationship with her as an actress. And she is in a tough spot because that's usually a pretty thankless role. The like girlfriend who's hanging on by a thread with her crazy boyfriend in a movie. And she gets to play a lot. She gets to have a kind of hustler moment herself.

• 55:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 55:29Sean Fennessey?

  That is really a, really funny moment. And she goes toe to toe with Shalhoub really well. She's now weirdly like, maybe not weirdly, maybe smartly. Because of I Love LA and because of the internet, has just become like much more well-known over the course of the last three months. But in the run-up to this, when I first saw it, I didn't really know very much about her at all other than like being Pamela Hadlin's daughter and-

• 55:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Didn't even know that.

• 55:49Sean Fennessey?

  Appearing in a couple of movies and TV shows. This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot has everything you need to launch your holiday season in style. Upgrade your yard with this year's hottest holiday decor, including the show-stopping towering Santa. Oh, I like that one. And his impressive reindeer, both 8.5 feet and both designed with incredible detail that stands out day or night. When you want decor that delivers impact, The Home Depot has it. Make your home Santa's favorite stop with the holiday decor you want, all waiting for you at The Home Depot. This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. You know what I love about football season? It's the football, but also the football watching food. And nothing hits like a Boar's Head sandwich when I'm watching the game. Really, any game day sandwich better with Boar's Head. Philly cheesesteak, layer up buttery slider rolls with Boar's Head London broil roast beef,

• 57:02Speaker 03

  American white cheese and picante provolone. Delicious. Then add roasted onions, peppers and Boar's Head pub style horseradish sauce. I love horseradish and you've got the ultimate game day cheesesteak. They've also got a whole lineup of premium meats, cheeses, hummus and dips, condiments and more to serve up on game day. Head to your local Boar's Head deli counter to shop now. For game day sandwich inspiration and more, visit boar'shead.com. Boar's Head, committed to craft since 1905.

• 57:30Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of awards.

• 57:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 57:32Sean Fennessey?

  Now, we've been putting the movie in the top five for best picture. Feel pretty comfortable that it's making best picture. Certainly comfortable that Timothy Chalamet will be nominated.

• 57:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:43Sean Fennessey?

  It feels like it will be a pretty tight race with Leo, maybe with some Wagner Mora spoiler potential coming in there, although Ethan Hawke also having a hell of a month recently.

• 57:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Unreal press tour.

• 57:55Sean Fennessey?

  I, Odessa Ozzian, I think it would take a lot for her to get in. I do think that she's ahead of Gwyneth.

• 58:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I do as well.

• 58:01Sean Fennessey?

  Even though Gwyneth is quite good in the film.

• 58:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, Gwyneth didn't even get a Golden Globe nomination, which is surprising.

• 58:06Sean Fennessey?

  She did not. The, um, directing is going to be tough for Josh.

• 58:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I think so too, which is sad.

• 58:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's going to be really challenging because you've got Paul Thomas Anderson, Chloe Zhao, Guillermo del Toro, Jafar Panahi.

• 58:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Sean Fennessey?

  You've got Joakim Trier in there. You've got Park Chan Wook in there. You've got all of a sudden Oliver Lash from Serat in there. You know, all these folks who are contending for these spots. There's others I'm forgetting, I'm sure. Um, so directing is going to be tough. Score has to happen. I'm, I'm, I'm getting, but I love Johnny Greenwood scores for Paul Thomas Anderson's films. I will always be interested in what they're doing together. That isn't my favorite of Greenwood's scores for his films. Probably there will be Blood, maybe The Master as my two faves, but. What Daniel Lopaten does in the movie

• 59:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Is unreal.

• 59:04Sean Fennessey?

  amazing. And the way that it is working with the film. And, you know, he has scored, you know, all the most recent Safdie Brothers movies. And he's the creator of this vaporwave subgenre and S100 Trix Point Never. Like he's has a long recording, recording history. But there isn't definitely an elevation of style for him where it's, you know, a lot of woodwinds and flutes. And the choir that you mentioned and this, the musical touches that brighten the sequences in the movie are really powerful. And I will, I will be stumped in for him.

• 59:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Essential. And, I mean, you know, the, the score voters are on notice after last year. And after the omission of challengers.

• 59:47Sean Fennessey?

  Not ideal.

• 59:48Amanda Dobbins?

  So we can't screw this up twice.

• 59:51Sean Fennessey?

  I agree with you.

• 59:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I'm just letting everybody know.

• 59:55Sean Fennessey?

  Original screenplay?

• 59:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope so.

• 59:58Sean Fennessey?

  Is it original? It's in original, right? Because it is based on some materials and, you know, Marty Riesman's life and

• 1:00:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Marty's Supreme.

• 1:00:05Sean Fennessey?

  I believe it's in original.

• 1:00:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Category. I would guess so, but it's not.

• 1:00:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I think it's probably debatable and it's what they want to go in.

• 1:00:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Let's see, what's in adapted this year?

• 1:00:26Sean Fennessey?

  One battle.

• 1:00:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. So you probably don't want to go against that.

• 1:00:30Sean Fennessey?

  Wouldn't be ideal.

• 1:00:33Sean Fennessey?

  The other one that I wanted to mention is casting.

• 1:00:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, this seems like a great casting.

• 1:00:40Sean Fennessey?

  Just to go through the list very quickly of folks who pop up who are not the stars of the movie. So you've got Isaac Mizrahi as Merle, Gwyneth Paltrow's publicist. You've got NBA legend George Gervin as Lawrence, the guy who runs the ping pong hall. You've got Ted Williams, who is the viral man with the golden voice dude as Ted, the guy who works at the pool hall or at the, at the ping pong hall. Pendleton, we mentioned as Hoff, the owner of the White House. Larry Ratso Sloman, legendary kind of writer, rock and roll gadfly figure is Marty's Uncle Murray. You've got Pico Iyer, the author as Ram Sethi, who is the head of the ITTA. David Mamet as the director of the play.

• 1:01:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really funny.

• 1:01:23Sean Fennessey?

  Fred Heckinger is the star of the play. Troy, perfectly named. Levon Hawk, Ethan Hawk and Uma Thurman's son, as one of the kids in the bowling alley.

• 1:01:33Sean Fennessey?

  Philippe Petit, the man on wire.

• 1:01:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Sean Fennessey?

  As the Brussels MC. I mean, these are just a few. Tracy McGrady and Kemba Walker are there as Harlem Globetrotters.

• 1:01:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That's right.

• 1:01:45Sean Fennessey?

  New Yorker writer, Nomi Frye appears in the film as a woman helping to stage manage the play.

• 1:01:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Sean Fennessey?

  She's great. I saw Nomi at the after party for the premiere of this film. And I was like, what the fuck, dude?

• 1:01:58Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, to me, like, this is the art of casting. The art of casting is not, let's find the most famous person in the world and put them in the movie. It is, how do we populate our film with unforgettable mini performances and faces and character?

• 1:02:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, well, this movie does both because it does have Timothy Chalamet.

• 1:02:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

• 1:02:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, animating the entire spirit of the movie. But yes.

• 1:02:20Sean Fennessey?

  But Kevin O'Leary and Tyler, the Creator, and people like that and saying like, what if this person was an actor? That's one of their superpowers, you know?

• 1:02:26Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really good. It's why, you know, PTA films are also very good at that. So you have to assume one battle will also be in that category.

• 1:02:34Sean Fennessey?

  Centers will be up there. There's a handful that'll be up there.

• 1:02:38Sean Fennessey?

  Any closing thoughts about the film?

• 1:02:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely loved it.

• 1:02:41Sean Fennessey?

  I did too.

• 1:02:43Sean Fennessey?

  If you want to learn more about it, listen to my conversation right now with Josh Safdie.

• 1:02:50Sean Fennessey?

  Josh Safdie is back on the show. It's been...

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  Six years.

• 1:02:54Sean Fennessey?

  Six years. Well, I did see you for a Criterion episode during lockdown over Zoom.

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  Okay, it's not the same.

• 1:03:00Sean Fennessey?

  That wasn't the same.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's been six years.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  We can share saliva particles now.

• 1:03:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, well, thank God for that.

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  I'm so excited.

• 1:03:06Sean Fennessey?

  Hopefully healthily, though you have been traveling the world. So who knows?

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  Uh, I have a three, three and a half year old and a four, five month old, four month old. And my wife bought me like seven sprays. She goes, you do this one in the middle of the day. You do this one at the end of the day. You do this one at the beginning of the day. And I'm like, so I have them and I...

• 1:03:24Sean Fennessey?

  Are they working?

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  I use them.

• 1:03:26Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. But it's a psychological thing. As long as you feel like you're getting something helping you. So six years.

• 1:03:33Sean Fennessey?

  We've talked a little bit, but I don't really know what you've been doing. I don't really, I mean, I know this movie.

• 1:03:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Sean Fennessey?

  But it is, it's a stretch. Like, can you, maybe before we talk about Marty, talk about life after Uncut Gems? Um, how did it change?

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Well, it's relevant. Uh, you know, I, I was, you know, I have these notebooks, right? That I, that I keep that most people probably keep in journals. You can call them journals, except you wouldn't really know. You might think that they're biographies because there's a different person at the center of, you know, long stretches of pages, like my books that I kept over the course of Gems. Very bizarre, it would be very bizarre to my children when I go and they start to look through them. I probably should burn them. But she, you know, I, because I'm experiencing my life through the characters of the, you know, I'm using them as vessels and obfuscating things.

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  So I, after the 10-year journey of Gems, which had a lot of detours, but they were all in service of one dream. That was my purpose to wake up every morning and, and try to see this thing through that no one believed in. Oh, I'll give you $300,000 with this actor. I don't want to work with that actor.

• 1:04:42Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't really know if you know how to do genre, blah, blah, blah. I make a good time to try to learn how to do that. It was my reason to wake up. And when I finished it, uh, which kind of coincided with me discovering the world of Marty Supreme and these like outcasts and these misfits who had this dream that no one believed in. I finished the movie and like pandemic's about to hit and doing like, you know, a Q and A, the last of the, you know, the Mohicans and, and uh, someone casually asked the most innocent question. What's next? Which is like, okay, you know, I would never ask that question because I know how disrespectful that is to all the work. It's like, okay, great, next, what do you got? And it's, it's, you know, but it, it destroyed me.

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  I cried. I was like super embarrassed and I was like covering my face. And I was like, let Benny answer that one. And, and I just couldn't, um, couldn't really understand where that feeling, that hollow feeling was coming from. Cause here's this thing that I willed into the world. The world doesn't want movies to exist. And I just, I didn't, didn't know what was next.

• 1:05:51Sean Fennessey?

  You don't have like a, a lineup sheet of like, I got a five movies I know I want to make. Cause some filmmakers are like that.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Of course, but they're not real. You know what I mean? I mean, not of course, that's actually not, you know, when I finish a project and Ronnie and I were talking about this the other day when I was writers. When we finish a project, there's no gas left in the tank. We put every, it's almost to the point where like, did we, is there anything else to pull from life? And, and COVID was weird because your experience with life is, becomes very, you know, limited and confined to your house, which obviously there's lots going on in the house. But you can't go out and just go into the real world and do research or live in a different way.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  But you know, no, I mean, I didn't, I didn't really, I didn't have an idea of, of, it wasn't, it's not like, I think of like the concept of like an idea. It's not, it's like, there's, it's a little like, kind of pejorative to the film itself because they're not, ideas are very strange, mercurial things. Like where do they come from? Well, they have some meaning. I, I start to learn about them later when you're watching a movie.

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  And, you know, that's what makes ideas in any art so great to mine and look at and kind of study.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  So, cause they're more just an attraction to something and like a world and a character and. But yeah, I didn't have an idea of, of what I wanted to do. I didn't have a feeling. I didn't have a world. There was this world that was interesting to me, this table tennis world, this, you know, post-war.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  Kind of moment with these young people who were, you know, not, did not fight in the war. And these outsiders, misfits, as I was discussing, but I, you know, I, this guy bought me a. Bottle of champagne and a cigar after I finished. Uncut Gems and he's like, it was a long journey. Here you go. Like, let's drink this champagne and smoke the cigar and I. And I didn't, I just put the champagne in the fridge and I put the cigar in my drawer. That will be there till the day I die because it'll never be worth, anything worth really celebrating. Because you get to the end of these journeys, these dreams and you, and you, the only thing is like, wow, it was really lonely experience. Even though I dream with other people, it's just, so that was kind of my life.

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  And then I finished the movie, uh, and pandemic hits. And I'm turning around, I'm looking around the people who like believed in me and my, my, the closest one was my, now became my, she became my wife. Months later, we went to city hall, got married, had my first daughter soon after that, and had my second daughter recently. And life just all of a sudden, time started to like move in a very different way. Time is like, is the enemy, but you, you still like start to be like, wow, you're seeing the personification of time in this kid. It's like getting older and developing and, and, uh, and then her experience with her own emotions is actually starting to inform my feelings with the world and, and the work later.

• 1:08:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny that you say that because literally the second thing I wrote down here was, so you're thirty four when you're making Uncut Gems.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Sean Fennessey?

  Marty has the same energy as a movie, but it's about a much younger character, but it's a much more mature movie. I, I found, do you, do you think of it that way?

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  I do.

• 1:09:11Sean Fennessey?

  And it feels like I had a kid movie. It feels like I have a different perspective on the world.

• 1:09:17Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, you know, I, I think the movie's about change and about happiness and the haunted, that, how haunted of a feeling happiness is. And how it haunts us all the time and how the past and the past can haunt the future and the future can haunt the past.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  But I do, I, that feeling of meeting my child, um, I, everyone who has a kid can, can say this and is a very profound moment. And you can't prepare yourself for it. There's no way to, to, to know what you'll feel or think. And it's a cosmic moment, uh, and you realize it's not about you at all. Uh, it's never really been about you and you, everybody you've ever met has, was born and we've all been born, you know? And you know, that was a, an incredibly powerful moment. Weirdly, the idea.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  The the ending was always kind of there without spoiling. That's really spoiling the credit sequence. Tells you what what's going on.

• 1:10:20Sean Fennessey?

  We know where we're going.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. But that was something that was I always kind of saw, but I saw it abstractly. And then when I experienced that, you know, firsthand, uh, it was. Yeah, it's it's ineffable, you know, and it's no way to really you're looking at the future. But again, through the lens of your own past and thinking about, you know, I think the movie is kind of a little bit about what that when you the feeling you have when you look at a picture of your folks before you were born. Like, what was going on there? I thought I was the center of their universe, but where was I wasn't there. My dad always told me growing up that I came from the stars.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  And that was always like made me feel like I was present in his life before, you know, when you look up at the stars, you're dreaming. And, uh, you know, I I see this movie and I do have that sense of this ghostly qual- there's a ghostly quality to it.

• 1:11:16Sean Fennessey?

  Well, OK, so I know that your wife handed you a book. That is like the origin of.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  The end of Uncut Gems, like towards the endish of.

• 1:11:24Sean Fennessey?

  What was the book?

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  Uh, to- towards the during production, she was at like a thrift store and she saw, um, a dime store book, uh, you know, uh, that said, Confessions of a Table Tennis Champion and Hustler. So she was the Ann Hustler. She knew I loved table tennis. She knew my uncle played, you know, in the older days, which was always unique. Even people don't think about table tennis as having a past or a history. I remember when when the players came on to the set, the Wembley set, one player was like emotional. I said, why so emotional? He goes, it's dignifying the sport. Look at this, this arena full of people and the the barriers are made of wood. Wood's expensive, the floor is wood and people don't, history is dignifying. That's why we have all need to know history and understand it.

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  It's it teaches us, um, where we are now.

• 1:12:14Sean Fennessey?

  Did your uncle play in that kind of environment?

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  Uncle played at Lawrence's.

• 1:12:17Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  He knew all these guys. He knew the author of that book was a guy named Martin Reisman, Marty Reisman. And what that book did is it opened me, opened my eyes to this group of people in New York. These guys from the Lower East Side who had no place to sleep on Wednesday, but you'd find them in a palatial hotel in Budapest on Saturday. And they were like this X class and they had a very specific vision for themselves. And yet they were total jokers, but they were all super intellects, autodidacts. And, and complete, like you have the Beats 40 blocks south. They were had their dreams. There was glory. There were museums for their dreams or publishers.

• 1:13:00Speaker 04

  There's no, there was, there's no, well, pun intended, there's no real arena for the destination of the dreams of these guys. And that, that element of the book and also the historical, the footnote of a footnote of history element from that book was interesting to me. When I talked to my Uncle Johnny, I was like, you played with Dicky Miles? And he used to, he's like, Dicky Miles, who was the best? He used to come over for Shabbat dinner and then they would clear the table and they'd put books and they would play ping pong on the table afterwards. He's like, I went to Lawrence's, George Gervin plays Lawrence. Lawrence's was the first black owned business in the Times Square district. That's historical. That's historical. The, the, you know, he told me that when you would show up there, it felt like an orphanage. It was like, who are all these people? What's going on here?

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  Everyone's betting money. They're all super serious, but also incredible jokers who will bet about who could throw a peach higher on the street. And like, they'll go down and they'll find a mark and everyone will come and steal all the person's money. But they're like guys who could, you know, describe relativity to you. Yeah. And there would be gangsters, like, uh, there was these holes above table number six. And they were the bullet holes from an attempt on, on, um, Legs Diamond's life. But there was like six balls and they all missed. And so it became lucky table number six. And it was a speakeasy for Legs. So there's this interesting history there. And when I started to hear him talk to me about, about, you know, the footnote quality of at least Lawrence's.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  And then I see, you know, in Tim, there's a Obviously, you get into this world and then there's a 10 volume set by Tim Boggan, who wrote the history of table tennis. There's a lot of great stories in there as well that are inspiring. You start to discover, you know, the story of Aloshia Ehrlich, who survived the Holocaust. And that honeybee story is true story. I mean, it's it's.

• 1:14:51Sean Fennessey?

  I was gonna ask you about that. How much are you pulling from like, I guess, an established, but not canonized history of a sport that like, we don't really have a meaningful relationship to in 2025.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  I mean, did they didn't really then either. I mean, you have these fanzines, basically. The Japanese were interesting because they did come out of isolation. And there was a very interesting moment in in time in Japan. 52 is when the war really ended is when America started to leave, which is when the movie takes place, which is when they their travel ban lifted and they started to go out. And the first thing they did was table tennis. And they invented a paddle. And I tried to squeeze this into the film. I even shot a fake interview with the inventor of the paddle. The paddle was called the atomic paddle. I mean, you can't write this stuff. You can't. And and it was it was it changed the game, changed the sport.

• 1:15:38Sean Fennessey?

  One half wood, one half foam.

• 1:15:39Speaker 04

  The sponge. Yeah, like that changed the sport. It made it. You could argue it. A lot of people argue it destroyed the sport because it made it less entertaining because the move too quick and the points went from being potentially hour long to being three, four seconds. Uh, that's we're getting into the minutia of the of the sport. Uh, which obviously you do get in when you when you do the research. Uh, but but the that moment in Japan, like when you start to do the research and you start to think about that being the background of the story. And you just think about telling a story about individuals inside of it and it's it becomes the the foreground is a is a is a personal emotional experience. It it becomes it became exciting to me because again, because when you read about what was going on in Japan, we wrote the constitution there.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  And they introduced the American dream, more or less, individual and rugged individualism. The emperor is just a real guy. Anyone can be a hero. Now, this folk hero, a million people waited for the real guy. And we wrote into that fake newsreel that we did that a million people were waiting. People laughed when they read that because no one could believe it. So we had to lower it because it was just, didn't want people to laugh at that. Because it was very serious. And then, and all of a sudden, you have this explosion of folk heroes. This explosion of literacy. And, and you have, and then I, you know, one of the things that I loved in the research was the, the American, obviously, the Globetrotters went through there too. The Globetrotters was also fascinating to read about. It's another footnote of history. There's a theory that they were American propaganda.

• 1:17:07Speaker 04

  They were being sent around the world, being bankrolled by the US government to show, you know, to combat, you know, this is the social, the war became, you know, the Cold War. You know, communism, socialism versus capitalism. And the propaganda war was, you know, look at how race, look at how black people are being treated in America. Now, okay, well, we have these, you know, the Americas thing, well, we have these incredible athletes. You know, let's show the world how they're treated royally. Something kind of strange about that. And Marty is hip to that. And, and, um, you know, that, you know, seeing where, there was a great, interesting diary written about, um, by the manager, not Saperstein, but another guy.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  Um, and obviously, it's like an insider thing, so it's not going to get into the nitty gritty. But it is fascinating. They had, table tennis was a halftime show. Yeah. Because in Europe, days were, there were a lot of great players and it was fun. It was a novelty.

• 1:18:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  But if you're, devote your life to something and trying to convince everybody that's the most serious thing and respectable, you don't, these guys, you feel bad for them. They're here doing parlor tricks.

• 1:18:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny, I, I said this to your brother when I last saw him, but I think that Lenny Cook is really like the originating agent of so much of these films. Because this idea of the chosen one and the person who believes in himself above all, who is competitive, maybe not an athlete, but competitive. And I see this recurring and it's crazy in Marty, the idea of someone who is, insists, is, is so sure that there is no other path.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  Interesting thing about Lenny Cook, which was very, uh, which makes it kind of, uh, um, and like a bottomless well. Is he didn't see himself as the chosen one. People.

• 1:18:57Sean Fennessey?

  But that was imposed upon him.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  Imposed upon him. And that was ultimately, I think, is the Achilles heel for him is that there was, he had this thing, but didn't care about it. Marty has this thing, but nobody cares about it. And he is the chosen one. But but it doesn't that and 250, you know, gets you on the subway. You know, like, that's not. So it is. I mean, look, the allegorical quality of Lenny Cook is, is, you know, obviously very inspiring. And like, feel like you're doing a profile of a Greek god. There is that quality, the fable-like quality and mythic quality to athletes.

• 1:19:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think I was thinking specifically of this like intellectual dynamic of making it or not making it. And that that is like the defining confrontation of like, frankly, a lot of men. You know, it's like, did I did I do what I set out to do or did I not do what I set out to do? And your movies are very, very much.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  Impermanence.

• 1:19:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:19:55Speaker 04

  Impermanence, like having a place on planet Earth.

• 1:19:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, you care about it.

• 1:20:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the George Stevens film Place in the Sun is so powerful for me. It was one of the films here that was spiritually inspiring, you know, and Cliff Montgomery's, you know, place in between these two women and wanting one thing and then but emotionally feeling pulled towards another. And ultimately, just wanting a little place to call home. Prentice Prentice ship of Daddy Kravitz, book more than the movie, but the movie's great, too. You know, and and and fate too, like Lenny Cook's fate was not to be an athlete. I love the guy. But he was fate was not that. This is and what is fate? And I think that the movie Marty is very much interested in in fate, you know, I think more, I think, you know,

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  you see the film, hopefully people see this after they've seen the film. But, you know, he's fathering a dream and that dream that he's fathering, you know, the the egg is the ball. And, you know, he doesn't realize that that dream he was. It was all the fate, his attempt, his dream, which is basically a heist on fate. His dream is an attempt to control fate. It's what they are. And it ends up becoming, he ends up exactly where he was railing against. But he does it in a much more earned way. And it was the journey that kind of helped him realize that and earn it.

• 1:21:21Sean Fennessey?

  One of the great things that happens in movies is sometimes the external realities of the people who are making the movies dovetails perfectly with the theme of the movie. So Timothy Chalamet is literally on the record as saying he's in pursuit of greatness.

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did that about, he's funny. He FaceTimed me at the SAG Awards and then they were like, next up, best actor. And I was like, dude, you gotta go. Turned it off and then I just watched him give this speech. And I, you know, he was like, I think we filmed, our last day of shooting was 23 hour shoot day, 46 days of shooting. And he kept pushing his flight, he's pushing his flight. And he left, we shot him falling through, falling in the bathtub.

• 1:22:00Sean Fennessey?

  Amazing.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  Don't want to spoil that. But he's in the bathtub. We shot that, one piece of that. And within seven hours of him doing that, he was entering the college in Minnesota to, I forgot what Dylan song they were playing. So he was still Marty. When I, when he finally came and he left Dylan, he was still Dylan for the very beginning of our conversations. I heard it in his voice. So, and which was not totally wrong for Marty. Obviously, I wanted him to become the character.

• 1:22:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  But he, he was, you know, one of the things we discussed early on was ambition and dreams and what does it mean to have this supreme vision of yourself? And when I met him, I met him before Call Me By Your Name. I met him about three and a half months before I saw it. And he was introduced to me through, you know, I was at the Good Time premiere and this, an agent came up to me and said, I want to introduce you to the next superstar. It's the worst when you hear that.

• 1:23:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  You know, it's like, you can just, you can just see the, you know, the dreaming big of the agent, you know? And, and, because I, I can find a superstar, I can stumble across a superstar anywhere.

• 1:23:15Sean Fennessey?

  But that's your superpower, though. That's a whole other.

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  I, I'm just inspired by people and people who are entirely themselves iconic. Iconic is what makes someone a star. And that has nothing to do with, you know. Being in public or whatnot, but I meet this kid and he's on the edge of the room. And he's somebody, his eyes were wide and couldn't stand still. And I had the sense that he was there, but he wasn't where he wanted to be. And he had this really intense vision of himself. And he was saying it without even opening up his mouth, which is what you want in a casting decision. You want someone to be the person without speaking. And, you know, we exchanged numbers and I went to go see him, call him by his name. Incredible performance, you know, because it comes through. You can see it through the screen and out of the screen.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  It's just like, there's a three dimensionality there. That feels larger than life. I think Timmy's a great, his acting style is larger than life realism. And that's, and he iconic, he has iconic expressions. And, you know, I think Tom Cruise is really was, and when he was younger in particular, was very good at that as well.

• 1:24:24Sean Fennessey?

  You're not wondering what they're thinking. They can tell you what they're thinking by looking at them.

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  In micro, in like a, in, but they're large, but it's a large, but it's also incredibly nuanced. It's very unique. It's incredibly unique.

• 1:24:35Sean Fennessey?

  But I remember, so I remember him.

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  He fell, I don't, were you at that New York Film Festival screening?

• 1:24:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I was.

• 1:24:41Speaker 04

  Remember he was, couldn't stop moving and he fell back in his chair. And every single person in that room, the way he treated it was like you were his guest. So like you were kind of embarrassed for him, but he was kind of like winking at you about it. And it was so charming. So this seriousness was also totally usurped by his jokey quality. And I loved that about him. It was totally the character.

• 1:25:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny though, my recollection of this was that he was almost like publicly courting you. Cause there was definitely an interview.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  An MBR, were you at the National Board of

• 1:25:12Sean Fennessey?

  I wasn't there, but I know that there was one conversation where he was just like, when's my Safdie Brothers movie happening? Basically, so I don't know what the, you know, is this just the long exchange where we're like, we're going to do this eventually?

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  I wanted to, you know, I said, you know, I was super fascinated by him and his drive, his ambition. And I, you know, the New York of him, I could, you know, relate to him and, and I. You know, we just stayed in touch. And when I stumbled into this world, you know, you flip through these books and you see these pictures of these like wiry guys who are, you know, intense. They're intense people because there's a threat of humiliation at every moment that their dream does not come true because it's such a silly dream. Like being the world's greatest ping pong, the word ping pong is offensive. It's unfortunate, you know, even when I got into it, I was like, well, what was the first,

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  you do research, like, well, it was created in India, it was invented in India by these, by British people who were, you know, bored. They took a cork, a champagne, champagne bottle cork, carved it into a ball, put the books, and they used books to hit it back and forth. And I think it was called like plikplok or something like that. And then it became table tennis. And then ping pong just kind of caught, I think for commercial reasons, you know, it became a silly name for a thing that they could get people to buy. And I think actually, maybe like Spald, I don't, I think it is, it was a commercial, like Q tips, you know what I mean? Like Q tips are cotton swabs, what we call them Q tips. So it's unfortunate because it's an expression that you often associate more with chaos.

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  Ah, I went to this event, I was ping ponging, this and the other. Most people don't play ping pong. They never thought about it as a real thing. It's a basement sport.

• 1:27:00Sean Fennessey?

  If you say table tennis to someone, they say you mean ping pong? Like they won't even acknowledge it as table tennis.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and it's people who play. They say ping pong because they know that's what you, how you'll relate to it. But they also know, it's like Anthony Edwards, you know, at the Olympics when he's like, ping pong, I'm like, you know, I can beat you. And people spend their entire lives mastering this sport, no different than the way he was with basketball. These guys, they can't get one point off of these, off of these athletes. And but they're going back. He's going back to his. You know, incredible career, it's paying him hundreds of millions of dollars and they're going back to a day job.

• 1:27:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Speaker 04

  You know, and it's, it's very different, but they're both in pursuit of greatness. So I think Timmy, you know, and Timmy is an athlete and he's, you know, and he sees himself as he wants to be the best version of himself. And the best version of himself should be the best version of any self. And he has that in him and that passion and that seriousness is perfect, was perfect for the character. Uh, and you know, I saw it in the way he prepared for the table tennis scenes. I saw it in the way they prepared for every scene. This is a lot of dialogue in this movie and I wanted him to say it as fast as he possibly could. Yvonne Lucas, my color, color, um, colorist, who was one of the great colorists who just retired. He started his career with Darius on delicatessen.

• 1:28:23Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:28:23Speaker 04

  And then he finished his career with Darius on delicatessen. I think he, I think he got Tarantino to do a DI. I think he was the first person to convince him to do a digital intermediate. Anyway, he's a legendary guy and he watches the movie and English is great. He's been working in Hollywood for all these years. It's like, Josh, I love the movie, but I have to be honest with him. I couldn't follow what Timmy was saying because he was speaking so quickly. And he's like, so I'm going to watch it again. And that was great for me to hear because I would, you know, jack Timmy up on coffee and he would, you know, some of the scenes, he's saying them so quickly.

• 1:28:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:28:56Speaker 04

  I love it. It's precision. That's very, it's, you know, Marty's a very precise person.

• 1:29:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's something that is, I wanted to ask you about, which is that the movie is simultaneously really propulsive, but also picaresque.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 1:29:08Sean Fennessey?

  And that's a unusual blend. Usually a picaresque, very episodic, you're bouncing around, you're moving into new environments all the time. We're always with the, with this rogue at the center, but it's, it takes its time.

• 1:29:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm happy to hear you say that because it is, it's like Ronnie and I, when we're cutting, we are. We're not, it's not fastly cut. It's, it's cut, it has, there's patience to it. You know, certain scenes, obviously, they're very hectic and the speed picks up, it slows down. But it ebbs and flows. I, you know, said earlier, you know, the dreams are heists on fate. That's a heist film. It's just, you know, it's an abstract heist film.

• 1:29:46Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:46Speaker 04

  And I think that that's what's, you know, that's kind of speaking to what your feeling is watching the film.

• 1:29:52Sean Fennessey?

  So I saw it a second time last night and I was thinking, I was like focusing on the editing style, like what you were doing. And I don't, I'm not trained in this at all, but just from a total layman's perspective, it feels like you make these very specific strategic moves. It's like, we're going to cut into a hard music cue.

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Sean Fennessey?

  Or we're not going to cut when, we're going to cut when the camera is still moving. Like, we're gonna make a choice, like, are these things that you and Ronnie are like, these are our strategies? How do you decide?

• 1:30:18Speaker 04

  It's funny.

• 1:30:18Sean Fennessey?

  How to create the energy?

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  I love that you noticed it because there's, you know, I talked about big feelings earlier. There, I get a big feeling sometimes from a cut that you can't describe. It just was like, you know, the feeling of this guy's life constantly being in motion and never being able to really settle. Sometimes, you know, that was kind of an early ethos with the film and the editing. Something I discussed with Ronnie very early on is, is the feeling of, of not, of, of kind of falling into something and falling out of it. And scenes do, like, I mean, there's one in particular I'm thinking of, and now tell me if you remember it, is when he's coming back from New York. And he's there and you have this moment that breathes a little bit and you're seeing

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  through the, through the glass when the period, I go nuts with the period stuff. So you see.

• 1:31:06Sean Fennessey?

  Going back to his mom's apartment.

• 1:31:07Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. Uh, his apartment too.

• 1:31:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:10Speaker 04

  Uh, and, but when he comes in, just when you think you're gonna actually get to see a moment with him, it, it drops out. And it's, now you're falling into the next scene. And, and, uh, you know, I, I think that, you know, and the, and the music cues, you know, the music is a second screenplay in the movie. The, either the needle drops or the score itself. So that's just present, coming in and out of his life. Marty's one of these guys who comes in and out of your life, but it's like, when he's there, he's present right away.

• 1:31:35Sean Fennessey?

  Well, tell me about the, working with Daniel Lopatton. So you guys have made three movies together. I think this is the best thing maybe he's ever done in his whole career. The music is unbelievable. But is he reading the script?

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:31:48Sean Fennessey?

  Is he on set? Is he?

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  He was on set for a half, like two hours.

• 1:31:52Sean Fennessey?

  What's he looking at to know what to do? Because it feels so tailored to not just like a long stretch of the film, but literally individual moments.

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Sean Fennessey?

  Feel like they have, like he's made choices and you made choices to make it work.

• 1:32:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, Dan, you know, the beauty of collaborating with your closest friends is that there's a dialogue there that's much deeper than the movie. That's just for me. And I think it creates a shorthand that allows, you know, Dan and all of my collaborators to, you know, work a little bit more immediately or be a little bit more inspired, hopefully.

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  Dan read the script. His reaction was very Dan. Dan's a very deep thinker, very patient with his thought. He likes, he's Jungian and everything he looks at. And he's, you know, he invented vaporwave movement. So he's kind of like one of the kings of hauntology. And, you know, something that we discussed early on, when I said I wanted to do a period piece, the very idea of doing a period piece is postmodern. So then the beginning of postmodernity is the eighties. And my instinct originally, when I first watched this, you know, footage from 1940s and I decided to set it, I was like, I'm going to listen to the energy of these players. I'm going to put I Have The Touch by Peter Gabriel. And when I put it on, it just kind of worked.

• 1:33:12Speaker 04

  There was a feeling of that these people were ahead of their time in a weird way, that there was a, there was a modernity to seeing them against a different time period. Then I start to ask myself, why? Why did I was attracted to the eighties? And you start to, you know, read up on it and you realize like, wow, this is the first time culture was eating its own tail. Eighties were doing the fifties. Back to the Future is literally doing it. It's here in the eighties and they go back to the fifties. You're seeing it in fashion, you're seeing it in music. Rock and roll is coming to being in the in the in the 50s and you're taking blues music. Sad expressions of dark of sad souls, putting a beat to it. So all of a sudden, it's propulsive. In the 80s, you're doing this new wave movement.

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  That's melancholic music, but it's dance music almost. So there's there was a lot of interesting parallels between the two. You know, and Reagan resurrecting the American dream. 50s were coming out of victory. The 80s are coming out of defeat. You're trying to chase the opulence again. And, you know, you start to, you know, Dan and I start to talk about the music and we talk about Marty. And the very early version of the script, it, you know, at the very end of the credits, you saw Marty in the 80s. He's watching a Tears for Fear concert. It was a very, very, at one point.

• 1:34:25Sean Fennessey?

  I've heard about this, yes.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  And and he's there and he's.

• 1:34:28Sean Fennessey?

  I won't spoil what I have heard about it.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  And he's listening. Oh, yes. Yeah, there was one little line that even the studio is like, hold on, what is this a mistake? This one little sentence at the very, very end. But it wasn't a mistake. And I actually was, it was one of those ideas that's so bad that it could be good. But.

• 1:34:44Sean Fennessey?

  You will talk about it, I'm sure, at some point. I believe in it, is what I'll tell you.

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  Oh, I 100%. I mean, without, you know, I think corporate colonialists and that beginning of like passive colonialism too. There was a lot of people like that. There were a lot of, without spoiling it, there were a lot of ghoulish people.

• 1:35:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, we're feeling it to this very day, this literal very day in America.

• 1:35:05Speaker 04

  Completely. I think, you know, I think we're feeling the 80s again, very much so. This even the idea of Dream Big, our campaign.

• 1:35:11Sean Fennessey?

  That was something I did want to ask you about. So obviously it's set in the 50s and it feels like the 80s and or at least it sounds like the 80s. And do you see that the spirit of the movie is meant to be contemporary? You know, not just the energy, but that you like it is a also a 2025 movie?

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, I was something that I discussed with the actors is, you know, do not feel tethered to quote unquote period. Don't study how people Tyler did it. And then Tyler, I gave him an index of slang. It's like this incredible 200 page book of just slang in New York and Harlem. And he was, you want me to know this stuff? And we were asking, no, no, no. I want you to see the way language is being used. You're a Wordsworth, you're genius. Come up with your own. Came first day, Sun Dodger. As a slur to a white person, it was the greatest thing in the world. I was like, where'd you get that? He's like, well, I was reading all this stuff and it just popped into my head. He had a couple of them, not all of them made it in.

• 1:36:04Sean Fennessey?

  But there's something incredibly modern about him regardless, like it doesn't feel like put on or something.

• 1:36:08Speaker 04

  He's also terribly timeless, incredibly timeless. Like I was one of the first things, Tyler was one of the, was the second person I wanted to put in the movie after Timmy. Because, you know, I got, I had them together and I saw them together and they just felt like friends from, you know, another era.

• 1:36:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's something very easy about them together.

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  Exactly, and they're electric together. And I, and Tyler's, you know, he's just total vertical artist. There's no difference between him designing a hat and releasing a Grammy winning album or doing this performance. Everything has the same approach from the ground up. He thinks about these things from the ground up. And that's the beauty of working with, he's also a director. He's made great music videos. I was, I met him, I discovered him through the Yockers video.

• 1:36:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  And then he directed it. He was directing it under an alias.

• 1:36:56Sean Fennessey?

  I was writing about him back then, yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  Man, that was a moment.

• 1:36:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 1:36:59Speaker 04

  That was a moment.

• 1:37:01Sean Fennessey?

  It didn't turn out the way I thought it would. It's been great for him.

• 1:37:03Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's been great for him.

• 1:37:05Speaker 04

  To my Odd Future, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Maybe Frank too, but.

• 1:37:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, no, they've done well.

• 1:37:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Sean Fennessey?

  Earl was fine, yeah, they're all doing well, yeah.

• 1:37:12Speaker 04

  They're all incredible artists. But, but I, um, just, so I told, I told all the actors, don't worry about that. If you're ever becoming too anachronistic, I'll tell you and we'll work it out. Or if I take something, I can edit it out. I didn't want them to feel inhibited by being nostalgic. It wasn't, nostalgia exists only in hindsight. So I wanted them to be present. And I, I, I love the feeling of the movie because I have the beauty of having Jack Fiss, the greatest production designer, who's literally a time traveler. And he said to me, he was making, he was producing a documentary for me. I have Miyako Belizzi, who's also been obsessed with this period. And she wanted to earnestly enter the period, not through fashion and understand character.

• 1:37:57Speaker 04

  I had Darius Kanji, who was trying to light using the, the color temperatures of the time. Kay Georgio, my. Hair, hair, makeup, Kira and Mike. But Kay, I gave her carte blanche. I cast with her and Todd and Jen every single extra in the movie. There's thirty five hundred, thirty seven hundred extras, because every face had to be perfect and not anachronistic. I've watched some period films where someone, a random face will pop up and it's like, I'm not in the world anymore. I'm taken out. Garbage does that for me. And all these, my collaborators all knew that. And I wanted everything to be perfect so that I could give the actors the freedom to feel, you know, like they were there

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  and be, you know, slightly modern about it. Because I, you know, when you, when I was meeting and talking to people who were either in that world or, you know, you start to go into other worlds and just start to talk to people about life in general in the 50s and the late 40s. They're talking to you and you're hearing the stories. And when you're hearing the stories, a good orator, you're present. You're just listening to them. Emotions are timeless. You know, life has obviously changed and we have a whole new feeling. And there's new nuances to anxiety now because of social media and the connectivity between everybody. But, you know, back then, like, there was such an earnest connectivity amongst everyone in the world because of the war. Not everyone in the world, but, you know, the modern.

• 1:39:20Sean Fennessey?

  We all went through something together.

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. Now, I remember I had a teacher who once said, like, who here thinks the internet's going to unite everybody? Everyone raised their hand. He just started laughing at us. Looking back on it in the moment, I was like, this guy, he's talking about the internets. You're so idealistic and democratic and what you think. And then you look now, whoa, so, so different.

• 1:39:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a rabbit hole machine.

• 1:39:41Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. But going, and, and, but going, going back to Dan in terms of the, um, the ontological quality of the film. I had originally written that Marty is at a concert, a Tears for Vera concert, and at the end, and he's with his, his son and his granddaughter, the son who you obviously meet, and he is.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  You know, look, looking at, you know, the band and thinking about the lyrics of the song, which is weirdly, the song is, is actually about the Cold War, but I don't like to think of it that way. Uh, it's about anxiety, uh, and, and control. Everybody wants to rule the world, to, to be specific about it.

• 1:40:20Sean Fennessey?

  It is one of the, the way it's used in the film as now is one of the most like thunder clap, emotional needle drops that I've heard in so long.

• 1:40:29Speaker 04

  The first lyric is powerful.

• 1:40:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's unreal. I mean, it is, it makes, it truly makes the movie.

• 1:40:34Speaker 04

  The first word of the movie is change, divorced, recut. And that was cool is you get to these artists allowed us to recut their, their music. So you just hear that, the mallets, right, from change. And then you just hear change and then you're in the movie and you drop out. So it's just like Marty, Marty, Marty, Marty, you're in the world.

• 1:40:52Sean Fennessey?

  It also gives it that almost hip hop style, like, you know, modern quality of like, there's just something recombinant going on in this movie that is a period piece that shouldn't have a moment like that, but does that, anyway.

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  That's what Ben was saying yesterday. Uh, but, so what I was, what I was, what, so the, the idea there is that the movie is a kind of reflection of the past from a present, which is, happens to have been the eighties. So that the whole time you feel like there's a mythic quality to what you're seeing, that there's this, this guy is literally from the future and he's back there and he's revisiting his past. And you're supposed to take lesson from that. It feels like there's a legend happening. And Dan and I discussed early on, do we sidle up alongside these needle drops, which were written into the script? Or do we also, or do we do a period score? And then we started to look at post-war music, which, you know, Steve Reich and, and things like, and artists like that.

• 1:41:48Speaker 04

  And, you know, he, you know, and you start to go in that direction for a little bit. This is before production begins. Then during production, I start, I say to Dan, what if we echo jam? It was one of his first, like, kind of seminal piece of music, which kind of spawned vaporwave. I was like, what if we echo jam the whole score? We take these eighties needle drops and you mess with them. Man, that's, sounds cool. Most time like conceptual things, it's hard to really land the plane there. So it didn't work. And then the, we landed in this place, which I think you're responding to with his work is, is in this, is that. There's a lot of, there's thirty string orchestra in Czechoslovakia. There's sixty voices in Vienna. There's flautists that we had, there's a lot of flutes, a lot of mallets in this movie. And mallets, he said, is like ping pong.

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  Ball, stick. And then the begin, all those eighties needle drops are all synthetic mallets. And those big drums, you know, and so that was, was interesting to start to try to think about organic instruments, real people, and the synthetic versions of them and combining the two.

• 1:42:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's all like, feels like literal time signatures too, where ping pong is a series of ticking and talking and ticking. And so you are moving in time with the movie. Anyway, it's a, it's a really brilliant choice. Um, you did mention your interest in the iconography of people.

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:43:02Sean Fennessey?

  And the casting is so fascinating again. I think actually a one-upping of Uncut Gems, not just because you have major stars and folks like Gwyneth in the movie, but.

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

  She's amazing in the film.

• 1:43:13Sean Fennessey?

  So, so great. Um, Odessa also incredible and having a very great moment right now.

• 1:43:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, as she deserves, yeah.

• 1:43:20Sean Fennessey?

  But all the, all the other people.

• 1:43:24Speaker 04

  It's a hundred, I think it was a hundred and thirty-five speaking parts.

• 1:43:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, well, talk to me about Kevin O'Leary and Abel Ferrara.

• 1:43:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:43:31Sean Fennessey?

  And the, the duality of your heavies and why you chose them.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  So Abel was, the part was written for him. Uh, he, when you cast somebody, you are bringing their entire history with them. And that's true of movie stars. When you cast, you know, uh, Brad Pitt, who's an amazing actor, when you cast him, you're bringing all of Brad Pitt's movies to the movies on a subconscious level. People, when they see his name on the poster, they think of every movie that they love him in. And, you know, the, you know, I believe movies are portraits of the souls of the people that you're in. And you want to work with those actors to use the characters as vessels to kind of express themselves inside of it. And, uh, you know, which is.

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  Kind of the basis of like the, this acting exercise, Meisner effect, where you're just like saying the same thing, but you're bringing your soul to it. Kind of, don't hate me if you're an actor and say that you have no idea what you're talking about, because I'm a moron at the end of the day. I'm, I'm, uh, whatever. Uh, so, so Abel was somebody, you know, who I knew and I put in one of my earlier films. But he was not sober when I worked with him the first time. It was a crazy experience.

• 1:44:40Sean Fennessey?

  I was curious about how it worked out, working with him.

• 1:44:43Speaker 04

  Well, now he's sober and he's a totally different person. He came in a video store I worked at briefly and he, you know, took money from the register. He, he doesn't care about talking about this. His book is amazing, by the way.

• 1:44:55Sean Fennessey?

  I have read it.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  Scene is amazing. So if you read that, you know, I'm not, I'm not, uh, violating him.

• 1:45:02Sean Fennessey?

  He's a complicated dude who's been very troubled over the years. He's made like 15 incredible movies.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  Really? I mean, The Funeral is an incredible period film.

• 1:45:09Sean Fennessey?

  Lost to time. You can't get it. Why is it not available?

• 1:45:12Speaker 04

  I have a great DVD of it.

• 1:45:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's a DVD, I know.

• 1:45:14Speaker 04

  Uh, it's a great, and Chris Penn is so good in that movie. That scene when he's dancing and singing is one of these things that I chase in my movies is that's chasing happiness. It's a pure moment. It's a big feeling moment. He's so good. What a tragedy to have lost him so early. He's so good in the film. Anyway, Abel is a street poet. And all of the films that he's made, now, some people see the movie, they don't even know who Abel Ferrara is, you know, like, which is crazy to me, but that's, I have, that's a harsh reality. And, but it's in his soul. It's in his DNA. You don't make those films if it's not. And when you see him immediately on screen, and he's hilarious too, and he's, you know, you immediately feel, this guy might not be up to some, so much, he might not be up to good.

• 1:45:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Speaker 04

  You know, like, we had early, early drafts of the movie, the Abel character Ezra Mishkin, and there was a character who we were casting, we was gonna try to cast Don King in. And he was about, it was a feud of the lottery feud in New York. This is like so early. This is like 2020.

• 1:46:16Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  Uh, and it's good because then this becomes backstory. And it's like where that bag of money is from and this allows Abel to know. And I said Abel is backstory. He was like, okay, he, he really, that meant a lot to him. Everyone gets a backstory. Uh, and the dog, he hates dogs in real life. He's petrified of them. So that was

• 1:46:33Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, God.

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  Hard for him. Uh, but, so when he, when he shows up on, on screen. You know, you feel, uh, you've, I think you feel all of his movies and you feel his, you know, you feel his past, you feel the Bronx, you know, you feel the guy who was living near Union Square, trying to raise money and working in pornography, trying to just make, get his dream to make a real film, uh, working with gangsters and, and, you know, you just, so when he steps on screen, it's the way he looks, it's the way he talks, it's the way he moves.

• 1:47:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Speaker 04

  Abel has a signature way he moves. There's a great Cinema of Our Times piece on him, a, a video doc on him and he's amazing. You can just, I can watch him forever. But when I worked with him on Daddy Long Legs, it was crazy. Every between takes, he had two beers on the inside of both jackets. In between takes, he'd wanna go and he'd pound the beer and then he would go over here and then he'd disappear and then he'd come back. When we got him, he, he wanted the money up front. This is a no budget movie. We're giving him, you know, a hundred and fifty dollars and, you know, he's, you know, but he was, he loved movies and he, he appreciated that I wanted to do this thing. He watched my first film and, uh, but he was, it was, he was completely blind to himself. I think that

• 1:47:51Speaker 04

  was part of the addiction, uh, was wanting to disappear from himself. And oftentimes that's makes for great acting because someone is not self-conscious. Here he was sober and he was, so he was a totally different guy in the beginning. It was like, wow, I have a, work with a whole new person. But I had whats, I, we whats app with each other all the time. So I, and he's a Buddhist and, and he's very peaceful and he's a father. Uh, and, you know, so, but working with him, he, and I've heard from actors who worked with him, he's the greatest director's actor.

• 1:48:18Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:19Speaker 04

  Actor's director.

• 1:48:20Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, you can see that in, many people getting their best performances in his movies. Yeah.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I, I don't know what his best film is. His most existential film, King of New York is-

• 1:48:32Sean Fennessey?

  Probably his best.

• 1:48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I- Mr. Forty Five. Yeah.

• 1:48:35Speaker 04

  Mr. Forty Five is amazing. I mean, they're all great. Uh, I really think they all have something. Dude, I even, him and I bond over Body Snatchers because-

• 1:48:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's really good.

• 1:48:43Speaker 04

  That was so hard. But just the, the journey of making that movie is so hard. I think it was the last official, now there's more, it was the last official quote, Cinemascope Hollywood film for a long time.

• 1:48:54Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:48:54Speaker 04

  Uh, I remember seeing him and he's the best at Q and As. And he did a Q and A with, he asked me to do a Q and A with me and Benny to do a Q and A with him once that moment. I knew, I've seen him throw these moderators under the bus. It's like, I'm gonna just be a mark. I don't wanna do that. He's like, no, no, no, don't worry. I'm not gonna do that. Cause he was traveling in from, and it was from King of New York. This guy threw me under the bus so quickly. And like, totally ridiculing me onstage. At one point, I think Julian Schnabel stood up. He goes, let the man fucking talk, not about me, about Abel. And I wasn't even talking.

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Anyway, so Abel, Abel, you know, you write for him and you just know he's a director. So he's gonna bring, he's gonna, he's gonna always be patient with you. And he's gonna be somebody you can always confide in. You know, like, this is where I wanna go with the scene. And he loved the words. He loved the page. He loved the script. And he was so committed. He was as committed as Timmy. And, you know, sometimes more so, I would be like, wow, this guy's in the corner for a long time. He's running through these things. The dog, he became, had a slight relationship with the dog. This guy was petrified of dogs. Tyler, too. Tyler's allergic. So I had, I cast these people who can't be around dogs. So you have these scenes where they have to be, Abel in particular, he's the love of the dog. So he was, he was great to have.

• 1:50:09Speaker 04

  Again, because he's bringing an entire history to the part. The Milton character was tricky because he was, you know, he's, obviously, he's the antagonist in the movie. You know, but he, up until a certain point, he doesn't do, he's the bad guy, but he doesn't do anything bad.

• 1:50:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:25Speaker 04

  Which is a hard thing to do because he's bad in the eyes of your main character. Even though he doesn't do, he's not a bad guy by any other definition. And he-

• 1:50:34Sean Fennessey?

  And if played differently, you might not even read him that way all the way up until the end.

• 1:50:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:50:39Sean Fennessey?

  The actor that you chose reads-

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  Instantly.

• 1:50:41Sean Fennessey?

  -as bad immediately.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  Exactly. So I interviewed some politicians. I interviewed other, you know, I interviewed some actors. I met with entertainers in general. And then, you know, I read with a couple. And I realized there was just something missing. There was that, that DNA was missing. So I was like, we need a corporate colonialist hardcore businessman who just is the American dream. So you start to think about-

• 1:51:07Speaker 04

  Entertaining, you first started thinking about businessmen. So you like, look at the Forbes list and you're like, okay, maybe the face, this interviews. You watch interviews, interesting, I don't know. And then you're like, well, let me look at entertainment. So then I started to think, you know, I once, I once wrote Mark Cuban a really long email to, to get him to pay for Lenny Cook. We'll see if he would put money.

• 1:51:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  And his response was, no, thank you. It was the producer was like, the producer of that movie wrote this long thing. His response was, no, thanks. Which was amazing, he responded.

• 1:51:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  Um, so I was thinking of Shark Tank and I said to Ronnie, you know, cause we write with people of mine. I was like, what about Shark Tank? He goes, Mr. Wonderful, immediately. He said, Mr. Wonderful, Ronnie loves Shark Tank. He's always calling, he's like, watch this episode, we'll watch them together. And Mr. Wonderful is the star of that show.

• 1:51:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50Speaker 04

  You know, Cuban's no longer on it. Cuban was always kind of the most famous person on the show. Uh, but Wonderful is the star. He sits center for a, a reason, uh, because he is an asshole and he is an iconic asshole. And he's, he has timing. He knows how to be an entertaining asshole, but it's also entirely sincere. He's also, when I got to know him, he's an artist. He started out as an artist. He edits his own material. He has his own studio where he shoots. When we shot in Japan, I saw him, uh, I went up to the, to rooftop bar and he's at the bar, sitting there with a glass of wine. And he has his laptop out and he has his Leica camera and he's editing photos that he took on the street that day. It's Mr. Wonderful, just sitting at the bar.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  It was like, it zoomed in on an image and like photo touching it. And it was so revealing that at the end of the day, he's just this, this man was, he's passionate. He's very passionate.

• 1:52:45Sean Fennessey?

  And he was probably meticulous as a performer then too.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  Oh my God, very much so. I mean, I, it was a lot of takes. We, he, he gave him, he was very generous with me in that, you know, first and foremost, he didn't have to do this movie. Uh, at all. And, and when I met with him, I, I had to pitch him and I straight up thought I was on Shark, it was felt like Shark Tank. I'm here, I'm pitching him, this guy, my dream, this, which is actually a business, it's a business. Movies are a business. And he's looking at me, he's, he's, he's going in with a no. But he's a curious person, so he's gonna hear me out. And I didn't want him, I thought he was gonna, for those reasons, I'm out. But he didn't, or he said, I'm gonna make you, I'm gonna make you an offer. So, so, so when he was into it, he loved Uncut Gems, which was very helpful, cuz he saw the vision. Then I, you know, you go and you, you meet with him and you start to tailor the, the movie to him.

• 1:53:33Speaker 04

  And again, he is the character before he opens his mouth, and you want that with every single casting decision. And some of those people are public people, and some of those people aren't. Obviously, the people who aren't, it's a different experience as a viewer, because you're seeing the person you're judging, as everybody does. You're like, what kind of person is this? Who are they talking to? What are they wearing? How do they talk? And, uh, you know, he's, he, he happens to be, you know, public, so you have that, you, you kind of inherit that. But with people, with first timers, it's almost, it's a luxury, because the audience gets to discover who they are in real time. And they have a very intimate relationship with them because of that, because there's no, there's no, um, they're on the same level.

• 1:54:16Speaker 04

  You know, with someone who's a public figure, they're, they're above, you're looking up at them in many ways.

• 1:54:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny, I mean, I'm sure you knew this going in, but the reactions to him in particular are fascinating, cuz the, what you hear the most from people who've seen it is, I regret to inform you that Kevin O'Leary is amazing and Marty Supreme. But that is-

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  Because he's an iconic asshole.

• 1:54:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. But you got that out of him too, that you got him to go to the place where you were like, this is an undeniably critical character and one of the best performances in the movie, and he's not an actor.

• 1:54:45Speaker 04

  No, he's a performer though.

• 1:54:46Sean Fennessey?

  He is a performer, but you do this over and over again, though. Like, you find people who just don't do this.

• 1:54:51Speaker 04

  What, what, to me, I was texting with him the other day, and I was, uh, proofing the, teching the, the 70mm print. And I'm in the final scene, and there's his final shot. You know, if you go back and, or maybe you can remember it, it's, it's very complicated. The performance he's doing is very complicated, and that was, shooting in Japan was incredibly hectic. I had very small amount of days, I had lots of Japanese extras. Wrong location, it was much colder than it was supposed to be. And Kevin was very generous, again, with his time to come to Japan, uh, and-

• 1:55:23Speaker 04

  He knows the, we shot it at the end. We, we knew we were gonna edit a bunch. We didn't really get to edit much, but then we were gonna go to Japan. So he had the whole movie cashed in his brain. And something that we talked a lot about, his backstory is fascinating and very fun to read. How he became the pen magnet, stole it from someone in Argentina. He stole the patent of the ballpoint pen, made four million dollars with the sales at Gimbal's in New York in the first week. And then he gets super upset that the pen wars begin and Bic is created in France. And Japan, they're bootlegging him left and right because a soldier brought it there and then pilot comes about. And then Japan, now Japan owns the, Japan and France own the pen game. So he was fascinated in the economics of his business.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  Uh, so here he is in Japan as a carpetbagger, as a colonial, corporate colonialist. And it's very misguided because he's avenging his son? Kind of, he thinks he is, but Marty's kind of showing that to him and rubbing his face in it a little bit. So, and he's also, the movie's about control, very much so about control. And in that moment, he has no control. And the way he internalized all those feelings and thoughts, I was in awe of it. And I was texting him, I said, Kevin, I don't even know how you did this. Because it's, you know, you give, I give a lot of space sometimes with takes, you know, for actors. And particularly with the Japan section at the end, I would do these long set takes where you let, and Timmy and Koto, who plays Endo.

• 1:56:51Speaker 04

  They were so good and my, Diego Scoff, who was my choreographer for table tennis, he was a, did Forrest Gump. He's like, they're never gonna be able to learn multiple points in a row. Get that out of your head, Josh. And I was like, oh, man. How am I gonna get the nuances of the motions between the points? And Timmy and Koto just started, they wouldn't even, they would just go into it.

• 1:57:09Sean Fennessey?

  You're shooting it in wide for long stretches.

• 1:57:11Speaker 04

  They would just go into the next point. So what I would do is then I would have, I would have another camera on Kevin throughout the plane. So I could see him in real time. And when you let points play and you let the emotions. Pile up. I don't have to be like, all right, you're feeling this in this shot. You know what I mean? So you allow him to kind of get there on his own. And I'm amazed by it. He's incredible. But like every single person in this movie was the star of the film for me. And I'm, and I'm touched by them all. Like the guy who plays Lloyd in the, in the, in the safe scene at the beginning. It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. Like I worked so hard. And he's, and he's given that business card. I, I talked to Lloyd about it. I talked to Ralph is the actor's name. We talk about the things that wouldn't get him, you know, as you do as a director.

• 1:57:56Speaker 04

  You talk about, and then, then you get as a, as a director, you get so vulnerable what people do. Then you roll the camera and you see how he's expressing the thing that he just told you about. It's devastating. It's, you cry, you know what I mean? It's very emotional. And that's when you, you know, you're like doing something like this is a great actor. They're willing to be bear themselves. Gwyneth was like that.

• 1:58:18Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  Gwyneth was.

• 1:58:19Sean Fennessey?

  My favorite scene in the movie is, having seen it a second time, is the conversation after their second encounter.

• 1:58:26Speaker 04

  In the hotel room?

• 1:58:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:58:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. So funny. That was like a scene. That was, that was a scene that was one, it turned out great, but it was one of those scenes where Ronnie and I, we rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it. Cause there's a lot of.

• 1:58:38Sean Fennessey?

  They're back and forth really fast.

• 1:58:39Speaker 04

  And there's a lot of meaning in that scene. And oftentimes when you're, you're life, you, in conversations in real life, you don't talk about meaning sometimes. Unless you're sitting down with a close friend and you're pontificating. Dan is somebody and Ronnie too, we, some of you talk about life with. But these people don't, aren't going to do. So you have to find the right tenor for that. And there's such an interesting, you know, he's a kid in that scene.

• 1:59:03Sean Fennessey?

  It's a mom and a son talking to each other. Yeah. Post-coital.

• 1:59:06Speaker 04

  And she lost her son.

• 1:59:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:07Speaker 04

  And he's got a really complicated relationship with his mother, uh, who's constantly trying to trap him. He tells her, you sound like my mom. And, and, you know, and she says in that thing, I got pregnant. That's what stopped her dream. You know what's going on in the movie? So there's, but there, it's so, there's the practical, the, the real time part of the conversation is just him saying that I heard your, I saw your husband is paying for the play, which is also a, an essential narrative piece. So it's, it's very hard. I'm happy you like that scene because every time someone tells us they enjoy that scene, Ryan, you're like, you know what I mean?

• 1:59:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's, it is like simultaneously philosophical and information delivering. And it never feels like it's there to like get something done for the movie. It is literally just. What they would be talking about at that time and feels natural, which is an accomplishment. Um, I could probably ask you a million more things for, okay, very quick one. Um, is that a knowing reference to look who's talking?

• 2:00:02Speaker 04

  Uh, I love look who's talking.

• 2:00:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:00:03Speaker 04

  Um, I one originally was gonna go in a different direction.

• 2:00:08Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  Um, I started, that took seven months, that sequence to do. From the, it started actually during production, towards the end of production. I, and I wanted to do, it's more inspired by, uh, Niels Larsson, who is this Swedish photographer, who did the book, this, this, did this seven sixties, uh, seminal book where he photographed the fertilization process. But it was done with Mike, uh, Mike, micro photography.

• 2:00:36Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:00:37Speaker 04

  Electron, like micron photography, which is black and white. Obviously, there's no light in these, in these process.

• 2:00:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  In these scenes. Uh, and then this, there was this very interesting commercial photographer who colored them in a very interesting way. So my initial instinct was, I want it to be as realistic as possible. I'm gonna make it look like we're looking at it in a science class in 1952. That was my initial, you know, exploration for it. So I was like, oh, we'll start. You, it's hard to direct CG artists because especially when you're doing something that you don't quite have references for, but I had these, this book, Child is Born. And I was showing it to him, showing, showing it to, to the team, uh, company Artery in New York. And they went and I was like, okay, first we'll do the black and white. We'll do the electron, and then we'll color it afterwards. But no one really understood the color it afterwards part.

• 2:01:26Speaker 04

  So I'm looking at this really realistic, um, recreation of sperms and, and, you know, the, the, the tubes and the, you know, the ovaries and the egg. And it was too realistic. It was not romantic. It was actually kind of abrasive looking. So then you start to go backwards and I was like, well, let's, then in the eighties, I, they did a, he did a film called, um, Oh God, eternal.

• 2:01:52Speaker 04

  It's the film version, basically, with a little bit more advancements, photographic advancements of his book in the 60s. And that was very inspiring. And then you think about Look Who's Talking, I'm doing it. I'm like, oh, wow, that's make me think of another movie. And you're like, oh, Look Who's Talking. I love Look Who's Talking. I remember as a kid seeing that and it being educational.

• 2:02:10Sean Fennessey?

  It's impactful. It's memorable.

• 2:02:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Incredible.

• 2:02:12Sean Fennessey?

  And I, I, I think maybe just people our age will be like, is that a nod to that, to that?

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  It isn't not. You know what I mean? It's, it's, and that, that sequence was definitely inspired by Neil's photography. There's no doubt about it. I mean, that was the only, that was such a seminar. I mean, it's, that's, I should have, you know, uh, every prize in the world for, for showing that, for showing that part of the human creation. I mean, it's, it's the only, it's our visual. Now it's getting, you can actually, we got super deep into making it as realistic as possible because you can really get in there now. And it's, it's again, it's just, but it's, it's abrasive looking. So I wanted the romantic quality. I didn't want to lose that.

• 2:02:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's, it works.

• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then the choir that comes in, the kids choir.

• 2:03:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's part, I think that's partly why is that it is like, it's, it's the smart thing that you do where you're setting us up for an inevitability, but we completely forget about the inevitability when we're watching the movie.

• 2:03:10Speaker 04

  That's awesome.

• 2:03:11Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I mean? Like you, you're not hiding anything.

• 2:03:14Speaker 04

  There's a lot going on in this guy's life.

• 2:03:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, there is.

• 2:03:16Speaker 04

  And it's easy to forget. And there's a handful of things, if you go back and watch the movie, it's like, oh, I, he did say about the bathtub. But you forget about it because this guy's, this guy's goal, he's making the best possible decision in every interaction he has. So you actually, as an audience, are not hearing things or remembering things. And that was, you know, uh, that was, that was Ronnie and I, that was something that we, that spent, that's what took so much time is to figure out a way to be present so that you couldn't kind of forget about things that you saw in the recent past in your real life an hour ago or something.

• 2:03:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Do you feel like it's a chapter closing, but movie in a way for you? Or do you think that?

• 2:03:57Speaker 04

  Uh, in what regards?

• 2:03:58Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I wonder if the next movie has this exact same propulsion.

• 2:04:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I feel very comfortable in this, in this speed. It's, um, I understand. Uh, I, I can understand more about the, the ideas and, and the, and the meaning of, of, uh, my own expression in a way, not to sound self-involved, but I do feel just comfortable in that. But, you know, as you're saying, there's lots of ebbs and flows in this film that are different from the other ones.

• 2:04:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's why I'm asking, because there's some moments where it's not.

• 2:04:33Speaker 04

  You never know, it depends on the story, you know what I mean? Like, there's, if I, uh, I was gonna say a movie about a painter, but, you know, then you think of like Life Lessons, the Scorsese film, which is incredible.

• 2:04:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:46Speaker 04

  You know, there's a real propulsion there. I mean, I just.

• 2:04:49Sean Fennessey?

  But that's in the emotional dynamics, not in the speed of the film, right? Like, not in the.

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  There's some, the cutting in that movie, at least the cutting in that movie is, uh, but, um, but yes, but that, but that, that is, it's kind of the case here, minus a couple of sequences. There are some pretty intense, propulsive sequences here, but I just, I, you know, I find that, you know, life moves really quickly, um, and, you know, the days move fast, and then you have, you know, uh, you have a kid, literally, the days move fast, the years are long, the, sorry, the days are long, the years are fast.

• 2:05:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:05:24Speaker 04

  And that freaks me out, and time in general freaks me out, so I'm trying to, I'm wish fulfillment with, with movies. I go to the movies to see characters do things that I wouldn't do. There's, there's a heroic quality to that, there's a wish fulfillment, and I go to the movies to, to, it's a maximalist art form, I don't care if it's the most minimalist film, it's still maximalist, there's people talking, there's music, there's, even if there isn't music, sounds in the score, there's music in the world that they're in, and there's, that's, uh, um, overwhelming in its own, you know, microbeats, so I go for the maximalist effect, so I'm, I, again, I can't tell, it's all about the subject matter.

• 2:06:06Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if you feel this way with your kids right now, but this year, so I have a four-year-old, this year is the first year of her life that I thought went too fast. The first three years, I was like, this is going slowly.

• 2:06:14Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 2:06:15Sean Fennessey?

  This is hard, and this year, I was like, oh no, I can feel it slipping through my fingers already, and I wonder what effect that might have on how you make movies, given the speed that you like to work with.

• 2:06:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I gotta figure out what I mean, movies quicker, can't spend.

• 2:06:28Sean Fennessey?

  Does that, are you worried about that?

• 2:06:30Speaker 04

  Um, you know.

• 2:06:33Speaker 04

  Sometimes.

• 2:06:35Sean Fennessey?

  Cause you wanna walk away having done 20 films?

• 2:06:38Speaker 04

  I have no idea. Yeah, you don't wanna, I definitely wanna work until the day I die, that's for sure.

• 2:06:43Sean Fennessey?

  That's nice to hear.

• 2:06:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, work sets you free. It's, it's.

• 2:06:46Sean Fennessey?

  Amen.

• 2:06:47Speaker 04

  I don't understand retirement. I just don't understand it. I don't even, and I love everyone who takes pride in what they do. I love when you meet a prideful person. It's incredible. It's life-affirming. And I hope I'll take pride. I hope I'll take pride in what I do. If I don't, I mean, I wanna, I don't know. I might wanna become an architect. That's my dream. I wanna build a public facing building. I wanna build a building that people can experience. I wanna think about the narrative of a building, what it's like to enter it, what it's like to go upstairs and leave. That would be an incredible dream to do that.

• 2:07:21Sean Fennessey?

  A real-life brutalist, yeah.

• 2:07:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 2:07:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so I'm not gonna ask you, what are you doing next? Cause you think that would be disrespectful, yeah?

• 2:07:32Speaker 04

  I'll start crying.

• 2:07:33Sean Fennessey?

  Knicks? How you feeling?

• 2:07:34Speaker 04

  Uh, I like them.

• 2:07:37Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:37Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm so accustomed to like a six-man rotation.

• 2:07:44Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:44Speaker 04

  And the grind that come, I'm, I'm, I watch sports for the chemistry. There's nothing less exciting to me than a team that has no chemistry. It's sad. It's like, what am I even looking? You watch for the narratives. You want the narratives inside your team. And I don't quite fully know the, the movie that the Knicks are right now. We have a lot of great players.

• 2:08:06Sean Fennessey?

  That'll open your heart to Tyler Kolek, you know?

• 2:08:08Speaker 04

  I love Kolek.

• 2:08:09Sean Fennessey?

  The man.

• 2:08:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love, I, see, the thing is, is I, I'm a big Deuce, Deuce guy as well.

• 2:08:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, an incredible season so far.

• 2:08:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's, but he's been, he was great since the moment he got onto the team.

• 2:08:21Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 2:08:22Speaker 04

  I. There are certain lineups that work better than others. The 11 man rotation is fascinating because you're just like, how do you like I? When I saw it with the Pacers last year, I was not, I was strange. It was

• 2:08:37Sean Fennessey?

  It was frustrating.

• 2:08:38Speaker 04

  Psychedelic.

• 2:08:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:39Speaker 04

  You're like, what's going on now? Is this person, when did they check in?

• 2:08:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:08:42Speaker 04

  Um, and no one gets tired.

• 2:08:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  But the drawback from that is you don't have these like long term relationships inside the game. You know what I mean? You don't get to see Brunson and Bridges develop over the game because Brun, Bridges is playing with, with, um, Deuce for long stretches of the game and, and Cat and Brunson, and they're not playing as much as they should be together. And Mitch is a is a totally, the team is totally different when Mitch is on the floor.

• 2:09:11Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 2:09:11Speaker 04

  So, and Brown, I don't, I don't, like, again, Tibbs was so simple. He was so simple, frustratingly simple at times.

• 2:09:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  But I

• 2:09:19Sean Fennessey?

  It was predictable.

• 2:09:20Speaker 04

  I loved him. I was happy he was fired. I wanted him fired.

• 2:09:24Sean Fennessey?

  I'm in the exact same position.

• 2:09:25Speaker 04

  But I miss him.

• 2:09:26Sean Fennessey?

  But he brought something, he brought a stability and, and success that we waited a long time for. Yes.

• 2:09:32Speaker 04

  You knew what you were getting.

• 2:09:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33Speaker 04

  And he, you know, look, I had heard that there was a couple of, you know, out, you know, the player, you're going into the summer inner meetings that went really long. And I know some of the players, some inside information that, uh, was 20 seconds. Some of them were like 90 minutes.

• 2:09:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:53Speaker 04

  So some players were clearly like, what are you doing with me? Why am I on this team?

• 2:09:58Sean Fennessey?

  You can see that in the way that some of them have performed this season too.

• 2:10:02Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:02Sean Fennessey?

  They feel more

• 2:10:03Speaker 04

  You know, who had the long outro outgoing, outgoing

• 2:10:07Sean Fennessey?

  He feels more free now.

• 2:10:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, for sure. We're talking about the five, the five boroughs.

• 2:10:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:10:12Speaker 04

  That's Cal Bridges. Um, he does, and he's, and it's great to see because he's an amazing defender. I mean, our defense is kind of better than we were last year too, which was, it wasn't, Tibbs just lost his identity last year. I have theories, we all do, um, about personnel and like

• 2:10:28Sean Fennessey?

  It's one of those be careful what you wish for with working till you die because like he grinds hard and there is a consequence.

• 2:10:34Speaker 04

  But his life is, his purpose is waking up. I mean, he's

• 2:10:37Sean Fennessey?

  No, but it has consequences.

• 2:10:40Speaker 04

  You're married to the game, though.

• 2:10:42Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 2:10:42Speaker 04

  He's married to the game. He has children with the game.

• 2:10:44Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 2:10:44Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 2:10:44Sean Fennessey?

  I know. I hope he finds another team.

• 2:10:46Speaker 04

  He'll never win a championship.

• 2:10:47Sean Fennessey?

  I know, it's so depressing.

• 2:10:48Speaker 04

  It just won't happen, and it's sad, but he's gonna be, he's gonna be one of those coaches that was great. You know, but like, do we still have Derrick Rose? If he's not the coach? I mean, that was amazing. Derrick Rose was incredible.

• 2:11:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 04

  Do we have him if he's not?

• 2:11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Probab- prob- it's impossible to know.

• 2:11:07Speaker 04

  You never know, but like, you know, I don't know, KG always told me that, that, um, the problem with, you know, the reoccurring injuries nowadays is the, is this, is the way that they're, they're not working out the right way.

• 2:11:20Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 2:11:20Speaker 04

  Cause there were less injuries back then.

• 2:11:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Speaker 04

  And you could say the game is more high-octane and it's more, you know, you have bigs that are having to run out to the three-point line and it's, it's faster. Uh, but Chuck Daly was fast as fuck.

• 2:11:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:32Speaker 04

  You know, and that was back then.

• 2:11:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Speaker 04

  And you don't, you didn't see 500 injuries a year.

• 2:11:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 2:11:39Speaker 04

  Uh, so it's hard to, hard to say. I mean, I do, the one thing that I'm, you know, by the way, they asked me to direct a game.

• 2:11:46Sean Fennessey?

  For the telecast?

• 2:11:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, in the truck.

• 2:11:48Sean Fennessey?

  You gotta do that.

• 2:11:49Speaker 04

  I'm gonna do it for sure. I mean, they, they saw how.

• 2:11:54Sean Fennessey?

  Are they prepared for the amount of cuts you're willing to do?

• 2:11:56Speaker 04

  The New York, I don't read reviews, right? But some reviews I end up reading because so many people send them to me. The New York Post one was sent to me by a lot of people. And, uh, so I read that review.

• 2:12:06Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:12:07Speaker 04

  Um, and.

• 2:12:09Sean Fennessey?

  Of Marty, you mean?

• 2:12:10Speaker 04

  Of Marty, yeah. And that one was sent to me by someone who works at MSG Networks. And, uh, that was, I love the review for that reason now. Um, that it, it linked me to, and then they said, wow, the way you captured table tennis, it'd be great to see you capture basketball. And I'm already thinking like, okay, I'm gonna get this camera over here, I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do this. I wanna get into the psychology of the game. It's gonna be hard and it's gonna, I don't, I hope I'll have time to prep for it.

• 2:12:35Sean Fennessey?

  If you haven't spoken to John DiMarsico, who cuts the Mets games, who directs the Mets games, you've gotta talk to him because he's a huge cinephile.

• 2:12:43Speaker 04

  Well, the way they've covered some of those, the split diaptr stuff is incredible.

• 2:12:46Sean Fennessey?

  He's doing amazing stuff and just as like, as an, as a movie nerd, being such a big fan of the team.

• 2:12:51Speaker 04

  Also, you get to have Keith. His cinephile taste is pretty.

• 2:12:54Sean Fennessey?

  All three of them, they love movies. They'll fucking talk about TCM for an hour and during a blowout game.

• 2:13:00Speaker 04

  It's the best time. You know that the, um. That Somerville, in One Battle for Another. Paul Grimstad.

• 2:13:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, he's like one second in your movie? Yeah, I clocked him yesterday.

• 2:13:10Speaker 04

  You can hear him a bunch. He's amazing. He's a friend of ours. He's the lead of Ronnie's film.

• 2:13:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, of course, that's right.

• 2:13:15Speaker 04

  He, um, he's the craziest Mets fan.

• 2:13:17Sean Fennessey?

  Really?

• 2:13:18Speaker 04

  Oh, my god.

• 2:13:19Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, we gotta get him on this show.

• 2:13:20Speaker 04

  The craziest Mets fan, amazing guy.

• 2:13:22Sean Fennessey?

  He also utters the words, "the big picture," multiple times in One Battle. So, you know, he's, we're good for life.

• 2:13:27Speaker 04

  Do a mashup of that.

• 2:13:29Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, "What's the last great thing they have seen?"

• 2:13:34Speaker 04

  Last great thing?

• 2:13:34Sean Fennessey?

  Great thing.

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  Can I just say, "The last thing I saw?"

• 2:13:36Sean Fennessey?

  If you want to.

• 2:13:37Speaker 04

  Okay, um.

• 2:13:39Sean Fennessey?

  I hope you, I hopefully didn't hate it.

• 2:13:40Speaker 04

  I kinda thought it was great. No, I thought it was great. Last night, you know, I just, you know, you, you, you get into this part of the process of the film, which you kind of forget about. When you're, you may, you have to forget about it.

• 2:13:51Sean Fennessey?

  In six years, yeah.

• 2:13:51Speaker 04

  Um, and of course, it's important to, to promote the film. Talking about yourself is a lot, and, um, I like to unwind. So I decided to, Ronnie and I were talking about Wild Things yesterday.

• 2:14:04Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 2:14:05Speaker 04

  And, uh, and then we realized it was directed by the, uh, McDonough?

• 2:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  McNaughton.

• 2:14:09Speaker 04

  McNaughton, excuse me, excuse me. McNaughton, who did Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer.

• 2:14:13Sean Fennessey?

  He sure did.

• 2:14:13Speaker 04

  And then I saw this movie he did called The Borrower. Have you ever seen The Borrower? It's fascinating movie.

• 2:14:19Sean Fennessey?

  What's The Borrower?

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  Borrower is about these two, this, this alien who did something really bad on his planet. And he's being, his punishment is he has to be human, and they're gonna drop him off on Earth, and he has to just be, live on Earth. So the alien who's like the cop who's bringing him to Earth, being like, "All right, go," is like, and they're arguing about it. They like, they speak English, which is whatever. You gotta get past certain things, yeah. And, uh, they, they, they arrive on planet Earth, and there are these two guys, a father and son, and they're just getting drunk in a car in the middle of a field. Um, and they see this insane alien-looking thing, and this human, but inside the human is the alien in human form.

• 2:14:59Speaker 04

  And they have, start having a huge fight, the alien and this human being, and they see, they imagine, they're like, "We have to help the human. That thing is a beast." So they kill the alien, and they go to help the human, but the human's an alien, and he's very violent. He's very violent. So he, he rips the head off of, he rips the head off of, uh, oh wait, his head is...

• 2:15:24Speaker 04

  Trying to remember, I just watched it. His, the human's head is ripped off. Uh huh. No, I'm sorry. His, the, the alien can't take the human form for too long. Okay. So while they're talking, they're asking this human if he's okay. And, and Kevin, Kevin Yeager did all the effects. Oh, looks good. It looks really cool. Um, who, by the way, I met very briefly when I produced, uh, If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You. We wanted to bring Kevin into Thing, but we couldn't get, get to him. But, um, uh, for the film. But he, but sorry. So Kevin Yeager did this. So, so there's this moment where Kevin Yeager's effects come in. And it's important to mention Yeager because the movie is kind of like The Thing. Mm hmm. Which was eight years or something like that earlier.

• 2:16:07Speaker 04

  Uh, and also The Hidden, it's very similar to The Hidden as well. Yeah. So this guy's, the alien can't take being in this body anymore. Or it's, it's expiration date is upon itself and it's, the head explodes. And it's, this creature comes through the hands and it needs a new head. So it rips the head off of the guy that killed the alien and it puts it on top of him. And it just, you can see, it looks like a, like Frankenstein's monster. Uh huh. Um, so he's, but now he's this new person who has the brain of the guy he just killed. But they're still kind of functioning as the alien. So each person it inhabits is, it has a different personality. Uh, so it, it goes, it ends up hitchhiking. Oh, no.

• 2:16:48Speaker 04

  Gets hit by a car, gets hit, uh, it gets hit by, by a car, by this woman. And then the movie becomes very interesting because the woman who hits him, it could just turn into kind of like a bad B movie. But there are these moments of, of like real people. Uh, in particular, the way he shoots, I think it's LA, you can't, doesn't really ever say. Um, documentary of this, like they's walking around like what looks like Skid Row. And he's literally, this is like a, a huge cut where the head, that the neck sits on top of the, the head sits on top of the neck. And then, uh, uh, he's just moving around and. Humanity is ugly in the movie. It's like worse and it's it's like an allegory about how basically we are the aliens. You know what I mean? Like, we're an ugly group.

• 2:17:31Speaker 04

  We don't really, we're just a parasite on this planet. And there's this e, there's a parallel story about a really bad dude of more who's more violent than the alien. But he just host through host through host. And weirdly, they he ends up taking the, he ends up taking a dog's head at one point, which is so weird because the hidden does that.

• 2:17:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:47Speaker 04

  And the thing does that.

• 2:17:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  It's like the same idea that the all three directors can't get away from. But it's a, it's a weird movie.

• 2:17:54Sean Fennessey?

  This is also very, it sounds like it's lifted completely in Men in Black. That's a whole thing in Men in Black too with the D'Onofrio character.

• 2:18:00Speaker 04

  It actually, he looks, the first guy looks like D'Onofrio in Men in Black.

• 2:18:04Sean Fennessey?

  So weird.

• 2:18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Sean Fennessey?

  The borrower, I've never heard of it.

• 2:18:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, check it out. I was, I was pretty, it was very helpful last night because I was just like, did like three Q and A's and like this. And I was like, I just want to, Ryan and I were talking about wild things. And then we're like, oh my God, same director as Henry Portman. And then we see this movie. The thing that made me want to watch it is as an alien arrives on planet Earth and he's very violent. There was just something so blunt about that. I was like, I gotta see this.

• 2:18:29Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible recommendation. Hey, congrats on Marty Supreme.

• 2:18:32Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 2:18:33Sean Fennessey?

  Congrats on If I'd Like to Kick You Too, which is also one of my favorite movies of the year.

• 2:18:36Speaker 04

  Such a special film.

• 2:18:37Sean Fennessey?

  It really is. And good luck with everything. I hope this movie makes eight hundred billion dollars.

• 2:18:43Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 2:18:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, thanks to Josh Safdie, thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. Hey, it's Christmas Eve when this is running.

• 2:18:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, it is.

• 2:18:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so have a happy holidays.

• 2:18:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:18:58Sean Fennessey?

  All the listeners out there, we're not done. In 2025, we have frankly several more episodes to both record and for you to listen to for the rest of the year. Later this week, I indicated another film coming on our 25 for 25 list. Number two.

• 2:19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Sean Fennessey?

  Will be coming.

• 2:19:15Amanda Dobbins?

  A great double feature.

• 2:19:16Sean Fennessey?

  Great double feature, we'll see you then.

• 2:19:36Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Fall is here and Whole Foods Market has everything you need for cozy meals, seasonal treats and easy entertaining. Elevate your hearty dishes with tasty bone-in beef short ribs or New York strip steaks with no added growth hormones or antibiotics. And as the fall evenings draw in, why not get ahead of cold season with immunity shots, herbal teas, lozenges and supplements? Make sure you look for sales throughout the month. Shop fall flavors with higher standards at Whole Foods Market.