Pod Insights The Big Picture 2. ‘25th Hour’ and ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ | Mission Accomplished About this episode In the wake of 9/11 and America’s new war on terror, two films capture the chaos of a country caught between open rage and simmering paranoia.
Host: Brian Raftery
Producers: Devon Baroldi, Brian Raftery, and Vikram Patel
Sound Design: Devon Baroldi
Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville
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Transcript 8,238 words · 25 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 It didn't take long for the American government to respond to the attacks of September 11th.
0:09 Speaker 01 Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes.
0:16 Speaker 00 That's President George W. Bush, addressing the nation on October 7th, 2001, the day US and British troops began airstrikes in Afghanistan. Their targets? Training camps belonging to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who'd orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. The US also set its sights on the local Taliban government, which was believed to have harbored Al Qaeda.
0:38 Speaker 01 The Taliban will pay a price.
0:41 Speaker 00 In his address, Bush sent a message to the rest of the world: "You were either with us, or you are against us."
0:48 Speaker 01 If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.
0:59 Speaker 00 Bush made it clear that the US was going to respond with force. During a visit to Ground Zero, he'd stood on the rubble with a bullhorn, surrounded by firefighters and first responders.
1:10 Speaker 01 America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn.
1:24 Speaker 00 At one point, somebody in the crowd yelled, "We can't hear you!"
1:29 Speaker 01 I can hear you!
1:37 Speaker 01 I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you.
1:41 Speaker 00 By now, you can probably guess my feelings about Bush. But this really was a remarkable moment.
1:46 Speaker 01 And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
1:54 Speaker 00 The roar you're hearing? That was being echoed across the country.
2:01 Speaker 00 Bush knew that millions of Americans wanted to hit back at the terrorists. And when he launched those strikes on the Taliban, he got a lot of public support. One poll by CBS and the New York Times found that nearly 90% of respondents approved of the fighting in Afghanistan. Still, for a country that was already on edge, the strikes were another shock to the system. First came the 9/11 attacks, and then, before we'd even had time to process what had just happened, the country was suddenly in the middle of a war. A war with no clear endgame. And the years ahead would be full of battles, both the literal kind and the emotional kind, as Americans dealt with their feelings of rage and fear. In this episode, we're gonna look at two films that plug you directly into that time.
2:46 Speaker 00 The first is 25th Hour, directed by Spike Lee. It stars Edward Norton as Monty, a drug dealer who's about to go to prison and who's spending his last night of freedom in Manhattan. It's a city where everyone is confused, pissed off, or both. No one quite knows how to feel about anything anymore, but they agree on one thing: that they don't feel good. In 25th Hour's most famous scene, Monty stands in front of a mirror and lets loose at everybody in New York City.
3:18 Speaker 02 Fuck this whole city and everyone in it.
3:21 Speaker 00 This whole rant, it's five minutes long.
3:23 Speaker 02 Let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash, and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.
3:33 Speaker 00 While 25th Hour deals with the emotional fallout of 9/11, Jonathan Demme's 2004 drama The Manchurian Candidate deals with the political fallout. It stars Denzel Washington as a veteran who becomes unraveled after he discovers a vast conspiracy, one that involves a war-obsessed US senator, played by a truly fierce Meryl Streep.
3:53 Speaker 03 And I will, and I will do whatever is necessary to protect America from anyone who opposes her.
4:00 Speaker 00 One thing I've learned while talking to people for this show is that everybody has a movie that brings to mind the months and years after 9/11, even if it's not about 9/11. Maybe that movie is Children of Men, maybe it's Signs, or maybe it's Donnie Darko, like we talked about in our last episode. Manchurian Candidate and 25th Hour are two of my 9/11 movies. I know that's a weird term, but those two movies bring me back to what it was like to be an American and a New Yorker in the early 2000s. These movies aren't allegories for the attacks or anything like that. Instead, they're dealing with the here and now of a strange time that even decades later is impossible to describe.
4:38 Speaker 04 There was definitely a palpable disassociation that everybody was going through.
4:43 Speaker 00 That's Daniel Pine, one of the screenwriters of The Manchurian Candidate.
4:47 Speaker 04 Like, what is happening? What is going on in the world? And what are we building toward? You know, what is this war that we're getting enmeshed in?
5:01 Speaker 00 What are we building toward? That's a question a lot of people were asking in the early 2000s, and none of the answers seemed promising.
5:08 Speaker 03 Make no mistake, the American people are terrified. They know something's coming. They can feel it.
5:15 Speaker 00 From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished, Episode Two, 25th Hour and The Manchurian Candidate.
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7:22 Speaker 00 On the morning of September 11th, 2001, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto was in Detroit, working on the movie Eight Mile. Prieto, who was born in Mexico City, had recently shot the 2000 drama Amores Perros, a film that made a lot of people in Hollywood want to work with him. And Eight Mile would be his first movie shot in the United States.
7:42 Speaker 07 And I was, I remember in the production office when we got the news and it was the assistant director. I was sharing an office with the ADs and he's the one who said, "Whoa, an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center, wow." And we all thought, you know, an accident, what an unfortunate accident.
7:59 Speaker 00 But it soon became clear that this was something much bigger.
8:04 Speaker 07 It was pretty traumatizing because I had moved shortly before that to the US, so it really felt weird to be there at that time, you know, and be away from my family and my daughters, my wife, they were all in LA and I was all paranoid.
8:18 Speaker 00 Not long after finishing Eight Mile, Prieto started working on his next American film, one that would take him to New York City, where the aftermath of 9/11 was visible everywhere you went. That movie was 25th Hour. It was based on a novel by David Benioff, who'd also written the screenplay, and who'd later go on to be one of the showrunners of Game of Thrones. 25th Hour is the story of Monty, a convicted dealer who's about to go to federal prison for seven years. Monty plans on spending his final moments of freedom with his two best friends and his girlfriend. But everyone is uneasy and unhappy, and their relationships have all become strained. Benioff's novel came out in early 2001, and he worked on his script before the September 11th attacks. But after the towers fell,
9:04 Speaker 00 director Spike Lee decided to make 9/11 a part of 25th Hour. This was a New York movie, made by a New York filmmaker. As Lee notes in this interview with Hollywood.com, "The city had changed. How could he not address it?"
9:20 Speaker 08 The New York I'm dealing with in my film, which I deal with all my films, take place here.
9:25 Speaker 08 In 25th Hour, it's the crippled, somewhat crippled, somewhat wounded, recovering city.
9:35 Speaker 00 At that point, mentioning 9/11 on screen in any way was a risky move. For the most part, Hollywood responded to the September 11th attacks the way the rest of the country did, with a mix of confusion and panic.
9:51 Speaker 00 In the weeks after 9/11, some big movies were delayed, like Collateral Damage, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a widower out for revenge against a terrorist bomber. Warner Brothers pushed Collateral Damage back a few months, and even pulled the trailer from theaters for a bit. And you can see why. The trailer promises lots of explosions and violence, things that likely would have made some moviegoers uncomfortable in the fall of 2001. What's the difference between you and I?
10:18 Speaker 09 The difference is, I'm just gonna kill you.
10:22 Speaker 00 Other movies would have entire sequences reshot. Like Men in Black 2, which originally featured an action scene set at the World Trade Center. And a few other films, including Zoolander and Serendipity, had the towers erased from the city skyline entirely. The worry was that seeing the World Trade Center on screen would upset moviegoers, or at the very least, take them out of the movie. It was a jittery time. But Lee wasn't nervous. In fact, he was disappointed that other filmmakers had cut the World Trade Center from their movies. In Lee's words, "Those directors had decided to, quote, 'punk out.'" And if there's one thing Spike Lee has never been accused of, it's punking out. He obviously didn't want to offend viewers,
11:05 Speaker 00 but he knew they could handle 9/11 being part of 25th Hour.
11:15 Speaker 00 The movie was originally supposed to star Tobey Maguire as Monty. After he dropped out, Lee turned to an actor who'd wanted to work with the director for years: Edward Norton. The two had recently hung out after attending the Concert for New York City, a post-9/11 fundraiser in October 2001. If you'll let me take a very quick diversion here, that concert, which was held at Madison Square Garden, was a massive undertaking. The show ran nearly five hours long and featured some of the biggest stars in the world: Paul McCartney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay-Z. But the Concert for New York City also highlights the unpredictable mood of the city at the time. It took place barely a month after the towers had fallen, and the garden was full of firefighters and police officers, and their families.
12:00 Speaker 00 Everyone was on edge, and everybody needed a release. So the crowd went wild when Saturday Night Live star Will Ferrell showed up as George W. Bush and talked about the airstrikes in Afghanistan. And why are we gonna do this? I can do anything I want. My approval rating is like 106% right now. Richard Gere got some big cheers, too, at least for a while. The crowd turned against the actor when he suggested that the national mood, scared, angry, bent on revenge, could be used for something different than war.
12:33 Speaker 10 We could take that energy and turn it into something else. We could turn it into compassion, into love, into understanding.
12:46 Speaker 00 That's apparently unpopular right now. My point is, emotions were running high in the city. And they were just as strong a few months later, when Spike Lee and Edward Norton decided to make 25th Hour. They'd be joined by a great ensemble cast, including some longtime New Yorkers. That includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jacob, a private school teacher who's one of Monty's buddies. And Rosario Dawson as Naturelle, his girlfriend, who Monty suspects of turning him into the feds. In the film, these characters all hang with Monty during his final moments of freedom.
13:23 Speaker 00 25th Hour plays with time, cutting between Monty's present and his past. Before filming began, Lee told Prieto he wanted each section of 25th Hour to look and feel unique. And the cinematographer was more than up to the challenge.
13:38 Speaker 07 So I wanted to come up with a look for each one of those things, which was perfect for me. It was how do I represent time is short? You know, how do I make it feel like there's a final day for the main character before going to jail, right? So time is short and time is precious.
13:55 Speaker 00 For scenes set in the present, Prieto decided to use a camera shutter technique that would make Monty's world look all the more urgent.
14:02 Speaker 07 So it makes each frame a little bit more sharp, in a way, or less motion blur for each frame. So it gives a little bit of a staccato feel to that, all that section.
14:16 Speaker 00 And because he was shooting on film, Prieto was able to develop those scenes so they came back looking slightly grainy.
14:22 Speaker 07 For me, that was a 9/11 element of it, which was sort of the dirtiness or the ashes in the air.
14:30 Speaker 00 Before shooting got underway, Prieto and Lee traveled around New York. Despite everything the city had been through, the people they saw were in a pretty upbeat mood. Though that's at least partly because of Lee.
14:41 Speaker 07 He's so loved in Brooklyn and New York that wherever we went, it goes, "Hey, man, Spike, what about them Knicks?" You know, it was always, there was excitement.
14:53 Speaker 00 Still, Prieto knew that, in some ways, he was very much an outsider.
14:58 Speaker 07 I didn't have that sense of loss that so many people from there had. For me, it was a sense of maybe of wonder, of, "Wow, I can't believe that these buildings were here and these lives were lost."
15:17 Speaker 00 That sense of absence would be conveyed by 25th Hour's dramatic opening credit sequence, one that would bring Prieto right next to Ground Zero. In early 2002, nearly 100 spotlights had been placed in downtown Manhattan. When the lights were projected into the sky, they created two giant blue beams that stood where the towers once were. The lights stayed on for just a few hours each night, and Prieto only had one evening to film them.
15:43 Speaker 07 So it really felt like we were in the middle of this historical moment. And that was, to me, very powerful and moving, very moving. Then we had to really rush to get to all the different places before they shut the lights off.
16:01 Speaker 00 He and the rest of the crew would have to do a lot of rushing around to make 25th Hour. The film will be shot in less than 40 days in the summer of 2002. And though the movie was being made by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, proof that, in the early 2000s, big studios were still willing to take big risks, 25th Hour had a modest budget of just $15 million. That meant the cast had to be willing to take pay cuts, including Barry Pepper, who plays Monty's friend Francis, an obnoxious Wall Street hustler who lives in a swank downtown apartment. That's the setting for 25th Hour's most pointed scene about 9/11. It starts with Pepper and Hoffman's characters shooting the shit and opening some beers. Then they walk over to a giant glass window, where it's revealed that Ground
16:45 Speaker 00 Zero, now a vast flat construction site, is right below them.
16:50 Speaker 11 Yeah, New York Times says the air is bad down here. Oh, yeah? Well, fuck the Times. I read the Post.
16:59 Speaker 11 EPA says it's fine.
17:02 Speaker 00 Hoffman's character then asks, "Are you gonna move?"
17:05 Speaker 11 Fuck that, man. As much good money as I pay for this place? Hell no.
17:12 Speaker 11 Tell you what, Bin Laden could drop another one right next door. I ain't moving.
17:22 Speaker 00 That moment sums up how a lot of New Yorkers felt at that time. Stubborn, angry, and kind of stupidly cocky. And by the way, I'm allowed to say that because I was born in New York City. But what really hit me when I saw this scene back in 2002 was the sight of Ground Zero itself. A lot of New Yorkers, including me, had tried to keep a respectful distance from downtown Manhattan. If you didn't have to be there, you just kind of quietly walked around it.
17:50 Speaker 00 But in 25th Hour, Lee forces you to confront the reality of 9/11, whether you wanted to or not.
17:57 Speaker 00 When I saw the film in a Manhattan theater full of New Yorkers on opening weekend, nobody moved or made a noise for a long while after seeing Ground Zero on the screen.
18:06 Speaker 07 I was so immersed in the technical challenge of it that I wasn't so aware of the magnitude of the shot, of the emotional impact, you know, of the shot. It was only until I was actually rolling the camera and seeing, "Oh shit, is the camera gonna be reflecting?" "No, no, I think it's okay. No reflection. Okay, good. Okay, I think we got it. I think we got..." And then after that, I realized, "Wow, look at when we're filming."
18:41 Speaker 00 As memorable as that Ground Zero scene was, the moment that most people remember from 25th Hour takes place a little bit earlier in the film. It's that long rant from Edward Norton's character, Monty. He's just a few hours away from going to prison. He's angry at the world, at himself, and even at his own friends and family. So Monty stands in front of a bathroom mirror, stares bitterly at his reflection, and rips into the entire city. Everyone gets taken down, from the rich...
19:09 Speaker 02 Fuck the Wall Street brokers, self-styled masters of the universe...
19:14 Speaker 00 ...to the poor.
19:15 Speaker 12 Fuck the panhandlers grubbing for money and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck the squeegee men, dirty enough to clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job!
19:26 Speaker 00 Nobody has spared Monty's wrath. He attacks Italians, Jews, and Puerto Ricans, the police, and the church. Monty even goes after Jesus Christ. I mean, it's just pure rage. But it's also kind of weirdly affectionate. After all, part of loving New York is also hating New York. And it's not even clear if Monty means everything he's saying. He just needs a target for his anger. A lot of targets, including, finally, himself.
19:55 Speaker 12 No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and you threw it away, you dumb fuck!
20:03 Speaker 00 Monty's rant was a key part of Benioff's novel, and Lee had to push hard with Disney to get it in the film. It's a good thing he did, because it's hard to imagine 25th Hour without that moment. If the Ground Zero scene represents the somberness and sadness that had gripped the city after 9/11, Monty's rant shows all the volatility that was right under the surface. But the movie ends with another long speech, this one way more hopeful. As Monty's driven to prison by his father, played by Brian Cox, his dad tells him that he can still escape, that he can flee to a different city, change his identity, and even raise a family. And when he's old, Monty's dad says, "Monty can tell his kids how lucky they are to be alive. He can remind them..."
20:47 Speaker 00 "This life came so close to never happening."
20:52 Speaker 00 "This life came so close to never happening." That's the way a lot of us felt in the early 2000s.
21:02 Speaker 00 Everybody across the city and across the country had been reminded that their fates were out of their hands, that their lives were a gift. The question now, not just for Monty, but for the audience, was, what do you do with that gift going forward? The fact that 25th Hour was willing to ask that kind of question is why, even now, people keep rediscovering this movie. It wasn't a huge hit at the time, but it's a film that shows that anything can be rebuilt, no matter how damaged, whether they happen to be buildings, cities, or even our own lives.
21:36 Speaker 07 We need, you know, the tools to help us deal with these traumas. And I think art, hopefully, is one of those tools. And I hope that 25th Hour has been that for New Yorkers.
21:47 Speaker 00 That's Rodrigo Prieto again. I should probably point out that he and I were talking just a few months after the Los Angeles wildfires of early 2025.
21:56 Speaker 07 I must add that now I'm going through something in a way similar in my personal life, because I lived in the Pacific Palisades. My house didn't burn down, but my neighborhood did. When you were mentioning that notion of seeing a ground zero and remembering what that was and at that moment where it's just basically, you know, they're still cleaning up the debris and starting to, you know, prepare for a construction of something. Who knows what that was going to be? That's where the Palisades are at now.
22:28 Speaker 00 Reminders that the fires are everywhere in the form of empty lots and burnt structures.
22:34 Speaker 07 So it's poignant for me that we're discussing this when I'm personally going through something similar, that trauma, right? Of the destruction of a place that you've been at, you know, for years, you know? So, anyway, it's interesting that right now this has come back, you know, and talking about 25th Hour. So I thank you.
22:58 Speaker 00 We'll be right back.
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24:45 Speaker 00 By the time 25th Hour came out in the fall of 2002, it was clear America was heading toward another foreign war. This time in Iraq.
24:56 Speaker 00 The two countries had a fraught history, to say the least. America was one of several nations to take part in a bombing campaign over Iraq in 1991, back when George H.W. Bush was president. That endeavor, which was a huge victory for the US, was known as Operation Desert Storm. Now, more than a decade later, some in the new Bush administration believed Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, had ties to Al Qaeda, and that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Here's George W. Bush in September 2002, making his case against Hussein to the American public.
25:32 Speaker 14 For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made, not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction.
25:47 Speaker 00 Okay, so, there were a couple of problems with all of this. First off, a lot of intelligence experts questioned the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And the government wasn't providing a lot of evidence that Iraq was manufacturing WMDs. That didn't stop members of the Bush administration, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, from trying to scare Americans into backing the so-called "War on Terror." Here's Cheney on "Face the Nation" in March 2003, going to extremes to justify America invading Iraq.
26:14 Speaker 09 And we now faced, are faced with the prospect of a terrorist using perhaps a nuclear weapon against us. And we know as a result of 9/11 that we are vulnerable.
26:24 Speaker 00 Now, if you happen to be a history professor, and by the way, I am not, you're probably ready to drive off the road right now in frustration, because I am really simplifying the whole geopolitical climate of the early 2000s. But I gotta get through this section fast. There's an underrated Denzel Washington movie to talk about. Anyway, by early 2003, it was clear Bush had set his sights on Iraq. That February, he sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to address the United Nations Security Council, so he could lay out the case for war. Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him.
27:03 Speaker 00 A lot of Americans weren't buying that argument. There was huge pushback against the invasion of Iraq, which some people believed was just a way for the US to gain control of the country's oil supply. There were protests around the world, like this one in New York City, which attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.
27:19 Speaker 01 George Bush, what do you say? The change in the USA. War on Iran, not on Iraq.
27:28 Speaker 00 But those rallying cries weren't going to stop Bush. In March, a global coalition began bombing Baghdad. Millions of Americans watched as Iraq was subjected to what was called a shock and awe military campaign. Here's Dan Rather explaining the massive amount of weaponry involved in those initial attacks.
27:46 Speaker 15 The attack came in waves. Cruise missiles, followed by the F-17 stealth bombers with so-called bunker busting bombs. Their target, a bunker believed to be-
27:56 Speaker 00 Everything about the lead up to the Iraq war felt wrong. The fear mongering, the lack of transparency, the way Americans were basically told, hey, this is happening and it's going to go great, so stop complaining. It was a truly terrible time. And this was before we all realized that Bush and Cheney's claims about WMDs were total bullshit. It really felt like we were being played, like there were these bigger forces controlling our lives, forces we couldn't see or understand or push back against.
28:25 Speaker 16 The feeling at the time was our system was slowly, it was almost like Invasion of Body Snatchers. The political forces were kind of being co-opted and none of us knew. And it was happening right in front of us.
28:38 Speaker 00 That's screenwriter Dean Georgiris, who told me about that sneaking suspicion that we were all being misled about Iraq. He worked on a movie that I think really depicts the emotional turbulence of the early 2000s, The Manchurian Candidate.
28:52 Speaker 17 Something happened out there in the desert that night, during that mission, and it's not what we thought it was. And it happened on my-
28:58 Speaker 00 The Manchurian Candidate stars Denzel Washington as Ben Marco, an Operation Desert Storm vet who's experiencing strange nightmares about his time overseas. Ben slowly begins to realize that he's been brainwashed and implanted with false memories. And he suspects that one of his fellow vets has also been manipulated. His name is Raymond Shaw, and he's a very handsome but very bland candidate for Vice President of the United States. Ben tries to convince Raymond, who's played by Liev Schreiber, that somebody's messed with their minds and is now in control of their lives. Which was kind of a relatable feeling back when this movie came out in 2004.
29:36 Speaker 17 Somebody got into our heads with big steel-toed boots, cable cutters and a chainsaw, and they went to town. Neurons got exposed and circuses got rewired.
29:48 Speaker 00 It turns out both men are part of a deadly political conspiracy involving Raymond Shaw's mother, Eleanor Shaw. She's a powerful US senator, played by Meryl Streep, who sees terrorism everywhere she looks.
29:59 Speaker 03 I will do whatever is necessary to protect America from anyone who opposes her.
30:06 Speaker 00 Eleanor uses some scare tactics that you could describe as Cheney-esque.
30:10 Speaker 03 You know, we are on the brink of another cataclysm, probably nuclear, on our own soil. Oh, Ellie, that's a
30:17 Speaker 00 The Manchurian Candidate had a long history, one that went back decades. It began as a novel by Richard Condon and was first made into a movie in 1962. That version stars Frank Sinatra as an ex-Korean war soldier who discovers one of his fellow vets has been unknowingly brainwashed by communists and has been ordered to kill the US president. The original Manchurian Candidate is a fantastic thriller, and the fact that the original was so good is why George Jaris was skeptical when he was asked about writing a remake back in the late 1990s.
30:47 Speaker 16 My first thought was, absolutely not. The original film is a classic that I love, and I don't want to be a part of doing that.
31:01 Speaker 00 But remakes were becoming more and more popular in the early 2000s, as studios tried to compete with video games, the internet, the rise of cable TV, and a bunch of other forms of entertainment. And besides, while the original version of The Manchurian Candidate was a classic, George Jaris knew that the country had changed since the movie came out in the early 1960s. Paranoia was very much in the air back then, but it was based on the government's efforts to root out suspected communists in the US. That search led to an atmosphere of mistrust, pitting friend against friend.
31:31 Speaker 16 And you know, the original film, obviously, an examination of the Red Scare, examination of communism, what the fear of communism could do to our government. So I started thinking, well, you know, what does it feel like is happening to our relationship with government?
31:49 Speaker 00 He thought about politicians like Dan Quayle, a smiling blank suit who'd come out of nowhere in the late 1980s and been elected vice president. He also thought of John F. Kennedy Jr., a young, good-looking go-getter many assumed was going to be a political superstar, despite his lack of experience.
32:06 Speaker 16 We're moving into this era of political apathy when it comes to how well we know and research the people who are in power.
32:16 Speaker 00 George Aras had also seen the rise of terrorism in the 1990s, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which had killed six people.
32:24 Speaker 16 Terrorism obviously hadn't become a war on yet, but it was building. And it was becoming evident that appealing to America's sense of security was something that was coming.
32:37 Speaker 00 New dangers from overseas, a wave of voter apathy, and a young generation of unknowable politicians. By the late 1990s, George Aras had a lot to work with.
32:47 Speaker 16 It felt like an exciting set of ingredients to tell a modern story.
32:56 Speaker 00 George Aras began working on a new version of the Manchurian candidate. The biggest question was, who would be the bad guys this time around? After all, the original story had been set during the Cold War, which was long over. So it was time to find a new villain. And George Aras went to Washington, DC to talk to some insiders.
33:14 Speaker 16 Almost every time the subject of this film came around, and I would say, who do you think would be involved today? How do you think it would unfold? It kept coming back to these corporations that people didn't know really existed yet.
33:33 Speaker 00 One giant corporation that people were about to become very familiar with was Halliburton. It was ostensibly a massive oil services company. But Halliburton was much more complex than that. The company seemed to have its fingers in everything. And in the 1990s, one of Halliburton's divisions was handling US military contracts overseas. By the way, Halliburton's CEO during the second half of the 90s? That would be Dick Cheney. Keep that in mind for later. The point is, when George Jaris began working on The Manchurian Candidate script, it was becoming clear that the country was entering a corporate era.
34:08 Speaker 16 All of this was happening behind the scenes. You know, it was a very slow-moving, yeah, obviously coup is way too dramatic a word, but it was a very slow-moving revolution of our political system that moved power really away from the voters and even from the parties into this small group of people with incredible amounts of wealth.
34:35 Speaker 00 Big corporations, vague politicos, secret power moves, they'd all wind up in The Manchurian Candidate remake, which, by the way, a lot of people in Hollywood thought was a terrible idea. Studios may have been looking for remakes back then, but this one was a very tough sell.
34:52 Speaker 16 So it was really more a project that I think no one believed would happen until we were able to come up with this version of it. And even then, it languished for a little while until after 2001.
35:05 Speaker 00 The Manchurian Candidate got stalled out during the development process. Then, in the early 2000s, it came to the attention of super-producer and incredibly nice guy, Scott Rudin.
35:15 Speaker 16 One thing he was great at doing was getting movies like this made. And he called Sherry Lancing up and said, "Why is this film sitting on the shelf? I can cast this and make this right away." And then, I mean, he did that in the span of about 48 hours.
35:33 Speaker 00 Sherry Lancing, by the way, was the chairwoman of Paramount Pictures. By the time she greenlit The Manchurian Candidate in the fall of 2002, it was clear the country was heading to war with Iraq. For a big studio to commit to a dark political drama back then was, honestly, pretty ballsy. I mean, I love The Manchurian Candidate remake, but even I would have been like, "Yeah, let's just make another Crocodile Dundee sequel."
35:57 Speaker 00 But Paramount had gotten Denzel Washington to agree to star, and the studio had landed on a major director, Jonathan Demme, the guy who did The Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense, and three or four of your other favorite movies. By then, George Jerris had to move on to another project he'd committed to. So screenwriter Daniel Pine took over. I talked to Pine about what it was like to write a movie about such a chaotic era while it was still underway.
36:21 Speaker 04 As I was writing it, as I was working on it, at the time, I was constantly chasing... I would come up with something and it would happen. We were constantly trying to stay ahead of... So that it didn't feel dated when it came out.
36:38 Speaker 00 A lot had happened, obviously, since the late 1990s. For one thing, Halliburton, through one of its divisions, had become an even bigger player in the world of military security. The company now had a foothold in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And while Cheney was no longer Halliburton's CEO, he's still at a financial stake in the company. And dozens of other corporations would be pulled into America's new wars. The invasion of Iraq was going to make a lot of people a lot of money. As Pine points out, a new philosophy was taking hold during the Bush years. For some people, there was a sense that the country had undergone a fundamental evolution. They felt that...
37:15 Speaker 04 America no longer needed presidents. They needed CEOs. We needed, you know, we needed a businessman to run the country. The Iraq war was kind of a corporate war.
37:31 Speaker 00 And in the new version of The Manchurian Candidate, the village wouldn't be some far-off communist country. It would be a corporation, one called Manchurian Global. Think Halliburton, but much more powerful. Manchurian Global has its fingers in everything, as Marco finds out when he visits a scientist, played by the late, great Bruno Ganz.
37:53 Speaker 18 Imagine not just a corporation, Marco, but a goddamn geopolitical extension of policy for every president since Nixon. Cash is king, Marco. Cash is king.
38:05 Speaker 00 I don't want to give away too much of the movie's plot here, but the whole Manchurian conspiracy involves Streep's character, the powerful US senator named Eleanor Shaw.
38:14 Speaker 04 We wanted her to be the smartest person in the movie.
38:19 Speaker 00 Eleanor is smart and shrewd. She's absolutely unapologetic about her desire for power and about America's use of force.
38:29 Speaker 00 Streep gets off some A++ speeches in this movie. I mean, they're like really wild, out-there Meryl Streep speeches. At one point, she makes a fierce case as to why her son should be the party's vice presidential candidate instead of the current guy who believes...
38:42 Speaker 03 Human beings are essentially good and that our powers somehow, I don't know, shameful or evil or never to be used.
38:49 Speaker 00 She then issues a not-too-veiled threat.
38:52 Speaker 09 And we now are faced with the prospect of a terrorist using perhaps a nuclear weapon against us.
38:58 Speaker 00 Sorry, that was actually Dick Cheney again. Not sure how I got my war mongers all mixed up. Anyway, here's Eleanor Shaw.
39:05 Speaker 03 Make no mistake, the American people are terrified. They know something's coming. They can feel it. And we can either shovel them the same old shit and call it sugar, or we can arm them.
39:17 Speaker 00 In the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, Eleanor was an enemy spy masquerading as a concerned mom. But times had changed. In the early 2000s, there were a number of powerful women in Congress: Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein. So the Eleanor Shaw character had to evolve with the times.
39:36 Speaker 04 She's a powerful person who, nevertheless, there was a glass ceiling that she couldn't get past, that she was not going to be able to be elected president.
39:47 Speaker 00 Streep took inspiration from some of those real politicians, at least in terms of appearance.
39:52 Speaker 04 I know that Marilyn hardened to wanting to look like Nancy Pelosi. And her hair was kind of a combo of Hillary. You know, we really did want to make it feel as real as possible.
40:11 Speaker 00 There are other similarities between the politics of The Manchurian Candidate and the politics of the early 2000s. Right before the movie began filming in the fall of 2003, a handsome, big-smiling young politician named John Edwards announced he was joining the presidential race. He'd eventually become the Democrats' vice presidential candidate. Edwards was boyish and chipper. Here he is at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, trying to get people amped up for his running mate, John Kerry, which was not an easy task.
40:41 Speaker 19 You can embrace the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible, because this is America, where everything is possible.
40:52 Speaker 00 Before he joined the race, most people in the country had no idea who Edwards was. But like Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, he'd seemingly been born to be a politician.
41:01 Speaker 04 At his best, John Edwards was just such a sort of charismatic... camera loved him, people loved him. You know, easy smile, glib answers. That kind of character seemed believable as someone that could be quickly inserted into a political process the way that Eleanor does at the convention.
41:28 Speaker 00 I should point out here that, in the new version of The Manchurian Candidate, it's never made clear which party Raymond and Eleanor Shaw are part of, even though it's pretty obvious they're Republicans.
41:37 Speaker 04 Jonathan really was interested in not making it partisan in that way, and not making it about liberal versus conservative, but more about a more fundamental right and wrong.
41:49 Speaker 00 But while the movie didn't get too specific about the country's politics, The Manchurian Candidate was very plugged into the era. Again, I don't want to give away all of its twists and turns, but this is a film about the many unpleasant side effects of living in the 21st century: conspiracy theories, PTSD, multinational conglomerates in cahoots, deep cahoots, with politicians. If 25th Hour chronicles the anxieties of being a New Yorker in the early 2000s, Manchurian Candidate shows what that time was like for the rest of the country.
42:19 Speaker 04 It's a story about not knowing what the facts are, not knowing what the truth is.
42:28 Speaker 00 But none of that would make The Manchurian Candidate an easy movie to sell. Paramount decided to release the film in the summer of 2004.
42:36 Speaker 04 They thought it would, it would play well in the summer, and it was popcorn thriller.
42:41 Speaker 00 That was optimistic, considering that test audiences had been kind of mixed on the movie.
42:46 Speaker 04 There was concern that the ending was too downbeat. It was too inconclusive. It didn't feel like there was a big win.
42:59 Speaker 00 Looking back now, it's kind of amazing that Paramount thought The Manchurian Candidate would do well in theaters. Granted, it was a smart, psychological thriller with some major stars. But by 2004, it was clear that many Americans weren't too interested in mixing their entertainment with their politics. In the months after 9/11, actors, filmmakers, and musicians who questioned the country's direction, whether they were talking about the Iraq War, or Bush and Cheney, or Halliburton, were being criticized in the press and in person.
43:28 Speaker 01 And the Oscar goes to...
43:34 Speaker 01 Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore and Michael Donovan.
43:38 Speaker 00 In March 2003, Michael Moore won an Academy Award for his documentary Bowling for Columbine. The bombing in Iraq had started less than a week before. And outside the Oscar ceremony that night, a dozen people were arrested for protesting the war. So when Moore was called to the stage to accept his award, he used his time to address the topic that was on everyone's minds. And we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. As Moore spoke out against the president, some people in the audience began to boo. We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you. Moore's comments pissed off a lot of Americans.
44:22 Speaker 00 How dare he speak out against the war? One newspaper even had readers call in to voice their opinions. Here's a sample of how they felt about the ceremony and about the anti-war protests in general. These are all real comments, read by some of your favorite Ringer people.
44:39 Speaker 00 I'm so glad I didn't waste any of my time watching the Academy Awards.
44:43 Speaker 20 Michael Moore made me angry when he said such ugly things about President Bush. The Hollywood folks are not doing their part to keep our country free.
44:52 Speaker 00 I just want to say that I'm appalled by all these anti-war protesters.
44:57 Speaker 21 I think Nicole Kidman should get acquainted with a real passionate man.
45:01 Speaker 00 Well, that's random, but I'm sure that was the only comment about Nicole Kidman, right? Oh, wait.
45:07 Speaker 22 The best thing Nicole Kidman ever did was to get rid of Tom Cruise. I hope now that we'll see more of her.
45:17 Speaker 00 Again, those are all real comments. You get the point. During the early years of the Iraq War, saying anything political was guaranteed to cause a backlash. After the Dixie Chicks criticized Bush during a concert in London in 2003, people smashed their CDs and some stations even pulled their songs from the air. That same year, at a Pearl Jam concert in Denver, Eddie Vedder impaled a mask of Bush's face on a microphone stand, leading some of their fans to boo and walk out. And the Baseball Hall of Fame canceled a Bull Durham event. Why? Because stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon had spoken out against the war. All of which is to say that by 2004, a political drama like The Manchurian Candidate, which cost Paramount $80 million, by the way,
46:02 Speaker 00 was bound to piss some people off. So when it was time to sell the movie, the film's political overtones were kind of smoothed over. And while the studio originally considered screening The Manchurian Candidate at the Democratic Convention that year, they quickly realized that was probably a bad idea. And when the actors promoted the movie, they often brushed off questions about the film's bigger implications. I've watched a lot of interviews for The Manchurian Candidate, and in almost all of them, the actors are doing all they can to say pretty much nothing at all.
46:31 Speaker 17 It doesn't say, hey, this is how politics are.
46:33 Speaker 00 That's Denzel Washington, trying his very best to avoid saying anything controversial.
46:39 Speaker 17 If anything, it says, hey, don't believe anything, including us, or make up your own mind.
46:45 Speaker 00 Even with its big-name stars and a big summer marketing push, The Manchurian Candidate didn't connect with audiences in 2004. As Daniel Pine notes, "People came in expecting a movie where Denzel kicks some ass, not one where he's struggling to piece together a conspiracy."
47:01 Speaker 04 There had to be some audiences who went expecting to have a great time at the movies and then to have this rather sober, thrilling, but very sober and paranoid experience.
47:16 Speaker 00 Now, when it comes to movies, sober and paranoid is exactly my kind of experience. And I've always dug The Manchurian Candidate. It's one of Denzel's most understated, underrated performances. And the movie is a real rarity in Hollywood. It's politically-minded and pissed off, but it's also deeply pleasurable. I mean, there's a scene where a guy gets assassinated while a Fountains of Wayne song plays in the background. Trust me, this is a very Brian movie.
47:43 Speaker 00 And I'm not the only one who loves The Manchurian Candidate. Along with 25th Hour, it's one of those early 2000 films that keeps getting reevaluated and rediscovered. If you weren't around back then, those films can give you an idea of what America was going through at the time. And if you were there for the 2000s, 25th Hour and The Manchurian Candidate bring up all the heavy emotions of that era. And I'm really glad that these movies just exist. They're both big studio films that weren't afraid to respond to what was going on in the world. And they were made by A-list filmmakers and actors. We didn't know it then, but those kinds of movies will become harder and harder to find in the years ahead.
48:22 Speaker 00 Then again, let's face it, everything will get harder in the years ahead. The 2000s were barely at the halfway point, and things were already pretty rough. After all the lies and through all the confusion, we were in desperate need of a new kind of leader, a real American, one who wasn't afraid to look us straight in the eyes and tell us the truth, no matter the consequences.
48:44 Speaker 23 And I'm Ron Burgundy. Go fuck yourselves, San Diego.
48:49 Speaker 00 That's next on Mission Accomplished.
48:54 Speaker 00 This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliette Littman and Sean Fennessy. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by me, Devon Baroldi, and Vikram Patel. Fact checking by Casey Gallagher. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Katz Boulain. Sound design by Devon Baroldi. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music you hear in this series is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.
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