‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Is Gut-Ripping and Gut-Wrenching. Plus: Mona Fastvold on ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’!

Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan as they enter the bone temple to discuss Nia DaCosta’s ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,’ which they all thoroughly enjoyed (10:12). Then, they briefly build the Ralph Fiennes Hall of Fame, featuring their favorite performances from the legendary actor (43:47). Next, they cover Mona Fastvold’s ‘The Testament of Ann Lee,’ starring Amanda Seyfried, which they found incredibly ambitious and strange but also wonderfully complex and mature (51:39). Finally, Sean is joined by Fastvold to explain what attracted her to the story of Ann Lee and the Shaker movement; talk through the process of cowriting the screenplay with her husband, Brady Corbet; and discuss how she’s able to make epic stories with lower-budget independent filmmaking (1:01:56). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Mona Fastvold and Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders 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.

• 0:00Sean Fennessey?

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• 0:44Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:33Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture Conversation Show about Bone Temples and Shaker Profits. Today on the show, we are breaking down 28 years later, colon, the Bone Temple with the Bone God himself, Chris Ryan. The Alpha is back. He'll be hanging dong later. Also later in this episode, I'll be joined by Mona Fastvald, the co-writer and director of The Testament of Anne Lee, a combo biopic musical about the spiritual leader of the Shaker religious movement in 18th century England and America. Sounds like very normal content.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Do me a favor, don't set me up so that I tell some incredibly like revealing weird story and then you're like, and now my interview with

• 2:12Sean Fennessey?

  We'll circle back on bodice ripping right before that convo. Ann Lee is a wild movie, fascinating, ambitious. Amanda and I both really liked it. We'll talk about it a little bit before our conversation with Mona. Amanda Seyfried is at the center of it as Ann Lee and is incredible. Stick around for the conversation. It's a nice continuation, I think, of my conversation with Brady Corbet from last year about the brutalists and the way that they make movies together. So if you are interested in Ann Lee, go see the movie and listen to that convo. But first, I wanted to point out a couple of things to you guys. One, this podcast has been nominated for best TV and film podcast by the iHeart Podcast Awards. Did you, did you know that, Chris?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I did know that.

• 2:49Sean Fennessey?

  So what are you gonna do about it? When are you gonna start the bot army voting?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's gonna be interesting to see who claims third chair credit for this.

• 2:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Ah.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  And will it be?

• 2:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, like, what are there?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Is this where Pulitzer Prize winners start crawling out of the cracks and be like, oh, I couldn't possibly accept.

• 3:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so who's on the shortlist?

• 3:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, do they enumerate who the actual nominees are by name?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna know.

• 3:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's sort of like the producers thing where it's like, you have a certain number of names that can be submitted. So of course, myself, Amanda, Jack Sanders, we make the show every episode. You, Chris Ryan, an essential part of this operation philosophically.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  But in the material sense?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:31Sean Fennessey?

  Would you say you've got it over, say, Tracy Letts or Alex Ross Perry or?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  That's not my place, that's not really my place to say. I know how I feel, you know what I mean?

• 3:41Sean Fennessey?

  What about Joanna or Mal? Like, what other names could we put on the list?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  God, it sounds like you guys don't need me anymore.

• 3:46Sean Fennessey?

  Rob Mahoney? It's just like Van Lathan?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:49Sean Fennessey?

  Some really strong voices.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so are there even enough natural stones in the world to make that many trophies? You know?

• 3:57Sean Fennessey?

  It's a really good question. What does the iHeart Podcast Award trophy look like? Do we know?

• 4:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. I would like to hear about Chris's plans for the acceptance speech. Yeah, if you, if you'd like to be involved, concept it out for us right now.

• 4:09Sean Fennessey?

  You gotta get the Fanny Horner back out there.

• 4:14Sean Fennessey?

  That would be funny. Couple of other things to mention.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Congratulations to you guys.

• 4:19Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, you're a part of it as well, obviously. Dante Moore is going back to Oregon. We discussed this during our auction.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Weird story because they, they just got Dylan Raiola from Nebraska, Oregon did. I'm, I'm a portal guy.

• 4:32Sean Fennessey?

  We know that about you.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I, weirdly.

• 4:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I do know what that means. Do you want to explain that for everyone else? He was only a sophomore, I'm learning.

• 4:40Sean Fennessey?

  Dante, yes.

• 4:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, a red shirt sophomore.

• 4:42Sean Fennessey?

  Fewer than 20 career starts under his belt.

• 4:44Amanda Dobbins?

  So, I, I, I see why.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I think that they thought he was leaving. I think that, I'll be curious to see what happens now because Dylan Raiola was not cheap. Now, I don't really know.

• 4:57Sean Fennessey?

  He's gonna say, Moore's gonna play again because so many guys went back.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Like two more years of eligibility.

• 5:01Sean Fennessey?

  He's not gonna play. There's no way because a bunch of guys from the defensive line at Oregon also stayed and they didn't think they were. Like Demary Washington is going back. That's really weird.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  They just, they get paid pretty decently to stay in college.

• 5:12Sean Fennessey?

  And people said this, they said that they, this could be an option. You know, this is not a Jets podcast, but this really materially impacts me. I think this is great news for the Jets.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, did you see that like Ty Simpson was getting offered like $6 million to stay in college?

• 5:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I don't want the Jets to draft a underdeveloped young kid and then get thrust into the worst situation in professional sports. So for me as a fan, I actually think it'd be fine if they went 0-17 and then got Arch Manning. That sounds fine to me.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Are you, are you?

• 5:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, wow. And you do, you want to be in the Arch Manning business?

• 5:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Amanda Dobbins?

  That's another generation?

• 5:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it worked for you, why, you know, why not?

• 5:43Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  True.

• 5:44Sean Fennessey?

  I can't change the Woody Johnson fact of the Jets, but I can get as many good players as possible into the mix. That's all we can do to try to be successful.

• 5:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Is Arch good?

• 5:54Sean Fennessey?

  He improved.

• 5:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I just have seen like control, concerned trolling pod.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I think if you're gonna draft Arch Manning, I like Aaron Glenn, like as a dude, I don't really know how, what the experience of cheering for his coached team is. But I think you need like a quarterback whisperer if you're gonna draft.

• 6:09Sean Fennessey?

  My, the secret, the underbelly of my take is that I think this means that the Jets will really struggle and Glenn will get fired. And then they will hire an offensive guru.

• 6:18Amanda Dobbins?

  You fired that guy?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Kevin Patullo.

• 6:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  There's now discussions that he's just been demoted. Much like me here, you know?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Moved out of the third chair.

• 6:29Sean Fennessey?

  If we win the iHeart Award, I will, I will saw mine in half and give you the other half.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Thanks bud. Yeah, Kevin Patula got demoted and I listened to a 45 minute podcast already about who we should hire. I've had an extensive conversation with Zach and Andy about who we should hire. There's a lot of ideas being thrown around in that group chat. There's a lot of emotions being thrown around in that group chat. A lot of fan fiction being written about Brian Daboll and Jalen Hurst's relationship and the 2017 national championship. Whether or not like they're boys, whether they hate each other. So it's like, it's an intense time. It's very sensitive.

• 7:03Amanda Dobbins?

  That's just me, I know.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  And I feel weird because this is definitely the topic I'm most conversant on in all of the world right now.

• 7:10Sean Fennessey?

  So I feel that there's not a thing. This is not interesting to 90% of the audience, but.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Phoebe walked by me the other day, like yesterday actually, and was like, saw that I had a Dexter Filkins New Yorker piece up on the screen. And she was like, how is that? I was thinking of reading it. And I was like, your usual Dexter Filkins, just really well reported in every other tab was like video essays about fucking Mike McDaniel's offensive system.

• 7:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Thank you for entertaining this.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 7:41Sean Fennessey?

  This little sideline. I appreciate your patience.

• 7:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, since last we met.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Well, this is just sort of like a.

• 7:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. News and, news and notes. Uh, been looking at earrings. Should I get my ears pierced in 2026?

• 7:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you got such rave reviews for your performance at the Globes.

• 7:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. I mean, those.

• 7:58Sean Fennessey?

  And those were clip-ons.

• 7:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, those were clip-ons. They were borrowed from my friend Lauren who took them off her ears on Saturday night and gave them to me to wear Sunday night. That's true.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  I think it's cool that you did that.

• 8:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I really liked them. Those were really nice fancy earrings, so I can't start there. And the thing about piercing your ears, I don't know if you guys remember this from having sisters or girlfriends, uh, and you know, when you were teenagers.

• 8:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, you have to leave the studs in for a while.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:26Amanda Dobbins?

  And that I could never make it through leaving the studs in for however many weeks. I looked too much like my mother. It was that there was something about the face symmetry where I can't wear small earrings because that's just really then I and I was just like, I'm not ready emotionally for this.

• 8:43Sean Fennessey?

  But now you've crossed.

• 8:44Amanda Dobbins?

  But then I did. I felt really fancy wearing, wearing the earrings and I liked that. So, I mean, obviously there are clip on earrings out in the world.

• 8:52Sean Fennessey?

  If you do get them pierced.

• 8:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Sean Fennessey?

  I get to film you and post it on the YouTube channel.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Why? Because you think that that would be painful? Oh, I'm fine. Listen.

• 9:01Sean Fennessey?

  I think it would just be amusing.

• 9:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Like IVF and two kids. Like I'm, I'm good. They can shoot whatever in my ears. I'm fine.

• 9:07Sean Fennessey?

  They can shoot whatever.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I think you should do it. I think you should do it.

• 9:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:12Amanda Dobbins?

  But I, I haven't solved for the problem of the six weeks until they, or I maybe.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Just wear your hair down?

• 9:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe they've improved times.

• 9:20Sean Fennessey?

  You should wear a beanie on the show for like six weeks. Just cover your ears for every episode. I think that would be good.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  You should wear a Deadpool mask.

• 9:33Sean Fennessey?

  That just was a countdown to doomsday.

• 9:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Sean Fennessey?

  Will Deadpool be in doomsday? Will he return?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah. Did you see the Russo's tweeted?

• 9:42Sean Fennessey?

  I did see this.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  A very cryptic thing about.

• 9:44Sean Fennessey?

  These are not trailers and they are not teasers. They're clues.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  And stories.

• 9:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Well.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  So what do you think?

• 9:50Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I've solved it.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Do you think that there's going to be like a extinction level event hitting all of these characters like in the first five minutes?

• 9:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm.

• 10:00Sean Fennessey?

  I suppose that's possible, but how is this a clue?

• 10:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Then what happens to the baby?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I don't know.

• 10:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And also in which, does an extinction level event happening in one multiverse affect all multiverses?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends on the kind of event. And I also, is that my camera? I don't know who Steve Rogers' baby is. I just want to say that. I, I kind of got confused.

• 10:20Sean Fennessey?

  You think it's Dante Moore? What, like, what are we talking about here?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Uh, I used to be really into Cable.

• 10:25Sean Fennessey?

  Cable, yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  The character Cable.

• 10:27Sean Fennessey?

  Time traveler.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Read his comics.

• 10:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, oh, you switched to YouTube TV?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Me and Bill keeping Spectrum afloat. Uh, I think I knew about, um.

• 10:39Sean Fennessey?

  Cable made an appearance in Deadpool 2.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  And there's a baby in Cable that like they have, I think it's Nathan.

• 10:43Sean Fennessey?

  You know who played Cable in Deadpool 2? Yeah, Josh Brolin.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, but I'm not, I'm not up on.

• 10:48Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I didn't. There's a baby in Cable?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  It's Nathan Summers. It's like Jean Grey in Cyclops's kid, Havoc?

• 10:55Sean Fennessey?

  Havoc, yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 10:57Sean Fennessey?

  The character, I thought it was the character of Havoc.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  There's somebody, he's, he's important though.

• 10:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Is Cable a person or a movie?

• 11:00Sean Fennessey?

  He's a person.

• 11:01Amanda Dobbins?

  So there's a baby inside the person?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  No, he's just protecting the child. Yeah, and then there's like a mutant virus.

• 11:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's very like Aliens, Terminator influenced.

• 11:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 11:10Sean Fennessey?

  Run of X-Men comics with time travel and apocalyptic events.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  This guy Bishop ruled.

• 11:16Sean Fennessey?

  Bishop was the man, yeah, yeah, he had big guns.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Uh, anyway, um, Doomsday.

• 11:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Sean Fennessey?

  Every episode should start with a Doomsday update. It's like the new Odyssey, but we hate it. You know, it's like, what's going on with these fucking idiots? Let's talk about a really good movie. Let's talk about 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple. That was a lot of throat clearing for an episode about a movie that I think we're all pretty excited about. So this is the follow-up to last Summers 28 Years Later, which was the follow-up to two previous 28 films. It featured the return of Danny Boyle. These scripts are written by Alex Garland. It was their reunion back then. It was your number one movie of 2025. Um, Nia DaCosta, the filmmaker, is stepping in now for The Bone Temple. It is again written by Garland. She is bringing with her, her, the cinematographer she's been working with recently, who is probably best known for his work with Steve McQueen, Sean Bobbitt. We'll talk about him a little bit.

• 12:06Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and the film stars, as 28 Years Later starred Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, after the ending of 28 Years Later is back in a big role here. Alfie Williams, who played Spike in the last film. Aaron Kellyman and Chi Lewis Perry also return. Uh, taking place after the events of the previous film, Spike is inducted into Sir Jimmy Crystal's gang of acrobatic killers in a post-apocalyptic Britain ravaged by the rage virus. Meanwhile, Dr. Ian Kelson forms a new relationship with potentially world-changing consequences.

• 12:36Sean Fennessey?

  Chris, I'm gonna start with you. What did you think of The Bone Temple?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Unbelievably, almost, loved it almost as much as I loved the first one. If, if there's 10 better movies than this this year, it's gonna be nuts. And it, it works in very different ways than, than the first 28 years later, me at least. I mean, like, I had such an emotional reaction to the first one of, you know, the, the third film in this series. Anita Costa just has, like, a completely different visual language that she's using. I think her camera is much more of a witness than it is like a protagonist in this film, but in a very cool way. And I kept thinking about her recent appearance on The Criterion Closet, where she talked a lot about come and see, and the cranes are flying, and movies about what happens to

• 13:22Speaker 01

  the sort of collective psyche of people after they've gone through like a war, or, you know, in this case, an apocalypse. And I, I think, I think that's really what was driving a lot of the stuff in this movie. And it's a brutal watch, but it's also a really, really, really funny movie.

• 13:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. What'd you think?

• 13:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's definitely gnarly. And I would say 28 years later was extremely gnarly, and also had a few more action set pieces built within the gnarliness. And I would say that this is just, is pure gnarly, and then, honestly, like, pure entertainment. Any movie where Ralph Fiennes is dancing is just, it's automatically in my personal Hall of Fame. It's really important. I was also thinking about it. I've obviously been listening to both the Marty Supreme score, but also the Marty Supreme playlist. And

• 14:17Amanda Dobbins?

  if you build your movie textually around, like, 80s new wave, I'm in. You know, like, I just absolutely-

• 14:25Sean Fennessey?

  Having a moment.

• 14:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. So, but, so there are a lot of, you know, flourishes. And as you'd, like, Anita Costa brings her own sensibility to this well-established world. And it, like, really played for me. And I'm not someone who likes to see people skinned alive.

• 14:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. This is- Two things. One, this is an extremely violent movie, more violent than the last film. I would argue probably more violent than the previous two installments. In part because it's really more of a pure horror movie. It's not just a zombie movie, but it is, there's a kind of funny games-esque torture aspect to the movie.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Green room, strangers.

• 15:02Sean Fennessey?

  Pure viscera, that human viscera, not just the zombie apocalypse stuff. And then also, I think because, you know, Nita Costa did make, did have a kind of Candyman reboot that she made a few years ago. She understands the mechanics of horror movies.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:13Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is using those mechanics much more so than what Boyle was doing, which, you know, is a really excitingly messy movie in a lot of ways. And there's a lot of like, um, risk-taking formally that is happening in that movie. This movie is more of a classical, uh, horror structured film. It doesn't have as much incident, though, and it doesn't have as many set pieces. And I think that there will be some people who struggle with it because quote unquote, "not as much happens." Or you could say by the time you get to the end of it, like, it didn't change the trajectory of the story.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  The big revelation, I mean, there's two rather large revelations towards the end of the film. And I think one of them might just be like, kind of lost to history. You know, I mean, it's a little ambiguous, but...

• 15:53Sean Fennessey?

  Meaning if they don't make a third film?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Uh, no, the third film, I think, seems nailed on to happen. But like, the, this, the, there's things that happen towards the end of the movie that are like, could be world-changing, but also could just be lost to the sands of time.

• 16:06Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes. Um, we will get into that and we'll get spoilery as we go along here. The, the thing that jumped out to me as I thought about it immediately after it ended was that this is a really interesting installment in the second in a trilogy run.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's technically the fourth 28 movie, but since these movies were conceived together and Garland wrote them together. And I never sold my Garland stock and I never will. And this movie again proves to me that he is so good at not just creating propulsive action, but blending theme and deep ideas about the modern world into conventionally entertaining movies. But this is like, in, I'm not saying it's as good as these films, but it accomplishes a similar thing to Empire Strikes Back, Dark Knight, Two Towers, Last Jedi, Ocean's 12, where it's like, this is the place to take some risks, to do some different things. They may feel like side quests, they can end in really like, um, beguiling and upsetting ways because you know that there's something else coming on the other side. You know there's going to be a third installment. It sounds like Danny Boyle is coming back for that third installment.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I think so, yes.

• 17:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Based on what we see and what we know about it.

• 17:08Sean Fennessey?

  Right. And so this movie, it leans a bit away from Spike. The character.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  It does, yeah.

• 17:12Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he's not the central focus of the story for much of it, though he is present throughout the entire movie. And it leans towards Jimmy Crystal and his seven finger fingers, these bandits, these evil bandits. And then Dr. Kelson and Samson, who is the alpha that you mentioned, who is an infected megaman.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:34Sean Fennessey?

  Who was-

• 17:35Amanda Dobbins?

  With a heart of gold.

• 17:36Sean Fennessey?

  Well-

• 17:38Speaker 01

  A heart of dope.

• 17:39Sean Fennessey?

  That's right, that's right.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  In the first film, he is shown as like a kind of infected leader, one that seems to be evolving. And I think in the backdrop of that, you start to think about like, you know, steps of evolution even for zombies, you know what I mean? Like, what does that mean? God, you know, like, the point you're making about the second film thing is really interesting because I thought that this was a tremendously cool way to world build without showing it. Like, going deeper into like these different characters that we had maybe seen in the background of the first film. You know, obviously, Jack O'Connell's Jimmy shows up in the very beginning and the very end of the first film with some spots in the middle. And Dr.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Kelson exists as a kind of like Wizard of Oz character in the first film, but is obviously very humanized in this movie and is vulnerable and weird and funny and longing. And I felt like I understood so much more about the state of the world without ever getting a voiceover or title card explaining what was happening anywhere outside of the kingdom.

• 18:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And even the way they introduced the new characters, who are kind of stuck between the fingers and-

• 18:57Speaker 01

  The alpha.

• 18:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and the alpha and everything. But what those characters, what they've been up to, how they're living, where they're living, just kind of gives you more pieces of, okay, like- This is how the virus infected some people and how other people are and so it expands it.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But without having to do any exposition, no one in that house says, well, four years ago, we like put up this fence and like here is how the combination code lacks. There's it's just.

• 19:28Sean Fennessey?

  You just accept.

• 19:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point because it being years later and not days or months later, it gives it like an added sense of like acceptance around what has happened to this this part of the world. We know that it's only really these British Isles, right? That are trapped in this way that the world at large, Europe at large has staved off the virus, but these people are stuck.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's this funny thing happening where, you know, Kelsen, the Fiennes character at one point says that he's starting to basically forget what life was like before the infection, before the outbreak of the virus.

• 20:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Well, he's talking with the Jimmy Fingers character.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Jack McConnell, yeah.

• 20:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah. And he's like, you're eight, so you probably don't remember. Here's what I remember. And then he's like, I don't remember going to shops.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's like the, I remember having a personal computer, but I didn't, you know, but I don't, but like now big chunks of time are disappearing. And on the flip side of that, the experience of this film is it's being released just a matter of months after the original. So you actually do have this sense of continuity. It's it's just a great experience because you have the sense of continuity with the characters and the story. You don't have to like teach yourself anything before going to it, but it's just different enough and just it's got that new perspective from the cost of like, okay, well, what if we shot it more like this? And what if it felt more like that? And what if really the infected were a tertiary worry? I mean, there's a couple of points here where some

• 20:52Speaker 01

  of the more accomplished killers in this movie treat infected running at them like, oh, who cares? And I'll just cut this person's throat.

• 21:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's like Ninja Warfare. Yeah, they're all samurais out there who have a ton of experience managing. And we see that, you know, there is this other group of people that you're alluding to that are in the film who are sort of just like native villagers who protect themselves and occasionally attempt to kind of hunt and explore the world at large. And they have way less experience, even 28 years later, way less ability.

• 21:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 21:20Sean Fennessey?

  To effectively kill these, these, you know, fast moving creatures. And that was obviously the innovation of the original film was that it felt like very novel and knew that the zombies were fast. But we're kind of like dispensed with that. There's been so much zombie stuff in 28 years. We need to find other places to go. And I really like where Garland wanted to go. And there's, there's two tracts of it. And I think they're, they're obviously speaking to each other. There's the Kelson tract, the sort of the healer. And then there's Jimmy Crystal and the fingers and the sort of like

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Cultish demagoguery.

• 21:50Sean Fennessey?

  Rage and opportunity to pursue like a, a cult apparatus in the face of these kinds of tragedies. And the way you can kind of compel people to join you and no one knows which way is up. Which one do you want to talk about first?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Let's talk about Jimmy first.

• 22:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Uh, I thought this was a fascinating characterization of somebody who I think you can kind of see in genre pieces across cinematic history where it's just like this, um, person who's taking advantage of like a particularly dire situation to create a cult around them and is saying like that they're the chosen person, that they are the chosen one who is getting communications from the dark lord, you gotta do what I'm telling you, whether it's David Koresh or whatever, these people who are like, kind of these, these incredibly central figures in this kind of story. And then I, I just, there's a couple of scenes with him in this movie where I just, I, rather than being revolted by him and,

• 22:46Speaker 01

  and even though he is like an absolutely amazing villain, I thought he was fascinating. The conversation that he winds up having with Kelson is so good and so interesting. And his sort of like, only I can hear the devil's teachings because I am his chosen son and all the stuff that he's doing. And Garland's not like shy about, like, obviously there's a lot of echoes of like, of contemporary leadership in, in, in our real world that he's talking about in this movie, but he's never like too over the top with it. You know what I mean? Like, I never thought it was too.

• 23:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's, it's grounded and, and I credit Garland, which is something I don't say very often on this podcast, both for the, the, the character is like, is, is quite literally of this earth. And so, um, you know, he's like negotiating with the Kelson character and he's kind of like, here's my problem. And like, here's where I am with my dad. He, he hasn't taken on full cult of personality. And then the way that Jack O'Connell plays him, even when he's in like full cult leader mode and giving all his speeches. It's weird, you know, it's a little, it's, he's trying to pump himself up.

• 24:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you can see a little bit of his insecurity and vulnerability, just in flashes. Like, he is a charlatan and it's communicated to the audience, but it's not overt. Because he is able to command his flock. He really can get these people to do these awful things to innocents. And that that is like, that's the persuasive power of cult-like leadership.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And the thing that unites the performance that Fines gives and the performance that O'Connell gives is that, like, you could run that thing with 99 out of 100 actors and it would just be a disaster. Like, if this didn't work, it would be almost unwatchable.

• 24:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And they both...

• 24:36Sean Fennessey?

  And it's hard to look at a lot of what they do. I mean, you've gotten a lot tougher over the years, but I saw you wincing in your seat a lot when we were watching this. Because it's really gnarly.

• 24:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And sometimes I'm just kind of like, you know, I'm looking elsewhere. I've trained myself to be like, okay, I understand what you're doing and now I don't need to like see any more people being peeled. Though I did find, and I know this is like a horror movie convention, a lot of the real moments of violence happen off-screen. Like, a lot of the knifings happen and like you cut away or like, you know, a hook or something goes in and I understand that you can't like film all of that always.

• 25:16Sean Fennessey?

  Elements of surprise to end the story.

• 25:17Amanda Dobbins?

  And like implication and that not, sometimes not seeing things is scarier.

• 25:21Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 25:21Amanda Dobbins?

  But, so I did okay, but yeah, it was gnarly.

• 25:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the other thing too is that DeCassa's arc is fascinating and weird. She's made, she made a small Sundance indie and then she made a Candyman reboot. And then she made a Marvel movie, which is the lowest grossing Marvel movie of all time.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  She was pretty open about being an unpleasant experience.

• 25:44Sean Fennessey?

  And it clearly went into the blender and it doesn't seem like she got to make exactly the movie she wanted to make. And then she just made this reimagining of Hetta Gobbler. Hetta, which is on Prime right now if people want to watch it, that came out last year, which I thought was interesting, but particularly there's a sense of anything can happen violent chaos in that movie, which is really just like a chamber piece at a party.

• 26:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yeah.

• 26:05Sean Fennessey?

  But it does seem like anybody could get shot in the head at any moment in that movie. And this movie has the same tool, like it has the same strength where... A character who you think is going to be with us for a long time could die at any moment. And there are real stakes against the figures that we're following. And because the movie kind of background spiked a little bit.

• 26:27Sean Fennessey?

  There's like a, there is a real sense of unpredictability in it.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  The thing, the hallmark of these last two films for me has been. A, a real shock at like what is unfolding on screen. Like, I think I went into the first film expecting it to be much more about Aaron Taylor Johnson and Jodie Comer. I had no idea that this kid was going to be the hero of the film. And I had no idea that the movie was going to deviate from your more traditional, like. Us versus the infected narrative into this kind of like. Almost like, you know, super cathartic. Ideas about grief and letting go and death and all this stuff. And in this film. I kind of just expected the spike stuff to pick up. And so this idea that these two ideologies are basically on a collision course.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And that those ideologies are as plain as day of, of science and reason versus. Faith or demagoguery, you know, and, and it's. To be able to do that, it's not even like Trojan horsing. It's like, it's really like hiding your punches until they can be the most effective swings.

• 27:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we should talk about probably the Kelson strain of this and how it intersects with the infected as well.

• 27:36Sean Fennessey?

  I don't mind saying, I was watching the movie and I was like, so this is Dr. Anthony Fauci. That's who Dr. Kelson is like, there's very clearly a, like, um. Heal or heal thyself. Narrative here and Kelson was introduced in the last film as potentially a threat. A man gone mad who covers himself in iodine. We assume it's blood.

• 27:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's building a giant bone temple.

• 27:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, he literally built a bone temple. He is treating and clearing, you know, at the beginning of this film, he is, you know, clearing the, um. The sort of, uh. Cartilage away from bones after he, you know, burns them up. And it seems like he's a crazy person, but the film goes to great lengths to show us that he's still like a man of science and still studying and still trying to learn. And we watched in the last film him slowly building this relationship with the alpha Sampson, who, you know, once again is just nude throughout the film. This film is unafraid to show Sampson in, in, in full.

• 28:34Sean Fennessey?

  And he realizes that when he sort of neutralizes him, narcotizes him with his blow dart, that Sampson is not just docile, but like, maybe there's something else going on behind the eyes, that his humanity has been unlocked in some way.

• 28:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Sean Fennessey?

  And it starts to get his wheels turning and he starts to think on, if not a cure, a kind of evolution of the virus.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  A treatment.

• 28:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And, you know, maybe a, um, solution to this, this problem that is, that is.

• 29:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Or say a vaccine.

• 29:06Sean Fennessey?

  A vaccine.

• 29:08Sean Fennessey?

  And Kelson is shown to be like a very sensible, sensitive, sincere person. It's not a cynical portrayal of a person like this at all.

• 29:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And a lonely person too, you know, because he keeps, he empathizes with the Sampson, with the alpha, but wants him to like speak as well, you know? And the, the music is woven in because he's like lost all contact with like other humans. And so this is, these are like his memories and he sings and dances and listens to the music a lot.

• 29:40Sean Fennessey?

  Lots of Duran Duran.

• 29:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, because he wants like, you know, he's just looking for some sort of connection. So, and I, I think that it's not just that he's like practical and looking for the cure, but he's trying to cure himself in a way as well.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I mean, there's also like. Some really interesting stuff. So basically, I mean, we allowed to be a little bit more detailed about how we're talking about it.

• 30:05Sean Fennessey?

  We've already spoiled a bunch of this movie if you don't want to hear anymore. Go see the film.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  The treatment plan is essentially opiates. You know, he's giving the alpha, he's giving Sampson morphine. And after a few weeks, or however long it's been that he's been treating him, and that clearly Sampson is regaining some elements of humanity, if still like unable to speak. He's essentially

• 30:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Memory and language.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Running out of morphine, like morphine supply in the United Kingdom. And this is something that comes up a couple of times in the film where, you know, there's that commune that you were talking about of villagers are using spears. Like, we are running out of the sort of manmade resources of the old world. The guns, the drugs, the everything that we've kind of built up. And he's just kind of talking to himself, but talking to Sampson. And he says, this is with the rate you're consuming this, we have about two more weeks, or you can take the big trip. And I put you out and I put you to sleep and you go out in like a way. And he's like, but if you could just consent, like if you could just tell me that's okay. And he's just basically kind of saying that out loud to himself.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And as he's about to give this guy the shot, Sampson says, moon. Which is, you know, a revelation, but also kind of tragic because now this guy is obviously showing progress, but they're running out of the medicine that they need to treat his psychosis essentially.

• 31:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you notice the poppies that showed up in the field at the very end of the movie?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  You know what? I didn't.

• 31:35Amanda Dobbins?

  While Refines was dancing, yeah, there are red poppies throughout.

• 31:38Sean Fennessey?

  The opiates, yeah.

• 31:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Sean Fennessey?

  Not unlike the Wizard of Oz, just like Dr. Kelson, the Wizard of Oz figure. I, I found this component of the movie to be what separated it from other things. I think a lot of filmmakers can do, we're gonna have crazy people peeling skin off. And this will be like a fun time at the movies and a good January movie. This, the contrast between these two components and just utilizing Refines, who, you know, we sing his praises anytime he shows up in a movie, the three of us love him. He, he might be the most daring and flexible. Post movie star that we have, like he has made so many different kinds of movies. He can take on any kind of complex material. He doesn't have to be making the third and fourth 28 movies like that's that you could say this is very easily above his pay grade.

• 32:22Sean Fennessey?

  And he could just be making Shakespearean adaptations, but he fucking loves this shit. You know, like he likes being Voldemort. He likes going into these worlds and he's so, so, so special in this movie because he's so free with his body. He's so unafraid. I mean, he's practically nude throughout the entire film.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Covered in orange.

• 32:36Sean Fennessey?

  Covered in the paint, the paint and you know, the eye black near the end of the film. You know, like you say, he's so magical and musical with his, his dance movements and the way that he kind of turns himself over to a character. It just makes a movie like this so much better when you have someone who is so free.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then it the, the long-term thinking to know that when Jack O'Connell and Ralph Fiennes finally get a big scene together where they're going to be like essentially doing a, a piece of theater with a gorgeous backdrop of, of, of Northern England or whatever, you know, is Northern.

• 33:10Sean Fennessey?

  I think so.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  But these two guys are just going to be chewing scenery for five, six, seven minutes, talking about their lives. How they've arrived at this point where they believe one thing or another. And where they kind of find themselves in this like struggle where it's like you're, we're going to have to make some sort of arrangement or I'm going to kill you. But the contrast of their performances, you know, O'Connell initially doing grand gestures and his blonde locks. And he's like, I'm Jimmy, I'm the seven. And then he's like continually comes down to the point where it's just like two guys talking on stools.

• 33:44Sean Fennessey?

  Well, yeah, cause, cause Kelson has disarmed him, right? He's disarmed him by asking him questions, by making him feel safe, by not posing a threat like he, this is also someone who's lived in fear of death. Living among the infected for 28 years. He's figured out ways to stay calm in the face of all this danger. Two really exciting actors. O'Connell is in the middle of quite a run. You know, I think you both were fairly early on Rogue Heroes.

• 34:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I was because of him.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I've loved him since.

• 34:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Skins.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Startup.

• 34:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yeah. Startup and 71 and all the great films that he's made in his early stretch. But now if you look, if you go to 2022, when Rogue Heroes started and you know, underrated in Ferrari, I think. The best part of Back to Black by far, Sinners last year as Remick. And now these two films.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  He's also fantastic in The Northwater, which is 21, which is Andrew Hayes' mini-series that he made. It's like Jack O'Connell and Colin Farrell.

• 34:42Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I'll tell you who you remind me of in this movie is Gary Oldman. He's giving a Gary Oldman performance. It is, it feels like a little bit of his Dracula, a little bit of his professional. Exactly. That kind of like greasy, slick, malevolent figure. Yeah, that there's something like you really don't want to cross him because things will go very, very bad. And he's just magnificent in this movie and he's a disgusting character. I mean, he is vile, the things that he does and the way that he takes advantage of children, women, and you know, just innocents throughout the film, but you kind of can't take your eyes off of him.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  I was blown away by him and I usually am, like I'm a huge fan of his, but this is a really easy part to make completely over the top and ridiculous.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  It's not that much different than like John Malkovich in Con Air or name any like overqualified actor in like a peak villainy part. But he finds pathos in this guy, you know what I mean? And you really do, in the same way that Kelson is saying that he can't really remember a time before the infection. You start to get an idea of why Jimmy would be the way he is if he's eight years old and the first thing that he kind of remembers is his father leading a horde of infected to storm a church and kill.

• 35:54Amanda Dobbins?

  His father, the vicar.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, an entire village. If that shapes your worldview, yeah, he's a con man, but I think he also believes the con.

• 36:02Sean Fennessey?

  Where are you at on Teletubbies?

• 36:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I remember I was babysitting when they were on, so I consumed them as like a twelve-year-old.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Was that dance that Jemima does?

• 36:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it was very good. I mean, it is, it's a very funny, very specific and accurate inclusion that's over several films now. Because aren't the little kids watching Teletubbies when there's like that horrible raid in the first? Yeah, it's very upset. Yeah, spot on, and they are really weird and in their own way a sign of end times.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Jack O'Connell being like, there's robots that have TVs in their tummies.

• 36:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And then he's watching on their tummies and so on and so on. It's really, yeah. It's funny.

• 36:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, this movie is like kind of a miracle. I wasn't sure that any of this stuff was going to work, these last two films, and I'm really. Kind of blown away by how good they are and now, um, you know, this is a deep spoiler, but by the time we get to the end of this film, a long rumored thing that some thought would happen in the last film does actually come to pass in this movie, which is that Cillian Murphy's character returns. And he returns and we see that he is raising his daughter. I guess that's his daughter he had with Naomi Harris?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Uh, yes.

• 37:12Sean Fennessey?

  And he's teaching her about history.

• 37:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Sean Fennessey?

  And she's studying World War II?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And the, the inter, between World War I and World War II.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Why the Allies were, uh, more conciliatory and, uh, helpful in the post-World War II era rather than the post-World War I era, which thematically, I think is Garland's sort of saying like, this will never work if every swing of the pendulum is about taking

• 37:41Sean Fennessey?

  Punishing.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Down the opposite side.

• 37:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. The more vindictive, the punishment.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Which is if you need like an example of like, I mean, I'm sure there are people who thought that was stupid, but like, I think that that's an example of why Alex Garland is really, really good is that you can have a character sort of off, half off-screen for some of the scene discussing, uh, Churchill and how that-

• 38:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, he does, if, um, those forget history are doomed to repeat it, like, from the kitchen.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Like while making toast.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, that was a gasp and applaud moment in our screening, as was probably the crescendo of the movie, which I guess, I don't know if you want to talk about that.

• 38:19Sean Fennessey?

  We should. I mean, it's an amazing feat of filmmaking, which is that, so finds his character who has been set up to be Satan.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Jack.

• 38:27Sean Fennessey?

  By Jack O'Connell's character.

• 38:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. He's, he's standing in.

• 38:30Sean Fennessey?

  Standing in for Satan.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  He's like, Jack O'Connell's like, I need you to pretend to be the devil, uh, so that my minions continue to believe that I am in contact with the devil.

• 38:38Sean Fennessey?

  And if you don't do that, I will kill you effectively. And so, we already know Dr. Kelson's a bit of a showman and he conjures up this performance as the Dark Lord, set to Iron Maiden's number of the beast.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Gives, uh, blows cocaine into, uh, the Jimmy's faces.

• 38:53Sean Fennessey?

  Is it cocaine? Do we know that?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  I think it was supposed to be him creating, he was like, he was mixing up coke or-

• 38:57Sean Fennessey?

  Got it.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Some sort of speed. Yeah.

• 39:00Sean Fennessey?

  And gives this kind of ravishing visual performance. And like I said, it's a Costa and Bob it very free with the camera and like what kind of it turns into a music video.

• 39:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Sean Fennessey?

  And a very exciting and amusing music video seen through the eyes of the the Jimmies who were baffled as to what they're watching.

• 39:15Amanda Dobbins?

  And then like moshing.

• 39:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And concludes with this epic kind of fire dance that he does with these shoulder weights that are knocking the sparks loose from the fire inside. It's just it's an amazing set piece. I guess there is also a crucifixion that happens in the aftermath of that.

• 39:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Sean Fennessey?

  Like it is a really dramatic and violent and fascinating conclusion. You know, we have also seen that Samson has sort of become humanized and become a potential victim once again of the infected, even though he remains clearly the infected.

• 39:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  But he. Yeah, I'm worried about his access to SSRIs.

• 39:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause he was like, he got one. I saw the puppies. They were there. That wasn't a mistake. So can he piece it together? And you know, you also see Kelson like doing some, you know, longhand math and consulting some books in a way that suggests he's trying to like make morphine again.

• 40:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Yes. I hope Samson's gonna be okay.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Well, he says he's like, I think that there is.

• 40:09Amanda Dobbins?

  He still absolutely wallops that entire train car of people.

• 40:12Sean Fennessey?

  He does. He does.

• 40:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Or was infected.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  He goes back to the place where both, I believe his child has been born, his zombie human hybrid child.

• 40:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, from the previous film.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  And also turns out the place where it looks like he was when the infection started, when the outbreak started. Just saying that people applauded in our screening for that fire dance. And then there was a gasp and a light round of applause for Killian Murphy. I only mention that just because I think this might be the most creatively invigorating running franchise in movies right now. And even the way that they construct the, the way that they tell a complete story and then do basically a two minute coda at the end of both of these past previous films.

• 40:55Sean Fennessey?

  Two in a row now, yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Is like, kind of the way this shit's off should work. It's like, there is another world out there. There is another story we're gonna tell. It's not gonna affect, we didn't stop telling our movie 35 minutes ago in order to set up some new problem. You know what I mean? I think it's pretty, it's pretty awesome.

• 41:12Sean Fennessey?

  I think part of my comfort with that is the idea that this, there's not gonna be 10 more of these, that this was pitched as a trilogy, sold as a trilogy.

• 41:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Garland wrote three scripts.

• 41:25Sean Fennessey?

  That makes me more at ease with the structure of the story. I generally am a little bit dubious of here's a two minute coda. Come back for the next one. It has to be done really well.

• 41:34Amanda Dobbins?

  When we walked out of 28 years later.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:38Amanda Dobbins?

  We were like, listen, we really like Jack O'Connell and we'll go wherever he leads. But we were, we were like, are we sure?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  It was confusing.

• 41:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Are we sure?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, what's going on here? And let's talk about the rest of the movie. And this, you know, confirms both that coda and the strategy.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  There were people who were like, I cannot, I cannot like endorse this film full as fully as I would like to because of the last scene. I also think like asking global, but especially American audiences to know who Jimmy Savile is and know like where the influences are coming from on this was a lot. I think by the time this movie comes out, people would either read about it or it's not really that necessary in this film because I think they come up with like their own kind of mythology and iconography.

• 42:23Sean Fennessey?

  That's why I think it works is if you understand the reference and you get the idea of sort of like a child predator and someone who appears to be friendly. But yeah, how's that? Great coda with that, like closing note on the how's that as well. But if you, if you, if you don't get it, it still works. He still seems like a demon, you know?

• 42:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. So really creepy.

• 42:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  This coda is, I think, tonally more in line with the rest of the film.

• 42:46Sean Fennessey?

  It actually, it, I mean, it doesn't just feel like a callback because Cillian Murphy is in it, but even the way that it's staged, that's sort of like long lens final shot. It felt like the first film. It felt like 28 days later.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  And it brings back the theme, the sort of.

• 42:58Sean Fennessey?

  The score.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  The score from the first film. Yeah.

• 42:59Sean Fennessey?

  Which I would imagine that there will be an attempt to kind of like reckon with and reexamine the first movie in this final.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I imagine they go back to London.

• 43:11Sean Fennessey?

  Perhaps.

• 43:11Amanda Dobbins?

  It would be exciting.

• 43:12Sean Fennessey?

  Perhaps. Is a cure possible?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  There's, look, I mean, the way to make this more practically and to make this more cheaply and thus make it more suitable for Sony is to keep it out in the hills and keep it rural.

• 43:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It is very beautiful in those cells.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Five or six people running around in circles, but you know, I mean, the, the cool thing about what this movie does is that, you know, it takes two major chess pieces off the board. So it's like, what's at stake? What are we, what is the end goal of this? Is it just about Spike becoming a man and becoming the kind of man that like, you know, you would hope he would become? Or is it about, we actually have Dr. Kelson's secret recipe to turn everyone back?

• 43:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. To be determined. Would you say more of like a Hungry Like the Wolf, Rio, Girls on Film Duran Duran fan? Or more of like an Ordinary World, like early 90s fan?

• 44:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, definitely Rio, Girls on Film. Yeah.

• 44:05Sean Fennessey?

  But you were getting into Ordinary World, I noticed. You know, when that acoustic guitar hits.

• 44:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, I am, I appreciate, I appreciate the entire oeuvre.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Was interesting to get a Kid A needle drop, which would be right up against when the infection is 02 or 01 or whatever, you know, so it's just right up, right up against.

• 44:25Sean Fennessey?

  But he just, so he kinda stopped getting into new music, Kelson, roughly like 93, but he

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Got brought back by Radiohead.

• 44:32Sean Fennessey?

  Hung around for Radiohead. Radiohead was still of interest.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Pretty common.

• 44:35Sean Fennessey?

  I, that song has now appeared in three films in the last five years.

• 44:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, it's just another catching up with us. We are in charge of everything now and the references.

• 44:45Sean Fennessey?

  I just like, we could have just done the National Anthem. That would have been another way to.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Oh, dun dun dun dun.

• 44:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know. Everything in its right place is like, we're good. We're good. Take a break. Take a break.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Um, I'm just, I'm just really, I was blown away by this and I just can't believe that this is what's happening with this series of films.

• 45:04Sean Fennessey?

  Let's take it, let's do an ad hoc where he finds Hall of Fame.

• 45:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 45:08Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if there's a logical time to do this. I don't know if this would normally be an entire episode. I started trying to rough it out in my head last night and I was like, this guy's got 25 essential performances.

• 45:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Sean Fennessey?

  So I want your feedback. I want your thoughts.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  I got down to 10, but I couldn't figure out one of them, which one he should be. But like, I, I know that some are missing, but I got down to 10.

• 45:30Sean Fennessey?

  Can we do Stone Cold Locks to start?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Sean Fennessey?

  Schindler's List.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Have to.

• 45:35Sean Fennessey?

  The English Patient.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Have to.

• 45:37Sean Fennessey?

  The Grand Budapest Hotel.

• 45:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 45:40Sean Fennessey?

  I think you have to do one of the Harry Potter films.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:43Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know which one.

• 45:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't remember which one either. Uh.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Is there like a Voldemort flashback one? Is there one like where he's like doing a bunch of different stuff?

• 45:51Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 45:52Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it's.

• 45:53Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's, it's played by another actor because his face isn't.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:57Amanda Dobbins?

  As best I can tell.

• 45:58Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I, I would say probably just Deathly Hallows 2, since it's the final film and it features like the final confrontation.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:05Sean Fennessey?

  So that's four.

• 46:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 46:06Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think there are any more Stone Cold Locks?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Uh, Conclave?

• 46:11Sean Fennessey?

  My thought about it, um, uh, he elevates that movie in a big way. That's another example of something that could have seemed very-

• 46:18Speaker 01

  So here's the cool thing about it.

• 46:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, there's one more. There's one more within the world of the big picture, which is a bigger splash.

• 46:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 46:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it just like-

• 46:25Sean Fennessey?

  If we were doing it, we would do-

• 46:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, we are doing it. This is our podcast, so.

• 46:29Sean Fennessey?

  So that's six. We'll say Conclave and we'll say a bigger splash.

• 46:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I will throw out a couple. So here's one of the things about him is that about five or six years into his career, he just develops this ability to go from, he can play the fifth on the call sheet to the first on the call sheet. And he makes as big of an impact either way.

• 46:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  So in, in Bruges or in Hail Caesar, he is able to make a crater in the film.

• 46:56Sean Fennessey?

  He steals both films.

• 46:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And the same, honestly, uh, in, I think he has like two minutes of screen time in The Hurt Locker and he's awesome in it.

• 47:05Sean Fennessey?

  So what do we do about that? That's part of why I found this to be challenging because like, he's not essential to the Craig Bond films, but I love when he shows up.

• 47:12Amanda Dobbins?

  He's great.

• 47:12Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he's, he, he lifts those movies when he pops up and he's a nice counterpoint to Craig.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  So you have, you have Schindler's English Patient, A Harry Potter, Graham Budapest is four. Conclave, let's say is five. Would you put 28 years later?

• 47:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And bigger splash is six.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Six is bigger splash. Let's say Bone Temple is seven.

• 47:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Great. I agree.

• 47:32Sean Fennessey?

  I'm with that. This is a great performance.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  I think personally, like my favorite underrated performance by him, uh, two of them, uh, one is Strange Days.

• 47:40Sean Fennessey?

  I was gonna, I would have nominated Strange Days.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  It has a little bit of a different look than probably you're used to seeing from him. And the other one is Constance Gardner.

• 47:47Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Uh, she's the John McCary adaptation, um, with Rachel Weisz, which I think he's phenomenal in.

• 47:54Sean Fennessey?

  So I am down with that. I think 10 would then have to be Quiz Show.

• 47:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought you, yeah, Quiz Show has to be in there.

• 48:00Sean Fennessey?

  So then that's like, that's 10 right there, but that does not account for any of those super cameos that he's so good.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  So we then basically-

• 48:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, there's no Mallory, uh, no M.

• 48:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Amanda Dobbins?

  There's no Hail Caesar. There's no-

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Hurt Locker and Bruges.

• 48:16Sean Fennessey?

  He's also brilliant as Francis Dollarhide in Red Dragon, which is a flawed movie, but he's very good in that movie. No shots of Tom Noonan.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to see it.

• 48:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I didn't even put up like the end of the affair or whatever, but that was important to me.

• 48:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, no, that's a really good film and he's really good in that. That movie's a little lost.

• 48:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Made in Manhattan is not good. He's not bad in it, but that's, it's, I don't appreciate it's politics.

• 48:40Sean Fennessey?

  Did not realize he played Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

• 48:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, and someone also-

• 48:43Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen this with Julia Benosch.

• 48:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Sean Fennessey?

  I gotta watch this.

• 48:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And then, wait, hold on. Is he in The Return as well? Is that, okay, so do you know what The Return is?

• 48:52Sean Fennessey?

  I do. I actually never saw it.

• 48:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't either, but a friend of mine just texted. This is a-

• 48:56Sean Fennessey?

  Connected to The Odyssey.

• 48:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Retelling of The Odyssey, so we're gonna have to see that.

• 48:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. What about The Prince of Egypt?

• 49:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you see The Choral?

• 49:02Sean Fennessey?

  Plays Ramses. Did I see the what?

• 49:04Amanda Dobbins?

  The Choral?

• 49:06Sean Fennessey?

  The Choral?

• 49:06Speaker 01

  The Choral.

• 49:07Amanda Dobbins?

  The Choral. I think it's Choral. There's no E, so I'm sorry for being an American.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  That's about the World War II singing group, right?

• 49:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I haven't seen that yet.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  That was heavily advertised in London.

• 49:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I definitely am gonna do like, if I ever have a date of myself again, like Nuremberg, Choral, back to back, you know? That we didn't say this.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  It's like, really?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Definitely go up with 15 other things you could do with a date of yourself.

• 49:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Next time I get the flu, you know, okay, The Menu, we didn't mention?

• 49:36Sean Fennessey?

  A huge hit.

• 49:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 49:37Sean Fennessey?

  A movie that also does not work without him. I like that movie. It's got some heavy detractors, but I'm a fan.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  So where are we?

• 49:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Remember The Dig? When he was an archaeologist with Carey Mulligan?

• 49:47Sean Fennessey?

  Was that a Netflix film?

• 49:48Amanda Dobbins?

  It was. I, well, I mean, it was 2021 also, so I, I needed that to be the inspiration and it wasn't.

• 49:54Sean Fennessey?

  Is there anything in the deep British lore from the 80s that we're not thinking of? I mean, he, you know, he's, he's in Peter Greenway's The Baby of Macon.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  I can't say that. I remember that.

• 50:05Sean Fennessey?

  I, you know, Schindler's List was really a major breakthrough for him. I don't, I don't know about this Wuthering Heights. I would like to see this.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  I mean, there, it's not Scream, but I just thought I would mention-

• 50:14Amanda Dobbins?

  It's his film debut.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  You can find a lot of his, there's several of his works, his theater works is on, are on like, online in various places, especially his collaborations with David Hare.

• 50:26Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, what about Cronenberg's Spider? I think is on the list.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:31Sean Fennessey?

  The first film I ever reviewed for the Ithican in college.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 50:37Sean Fennessey?

  The failed Avengers relaunch opposite Uma Thurman, not the Avengers comic book characters, the British TV spy series.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I remember that. And then what was the Kingsman that he was in? Was he in the?

• 50:48Sean Fennessey?

  The Kingsman.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  The Kingsman?

• 50:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, from 2021.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Is that the prequel one?

• 50:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 50:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. What's he doing in that?

• 50:55Speaker 01

  He invents the Kingsman.

• 50:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  He's like the guy with the first suit shop.

• 51:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 51:00Sean Fennessey?

  He also directed an adaptation of Coriolanus.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:04Sean Fennessey?

  I remember being pretty good. Really a war movie. Hmm. Anything else? We did our 10 pretty easily.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  The 10 was pretty easy and we have like five to seven.

• 51:14Sean Fennessey?

  Honorable.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Also check this out.

• 51:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Any other thoughts?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Um, do you think?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  We'll get 28 years later, the last year or whatever? This time next year, next summer?

• 51:31Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  You think it's gonna be a little while?

• 51:33Sean Fennessey?

  Danny Boyle has a movie coming out at the end of this year. So if Danny Boyle's making it, I don't believe production has begun. It depends on probably how this movie does too. I think it's tracking for less.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Like 20 million over four days. Yeah.

• 51:45Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Word of mouth will be good, but I do think that there will be also the, that was fucking brutal word of mouth as well, coming out.

• 51:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. It's extremely violent and hard to take at times.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  I come out of this with just like,

• 51:58Speaker 01

  I, I, I've needed to cost a season tickets now.

• 52:01Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  You know, just like.

• 52:02Sean Fennessey?

  Big sign on.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Just, I think I, I get what she's go.

• 52:06Sean Fennessey?

  You should watch Hada. You should see what you think of that.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  No, but I got, I was just so, so thrilled with what she did with this.

• 52:11Sean Fennessey?

  She did, it's, you know, as I said before we began recording, this story has good bones.

• 52:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Sean Fennessey?

  It has really good bones.

• 52:18Amanda Dobbins?

  There we go.

• 52:18Sean Fennessey?

  It is, it is, in a way, I almost don't want Boyle to go back. I want to see another filmmaker's point of view.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:24Sean Fennessey?

  Cause I think it could withstand another reimagining, another visual.

• 52:27Amanda Dobbins?

  But if you're gonna do Cillian Murphy, yeah, you got it.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  And if there's gonna be some sort of conclusion to the story, which I don't know. I mean, I imagine if he wrote it as a trilogy, although knowing Alex Garland, maybe he's like, there's no fucking end. This is the end. Like, we are all infected, you know?

• 52:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Sean Fennessey?

  That would be appropriate. CR, thank you.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 52:43Sean Fennessey?

  We're gonna talk a little bit about Ann Lee, but you wouldn't watch a film starring a woman, so we're gonna ask you to move on.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And now my interview was one of the best.

• 52:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, we're back. Before I talk to Mona Festival, I thought we should talk about The Testament of Anne Lee a little bit. So, you know, this film is co-written with Mona and Brandy Corbeil, just like The Brutalist, and it stars Amanda Seyfried, Thompson McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott. It is a story I'd not heard anything about. I'd never heard of Anne Lee. It spans 18th century England and America. This visionary spiritual leader, Anne Lee, comes along, rises from obscurity. She forges this radical movement called The Shakers, inspired by the Quaker movement. She suffers significant personal tragedy and, in the wake of that,

• 53:35Sean Fennessey?

  develops this concept of celibacy colliding with a kind of convulsive, musical reckoning with God. And the film portrays her struggles and also her brilliance and her radiance. And features like a wildly transformative performance by Amanda Seyfried. I know you first saw it out of Venice.

• 54:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I did.

• 54:03Sean Fennessey?

  You liked it then?

• 54:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I really liked it and I knew nothing about it, besides, you know, what was printed in the programs. And I also knew nothing about The Shakers. And I didn't even know, as it's explained fairly early in the film, that they are called Shakers. Or at least in the context of them, they're called Shakers because they were shaking Quakers. So, I didn't even know to anticipate the movement and the choreography, and certainly the music that was, that is a major part of this. Because in addition to it being an examination of the founding of a religious spiritual movement, and also...

• 54:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Fastvold and Corbe's sequel or next installment of

• 54:53Amanda Dobbins?

  The Cult of Personality and self-belief and hatred in the wake of personal tragedy.

• 55:03Amanda Dobbins?

  It is also like a musical and it has and with a lot of dancing as well and not your traditional like theater, like jazz hands, really, really

• 55:17Amanda Dobbins?

  memorable movement. And that is actually what stood out to me the most. I loved it. I loved the choreography and the way that it incorporates the traditional shaker music and the very weird dancing and literalizes that shaking quaker.

• 55:33Amanda Dobbins?

  It surprised me. You just, I hadn't seen anything like it.

• 55:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a cool act of not just synthesis, but synchronization, like the choreography and the music, which is written with Daniel Blumberg, fits the filmmaking style. The movie, the camera moves and the story moves the way that the shakers move. And particularly during these ecstatic dance sequences, you know, singing sequences, you can kind of feel how you could get wrapped up in this movement, which on its face is quite severe and quite strange, a very alien, I think, to a 21st century sensibility. But there's something about the kind of emotional hysteria of this movie that is very transfixing and Fastvold does not wink.

• 56:19Sean Fennessey?

  She never is like, isn't this funny or weird? She's, it's just a portrait, which I think is a really, really good choice. And I feel like in these times, whenever you're trying to tell a story about a person like this, it's very, and you know, the brutalists got kind of held to task for this as well, but it's something that I liked about that movie also, which is that this is a person who transformed their lives and attempted to heal a deep wound by focusing on construction and imagination and community. Like those things can be, can help heal. And I appreciate it. The movie is a little ridiculous. Like you will, as you're watching it, you'll be like, this is so strange.

• 56:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And the sequences and when everyone like in the back corner of the frame and the way that camera is like up people's noses as they're as they're having these ecstatic, it is, there is something uncomfortable about it that purposely, right, that it is supposed to communicate how desperate and consuming the the nature of this expression was, people trying to work themselves like out of something and into something else. I saw more walkouts for this in Venice than any other film. I mean, the Italians were just like, absolutely not.

• 57:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think there's also a significant amount of very raw portrayals of childbirth and then infant death in the movie that is very severe, very severe, and I think will alienate people.

• 57:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, see also Hamlet, you know?

• 57:51Sean Fennessey?

  It's true. I mean, it's a running theme in the films of 2025. But I think also, you know, that's obviously a kind of inspiration point for Ann Lee's thinking about how she sees the world. She's also been subject to physical abuse by her family and by her partner. She has this very tenuous relationship to sex, and that tenuous relationship leads to some of this thinking about celibacy, and then the way in which she's rejected by her partner in life because of that. I mean, these are really thorny ideas, and they seem old fashioned or alien. But the movie doesn't do that kind of like cheap, this is her trauma.

• 58:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 58:27Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't explain it. Yeah, exactly.

• 58:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, we were talking about the brutalists in this movie as a response to to personal trauma, or to, and like really honestly to rape in both cases. And and that these people are trying to find some sort of healing is very different than finding healing.

• 58:49Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 58:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And they're they're trying to work things out. But I wouldn't say that either film has a happy ending, at least my interpretation of them.

• 58:57Sean Fennessey?

  I will say, though, without spoiling it, I found that the way that Ann Lee is portrayed at the end of the film is really interesting and mature and complicated and kind of had me thinking about how I want my life to end. And sort of like what you want to, how you want to feel about yourself and what you've done and how you see the world when it when your time has come.

• 59:17Sean Fennessey?

  God tier work from Amanda Seyfried.

• 59:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Sean Fennessey?

  I think-

• 59:19Amanda Dobbins?

  One of, just one of the greats.

• 59:20Sean Fennessey?

  Truly an amazing performer. This movie is asking so much of her. I could not think of another movie that was asking so much of a performer because she has to have a clear sense of this spiritual ideology. She has to represent a fearless leader, an ecstatic devotion in this conceit. She has to sing. She has to dance. She has to lead in singing and dancing.

• 59:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 59:45Sean Fennessey?

  She's not just participating, but she is at the center of the frame through all of these experiences. Plus, the prosthetics involved in those childbirth sequences, the amount of violence that this character endures, the crazy set pieces, the epic ship journey that her character takes.

• 59:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:00:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's an epic film.

• 1:00:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And as you said, like as Fastful doesn't wink and she does not either.

• 1:00:05Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And we have seen that Amanda Seyfried can wink when she needs to.

• 1:00:09Sean Fennessey?

  Totally.

• 1:00:09Amanda Dobbins?

  The housemaid, and that is what the housemaid is for, and she's perfect in it.

• 1:00:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:00:13Amanda Dobbins?

  But there is a sincerity to what she does in all of this that's pretty amazing.

• 1:00:19Sean Fennessey?

  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 the 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.

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• 1:01:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very unusual film. I could not really think of too many other movies.

• 1:01:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is cool.

• 1:02:00Sean Fennessey?

  It is cool. I think that's part of the reason why, and I think that your general audience is going to be made a little uncomfortable by this movie, or bored in some ways. And I don't know that it has necessarily the same, that uplift in the first half of The Brutalist. You know, that's sort of like.

• 1:02:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, there's no ba ba ba ba.

• 1:02:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, exactly. That triumphal quality. This movie is different. I would say that it ends in a similar way to the way that the previous, The Brutalist begins. But the movie does feel like a little bit of splitting the atom between Vox Lux and The Brutalist to me.

• 1:02:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Sean Fennessey?

  You know, in terms of like, here's how music and performance collides with artistry, pain, spirituality, history. It's a very cool project they have going on. I like what they're up to.

• 1:02:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I was, I am really into it. I think this, to me, I clicked with this film the most of the three. And, you know, to anyone who has listened to what we're talking about and is like, no thanks. I was skeptical walking in. It was not like my most anticipated of the Venice Film Festival. And it, and it really did win me over.

• 1:03:07Sean Fennessey?

  I think Mona is also an amazing advocate for the movie, so I highly recommend people listen to the conversation with her. It's not even really, it's not the kind of movie that can be spoiled. There's a Wikipedia page that details Ann Lee's life. It is a speculative portrait, as she points out.

• 1:03:19Amanda Dobbins?

  She is no longer alive. I just want to let everyone know. Yeah.

• 1:03:23Sean Fennessey?

  But I do think that, first of all, the music is easy to return to. I've started listening to it on Spotify. Maybe new writing music for me, you know, Daniel Blumberg.

• 1:03:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, alright.

• 1:03:33Sean Fennessey?

  Who made that ba ba bum bum moment in The Brutalist, also makes the music here.

• 1:03:38Sean Fennessey?

  I can't say I'm swayed to explore the Shakers ideology any further. It's not something that really-

• 1:03:43Amanda Dobbins?

  We've been talking about this. I'm good on spirituality.

• 1:03:45Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:03:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I got my own.

• 1:03:46Sean Fennessey?

  What could I discover? What could I pursue?

• 1:03:49Amanda Dobbins?

  The Shakers also made furniture, right? They're making, yeah, yeah, the furniture is lovely.

• 1:03:53Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's also something Amanda Seyfried and Lewis Pullman learned to do is they learned to make this furniture.

• 1:03:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is really cool.

• 1:03:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Downright Daniel Day Lewis-esque.

• 1:04:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and I like the furniture, but maybe I'll just admire that from afar.

• 1:04:05Sean Fennessey?

  18th century would have been a tough time to live.

• 1:04:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, think about how bad it smelled. You ever think about that? I think about that all the time.

• 1:04:13Sean Fennessey?

  But you wouldn't know any different because there's no deodorant.

• 1:04:16Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, but it's not just like bodily smell, you know, like sewage, like food waste, all of these sorts of things.

• 1:04:22Sean Fennessey?

  But you wouldn't know any different.

• 1:04:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I spend a lot of time thinking about how dehydrated I would be and how terrible everything would smell.

• 1:04:29Sean Fennessey?

  But you would have God inside you, unlike now, in which you live in a godless world.

• 1:04:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I find God all around me every day.

• 1:04:34Sean Fennessey?

  Do you?

• 1:04:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Sean Fennessey?

  While shopping.

• 1:04:36Amanda Dobbins?

  In the furniture.

• 1:04:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, well, that's an advocacy for the movie. This is more advocacy for Mona Fastvold. Let's go to my conversation with her right now.

• 1:04:49Sean Fennessey?

  Mona Fastvold here for the first time. Thank you for being here. I'm very excited to talk to you about this movie. There are some superficial similarities between The Brutalist and The Testament of Ann Lee. So I was hoping you could walk me through the development, the discovery of Ann Lee's life for you and kind of when this movie really first started.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Well, so we wrote it before we shot The Brutalist. But yes, I didn't really think about the similarities until I was in the edit. While I was editing The Testament of Ann Lee, I was also promoting and putting out The Brutalist with Brady and just talking about The Brutalist every day while, you know, when you were in that really, that space when you're editing and you're just analyzing the work that you've done.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  All of a sudden, we started seeing all of these similarities and seeing sort of how the pictures both spoke to one another. It's like they're both immigrating to America. They're both trying to do something impossible, perhaps unwanted.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Of a guard uh in many ways philosophically, artistically, um both of these characters. But they're very different characters. So it was it was an interesting kind of all of a sudden it was an it was interesting looking at it at it as a companion piece. But we didn't think about that at all when we started when we were writing it. We um we had written the brutalists and we. We I was I was fascinated by the Shakers. I I came across it when I was doing research on the world to come, which takes place in eighteen fifty six. Um and I was looking, I was actually looking for some for hymn um to use in the film. And I was looking at something that was would date further back than than eighteen fifty six, something that could have been passed down from um.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  To them from their mothers uh or something like that. So I started just looking at, you know. Hymns from that from Massa- that also takes place in Massachusetts uh and upstate New York. So I was looking at that area and I was reading about. You know, the hymns and history of them. And I came across this one specific song that I really fell in love with called Pretty Mother's Home. That's in the film as well, that song by this beautiful um actor and singer, Lark White. And Joseph and Josephine Foster as well sings on that. And um. And I I I started reading about it and and that led me to the Shakers and to Mother Anne Lee. And um and I thought it was just a fascinating story, a fascinating historical figure.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  She kept surprising me as I was learning more about her. There was a lot of detective work that went into learning about her because there's not that much that has been written about her and. Um the, you know, there's one like and the word, which is great biography, um but that one, that's the only one that was available. Everything else was more or less out of print. Um and you had to sort of, yeah, go down, go digging.

• 1:07:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  But as I learned more about her, I was really, I was just fascinated. I was surprised by how. Radical she was, her ideas, um, for, you know, uh, justice, equality, um, and how sort of, what a feminist she was. And then there's sort of this like this aspect of the religion that that is that they worship through ecstatic song and dance. Which I thought was so cinematic and interesting. It's like a, it's a, it's a forced musical, like it has to be a musical because that's how they live their life. It's that they sort of almost live their life like a musical. Early on, so all those aspects I just felt were really just made for an interesting project to dedicate years and years of my life to.

• 1:08:22Sean Fennessey?

  I want to hear about those years. I saw you describe it as a speculative retelling of her life, which I think is a really interesting phrase. And then whenever there's a biopic, for lack of a better word, there is this line between truth of a person's life and what makes a kind of coherent narrative film. So how did you think about that? Especially since there's maybe not as much material as you would have liked to even just use as a source when you were writing the film?

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Well, there's definitely blanks that has to be filled in. There's definitely things that you have to, to imagine. And but it's all, you know, it's all based on a lot of research. There is a lot of information, but speculative, yes, because it, what's written down as truths are, it's not written down by Ann Lee herself because she was illiterate. And it is written by, down by her witnesses, um, much like the Bible. So is it, did it really happen this way or did it happen another way? It's, it's, it's their interpretation of, of, um, of these events. And then, then again, it's, it's ours interpretation of them. And so, you know, I just, I sat down, I did as much research as I could.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  And, and I felt like the story and the structure of the story was very much there. And then when we sit down to, I sat down to write it with Brady, we, we really. For us, it was really, okay, now, now you write from intuition because now this becomes a dialogue between us and this material and us and this historical figure, then that's sort of, that's where the film lives for me, in that conversation between the filmmaker and the, and the, and the historical figure or the historical events they were portraying. So therefore, you know, it's not a, it's not a straight biopic. I'm not trying to say, oh, this is exactly what happened, but um, this is, it's more, this is my conversation with, with what happened.

• 1:10:12Sean Fennessey?

  I asked Brady a somewhat similar question around The Brutalist, which was that I felt like that film and this film, the drive and ambition and the sort of like, the commitment, devotion to the belief and the process of what those two characters are doing, it does map kind of neatly onto the life of an independent filmmaker. And like, do you see a connection, like a close personal connection between what you do and your work and what Ann Lee stood for, how she did it, how she pursued it? Like, is there a match there?

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that, you know, I think that these, both of these stories, this, yes, they, they do, it is for us, my personal sort of connection to the story is of course, you know, tied to what is it that drives you? What is this faith that drives you to try and create impossible, you know, things? Like, it, it is, feels impossible to make these movies, um, down to the very end in many ways, even putting them out into the world and like finding a great distributor, even when you've made it, like, you know, it's so hard, it's so challenging and it, it can't, you have so many no's and you have so many shut doors over and over and over again. Um, but then, you know, with this project

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  and with The Brutalist, we have a tight-knit group of people that we're working so closely with and that just stands, you know, together with us and, and we, you know, and will just... Do anything it takes to to make it happen. So yes, there's like, there's definitely parallels in that. I'm sure there's that. You know, that part, that's that journey of that struggle is something, you know, we I guess we keep returning to. But I think also that defiance is appealing to me because there's a part of me that I guess. When nobody wants it, I still will not stop making the movie. I won't say, okay, well, I guess no one. No one wants to finance this, my shaker musical. I don't know why, but uh.

• 1:12:04Sean Fennessey?

  Why do you, why do you think that is? Why do you feel like you, when someone says no, that almost empowers you more to keep going?

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Because I believe in the story so much, so, so much. I do. If not, I wouldn't be making it. If not, I wouldn't dedicate years of my life to it. I and I I don't know why I believe in it, but I do. I mean, I just do. You have, it's it's a bit of a. And that's, I guess, the kind of faith aspect. I'm not religious. I wasn't raised um in a religious household, but I. I am interested in faith and I do think like, what is, what is it that drives you to be so uncomfortable all the time as well? You know, it's it's hard, it's hard, you know, and and you're just, you're pushing yourself to the very limit to make something that you believe in. Uh that the world is also telling you maybe, no, thanks, we're good, we're good on this.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  And then, of course, you know, like, I mean, the wonderful thing is that I think that if you do make something that's really singular and very precise and specific. Then there usually is an appetite for it.

• 1:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  Because of the specific specificity of it, I think. At least that's what I seek out. Something that's just like one vision, really clear, precise.

• 1:13:11Sean Fennessey?

  That is definitely how I felt watching it. And I do feel like I I couldn't, I'm I'm fond of comparing movies to other movies. That's something that cinephiles do nonstop all the time. But there are, there's not a lot of strong comparisons that can be made because of the structure, because of the approach that you take in telling the story, that. Sort of forced musical that you described. I love that phrase. But one thing I wanted to ask you about is that. The the sequence of events of her life at times are dark and also absurd. And the idea of a forced musical is kind of absurd on its face. But the tone of the film is very straight. You do not lean into irony. There's no, there's no wink in the film whatsoever. There are some humorous moments, but not, not much. And holding that tone of seriousness, like in our society now, can sometimes be considered a negative.

• 1:13:54Sean Fennessey?

  But you really make it work despite or in part because of all of these choices. So like, I was wondering if you could just talk about the decision on the tone of the film and how you wanted it to go.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  It was so important to me to stay right in that space. And it was very hard because it's easy to make fun of her. It's easy to debunk the myths of her. That's the easy route. The hard route is to take her seriously and to treat her with respect. It's more, it's more difficult, I think. And it's felt more radical in a way. And it almost felt more radical for me in a way to also. This is the most, this is the most traditional story structure that we've ever written for me and Brady. It's like a three act.

• 1:14:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's linear.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  It's linear and all that. So of course, there's things in the, but I knew that the filmmaking was going to be, um, be radical. And I knew that with the movement and the, and the music and the editorial pattern and, and I knew that that was going to bring that in. So I kind of, I wanted that structure to be a bit more, yeah, to be a bit more linear.

• 1:15:03Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  I like a cradle to grave story and also felt like treating her with respect by doing that. I wanted, I wanted to have this, to see this is her life. This is not, it's not just this little part of her life or this little one idea about her. It's, it's, this is her entire life and it was grand. And here's a grand gesture to celebrate that or to, you know, even celebrate it, just to even to look at it. Um, but I also think because I, when I was, when I began to research her. And I had moments where I thought, oh, when am I gonna? Feel, when am I gonna be like, oh, what a charlatan, you know, that kind of idea? Cause you, I think that's the, that's the relationship that I have to a lot of stories about uh

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  cult leaders or uh other religious leaders or even political leaders, like people who are driven by ego or personal gain or um who are manipulating and and leading from fear and then through and through reading about Ann Lee, I just discovered that she was always just kind of leading from this like place of love and it was never about her and it was never about her ego and it was always just about um trying to create safe space where people could worship in a different way and where they could worship through creating objects or art, drawings, paintings, music, um the architecture, you know, like all these things. So it's, it just felt like this very, it was surprising how sort of pure and like

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  and and and full of love and caring their their beliefs were and how and how radical they were and I just, I wanted to, I wanted the audience to to make up their own mind as they went through the story. I couldn't, you know, go full, couldn't join the shakers and but I couldn't go full, you know, I couldn't be, become a preacher with her. But I, I certainly wanted to keep this sort of, create the space where you could just make up your own mind and maybe change your mind throughout and have different thoughts and feelings about her, like I did when I was researching her.

• 1:17:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I was thinking about this revisiting a movie last night was, is this movie a celebration or just a portrait? And you, you kind of hinted at that in that answer too, is it?

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  A little bit of both, huh?

• 1:17:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:16Speaker 04

  Hopefully, hopefully, it's about, it's, it's, it can be both. I think you can celebrate someone without agreeing with them completely as well. Also, she's a portrait of her time.

• 1:17:24Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:25Speaker 04

  You know, like arguing for celibacy and dissolving of marriages at that time. It was her only way to, to gain autonomy as a woman. She was the only way to say, okay, I, there is no husbands and wives because husbands and wives are not equal. It's a wife, you're your husband's property, but brothers and sisters are equal, so that's what we're gonna be. And that's how we, we are gonna, and the, what is the female figure of authority, a mother. Everyone respects their mother. I will be a mother, I will be a leader as a mother. And so using these sort of different ideas to create autonomy and to sort of find a place where she could be a leader, I think is, at that time, I understand.

• 1:18:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's interesting because she's not messianic, right? She's like a community stirrer, you know? Like, there's a difference between the cult leaders that you're talking about, too.

• 1:18:16Speaker 04

  I think so, too. And I think it's that lack of ego. And I think that is also something that's really connected to motherhood in a way. Where you're like, I am just here. I'm like, living for my children. I'm like, I will like, you know, you know, move mountains to protect and love my children. And it's like, that that power comes from that, like, intense overwhelming feeling of love.

• 1:18:39Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm. I'm curious about the conception and the actual kind of building out of the execution of the movie. So I know that the scripts are usually pretty detailed in terms of what you're gonna shoot and how you're gonna shoot it. But I don't, in terms of choreography and song and this, that movement in the editing style that you described.

• 1:19:01Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:19:02Sean Fennessey?

  Are you writing through all of that? Are you saying like, we're going to see in these quick cutting moments, this kind of like euphoric experience of being inside of this religion or this sect?

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, for example, Beautiful Treasures is described, you know, as a serious, as a movement piece. You're moving through this dance or movement sequence where she's with all the circular spinning movements that, and then you have scenes and moments that intercut with that, um, with all of these births and losses and the sexuality as well. Um, so that's, that's written out as so, like, this is, here's nine years of her life that we see through this one piece of movement and song.

• 1:19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Do the, do the songs and choreography exist before you're writing the script?

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  No, uh, I wrote this, Brady and I wrote the script. First, and then I started working with Daniel right away and Celia shortly thereafter. Um, Daniel first, because we would give Celia music um and and demos to work with as well. Um, so um, Daniel Blumberg and I would, we start started talking. The first thing we dove into was um the very first song, The Woman Clothed by the Sun, which was like our first true exploration of what this, what the music and the score and the songs could be be like. And that's that's an original piece that's based um on shaker, um, on shake shaker text.

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  Um, and and that was, the first thing we were talking about was like, we wanted, we had, we wanted to use bells. That's the only instrument um to begin with, and then breathwork and and percussion as as as part of the movement. So um, using all of the sounds that you hear when you're like, the the slaps and the hits and the even down to like, I'm the finger moving across the table, like all of those sounds just really being a big part of the music. And I, it's very important to me. And I spoke to Daniel and um Steve, our our wonderful mixer as well, about this, that there's never going to be a separation between the worlds that we are in, and the music is not going to be

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  um like a typical musical where you, the diegetic world dies out and and the music overtakes. Um, no, I want I want the world to be as present, if not even more, within the music. Um, so we started diving into different kind of shaker hymns and um and into the shaker music tradition. And we knew that we wanted to use a lot of their traditional hymns and then um, and then writing something that was original, a few pieces that were original as well. But not until after we really had understood their musical tradition and then. Again, the same as you do with research, you try and understand their tradition and then you you make it, we make it your own. I wanted there to be Daniel's conversation with

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  the Shaker tradition, so I wanted there to be a lot of Daniel in there as well. And the same with Celia as well, it's like I was showing her all of the research. I had very specific images and ideas of things I wanted to do movement wise. Um, that was based on Shaker drawings and, and, um, and paintings. Uh, and some, um, dance sanitation as well, uh, that they had, that we found in their archives, but beyond that, I also wanted it to be Celia's, um, Celia's, I wanted Celia's choreography as well and her language to be brought in and combine that with the research as well.

• 1:22:29Sean Fennessey?

  So I saw the film a second time yesterday with my wife and I said, what would you like to know about the making of this movie? Because she was kind of like, I've not seen a film like this before. And she said, I have to assume that the person who made it has a background in dance, but I did, actually didn't know if you did. And then you sat down and you said, I, I, did you study as a ballerina?

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  Yes, I danced from when I was four years old until I was eighteen. Then had a back injury, so I stopped, uh, dancing. Um, but I, um, yes, I, I danced.

• 1:22:57Sean Fennessey?

  But it's like a film that understands.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  But movement is so, especially be part of my, how I work as a director. It's, it's really, even though I haven't, I mean, I used to direct music videos when I started out, but I, for me, the camera movement and the, and the performer's movement, um, and the relationship between the, um, those two is, is always choreography. It's always a dance for me. Finding that right rhythm, finding that correct rhythm, like if you're finding the edit with movement and, and having movement always be guiding your, your edit as well. It's just such a big part of it. So for me, this was just like a continued exploration of that and just very, very exciting and fun to, to work with, um,

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  with, and Celia, my choreographer, we've, you know, we've known each other for almost twenty years. We have such a long history, so we have a really lovely shorthand and, and, um, it was, I would bring, I would have my cinematographer and our camera operator as well would come in, in the dance studio and, and work with us during rehearsals. Um, early on, even we were doing early workshops with Amanda and, and with our twenty five dancers, um, and so we, they, they come in so that I can start working not just with. Adjusting the choreography, but um but also adjusting the camera movement and really working then with them and saying, I want you guys to be here with with your team and moving

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  this way. And then work with Celia and say, now, can you adjust, you know, two hundred people to like or pull out twenty five to make room for us, because this is where I want the movement to be. So it's it's a it's about really about everyone understanding that language together and practicing.

• 1:24:45Sean Fennessey?

  I love how they fit together. It's really, it's gorgeous. And you can see the intentionality with the way that the camera's moving around this big world that you've made. It's really quite impressive. I you know, I know you guys have talked about this a lot over the years, but you make these what seem like extraordinary scaled movies at lower budgets.

• 1:25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Sean Fennessey?

  Independently.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:25:06Sean Fennessey?

  But you know, I know people are asking you about the ship, but the ship is one of those things where I'm like, I don't, I just don't know how you where where did that ship come from? How did you pull this off for quote unquote smaller film? But even just the period costume and the sense of being out in the world and immigrating to a new country and kind of like transforming the environment that they're in from one segment of the film to another. I I don't really understand it, what little I understand about how you finance a film. So like, can you talk a little bit about doing it for this film?

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so it, you know, it's not a necessity that we, one, like, we we I want we want to tell these kind of, we want to tell an epic grand story. And then we do make independent films and the stories are quite radical. So it, you know, it's just kind of this is what it is. I I um I would, you know, it's it's hard to do it, obviously, it's challenging, but part of me also, I'm excited by the challenge because it does um it just inspire more inspires creative solutions. So.

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  Um, one of the things that I did on this film, it's new to this film, is that I, um, we brought back a traditional matte painter. Um, so we would, I would shoot, for example, the ship when the ship is docked. I shot, we, we, I found the ship in Sweden, the only tall ship that was available in the world that we luckily were allowed to shoot at. So that's a real ship. Um, and when that, we, and I shot that ship docked in that wide shot. And then I had this wonderful man, Lee Took, he hand painted, um, the surroundings. And then we shoot that on film and we scan that back in and then we, with our VFX company, we married it to images.

• 1:26:50Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:51Speaker 04

  And then I add a little bit of movement, a tiny bit of VFX, like some birds and some humans and some animals to it. Um, and some more movements to the sails. Just, so this is a combination of old and a new technique, which I really enjoy. There's a slightly like, slightly artificial, um, feel to it or very, but it's very painterly.

• 1:27:10Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  I, I couldn't afford to do massive CG builds, like, you know, like you would do with a period piece now if you have all the money in the world.

• 1:27:18Sean Fennessey?

  But it's, I, what you've done is better. I mean.

• 1:27:20Speaker 04

  I, for, I, for me, but I just, for, for this movie, I just really prefer this look for it, like this feel to it. It feels organic, it's handmade, everything in the movie is handmade. It, there's so much craftsmanship in, in the film, uh, that is, you know, like down to us finding Shaker blueprints and, and building in their style and learn Amanda and Lewis and everyone learning woodworking from the interpreters at the Hancock Shaker Village, like a wood joinery and making pegs. And it's just, we, we all just became so obsessed with the craftsmanship in it. So even just bringing back Lee, so Lee Took would, he would paint, you know, all of our little set extensions.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  So we would, you know, and I would work with my cinematographer and my production designer all the way from pre-production into end of post-production with my cinematographer joining every conversation with Lee and saying.

• 1:28:14Speaker 04

  Listen, I think we need to adjust the light slightly here uh so it matches what we shot. Or there's a bow to the lens that we need to um recreate at the top corner here. Or you know, or my production designer would say, oh, no, this this window seal right there is is a little bit off in the period. And we should, you know, just, I mean, we we just, we could go on forever. We we just kept going until it was like pencils down, we're just obsessing of these details. And but it was really wonderful because we, you know, I wanted the film to feel like you like crawled into a painting. And by bringing back, you know, Lee and his his way of working, I really felt like it was evoking the past.

• 1:28:56Speaker 04

  But then adding in our collaboration with the VFX company, it's you're bringing in a little bit of the future. It's an exciting place to be at, I think.

• 1:29:04Sean Fennessey?

  That's so interesting. I was very randomly on the Universal Studios lot tour recently with my four year old. And the tour is like just a series of rides now, except for one thing. There's this tank that has a giant blue wall. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but they've shot many films in front of this giant blue wall. Kind of representing in a similar fashion, using matte style to create different environments. But now it's just like a stop on a tour. It's not something that studios use anymore. They don't use that wall.

• 1:29:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Sean Fennessey?

  Because some of the best movies ever made use this incredible tool that you built that still stands.

• 1:29:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Sean Fennessey?

  So it's very cool that you've done that.

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  It's exciting to do, and it's exciting to bring back those techniques. But my thought around doing it on a small budget is also that they, you know, they filmmakers used to do, figure it out somehow. Before we even had these other extraordinary modern tools.

• 1:29:51Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:52Speaker 04

  Um, so it's, it's like, there must be a way. Like, how did they do it? How did they move, you know, cameras around like that? You know, the boat, we, I couldn't afford um a a big enough crane to shoot the overhead shots on the boat. So we built an arm and we rigged it off the rain tower. It was crazy. But it worked and it was beautiful and um you know it's it's it's a lot it of course it's a lot of like if you you know the boat there was only a few angles that I could shoot on it for uh for the exteriors for it to work and I had to also have the sails low um um up in order to for it to work as well so it's just like all of these things that really had to come together and you just you know you're up

• 1:30:37Speaker 04

  you know it's till four in the morning trying to figure out how to get a bunch of people from Belgium to come and the only people in the world who can rig these sails you know things like that where you're just like you just have like you know terrible heartburn and you wanna you know just you terrified that it's not gonna all come together so I would love to have a little bit more security in my life but uh and when it comes to these things but also you know it's it somehow we you know you figure out ways to make it work and and yeah that's

• 1:31:04Sean Fennessey?

  You get called audacious on the flip side of it so there's a phrase in the film that popped out to me the second time I saw it um that appears a couple of times and I just wanted to hear you talk about where it came from which was exteriorized rottenness I was like I've not heard those words together in that way before and they you know they they recur in the film and felt like a very modern condition and not a not a seventeenth or eighteenth century

• 1:31:31Speaker 04

  It's a quote from their testament uh you know it's just something that they that they an end from from the from from the Bible that there again so it is it's an old it's an old term and so I just thought it was so such a wonderful description of like

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  like you know just like opening it all up and just letting it all out and and and it's just it's it's just such a yeah it's wonderful but I can't take credit for it it's from their testament

• 1:32:00Sean Fennessey?

  This is very powerful, very resonant.

• 1:32:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Sean Fennessey?

  Um I do want to hear a little bit about the collaboration with Amanda I know you guys have known each other for a long time you've worked together previously

• 1:32:11Sean Fennessey?

  This seems like a hard job being Emily. This seemed like a very hard, like a challenging performance for a variety of reasons. Like, there's a huge emotional swings in terms of what she has to portray. I read a bit about some of the prosthetics that you guys talked about during the birthing sequences, which seemed pretty extreme. Obviously, choreography, performance, singing, woodworking. This is a, it's a, it's a, it's a full plate of work. It sounds like you were pretty direct about what would be expected of her when you guys were talking about doing it. But I'm, I'm, I'd like to hear you just kind of talk about the collaboration and what was, what was challenging, what was easy about doing it together, what she was adept at, what she wasn't as adept at, maybe, that she had to learn?

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  I mean, she had to learn everything. I mean, she's, she's a great singer, and she's a great mover, and she's a great actress. But, you know, it's, this is a difficult accent. So she started immediately, she started a year in advance, working on it. She's such a hard worker, Amanda. She's really throws, she, she gives everything when she's doing something. She doesn't do something halfway. Like, that's just not who she is. And I knew that about her, and I knew that she was gonna give me everything, because we had, we had great conversations about this character very early on about this project. And, and we had a really wonderful experience working together, and, and directing her was easy for me.

• 1:33:37Speaker 04

  Sometimes you have to take, spend a lot of time trying to find the key into a performer. I like that. I like trying and finding it, and then all of a sudden, you're like, okay, something, if it doesn't click right away, and you, it's my job to really try and find what is it, how can I help you best as your first, the first viewer, the first moviegoer watching you perform? How can I, how can I help you and guide you? And, but with Amanda, for, you know, it was just a very easy, immediately. We spoke the same language. So... Uh when we we saw, yeah, she saw, she had to, so she she but she, I didn't know that she was gonna give me this much time. It was very generous, but she cared so much, she cared as much as me.

• 1:34:21Speaker 04

  She connected with this role and she wanted to do, she knew how hard it was gonna be. Um and she was ready to just go full force and start the work. So she started doing accent work. Uh year in advance with Tanner and Marshall, our wonderful accent, um designer really, cause she built this accent. Cause no one knew how they really spoke back then. So this is based on a lot of research that she did. And then she started working with uh with Celia and myself on on the movement. And um and with Daniel and I, we started singing immediately. So it was just a lot of prep work, cause she.

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  Everything had to come from this place of of just honest, truthful, um movement, honest, truthful singing. It couldn't be performative, it couldn't be musical theater in the traditional sense. Um even though she's amazing at that, that's not what this stor- this story or this character required. So it had to come from, she had to sort of really relearn how, like retrain, detrain herself from. Oh, you know, she sings, she's such a great, she's so, you know, such a great singer and so, she's so skilled. So she had to kind of unlearn that and just start trying to find a place where she's just not listening to herself. And so we started going into the studio and singing through imagining giving birth or whispering or.

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  Screaming or laughing or just try and just find ways of really just connecting um in a different way to her voice. And the same with the movement as well. Celia really, her thought was, okay, I'm gonna create this choreography. I'm gonna give you this piece of movement, but now it's yours. I don't care about it being perfect. I always would say to Celia, like, I don't wanna see dancing, I just wanna see move, we ju- we just wanted to see movement. And uh so now you own this movement and it doesn't have, it just has to be with a lot of intent. The intent needs to be like in your fingertips, in every like, needs to be go all the way out here. And all the way down to your toes, but it can be your intent and it can be your story.

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  And it doesn't have to be all about, oh, I'm doing this perfect, you know, beautiful piece of movement. But you know, it's it's, she's she she gave it, gave us everything and was willing to do all that work. And then, so then when we came on set. The hard things are, of course, that you're dancing covered in snow and rain and mud. Or and every single day, there's like, I have ten goats and a cow and a baby in a scene. You know, it's just all of those things. It just makes it harder. But I think that both Amanda and I thrive in those environments and kind of maximalism. She she gives herself to the moment. And when you've done all your homework, you can then you can rest in that moment. And just let every let the surroundings affect you.

• 1:37:08Sean Fennessey?

  I agree that this is not musical theatre-y, but would you ever consider making this a stage musical?

• 1:37:13Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 1:37:14Sean Fennessey?

  Because it definitely could play.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes. If there's a interest in that, we would love to do that. I think I I think the music and the movement is so exciting and and I just I I could look at. I would love to. I would love. I would love for people to see the movement um on a stage. Because I I exclude some like pretty fantastic things.

• 1:37:38Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:37:38Speaker 04

  Just because it it's not right for the story and it's not right for the character to be for the camera to be an observer. Uh, most of the time, the camera has to be a believer. It has to be intimate. It has to be with and and her story and her journey. And there's like some glorious like parts of of this choreography, like Hunger and Thirst. That's a beautiful um movement piece. And it's I should just like post it on on YouTube or something, the rehearsal videos, because I really love the movement piece. But in the end, I just needed that that that sequence needed to be one continuous handheld take that's just with her.

• 1:38:16Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:17Speaker 04

  But I still feel the movement so much. I feel the intent of the movement in that scene. And it's just so delicious. And I but I would love to. I would love to for someone to see it on a stage.

• 1:38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Even just as a one-time only, it could be.

• 1:38:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe we'll do like a special movement night in New York.

• 1:38:32Sean Fennessey?

  That would be cool.

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  We're doing a concert in in the UK.

• 1:38:37Sean Fennessey?

  Of of.

• 1:38:38Speaker 04

  Of the score.

• 1:38:38Sean Fennessey?

  All the music.

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  All the music. And yeah, with Amanda and Daniel.

• 1:38:42Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible. Wow. So she'll sing this, the hymns.

• 1:38:44Speaker 04

  She'll sing all of it, yes.

• 1:38:45Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Sean Fennessey?

  Amazing. Um.

• 1:38:49Sean Fennessey?

  Will you continue working in the independent mode? Like, this film's got distribution from a major studio.

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:38:56Sean Fennessey?

  Disney Searchlight is distributing this movie.

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  How cool is that?

• 1:39:00Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy, right?

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  How crazy is that? It's very exciting. Thank you. I am, yes, it's so, we always said that Amanda was like a little bit of a, like a little bit of like a fucked up Disney princess in this film. Well, that was Brady's joke as we were making.

• 1:39:15Sean Fennessey?

  She, that's kind of her persona, I think, at large, too, you know?

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

  It is, it is, and I love that for her. I love that for this character. And then it's, you know, it's with Searchlight, which is so wonderful.

• 1:39:24Sean Fennessey?

  But does that, now that you've been kind of escorted into like a slightly more Hollywood experience here in the aftermath of making the movie, does that give you any ideas? Could you guys work in the world of Hollywood in this way in this time? Or do you think you'll stick to, we make our movies the way that we want to make them? We, you know, get financing the best way that we know how? I'm just curious.

• 1:39:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I will, I will always make the movies the way I want to make them. And if the studio want to make them with me the way that I want to make them, then that makes, then sure. I mean, I don't have any, there's not like a, I have a philosophy about filmmaking, not just about the stories I tell, but about how we build the projects as well. And that is important to me, um, down to even the economy of it. There's so many.

• 1:40:13Sean Fennessey?

  Lee is coming out here, your philosophy of filmmaking.

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  There is, because there is, you're creating a small community and how that community functions is important to me, um, that everyone is taken care of. Uh, and that there is, uh, not too much of a, not a hierarchy that is negative hierarchy, that there is, that that doesn't exist, that of course, everyone has roles that they fill. And because dangerous things can happen on film sets, because you're rigging electricity, big lights, you're doing stunts, all these things. Everyone needs to do the job that they're assigned to do, of course. It's like, you know, like, oh, you're on a ship or in the army or something. It has to be precise. But the creative sort of, to create a creative environment,

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  whenever anyone can come to my monitor and we can all talk and we're all part of creating something together. And that sense of unity is incredibly important to me.

• 1:41:09Speaker 04

  So I hope that, and I don't know how to fully preserve that, and I don't know how to have all the autonomy that I need. Which is, you know, final cuts and all these things that are to preserve that within the Hollywood um uni- universe. I don't know, I don't know if that, how, how, you know, some people do, there's some great filmmakers who've done that for their whole career. Um, and maybe, maybe I get to not have to, you know. Uh, work so hard on the, on the financing part in the future, but I do wanna preserve them. I do want it to make sense still also.

• 1:41:49Speaker 04

  There's a sustainability element here that's important to me a little bit.

• 1:41:52Sean Fennessey?

  Andy, what do you mean by that?

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  I mean that I want, I feel a great responsibility when I'm making, when I'm telling a story for it also. I feel a responsibility for people who put the money in as well. I want it to make sense, you know, in every way when the film comes out as well, so. You tell a really radical story and I, I don't, I don't, I would love for it to reach. So many people as possible, we can't always guarantee that and maybe some doesn't take time.

• 1:42:21Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  And I guess I'm, I feel anxious about not making everyone whole and making sure that everyone, every single person is, you know. That they made sense for them as well, so. I think there's like that, all of that autonomy that I get from keeping the budget at a quite reasonable place um feels good to me.

• 1:42:43Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  That being said, one of my favorite movies of all time is Lovers on the Bridge. And.

• 1:42:49Sean Fennessey?

  Garrix, yeah.

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  One of the most expensive films in, you know, the history of French filmmaking and. It was, did not make its money back and it was not, it was a, you know, it was really, uh, but I would, and I would be heartbroken if that film didn't exist. So it's not really, it's not about like, you know, that it, that it's a bad thing that you make a beautiful piece of art and then over time, you know, it maybe. It, it just, you should just be, I'm just glad they exist, but I think I, I think also maybe being, being a woman as well, there's. There's like a really, in this really heavily ma- male dominated profession, I feel. The need and the want for every aspect of it to work and to make sense. And uh, I don't know, maybe that's something I have to get over.

• 1:43:35Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no.

• 1:43:36Speaker 04

  But I do feel, I feel that need for it. Just like I want the whole process, I wanna understand the whole process from beginning to end. From, you know, writing to the film is on, you know, your stream or whatnot. And that whole process, I wanna, I wanna somehow be in slightly, somehow in, in part of it and really and understand it for it to, to fully like make sense for the project.

• 1:44:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I always say it's an art form, but it is a commercial art form, right? It's a, it is a release art form. You're meant to share with as many people as possible, right?

• 1:44:08Speaker 04

  You are, you are. Um, and it's exciting if you can do something that's radical and that pushes boundaries and ideas within that format. I, I I am, you know, I grew up in Norway and, and I, uh, I've spent my adult life in America. Uh, my films have always been an American, European co-production of some sort. I, that, that space between the two is, is, is a place I really love. There's elements, I don't want my films to be, um, my films are, are, are there, I find them to be to speak to the Hollywood tradition as much as it speaks to the European.

• 1:44:46Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  Um, for both of, for the, everything I write and the things I direct. I really love American movies. Um, you know, we're here in the city of David Lynch Spielberg and, you know, there's, I, and I love, I love those. I love the grand, you know, American movies as well.

• 1:45:05Sean Fennessey?

  This is like a John Ford movie, but with music in it. I mean, this is a story about a a hero conquering America in some ways and in other ways not, you know?

• 1:45:13Speaker 04

  And I wa- I wanted to nod to that with the story because I felt her being this, this, you know, this audacious feminist, you know, religious leader, but then to try and give her a little bit of that Hollywood treatment is exciting to me. So if Hollywood wants to come along on some of these things, then sure, that would be great. But, you know, if not, then. It's I know how to do it. I know how to build these movies and and execute them and make them happen. And, you know, I um if I can't find distributor who wants to put it out, then we'll figure that out, too. I think there's you can you can always learn about this process. And

• 1:45:57Speaker 04

  there's lots of good people that you can hire who will work with you. And, you know, but now, being with a luxurious distributor for this strange lady, Ann Lee, is fabulous. It's wonderful.

• 1:46:12Sean Fennessey?

  I'll be watching regardless. Mona, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? I don't know if you've been watching movies on your journeys.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, I have been watching movies on my journeys. The last great thing that I saw, well, I mean, I presented a print of Lovers on the Bridge in Sag Harbor at the cinema out there.

• 1:46:38Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:46:38Speaker 04

  When we were there. So, I mean, that was so beautiful to see that print. It was stunning. It was so gorgeous.

• 1:46:45Sean Fennessey?

  When did you first see it? Did you see it upon release?

• 1:46:47Speaker 04

  Uh, no, I I mean, I was young. What year did it come out?

• 1:46:53Sean Fennessey?

  In mid 90s, right?

• 1:46:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess I saw it upon release, I would imagine. Yeah. And back in Norway.

• 1:47:00Sean Fennessey?

  What is it about that movie that touches you?

• 1:47:02Speaker 04

  I think it's I think it's the ambition, and I think it's the physicality. There's a lot of movement in this as well, which is like incredible. It's like one of the best, most incredible physical performance, performance artists and and performances that that exists. And Juliet, I don't know, there's seeing it now, it was making it was bringing tears to my eyes because it really made me think so much about how many in New York now that, you know, that there's a crisis with people who are, you know, unhoused people and and here as well, obviously, and just seeing this beautiful, like romantic, wonderful love story from their perspective. I was like, I'm happy to. I think we should more people should revisit that film.

• 1:47:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great recommendation.

• 1:47:47Speaker 04

  Right now, yeah.

• 1:47:48Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Mona.

• 1:47:48Speaker 04

  No, thanks. Thanks for having me.

• 1:47:55Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thanks to Mona Fastvold. Thanks to Chris Ryan, CR, Third Chair in Our Hearts. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. We'll be back next week with a draft.

• 1:48:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's a Matt Damon and Ben Affleck draft.

• 1:48:10Amanda Dobbins?

  So excited.

• 1:48:11Sean Fennessey?

  The cause for such draft is the film The Rip.

• 1:48:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I already, I made my long list already. It's like harder choices have never been made for me personally.

• 1:48:20Sean Fennessey?

  We tried this once before.

• 1:48:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Sean Fennessey?

  With George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

• 1:48:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And it didn't.

• 1:48:24Sean Fennessey?

  Complicated episode.

• 1:48:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I guess we'd seen Wolves.

• 1:48:28Sean Fennessey?

  Wolves.

• 1:48:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Wolves. Wolves.

• 1:48:31Sean Fennessey?

  Wolves.

• 1:48:32Amanda Dobbins?

  It's I'm affixed Wolves and then Wolves. Yeah.

• 1:48:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Amanda Dobbins?

  All illustrious moments in our cultural history. Um, we had seen Wolves, but we still wanted to do the draft. I was, I was also really pregnant at that point. Um.

• 1:48:47Sean Fennessey?

  What happened? You have the baby?

• 1:48:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:48:50Sean Fennessey?

  Exciting.

• 1:48:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Worked out. Uh, I, I think this will be good. I'm excited.

• 1:48:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think so, too. There's a lot of good stuff to choose from. We'll see you then.

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

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• 1:49:44Speaker 05

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