On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience: The Podcast, we talk about how to kill someone without leaving a trace, and how to make sure you don t get caught by the authorities. We also talk about a new segment called "How To Kill Someone With Coffee" where we discuss a list of the top 10 ways to kill people without leaving any trace.
00:00:22.000And I got to know through a friend, through a billionaire friend who loaned his plane to Clinton to fly those people out of, I think, North Korea.
00:00:34.000And so from that point on, he was surrounded by these guys.
00:00:38.000And one of them, this guy Mikey, which isn't his real name.
00:00:45.000I think he's actually named – they name them all after the archangels.
00:01:01.000And well, you know, and so he, you know, we got to know each other because of our mutual friend.
00:01:08.000And I think what happened was he and a couple of the other guys, you know, they were placed on me as like for surveillance purposes, like, you know.
00:01:19.000Find out what this Avery guy's about, maybe.
00:01:21.000Or just keep an eye on him or whatever.
00:01:22.000And they told me right up front, like, be nice to your surveillance.
00:01:26.000You know, like, don't try to lose us or anything like that.
00:01:28.000Because I heard stories about how, you know, they're surveilling somebody in wherever.
00:02:10.000And so one of the ones that I think is the best one is you inject someone with coffee, caffeine, like just inject coffee into their bloodstream, gives them a heart attack, and it's untraceable.
00:02:22.000Later on, they do an autopsy and they just discover caffeine in your system.
00:02:53.000And he was a medic, and so he, you know, was kind of identified as somebody who knew how to kill somebody very easily, because you know what will work, because you're a medic.
00:03:06.000And so, you know, I would hear every now and then, oh, yeah, I'd kill some guy and some diplomat or something in the Philippines, and I'd hit him with my car, and...
00:03:13.000And I'd look in my rearview mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, you know, is the guy still alive?
00:03:20.000Or is he, I better finish him off and put him in reverse and drive him over again a couple of times and then take off.
00:04:58.000I'm almost afraid to say it, because I've been living in the Hollywood Hills, and any of the fire stuff that happens never happens around me.
00:06:07.000Yeah, well, there was a big Malibu fire.
00:06:09.000The big Malibu fire happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction.
00:06:12.000So we actually set up a TV on the set because Bruce Willis was going to maybe lose his house.
00:06:20.000And so he was like, actually, so we have this little TV area so we can, like, in between takes we can watch what's going on with the fire.
00:06:27.000And they're like, and there was all these reports that, no, Bruce Willis and his family are on top of the house with their water hose.
00:06:36.000And I go, no he's not, he's right here!
00:06:39.000Well, the thing is, fires were normal.
00:06:42.000Like, it used to be when I was young, you know, I grew up in California, and so when I was young, fires would burn through Malibu constantly.
00:06:48.000But now they put all those houses in there where there never were houses, because the fire is a natural process.
00:06:54.000It kind of clears the land, cleans the land, and it's normal, actually.
00:06:59.000But, you know, when you put all that kindling in there, suddenly we end up with these, like, super storms of fire, just, you know, going crazy.
00:07:22.000Just having Marshall around can make my day ten times better.
00:07:25.000I'm sure you love your dog just as much, and you want to do your best to help them live longer, healthier, happier lives.
00:07:33.000And a healthy life for your dog starts with healthy food, just like it does for us.
00:07:38.000There's a reason having a balanced diet is so important.
00:07:41.000So how do you know if your dog's food is as healthy and as safe as it can be?
00:07:46.000Well, Farmer's Dog gives you that peace of mind by making fresh, real food developed by board-certified nutritionists to provide all the nutrients your dog needs.
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00:08:19.000The Farmer's Dog makes it easy to help your dog live a long, healthy life by sending you fresh food that's pre-portioned just for your dog's needs.
00:09:32.000I drove home once, we were filming Fear Factor, we had to stop the set early because the fire was so bad.
00:09:36.000This was like 2003 or something, 94. And driving home, it took me 55 minutes on the 5 to get home, and the entire time, the right side of the highway was on fire.
00:12:39.000You don't have to wait two hours during election.
00:12:43.000You just go to the local elementary school.
00:12:46.000You're in and out in five minutes when it comes to election day.
00:12:52.000It's one of those stupid things that you do, like, what was the fucking idiot, where you turn on the burner and then you leave the room for a while, and then you come back and all of a sudden your kitchen is flaming.
00:16:07.000I didn't think the theater experience was going to go away either.
00:16:09.000But one of the things, though, that was the...
00:16:13.000Death keel to video stores that no one ever – when they're talking mom and pop, when they're talking old people to like, hey, you've retired from your business.
00:16:28.000If you want to invest in a nice little business where you get to work with your neighborhood and be in a nice little store with your family, video stores, that's a good business.
00:19:08.000And you're defined by you having the new shit.
00:19:11.000And then there was another problem when companies that were massively funded like Blockbuster came onto the scene, they would go in and they would kind of do this sort of gray market purchasing where they would buy, you know, 50 diehards.
00:19:28.000And a mom and pop store can't afford to buy more than one or two diehards or three, maybe, to satisfy your clientele.
00:19:34.000When it comes to a big title, yeah, the thing is you spend the money, like, okay, like, you know, one of our big titles in the early days of video was Top Gun.
00:21:47.000And so, consequently, because you can only get three or 12 Top Guns, whatever it is, it's not as many as Blockbuster is getting, you end up having to focus on, like, how am I going to convince my clientele to watch something other than Top Gun this weekend?
00:22:30.000But we had customers that, like, came in every fucking day.
00:22:35.000And part of their day, or every other day, you know, when their camps were due.
00:22:39.000And they were people of the neighborhood.
00:22:41.000And they came in, and not only did they rent stuff, they dropped stuff off, and then they rented new stuff out, but, like, they came in to talk to us for 20 minutes or 45 minutes, like, every other day.
00:26:03.000Well, when the time came where we actually wanted to be making movies, where we were talking about making movies, because I can remember when...
00:26:09.000I think it was around the time of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or maybe She's Gotta Have It.
00:26:15.000No, no, definitely Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
00:26:16.000But I remember you coming to me and saying...
00:28:49.000And if you can, if you have a script that takes place in a bank, we can kick together a couple hundred thousand dollars and make a movie there.
00:28:56.000It's like this complete, solid, amazing location.
00:28:59.000And I said, oh my god, Lawrence, this is your lucky day.
00:29:02.000I happen to have a script that takes place in a bank.
00:29:04.000And then I just quickly wrote one based on the location.
00:29:08.000And as I was writing it, I was thinking, okay, you know, I know that it's going to be a bank robbery.
00:29:14.000And so I know it's going to be a bank robbery.
00:29:15.000And that's my solid bankable genre that I'm going to stick with.
00:29:22.000But I knew I wanted to do something more with it, and I had just traveled through Europe, and I had been telling Quentin the stories of traveling through Europe.
00:29:30.000He's like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes a Trip!
00:29:34.000I still think it should have been called that.
00:33:01.000You know, it starts off as a concept, as a conception, has a conception, and then it has an infancy.
00:33:06.000And then you're raising that child to become the movie.
00:33:10.000And along the way, you're really just kind of protecting it and trying to allow it to grow into what it's going to grow into without forcing it to become something that it's not.
00:33:21.000You have to be a good parent, which means you have to give it a little bit of freedom to grow into something that you don't know what it's going to be.
00:33:26.000But at the same time, you have to be willing to, you know, be strong with it as well.
00:35:44.000And the bond company showed up and you're behind schedule and you've got to cut pages and...
00:35:52.000I couldn't cut anything, and I'm shooting upstairs-downstairs stuff, and so it's like I had to have something because he leaves the scene and then comes back angry.
00:36:00.000And so I knew I needed to have something, and originally I had this whole scene where the cops are coming in, and he reacts to that.
00:36:06.000And so I said, well, okay, I just need one shot because it's all I had time to do because of the fucking Bond Company.
00:36:12.000And so I set up, which were actually really cool to me.
00:36:15.000They were actually, film finances was great.
00:36:17.000LAUGHTER I just set up a single camera.
00:36:21.000I asked for a kind of a Kubrickian lens, a nice wide, like maybe a 14 millimeter lens.
00:36:27.000And I just had John Hug walk up into a close-up and I just had him do...
00:36:32.000I said, just walk into a close-up and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls.
00:36:39.000And is that the shot you're talking about?
00:36:41.000And he does like a little magic trick beforehand, like...
00:38:01.000I wanted to hear about the Italian sweetness.
00:38:04.000Well, it was very sweet, but it started off sour.
00:38:07.000It started off sour because I couldn't do what I wanted to do.
00:38:10.000And so I just came up with something that was, well, he puts it together in his head.
00:38:14.000I mean, I still think that sequence is exhilarating because it all boils down to an actor's face.
00:38:20.000Well, I had Tom Savini on the set, and I couldn't afford Tom Savini, but I found his number before I shot, and I called him up in Pittsburgh, and I said, Tom Savini's a makeup effects artist who did Dawn of the Dead.
00:38:33.000He did all the effects for Dawn of the Dead.
00:38:34.000Not to mention all the great Friday the 13th, all the slasher movies.
00:38:38.000He's the superstar of practical makeup effects of horror films of that era.
00:38:46.000And every time I'm talking to him about stuff, he's like, oh yeah, well, you know, if you're bleeding from back here, there's only two small veins, because when your head gets knocked off, he's seen all this stuff, and so this is his way of processing it.
00:38:58.000But Tom came in, and I couldn't afford him.
00:39:17.000I think we paid him like some tiny amount.
00:39:20.000He flew himself to L.A., put himself up, worked on the film, and he made that burn makeup on that burned guard in the vault out of Vaseline paint and tissue paper.
00:39:30.000And I watched him make, it was the most unbelievable thing how he made blisters and burn effects and it was like watching one of the great artists work.
00:41:48.000We had a buddy of ours named Steve-O. We had different living arrangements and at one point in time, me and Steve-O were living in the same house together, towards the back of the store.
00:42:58.000And he's describing a situation that was very common if you were a kid growing up without a degree or anything in the 80s, especially in California, where it's like you can't get any really good jobs.
00:43:14.000But like you can work at Licorice Pizza.
00:43:18.000And if you're an okay employee, you could like work at Lincoln Street for a couple of years and maybe you could even become assistant manager or a manager and maybe they send you to another store.
00:43:26.000And maybe you worked there for three years and that's really great.
00:43:30.000But then, you know, all of a sudden, the district manager doesn't like you.
00:43:34.000You run a file of somebody higher up in corporate.
00:43:38.000And all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're fired and you're out in the street.
00:43:42.000And so now you've just spent three years at Licorice Pizza.
00:43:45.000Now you could get a job at TRW or some place that's like a real job job.
00:43:51.000Or, well, those are kind of hard to get, but you can work at Warehouse Records and Tapes tomorrow, because you just had three years at Licorice Pizza.
00:43:58.000Same thing with Wild West Clothier, same thing with Miller's Outpost, same thing with any of these kind of stores.
00:44:03.000Next thing you know, you're 28, and the only jobs you've ever had are minimum wage jobs behind a counter that were designed for kids to pay for their gas.
00:46:08.000So I'm having my own little anxiety hitting 25, but I'm seeing what it's like five years from now when you turn 30. A window to the future.
00:46:28.000That I had what I used to call – I would do it every once in a while.
00:46:30.000I haven't done it in a long time, thankfully.
00:46:33.000I would have a Quentin Detest Fest where I would stay up all night long and rather than give myself excuses, I would look at everything that I'm fucking up in my life or everything I'm not doing or whatever and just not give myself any fucking excuses out.
00:46:52.000And I would spend like all night laying out everything I'm doing that's wrong and then I would spend the last two hours figuring out how I can change it.
00:47:02.000And as opposed to just doing it and then going to get some sleep and then you forget about it and fall back into your routine, I decided to change my life.
00:47:15.000I was like, look, the problem is that I'm living in the South Bay, and even though I drive to Los Angeles, one, I got to not worry about this job anymore.
00:47:26.000I got to meet other people that are in the business.
00:47:29.000And if I have to work manpower jobs, you know, where you just work like four days at this place and four days at that place, well, then that's fine.
00:47:36.000And by the way, I shouldn't be making money until I'm making money doing what I want to do.
00:47:57.000And literally the minute I kind of moved out there, I met a guy who wrote – I met low-budget horror movies and then through him I met other guys that wrote low-budget horror movies and this guy who directs a few low-budget horror movies and this guy who produces a couple.
00:48:15.000But yeah, you meet one person and that introduces you to three other people.
00:48:18.000Now all of a sudden I actually knew people who were actually making movies.
00:48:22.000And the thing about it was it was like – Also, well, if these guys can do what I can do, because they weren't too special.
00:48:32.000That's the weird realization that you end up having.
00:48:35.000Yeah, and then literally, it wasn't like everything changed, but within a year and a half from moving out of the South Bay, moving into the Hollywood area, within a year and a half, I was finally able to make a living as a writer.
00:48:53.000You know, getting like $7,000 for this rewrite on this script over here.
00:49:15.000It just takes being around people that are actually doing it so you realize it's possible.
00:49:20.000Well, it's the realizing it's possible but it's also a situation where it's like as opposed to talking to your buddies about comedy in Minnesota – You're buddies who like comedy.
00:49:35.000No, you're at the comedy store and you're dealing with comedians every fucking night.
00:49:39.000And you're in the place where the shit happens and you're hearing how the laughs work.
00:52:12.000The mythology of the plays is you go down there and open mic night and if you have something to offer, then you work your way up and then you're the doorman and then you work your way up.
00:53:07.000You have to have the opportunities to fail.
00:53:09.000Well, there's also no one who can tell you how to do it.
00:53:12.000Writing a film, you have a protagonist, you have the antagonist, you have a plot, you have a bunch of stuff that you can kind of create and formulate.
00:54:19.000It's good on the weekends because they'll fly in, you know, Greg Fitzsimmons, some headliner, and you get to see a real comic for a weekend.
00:54:25.000So you get a little bit of an education from that.
00:54:27.000And maybe if you're lucky, the club owner will let you open for him or do 10 minutes on that show.
00:54:31.000And you kind of like get a feel what it's like to perform in front of a real audience that's there to see a real comic.
00:54:36.000But you gotta be around, like, comedy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
00:54:41.000There's no great comedian that lives in some small town by himself.
00:54:45.000Like, you could find some great blues artist.
00:55:48.000I think these conversations are so important for young people to hear.
00:55:52.000Because there's a lot of people out there that do have ideas, and sometimes they have a little bit of a fire, and then maybe they have a job that's kind of cool, like yours was, and they get sedated.
00:56:01.000Almost the worst thing that can happen is getting comfortable, which I think is what you were talking about.
00:57:06.000And that's the velvet curtain, you know, that's pulled over your eyes.
00:57:13.000I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the movie about Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing.
00:57:21.000And I'm not like a surfer or anything, but my entry point into that movie was Zephyr surfboards was exactly like Video Archives.
00:57:30.000And I imagine that this is like this in a lot of places where, you know, you have a shop, they do skateboards, and they've got a shaper guy there, Skip Englum, who's a surfboard shaper, and he was sort of like Lance, the guy who owned Video Archives.
00:57:47.000And he started a shop and he's selling to all the kids locally and all the kids who like love surfing, you know, like Stacey Peralta or Tony Alva or guys like that, they would just go hang out there just like we would go hang out at the video store.
00:58:00.000And so I looked at that and I was like, okay, I don't really know anything about these guys other than growing up in the beach community.
00:58:06.000But my real entry point was I understand gravitating towards what you love and wanting to be close to it.
00:58:14.000And that if a video store is the closest thing to Hollywood in your town, that's where you go.
00:58:20.000Well, you know, it was funny because when I first started – when I started at the video store, I was like – it was great because, you know, like I said, I got to hang out in this place that I enjoyed and I'm surrounded by movies and talking about movies.
00:59:49.000But one of the things that ended up happening – I hope I didn't say it the last time I was here – that ended up happening is we became really famous in the neighborhood.
01:02:02.000The fame thing is no one can teach you how to do that.
01:02:05.000There needs to be like a group of people to get together with people that are about to get famous and say, hey, listen, we're famous already.
01:02:12.000Let me tell you how fucking weird this is.
01:02:14.000I don't know if you were prepared for this.
01:02:17.000We were first trying to make True Romance.
01:02:19.000You know, Quentin had this amazing screenplay, and it was like we were going to try to do it Coen Brothers style.
01:02:24.000We had just seen Blood Simple, and we were like, okay, I'm going to produce.
01:03:56.000Because I think that's one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was very risky.
01:04:02.000Like, we're talking about executives and all these different management people that are going to come in and fuck with your thing and don't do that and cut that out.
01:04:09.000But you had a sensibility, not of a person in management, but of a person that, I know what I like.
01:04:22.000One of the things we talked about, we had a little theory about it, was that gave us a bit of a superpower when we were first brought into...
01:04:31.000Once we established ourselves, the people knew, you read our scripts, so you knew we had something to offer.
01:04:39.000We would walk into rooms and we realized that...
01:04:43.000And look, I'm not here to make fun of Hollywood executives.
01:09:25.000You know, when I was young, one of my first jobs was actually given to me by one of our customers, this guy John Langley, who did that show, Cops.
01:09:33.000And so, like, he was, you know, getting his power turned off and stuff like, you know, We were picking up dog shit in Venice Beach with our hands so that Dolph could do aerobics on that little grassy knoll.
01:12:40.000But I told people what I was and what I was doing, and eventually it stuck.
01:12:45.000Eventually enough people hear it, and all those people who you end up going into a room and pitching your idea and they say no, eventually they see you at Cannes running around trying to do foreign sales.
01:12:56.000They're like, hey, Maybe that kid is a director.
01:12:58.000It was just believing in yourself when no one else believes what you believe.
01:13:04.000The guy who's talking about, John Langley, who created Cops, he was a really good customer and his wife Maggie was really lovely.
01:13:13.000And I heard the story came back to me later that When I got the deal to make Reservoir Dogs, just little by little, through the Manhattan Beach community, they started hearing, oh, hey, Quentin's making his movie.
01:14:56.000I kept a really detailed, super detailed journal about like everything that's going on around me.
01:15:03.000And, you know, it became a really I mean, that was an It was a very intense experience being placed into a room, having the doors closed, and you're just left with yourself.
01:15:16.000And everything, all your things which define you get stripped away.
01:15:20.000Everything gets kind of dropped and you lose who you are and you're just left with your remorse and regret for why you're there.
01:15:31.000And you have a lot of time to think about things.
01:15:35.000But having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on.
01:18:46.000Like, I'm feeling something and it's traveling into the page.
01:18:50.000And also, because I had been a working writer in Hollywood for a long time, just by speed, I had fallen into the very bad habit of composing at my computer, at my laptop.
01:19:01.000Like one of those assholes who goes to Starbucks.
01:22:00.000Is it you on either typing or whatever, is it you doing that Is it an eight-page thing on transportation, or is it more likely that you're just pacing around, doing a running monologue on public transportation?
01:22:19.000Well, I'm sitting still, if that's what you mean.
01:22:22.000The thing about typing is I type good, so not great, but I don't have to look at the keys, and I have to type pretty quickly.
01:22:28.000And if I have a good laptop, like a ThinkPad that has a lot of finger travel, then you really feel it.
01:24:07.000Because you're just, you're just getting it out there, you're getting it out there.
01:24:11.000Then, after all the vomit happens, Then you sit down with a typewriter, or then you sit down with a thing, and now you take the vomit and you tame it.
01:25:25.000Well, after what happened to me, I mean, I should probably tell the whole story and maybe I eventually will here, but, you know, I went to jail.
01:25:39.000For a DUI-related incident that caused manslaughter.
01:28:28.000That's the other part of it is, I think there's a line in Highlander 2 where Sean Connery says, I don't eat anything that I cannot identify.
01:29:04.000Like, you know, if I am in the right place and the right environment and the right food is there, like if there's a, like, if I'm on an island in Greece and the guy comes up from the boat with a basket of fish, which one would you like?
01:32:17.000And so about once a week, like when I was in Population, about once a week, the middle of the night or, you know, the lights are down and suddenly the lights come on bright.
01:32:32.000Lights are always on, but lights come on bright.
01:32:34.000And suddenly a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors.
01:32:37.000know they just storm into the the tank into the uh the section and uh they pull everybody out of their cells and they strip everybody naked and they put you up against a wall so you're up there with like you know sancho and you know leroy and like everybody's suddenly you're all you know one moment you're being kept separate and next thing you know you're all naked together standing up against the wall and they're going through everybody's cell and they're just ripping your cell apart looking for anything and you're going to be able to do that
01:33:06.000And usually they're looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind or cell phones, anything.
01:33:14.000Like they're looking for anything that's considered contraband.
01:33:16.000Okay, for me, they were looking at my writing because when I was in solitary at that time, like literally on kites, a kite is like a requisition form that you send out to the guards.
01:33:27.000You're not allowed to talk to the guards.
01:33:40.000And so they come in, they strip everybody naked, they take all your clothes, and they're under the guise of where, you know, we're doing a laundry exchange.
01:33:51.000And so everybody gets new clothes and you end up with like these big baggy pants or something too small for you.
01:34:00.000Well, with me, they would look for whatever I was writing because when I was in solitary, I was writing, you know, like maps.
01:34:07.000I would map the place like a fucking idiot.
01:34:10.000Like I still was, you know, I'm writing about, oh, Eisenhard, the guard.
01:34:14.000I saw him watching, you know, literally saw him watching on a little TV, Nazi propaganda, like Triumph of the Will is playing on his TV and he's watching it.
01:34:31.000And so I noticed that whenever I was taken out of my cell to shower, to go to yard, to do whatever, that they would come in and just take whatever I had written.
01:34:40.000So I learned that they couldn't take or open letters to my attorney because it's privileged.
01:34:49.000And so what I would do is I would just write, and then whenever I had to leave my cell, like to go to yard, or if they were raiding the cells and taking everybody out and looking for contraband, I would just quickly seal the envelope.
01:35:02.000My writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working, in the letter to my attorney.
01:35:07.000And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out.
01:35:12.000And then he would send that letter to my daughter who would then type up the pages that I was writing.
01:35:18.000And so that's how I wrote several scripts was like that.
01:38:35.000Well, like everything, there's a lot of misinformation being given to us by the mainstream media.
01:38:39.000But it gets attributed to it, you know, sort of like when, you know, anything happens to anyone four years after the vaccine, they attribute it to the vaccine.
01:39:02.000How would you ever think that that is going to let you wind up in jail?
01:39:06.000How would you ever think that if you're an unsophisticated guy who was wearing fucking face paint, And you're kind of a kook, and you think you're part of a movement, which is really scary, you know?
01:39:17.000People get a part of a movement, and they, yeah, we're all doing it!
01:39:20.000And then you've got literal government agents encouraging you to do it, moving barriers, letting you in.
01:39:27.000They were playing chess, and these idiots were playing checkers, and they all got locked up.
01:39:33.000Well, because nobody was doing an insurrection!
01:40:12.000It's like we were a culture of smashing things at that point.
01:40:14.000It's also, as soon as you find out that there were government agents that may or may not have incited people to go in, the whole thing fucking changes.
01:40:53.000And, you know, there's all this pushback about Trump getting into office because he said one of the first things he said was he was going to release all the January 6th prisoners.
01:41:01.000How long do you think they should be in there for?
01:41:54.000Believe me, I read every Manson book that they possibly could read, and then I read that one, and I throw the rest of them away in the fucking trash.
01:42:09.000And when I was writing the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood book, I go deeper into the Manson stuff.
01:42:16.000And so I had a couple of little questions in my head that I always kind of wanted to know the answer to.
01:42:22.000So I got Tom's number, and I called him up, and I was able to ask him some really super, like, direct questions that could really help my book.
01:44:00.000There's the main movie, then there's that second movie that's kind of like the main movie, but probably you don't know that much about some wild exploitation thing.
01:44:12.000One of the things that's about our show is...
01:44:15.000I don't say, hey, Roger, so find these movies and you watch them and I'll watch them and we'll get together and we'll do it on the phone, too.
01:44:21.000Well, no, no, no, we don't do that shit.
01:44:23.000All right, you know, we get together to watch the movies together.
01:44:27.000Part of it is the experience of being together and watching the movie together, watching it through his eyes.
01:44:31.000The reason we came up with the idea of the show is like when we reconnected, we started doing what we used to do.
01:44:51.000Then we have a day off and then we get together on another day and then we record and we're always in the room when we do it.
01:44:56.000But the thing is when Roger comes over to watch the films, I've kind of learned that it's like, Roger, I'm starting It's three movies we're going to watch.
01:45:06.000I am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here.
01:45:10.000Because Roger will just get off on some archaic piece of thing.
01:45:59.000Even the idea – I mean one, the fact – the idea that – This has replaced the talk show, the talk shows that we grew up watching, and those guys were the kings.
01:46:16.000The fact that podcasting, and you're the king of it, but the fact that podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that...
01:46:27.000Anybody that's got something intelligent, has got a cool little setup, has got an interesting personality, and can sell an interesting conversation, theoretically can start a podcast.
01:46:58.000I like the fact that this is something where, for the first time in my life at least, I'm involved with something where there is nobody else.
01:47:07.000It's me and Quentin who decide everything.
01:47:09.000And, you know, if Quentin wants to do it, we go there.
01:48:18.000And I call it a sort of a business-related falling out.
01:48:23.000And maybe if I had been a little more mature – I was young as a filmmaker and probably unprepared to deal with the complexities of agents and attorneys and Hollywood and money and fame and – The press and the press's agenda and all of that.
01:48:38.000I was just approaching it like I'm a SoCal, Gen X, punk filmmaker.
01:48:47.000I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.
01:48:49.000I'm going to make the movie that I want to make and with that attitude of, you know, I know what I want and I know what's right and nobody can tell me I'm wrong.
01:48:57.000Because you have to be a little bit of a megalomaniac to be a director.
01:49:00.000You have to be willing to say, no, I'm right, even when everyone is telling you you're wrong.
01:49:51.000But when he was on your thing talking about the election, and when he described Tim Waltz as like, well, that guy's a goofball who just should be at a county fair eating hot dogs.
01:50:07.000I laughed for 15 minutes and played it back about three different times because I thought that was such a funny comment.
01:50:29.000If you ever watch his show, it's the best.
01:50:31.000Because it's literally just him ranting and a producer.
01:50:35.000And the ability to rant as a singleton operator, as a fucking...
01:50:41.000Lone person out there without anybody to bounce ideas off of is a rare talent, and he's the best at it I've ever seen.
01:50:48.000Bill Burr is really good at it as well, but Tim Dillon is the best at it I've ever seen.
01:50:52.000He's so fucking good at it, and he's just basically performing to one person who's his producer, and he's just ranting.
01:51:00.000And so because of that, he's got this crazy muscle that he's developed from years of doing that, where he just rants about all these different things, but it's fucking brilliant.
01:53:08.000Maybe this will be a thing now that, like, you know, one or three or four porno movies will come out every year that'll be, like, kind of considered, like, real movies, you know, that couples will go see.
01:53:19.000And that was a whole thing, was promoting the idea of couples going to see – A porn film.
01:53:29.000Either porno films or just heavily erotic movies.
01:54:31.000I loved Game of Thrones at first, and then I started realizing, wait a minute, they're getting off on me falling in love with characters, and then the moment I've fallen in love with a character, suddenly they're vivisecting their genitals.
01:56:33.000I've always been a big Kevin Costner fan.
01:56:34.000He's fucking wonderful in this, all right?
01:56:36.000And I got really caught up in the show and everything, and all of a sudden I'm having a good time, and, you know, I've got a couple seasons I haven't seen, so I'm watching it.
01:56:45.000And in the first season, I'm kind of talking about, oh, this is like a movie.
01:59:44.000When it gets to that final episode of the first season, and he's got the suicide vest on, and he's in the room, he can kill the guys that he's been waiting for to do it for the whole movie.
01:59:58.000And you don't want him to die, but you're kind of into him, and you kind of want him to pull it off.
02:00:04.000And then his daughter calls him on the phone.
02:00:08.000Before he does it, she doesn't know what he's going to do, but she gets that little sense from him that something's weird.
02:00:14.000Daddy, you need to tell me that you're going to come home right now.
02:00:17.000You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight.
02:00:22.000And the entire series has been built to this scene.
02:00:25.000And it's one of the most emotional scenes I've ever seen in a movie, in a TV show, I've ever seen Dramatized.
02:01:19.000I don't expect you to do that every week, but at the end of the arc, if you're telling a continuing story, at the end of that fucking season, you need to, bam, drop the mic.
02:01:31.000You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
02:01:49.000I mean, this is the weirdness of the theater experience versus home.
02:01:54.000Here's where it's not a different thing.
02:01:55.000Part of the thing that makes it different is the fact that everyone's watching these continuing stories, continuing stories, continuing stories.
02:02:02.000If it were Bonanza, where it's just a set-up story, Charles Bronson shows up, he's a half-breed Indian, and he's working at the Ponderosa for a while, and he gets involved in an adventure, and then at the end, it's done.
02:02:19.000Well, on that show, you have the episodes that are maybe not so good, or the episodes that are whatever, they're treading water.
02:06:23.000Literally, the tape that we used to rent and handle and shuffle and put back and forth into the drawers and then rent to customers that has been sitting on the shelves with the number on it and everything for the computer.
02:06:32.000We've seen the movie a bunch of times, but something about watching it with the three of us and then just sitting there and it's so good.
02:06:39.000But it was Roger who was adding to it.
02:07:49.000Well, I told Roger that when we finished the first season, I go, you know, Roger, if we do this the right way, in three or four years' time, we could be considered like Siskel and Eva.
02:08:37.000They paid us a lot of money to do it, and we actually did pretty good for our little archaic little movie show that goes on about two hours and everything.
02:08:58.000So we actually had about like 2 million listeners, which was like, hey, that was pretty good for us doing our little stupid movie show about VHS. And it's all about VHS. It's about the VHS. We're talking about the box art of VHS tapes.
02:09:13.000We talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie.
02:10:15.000When we made our deal, we're thinking, okay, well, maybe we'll do it here for two years, and we own the show, and then we want to take it to Patreon so we don't have to do commercials.
02:10:55.000ZipRecruiter can fill your placement in a week.
02:11:02.000Some people even get, in the first week, they get qualified candidates only on ZipRecruiter.com.
02:11:10.000I like solo stoves, they're great, but I found myself doing stainless steel ads, basically, and talking about solo stoves, and suddenly people on Twitter were saying, Roger Avery will sell you sour milk from a sick cow!
02:11:26.000I was like, well, I don't know if I want to be shilling stuff like that anymore.
02:11:31.000You just have to only approve the ads that you want to do.
02:11:41.000We're not even under that kind of pressure now.
02:11:43.000The thing about it, I thought that would be kind of cool, is if we go to Patreon, we'll lose a whole bunch of listeners, but We'll put a 40-minute version of the show out there for free.
02:11:59.000But if you want to get the whole show, then you've got to subscribe.
02:12:04.000And if you just subscribe, you get the show.
02:12:27.000I'm the guy that, I'm the guy in my 20s would go to happy hour at the bar, all right, and nurse a beer while I ate all the pizza and the chicken wings.
02:12:39.000And by the way, if you want to wait until the end of our season and then join for a month and listen to all of our shows that way, you can!
02:13:07.000And as long as we can make enough to just do the show, we're cool.
02:13:10.000And the general feeling is, wow, this is like a $5 film school.
02:13:14.000Because you've got a couple of guys talking about movies and talking about how to watch movies, how to appreciate films, how to read a film.
02:13:22.000And then- And hopefully just genuinely compelling discussions.
02:13:26.000And using our experience as filmmakers to discuss even, you know, deeper into the movies and to better understand them.
02:13:34.000And, you know, it's largely something has happened in culture where...
02:13:45.000People, they don't know how to argue anymore, politely.
02:13:48.000They don't know how to, like, enjoy an argument with each other before.
02:13:51.000And so Quentin and I, we don't have to like the same movie, just like Siskel and Ebert didn't have to like it.
02:13:57.000But, you know, we can argue about something, and then afterwards it's like, okay, let's go do karaoke now.
02:15:44.000My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show and she's on the show with us.
02:15:49.000And one of her things is like we get together and we watch the movies at Video Archives and then we know the films and then she doesn't have that access.
02:19:43.000And no, we don't have that new one, but let's show you something interesting.
02:19:47.000And so it was always a matter of, you know...
02:19:50.000well the thing is one of the things that like and there's a lot of movie there's a lot of movie shows out there on podcasts and they talk about stuff and the idea isn't for me to just say oh we're better than all those guys from that place.
02:20:05.000But I'll tell you what bugs me about a lot of the other shows is the fact that the people are sincere.
02:20:12.000They're completely sincere, but their film knowledge is fucking abysmal.
02:20:18.000They really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
02:20:21.000And especially when they're trying to talk about movies from the 70s or something, Well, they were usually born in the 80s.
02:20:29.000So they don't know what something was like when it opened up and they don't really have any context.
02:20:51.000All right, you know, we re-record it, all right, to make sure that we just don't yank shit out of it.
02:20:57.000And there is a little bit of yanking stuff out of your ass, but when I'm not sure about it, we look it up, and then if I'm wrong, then we change it.
02:21:06.000You can count on what we're saying that we're telling you the true fucking shit.
02:21:10.000I consider it as a film expert that my show wouldn't be worth listening to if I don't tell you the truth, if I don't give you factual information that you can count on.
02:21:23.000Well, so because you were there during the opening of the film and, you know, we're going...
02:21:29.000Yeah, we have the context to talk about.
02:21:31.000A lot of these people, they maybe didn't see these movies in theaters.
02:21:35.000And the thing is, you know, it's like, you know, my writing guru as far as, like, film writing, but I think writing in general, was the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.
02:23:22.000As a matter of fact, I have so many, but when I was younger particularly, I was the champion of the movie that all the critics put down and said was the fiasco.
02:24:01.000Well, the problem with Ishtar, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, the problem with Ishtar is that it suddenly became not about the movie, but about the production.
02:24:11.000And so people had formed an opinion about whether they liked it or not.
02:26:46.000Yes, the sex scene in the pool is a little ridiculous, but actually, the fact that it's going for a Hollywood movie that it's going there was actually interesting to me.
02:26:56.000But what I really liked, what I really liked her in it, When she beats the shit out of that guy, that's so fucking cool.
02:27:02.000When she beats the shit out of the guy at the end, the guy who fucked over her girlfriend and beat up his girlfriend, and then she does these spinning roundhouse kicks and beats the fucking shit out of the guy.
02:27:18.000What I love about Showgirls is normally a movie like Showgirls would be made for under a million, go straight to video, star Robert Davi, and just be this little exploitation movie.
02:27:30.000And here was an example of that being made for $60 million with Paul Verhoeven directing.
02:28:24.000I brought it up to all the—I had a dinner once with Verhoeven and a bunch of the producers that filmed it.
02:28:29.000I started going off on it, and they all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film.
02:28:35.000And then at the end of it, one of the producers said, well, yeah, that's all nice to hear, but really that movie was just about us doing a lot of cocaine.
02:28:42.000That's exactly what I was just going to say.
02:28:44.000I'm so glad you just said that, because I always describe that movie as a cocaine movie, and I was just casting aspersions with no evidence.
02:28:52.000But it seems like a cocaine movie, because it seems like they thought it was great while they were doing it, but it's like, what are you doing?
02:28:59.000It's one of those things where you think it's great because you're on coke.
02:29:03.000I have a place in my heart for those big movies like that.
02:29:06.000Like I said, that's not the one I would make my case on, but I still don't like it.
02:29:47.000Okay, but just watching Elizabeth Berkley's tits, all right, in a big studio movie like this, flopping up and down, I'm getting my money's worth.
02:29:53.000Well, that was huge, because it was from Saved by the Bell.
02:36:08.000But it's the thing, it's like everybody wants to be smart.
02:36:10.000It's unlikely he's going to raise a fist.
02:36:11.000Everybody wants to be smart, and you want to be secular, and you never want to say that you believe in something that's superstitious or ridiculous.
02:36:18.000So you don't believe in religion, you're either agnostic or you're atheist, that's how you get respect.
02:36:23.000And it's like this weird thing where you're not willing to consider like, okay, but what are the actions?
02:36:27.000What are the actions of good and the actions of evil?
02:36:43.000Well, there's a whole speech of apocalypse now.
02:36:48.000Brandos Kurtz tells the story of going into the village and inoculating all the children in the village, shooting their arms with flu shots or something like that, inoculating them.
02:37:05.000And then the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kids' arms.
02:37:10.000And then there's like a little pile of arms.
02:37:13.000And Kurt says, you know, so we did all that.
02:39:01.000Yeah, that I worked on with him to help turn it into a series.
02:39:05.000My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke.
02:39:08.000And, you know, you look at his Genghis Khan script and he's, you know, he's realistically talking about these horrific atrocities that just, you know, sewing people up in felt and lighting it on fire and throwing them in river.
02:39:23.000Just however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better.
02:39:29.000But at the same time, he invented paper money, and he invented the Silk Road, and he pulled that whole region of the world together under one empire.
02:39:41.000And over the course of it, you start out as...
02:39:48.000Almost like Conan, Conan the warrior, Conan the conqueror, Conan the king.
02:40:41.000It does feel a little like we're in kind of neo-feudalistic times where there's highwaymen that you have to contend with when you go out and everything's a little more fragile.
02:40:54.000Well, there's also this new thing, which is the internet and social media.
02:40:58.000And there's this new thing that has overcome our minds.
02:41:01.000And it's affecting everyone in this very bizarre way.
02:41:04.000And it's making people more tribal and more inclined towards echo chambers, more antagonistic against opposing beliefs and views.
02:41:13.000So you were saying about being able to sit and have a conversation with someone and completely disagree, but not take it personally.
02:41:34.000Okay, so I go on a show and I said that I like Joker 2. Well, I say I like Joker 2, and now there's 150 articles that come out, all these cannibalized articles.
02:41:46.000One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it, and then there's 150 rip-off articles.
02:44:56.000You could hear a pin drop, and then it was over, and everyone was still kind of in this collective emotional state, and they just all kind of left the theater, and they'd just seen something emotional.
02:45:06.000And they all kind of just moved out into the lobby, and in this emotional state, and it was like, That sounds like fucking fantastic.
02:45:16.000I mean, I think one of the most magical things about movies is that it can speak to you at different times of your life, you know, at the different windows of opportunity in your life.
02:45:26.000So you might see a movie and not like it.
02:45:28.000And then, you know, people might see Joker 2 today and not really care for it.
02:45:32.000And then five years from now, revisit it and watch it again.
02:46:24.000I mean, having been a filmmaker and knowing the struggle that goes into getting something on screen, I know how hard it is sometimes to get what you have up here onto screen and it doesn't always work and sometimes you're faking it by the time it gets to the cut.
02:46:41.000But, you know, it's not an easy thing to...
02:46:59.000And I'm going to give that, you know, I'm going to value that and give myself to it and try to find in it what I like about it.
02:47:07.000And so I always give every movie a shake, you know, a good shake.
02:47:11.000What's happened with our show that I think is really cool, again, for the fans that follow it and everything, is...
02:47:17.000In our first season, we ended up covering about 70 movies all together.
02:47:23.000We mentioned a zillion movies in the course of a show, but we covered about 70 movies all together between the three movies that we did over the course of 26 episodes.
02:47:37.000And we kind of created new classics, at least amongst the people who followed the show.
02:47:42.000Because they followed it, and they liked it, and they watched some old Mexican horror movie like Demonoid.
02:50:06.000Best thing about the horror genre and science fiction is that they're the best vehicles to kind of study culture and sociological issues because you have that abstraction layer that makes people think, oh, I'm just watching a science fiction film or I'm just watching a horror movie.
02:50:21.000Like you watch Dawn of the Dead and, yeah, you're watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall.
02:50:24.000Or are you watching a movie about the vanishing middle class being drawn to the consumer temple because it's what they remembered from their lives that was an important place to them?
02:50:33.000You're literally quoting the movie now.
02:50:36.000I'm actually quoting my liner notes that I wrote for the DVD way back when.
02:50:42.000Let me stop and go to the bathroom one more time.
02:50:44.000The coffee is making me take a piss like crazy.
02:50:52.000First got into this like did you have?
02:50:56.000Like a film that you aspire to create something like like when you first did you say I got you know like a Composite be like I want to be the next Eddie Murphy.
02:51:06.000It was a composite I have like a kind of a top three filmmaker, you know When you're a young filmmaker And when you're a young child you look to your parents to learn how to behave and You know, you're a child, and you look to them, and you're like, they teach you how to be.
02:51:22.000And so, at the beginning of your life, you're copying your parents.
02:51:27.000Because that's who you love, and that's what you're copying.
02:51:30.000When you're a young filmmaker, Very frequently, you kind of copy your parents, your cinematic parents.
02:51:38.000And, you know, so in my case, you know, in many filmmakers, like, for instance, Stanley Kubrick, who is one of my favorite filmmakers, who I'm always thinking about his zero-point perspective, his reverse tracking shots.
02:51:52.000I just love the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies.
02:52:23.000Metropolis is a super, super powerful and kind of important movie that's exactly talking about everything that's going on today that people should see.
02:52:32.000The movie I was thinking about was M, which is his movie with Peter Lorre about the pedophile who's...
02:52:38.000And the movie's made just before the Nazis took power.
02:52:44.000And so he's making a movie that's really about the rise of...
02:52:51.000Hitlerian fascism in Europe, but he's doing it through this movie about a pedophile.
02:52:56.000And Peter Lorre is fantastic, and it's actually his first sound movie.
02:53:02.000Like, Fritz Lang hadn't made a sound movie, and so every single shot in the film is based on sound.
02:53:09.000So he'll have shadows talking and the backs of people's heads talking, or even the device of the movie is Peter Lorre whistling Peter Giant, you know, That becomes like the device by which they find the killer.
02:57:57.000And that's the two men that are throughout the movie that are constantly in the background of the film who eventually in the final shots of the film, you see like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in that final scene in the toy store when she's looking at the Rosemary's baby bassinet, which is totally Kubrick saying something, and they never take their eyes off their daughter until the moment they take their eyes off and the final line of the movie is coming up.
02:58:23.000You see those two guys walking off with the daughter.
02:58:44.000There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it's my movie, you can't cut it!
02:59:58.000Like the exponential curve of improvement.
03:00:00.000I'm literally, as I'm working on things, I'll be talking to the guys and, you know, I'll be saying, well, it'd be nice to be able to move the camera.
03:00:17.000And so it's advancing so fast and so rapidly that I, without telling you, Quentin, I made a little claymation version of you.
03:00:26.000And I have him talking and kind of funny looking.
03:00:31.000I'm sure a claymation version of me would be funny.
03:00:35.000But it's a claymation version of both you and me.
03:00:38.000How bizarre that something that would have cost like hundreds of millions of dollars, like if you wanted to do a film, like a pixel type, you know, one of those crazy movies where you have all this like insane animation.
03:01:16.000Yeah, my original plan for that movie, because I was going to direct it myself, was to make it, like, you know, in Iceland, you know, under $10 million, you know, just...
03:04:05.000It's funny because our original script was much more modest than this, but then Zemeckis was like, okay, boys, it costs a million dollars a minute.
03:06:46.000And I had grown a beard to make the movie and, like, grew my hair long like a Viking to learn about, you know, why Vikings had beards, etc.
03:09:02.000I think my tire blew, but I was going into a ditch and I knew I was going into this deep ditch because it was right near my house full of rocks and stuff.
03:09:13.000And I knew if I go in there, we'll die.
03:09:15.000And so I turned into the thing and then I turned away from it to try to – the car spun out.
03:09:20.000And I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was like a cow pasture.
03:09:24.000And I was like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen there?
03:10:14.000And I threw myself onto my knees on the pavement, and I found myself in that moment Asking for the one thing that mattered, which was just life.
03:12:28.000It's the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me.
03:12:34.000And I... And I found myself then alone in jail, incarcerated, alone with my remorse and regret and really getting existential about things.
03:14:19.000I, you know, once you've been incarcerated and And you've been deprived of everything and you have a lot of time to think and be existential.
03:14:32.000You come out of that, at least I came out of that experience, and, you know, I looked at a tree and I was like, okay, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.
03:14:40.000I hope I never not feel this way, this appreciation for a cloud.
03:14:47.000You know, to be able, like, when you're imprisoned, to be able to pet a cat, for example.
03:15:40.000And not only that, but Greg Shapiro, who produced the Rules of Attraction for me, my producer, who came and visited me with Robin Wright in the days that followed, he won for Zero Dark Thirty.
03:16:39.000And the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic that I had in jail, were like, I mean, you see things kind of for real.
03:16:47.000When you see somebody get hanged by their celly in a cell, or when you know that You know, oh, that El Salvadorian MS-13 hitman guy, he's going to kill that gay dude.
03:17:15.000Shut the door because you know shit is going to go down.
03:17:18.000And so, like, that was, like, every day.
03:17:21.000And so suddenly it was, like, you know...
03:17:25.000And also, you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens.
03:17:31.000And like John Langley, our customer from Video Archives, ended up being like, like I said, when I was in jail, he loaned me money and he gave me my first job when I got out.