The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:11.000 All right, here we go.

00:00:12.000 We're rolling.

00:00:13.000 So you're saying that someone was telling you how to kill someone with coffee?

00:00:16.000 Okay, so I got to know all these...

00:00:18.000 You were talking about some...

00:00:20.000 His name's John McPhee.

00:00:21.000 Some operators.

00:00:22.000 And 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.

00:00:34.000 And so from that point on, he was surrounded by these guys.

00:00:38.000 And one of them, this guy Mikey, which isn't his real name.

00:00:45.000 I think he's actually named – they name them all after the archangels.

00:00:48.000 So he was like Michael and Gabriel.

00:00:52.000 They take on these – There's nothing creeper than an assassin with a biblical name.

00:00:59.000 Name that for an archangel.

00:01:00.000 Yeah.

00:01:01.000 And well, you know, and so he, you know, we got to know each other because of our mutual friend.

00:01:08.000 And 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.

00:01:19.000 Find out what this Avery guy's about, maybe.

00:01:21.000 Or just keep an eye on him or whatever.

00:01:22.000 And they told me right up front, like, be nice to your surveillance.

00:01:26.000 You know, like, don't try to lose us or anything like that.

00:01:28.000 Because I heard stories about how, you know, they're surveilling somebody in wherever.

00:01:35.000 Bolivia.

00:01:36.000 And suddenly some gang attacks their surveillance and they step in, kick the shit out of the gang.

00:01:41.000 And so I got to know these guys.

00:01:44.000 And naturally, you know, I'm a writer and filmmaker.

00:01:47.000 And so I, of course, want to talk to them about stuff.

00:01:50.000 And they immediately start volunteering.

00:01:52.000 Oh, yeah, we've learned all these different ways when I became an operator, blah, blah, blah.

00:01:55.000 I learned how to kill people without...

00:01:57.000 And I was just making a list now of the 10 ways to kill someone without leaving a trace.

00:02:02.000 And I was like, well...

00:02:04.000 Just like when I told Quentin about this, he's like, well, what are those?

00:02:07.000 I'd like to hear those.

00:02:09.000 Everybody wants to hear those.

00:02:10.000 And 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.

00:02:22.000 Later on, they do an autopsy and they just discover caffeine in your system.

00:02:26.000 That's it?

00:02:26.000 That's it.

00:02:27.000 Just right into the blood?

00:02:29.000 Coffee can kill you?

00:02:30.000 Sometimes the simple ways are the best.

00:02:32.000 Just right into the juggler with a syringe?

00:02:34.000 Yes.

00:02:34.000 Jesus.

00:02:35.000 After extracting whatever information you need to get out of him.

00:02:37.000 How much coffee will kill you like that?

00:02:39.000 A syringe's worth?

00:02:40.000 I don't know.

00:02:41.000 Is it the Turkish kind or is it Folgers? 1.00

00:02:45.000 Cuban espresso?

00:02:46.000 Yeah.

00:02:46.000 But he was a medic during the war.

00:02:51.000 What?

00:02:52.000 Well, the war.

00:02:53.000 And 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.

00:03:06.000 And 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...

00:03:13.000 And I'd look in my rearview mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, you know, is the guy still alive?

00:03:20.000 Or 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.

00:03:26.000 And he's doing that all the time.

00:03:29.000 All the time they're doing it.

00:03:30.000 Well, Jamie and I were just talking.

00:03:31.000 They think they have a photo of the guy who whacked that insurance CEO. Oh, yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

00:03:36.000 Yeah, they think they have a photo of his face now.

00:03:38.000 Oh, they do, huh?

00:03:39.000 Well, I would think with the amount of cameras.

00:03:41.000 Or they picked it up later.

00:03:42.000 I think, you know, there's cameras everywhere.

00:03:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:45.000 And that's part of the problem with someone.

00:03:47.000 I don't think this guy was a professional.

00:03:49.000 I think this guy...

00:03:50.000 If I had to guess, some guy got fucked over.

00:03:53.000 Apparently that company is really bad on denying claims.

00:03:57.000 34% denial rate?

00:04:00.000 Something like that?

00:04:00.000 Normal's like 16. Yeah.

00:04:01.000 Yeah.

00:04:02.000 So, those guys.

00:04:04.000 I don't think anybody's going to be crying too hard over that guy.

00:04:07.000 Maybe his family, but that's about it.

00:04:10.000 It's a dirty, dirty business.

00:04:12.000 The business of insurance is fucking gross.

00:04:14.000 It's gross.

00:04:15.000 And especially healthcare insurance, just fucking gross.

00:04:18.000 Well, actually, all insurance.

00:04:20.000 I live in California, and all of a sudden, because I live adjacent to any kind of open space, nobody will insure my house because of fire.

00:04:29.000 And so suddenly it's like I have a house that's uninsurable, and it's not just me, it's everybody.

00:04:33.000 And so it's chaos.

00:04:35.000 Yeah, I have a friend who's trying to sell a house in California and it turned out it was $125,000 a year just to get fire insurance.

00:04:44.000 Yeah.

00:04:44.000 Like, what?

00:04:46.000 Yeah, it's insane.

00:04:47.000 It's fucking nuts!

00:04:48.000 It's insane.

00:04:49.000 Yeah, but, you know, I was evacuated three times when I lived there.

00:04:52.000 I used to live in Bell Canyon, and it was rough.

00:04:56.000 I've been really lucky.

00:04:58.000 I'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.

00:05:06.000 Yeah, it is just luck.

00:05:08.000 I mean, the benefit of your place is you're at least in a helicopter accessible.

00:05:13.000 They're just going to dump all that fire retardant right on top of you. 1.00

00:05:16.000 I literally am at the top of the hill on a bunch of rock.

00:05:20.000 So if the whole fucking place turns into an inferno, I'm still fucked.

00:05:24.000 And I think that place has probably been there a while.

00:05:25.000 It's probably withstood all sorts of calamity.

00:05:28.000 Yeah, when I was filming Fear Factor, I talked to this guy who was a fire guy for the fire department.

00:05:32.000 He said, it's just going to be a matter of time.

00:05:35.000 There's going to be one day where a fire hits L.A. and the wind is the right way and we're not going to be able to stop it.

00:05:41.000 It's just going to burn right through to the ocean.

00:05:43.000 He goes, it's just a matter of time.

00:05:44.000 We all know it.

00:05:45.000 I was like, what the fuck, dude?

00:05:47.000 I go, the whole city?

00:05:48.000 He goes, the whole city?

00:05:50.000 He goes, when those big fires get going, there's not a damn thing.

00:05:53.000 Like what happened in Malibu a few years back?

00:05:56.000 I always thought Malibu, those rich people, Maui.

00:06:01.000 That was like around 93. That actually happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction.

00:06:06.000 Really?

00:06:07.000 Yeah, well, there was a big Malibu fire.

00:06:09.000 The big Malibu fire happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction.

00:06:12.000 So we actually set up a TV on the set because Bruce Willis was going to maybe lose his house.

00:06:20.000 And 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.

00:06:27.000 And 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.

00:06:36.000 And I go, no he's not, he's right here!

00:06:39.000 Well, the thing is, fires were normal.

00:06:42.000 Like, 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.

00:06:48.000 But now they put all those houses in there where there never were houses, because the fire is a natural process.

00:06:54.000 It kind of clears the land, cleans the land, and it's normal, actually.

00:06:59.000 But, 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.

00:07:08.000 Yeah.

00:07:09.000 I think it's overdevelopment, which is the cause of these insane kind of fires that we're getting.

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00:09:14.000 Yeah, but it's a cool place to live.

00:09:16.000 You're not going to stop people from developing in Malibu, you know?

00:09:20.000 It's just too nice.

00:09:21.000 No, you're not going to stop.

00:09:21.000 Just take your chances, roll your dice.

00:09:23.000 Yeah.

00:09:24.000 Well, but you roll your dice, you take your chances and you roll your dice no matter where you live.

00:09:28.000 Yeah, it's just fucked up when it happens.

00:09:31.000 Oh my God, yeah.

00:09:32.000 I drove home once, we were filming Fear Factor, we had to stop the set early because the fire was so bad.

00:09:36.000 This 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.

00:09:46.000 For 55 minutes.

00:09:47.000 Everything, like Lord of the Rings style.

00:09:49.000 So three different times you got evacuated from your house?

00:09:52.000 Yeah, three different times.

00:09:53.000 So you decide what you're going to take with you?

00:09:56.000 Yeah, the last time was the last time.

00:09:59.000 It was the last big fire in LA. And I came home from the comedy store at like 1 o'clock in the morning.

00:10:06.000 And my wife and I are looking out the window and the fire is like maybe 500 or 600 yards away.

00:10:11.000 And it's coming over the hill.

00:10:12.000 And we were looking at each other and I said, let's just get the fuck out of here.

00:10:15.000 Yeah, right on.

00:10:16.000 Let's just get out of here now.

00:10:18.000 So we grabbed the kids, got a laptop, took some clothes.

00:10:21.000 I didn't even have underwear.

00:10:22.000 I said, we could just buy stuff.

00:10:24.000 Who gives a fuck?

00:10:25.000 Who cares?

00:10:26.000 If you have your life.

00:10:27.000 I'm always the, I don't want to say the stupid guy, but I'm the guy who for some reason always decides I'm going to stay.

00:10:35.000 Oh, you're that old guy. 0.87

00:10:36.000 I live near a fire department.

00:10:38.000 There's a fire hydrant across from my driveway.

00:10:40.000 You're the guy on the roof where the flood is happening.

00:10:43.000 You're going to wipe rubber.

00:10:44.000 Yeah, that's me.

00:10:45.000 Like, my family went away, and I was like, well, they're going to close it out so we can't get back in.

00:10:49.000 I'm just going to hang out here until I know that it's...

00:10:51.000 And, you know, at a certain point, there was fire, like, cresting the ridge, and I'm kind of watching it.

00:10:56.000 I ran down to the fire department to see, you know, like, hey, guys, it's coming!

00:11:01.000 I can see it from my house!

00:11:03.000 And they're all there, like, hanging out and eating sandwiches and, like, not even worried about it at all.

00:11:07.000 They kind of looked over at it and said, eh, it's okay.

00:11:10.000 It'll be fine.

00:11:11.000 It'll just burn a little.

00:11:11.000 Yeah, they get a little too blasé-blasé about fire.

00:11:14.000 They're pretty blasé.

00:11:15.000 By the way, my spec ops friend, he's like, fuck those firemen, man.

00:11:21.000 Fuck them.

00:11:21.000 They get so much credit for nothing.

00:11:24.000 They barely do anything.

00:11:26.000 They're on these incredible pension plans.

00:11:28.000 He hates firemen.

00:11:30.000 That's ridiculous.

00:11:32.000 It is a great job, but you can't get mad at someone for having a great job.

00:11:36.000 For having a great job.

00:11:37.000 There's a buddy of mine that I used to play pool with.

00:11:39.000 Well, he has to actually hump it into another country and kill somebody.

00:11:43.000 He's got a real tough job.

00:11:45.000 He's not getting enough credit.

00:11:46.000 That's what it is.

00:11:47.000 That's really what it comes from.

00:11:48.000 That's a better way to say it.

00:11:50.000 Yeah, that's the reality of our world today.

00:11:53.000 Those people don't get enough credit.

00:11:55.000 But firemen, you know, it is a great fucking job.

00:11:58.000 But I like the way he breaks it down.

00:11:59.000 Fuck those guys.

00:12:01.000 It's like they have all these huge pensions and everybody thinks they're heroes.

00:12:05.000 They're not heroes!

00:12:07.000 They're just doing their job!

00:12:09.000 The firemen are very comfortable with fire.

00:12:10.000 These people are very comfortable with people dying.

00:12:12.000 Dying because of them.

00:12:14.000 They just get real...

00:12:15.000 They get blasé blasé about murder.

00:12:19.000 It's not murder if it's sanctioned by your own country.

00:12:22.000 Isn't that wonderful?

00:12:23.000 What a cool loophole.

00:12:24.000 Yeah, isn't it?

00:12:24.000 I had an interesting thing.

00:12:27.000 You know, it's like, you know, when you live in the Hollywood Hills, you're paying actually, you know, you...

00:12:32.000 Pretty decent property taxes.

00:12:34.000 There's a little vig that comes with it.

00:12:37.000 There's a reason.

00:12:39.000 You don't have to wait two hours during election.

00:12:43.000 You just go to the local elementary school.

00:12:46.000 You're in and out in five minutes when it comes to election day.

00:12:52.000 It'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.

00:13:06.000 Has that happened to you?

00:13:09.000 That happened to me once.

00:13:12.000 And so the alarm goes off and I hit the button, let the fire department know, and then I put it out.

00:13:20.000 I put it out like pretty much immediately.

00:13:24.000 And then maybe five minutes later, it could have been three, five minutes later, The firetruck is at my door.

00:13:36.000 So I didn't even have time to say, hey, it's okay now.

00:13:40.000 It's okay.

00:13:41.000 And so there's an entire firetruck at my door.

00:13:43.000 And I left them in and I go, look, guys, I'm really sorry.

00:13:47.000 I was really stupid.

00:13:49.000 You know, I left the room with the pot on the stove and whatever in any way.

00:13:55.000 And so I'm really sorry I wasted your time.

00:13:57.000 I'm really, really sorry I wasted your time.

00:14:00.000 Having said that, it's nice to see that you guys are here this quick.

00:14:04.000 Yeah, and I'm sure they were like, oh, we'll just get a selfie.

00:14:07.000 And they were like, yeah, yeah, you're right.

00:14:09.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:14:10.000 Your property taxes pay for something.

00:14:11.000 Are you sure you want us to come in and just make sure?

00:14:13.000 Yeah, go ahead if you want.

00:14:16.000 The problem is sometimes they have to chop through the walls to make sure that there's not fire and embers inside.

00:14:22.000 Yeah.

00:14:22.000 Spray it all down.

00:14:23.000 It's a hard fucking job when it's a hard job, though.

00:14:26.000 The thing is, most of the time, they're just chilling.

00:14:28.000 They get to cook, they eat, they work out.

00:14:30.000 I take ice cream down to our guys.

00:14:33.000 I'll go out and buy a bunch of ice cream or some pizzas and take it down just on random days just to make them happy.

00:14:40.000 That's cool.

00:14:41.000 I'm okay with the fire guys.

00:14:43.000 It was actually funny because it was like one of the things that was a crack up.

00:14:47.000 It was like the local fire department when we worked at Video Archives at our video store.

00:14:51.000 The local fire department was a customer.

00:14:55.000 And so they'd rent different movies.

00:14:56.000 But like it was almost out of five movies that they would rent, four are pornos.

00:15:04.000 Yeah.

00:15:05.000 No, they lived up to their careers.

00:15:08.000 Did you guys work together?

00:15:09.000 Yeah.

00:15:10.000 No shit.

00:15:11.000 That's how you guys met?

00:15:11.000 Yeah.

00:15:12.000 That's how we met.

00:15:12.000 Wow.

00:15:14.000 Video archives in Manhattan Beach, California.

00:15:16.000 How fucking cool is that?

00:15:17.000 From like 84, yeah.

00:15:19.000 Wow.

00:15:19.000 84 for about five years.

00:15:20.000 Yeah.

00:15:21.000 Maybe even a little bit before 84. Well, I started officially at 84 because I remember...

00:15:25.000 But you were a customer before.

00:15:26.000 Well, I was a customer before.

00:15:27.000 Yeah.

00:15:27.000 I was a customer before, yeah.

00:15:29.000 I predated Quentin as one of the employees, so I was there.

00:15:33.000 Look at you guys!

00:15:34.000 Yeah, actually, yeah.

00:15:36.000 That's us.

00:15:37.000 That's crazy.

00:15:39.000 Very unfortunate shirt on my part.

00:15:41.000 Yeah.

00:15:43.000 There was a lot of unfortunate shirts in the 80s.

00:15:45.000 Everybody was confused.

00:15:46.000 They cut the drugs off in the 70s.

00:15:48.000 No one knew what to do for 10 years.

00:15:51.000 That's exactly it.

00:15:51.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:15:53.000 You would have never thought back then that that industry would completely vanish.

00:15:57.000 You thought blockbuster video was going to be around forever.

00:16:00.000 Well, you know, one of the things that...

00:16:02.000 What?

00:16:04.000 I didn't think film was going to vanish either.

00:16:06.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:16:07.000 I didn't think the theater experience was going to go away either.

00:16:09.000 But one of the things, though, that was the...

00:16:13.000 Death 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.

00:16:26.000 You've got a nice little nest egg.

00:16:28.000 If 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.

00:16:37.000 I don't know anything about movies.

00:16:39.000 Well, people help you, you know, help you choose the titles and everything.

00:16:43.000 So there's a lot of people that, like, invested in this stuff.

00:16:46.000 And it seemed like a good idea.

00:16:49.000 The reason that it seemed like a profitable idea was the idea, like, well, you know, I sell you this videocassette.

00:16:58.000 And you pay for the videocassette.

00:17:00.000 But the minute you rent it past the point where you paid for the videocassette yourself, then everything else is you.

00:17:08.000 All that other money that you make from here on in is just all profit once you pay for the actual cassette.

00:17:13.000 Of course, you'll have some cassettes that don't rent as well, but that's the way it works out.

00:17:17.000 But it should work out great.

00:17:19.000 Well, again, that sounds like a pretty good business model.

00:17:22.000 Well, if I spend this money and then five years from now, boom, everything is a profit.

00:17:31.000 Where it all fell apart is the idea that you always have to get new shit.

00:17:40.000 Because it's not a bookstore.

00:17:42.000 Well, bookstores need to get new stuff too, but it's not a library.

00:17:45.000 Life doesn't stand still.

00:17:47.000 Every month there's new titles coming out and you have to be competitive and you have to get the new titles.

00:17:55.000 And so...

00:17:57.000 Even if that were the issue, that wouldn't be that big of a deal.

00:18:02.000 But if you're a mom and pop star, you only have so much room.

00:18:07.000 It's literally a shelf space issue.

00:18:09.000 Within three to four years, you're bursting out of the seams of videos.

00:18:16.000 You're just bursting out.

00:18:17.000 You've got no more room.

00:18:19.000 You've got no more room.

00:18:20.000 And so now all of a sudden, rather than having your tapes facing out, now everything is, you know, sideways.

00:18:28.000 Spine facing.

00:18:30.000 And you've got to really...

00:18:32.000 And it just never stops.

00:18:34.000 It never stops.

00:18:34.000 Next month, you've got to get this.

00:18:36.000 And next month, you've got to get that.

00:18:37.000 And next month, you've got to get that.

00:18:38.000 You need a Costco-sized building.

00:18:40.000 Yeah.

00:18:40.000 Well, again, if you have four different video stores or if you have a chain, you can move things around and it's easier.

00:18:47.000 But when you're a mom-and-pop, that's just it.

00:18:50.000 If you're a mom-and-pop store and you have a bike store, you don't have to keep getting new bikes every month.

00:18:58.000 If you have a pottery store, you don't have to keep getting new pots every single month.

00:19:03.000 You constantly have to grow your inventory.

00:19:04.000 Every six months you get something cool.

00:19:07.000 You don't need to get it every month.

00:19:08.000 And you're defined by you having the new shit.

00:19:11.000 And 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.

00:19:28.000 And a mom and pop store can't afford to buy more than one or two diehards or three, maybe, to satisfy your clientele.

00:19:34.000 When 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.

00:19:42.000 Yeah, Top Gun.

00:19:43.000 Perfect example.

00:19:43.000 So you get, like, you know, you'll get, even the mom and pop store, you'll get 12. Yeah.

00:19:48.000 Or 15. Because everyone wants to see it.

00:19:52.000 And at some point, it's going to be out.

00:19:53.000 And it's going to be checked out.

00:19:54.000 And so you've got to satisfy your...

00:19:56.000 Well, you're going to...

00:19:56.000 Yeah, you'll rent all 15 of those for the next two weeks.

00:19:59.000 You know, it's going to be good.

00:20:01.000 But then now you have to sell them off.

00:20:04.000 You know, for $10 a piece, you know, once the, you know, once the desire has died down.

00:20:11.000 It largely fell on us because we were a smaller store and we had a Blockbuster just a block away, basically.

00:20:16.000 Not even a block.

00:20:17.000 We're talking about in the same fucking...

00:20:18.000 Basically.

00:20:19.000 It's not a block away.

00:20:21.000 It was in the...

00:20:21.000 On the block.

00:20:22.000 Yeah, in the shopping center that we were in.

00:20:26.000 Well, you're missing the most interesting thing.

00:20:29.000 It's not about the bulk buy.

00:20:30.000 The bulk buy is what it is.

00:20:32.000 But every mom and pop store has to deal with that, dealing with a franchise.

00:20:38.000 It changes your strategy, though.

00:20:39.000 But what Blockbuster would do, and they were famous for doing this.

00:20:44.000 They were famous for doing this.

00:20:48.000 But particularly, they were strategic about it.

00:20:50.000 It's like, okay, we're going to go into this town.

00:20:54.000 Okay, we're going into Manhattan Beach.

00:20:57.000 What's the biggest video store?

00:20:59.000 What's the most popular local video store in Manhattan Beach?

00:21:02.000 Well, that would be video archives.

00:21:03.000 They're right on Sepulveda.

00:21:04.000 They're right across the street from the warehouse, which was one of the big rental places.

00:21:10.000 Before Blockbuster, that was the place.

00:21:11.000 Before Blockbuster, it was warehouse, warehouse records and tapes.

00:21:15.000 And they still managed to survive across the street from warehouse.

00:21:21.000 And then what does Blockbuster do?

00:21:23.000 They buy the Shakey's Pizza that is in our shopping center.

00:21:27.000 Our shopping center!

00:21:29.000 And they moved into the Shakey's Pizza.

00:21:31.000 Because it's like, well, okay, with the warehouse and with these video archives guys, well, this is obviously the place to be.

00:21:37.000 So they just bought out the Shakey's Pizza and opened up.

00:21:40.000 And they still couldn't shut us down.

00:21:41.000 Yeah.

00:21:42.000 Wow.

00:21:43.000 I'm sure they had the attitude of, we'll just brush them aside.

00:21:45.000 Oh, of course that's how they felt.

00:21:47.000 And 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?

00:22:00.000 And so...

00:22:02.000 Landed on us to basically say, oh, you can't get Top Gun.

00:22:05.000 Well, how about this movie that you haven't seen?

00:22:08.000 It's the difference between being a cool coffee place and being Starbucks.

00:22:13.000 Or a franchise bar and a cool little Joe's bar.

00:22:18.000 And the bartender knows you.

00:22:20.000 So it's like, look, if you just absolutely positively need Top Gun that weekend, then go across the streets of the warehouse and get it.

00:22:28.000 We have what we have.

00:22:30.000 But we had customers that, like, came in every fucking day.

00:22:35.000 And part of their day, or every other day, you know, when their camps were due.

00:22:39.000 And they were people of the neighborhood.

00:22:41.000 And 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.

00:22:56.000 to tell them what to do.

00:22:58.000 We're the algorithm.

00:22:58.000 You have to know, oh, this guy, oh, they're on a date night, so they're going to want this kind of rom-com type movie.

00:23:04.000 Or this guy, he really likes Vietnamese hooker porn tapes. 0.73

00:23:11.000 I've got to make sure to find something like that for him.

00:23:13.000 And those kids, they're going to want some skate stuff, so I've got to learn all about the Bones Brigade videos and stuff like that.

00:23:21.000 And so, you know, you just kind of figured out, like, how can I upsell the stuff that they haven't heard of?

00:23:26.000 Because invariably, anybody who comes in...

00:23:29.000 But you're making it just sound a little bit more cynical than it was.

00:23:32.000 You are making it sound more cynical than it was.

00:23:34.000 No, more like the challenge of it.

00:23:35.000 You guys are like a married couple.

00:23:38.000 Totally, we're like a married couple.

00:23:42.000 Tell them the whole story, honey.

00:23:43.000 Tell them the whole story.

00:23:45.000 We were just hanging out and they're coming and hanging out too.

00:23:48.000 And we would pop a movie on and like, you know, pop the movie on and be watching scenes from it and be talking about the scenes.

00:23:55.000 Then a customer would come in or many customers would come in and they'd just become part of the conversation.

00:23:59.000 And we would have like, you know, like a chat room in the...

00:24:04.000 No, no, there was like...

00:24:05.000 No, there was about like 15 customers that like...

00:24:13.000 You know, I talk to Five hours a week.

00:24:18.000 Every week for five years.

00:24:20.000 Because they come in and I'm like, we'll spend at least 40 minutes.

00:24:23.000 Every other day.

00:24:24.000 And I expected to see them.

00:24:26.000 And I watched what I watched on TV. I saw what I saw at the movies.

00:24:30.000 And they saw what they saw in the movies.

00:24:31.000 They watched what they watched on TV. We all talked about it.

00:24:33.000 And they talked about the videos.

00:24:35.000 And what else we're going to get.

00:24:36.000 And da-da-da-da-da.

00:24:37.000 And if you liked that, you're going to like this.

00:24:38.000 About our lives and everything.

00:24:40.000 So at what point in time, while this is all going on, do you guys decide, we need to make our own fucking movies?

00:24:46.000 It was always the case.

00:24:48.000 Well, we were always thinking...

00:24:49.000 Well, Roger had another friend that...

00:24:53.000 It was a guy that connected me and Roger together.

00:24:55.000 It was a guy named Scott who took his own life at a certain point.

00:24:58.000 His father owned another video store that I worked at as well and that Quentin used to come into.

00:25:02.000 But the thing is, though, that while I was just thinking about making movies, Roger and Scott were like making movies on Super 8. Yeah.

00:25:10.000 And they were making little horror films and little zombie movies on Super 8. Supernatural thrillers.

00:25:17.000 Warp Turns is a zombie movie.

00:25:18.000 Yeah, it's kind of a zombie movie.

00:25:23.000 More of an afterlife film.

00:25:24.000 Okay, maybe.

00:25:26.000 But you're making like legit horror films.

00:25:29.000 I'm just thinking about this stuff.

00:25:30.000 And these guys are like Sam Raimi-ing it.

00:25:33.000 They're making their shit in their backyard and working on it for like three months and stuff.

00:25:38.000 Yeah.

00:25:38.000 And, you know, like I was friends with all the punk guys because it was like L.A. punk.

00:25:43.000 And so they were always in my movies.

00:25:46.000 All the punks were in my movies because they were media literate. 0.99

00:25:49.000 They loved movies.

00:25:49.000 And so they were easy to pull in and to be in the film.

00:25:53.000 So they were always playing like, you know, the gang of punks who beat somebody up or something.

00:25:57.000 Yeah.

00:25:58.000 So it must have been cool working at a video store, though, because it's essentially like you have...

00:26:02.000 It's like an education.

00:26:03.000 Well, when the time came where we actually wanted to be making movies, where we were talking about making movies, because I can remember when...

00:26:09.000 I think it was around the time of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or maybe She's Gotta Have It.

00:26:15.000 No, no, definitely Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

00:26:16.000 But I remember you coming to me and saying...

00:26:19.000 The moment is happening.

00:26:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:21.000 It's happening.

00:26:22.000 Like, a small movie is possible to get made.

00:26:26.000 Like, it's happening for us, for guys our age.

00:26:30.000 Yeah, I mean, the one, you know, Sex dies and videotape was sort of like the Seattle band that broke.

00:26:40.000 But I was already looking at Blood Simple was my in.

00:26:46.000 That's a great movie.

00:26:48.000 That was, okay, it's an artistic movie.

00:26:53.000 It's arty.

00:26:54.000 It's funny.

00:26:56.000 It can play the art houses.

00:26:57.000 It can play the art house circuit.

00:26:59.000 But there's a genre base to it.

00:27:01.000 Yeah.

00:27:02.000 There's a genre base.

00:27:03.000 It's a thriller.

00:27:04.000 It's a film noir-y kind of thriller done in a certain kind of way, but it's a genre base.

00:27:09.000 Yeah, I go, that's the way you do an art film.

00:27:11.000 You make it a genre base art film.

00:27:14.000 If you keep one foot in...

00:27:16.000 Because it's entertaining.

00:27:17.000 Yeah, if you keep one foot in exploitation in some way, in genre, if you keep your foundation in genre, then you can do whatever you want.

00:27:24.000 Like, my favorite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick.

00:27:27.000 I love Kubrick movies.

00:27:29.000 Okay, so...

00:27:30.000 One can pretty much look at all of his films and say each and every one is a genre film.

00:27:34.000 He's got a science fiction movie.

00:27:35.000 He's got a horror movie.

00:27:37.000 Even Barry Lyndon as a costume drama at the time.

00:27:40.000 As a costume genre.

00:27:41.000 That was a solid, bankable genre.

00:27:44.000 The book is definitely a pulpy genre of its time.

00:27:48.000 The book was serialized, wasn't it?

00:27:49.000 It was like Thackeray wrote him in an episode.

00:27:52.000 It was like a soap opera.

00:27:53.000 But that was a very popular book at that time.

00:27:56.000 Yeah, and so it was all...

00:28:00.000 If you can...

00:28:02.000 And I knew this making my first film, and I know, Quentin, you were talking about it.

00:28:06.000 This was a conversation we were actively having of, we have to make sure that we make a movie people want to see, like a genre film.

00:28:12.000 And I was calling them exploitation movies at the time, like, I want to keep one foot in exploitation.

00:28:17.000 But at the same time, I'm like, well, I kind of also want to make, like, you know, I want to elevate it as much as possible.

00:28:23.000 And so when the time came for me to make my first film, Killing Zoe...

00:28:30.000 You know, it was like I knew it was going to be a bank robbery because I wrote it around a location.

00:28:35.000 You know, we found this while they were scouting for Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence Bender.

00:28:40.000 Or maybe you also had scouted that location.

00:28:43.000 You found this bank location.

00:28:45.000 And Lawrence called me up.

00:28:46.000 He's like, hey, I'm calling all the writers I know.

00:28:48.000 I found this bank location.

00:28:49.000 And 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.

00:28:56.000 It's like this complete, solid, amazing location.

00:28:59.000 And I said, oh my god, Lawrence, this is your lucky day.

00:29:02.000 I happen to have a script that takes place in a bank.

00:29:04.000 And then I just quickly wrote one based on the location.

00:29:08.000 And as I was writing it, I was thinking, okay, you know, I know that it's going to be a bank robbery.

00:29:13.000 It's a bank.

00:29:14.000 And so I know it's going to be a bank robbery.

00:29:15.000 And that's my solid bankable genre that I'm going to stick with.

00:29:22.000 But 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.

00:29:30.000 He's like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes a Trip!

00:29:34.000 I still think it should have been called that.

00:29:37.000 I think it's a different movie.

00:29:39.000 I don't think it's a...

00:29:40.000 No, you kind of made Roger Takes a Trip, just added bank robbers in it.

00:29:43.000 But it's still Roger Takes a Trip.

00:29:45.000 I had been in Paris.

00:29:46.000 I had bumped into a guy that I knew from Los Angeles who was a French guy.

00:29:49.000 And he was like, oh, I'll show you the real Paris.

00:29:52.000 And I went out with he and his friends, Enric, Jean, Claude, all the characters from the movie.

00:29:57.000 I went out with him and his friends and we, you know...

00:30:01.000 He drove me through Paris, and next thing I know, he's doing heroin, and it started coming through.

00:30:06.000 With you?

00:30:06.000 No, not with me.

00:30:08.000 Now we do heroin!

00:30:09.000 Yeah, it was like, now we do heroin.

00:30:10.000 Hold my arm.

00:30:11.000 I did hold his arm.

00:30:12.000 For real?

00:30:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:14.000 I had never seen anything like that.

00:30:16.000 Like he tied his arm off?

00:30:17.000 He's like, hold my arm?

00:30:18.000 No, no, no.

00:30:19.000 He was the tying arm.

00:30:20.000 Roger was the tying arm.

00:30:21.000 Roger, hold my arm while I shoot up.

00:30:23.000 Jeez.

00:30:24.000 But he doesn't quite know that this is all going to happen, that everything else has been a preamble to this.

00:30:30.000 Yeah, suddenly that happens.

00:30:31.000 He just needed a heroin partner.

00:30:33.000 Yeah, and his friends are like, oh, doing it to the nose doesn't even affect me anymore.

00:30:38.000 And I'm writing these lines down like, this is great shit.

00:30:43.000 And so I get back and I tell Quentin about this whole story and about these guys and driving around the Champs-Élysées and, oh, this is where the fags sell themselves! 1.00

00:30:55.000 Now we go into the nightclub down below and we do more heroin.

00:30:59.000 I'm like, what about the cops?

00:31:00.000 Aren't the police going to say anything?

00:31:02.000 It's safer here.

00:31:04.000 You can do heroin anywhere in Paris.

00:31:09.000 I work at Le Monde.

00:31:11.000 Basically, everything in that movie was stuff that I'd actually seen.

00:31:16.000 When the time came to make it as a bank robbery film, I just, you know, I'm thinking about it.

00:31:22.000 I'm like, well, it's a bank robbery movie, but it's going to be about these guys.

00:31:24.000 And it just became a movie about a guy going someplace and everything that he thought he knew is wrong.

00:31:32.000 You know, like, you think, you know, you haven't seen your friend in a while.

00:31:37.000 You go see him.

00:31:38.000 Okay, it's all about that kind of friendship and misconception.

00:31:44.000 He's downstairs at the bank.

00:31:46.000 Jean-Yves Genglad, the bad guy, is upstairs.

00:31:48.000 Chaos is going on upstairs.

00:31:49.000 He has no idea what's going on upstairs.

00:31:51.000 And so this kind of just became what the movie was about.

00:31:55.000 And so I just quickly wrote the script.

00:31:57.000 And then, you know, we ended up not even using that location to shoot the movie in.

00:32:02.000 It came together quickly.

00:32:04.000 Later, and I ended up shooting in downtown LA instead.

00:32:07.000 But it was...

00:32:08.000 The seed was planted.

00:32:09.000 The seed was planted.

00:32:10.000 So the idea was, okay, I'm going to make a French film out of it.

00:32:14.000 Because I'm like in LA, I'm making a film.

00:32:15.000 What can I do that would be different?

00:32:17.000 Like that would make this more than just a bank robbery movie.

00:32:20.000 And because of the experience I had just had, I was like, well, I'm going to make a French film.

00:32:24.000 Okay, I had no business making a French movie.

00:32:29.000 I didn't even really speak French.

00:32:31.000 I just thought it would be kind of cool.

00:32:33.000 I like, you know, a cool French girl and like greasy, dirty French guys, French criminals. 1.00

00:32:40.000 And I always loved, you know, Alain Delon and Le Samurai.

00:32:44.000 You know, the way he wears a suit and the way he carries a gun and the way he walks around.

00:32:47.000 I just like, I, you know, just adored all of that.

00:32:51.000 And so it was like, well, let's put all of that kind of...

00:32:55.000 Space that's in my brain into the movie.

00:32:57.000 And then the movies tend to take on a life of their own.

00:33:00.000 They tend to be like children.

00:33:01.000 You know, it starts off as a concept, as a conception, has a conception, and then it has an infancy.

00:33:06.000 And then you're raising that child to become the movie.

00:33:10.000 And 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.

00:33:20.000 And it's a little bit of a balance.

00:33:21.000 You 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.

00:33:26.000 But at the same time, you have to be willing to, you know, be strong with it as well.

00:33:31.000 That's a very underappreciated movie.

00:33:34.000 It's a fucking great movie.

00:33:35.000 I think I'm really good at making underappreciated movies.

00:33:38.000 I think I've built a career on underappreciated movies.

00:33:42.000 Those are the classics that you would look for in a video store.

00:33:44.000 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:33:45.000 You'd look for the movies that were really good that no one knew about.

00:33:47.000 Dark Day Afternoon's not in, but we could get you Killing Zone.

00:33:52.000 My favorite moment in the movie.

00:33:54.000 Well, I like it when the guy gets burned alive.

00:33:57.000 You know, the hamburger scene.

00:33:59.000 But I remember they were trying to talk to you to cut out.

00:34:02.000 And they go, no, no, you can't cut that out.

00:34:03.000 I'm taking my name off.

00:34:05.000 No, Quentin did that.

00:34:06.000 Actually, Quentin was a great gorilla to have on my side at that time.

00:34:11.000 Why would they tell you to cut that out?

00:34:12.000 Well, I don't know.

00:34:14.000 Everyone is afraid.

00:34:15.000 It's too rough.

00:34:16.000 Everyone's afraid.

00:34:17.000 Everyone operates out of fear.

00:34:19.000 If you take that out, I'm taking my name off the phone.

00:34:19.000 The only people that don't operate out of fear, I think, is the director and the actors.

00:34:23.000 Those are the ones who, if everything's working right, you're fearless.

00:34:26.000 It's always executives that are fucking out.

00:34:28.000 But it's the scene.

00:34:29.000 My favorite scene is the scene with Hugh Anglon when he walks into the close-up.

00:34:35.000 Oh, yeah.

00:34:36.000 And he's just like...

00:34:38.000 Wait a minute.

00:34:39.000 He's like remembering what he heard and he realizes...

00:34:44.000 Okay, so that's a good example of...

00:34:47.000 Because the movie was shot for...

00:34:47.000 Explain the scene better.

00:34:49.000 The scene was shot for...

00:34:50.000 Explain the scene better.

00:34:52.000 I will.

00:34:52.000 The movie was shot for very little money.

00:34:54.000 We had no money to make it.

00:34:55.000 So I had to shoot the entire upstairs first and then the downstairs.

00:35:00.000 Because it's like doing a company move.

00:35:02.000 But I had kept...

00:35:03.000 I knew that when writing...

00:35:05.000 And this was sort of a...

00:35:07.000 Kind of a rule that we had was, one, make a genre movie.

00:35:12.000 Explain the scene!

00:35:13.000 I'm going to!

00:35:15.000 I said explain the scene!

00:35:17.000 Don't tell me what you felt about at that moment.

00:35:20.000 You missed the exit!

00:35:21.000 The scene was a replacement for another scene that was in the movie that was too expensive to shoot.

00:35:25.000 That's the short of it.

00:35:26.000 What does that have to do with what I like?

00:35:28.000 What I replaced it with was, and I had to fight for it, was a single shot.

00:35:32.000 Because originally he goes downstairs and he sees a bunch of guys coming in through the sewer.

00:35:36.000 So he starts machine gunning people in the sewer.

00:35:39.000 Because there was like a little sewer manhole in the bottom of the bank.

00:35:41.000 I was like, well, let's use that.

00:35:42.000 And so I had this whole thing.

00:35:44.000 And the bond company showed up and you're behind schedule and you've got to cut pages and...

00:35:52.000 I 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.

00:36:00.000 And 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.

00:36:06.000 And 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.

00:36:12.000 And so I set up, which were actually really cool to me.

00:36:15.000 They were actually, film finances was great.

00:36:17.000 LAUGHTER I just set up a single camera.

00:36:21.000 I asked for a kind of a Kubrickian lens, a nice wide, like maybe a 14 millimeter lens.

00:36:27.000 And I just had John Hug walk up into a close-up and I just had him do...

00:36:32.000 I said, just walk into a close-up and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls.

00:36:39.000 And is that the shot you're talking about?

00:36:41.000 And he does like a little magic trick beforehand, like...

00:36:44.000 No.

00:36:45.000 That's not the one you're talking about?

00:36:46.000 No.

00:36:46.000 That's the great shot.

00:36:47.000 That's a great shot.

00:36:49.000 No, the scene I'm talking about is...

00:36:51.000 But that's why I wanted you to explain it because I hadn't seen it in a long time.

00:36:54.000 But it was...

00:36:56.000 There it is.

00:36:56.000 Is that the shot?

00:36:57.000 Well, that's the shot.

00:36:58.000 That's the shot I'm talking about.

00:36:59.000 Look, he's looking into the walls.

00:37:00.000 He's looking around.

00:37:03.000 But I thought the whole idea about it is the idea that I added those lines of dialogue in.

00:37:10.000 No, but I thought the whole idea is he puts it all together.

00:37:16.000 He realized that there's something going on, that the cops are doing this, or Eric Stoltz is dirty with him.

00:37:22.000 And it all hits him.

00:37:24.000 He's ready to do something else, and he walks into a close-up, and it all hits him.

00:37:27.000 But now we, the audience, know what's going on.

00:37:30.000 Yeah.

00:37:31.000 And then he's just like...

00:37:33.000 Well, it just shows that sometimes if you can't do what you want to do, what you come up with is better.

00:37:39.000 And this was an example of, it rained that day, and I had to use the rain.

00:37:44.000 That's sort of the example.

00:37:45.000 The frustrating part for me about what you're talking about is, like, I don't care how the sausage was made.

00:37:49.000 I like the sausage.

00:37:50.000 I wanted you to talk about the sausage, not the factory!

00:37:58.000 You don't want to know what's in that sausage.

00:38:00.000 You have no interest in that.

00:38:01.000 I wanted to hear about the Italian sweetness.

00:38:04.000 Well, it was very sweet, but it started off sour.

00:38:07.000 It started off sour because I couldn't do what I wanted to do.

00:38:10.000 And so I just came up with something that was, well, he puts it together in his head.

00:38:14.000 I mean, I still think that sequence is exhilarating because it all boils down to an actor's face.

00:38:20.000 Well, 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.

00:38:33.000 He did all the effects for Dawn of the Dead.

00:38:34.000 Not to mention all the great Friday the 13th, all the slasher movies.

00:38:38.000 He's the superstar of practical makeup effects of horror films of that era.

00:38:42.000 He was in Vietnam and saw some shit.

00:38:46.000 And 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.

00:38:58.000 But Tom came in, and I couldn't afford him.

00:39:01.000 I called him up on the phone.

00:39:02.000 I was like, hey, do you think I'm a young filmmaker?

00:39:07.000 I'm your biggest fan?

00:39:11.000 I like the makeup effects, blah, blah, blah.

00:39:14.000 Okay, he flew himself out.

00:39:16.000 We had no money to pay him.

00:39:17.000 I think we paid him like some tiny amount.

00:39:20.000 He 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.

00:39:30.000 And 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.

00:39:40.000 Tom is an incredible guy.

00:39:44.000 He's an incredible, incredible guy.

00:39:46.000 Where you were asking earlier on about – whoa, you're working at a video store.

00:39:51.000 Did you ever think – when did you start thinking about making your own stuff?

00:39:54.000 Well, I was thinking about making my own stuff for like a long, long, long time but these guys were actually doing it.

00:40:01.000 But there is a truth while I thought about it like for a long, long time and always figured I would do that eventually.

00:40:08.000 I did fall asleep for a few years.

00:40:13.000 Because working at that store, I just got caught up in the little life there.

00:40:18.000 And it's interesting because you spent your 20s going to comedy clubs and building a career.

00:40:28.000 So I'm spending my 20s there.

00:40:31.000 And, well, it's one of those things where it's like, well...

00:40:36.000 This isn't my dream.

00:40:38.000 This isn't what I wanted to do working at a video store for years.

00:40:44.000 I wanted to actually make movies.

00:40:46.000 It's not my dream what I'm doing.

00:40:49.000 But it's dream adjacent.

00:40:51.000 It's close to my dream.

00:40:53.000 It's close to my dream.

00:40:54.000 I get to watch movies all fucking day.

00:40:56.000 I get to talk about movies all fucking day.

00:40:59.000 I don't have to work at a pizza parlor.

00:41:01.000 I'm not delivering pizzas.

00:41:03.000 I'm not busting ass as a bartender.

00:41:06.000 I'm not busting ass doing menial jobs.

00:41:08.000 I mean, this is the kind of job that I'd go to the store if I wasn't paid to go to the store.

00:41:19.000 But for a couple of years, it did put me to sleep.

00:41:23.000 It did kind of put me to sleep.

00:41:24.000 It put my ambitions to sleep for a little bit because I was happy enough.

00:41:28.000 Yeah.

00:41:30.000 I was happy.

00:41:30.000 And just one of these days, I'll...

00:41:33.000 Right, but you didn't have the fire.

00:41:34.000 I didn't have the fire.

00:41:36.000 And when I got the fire, when I eventually got the fire back again, and it was a life-changing thing.

00:41:44.000 It was a life-changing day.

00:41:46.000 It was...

00:41:48.000 We 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.

00:42:02.000 The dude house.

00:42:03.000 Yeah.

00:42:04.000 It was where everyone would hang out.

00:42:08.000 But now, Steve-O was older than the rest of us, so he was about almost five years older than us, but he didn't seem like it.

00:42:16.000 He was a young guy.

00:42:17.000 Yeah, like five years younger mentally.

00:42:19.000 Or emotionally.

00:42:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:21.000 And, but...

00:42:26.000 So he hits 30, and he starts changing.

00:42:30.000 He starts changing, like, drastically.

00:42:32.000 I mean, he was, like, one of the funniest guys I ever knew, and he was this really, really funny stoner dude and really cool.

00:42:40.000 And all of a sudden, he's, like, angry about things, and now he's not quite as funny, and now he's got this issue.

00:42:47.000 And so we're roommates, and there's this one night that he's kind of, like, all...

00:42:52.000 He's kind of disgusted with his life.

00:42:55.000 And he starts ranting.

00:42:58.000 And 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.

00:43:14.000 But like you can work at Licorice Pizza.

00:43:18.000 And 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.

00:43:26.000 And maybe you worked there for three years and that's really great.

00:43:30.000 But then, you know, all of a sudden, the district manager doesn't like you.

00:43:34.000 You run a file of somebody higher up in corporate.

00:43:38.000 And all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're fired and you're out in the street.

00:43:40.000 Again, it's management.

00:43:41.000 Yeah.

00:43:41.000 Okay.

00:43:42.000 And so now you've just spent three years at Licorice Pizza.

00:43:45.000 Now you could get a job at TRW or some place that's like a real job job.

00:43:51.000 Or, 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.

00:43:58.000 Same thing with Wild West Clothier, same thing with Miller's Outpost, same thing with any of these kind of stores.

00:44:03.000 Next 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.

00:44:14.000 Right.

00:44:15.000 And you've spent your entire 20s doing that.

00:44:19.000 And then you start getting bitter.

00:44:20.000 And you start getting bitter.

00:44:22.000 But he was not just bitter about the job aspect of it.

00:44:27.000 But I knew – oh my god, he's telling me the truth.

00:44:30.000 I'm learning something here.

00:44:32.000 Because he goes, you know, Quentin, you think that we're this really great team.

00:44:39.000 We're this really great crew.

00:44:41.000 Well, we are.

00:44:42.000 I mean, you know, that time of your 20s were like your group of friends or your family, you know?

00:44:47.000 And like, well, we are.

00:44:49.000 Quentin, at 20, I worked at South Bay Cinemas and I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you and some girls there, too.

00:45:03.000 But it was a bunch of guys just like you.

00:45:04.000 And then I stopped working at South Bay Cinema.

00:45:06.000 Then I worked at Miller's Outpost.

00:45:08.000 I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you and we did everything just like we do.

00:45:13.000 We went to movies together, we went out and we dated amongst the girls there, everything.

00:45:18.000 Then I worked at Alicia Pizza for four years with a bunch of guys just like you.

00:45:23.000 I've wasted my life hanging out with a bunch of guys just like you and they all go away at a certain point.

00:45:33.000 And I realized this guy's kind of telling the truth.

00:45:37.000 He's showing me a truth about him.

00:45:41.000 This is coming from somewhere.

00:45:43.000 And then all of a sudden, he still hung around us.

00:45:46.000 He still liked us.

00:45:47.000 But then he started making it a point to touch base with some of his high school friends that were still around.

00:45:53.000 So he's not just hanging out with guys four years younger or five years younger than him.

00:45:58.000 Anyway, I'm turning 25 around this time.

00:46:03.000 So I'm having my own little, okay, well, what have I done with my life so far?

00:46:06.000 So far, fucking nothing.

00:46:08.000 So 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.

00:46:19.000 When you're in this situation.

00:46:22.000 And there was like one night.

00:46:28.000 That I had what I used to call – I would do it every once in a while.

00:46:30.000 I haven't done it in a long time, thankfully.

00:46:33.000 I 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.

00:46:50.000 Just like nail it. 0.97

00:46:52.000 And 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.

00:47:02.000 And 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.

00:47:15.000 I 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.

00:47:22.000 I got to just move to Hollywood.

00:47:24.000 I got to get involved there.

00:47:26.000 I got to meet other people that are in the business.

00:47:29.000 And 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.

00:47:36.000 And by the way, I shouldn't be making money until I'm making money doing what I want to do.

00:47:41.000 Not that that was ever a danger.

00:47:43.000 But then the next thing I knew, I moved out of the South Bay.

00:47:50.000 And then I couldn't move into Hollywood.

00:47:52.000 I couldn't afford Hollywood, but I could afford Koreatown.

00:47:55.000 And I was close enough.

00:47:57.000 And 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.

00:48:15.000 But yeah, you meet one person and that introduces you to three other people.

00:48:18.000 Now all of a sudden I actually knew people who were actually making movies.

00:48:22.000 And 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.

00:48:32.000 That's the weird realization that you end up having.

00:48:35.000 Yeah, 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.

00:48:53.000 You know, getting like $7,000 for this rewrite on this script over here.

00:48:57.000 $4,000 for this polish over here.

00:48:59.000 Another $10,000 for this rewrite over here.

00:49:02.000 Well, shit.

00:49:02.000 I mean, I would make $10,000 a year through all my 20s before that point.

00:49:06.000 So if I can make $15,000 from writing, oh my god, that was the greatest thing in the world.

00:49:14.000 Wow.

00:49:15.000 It just takes being around people that are actually doing it so you realize it's possible.

00:49:20.000 Well, 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.

00:49:35.000 No, you're at the comedy store and you're dealing with comedians every fucking night.

00:49:39.000 And you're in the place where the shit happens and you're hearing how the laughs work.

00:49:45.000 But also, you know what's going on.

00:49:47.000 Oh, Caroline's Comedy Hour is doing the tryouts for this. 1.00

00:49:51.000 And, you know, Chuckles is doing this thing or that thing.

00:49:56.000 Oh, and there's this sitcom going on.

00:49:57.000 There's the funny neighbor guy.

00:49:59.000 Yeah.

00:50:00.000 At any moment...

00:50:00.000 You're plugged in.

00:50:02.000 At any moment, there's a circle of people rising in any industry.

00:50:06.000 Yes.

00:50:06.000 And it's just a matter of finding those people.

00:50:09.000 And those people will all gravitate towards the same things.

00:50:12.000 Yeah.

00:50:12.000 And they have the thing where it's sort of like, you know, like, hey, Benny, we have a spot for you that could be really...

00:50:17.000 You know, I can't do it.

00:50:19.000 But my friend Joe could do it.

00:50:21.000 How about giving Joe a chance?

00:50:24.000 Yeah.

00:50:24.000 Okay, will you back Joe up?

00:50:26.000 Yeah, I'll back Joe up.

00:50:27.000 Okay, yeah, well, let's call your friend Joe.

00:50:28.000 Can he be down here at nine?

00:50:30.000 Yeah, he can be down here at nine.

00:50:31.000 Well, that's how you get a fucking gig.

00:50:33.000 This is exactly what we tried to do when we built the mothership here.

00:50:37.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:50:37.000 What we've done.

00:50:38.000 We decided when we left LA, we need a place where comics have a hub.

00:50:42.000 And when we were all in Austin, we all just moved to Austin because of the pandemic.

00:50:46.000 And all of a sudden, we were allowed to perform indoors.

00:50:48.000 It was crazy.

00:50:49.000 In November of 2020, we were doing shows indoors.

00:50:52.000 And, you know, you couldn't go on Twitter because they would call you a big super spreader, a fucking monster.

00:50:57.000 But everybody started moving here.

00:50:59.000 And by the time 2020 rolls around, there's like 15, 16 world-class comedians that didn't used to live in Austin that are here now.

00:51:07.000 And we were like, let's build a club.

00:51:09.000 And so we bought the Ritz Theater, where, you know, some of your movies are played.

00:51:13.000 This is fucking crazy.

00:51:15.000 And when we put it together, the whole idea was like have a place where people can come.

00:51:20.000 We have two nights of open mic nights, Sunday and Monday night.

00:51:24.000 So there's always a chance to get on stage.

00:51:27.000 There's always a guy.

00:51:29.000 There's a real talent.

00:51:30.000 Adam Egett is a real talent coordinator.

00:51:32.000 He's really going to watch you.

00:51:34.000 He's really going to give you advice.

00:51:35.000 And you're around the best comics in the world all the time.

00:51:38.000 And everybody knows it's possible.

00:51:39.000 And everybody treats you the way you would want to be treated if you were starting.

00:51:44.000 So you're just one of us.

00:51:45.000 You just started.

00:51:46.000 But we're not better than you.

00:51:48.000 There's nothing special about us.

00:51:49.000 We're just telling you.

00:51:50.000 We started walking and now we're 15 miles in.

00:51:53.000 You're 15 feet in.

00:51:55.000 Just keep walking.

00:51:55.000 Okay, but let me ask you a question.

00:51:58.000 When I watch some of the things on the Comedy Store...

00:52:01.000 Because you know I really love going to the Comedy Store.

00:52:04.000 And they treat me really great there.

00:52:06.000 It's really cool.

00:52:09.000 But, you know...

00:52:12.000 The 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.

00:52:24.000 But it seems like that was then.

00:52:28.000 That was a long time ago.

00:52:29.000 Now it seems like people are almost spending 10 years or 8 years before they actually are getting up and getting paid.

00:52:39.000 Not necessarily.

00:52:41.000 Tony Hinchcliffe started at the Comedy Store.

00:52:43.000 He started as a doorman, and he worked his way up to selling out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row.

00:52:47.000 I mean, it is possible to still be a doorman.

00:52:51.000 I met Tony when he was just starting out.

00:52:53.000 I'm figuring that that's a spot, but it seems like if you have to wait five years...

00:52:58.000 Well, you don't get good for 10 years.

00:53:00.000 It takes forever.

00:53:01.000 Comedy is like making a mountain out of layers of paint.

00:53:04.000 It takes forever.

00:53:05.000 You have to fail.

00:53:07.000 You have to have the opportunities to fail.

00:53:09.000 Well, there's also no one who can tell you how to do it.

00:53:12.000 Writing 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.

00:53:20.000 But would you really say...

00:53:23.000 That it takes 10 years to be a solid comedian?

00:53:26.000 It takes 10 years to be a real headliner.

00:53:28.000 Well, a headliner, that's a little different.

00:53:31.000 Well, that's when you're a real comic.

00:53:32.000 Yeah, okay.

00:53:32.000 When you can do an hour.

00:53:33.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:34.000 You can do an hour, and then you can write another hour.

00:53:36.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:37.000 You kind of know who you are.

00:53:39.000 Because it takes years to build that.

00:53:40.000 Well, also, to be a headliner, you have to be enough of a name to actually draw an audience.

00:53:46.000 Yes.

00:53:47.000 And usually you go on the road with a headliner, and then the people get to see you.

00:53:52.000 Oh, I remember he was here when Tom Segura was in town.

00:53:54.000 That guy's really good.

00:53:55.000 We saw him then, and he did 15 minutes.

00:53:58.000 Now he's gonna do an hour.

00:53:58.000 This should be great.

00:53:59.000 And it's sort of that kind of a deal.

00:54:01.000 But it's the same sort of situation where most people don't, like if you're in Pittsburgh, you don't know what to do.

00:54:07.000 You go up, there's a couple open mic nights, everybody sucks.

00:54:11.000 And there's no inspiration.

00:54:12.000 It's not set up for comedy and it's in a fucking pizza pliler.

00:54:14.000 Exactly.

00:54:15.000 And it's good on the weekends.

00:54:16.000 And it doesn't work and you go, well, I guess this is not for me.

00:54:19.000 Right.

00:54:19.000 It'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.

00:54:25.000 So you get a little bit of an education from that.

00:54:27.000 And maybe if you're lucky, the club owner will let you open for him or do 10 minutes on that show.

00:54:31.000 And 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.

00:54:36.000 But you gotta be around, like, comedy doesn't exist in a vacuum.

00:54:41.000 There's no great comedian that lives in some small town by himself.

00:54:45.000 Like, you could find some great blues artist.

00:54:48.000 Or a great novelist.

00:54:49.000 Yes, novelist is probably the best one because you kind of live in your own head.

00:54:53.000 But you have to be around the other people that are doing it.

00:54:56.000 Which is exactly why Quentin moved to Hollywood.

00:54:58.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:54:59.000 Get away from these losers.

00:55:01.000 You had to do it, but you really do have to do it.

00:55:04.000 Cut the dead weight.

00:55:04.000 I recall living in Hollywood as well.

00:55:07.000 Yeah, you did.

00:55:08.000 Freakin' Franklin!

00:55:09.000 Yes.

00:55:09.000 Across from Plummer Park.

00:55:10.000 Your bitter friend gave you a valuable little piece of information.

00:55:14.000 Yeah, he did.

00:55:15.000 No, very much so.

00:55:16.000 You need those.

00:55:16.000 You need those moments.

00:55:17.000 Oh, I knew I was hearing the truth.

00:55:19.000 And I knew I was hearing a coming attraction.

00:55:21.000 Yes.

00:55:22.000 Because I was already feeling it at 25. Right, right, right.

00:55:25.000 Am I throwing my topsoil years away?

00:55:28.000 Right, right.

00:55:29.000 The topsoil.

00:55:30.000 Exactly.

00:55:31.000 It doesn't come back.

00:55:32.000 It doesn't come back.

00:55:33.000 You never get to be 21 again.

00:55:34.000 Let's hit reset.

00:55:35.000 You get one weird march through this life.

00:55:39.000 You can throw it away until 23, but from 24 on, you need to be thinking about what you're doing for the rest of your life.

00:55:46.000 Get it going.

00:55:47.000 Yeah, get it going.

00:55:48.000 I think these conversations are so important for young people to hear.

00:55:52.000 Because 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.

00:56:01.000 Almost the worst thing that can happen is getting comfortable, which I think is what you were talking about.

00:56:04.000 Yeah.

00:56:06.000 But, you know, I mean, it all worked out, okay?

00:56:08.000 It all worked out really, really good.

00:56:10.000 And the thing about it was, you know...

00:56:13.000 I did get comfortable, but I got comfortable in a cool place.

00:56:15.000 And ultimately, I did have the energy and the wherewithal to ultimately get dissatisfied with it and want more.

00:56:23.000 You know, the alternative would have been me working at a department store for those four years.

00:56:30.000 Yes, right, right, right, where there's nothing.

00:56:32.000 And then I would have been, like, really been miserable.

00:56:34.000 Right, right, right.

00:56:37.000 In this instance, I'm still involved with filming.

00:56:40.000 The sedative part was the idea that it was close enough to what I wanted to do.

00:56:45.000 Right, right, right, right.

00:56:46.000 It was close enough.

00:56:47.000 I could get comfortable.

00:56:49.000 There's guys like that at the Comedy Store.

00:56:51.000 There's a friend of mine at the Comedy Store that was a bartender in the back bar, and he wanted to be a comic.

00:56:56.000 Yeah.

00:56:56.000 But he was there, it was like five years after I met him, I'm like, hey man, you gotta quit this fucking job.

00:57:01.000 Because you're here with all the greatest comics in the world, but you're not going on stage.

00:57:05.000 And you're making good money.

00:57:06.000 And that's the velvet curtain, you know, that's pulled over your eyes.

00:57:13.000 I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the movie about Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing.

00:57:21.000 And I'm not like a surfer or anything, but my entry point into that movie was Zephyr surfboards was exactly like Video Archives.

00:57:30.000 And 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.

00:57:47.000 And 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.

00:58:00.000 And 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.

00:58:06.000 But my real entry point was I understand gravitating towards what you love and wanting to be close to it.

00:58:14.000 And that if a video store is the closest thing to Hollywood in your town, that's where you go.

00:58:19.000 Or if it's not a movie theater.

00:58:20.000 Well, 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.

00:58:37.000 Access to all those titles.

00:58:39.000 But then also, there was also the situation of, you know, I became like a little film critic in that town.

00:58:45.000 You know, it was like, I was like, the store was my little village voice.

00:58:50.000 And I was the Andrew Sarris there.

00:58:51.000 I was the critic.

00:58:53.000 And people would come in And at a certain point, I'm like, oh, Quentin, what should I get, you know?

00:58:58.000 And the thing is, I'm not just like holding court on my own personal taste.

00:59:02.000 Pretty soon they got a really good idea about my taste.

00:59:05.000 But the thing is, I'm usually gearing it towards the people, you know?

00:59:08.000 I'm not going to...

00:59:10.000 You know, get some housewife to watch some gonzo movie that I... Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:59:15.000 Gonzo violent movie that I really like.

00:59:16.000 I'm gaming...

00:59:18.000 I get to know her.

00:59:19.000 You have to tailor it to her.

00:59:20.000 And so I'm putting something in her hand that I think she's going to appreciate.

00:59:23.000 And I kind of know what kind of comedy she likes.

00:59:25.000 I know who she likes.

00:59:26.000 Stuff like that.

00:59:27.000 And so I'm like, you know, really kind of...

00:59:30.000 You know, gearing it in a certain way, that felt really good.

00:59:39.000 It felt like I said, I felt like a film critic.

00:59:42.000 Yeah.

00:59:43.000 But one of the things that – I forgot I was going to go somewhere with that and I forgot.

00:59:46.000 I lost my train of thought.

00:59:49.000 But 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.

01:00:02.000 We were the video guys.

01:00:04.000 And our store was a little different than most of the businesses that were in Manhattan Beach.

01:00:11.000 And so everyone kind of knew us.

01:00:13.000 We were the video guys.

01:00:14.000 So in a strange way, it was a precursor to what it would be like to be famous where the whole world kind of knows about you like that.

01:00:26.000 In Manhattan Beach, I'm like walking down the street and people are like, hey, Quentin!

01:00:31.000 Hey, Quentin!

01:00:32.000 Hey, how you doing?

01:00:33.000 How you doing?

01:00:34.000 You know, I'm like...

01:00:34.000 I'm working at the store.

01:00:35.000 I'm walking to the Jack in the Box to get a Coke and come back.

01:00:39.000 But we'd walk into the man's movie theater.

01:00:43.000 That was by the theater.

01:00:45.000 And me and two of the guys would walk in to go see a movie.

01:00:48.000 And we'd walk down the aisle and we'd hear...

01:00:53.000 I was in San Francisco once, and the guys from Red Cross, the punk band, they were customers of ours.

01:00:59.000 I was like, oh, they're doing a signing at this local record shop.

01:01:02.000 I'll just go show up.

01:01:04.000 I'll just show up there on Haight-Ashbury.

01:01:06.000 And I walk in, and immediately the McDonald Brother guys are like, hey, it's the video store guy.

01:01:12.000 Hey, man, come back behind with us.

01:01:17.000 I don't think they talk like that.

01:01:22.000 It's good to get that slow drip, get a little bit of a taste of it before you actually get famous.

01:01:26.000 Just get a feel of what it's like.

01:01:30.000 It still doesn't give you the full...

01:01:32.000 It's like, oh, I'm just going to smoke a little weed compared to I'm going to mainline heroin.

01:01:39.000 Oddly enough, the thing that it did...

01:01:43.000 It made me feel part of a community, which I had never felt with before.

01:01:47.000 I actually felt part of the Manhattan Beach community.

01:01:50.000 I felt part of the Manhattan Beach community.

01:01:52.000 I was part of the Manhattan Beach community.

01:01:54.000 The people knew me there.

01:01:55.000 And I was an upstanding member inside of that community.

01:02:01.000 Yeah.

01:02:02.000 The fame thing is no one can teach you how to do that.

01:02:05.000 There 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.

01:02:12.000 Let me tell you how fucking weird this is.

01:02:14.000 I don't know if you were prepared for this.

01:02:17.000 We were first trying to make True Romance.

01:02:19.000 You know, Quentin had this amazing screenplay, and it was like we were going to try to do it Coen Brothers style.

01:02:24.000 We had just seen Blood Simple, and we were like, okay, I'm going to produce.

01:02:27.000 Quentin's going to direct.

01:02:28.000 We're going to go out and make this.

01:02:29.000 Our first thought was, okay, we've got this database of doctors and lawyers and housewives in Manhattan Beach.

01:02:35.000 We're going to go to the video store.

01:02:37.000 You know, we ended up not doing that.

01:02:40.000 You were going to ask them for money.

01:02:41.000 We never had the balls to actually ask anybody for money.

01:02:45.000 Yeah, it was...

01:02:47.000 Thinking about getting money and actually getting money are two different things.

01:02:49.000 We strategized about it a lot, but we never actually...

01:02:51.000 I drew up full partnership papers before that whole dream failed of doing it that way.

01:02:59.000 Yeah, nobody knows what it's like to actually be successful until you are.

01:03:04.000 But in the beginning, did you guys feel like pretenders?

01:03:06.000 Did you feel fake?

01:03:07.000 Did you have imposter syndrome?

01:03:08.000 I didn't have imposter syndrome because I did a movie and I was really happy with the film.

01:03:12.000 But the thing is, what I felt like...

01:03:14.000 I'll tell you exactly how I felt.

01:03:15.000 I didn't feel imposter syndrome.

01:03:17.000 Well, I guess a little bit.

01:03:18.000 There is all that, like, waiting for somebody to tap you on the show.

01:03:21.000 What the fuck are you doing?

01:03:22.000 Get out of here.

01:03:24.000 Who would let that guy in?

01:03:25.000 Right.

01:03:26.000 The fuck out.

01:03:27.000 What I had was I felt like I was a reporter deep undercover on the opposite side of the line.

01:03:38.000 This isn't really me.

01:03:40.000 I'm like those people over there, but I'm deep undercover.

01:03:45.000 I can give you reports from the front of what it's like here on the battle line.

01:03:52.000 Right.

01:03:52.000 Well, maybe that was a good thing, though.

01:03:54.000 It was a really cool thing.

01:03:56.000 It was neat.

01:03:56.000 Because I think that's one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was very risky.

01:04:02.000 Like, 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.

01:04:09.000 But you had a sensibility, not of a person in management, but of a person that, I know what I like.

01:04:16.000 I know what I like.

01:04:17.000 And I think I can think differently than these people do.

01:04:21.000 Oh, no, no.

01:04:22.000 One 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...

01:04:31.000 Once we established ourselves, the people knew, you read our scripts, so you knew we had something to offer.

01:04:39.000 We would walk into rooms and we realized that...

01:04:43.000 And look, I'm not here to make fun of Hollywood executives.

01:04:47.000 Some of those guys...

01:04:49.000 You don't know how bad some of these movies, these scripts are.

01:04:53.000 Oftentimes, they actually make them better.

01:04:56.000 They're really, really terrible.

01:04:58.000 When they go through the Sausage Factory, oftentimes they get better.

01:05:03.000 Believe it or not.

01:05:05.000 But the thing is, though, you'd walk in there and...

01:05:09.000 You don't become...

01:05:15.000 This super successful executive by doubling down on your own opinions.

01:05:21.000 You kinda wanna get the temperature and get a consensus going on.

01:05:27.000 You're not the maverick.

01:05:29.000 That's not how people establish themselves as executives.

01:05:32.000 The D girl doesn't become the head of the development process by being the punk rock person who's shooting for the plimsolls. 0.55

01:05:46.000 They're looking for a Rolling Stone.

01:05:48.000 But film people, film geeks and film buffs, The one thing they have is their opinion.

01:06:02.000 And they have spent years defining their opinion.

01:06:05.000 And they almost have nothing to show for their dedication to cinema other than their highly evolved opinion.

01:06:13.000 So you put them in a room and say, well, what would you do?

01:06:16.000 Well, it's about time you asked me.

01:06:19.000 And then all of a sudden you take the strong point of view.

01:06:23.000 And the term in Hollywood is, he who has the strongest point of view in the room wins.

01:06:34.000 And executives don't have the strongest point of view.

01:06:37.000 But the maverick artist, who only can hear the sound of his own voice, he definitely has the strongest point of view.

01:06:42.000 But it's refreshing to them.

01:06:45.000 Invariably, they hire you because you scare them a little.

01:06:49.000 You're a little scary.

01:06:50.000 They want to be a little thrilled by that.

01:06:54.000 But then, like a girlfriend or something, they want to change you.

01:06:57.000 They think they're going to make you normal.

01:06:59.000 And then it falls on you to just stay true to that initial guy who was in the room.

01:07:05.000 I had a really interesting situation where I had a guy who was an executive who actually directed a movie.

01:07:11.000 And he was talking about, like, oh, I've seen these jokers out there. 0.97

01:07:15.000 And, you know, what they do isn't so special.

01:07:17.000 I think I could do it.

01:07:19.000 And so he finds a book and then they adapt it and now he's doing the movie.

01:07:27.000 And he's getting through it.

01:07:29.000 Everything's working fine.

01:07:30.000 He's getting through it.

01:07:31.000 And then he realizes the difference between himself and a director because he's dealing with another director about something.

01:07:40.000 Because he's an executive.

01:07:41.000 So he's dealing with another director about another movie.

01:07:44.000 And he asks him a very important question about his movie.

01:07:50.000 And the way he answers it, he realized the difference between him and that director.

01:07:56.000 And he goes, I realized...

01:07:57.000 Oh...

01:08:02.000 See, he's a real director because he sees the movie.

01:08:06.000 He sees the movie in his head.

01:08:09.000 The question I asked, he went into his head and he saw it.

01:08:14.000 He saw it and he could actually answer it.

01:08:17.000 Oh, the flower pot is green because he sees the entire picture.

01:08:23.000 Yeah.

01:08:24.000 I don't see it.

01:08:26.000 I'm just doing my best.

01:08:27.000 I see it written, but I don't see the movie in my head.

01:08:31.000 I'm just doing my best with the written material.

01:08:34.000 He's the Comedy Central executive that thinks they could be a comedian.

01:08:37.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:08:38.000 Right on.

01:08:39.000 And then they get on stage and they eat shit.

01:08:41.000 What you were saying is exactly what happened to Chappelle.

01:08:44.000 The Chappelle show.

01:08:46.000 They loved him.

01:08:47.000 He's this wild dude.

01:08:48.000 And then all of a sudden, this is too wild.

01:08:50.000 This is becoming really successful.

01:08:52.000 We can change him.

01:08:52.000 We can change you.

01:08:53.000 They wanted him to stop saying the N-word.

01:08:54.000 They wanted him to stop a bunch of different things on the show.

01:08:57.000 And we'll give you all this money if you roll over.

01:09:00.000 They gave him literally the devil's deal.

01:09:01.000 We're going to give you $50 million, and this is what you're going to get.

01:09:04.000 And he's like, no.

01:09:06.000 I quit.

01:09:06.000 I quit everything.

01:09:07.000 And I'm going to go to Africa. 0.82

01:09:09.000 I'm going to hang out in Africa for a while, and I'm going to quit stand-up for 10 years and come back and still be the best.

01:09:14.000 That is so the right move.

01:09:16.000 Oh, my God.

01:09:16.000 Well, look, he's a legend now, but that's really him.

01:09:20.000 If you're around him, he's an artist in, like, the truest sense of the word.

01:09:24.000 Yeah, absolutely he is.

01:09:25.000 You 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.

01:09:33.000 And 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.

01:10:00.000 Hilarious.

01:10:01.000 And so, you know, I'm like the first, I'm a PA working for him, a driver.

01:10:07.000 I'm running around town.

01:10:08.000 My car is like the transmission is going out.

01:10:10.000 I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do.

01:10:11.000 This is not what I want to do.

01:10:12.000 I don't want to work on cops, but like I need the job.

01:10:15.000 And so I go in and I meet with John, and he's been a customer of ours, and he's fatherly-like to me.

01:10:22.000 Yeah.

01:10:25.000 I go into his office and I sit down, and Cops has just started.

01:10:29.000 It started because of a Writers Guild strike.

01:10:31.000 There was a Writers Guild strike, and so Fox was like, well, that show has no writers.

01:10:35.000 And so they ordered his thing, and he went from nothing to, like, I'm buying yachts.

01:10:40.000 I'm collecting vineyards.

01:10:41.000 Not only that, though.

01:10:43.000 I remember when he first came up with the idea with his partner, Malcolm Barber.

01:10:47.000 Yeah.

01:10:47.000 All right.

01:10:48.000 So he comes in and he's like, hey, we've got a really good idea for a show.

01:10:51.000 So he's describing cops before cops has ever been made.

01:10:55.000 Yeah.

01:10:56.000 And his first idea was it wasn't called cops.

01:10:59.000 It was called the real Miami Vice.

01:11:07.000 The problem was it doesn't scale out to the whole country.

01:11:09.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:11:10.000 Well, they defined it.

01:11:12.000 They refined it.

01:11:14.000 I asked him, I said, John, you've worked in this business a long time.

01:11:19.000 He was an AD for a long time.

01:11:20.000 What kind of advice can you give to a guy like me who's trying to work my way up?

01:11:25.000 He's like, well, what do you want to do ultimately?

01:11:26.000 I said, well, I want to direct films.

01:11:28.000 Well, then be a director.

01:11:30.000 Don't work your way up the ladder.

01:11:32.000 Don't try to be a grip and work your way in.

01:11:35.000 Just be a director.

01:11:38.000 And I heard that.

01:11:40.000 And he's like, start at the top.

01:11:41.000 It's the best way to go.

01:11:42.000 Just start at the top.

01:11:43.000 And, you know, just tell people you're a director.

01:11:47.000 Put yourself in that.

01:11:48.000 Otherwise, people will just pigeonhole you.

01:11:50.000 They'll just say that's who he is.

01:11:52.000 He's a grip or he's a PA or he's you'll you'll have to work your way up.

01:11:56.000 Just tell people who you are.

01:12:00.000 So I thought about it.

01:12:01.000 It's like, OK. I quit.

01:12:05.000 He's like, what?

01:12:06.000 I said, I quit.

01:12:07.000 I'm a director.

01:12:08.000 And I left.

01:12:09.000 I walked out.

01:12:10.000 I mean, I gave him notice.

01:12:12.000 And I walked out.

01:12:14.000 And he sat there and he later told me, years later, told me, man, I thought that was the most audacious, ballsy thing.

01:12:22.000 I gave you advice and you took it.

01:12:25.000 Right away!

01:12:27.000 Never mind the fact that it took me years of just telling people I'm a director.

01:12:32.000 I directed Super 8 movies.

01:12:35.000 I was not a director.

01:12:37.000 I was a poser.

01:12:38.000 I was faking it until I made it.

01:12:40.000 But I told people what I was and what I was doing, and eventually it stuck.

01:12:45.000 Eventually 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.

01:12:56.000 They're like, hey, Maybe that kid is a director.

01:12:58.000 It was just believing in yourself when no one else believes what you believe.

01:13:04.000 The guy who's talking about, John Langley, who created Cops, he was a really good customer and his wife Maggie was really lovely.

01:13:11.000 Morgan and all of his kids.

01:13:13.000 And 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.

01:13:30.000 Quentin got his movie off the ground.

01:13:31.000 He's actually making his movie.

01:13:33.000 He's not at the video store anymore.

01:13:34.000 He's actually making a movie.

01:13:35.000 Good for him.

01:13:36.000 And who knows what's going to happen to it, but it's happening.

01:13:39.000 And I think they were having a little dinner party at their house.

01:13:45.000 And then Maggie mentions to John about what happened.

01:13:49.000 Really?

01:13:49.000 That's actually happening?

01:13:50.000 It's actually happening?

01:13:51.000 Yeah, no, they've got production offices and everything.

01:13:53.000 They're making the movie.

01:13:57.000 Everybody, raise your glass.

01:13:59.000 Yeah.

01:14:00.000 To Quentin.

01:14:01.000 He did it.

01:14:02.000 Good for Quentin.

01:14:03.000 That's awesome.

01:14:04.000 Raise your glass.

01:14:04.000 I'm getting terry-eyed just even thinking about it.

01:14:07.000 You know, I just have to say, John Langley, you know, because I had some shit happen to me in my life.

01:14:13.000 I spent some time in jail.

01:14:15.000 I kind of screwed up my life.

01:14:17.000 But when everything went down, when everyone in Hollywood dropped me like a hot rock, John Langley was there.

01:14:24.000 Our customer, John Langley...

01:14:26.000 Because we lost everything.

01:14:28.000 He loaned me some money.

01:14:29.000 He gave me my first job when I got out of jail, writing something for very little money, but he wanted me back in the saddle.

01:14:37.000 I love the things you wrote from jail.

01:14:39.000 Oh, thanks.

01:14:40.000 Thank you.

01:14:41.000 They were really good.

01:14:42.000 It was really interesting.

01:14:43.000 It was like this super intelligent writer who's in jail.

01:14:48.000 It's a different sort of perspective.

01:14:50.000 Roger's working on a book about his jail experiences that is...

01:14:55.000 Fantastic.

01:14:56.000 I kept a really detailed, super detailed journal about like everything that's going on around me.

01:15:03.000 And, 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.

01:15:16.000 And everything, all your things which define you get stripped away.

01:15:20.000 Everything 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.

01:15:31.000 And you have a lot of time to think about things.

01:15:35.000 But having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on.

01:15:42.000 I had golf pencils.

01:15:44.000 I could buy sheets of paper.

01:15:46.000 And I've never in my life been more productive.

01:15:51.000 I've never wanted to write more than when everything was taken away.

01:15:55.000 And I've never felt more about the world.

01:15:58.000 And I've never...

01:16:00.000 It was a very monastic... 0.64

01:16:04.000 I was telling Quentin at one point, it was kind of monastic-like.

01:16:08.000 You know, you're in a secular kind of...

01:16:12.000 You're in a cell.

01:16:13.000 You're in a cell and you're...

01:16:16.000 With a bunch of dudes.

01:16:17.000 And you're writing.

01:16:18.000 You know, it's like you're...

01:16:19.000 I became a scribe.

01:16:20.000 I started...

01:16:21.000 I mean, I was a scribe beforehand.

01:16:22.000 But I really, really...

01:16:24.000 It became my escape.

01:16:25.000 Being able to write.

01:16:26.000 Being able to fall into things.

01:16:28.000 And to be able to travel into another world.

01:16:30.000 And then also, people find out you're a writer.

01:16:33.000 And they're like, hey man, would you write my...

01:16:35.000 Yo, essay, would you write my girlfriend?

01:16:38.000 I want to write her a love letter.

01:16:39.000 I need your help.

01:16:40.000 So I wrote like a ton of love letters.

01:16:42.000 Yeah.

01:16:44.000 That's actually good practice for dialogue.

01:16:46.000 Oh, yeah.

01:16:46.000 No, totally, totally.

01:16:47.000 No, actually, I heard some amazing dialogue.

01:16:51.000 And you're writing your Robin Hood script, all right?

01:16:53.000 So that's your way to get out of the cell, is to write his Robin Hood script.

01:16:58.000 Well, there's a book cart, and so every now and then you go through the book cart, and mostly it's like Tom Clancy novels.

01:17:04.000 They love Tom Clancy and stuff like that.

01:17:06.000 And Clive Barker novels and things like that.

01:17:10.000 Lo and behold, I found this old Penguin paperback of, you know, an old, old version of Robin Hood written by E. Charles Vivian.

01:17:19.000 And I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great.

01:17:20.000 And I start reading it.

01:17:23.000 And it's like, they get into Evil Hold, which is like this castle where, you know, Marion's father is being kept.

01:17:31.000 And nobody knows it, and he's there.

01:17:33.000 And he's not away at Crusades, he's in this prison.

01:17:36.000 And Robin Hood goes into the prison, and in the moment when he's in the prison, how he sees the wretches that he has to leave behind.

01:17:45.000 Because they're too wretched to even come out.

01:17:48.000 Like, how bad the prison is and what he's seeing inside and his observations.

01:17:54.000 I was shaking after reading it.

01:17:57.000 I'm shaking thinking about, I mean, the entire experience now, but, you know, it was such a vivid depiction.

01:18:04.000 I'm like, well, I'm adapting this because I'm feeling it right now.

01:18:07.000 I'm feeling like what it's like.

01:18:10.000 I'm feeling what...

01:18:11.000 It's like to have the boot on your neck.

01:18:15.000 I mean, rightfully so, but nevertheless.

01:18:18.000 And so I started writing my version of Robin Hood on pencil and paper.

01:18:26.000 And as I'm writing it, I was crying as I wrote it.

01:18:29.000 I was looking at the pages the other day, and there's teardrops all over it.

01:18:34.000 On every page, it's like, holy crap!

01:18:36.000 It's like...

01:18:37.000 When you're writing like that and you're feeling that much, it's not a bad thing to cry when you're writing.

01:18:43.000 It's like, thank God, I'm feeling.

01:18:46.000 Like, I'm feeling something and it's traveling into the page.

01:18:50.000 And 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.

01:19:01.000 Like one of those assholes who goes to Starbucks.

01:19:03.000 And I was that guy.

01:19:05.000 And so I'm sitting...

01:19:07.000 I had kind of become used to that.

01:19:09.000 Well, writing by hand while incarcerated, it reconnected me with pen to paper or pencil to paper.

01:19:20.000 And it reminded me that when you write something down, you have a different relationship with the word.

01:19:27.000 No, I consider the pen as the antenna to God.

01:19:30.000 It is the intent of God.

01:19:31.000 And also, when you type it into the computer, that's a process of rewriting.

01:19:36.000 And so you're losing an entire section.

01:19:39.000 And so it reconnected me with that.

01:19:40.000 I couldn't agree with you more.

01:19:42.000 Explain this more to me.

01:19:44.000 This is fascinating to me.

01:19:45.000 Because I've heard many people say this about comedy, that they have to write on paper.

01:19:49.000 I don't.

01:19:50.000 I write on a laptop.

01:19:51.000 I've always written on a laptop.

01:19:52.000 For me, what I like about writing, even writing on paper, is that it takes more time to write I don't know.

01:20:18.000 I don't know.

01:20:21.000 That is not false.

01:20:22.000 Not that I've ever written an hour-long stand-up comedy show.

01:20:28.000 But I would think that your writing is different than my kind of writing.

01:20:33.000 I would think as far as writing stuff down, it's like notes and ideas and funny word phrases or this and that and the other.

01:20:42.000 But then you're working it out.

01:20:44.000 You're saying it, you're saying it, you're saying it, you're saying it, and then you get your story.

01:20:48.000 Right.

01:20:49.000 And maybe you say it into a recorder.

01:20:50.000 Maybe you do this or you do that.

01:20:52.000 But, you know, it probably doesn't even look right when you type it up on a thing.

01:20:56.000 It doesn't look right.

01:20:57.000 It's the way you tell the story.

01:20:59.000 What I was going to get to is that when I type, I can type quicker than I can write by hand.

01:21:04.000 And the problem with comedy is it comes quick and slippery.

01:21:07.000 Especially if you're a little lit.

01:21:08.000 You can edit.

01:21:10.000 That makes a tremendous amount of sense.

01:21:12.000 I mean, we're writing stuff that has to hold up on the page.

01:21:15.000 Right.

01:21:16.000 That has to hold up as writing.

01:21:18.000 I'll write a 1500 word essay and I'll use one line.

01:21:22.000 Like there's one thing in there that might be a bit.

01:21:25.000 But I'll write all this other shit on transportation.

01:21:28.000 It's like strip mining.

01:21:29.000 You just pull all that dirt out and just process it.

01:21:31.000 That's exactly what it's like.

01:21:33.000 I've tried to write.

01:21:35.000 So you open up your mind about...

01:21:36.000 100%.

01:21:37.000 Just let loose on public transportation.

01:21:39.000 Yes, yes.

01:21:40.000 And I'm not even trying to be funny.

01:21:42.000 I'm just trying to write.

01:21:43.000 And then I'll find something funny in it.

01:21:46.000 And then that's the starting point.

01:21:49.000 Now I take that, cut it, copy it into a completely fresh document.

01:21:53.000 Now what is this?

01:21:56.000 And how do I get to this?

01:21:57.000 Ultimately it's whatever works.

01:21:58.000 Let me ask you a question.

01:22:00.000 Is 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?

01:22:19.000 Well, I'm sitting still, if that's what you mean.

01:22:22.000 The 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.

01:22:28.000 And if I have a good laptop, like a ThinkPad that has a lot of finger travel, then you really feel it.

01:22:33.000 And I get into, like, a zone.

01:22:35.000 And then it's just about, like...

01:22:37.000 Yes, but no, you actually do write your notes.

01:22:39.000 Yeah.

01:22:39.000 And then it's just about...

01:22:40.000 But they don't always come out the same way, because sometimes when you bring them out on stage...

01:22:45.000 The moment lets you know, this is not the way to go, it's this way.

01:22:48.000 And then all of a sudden you're like, God, how did I not see that in front of the computer?

01:22:52.000 Because you weren't in that vibe of the crowd.

01:22:55.000 You don't do it on your own.

01:22:56.000 You have to do it with them.

01:22:57.000 It's like the one art form that literally cannot be practiced in solitary.

01:23:01.000 You have to do it.

01:23:02.000 So when I write, I write like that.

01:23:04.000 But I also write things down on pieces of paper.

01:23:08.000 If I have an idea, I've got to catch it.

01:23:11.000 Well, they're not going to give you that computer in jail.

01:23:14.000 Well, that's true.

01:23:15.000 You're going to be forced to write it on pencil and that's going to be an okay experience for you.

01:23:21.000 But what is it that makes it to you like the hand of God?

01:23:25.000 Like what is it about writing on paper?

01:23:27.000 Well, my little analogy of it is you can't write poetry on a computer.

01:23:33.000 Why not?

01:23:33.000 Well, because I'm going for a rhythm.

01:23:37.000 Right.

01:23:38.000 I'm going for a rhythm.

01:23:41.000 And there's a connection between my chicken scratch and this paper and this pen as opposed to this other thing.

01:23:52.000 And the more unintelligible and only I can read it, the more legit it kind of is.

01:23:58.000 And the thing is, it's vomit.

01:24:01.000 It's absolutely vomit.

01:24:04.000 When you write by hand, you overwrite.

01:24:06.000 You're way, way overwrite.

01:24:07.000 Because you're just, you're just getting it out there, you're getting it out there.

01:24:11.000 Then, 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.

01:24:22.000 And now you make the sentences work.

01:24:25.000 And now you make it work like a writer.

01:24:33.000 Now you make the page work.

01:24:34.000 Now you make the sentences work.

01:24:37.000 Can we stop for a second while we're in the restroom? 0.99

01:24:38.000 Hey, you have cigars, don't you?

01:24:40.000 Yeah, you want a cigar?

01:24:41.000 Yeah, let's have some cigars.

01:24:42.000 He doesn't do anything fun.

01:24:44.000 I'll have a cigar.

01:24:45.000 On Joe Rogan's show, I will have a cigar.

01:24:50.000 He doesn't do anything fun.

01:24:51.000 That is the truth.

01:24:54.000 You don't do anything fun?

01:24:55.000 Really?

01:24:56.000 Nothing?

01:24:58.000 Well, maybe I should talk about this.

01:25:00.000 You should talk about it.

01:25:01.000 Maybe I should talk about it.

01:25:03.000 Are we on?

01:25:03.000 Yeah.

01:25:04.000 Can I go?

01:25:04.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:25:05.000 Yeah, I don't do anything fun.

01:25:07.000 Don't do anything fun.

01:25:08.000 You know...

01:25:10.000 Making movies is fun.

01:25:11.000 Well, that's the fun...

01:25:12.000 Where's the cutter?

01:25:14.000 I thought that was a cutter.

01:25:15.000 That looked cool.

01:25:16.000 I was like, is that a cutter or is that brass knuckles?

01:25:20.000 Oh, cool.

01:25:22.000 What are you saying about fun?

01:25:24.000 I don't do anything fun.

01:25:25.000 Well, 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.

01:25:39.000 For a DUI-related incident that caused manslaughter.

01:25:46.000 And one of my passengers died.

01:25:50.000 And, you know, after that and going to jail and whatnot...

01:25:57.000 He's not the funnest guy to get drunk with.

01:26:00.000 Yeah, I don't...

01:26:03.000 That's kind of what it is.

01:26:05.000 You know, if I go to a party or something like that, I don't want to be seen holding a drink, even with water in it.

01:26:13.000 I'm teasing him, but I get it.

01:26:16.000 Of course.

01:26:18.000 Who wouldn't fucking get it?

01:26:22.000 But then you add the fact that he's a vegetarian.

01:26:26.000 You're a vegetarian?

01:26:28.000 Why did he do that?

01:26:29.000 Because his wife made him. 0.86

01:26:30.000 That happens.

01:26:31.000 That happened to a friend of mine.

01:26:33.000 He sneaks out burgers every now and then.

01:26:38.000 I also have a kind of, it's kind of like an animal thing.

01:26:44.000 I had a pig as a pet.

01:26:48.000 And man, when you look at those eyes, those are human eyes.

01:26:52.000 And I looked into it and it looked into my, I just, I had chickens before that.

01:26:58.000 And you know what it's like?

01:26:58.000 Chickens are like cats, you know, they want back scratches and stuff.

01:27:01.000 And I just couldn't, like after a while, I just couldn't do it.

01:27:03.000 Yeah.

01:27:04.000 There's people that are feral.

01:27:06.000 You ever met a feral person?

01:27:08.000 You don't want to let them sleep in your house.

01:27:09.000 Yeah, right.

01:27:09.000 You met a wild, crazy person.

01:27:11.000 You're in jail.

01:27:12.000 So push that thing up. 1.00

01:27:13.000 You had it right.

01:27:14.000 You had it right.

01:27:15.000 Did I? Yeah.

01:27:15.000 This thing right here?

01:27:16.000 Yeah, push that up.

01:27:16.000 It's an intelligence test.

01:27:17.000 I'm sorry.

01:27:18.000 Push it down.

01:27:18.000 Pull it down.

01:27:19.000 Yeah, sorry.

01:27:20.000 Pull it down.

01:27:20.000 Sorry.

01:27:21.000 Hey, I'm digging this.

01:27:22.000 Yeah, they're great.

01:27:23.000 Foundation Cigar, shout out.

01:27:26.000 You've been around feral people, right?

01:27:28.000 You don't want feral people living in your house.

01:27:31.000 You don't want to take some murderer and give them your car and let them come and sleep in your room.

01:27:38.000 It's different.

01:27:39.000 I should take you around some wild pigs.

01:27:42.000 Wild pigs are like little demons.

01:27:44.000 They make like orc sounds.

01:27:46.000 Wild pigs are wild pigs.

01:27:47.000 You know, I get it.

01:27:47.000 You hear them fight with each other.

01:27:50.000 There are people who are like that also.

01:27:52.000 Exactly.

01:27:53.000 That's my point.

01:27:53.000 My point is, domesticated people are awesome.

01:27:57.000 Domesticated people like yourself and myself, we're fun to be around.

01:28:00.000 We're nice people.

01:28:01.000 We're not going to rob you.

01:28:03.000 No one's going to kill you.

01:28:04.000 There's a difference with the wild.

01:28:07.000 I like the way you describe that.

01:28:09.000 It's different.

01:28:10.000 So I understand that you wouldn't want to eat animals, but they eat each other.

01:28:15.000 And it's just this bizarre cycle of life.

01:28:18.000 I think it's where you're getting your animals from.

01:28:21.000 Are you getting your animals from, like, this mass factory, farming, disgusting?

01:28:27.000 Well, that's the other part of it.

01:28:28.000 That'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.

01:28:36.000 Yeah.

01:28:37.000 And I kind of feel like that as well.

01:28:39.000 Like, I don't have a lot of trust for large industrial systems of food.

01:28:44.000 You shouldn't.

01:28:45.000 But you can get meat from, like, a farm.

01:28:49.000 You know, like, you can get it from a ranch.

01:28:51.000 You could go to one of those, you know, they have those, what are those, farmer's market type deals?

01:28:57.000 You can go meet a rancher and you can buy beef right from them.

01:29:00.000 I am not like one of these people who are like, oh!

01:29:03.000 Never, never!

01:29:04.000 Like, 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?

01:29:20.000 I'll take that one! 0.80

01:29:22.000 You know, sure.

01:29:24.000 Do you at least eat eggs?

01:29:25.000 Oh, yeah.

01:29:26.000 Yeah, I eat eggs.

01:29:26.000 Okay, so eat eggs.

01:29:27.000 Like, they're going out of style.

01:29:28.000 Yeah, that's good.

01:29:29.000 So you're probably getting what you need.

01:29:32.000 As long as you eat eggs, I tell people, like, eggs are free.

01:29:34.000 No one's getting hurt.

01:29:35.000 Especially if you have your own chickens.

01:29:37.000 That's the greatest thing in the world.

01:29:38.000 We have 15 chickens.

01:29:38.000 There's nothing like eggs straight from a chicken.

01:29:42.000 Oh, it's great.

01:29:43.000 But it's also, it's karma-free.

01:29:45.000 Like, the chickens are having a good time.

01:29:47.000 No one's getting hurt.

01:29:48.000 They're all treated like pets.

01:29:50.000 Like, hey, girls! 1.00

01:29:50.000 I love chickens. 1.00

01:29:52.000 I actually really have...

01:29:53.000 I've always actually thought that...

01:29:59.000 An exotic pet would be to have, like, a chicken.

01:30:02.000 You know, it's like one chicken.

01:30:04.000 Yeah.

01:30:04.000 And just, like, treat him like a dog.

01:30:06.000 Treat him like, hey, that's my chicken.

01:30:07.000 He hangs around.

01:30:07.000 You've got to get a couple of them, though.

01:30:09.000 They need to have a pecking order. 0.82

01:30:10.000 Yes.

01:30:11.000 They like to hang out with each other, too.

01:30:13.000 I think Goebbels figured that one out.

01:30:16.000 He was a chicken farmer.

01:30:17.000 Was he really?

01:30:18.000 Oh, yeah.

01:30:19.000 Oh, no shit.

01:30:19.000 He was a chicken farmer.

01:30:20.000 That's how he...

01:30:21.000 Worked out all of his policies in the camps.

01:30:24.000 We shouldn't talk about that.

01:30:25.000 Don't want to connect that to chicken farming.

01:30:27.000 It's like the name Adolph, right?

01:30:31.000 You can't use it anymore.

01:30:32.000 You can't have that little mustache anymore.

01:30:34.000 You can't have a chaplain.

01:30:35.000 You can't have that cool mustache anymore.

01:30:37.000 Remember when Michael Jordan tried for a little while?

01:30:38.000 Yeah.

01:30:39.000 That's how competitive that guy is.

01:30:40.000 Like, fuck that.

01:30:41.000 I can wear that mustache.

01:30:42.000 He had a Hitler for a while. 0.96

01:30:44.000 Think I can't make it happen?

01:30:45.000 I'll make it happen.

01:30:46.000 He just decided he was going to force it through.

01:30:48.000 You know, as far as writing in jail, I'm just thinking about it right now.

01:30:53.000 One of the other things I had to contend with was they would confiscate anything that I wrote.

01:31:00.000 Oh.

01:31:02.000 So, you know, like once a week or once every two weeks or so.

01:31:05.000 Why would they do that?

01:31:05.000 Was it illegal to write?

01:31:06.000 I was considered a security threat by what I was writing.

01:31:10.000 Oh, because you were telling the truth about what was going on.

01:31:13.000 And then when they sent me in, I was placed in this solitary confinement thing, like in the hole.

01:31:18.000 And, you know, you're in there and like, I'd never been in anything like that before in my life.

01:31:23.000 I was thinking, this is like fucking Guantanamo, except it made me think about it.

01:31:27.000 I've got due process at least.

01:31:29.000 And so I'm in this like crazy Kafkaesque mechanized totalitarian environment.

01:31:40.000 You're in a room where you have no window and the lights are on 24-7.

01:31:44.000 And, you know, I don't care what anybody says.

01:31:48.000 You go into a room three days deprived of sound and the understanding of time, you go crazy after two days.

01:31:57.000 You're insane.

01:31:58.000 They broke me after two days.

01:32:00.000 I was like, oh, I'll do some yoga, I'll meditate.

01:32:02.000 No problem.

01:32:03.000 No, after a while, if the lights are on 24-7 and you can't hear and it's like being inside of a seashell, you go slowly nuts.

01:32:11.000 Is that by design?

01:32:13.000 Oh, yeah.

01:32:13.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:32:14.000 It's by design.

01:32:14.000 It's like you're placed into a...

01:32:17.000 And 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.

01:32:32.000 Lights are always on, but lights come on bright.

01:32:34.000 And suddenly a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors.

01:32:37.000 know 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

01:33:06.000 And usually they're looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind or cell phones, anything.

01:33:14.000 Like they're looking for anything that's considered contraband.

01:33:16.000 Okay, 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.

01:33:27.000 You're not allowed to talk to the guards.

01:33:28.000 They don't want to talk to you.

01:33:30.000 You tell them what you want on a kite and then you give them the kite and then they take it off and maybe it gets answered.

01:33:36.000 I never had one answered in my life.

01:33:40.000 And 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.

01:33:51.000 And so everybody gets new clothes and you end up with like these big baggy pants or something too small for you.

01:33:57.000 And they would...

01:33:59.000 Look for contraband for everybody.

01:34:00.000 Well, with me, they would look for whatever I was writing because when I was in solitary, I was writing, you know, like maps.

01:34:07.000 I would map the place like a fucking idiot.

01:34:10.000 Like I still was, you know, I'm writing about, oh, Eisenhard, the guard.

01:34:14.000 I 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.

01:34:24.000 I'm going to write that down.

01:34:25.000 So they didn't want me writing all my stuff.

01:34:27.000 They were like, that guy's a fucking threat.

01:34:29.000 You get whatever he's written.

01:34:31.000 And 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.

01:34:40.000 So I learned that they couldn't take or open letters to my attorney because it's privileged.

01:34:49.000 And 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.

01:35:02.000 My writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working, in the letter to my attorney.

01:35:07.000 And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out.

01:35:12.000 And then he would send that letter to my daughter who would then type up the pages that I was writing.

01:35:18.000 And so that's how I wrote several scripts was like that.

01:35:21.000 Wow.

01:35:22.000 And yeah, because little...

01:35:27.000 You said you read some of Roger's writing when he was in prison.

01:35:30.000 What did you read?

01:35:32.000 Where did you publish it?

01:35:33.000 I don't remember where I was reading it.

01:35:35.000 Was it on Twitter?

01:35:36.000 I had several things.

01:35:37.000 Okay, so first of all, I was placed...

01:35:42.000 I was sentenced to go to a low-security, like a country club facility.

01:35:46.000 I went to a low-security facility.

01:35:48.000 And I went in there and, you know, you have access to stuff.

01:35:53.000 It's more like a camp, almost.

01:35:56.000 And you're there and you're...

01:36:00.000 Incarcerated, but it's a light incarceration almost.

01:36:04.000 And I had access to a cell phone.

01:36:07.000 And so I started tweeting.

01:36:09.000 And these were the early days of Twitter.

01:36:10.000 And so I started tweeting, oh, they found tar heroin in Pudgy's cell.

01:36:15.000 And they dragged him off.

01:36:17.000 And, oh, this happened over here.

01:36:20.000 Oh, so-and-so shanked so-and-so.

01:36:23.000 Oh, they've rolled up so-and-so and taken him away.

01:36:25.000 I was, like, tweeting this stuff.

01:36:27.000 And this is the early days of Twitter, and Roger Ebert, who was at that time the biggest on Twitter, was following me.

01:36:36.000 And he put me on blast.

01:36:38.000 He suddenly decided that he would tell everybody.

01:36:42.000 And all of a sudden, one day overnight, the story kind of went everywhere in the world.

01:36:48.000 He put you on blast in a positive way?

01:36:50.000 Well, he just told everybody that, oh, this is happening.

01:36:53.000 Roger Avery, Academy Award-winning writer, is tweeting from jail.

01:36:58.000 And tweeting from behind bars.

01:37:01.000 At the time, now it's like nothing.

01:37:03.000 People do it all the time.

01:37:06.000 I've got a friend who's one of those January 6th guys, and he sends me tweets all the time.

01:37:14.000 You've got a friend who's a January 6th guy?

01:37:17.000 You've got a friend who's a January 6th guy?

01:37:19.000 Well, he's still there.

01:37:20.000 He's like...

01:37:21.000 Hundreds of days in jail without any kind of, without trial.

01:37:28.000 I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but that's not how it's supposed to be, is it?

01:37:34.000 It's not how it's supposed to be.

01:37:34.000 You're supposed to have a due process of some kind.

01:37:36.000 Well, especially when you watch the actual footage of how it went down.

01:37:39.000 Oh, I watched it live, and there was that guy, that Antifa guy, waving people in, moving them in.

01:37:47.000 They were moving the blockade things.

01:37:52.000 They were moving them out, and cops were waving people in.

01:37:55.000 They were opening the doors for people.

01:37:56.000 I want you to think about it this way.

01:37:58.000 In the most heavily armed nation the world has ever known, why would you have an insurrection with no guns?

01:38:04.000 Got to have guns.

01:38:06.000 Machine guns.

01:38:06.000 Those guys weren't planning on an insurrection.

01:38:08.000 No!

01:38:09.000 And then you have the factor that there was agents in the crowd, and we don't know how many.

01:38:14.000 There's government agents in the crowd that were inciting people to go in.

01:38:18.000 That's what they do.

01:38:18.000 And I want to know who that cop was who shot that woman.

01:38:21.000 Yeah.

01:38:21.000 What about that?

01:38:22.000 Yeah.

01:38:23.000 The whole thing's crazy.

01:38:24.000 The whole thing's crazy.

01:38:25.000 And there's this thing that cops died.

01:38:27.000 No cops died that day.

01:38:29.000 That's not true.

01:38:29.000 No.

01:38:29.000 The cop who died, he died of a stroke.

01:38:32.000 And I believe it was a stroke.

01:38:33.000 A stroke or a heart attack.

01:38:35.000 Well, like everything, there's a lot of misinformation being given to us by the mainstream media.

01:38:39.000 But 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.

01:38:46.000 Oh, it was probably the vaccine.

01:38:47.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:38:47.000 Could have been the guy just had a fucking heart attack.

01:38:50.000 But this guy who is a cop, he did not die.

01:38:52.000 He was not killed by the protesters.

01:38:54.000 And you watch the video of the shaman dude with the fucking buffalo hat.

01:38:58.000 They're walking him around.

01:38:59.000 The cops are guiding him.

01:39:02.000 How would you ever think that that is going to let you wind up in jail?

01:39:06.000 How 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? 1.00

01:39:17.000 People get a part of a movement, and they, yeah, we're all doing it!

01:39:20.000 And then you've got literal government agents encouraging you to do it, moving barriers, letting you in.

01:39:27.000 They were playing chess, and these idiots were playing checkers, and they all got locked up.

01:39:33.000 Well, because nobody was doing an insurrection!

01:39:35.000 It wasn't an insurrection!

01:39:37.000 Yeah, you don't do an insurrection without weapons.

01:39:40.000 The whole idea is crazy.

01:39:41.000 So there was no presumption that there was going to be any kind of, like, that you were going to get thrown in jail for a thousand days.

01:39:46.000 No, they thought they were doing a protest.

01:39:48.000 My pal Jake Lang, he's been there forever, and every now and then I get a picture of him.

01:39:53.000 He's been in, like...

01:39:54.000 Look, I deserve to go to jail.

01:39:57.000 That guy doesn't.

01:39:59.000 And most of those guys don't.

01:40:00.000 Yeah, I think it was a bad decision, certainly, to go into the Capitol.

01:40:04.000 It was a bad decision to smash windows, but I want to know who was doing it.

01:40:07.000 People had been smashing things, like, for a whole year before that.

01:40:10.000 Right.

01:40:10.000 That's a very good point.

01:40:12.000 It's like we were a culture of smashing things at that point.

01:40:14.000 It'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.

01:40:20.000 Like, what are you trying to do?

01:40:22.000 Are you there to serve and protect, or is there some other weird shit going on?

01:40:25.000 Because it seems like there is, and no one wants to talk about it because you don't want to be that guy.

01:40:30.000 But at a certain point in time, you should be that guy.

01:40:33.000 You should go, what's going on, man?

01:40:38.000 There comes a point when men of good conscience must stand up and speak out against things that are obviously wrong.

01:40:47.000 Yeah.

01:40:48.000 And that is one of them, I think.

01:40:49.000 Yeah, that is one of them.

01:40:51.000 It's a big one.

01:40:52.000 It's a weird one.

01:40:53.000 And, 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.

01:41:01.000 How long do you think they should be in there for?

01:41:03.000 Who's opposing this?

01:41:04.000 They should at least be going to trial.

01:41:06.000 You should at least be going to trial.

01:41:09.000 It is unconscionable to hold somebody for over a year, two years now.

01:41:14.000 The government has always had a situation where we talked about when we did our episode on the Andersonville trial.

01:41:26.000 The one charge that the government can put against you where they don't need direct evidence is conspiracy.

01:41:33.000 If they arrest you for conspiracy, that means they don't have direct evidence, but they don't need direct evidence for conspiracy.

01:41:38.000 By the way, when I was in...

01:41:40.000 Just one thing.

01:41:42.000 That's how they got Manson.

01:41:43.000 Right.

01:41:43.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:44.000 Yeah, that's true.

01:41:45.000 Right.

01:41:45.000 All right.

01:41:46.000 Well, they knew what Manson had done because they were helping him.

01:41:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:41:49.000 Well, I believe that, too.

01:41:51.000 Did you ever read Chaos?

01:41:52.000 Oh, the book's one of the best.

01:41:54.000 One of the best books ever.

01:41:54.000 Believe 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.

01:42:01.000 Chaos is insane.

01:42:02.000 Chaos is just fantastic.

01:42:04.000 And he helped me, too, because my first AD is a friend of his, Bill Clark.

01:42:09.000 Oh, wow.

01:42:09.000 And when I was writing the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood book, I go deeper into the Manson stuff.

01:42:16.000 And so I had a couple of little questions in my head that I always kind of wanted to know the answer to.

01:42:22.000 So 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.

01:42:29.000 It's a crazy fucking story, man.

01:42:32.000 You know, when I was in jail, I found out they record everything.

01:42:35.000 They're just constantly recording.

01:42:37.000 And so somebody's in there and they're like, man, I'd like to kill that DA. Well, that's conspiracy.

01:42:43.000 And so they'll wait and like, oh, you're about to get out.

01:42:46.000 And they'll literally start walking around like, ah, stop.

01:42:49.000 Oh, God.

01:42:50.000 Remember that thing you said about conspiracy?

01:42:51.000 Let's play that back for you.

01:42:53.000 Oh, God.

01:42:53.000 Or what you said about killing the DA. Well, you're going away again.

01:42:58.000 You're going back to trial.

01:42:59.000 Wow.

01:43:00.000 That happened a lot.

01:43:01.000 Don't ever talk.

01:43:03.000 They put guys in your cell to get you talking about shit.

01:43:06.000 Oh yeah, that happened right away.

01:43:07.000 That happened right away.

01:43:08.000 They're trying to get you to incriminate yourself deeper constantly.

01:43:13.000 It's like a fun game.

01:43:15.000 What a fun game.

01:43:16.000 What a fun game.

01:43:17.000 To serve and protect and incriminate you deeper.

01:43:20.000 Well, as Quentin will confirm, I have my authority issues.

01:43:27.000 I always have.

01:43:29.000 I'm suspicious of anyone in power.

01:43:33.000 You should be.

01:43:34.000 It's intoxicating.

01:43:36.000 Part of the thing on our show...

01:43:40.000 I'm getting back to what Roger's saying.

01:43:41.000 I'm not changing the subject.

01:43:46.000 When we do our show, you know, the thing is, when we do our show, we talk about three movies.

01:43:50.000 So I pick three video cassettes.

01:43:53.000 The show we're talking about is the Video Archives podcast, which is...

01:43:56.000 It was our second season.

01:43:57.000 Patreon.com slash Video Archives.

01:43:59.000 But the thing is...

01:44:00.000 There'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.

01:44:09.000 What the fuck is this?

01:44:10.000 Let's watch it and find out.

01:44:12.000 One of the things that's about our show is...

01:44:15.000 I 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.

01:44:21.000 Well, no, no, no, we don't do that shit.

01:44:23.000 All right, you know, we get together to watch the movies together.

01:44:27.000 Part of it is the experience of being together and watching the movie together, watching it through his eyes.

01:44:31.000 The reason we came up with the idea of the show is like when we reconnected, we started doing what we used to do.

01:44:38.000 During the pandemic.

01:44:39.000 Yeah, and then we were sort of like, well, hey, let's come up with a way we can get paid to do this.

01:44:43.000 this.

01:44:43.000 All right.

01:44:43.000 You know, so me and Roger will get together and we'll watch three movies and sometimes even four.

01:44:50.000 And then we'll get together.

01:44:51.000 Then 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.

01:44:56.000 But 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.

01:45:06.000 I am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here.

01:45:10.000 Because Roger will just get off on some archaic piece of thing.

01:45:15.000 The Earth is flat!

01:45:16.000 The Earth is flat!

01:45:17.000 And the next thing you know, it's been an hour and 15 minutes later.

01:45:22.000 And you're getting further and further and further away from the...

01:45:27.000 The alchemy we're trying to create with the first movie.

01:45:31.000 In 20 minutes, I'm hitting play.

01:45:33.000 That's it.

01:45:34.000 So wrap it up.

01:45:35.000 That's a problem with podcasts.

01:45:36.000 When people come over, sometimes we have some of the best conversations before the podcast.

01:45:41.000 So now I have to be rude.

01:45:42.000 I'll be like, stop, stop, stop.

01:45:43.000 Not talk.

01:45:44.000 Come on in.

01:45:46.000 Let's catch that magic. 0.95

01:45:47.000 Yeah, because you got to catch it because it is weird.

01:45:49.000 It's a weird thing.

01:45:52.000 It's a beautiful thing though because it's so open.

01:45:56.000 There's no studio people.

01:45:59.000 Even 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.

01:46:16.000 The fact that podcasting, and you're the king of it, but the fact that podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that...

01:46:27.000 Anybody 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.

01:46:38.000 100%.

01:46:38.000 Yeah.

01:46:39.000 Yeah, the barrier to entry is so low.

01:46:41.000 Think about the barrier to entry when you wanted to be a director.

01:46:43.000 Oh, God, Jesus.

01:46:44.000 It's fucking crazy.

01:46:45.000 Not only that, like the old days of television, like Desilu, we own our content.

01:46:53.000 Like, you own your content.

01:46:54.000 Yeah.

01:46:56.000 Never mind that it's a podcast.

01:46:58.000 I'm okay with that.

01:46:58.000 I 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.

01:47:07.000 It's me and Quentin who decide everything.

01:47:09.000 And, you know, if Quentin wants to do it, we go there.

01:47:12.000 If I want to do it, we go there.

01:47:14.000 Talk to Quentin.

01:47:15.000 If Quentin allows it, we go there.

01:47:16.000 Yeah.

01:47:19.000 I mean, basically what we're doing is the same thing we used to do at the video store.

01:47:24.000 We do what we used to do at the video store.

01:47:26.000 We're talking about movies.

01:47:27.000 It's completely terrible.

01:47:28.000 I have the kill switch.

01:47:30.000 But other than that...

01:47:31.000 No, no, no.

01:47:32.000 I didn't mean it like that.

01:47:36.000 I never use the kill switch.

01:47:38.000 But the kill switch is always there.

01:47:40.000 No!

01:47:40.000 Not really.

01:47:41.000 Not really.

01:47:42.000 Well, I guess.

01:47:43.000 Theoretically.

01:47:45.000 But you know what?

01:47:46.000 But you want a theoretical sort of Damocles.

01:47:49.000 Most times when you've used the kill switch, you've used it on your own.

01:47:52.000 I've used it on myself.

01:47:53.000 You've used it on yourself.

01:47:54.000 You actually haven't used it on any of my things that I've wanted to do, which is really cool.

01:48:00.000 But basically we're doing the same thing we used to do.

01:48:02.000 We used to sit around and talk about movies.

01:48:05.000 And so during the pandemic, you know, Quentin called me up and we hadn't talked for, I mean, we had bumped into each other.

01:48:12.000 We bumped into each other a few times, though.

01:48:13.000 But we hadn't really – we had had a little bit of a – We had a falling out.

01:48:17.000 We had a falling out.

01:48:18.000 And I call it a sort of a business-related falling out.

01:48:23.000 And 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.

01:48:38.000 I was just approaching it like I'm a SoCal, Gen X, punk filmmaker.

01:48:45.000 That was how I approached it.

01:48:47.000 I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.

01:48:49.000 I'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.

01:48:57.000 Because you have to be a little bit of a megalomaniac to be a director.

01:49:00.000 You have to be willing to say, no, I'm right, even when everyone is telling you you're wrong.

01:49:06.000 Is that how Joker 2 got made?

01:49:08.000 I like Joker 2. I know you did.

01:49:11.000 Yeah, I like Joker 2 also.

01:49:12.000 I haven't seen it.

01:49:12.000 I'm just fucking around.

01:49:14.000 I will defend Joker 2. Yeah, I'll defend the movie as well.

01:49:18.000 Not that I need more fucking press on that.

01:49:20.000 I can't wait to watch it and then talk to you about it afterwards.

01:49:24.000 Tim Dillon said it's the worst fucking movie that's ever been made, and he's in it.

01:49:29.000 Well, that may have colored his perception, though.

01:49:32.000 Oh, but Tim thinks everything sucks.

01:49:34.000 It's the beauty of Tim.

01:49:36.000 No matter what everybody's saying is amazing.

01:49:38.000 Tim loves to talk shit about Austin.

01:49:40.000 I gotta tell you, the funniest thing that I've heard for a while on YouTube, when I was listening to you guys talk, is...

01:49:47.000 He's a guy, I never really listened to his show or anything like that.

01:49:50.000 He's fucking brilliant.

01:49:51.000 But 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.

01:50:07.000 I laughed for 15 minutes and played it back about three different times because I thought that was such a funny comment.

01:50:14.000 He's always funny.

01:50:15.000 He said it sounds like Kamala Harris is doing voodoo curses. 1.00

01:50:18.000 She's doing gypsy curses, he said.

01:50:20.000 She speaks in gypsy curses. 1.00

01:50:25.000 And he always does his show with these fucking crazy glasses on.

01:50:28.000 Like, that's his new thing.

01:50:29.000 If you ever watch his show, it's the best.

01:50:31.000 Because it's literally just him ranting and a producer.

01:50:35.000 And the ability to rant as a singleton operator, as a fucking...

01:50:41.000 Lone 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.

01:50:48.000 Bill Burr is really good at it as well, but Tim Dillon is the best at it I've ever seen.

01:50:52.000 He's so fucking good at it, and he's just basically performing to one person who's his producer, and he's just ranting.

01:51:00.000 And 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.

01:51:09.000 I like ranting.

01:51:10.000 Oh, yeah, clearly, you both do.

01:51:12.000 Well, that's the great thing about you guys doing a podcast together.

01:51:16.000 What I was going to get to is, like, in the beginning, you were talking about replacing the talk show.

01:51:19.000 Well, fucking, you guys replaced Siskel and Ebert, right?

01:51:22.000 Well, that's what we wanted to do.

01:51:24.000 Thank you.

01:51:24.000 They're gone.

01:51:25.000 That was actually the agenda that Quentin proposed to me.

01:51:28.000 Well, both those guys are gone.

01:51:29.000 You know what I love watching is videos of, like, outtakes of those guys, like, bitching at each other?

01:51:33.000 No, bitching at each other, yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:51:34.000 They fucking hated each other.

01:51:35.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:51:35.000 They were so shitty to each other.

01:51:37.000 And then they had to be smiley, and what a bullshit way to live.

01:51:42.000 Do you remember when Vincent Gallo wished testicular cancer on Roger Ebert, and then he got it?

01:51:49.000 Oh, wow.

01:51:50.000 Do you remember that?

01:51:51.000 Okay, I do.

01:51:51.000 Well, he had cancer in the mouth.

01:51:53.000 Now that you bring it up, yeah.

01:51:54.000 Right?

01:51:54.000 Like, he lost his jaw.

01:51:55.000 He had to remove his jawbone.

01:51:57.000 That was Vincent Gallo cursing it onto him.

01:52:00.000 Oh, voodoo's real. 0.98

01:52:00.000 He apologized after he, oh my god, I didn't, I think he got it. 0.98

01:52:04.000 Well, I think it was after Roger Ebert said that Brown Bunny was the worst film to ever play in the history of con film films.

01:52:09.000 That's exactly what happened.

01:52:10.000 And then he went and he cursed him and then the curse came true and then he regretted it.

01:52:14.000 I talked to him and he was like, I wish I had never done that.

01:52:18.000 It's crazy if it really worked.

01:52:20.000 That movie, Brown Bunny, I wanted to talk about that because...

01:52:24.000 I've always thought it's so strange that we can show violence, but we can't show sex.

01:52:31.000 And I know they tried to do that.

01:52:33.000 You ever see the lines outside the movie theater when Deep Throat came out?

01:52:37.000 Carson was in line.

01:52:38.000 Johnny Carson went to see Deep Throat in a public theater.

01:52:41.000 Oh, Bing Crosby.

01:52:41.000 I heard stories about Bing Crosby arrived at midnight at the...

01:52:44.000 People didn't know what they were seeing yet.

01:52:47.000 It hadn't been defined as a genre.

01:52:48.000 There was nudie movies that people watched, the stag parties.

01:52:51.000 And there was that little moment in 73 where there was porno chic.

01:52:56.000 Yeah.

01:52:56.000 Well, Stallone did Italian Stallion.

01:52:59.000 Yeah, but that wasn't a popular thing.

01:53:01.000 This was.

01:53:02.000 And everyone had to kind of see it.

01:53:04.000 And like, oh, hey, maybe this will be a thing.

01:53:07.000 Right, right, right.

01:53:08.000 Maybe 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.

01:53:19.000 And that was a whole thing, was promoting the idea of couples going to see – A porn film.

01:53:29.000 Either porno films or just heavily erotic movies.

01:53:32.000 Right.

01:53:32.000 You know, like for sexy nights.

01:53:35.000 Yeah, not like how Travis Bickle does it.

01:53:38.000 No, no, no.

01:53:38.000 It's a sexy night.

01:53:39.000 Now we're going to have a sexy night.

01:53:41.000 We're going to go out and see and then we'll go home and we'll take care of business.

01:53:43.000 Right.

01:53:45.000 It didn't really happen, but there was this hope in the early 70s that that could happen.

01:53:52.000 But it's fascinating that it didn't happen, because what I was going to get to is violence we don't have any problem with.

01:53:57.000 But we all agree that consensual sex is way better than someone getting shot in the face.

01:54:02.000 But people get shot in the face in movies constantly.

01:54:06.000 You see heads explode and arms getting lopped off and Game of Thrones.

01:54:11.000 Bread and butter.

01:54:11.000 It's constant.

01:54:12.000 I think it's actually gone too far, I think.

01:54:14.000 I mean, this could be for me.

01:54:16.000 Well, it's not that violence has gone too far.

01:54:18.000 It's the meaningless violence.

01:54:21.000 Violence without purpose, almost.

01:54:24.000 And I started to recognize this during Walking Dead, but really Game of Thrones, though.

01:54:29.000 You mentioned Game of Thrones.

01:54:31.000 I 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. 0.69

01:54:45.000 It's like...

01:54:48.000 And then the cycle begins again.

01:54:49.000 You fall in love with a different character.

01:54:50.000 And then they're killing them.

01:54:52.000 And they're just doing it sadistically because there's nowhere to go other than that.

01:54:57.000 They're just pushing the ceiling higher and higher.

01:55:00.000 Sort of.

01:55:00.000 But also, if you were living in that world, that would be reality.

01:55:04.000 Nobody lived forever and became the hero of the fucking movie. 0.77

01:55:07.000 There's no heroes back then.

01:55:08.000 Everybody's getting gutted.

01:55:10.000 They're getting usurped.

01:55:12.000 Turned into a dungeon.

01:55:13.000 Yeah, people getting fed the lions.

01:55:14.000 You're out of the picture now.

01:55:15.000 You're getting eaten by dogs.

01:55:17.000 This is real.

01:55:18.000 And now you have to fight for the next five years against the rats that are in the fucking dungeon with you.

01:55:22.000 Television, at least the television I grew up with, was all about the familiarity of returning to the characters you love.

01:55:29.000 Yeah, but there was plenty of characters.

01:55:31.000 And you did get to return to the ones that stuck around and didn't get their heads locked.

01:55:35.000 I just wish they had killed other characters.

01:55:36.000 No, no, no.

01:55:38.000 I love that.

01:55:39.000 Let me give you another example.

01:55:43.000 Everyone talks about how great television is now.

01:55:46.000 It's pretty good, I gotta say.

01:55:48.000 It's pretty good.

01:55:49.000 But...

01:55:52.000 It's still television to me.

01:55:54.000 And what's the difference between television and a good movie?

01:55:59.000 Because a lot of the TV now has the patina of a movie.

01:56:05.000 They're using cinematic language to get you caught up in it.

01:56:10.000 And obviously I'm talking about good shows.

01:56:14.000 We're talking about shows that you're...

01:56:15.000 Ozark.

01:56:17.000 Shows that you're compelled to watch.

01:56:18.000 Right.

01:56:22.000 And so, okay, so I'll use an example of a show.

01:56:24.000 I'll use Yellowstone.

01:56:27.000 I didn't really get around to watching Yellowstone the first three years or so.

01:56:30.000 And then I watched, like, the first season.

01:56:32.000 I go, wow, this is fucking great.

01:56:33.000 I've always been a big Kevin Costner fan.

01:56:34.000 He's fucking wonderful in this, all right?

01:56:36.000 And 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.

01:56:45.000 And in the first season, I'm kind of talking about, oh, this is like a movie.

01:56:49.000 This is like a big movie.

01:56:50.000 It's like a big movie.

01:56:51.000 And the guy who writes that is a good writer.

01:56:53.000 There's good, like, punchy monologues and stuff.

01:56:58.000 So then I end up watching, like, three seasons of it.

01:57:02.000 And then I even watched that, like, 1883. Oh, this is a good Western show.

01:57:06.000 I like Westerns.

01:57:07.000 But then...

01:57:10.000 After I've watched like two or three seasons or one season of 1883, look, while I'm watching it, I am compelled.

01:57:20.000 I'm caught up in it.

01:57:21.000 But at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera.

01:57:24.000 They've introduced you to a bunch of characters.

01:57:26.000 You actually kind of know all their backstories.

01:57:29.000 You know everybody's connection with everybody else.

01:57:31.000 And they spend some time selling that out.

01:57:33.000 And then everything is just the compellingness of the soap opera.

01:57:39.000 Of what's happening to this character.

01:57:40.000 And what's different between that and a film?

01:57:42.000 Well, I'll tell you.

01:57:43.000 Because the thing is...

01:57:46.000 If you watch Edge of Night, Monday through Friday, you get caught up in the dramas of the family and everything.

01:57:54.000 But you don't remember it five years from now.

01:57:56.000 You're caught up into the minutia of it at the moment.

01:57:59.000 So the difference between is...

01:58:03.000 I'll see a good western movie and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

01:58:08.000 I'll remember the story.

01:58:09.000 I'll remember this scene or that scene.

01:58:10.000 It built to an emotional climax of some degree.

01:58:16.000 One, the story is good.

01:58:17.000 It's not just about the interpersonal relationships.

01:58:19.000 The story is good itself.

01:58:21.000 But there's a payoff to it.

01:58:23.000 But there's not a payoff on this stuff.

01:58:25.000 It's just more interconnectional drama.

01:58:28.000 And while I'm watching it, that's good enough.

01:58:31.000 But when it's over, I couldn't tell you.

01:58:33.000 I can remember who the bad guy was in the first season of Yellowstone because it was Danny Houston.

01:58:40.000 I remember him in it.

01:58:41.000 But I don't remember any of the details of it.

01:58:44.000 And I don't remember any of the bad guys for season two or season three.

01:58:47.000 It's out of my head.

01:58:48.000 It's just completely out.

01:58:50.000 And same thing with 1883. When I watched the whole thing, and that was like a, that seemed like a movie, except I don't remember.

01:58:58.000 Sam Elliott's about the only thing I really remember of it when it was finished.

01:59:02.000 But now, Red River, I remember for the rest of my life.

01:59:06.000 Isn't that, though, because it's a different thing, right?

01:59:09.000 Because when you go to a film, film is designed for one sitting.

01:59:14.000 You sit down in the theater.

01:59:16.000 You're going to get the entire encapsulation of what happens to these characters in three hours.

01:59:19.000 Okay, I'll give you an example of one that is more than a soap opera.

01:59:21.000 And here's the difference.

01:59:23.000 Here's the difference.

01:59:25.000 Yeah, you could say that.

01:59:26.000 Look, they're in the soap opera business.

01:59:28.000 But I'll tell you one that's not, okay?

01:59:31.000 If you watch that first season of...

01:59:34.000 Now, here's one that really works like a movie.

01:59:35.000 If you watch the first season of Homeland...

01:59:38.000 Oh yeah.

01:59:39.000 That first season of Homeland.

01:59:41.000 First season is incredible.

01:59:42.000 Okay.

01:59:42.000 Yeah, very good.

01:59:44.000 When 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.

01:59:58.000 And you don't want him to die, but you're kind of into him, and you kind of want him to pull it off.

02:00:04.000 And then his daughter calls him on the phone.

02:00:08.000 Before 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.

02:00:14.000 Daddy, you need to tell me that you're going to come home right now.

02:00:17.000 You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight.

02:00:22.000 And the entire series has been built to this scene.

02:00:25.000 And it's one of the most emotional scenes I've ever seen in a movie, in a TV show, I've ever seen Dramatized.

02:00:31.000 The first season was great.

02:00:32.000 I've ever seen Dramatized.

02:00:34.000 Now, that was a movie.

02:00:35.000 That was not a soap opera.

02:00:37.000 That built to this moment of him being in that fucking room with the suicide vest on.

02:00:43.000 And there was complexity.

02:00:45.000 She doesn't know what she's asking.

02:00:48.000 But we do.

02:00:50.000 She's stopping this major thing and she'll never know that.

02:00:53.000 But we do.

02:00:54.000 Right, right, right.

02:00:56.000 And he's still committed.

02:00:58.000 But he's more committed to her.

02:00:59.000 And we know that.

02:01:02.000 That's just great shit.

02:01:04.000 That's a movie.

02:01:05.000 Right.

02:01:05.000 And you can't...

02:01:06.000 Can you do that every week?

02:01:08.000 No, I didn't say you can do it every week, but I'm saying when the season's over, I need to walk away with more than just the soap opera.

02:01:17.000 An impactful moment.

02:01:18.000 Exactly.

02:01:19.000 I 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.

02:01:31.000 You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

02:01:36.000 I see what you're saying.

02:01:37.000 And look, while I'm watching it, I'm not asking for that.

02:01:41.000 But the fact that it all just disappears once it's over and it's just sand on the beach?

02:01:46.000 Right.

02:01:47.000 It's a different thing though, right?

02:01:49.000 I mean, this is the weirdness of the theater experience versus home.

02:01:54.000 Here's where it's not a different thing.

02:01:55.000 Part of the thing that makes it different is the fact that everyone's watching these continuing stories, continuing stories, continuing stories.

02:02:02.000 If 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. 0.95

02:02:19.000 Well, on that show, you have the episodes that are maybe not so good, or the episodes that are whatever, they're treading water.

02:02:27.000 That's not one continual story.

02:02:28.000 But then you'll have this great episode with Charles Bronson.

02:02:32.000 Or do they have a great episode with James Kober.

02:02:34.000 Well, they're almost skandalins.

02:02:36.000 That could be...

02:02:37.000 That could have been a movie.

02:02:38.000 Yeah.

02:02:39.000 They could have expanded that to a movie.

02:02:40.000 Right.

02:02:41.000 They're standalones instead of just a long, ongoing story.

02:02:43.000 Well, the difference is that's episodic.

02:02:46.000 It's a long, ongoing story that leads to the soap opera aspect.

02:02:50.000 Well, it's episodic.

02:02:51.000 And television now has become completely serialized.

02:02:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:02:55.000 And so, you know, somebody's going in and they're pitching their show, even a really, really good show like...

02:03:00.000 Deadwood.

02:03:01.000 Okay, Deadwood, I know what they probably went in, they pitched, and what they knew that they were going to make was the Wild Bill story.

02:03:09.000 And they've got Carradine, and they know that story.

02:03:12.000 And that show is fantastic, as long as they're telling that story, which is like six to eight episodes.

02:03:19.000 Once he's gone, I don't think they had a plan.

02:03:21.000 Mm-hmm.

02:03:23.000 That was what they pitched, and it was like they pitched a movie spread out over a number of episodes, but it wasn't even the full season.

02:03:30.000 But by that point in time, now they have all the town characters.

02:03:33.000 Well, they've got everybody, but I would maintain that for the rest of Deadwood, after Carradine's gone, it's just things are happening.

02:03:40.000 Stuff is happening.

02:03:42.000 But I don't remember anything about that show, other than the town and the various actors that I liked on the show.

02:03:50.000 But really, all they had was those first six to eight episodes.

02:03:53.000 I can't remember exactly what it was.

02:03:55.000 And the thing about it is, I'm not...

02:04:01.000 I don't say all this and the sum up of it all is it's useless.

02:04:05.000 It is very compelling while I'm watching it.

02:04:08.000 But it just doesn't compare to a movie real story that stays with me for the rest of my life in some cases.

02:04:16.000 Right.

02:04:16.000 I know what you're saying.

02:04:20.000 I try to watch at least one movie every episode that I haven't seen.

02:04:24.000 And sometimes it's like, well, I haven't seen it since I was 12. Right.

02:04:29.000 Or I haven't seen it since...

02:04:30.000 Those are actually the scariest ones to watch because if you loved something when you were young, it's almost like...

02:04:34.000 I'm expecting not to...

02:04:35.000 I'm tougher on stuff now than I used to be.

02:04:38.000 I was a big champion about stuff.

02:04:40.000 Now I'm not such a champion.

02:04:41.000 Now I see all the problems with it.

02:04:43.000 But now I'll watch something that I haven't seen since I was 22 and I saw it like the day it opened.

02:04:48.000 And I watch it again.

02:04:53.000 I think I just lost my train of thought.

02:04:55.000 Well, actually, I can jump in really quick if you want.

02:04:58.000 I'm talking like I'm stoned and I'm not.

02:05:02.000 Strong cigars.

02:05:03.000 Yeah, strong cigars.

02:05:04.000 One of the movies we saw that we had seen a million times and we didn't even think that it was going to be anything was Dressed to Kill.

02:05:12.000 Yeah.

02:05:12.000 Okay, let me set this up a little bit.

02:05:13.000 Yeah, set it up.

02:05:13.000 And then you can take it.

02:05:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:05:15.000 It was one of those things where we were doing a thing, a special episode with Eli Roth.

02:05:19.000 We were taking the Italian Jallo thrillers and saying, okay, what are the American versions of Jallo thrillers?

02:05:24.000 And we figured out there was like four of them.

02:05:27.000 And one of them was Dressed to Kill.

02:05:28.000 Michael Caine.

02:05:29.000 Yeah.

02:05:29.000 And so we get together with Eli.

02:05:32.000 And we're going to watch these four movies.

02:05:34.000 And then it comes down to Dressed to Kill.

02:05:36.000 And it's like, I can't even think about how many times I've seen Dressed to Kill.

02:05:40.000 I can't even think how many times he's seen it.

02:05:42.000 And how many times that Eli's seen it.

02:05:45.000 I mean, we're just huge Brian De Palma fans and Nancy Allen fans and everything.

02:05:48.000 So, like, how many fucking times?

02:05:49.000 And so, I almost, almost brought up, I mean, do we even need to watch Dressed to Kill?

02:05:57.000 We had a little Congress about it.

02:05:58.000 We've got three movies.

02:05:59.000 No, okay, let's just watch it.

02:06:01.000 Let's watch it.

02:06:03.000 That ended up being one of the greatest screenings of Dressed to Kill I've ever seen.

02:06:08.000 All right?

02:06:08.000 In our living room.

02:06:10.000 In my living room watching it with Roger.

02:06:12.000 On VHS. On VHS. Pan and scan.

02:06:15.000 All right?

02:06:16.000 The old Warner Brothers video.

02:06:18.000 Because we watch them on the actual video cassettes of Video Archives.

02:06:22.000 All right?

02:06:23.000 Literally, 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.

02:06:32.000 We'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.

02:06:39.000 But it was Roger who was adding to it.

02:06:41.000 It was Eli that was adding to it.

02:06:43.000 And I was adding to them.

02:06:45.000 And we just had this appreciation for the movie watching it with the three of us in this situation.

02:06:52.000 The fact that we even considered not even watching it was just like sacrilege.

02:06:57.000 And we saw things in it that we had never seen before.

02:06:59.000 That was the other thing.

02:07:00.000 I saw things during that screening because of...

02:07:04.000 Because of feeling watching the movie with you guys that I had never thought about before.

02:07:10.000 And so it opened up all sorts of avenues and, you know, Most frequently you watch a movie and it doesn't live up.

02:07:19.000 I'm afraid to watch movies again a lot of the time.

02:07:23.000 That was just one of those happy incidences where the movie really lived up.

02:07:29.000 It stayed strong.

02:07:31.000 Even when we'd seen it hundreds of times.

02:07:34.000 I know.

02:07:35.000 It'd be hard to pick a movie that I've seen as much as Jessica.

02:07:39.000 See, this is the better version of Siskel and Ebert.

02:07:43.000 This is exactly what I'm talking about.

02:07:46.000 The completely unproduced, uninfluenced version.

02:07:49.000 Well, 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.

02:07:59.000 A hundred percent.

02:08:00.000 It's just a matter of getting it out there.

02:08:03.000 I think there's just a bunch of people that aren't aware of it yet.

02:08:07.000 They will come.

02:08:08.000 Build it and they will come. 1.00

02:08:10.000 What I love about the way we're doing it now, because our first season we just put it out.

02:08:15.000 And we had a partner with SiriusXM back then.

02:08:19.000 And this season...

02:08:20.000 Yeah, they kind of went out of business for their podcasting thing a little bit.

02:08:24.000 Oh, did they?

02:08:26.000 Pandora now, right?

02:08:27.000 Yeah, they kind of turned into a different thing.

02:08:28.000 They just signed a big podcast deal with the Call Her Daddy chick.

02:08:32.000 Yeah, I think they did, yeah.

02:08:33.000 So I guess they're trying to get back into it.

02:08:35.000 I think some other people as well.

02:08:37.000 They 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.

02:08:45.000 It's a real niche type...

02:08:47.000 Yeah, and we...

02:08:49.000 Can you guys do Jaws?

02:08:50.000 No, we don't want to do Jaws.

02:08:51.000 But that's the best part of it.

02:08:53.000 Do whatever the fuck you want to do.

02:08:54.000 That's exactly it.

02:08:55.000 But the thing is, they wear like a...

02:08:58.000 So 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.

02:09:13.000 We talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie.

02:09:17.000 We talk about the transfer.

02:09:19.000 By the way, the movie VHS is one of my guilty pleasures.

02:09:21.000 That's a good film.

02:09:22.000 The one with the devil lady. 0.52

02:09:25.000 She turns into a devil. 0.99

02:09:26.000 Four different stories or three different stories.

02:09:28.000 But that one is worth it.

02:09:29.000 Just sit through the other three for that one.

02:09:31.000 The devil lady was fucking amazing. 1.00

02:09:33.000 But I think they were expecting us to do like...

02:09:37.000 Jaws! 0.99

02:09:38.000 Citizen Kane!

02:09:38.000 They were going to do like Dax Shepard kind of numbers.

02:09:41.000 Right, right, right.

02:09:41.000 But we're never going to do that with what we're doing.

02:09:44.000 Right, right, right.

02:09:46.000 Yeah.

02:09:46.000 And, you know, and so we're talking...

02:09:48.000 But you could, though.

02:09:50.000 People want to see it.

02:09:52.000 They want to listen to it.

02:09:53.000 It's just a matter of...

02:09:54.000 They'll realize they wanted it once they hear it.

02:09:57.000 That's what it is.

02:09:58.000 It's like, oh, we want them to only talk about Citizen Kane.

02:10:01.000 No, no, no.

02:10:02.000 It's got to be whatever the fuck they actually want to talk about.

02:10:05.000 And then you'll learn about that movie that you never heard about.

02:10:08.000 Maybe you go see it, and then you'll have a deeper appreciation of why these guys love movies.

02:10:11.000 But one of the things that was interesting when we did it...

02:10:14.000 Okay, so...

02:10:15.000 When 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.

02:10:24.000 Right.

02:10:25.000 Okay, and then when I did commercials, I did it with a 70s DJ announcer voice, all right?

02:10:32.000 Because I felt like such a sellout that I'm not going to do it in my voice.

02:10:35.000 Right.

02:10:36.000 That's funny.

02:10:39.000 The Datsun 750 is coming, and it's coming soon!

02:10:44.000 You know, and I did it.

02:10:45.000 The real Don Steele.

02:10:46.000 That was my whole thing.

02:10:47.000 Doing it like the real Don Steele.

02:10:49.000 I just did those readings like myself, and people started commenting on Twitter.

02:10:53.000 They were like, man, Roger Avery.

02:10:55.000 ZipRecruiter can fill your placement in a week.

02:11:02.000 Some people even get, in the first week, they get qualified candidates only on ZipRecruiter.com.

02:11:10.000 I 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!

02:11:26.000 I was like, well, I don't know if I want to be shilling stuff like that anymore.

02:11:31.000 You just have to only approve the ads that you want to do.

02:11:34.000 I approve ads.

02:11:35.000 I don't just let them give me every ad.

02:11:38.000 I'm like, I can't do this one.

02:11:39.000 And I say it all the time.

02:11:41.000 We're not even under that kind of pressure now.

02:11:43.000 The 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.

02:11:59.000 But if you want to get the whole show, then you've got to subscribe.

02:12:04.000 And if you just subscribe, you get the show.

02:12:05.000 If you pay $5, you get our show.

02:12:08.000 Boom.

02:12:09.000 And if you pay $8, then you get an extra special show that we do.

02:12:13.000 There's still a truncated version of it available for everybody to listen to.

02:12:17.000 You like the first part of it?

02:12:18.000 Come for the rest.

02:12:19.000 But the thing is, though, is what I like, and some people are sort of like, hey, fuck those guys.

02:12:24.000 And I think, well, okay, fine.

02:12:25.000 And look, I get it.

02:12:27.000 I'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.

02:12:36.000 And that was my dinner.

02:12:37.000 So I get that.

02:12:39.000 And 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!

02:12:46.000 That's an easy way to do it.

02:12:48.000 You can get everything for free for a month.

02:12:49.000 You can get everything you want in a month.

02:12:54.000 We're doing it for the people who care about the show and are subscribing to it.

02:12:58.000 And those people, those are our audience.

02:13:01.000 Right.

02:13:01.000 And then they write on the message board and we write them back.

02:13:05.000 So we're doing it for those people.

02:13:07.000 And as long as we can make enough to just do the show, we're cool.

02:13:10.000 And the general feeling is, wow, this is like a $5 film school.

02:13:14.000 Because 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.

02:13:22.000 And then- And hopefully just genuinely compelling discussions.

02:13:26.000 And using our experience as filmmakers to discuss even, you know, deeper into the movies and to better understand them.

02:13:34.000 And, you know, it's largely something has happened in culture where...

02:13:45.000 People, they don't know how to argue anymore, politely.

02:13:48.000 They don't know how to, like, enjoy an argument with each other before.

02:13:51.000 And so Quentin and I, we don't have to like the same movie, just like Siskel and Ebert didn't have to like it.

02:13:57.000 But, you know, we can argue about something, and then afterwards it's like, okay, let's go do karaoke now.

02:14:04.000 It's not a recommend show.

02:14:06.000 We want to pick three movies and we want to discuss them.

02:14:09.000 Yeah.

02:14:10.000 You don't have to like it to discuss it.

02:14:11.000 Even if we don't like the movie, if there's an interesting point of discussion about it, well, that's good.

02:14:16.000 That's all we need.

02:14:18.000 We just need an interesting conversation.

02:14:22.000 Yeah.

02:14:23.000 It's not about we recommend you watch this movie.

02:14:26.000 Right.

02:14:27.000 Personally, I don't care if anybody watches any of the movies that we talk about.

02:14:30.000 I want them to listen to the show and enjoy our back and forth.

02:14:34.000 And get to understand how you appreciate movies.

02:14:36.000 Yeah, if you want to go out and check the movies out afterwards, fine, go ahead.

02:14:40.000 But I don't care if you do or not.

02:14:42.000 And we have a really, like, dedicated group of people who have come and they've signed up and they, like...

02:14:49.000 What's funny is I really care about these people now.

02:14:52.000 It's like they're there and they're in the club.

02:14:54.000 It's like a clubhouse.

02:14:55.000 And the people who want to be there want to be there and they're talking and they're talking.

02:14:59.000 They're on a message board with Quentin and Eli Roth is there and Edgar Wright.

02:15:07.000 We wanted to create a Something that was like video archives in that people could come in and talk.

02:15:14.000 And I want at least one of the three movies, not every week, but at least...

02:15:18.000 They're not easy to find.

02:15:21.000 I want to come up with like, well, that's not streaming anywhere.

02:15:24.000 How am I supposed to get this?

02:15:25.000 Well, it's on VHS, you know.

02:15:27.000 Get a VHS recorder and buy it on eBay.

02:15:30.000 And now all of a sudden that little group is like...

02:15:33.000 Maybe we can buy a VHS and then we'll burn it and we can trade it with everybody else.

02:15:41.000 And now they're all doing the work to do that.

02:15:43.000 Well, good.

02:15:44.000 My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show and she's on the show with us.

02:15:49.000 And 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.

02:15:59.000 She's not there with us.

02:16:01.000 She represents one of the people out there.

02:16:04.000 She's got to find it.

02:16:06.000 So if Quentin finds something that's pretty difficult to find, she's got to track it down.

02:16:10.000 And she usually has a little timetable to do it on. 1.00

02:16:13.000 And she kind of is doing her proof of concept on, you can get these.

02:16:17.000 You can find these.

02:16:18.000 She'll find it on VHS. She explains how she tracked it down.

02:16:21.000 And you can follow her guide.

02:16:23.000 If it's on YouTube, she'll tell you it's on YouTube.

02:16:24.000 However...

02:16:25.000 When she goes, Quentin, I just couldn't track this one down.

02:16:29.000 I'm like, yes!

02:16:30.000 I think that's the real reason he likes to do the show.

02:16:37.000 That's right!

02:16:39.000 Eat shit!

02:16:41.000 Gotcha!

02:16:43.000 Is everything on YouTube now?

02:16:47.000 A lot of things.

02:16:48.000 Not everything, but a lot of things.

02:16:49.000 A lot of things.

02:16:50.000 Yeah, there's some certain things you can't find on YouTube still.

02:16:53.000 And if it's up there and it's not there, it'll be up again somewhere.

02:16:57.000 It's like whack-a-mole.

02:16:58.000 Right, right, right.

02:16:59.000 It's like whack-a-mole.

02:17:00.000 There was the Gore Vidal film, the transsexual movie with Raquel Welch.

02:17:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:17:04.000 Oh, we watched that.

02:17:06.000 We didn't do an episode on it, but I had the video of it.

02:17:08.000 We watched it.

02:17:09.000 Myra Breckinridge, I like that movie.

02:17:11.000 It's a crazy movie.

02:17:12.000 When she fucks the guy in the ass, that's the best fucking scene. 1.00

02:17:14.000 When she fucks the guy in the ass, that is the best fucking scene. 1.00

02:17:18.000 It's pretty wild.

02:17:19.000 I like that movie so much, I read the book afterwards, because I thought it was so cool.

02:17:24.000 Okay.

02:17:25.000 I never liked Rex Reed, and I am not gay, but I was actually like, wow, Rex Reed's kind of hot in this.

02:17:33.000 Well, that's what he was trying to do.

02:17:35.000 That was the whole movie.

02:17:36.000 You did it.

02:17:36.000 Gore Vidal was trying to turn you gay.

02:17:38.000 Can you give me that lighter?

02:17:39.000 Yeah, you should.

02:17:41.000 That's one of those weird ones that's difficult to find.

02:17:44.000 I had to buy a DVD to get it.

02:17:47.000 Oh, I like that light she has that keeps building up to it.

02:17:51.000 She goes, Was she actually going to finally show her pussy? 1.00

02:17:54.000 She goes, well, it looks like the moment of truth has finally arrived.

02:18:03.000 I think Raquel was just fantastic in that movie.

02:18:06.000 Did you ever see those debates that Gore Vidal did with William F. Buck?

02:18:09.000 Oh, yeah.

02:18:10.000 Those are legendary.

02:18:11.000 Yeah.

02:18:12.000 Incredible.

02:18:13.000 Yeah.

02:18:13.000 But this is, you know, you used to be- Gore Vidal always won, though.

02:18:17.000 Oh, yeah.

02:18:17.000 Well, he was right and he was better.

02:18:20.000 Yeah, he's right and he's better.

02:18:21.000 Yeah, he's right.

02:18:22.000 But then you have Gore Vidal fighting with fucking Norman Mailer.

02:18:24.000 What were they fighting about?

02:18:25.000 They'd get him on the Dick Cavett show together.

02:18:31.000 He would talk to him like a Ponzi bastard and the other one would talk to him like a Neanderthal. 0.90

02:18:36.000 I'm sure they had dinner afterwards.

02:18:40.000 You used to be able to have those kind of conversations on television, which is really fascinating.

02:18:44.000 It's like now they exist in podcasts.

02:18:47.000 And the Siskel and Ebert thing, which I was talking about, you can't manufacture a friendship.

02:18:52.000 And you can't manufacture a real interest.

02:18:55.000 You can't be a guy who was a local news reporter who auditioned for the role of the guy who reviews movies.

02:19:01.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:19:02.000 Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

02:19:02.000 It's like this thing that you guys have is what...

02:19:06.000 This is the whole new media movement is based on authenticity, right?

02:19:12.000 And this is like the whole thing.

02:19:13.000 You want people to not be able to find these movies.

02:19:15.000 You want to just review movies that you want to review.

02:19:18.000 And that's the beautiful thing about it.

02:19:20.000 It's like the perfect show in that regard.

02:19:22.000 Like for a film review show or a film discussion show, it's the perfect show.

02:19:27.000 And also, when a customer used to come into the store, they had basically three requirements.

02:19:32.000 I want something that's new, that was always the first one, that's good, that I haven't seen yet.

02:19:37.000 And I was like, well, if you haven't seen it yet, it's new to you.

02:19:41.000 So that takes care of two of those.

02:19:43.000 And no, we don't have that new one, but let's show you something interesting.

02:19:47.000 And so it was always a matter of, you know...

02:19:50.000 well 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.

02:20:05.000 But I'll tell you what bugs me about a lot of the other shows is the fact that the people are sincere.

02:20:12.000 They're completely sincere, but their film knowledge is fucking abysmal.

02:20:18.000 They really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

02:20:21.000 And especially when they're trying to talk about movies from the 70s or something, Well, they were usually born in the 80s.

02:20:29.000 So they don't know what something was like when it opened up and they don't really have any context.

02:20:36.000 They definitely don't have context.

02:20:38.000 That's what they don't have.

02:20:38.000 They don't have context.

02:20:39.000 They just know whatever they've learned along the way.

02:20:41.000 And so they just yank stuff out of their ass and say stuff that's just wrong a lot.

02:20:46.000 They're just misinformation a lot.

02:20:48.000 We actually fact check our shit.

02:20:51.000 All right, you know, we re-record it, all right, to make sure that we just don't yank shit out of it.

02:20:57.000 And 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.

02:21:06.000 You can count on what we're saying that we're telling you the true fucking shit.

02:21:10.000 I 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.

02:21:23.000 Well, so because you were there during the opening of the film and, you know, we're going...

02:21:27.000 I can describe the context!

02:21:28.000 Yeah!

02:21:29.000 Yeah, we have the context to talk about.

02:21:31.000 A lot of these people, they maybe didn't see these movies in theaters.

02:21:35.000 And 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.

02:21:47.000 And she had one...

02:21:49.000 One rule for film criticism, and I think this could apply to all writing.

02:22:00.000 You have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing.

02:22:06.000 It's that fucking simple.

02:22:08.000 There has to be a compelling reason for you to engage in reading analysis.

02:22:14.000 And the same thing about talking about cinema.

02:22:16.000 You have to give a compelling reason.

02:22:17.000 Now, yeah, I like the guys.

02:22:19.000 That's a good start.

02:22:22.000 I like their personality.

02:22:23.000 I think they're kind of funny.

02:22:25.000 That's a good start.

02:22:26.000 But there has to be something more than that.

02:22:29.000 Well, that's what's more than that, what you just did.

02:22:32.000 This passion for it, right?

02:22:34.000 That's what's more than that.

02:22:35.000 It's this severe commitment to it.

02:22:39.000 That's what's exciting.

02:22:40.000 And then when we talk about the movies, we talk about everything that's good about them, we talk about the things that aren't good.

02:22:44.000 Right.

02:22:45.000 Honest.

02:22:45.000 Yeah, very honest.

02:22:47.000 And I can be wrong.

02:22:49.000 I don't have to be right about it.

02:22:51.000 You might be wrong about the Joker.

02:22:52.000 I'm not sure.

02:22:55.000 It's audacious.

02:22:56.000 It's audacious.

02:22:57.000 Because you haven't even seen it.

02:22:58.000 You're just jumping on a fucking bandwagon.

02:23:01.000 I'm just talking shit.

02:23:02.000 Talking shit.

02:23:03.000 I'm just trying to wind you up.

02:23:04.000 Talking shit.

02:23:04.000 I'm just trying to wind you up.

02:23:05.000 Sorry.

02:23:10.000 What's an example of a film that you love that other people hate other than The Joker?

02:23:16.000 I don't know if I loved it, but I liked it a lot.

02:23:20.000 I have a ton of those.

02:23:22.000 As 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.

02:23:39.000 Is it because you're a contrarian?

02:23:40.000 Can I guess?

02:23:42.000 Is it Ishtar?

02:23:44.000 I defended Ishtar, I defended 1941. He was like one of the champions of Ishtar. 0.58

02:23:50.000 Ishtar, I championed 1941. Pushing that tape on so many customers.

02:23:55.000 How many of them came back angry?

02:23:56.000 No, Ishtar's a funny movie!

02:24:00.000 Is it really?

02:24:01.000 Well, 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.

02:24:11.000 And so people had formed an opinion about whether they liked it or not.

02:24:14.000 Because it was so expensive.

02:24:15.000 Because it was expensive.

02:24:16.000 It doesn't change your ticket price.

02:24:19.000 No, but that is the kiss of death.

02:24:20.000 If you feel like a film is over-budgeted.

02:24:23.000 Especially comedies.

02:24:25.000 It's like critics...

02:24:26.000 Critics have a thing about spending a lot of money on comedy.

02:24:30.000 It seems obscene to them.

02:24:32.000 What happened with this film?

02:24:34.000 Where did the budget go south?

02:24:36.000 Where the budget kind of went south for the most part was the fact that...

02:24:42.000 Like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman kind of like had their full freight on the movie.

02:24:47.000 So Dustin Hoffman got his high big salary.

02:24:49.000 Warren Beatty got his high big salary.

02:24:52.000 And all the accoutrements that go with it.

02:24:54.000 And everything that goes with it.

02:24:56.000 I need a plane to fly me back from Morocco to New York every weekend.

02:25:01.000 I'm sure.

02:25:02.000 He's just making that up.

02:25:03.000 I'm making that up, but that's not unrealistic.

02:25:05.000 It's not unrealistic.

02:25:06.000 It would be like if when they did during the time when they did a chart, Tom Hanks was famous, but he wasn't the superstar that he is now.

02:25:13.000 Right.

02:25:13.000 All right.

02:25:14.000 So if that had starred Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, like the two guys from Bosom Buddies.

02:25:19.000 Yeah.

02:25:20.000 Well, then that movie would have it would have been it would have cost a lot less and would have been just as funny.

02:25:23.000 Those guys were terrific together and they would have been really good in that role.

02:25:28.000 And the film would have been seen for what it is.

02:25:30.000 Yeah.

02:25:30.000 Mmm.

02:25:32.000 When a film does get labeled as a bloated film, though, that is the kiss of death.

02:25:37.000 It kind of is.

02:25:38.000 Because the general public will turn on it then.

02:25:40.000 They want it to fail.

02:25:41.000 But you know what?

02:25:42.000 Generally, you give those movies a couple of years, and suddenly they're like these amazing movies.

02:25:46.000 Waterworld?

02:25:46.000 Well, Waterworld's a pretty fun film.

02:25:49.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

02:25:50.000 I kind of have a great time watching.

02:25:52.000 Waterworld was the first Laserdisc I ever bought.

02:25:55.000 That and Days of Thunder.

02:25:56.000 Here's one I bet you can't defend.

02:25:59.000 Kevin Costner's The Postman.

02:26:00.000 I never saw The Postman.

02:26:01.000 I like the idea of The Postman.

02:26:03.000 I remember the screenplay for The Postman was great.

02:26:05.000 I never saw The Postman, but I actually like Kevin Costner.

02:26:08.000 I love Kevin Costner.

02:26:10.000 I think Dance of the Woods is one of the best movies.

02:26:12.000 Kevin Costner is fucking awesome.

02:26:13.000 I love that dude.

02:26:14.000 But you're right about The Postman.

02:26:15.000 It's hard to defend.

02:26:17.000 I'm not saying he's right about it because I've never seen it.

02:26:19.000 But now that says something that I've never seen it, but...

02:26:22.000 Yeah.

02:26:23.000 But I wouldn't mind seeing it.

02:26:24.000 I'll bet y'all I like it.

02:26:25.000 But then there's films that are so bad they're great.

02:26:27.000 Like Showgirls.

02:26:28.000 I love Showgirls. 1.00

02:26:29.000 Showgirls is fucking great.

02:26:30.000 Oh, I can defend Showgirls. 1.00

02:26:31.000 There's nothing wrong with Showgirls. 1.00

02:26:32.000 I can defend it as an entertainment piece.

02:26:36.000 Look, I am not a so bad as good guy.

02:26:38.000 Okay.

02:26:39.000 I'm not a so bad as good guy.

02:26:40.000 You are a so bad as good guy.

02:26:41.000 I'm not a so bad as good guy.

02:26:42.000 The sex scene in the pool?

02:26:43.000 That's a little ridiculous, but...

02:26:46.000 Yes, 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.

02:26:56.000 But 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.

02:27:02.000 When 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. 1.00

02:27:16.000 I was like, Yeah!

02:27:17.000 Elizabeth Berkley, go!

02:27:18.000 What 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.

02:27:30.000 And here was an example of that being made for $60 million with Paul Verhoeven directing.

02:27:35.000 Doing whatever!

02:27:36.000 Doing whatever he wants, making it as big as possible.

02:27:39.000 And we're releasing it!

02:27:39.000 NC-17!

02:27:40.000 Fuck you all!

02:27:41.000 It's basically the same as one of those sub-million dollar exploitation films.

02:27:46.000 It still has Robert Davi in it.

02:27:49.000 He's still playing the same part he would normally play.

02:27:52.000 And so it's this opportunity to see one of those weird little, you know, exploitation movies made in this grand...

02:28:00.000 In this huge fashion.

02:28:02.000 Showgirls doesn't sit on a special shelf in my heart.

02:28:08.000 But I really liked it when I saw it.

02:28:10.000 I saw it at the theaters.

02:28:11.000 I enjoyed it.

02:28:12.000 I love it when Elizabeth Berley pushes Gina Gerson down the stairs. 1.00

02:28:14.000 Is it Gina Gerson she pushes down the stairs? 0.98

02:28:17.000 Everything about that movie is awesome.

02:28:20.000 I think it's great.

02:28:22.000 I love the film.

02:28:23.000 I love the film.

02:28:24.000 I brought it up to all the—I had a dinner once with Verhoeven and a bunch of the producers that filmed it.

02:28:29.000 I started going off on it, and they all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film.

02:28:35.000 And 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.

02:28:42.000 That's exactly what I was just going to say.

02:28:44.000 I'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.

02:28:52.000 But 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?

02:28:59.000 It's one of those things where you think it's great because you're on coke.

02:29:03.000 I have a place in my heart for those big movies like that.

02:29:06.000 Like I said, that's not the one I would make my case on, but I still don't like it.

02:29:11.000 That's not my chest case.

02:29:14.000 But isn't that sort of an example of what happened when the 80s were a cocaine culture?

02:29:20.000 The world kind of shifted from a psychedelic thing from the 60s and 70s to a cocaine thing in the 80s, and you get movies like that.

02:29:28.000 Yeah, you get a little bit more edgy, a little less trippy.

02:29:31.000 Well, also, like, a little more ridiculous.

02:29:33.000 See, the beginning, it's pretty good.

02:29:35.000 That's what I call an actress dedicated to her role. 0.63

02:29:38.000 No, this is where you're losing me.

02:29:40.000 This is where you're losing me.

02:29:41.000 Because how are you keeping a heart on?

02:29:43.000 Yeah, and then it's Kyle MacLachlan of all people.

02:29:46.000 The whole thing is...

02:29:47.000 Okay, 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. 1.00

02:29:53.000 Well, that was huge, because it was from Saved by the Bell.

02:29:55.000 Yeah, but I'm not...

02:29:57.000 Actually, I'm not thinking about it from his point of view.

02:30:00.000 I'm thinking about it from the water hitting her face.

02:30:03.000 I'm thinking from her point of view, that's the unrealistic part.

02:30:08.000 That true.

02:30:09.000 True.

02:30:11.000 Cocaine movies are fun, though.

02:30:12.000 There's quite a few of those that were just like, what is this?

02:30:17.000 Like, how much coke was going around the 80s?

02:30:19.000 A lot.

02:30:20.000 A lot.

02:30:21.000 It was actually coke, too.

02:30:23.000 It was actually real cocaine.

02:30:24.000 It was like proper cocaine.

02:30:28.000 It's actually really interesting because it's like one of those things where...

02:30:33.000 Remember that customer who used to come in and he would bring in like a rock of cocaine?

02:30:37.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:30:37.000 Drop it on the counter.

02:30:38.000 Like a rock of cocaine.

02:30:41.000 The guy's name was Tuttle.

02:30:44.000 Yeah, Tuttle.

02:30:45.000 The size of a coffee mug.

02:30:47.000 And he would bring us these things.

02:30:49.000 He was a cocaine dealer and the thing is he would rent, you know, we'd let him take the movies out and come back whenever he wanted.

02:30:56.000 Whenever you want.

02:30:57.000 Yeah.

02:30:57.000 And he would come in and he'd get his films and then he would like either open up a little like a skull can.

02:31:08.000 I remember that skull can.

02:31:11.000 There you go boys!

02:31:13.000 Have fun!

02:31:14.000 Jesus Christ!

02:31:17.000 BAM! I throw it on the counter and it bounce off of you.

02:31:20.000 There you go, boy.

02:31:21.000 See you later.

02:31:22.000 See you in two weeks.

02:31:22.000 Like a baseball.

02:31:24.000 Like a baseball and you take a colander and just grind it up.

02:31:29.000 Okay, who wants some?

02:31:30.000 Pure.

02:31:31.000 For the first time, because we're minimum wage kids, for the first time, we actually had...

02:31:37.000 Fuck you, Coke.

02:31:38.000 We actually had access to Coke in a way that we could never afford.

02:31:42.000 For about a few months, because those relationships don't last that long.

02:31:46.000 No, no, no.

02:31:46.000 Cocaine relationships never last.

02:31:49.000 But for a few months, we were like, holy shit, we're in the powder.

02:31:54.000 There was a party once that he came to, and he brought, again, a rock of cocaine and a live hand grenade.

02:32:02.000 I put them both down.

02:32:03.000 They usually go together!

02:32:05.000 Yeah, and it was like, okay, it's a dangerous combination.

02:32:08.000 The type of person who does a lot of coke usually would buy hand grenades.

02:32:10.000 That was a fun party.

02:32:11.000 And his name was Tuttle, and we always described excess as Tuttle.

02:32:14.000 Okay, we're getting into a Tuttle situation.

02:32:17.000 Dude, I'm so tuttled!

02:32:19.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

02:32:20.000 It became like your figase.

02:32:21.000 Yeah.

02:32:22.000 Oh, that's so funny.

02:32:24.000 When I worked in Boston, at Nick's Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or cash.

02:32:31.000 There was guys who just took the cocaine.

02:32:33.000 There's certain comics.

02:32:34.000 They just wanted to get paid in coke.

02:32:38.000 Wild times.

02:32:40.000 You know, that's the 80s.

02:32:41.000 It was the 80s.

02:32:42.000 It was the 80s.

02:32:43.000 That was actually even kind of an interesting situation because like...

02:32:48.000 It was also one of those things where, like, I was actually really kind of proud of us because we all kind of like, woo!

02:32:53.000 We all kind of went nutty for like a little bit with this kind of, like, more access to Coke than we normally would have.

02:33:00.000 More access to Coke than we ever had!

02:33:02.000 Ever had, ever had.

02:33:05.000 Because we can't afford that shit.

02:33:06.000 All right.

02:33:07.000 And so we all kind of went nuts for like a little bit about it.

02:33:11.000 And then we all kind of like, okay, let's...

02:33:13.000 Yeah, enough of that.

02:33:14.000 Let's bring it together.

02:33:16.000 Well, that's great.

02:33:16.000 Let's bring it together.

02:33:17.000 You figure that out.

02:33:18.000 And we also saw some other people who were like, who let it get the best of them.

02:33:24.000 Yes.

02:33:25.000 And they got really kind of...

02:33:26.000 Like your friend with the story about being bitter.

02:33:28.000 It's the same sort of thing.

02:33:29.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:33:30.000 The same sort of thing.

02:33:31.000 You go, oh, I know where this is going.

02:33:32.000 Yeah.

02:33:33.000 And so we're all like, okay, let's pull back.

02:33:36.000 Let's get control of this.

02:33:37.000 And we all did.

02:33:39.000 It was all collectively.

02:33:40.000 We all kind of just got our shit together and put it in the rearview mirror.

02:33:44.000 Right, right.

02:33:45.000 Didn't mean we didn't do it, but we controlled it.

02:33:50.000 Contrary to your goals.

02:33:51.000 We'll stay with pot.

02:33:52.000 We'll stay with pot.

02:33:53.000 Yeah.

02:33:55.000 Well...

02:33:59.000 When I was growing up, a bunch of people that I knew got hooked on coke, and that's what kept me from ever doing coke.

02:34:04.000 I mean, I had children, and suddenly it was like, oh my god, I have to be on call 24-7.

02:34:12.000 Right.

02:34:12.000 You can't be out, coked up.

02:34:13.000 Yeah.

02:34:15.000 That's not going to last anymore.

02:34:17.000 It gets in the way of mushroom trips.

02:34:20.000 And pretty soon my Saturday mornings became more important than my Friday nights.

02:34:23.000 It's pretty simple.

02:34:25.000 My thing about...

02:34:26.000 Priorities change.

02:34:27.000 I wanted to have excess or I didn't...

02:34:29.000 Oh, I wasn't that interested in it.

02:34:31.000 Yeah, you want to take it to 12. No, I wanted to have a big pile of it, and we're doing it all fucking night.

02:34:36.000 Until this is gone!

02:34:38.000 Until the straw is bloody.

02:34:42.000 Okay, I'm stopping now because the straw got bloody.

02:34:45.000 I think it's like some people don't have the ability to only do that once.

02:34:49.000 Like, for whatever reason, some people, they have that thing, and they do coke a little bit, then they just want to keep doing coke.

02:34:55.000 Yeah.

02:34:56.000 That's scary when that happens.

02:34:58.000 It is scary.

02:34:58.000 That's scary when that happens.

02:34:59.000 Because you're captured by a demon.

02:35:01.000 Yeah.

02:35:01.000 And it's literally, and I think it's literally a demon.

02:35:04.000 Yeah.

02:35:04.000 In the classic djinn sense of the word, where it's whispering into your ear.

02:35:09.000 Well, in a sense, it does all the things a demon would do.

02:35:11.000 You know, you could say the demons aren't real.

02:35:14.000 Okay, but they might be real.

02:35:18.000 I think there's pretty good evidence.

02:35:20.000 There's a lot of legitimate evil in the world.

02:35:23.000 And where is that coming from?

02:35:24.000 What's that energy?

02:35:25.000 What begets that? 0.98

02:35:27.000 What is the reason why people are willing to mass murder?

02:35:31.000 What is it?

02:35:32.000 What is it?

02:35:33.000 People are willing to launch missiles into cities.

02:35:35.000 What is that?

02:35:35.000 Where is that coming from?

02:35:38.000 That would be evil if you defined it in the classic sense of the word.

02:35:43.000 You know, when an invading army comes into a village and hacks people, that's not demonic.

02:35:48.000 That's not evil.

02:35:50.000 You're lighting children on fire and throwing them on thatched roofs.

02:35:53.000 That's not demonic.

02:35:54.000 Seems pretty demonic.

02:35:55.000 Like a demon would do that.

02:35:57.000 Whether the physical demon exists is almost like not even important.

02:36:01.000 It's like demonic behavior is 100% documented.

02:36:04.000 What would Jesus do?

02:36:06.000 Yeah.

02:36:06.000 Right, right.

02:36:07.000 Just ask yourself that.

02:36:08.000 But it's the thing, it's like everybody wants to be smart.

02:36:10.000 It's unlikely he's going to raise a fist.

02:36:11.000 Everybody 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.

02:36:18.000 So you don't believe in religion, you're either agnostic or you're atheist, that's how you get respect. 0.89

02:36:23.000 And it's like this weird thing where you're not willing to consider like, okay, but what are the actions?

02:36:27.000 What are the actions of good and the actions of evil?

02:36:30.000 The actions are real, right?

02:36:32.000 And we all know in our heart, in our soul, when you do a good thing, how you feel.

02:36:37.000 Versus when you do a bad thing, how you feel.

02:36:41.000 So what are those forces?

02:36:43.000 Well, there's a whole speech of apocalypse now.

02:36:48.000 Brandos 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.

02:37:05.000 And then the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kids' arms.

02:37:10.000 And then there's like a little pile of arms.

02:37:13.000 And Kurt says, you know, so we did all that.

02:37:15.000 Then we came back in the village.

02:37:16.000 The next time we saw the little pile of all the little arms in there where they hacked them off.

02:37:20.000 And I cried like a baby.

02:37:24.000 Then I started thinking, the genius of that.

02:37:30.000 The genius of that.

02:37:32.000 Because...

02:37:34.000 These are not monsters.

02:37:35.000 They're not demons.

02:37:37.000 These are men doing a job.

02:37:40.000 And they had the force of will to take the job and take it to its logical conclusion of what they had to do.

02:37:50.000 I'm not condoning what Kurtz is saying.

02:37:55.000 Kurtz is a fucking crazy person.

02:37:59.000 But I'm interested in his perspective.

02:38:02.000 Of course that would be Kurtz's perspective.

02:38:05.000 He's speaking about true power.

02:38:06.000 Where he's a god.

02:38:07.000 He's a god worshipped by these natives.

02:38:12.000 He clearly lost his fucking mind in the fog of war.

02:38:15.000 He's completely lost his mind in the fog of war.

02:38:17.000 But he's talking like Genghis Khan.

02:38:19.000 Yes, exactly.

02:38:21.000 Like, they all talk.

02:38:22.000 But this is the thing where you're suspicious of power, right?

02:38:26.000 Like, why are you suspicious?

02:38:27.000 Well, you should be, because you see where it ultimately leads.

02:38:30.000 It ultimately leads to a Kurtz, or it ultimately leads to the way to really be in control of people.

02:38:35.000 Like, you have to use violence.

02:38:36.000 You can only use words for so long.

02:38:38.000 Strong men hold civilizations together.

02:38:42.000 That's just a fact of things.

02:38:43.000 Both of us have become friends over the years with John Milius.

02:38:47.000 Who wrote Apocalypse Now.

02:38:49.000 Who wrote Apocalypse Now.

02:38:50.000 And, you know, John is the kind of guy who's like, you know, conquerors!

02:38:56.000 Conquerors!

02:38:57.000 And he wrote a script about Genghis Khan.

02:39:00.000 That you worked on.

02:39:01.000 Yeah, that I worked on with him to help turn it into a series.

02:39:05.000 My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke.

02:39:08.000 And, 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.

02:39:23.000 Just however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better.

02:39:28.000 Right.

02:39:29.000 But 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.

02:39:41.000 And over the course of it, you start out as...

02:39:48.000 Almost like Conan, Conan the warrior, Conan the conqueror, Conan the king.

02:39:54.000 King by his own hand.

02:39:56.000 Yeah, king by your own hand.

02:39:57.000 And eventually you start realizing...

02:40:00.000 And John Millais also wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian.

02:40:02.000 And so he rightly recognizes that it's strong men who conquer.

02:40:08.000 But also who hold together and maintain order.

02:40:11.000 And there's a balance to be had between force and strength and, you know, and compassion as well.

02:40:18.000 Too much compassion, you know, countries fall apart.

02:40:21.000 Too much introspection, countries fall apart.

02:40:23.000 Right.

02:40:24.000 And when things are too good.

02:40:25.000 When things are too good.

02:40:26.000 When things are too easy and you think they're supposed to be easy, you don't understand how they became easy and what keeps them easy.

02:40:31.000 Yeah.

02:40:32.000 Yeah.

02:40:33.000 And that's kind of where we are right now.

02:40:37.000 Weird times right now.

02:40:39.000 As we are.

02:40:40.000 We're in a Conan movie.

02:40:41.000 It 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.

02:40:54.000 Well, there's also this new thing, which is the internet and social media.

02:40:58.000 And there's this new thing that has overcome our minds.

02:41:01.000 And it's affecting everyone in this very bizarre way.

02:41:04.000 And it's making people more tribal and more inclined towards echo chambers, more antagonistic against opposing beliefs and views.

02:41:13.000 So you were saying about being able to sit and have a conversation with someone and completely disagree, but not take it personally.

02:41:19.000 Just disagree about the points.

02:41:20.000 We've lost that.

02:41:22.000 It's really important to be able to engage with other people, to disagree with them, and then to know that that's just that.

02:41:30.000 We can still have dinner together.

02:41:32.000 We can still be friends.

02:41:34.000 Okay, 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.

02:41:46.000 One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it, and then there's 150 rip-off articles.

02:41:52.000 On that.

02:41:53.000 And then you read the comments, it's like, man, Quinn's a fucking asshole.

02:41:56.000 That movie's fucking sucked.

02:41:57.000 He's a fucking asshole for saying this.

02:41:59.000 Why am I a fucking asshole?

02:42:01.000 I like the fucking movie.

02:42:03.000 That makes me a fucking asshole?

02:42:06.000 It's crazy.

02:42:06.000 You either like the movie or you don't.

02:42:09.000 I'm not plugging the movie.

02:42:10.000 I'm not doing anything.

02:42:13.000 I'm just saying I like it.

02:42:14.000 Who gives a fuck what I like?

02:42:16.000 Why do you care what the fuck I like?

02:42:18.000 But then I'll say I didn't see something.

02:42:21.000 "Well, he's a fucking asshole!" "I didn't see it!" "What do you care what the fuck I see and what I don't see?

02:42:27.000 What the fuck do you fucking care?" But there's no one in front of him to say that.

02:42:32.000 He's an idiot alone with his phone.

02:42:34.000 If he just said it out loud amongst reasonable people, they would turn to him and go, what the fuck are you talking about?

02:42:39.000 But he doesn't get that check, which is also part of the problem with social media.

02:42:43.000 Someone will say something like, well, I think he's fucking missing out.

02:42:46.000 Well, I'm sure there's a lot of shit I can say that you're missing out on, and I don't care if you miss out.

02:42:52.000 Also, you have to be missing out.

02:42:54.000 Otherwise, you don't have a life.

02:42:55.000 How much information do you think you can absorb in a day?

02:42:58.000 How much things do you watch and listen to?

02:43:01.000 Four movies a day, apparently.

02:43:04.000 That's a lot of time, man.

02:43:05.000 You have to miss out.

02:43:06.000 There's going to be shit you miss out on.

02:43:09.000 Well, the other thing is, if you're a film fan today, you're not just dealing with today's films.

02:43:15.000 You're dealing with this insane archive that goes back to Rocky.

02:43:19.000 It goes back to On the Waterfront.

02:43:23.000 It goes back to the 20s.

02:43:24.000 Good lord!

02:43:24.000 There's so many films to watch.

02:43:26.000 A film that I saw that was very meaningful to me this year I really like the story of Beau Jess, the French Foreign Legion story.

02:43:36.000 I like French Foreign Legion movies, any old way.

02:43:38.000 But that's a really cool story, and I really like the whole story of the three brothers in there.

02:43:42.000 And I was familiar with the Gary Cooper version, the 1939 version, put it on a stamp.

02:43:48.000 But I'd never seen the silent version, and it starred Ronald Coleman.

02:43:52.000 And I watched the silent version recently.

02:43:54.000 And I was blown away by it.

02:43:57.000 The storytelling was so epic and was so visually just beautiful.

02:44:03.000 And we have a little micro-cinema in the theater I have, one of the theaters I have in Los Angeles, the Vista.

02:44:09.000 And it's like a little 20-seat cinema that we just show VHS and 16mm.

02:44:15.000 It's our video archives.

02:44:16.000 Yeah, it's like the Video Archives Cinema Club.

02:44:18.000 And it's like literally, it's like the brick-and-mortar version of Video Archives.

02:44:21.000 But like a little Paris...

02:44:24.000 Back Avenue.

02:44:25.000 It's like a little clubhouse.

02:44:27.000 I mean, it's open to everybody, but for our core fans.

02:44:30.000 And the thing is, last week, we showed the silent version of Bo Jest in it.

02:44:36.000 And I wasn't there at that screening, but I asked the guy who was our manager there, Matt, and I said, how did it go?

02:44:42.000 He goes, Quinn, you would have really loved to have been there for that screening.

02:44:45.000 And I go, well, what?

02:44:46.000 And he goes, it was so moving.

02:44:49.000 The end of it, and it is really moving.

02:44:52.000 And it's just like, nobody was talking.

02:44:54.000 It was just, it was silent.

02:44:56.000 Emotional.

02:44:56.000 You 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.

02:45:06.000 And they all kind of just moved out into the lobby, and in this emotional state, and it was like, That sounds like fucking fantastic.

02:45:14.000 That's amazing.

02:45:16.000 I 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.

02:45:26.000 So you might see a movie and not like it.

02:45:28.000 And then, you know, people might see Joker 2 today and not really care for it.

02:45:32.000 And then five years from now, revisit it and watch it again.

02:45:34.000 And you're in a different place.

02:45:35.000 Culture is in a different place.

02:45:37.000 Everything's in a different place.

02:45:38.000 And you have a different perspective on the movie and maybe you like the movie.

02:45:40.000 I hated Blade Runner when it first came out.

02:45:43.000 Did not like the film.

02:45:44.000 I thought it was awful.

02:45:45.000 Really?

02:45:46.000 Awful.

02:45:47.000 Like, boring.

02:45:50.000 Like, muddled.

02:45:52.000 Like, everything that was wrong.

02:45:53.000 Suddenly I'm seeing Kubrick shots in the end from The Shining.

02:45:58.000 Roger would say, Blade Runner should be called Blade Crawler.

02:46:02.000 Yeah.

02:46:03.000 No, I was really hard.

02:46:04.000 I was really hard on movies.

02:46:06.000 I was a really angry young guy.

02:46:08.000 He was such a prick about shit.

02:46:11.000 He's a completely different guy.

02:46:14.000 Now he bends over backwards to be nice about something.

02:46:17.000 I go, who the fuck is this guy?

02:46:21.000 Hummeled by life.

02:46:22.000 Well, I now look at...

02:46:24.000 I 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.

02:46:41.000 But, you know, it's not an easy thing to...

02:46:46.000 So when I watch a movie now...

02:46:49.000 I'm applying my life experience to it.

02:46:52.000 And I'm like, okay, this movie may not be the greatest movie, but this is somebody's, you know, vision.

02:46:58.000 Yeah.

02:46:59.000 And 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.

02:47:07.000 And so I always give every movie a shake, you know, a good shake.

02:47:11.000 What's happened with our show that I think is really cool, again, for the fans that follow it and everything, is...

02:47:17.000 In our first season, we ended up covering about 70 movies all together.

02:47:23.000 We 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.

02:47:37.000 And we kind of created new classics, at least amongst the people who followed the show.

02:47:42.000 Because they followed it, and they liked it, and they watched some old Mexican horror movie like Demonoid. 0.64

02:47:47.000 Hey, that was pretty cool!

02:47:48.000 Demonoid is amazing!

02:47:49.000 And then everybody would put it down.

02:47:52.000 If you tried to look at anything about it, it would all be shitty reviews about it and everything.

02:47:56.000 But then we talked about it with passion.

02:47:58.000 And then we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie.

02:48:02.000 It's a killer hand movie.

02:48:03.000 And we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie.

02:48:05.000 And then the people appreciated it under that right context.

02:48:08.000 Like, because a movie is old and because maybe they didn't have the money to do it, like, super clean or perfect, you know?

02:48:16.000 Actually, that actually has the most best hand effects I've ever seen in my life.

02:48:18.000 Well, yeah.

02:48:19.000 That movie in particular is actually a tough one because it's...

02:48:22.000 Is this Steven?

02:48:23.000 Yeah, yeah, that's Steven.

02:48:24.000 So it's a killer hand that fucks everybody up?

02:48:27.000 Is this the best, like, hand on the loose movie?

02:48:31.000 It's a mexploitation movie.

02:48:33.000 Okay, a Mexican exploitation movie.

02:48:35.000 But the one that's great about it, one, she's fantastic in it, Samantha Egger.

02:48:38.000 Samantha Egger is...

02:48:39.000 She's become one of our heroes from the show.

02:48:41.000 I love Samantha Egger.

02:48:43.000 This movie looks hilarious.

02:48:44.000 Yeah.

02:48:47.000 But what's really cool about the Mexican horror genre is they take their tacky horror very seriously. 1.00

02:48:59.000 It's tacky horror, but they take it really seriously.

02:49:02.000 And you appreciate the seriousness that they're delivering their payload with.

02:49:08.000 And I know how hard it is to do some of the things that they're doing.

02:49:11.000 This is pre-computer graphics.

02:49:13.000 They have a limited budget.

02:49:16.000 But their vision is so big.

02:49:19.000 And you're watching it and you're like, oh my god.

02:49:21.000 If you try not to judge it on what a movie looks like today.

02:49:25.000 But not only just that.

02:49:27.000 What's interesting is when you see some of the effects.

02:49:30.000 There's a couple of the effects.

02:49:31.000 How did they do that?

02:49:32.000 Because it's all done practical.

02:49:34.000 And then some of it is like, oh well...

02:49:36.000 I can see how they did that.

02:49:38.000 Oh my god, that's so fucking clever!

02:49:39.000 They figured out how to do it in such a clever way.

02:49:42.000 I can see how they did it, but that's so neat.

02:49:45.000 Because they just figured out how to do it on camera in a way that sells it.

02:49:50.000 Yeah.

02:49:51.000 And it's a crazy movie also.

02:49:54.000 That is crazy.

02:49:54.000 It's like you're inside of some sort of crazy Mexican's head making a horror movie.

02:49:59.000 It's fantastic.

02:50:01.000 Well, the horror genre is hard to do to not make ridiculous.

02:50:04.000 Yeah.

02:50:05.000 Although the...

02:50:06.000 Best 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.

02:50:21.000 Right.

02:50:21.000 Like you watch Dawn of the Dead and, yeah, you're watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall.

02:50:24.000 Or 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?

02:50:33.000 You're literally quoting the movie now.

02:50:36.000 I'm actually quoting my liner notes that I wrote for the DVD way back when.

02:50:42.000 Let me stop and go to the bathroom one more time.

02:50:44.000 The coffee is making me take a piss like crazy.

02:50:46.000 No worries.

02:50:46.000 Go for it.

02:50:48.000 We can keep going.

02:50:49.000 Okay.

02:50:50.000 So when you...

02:50:52.000 First got into this like did you have?

02:50:56.000 Like 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.

02:51:04.000 Yeah, it was a composite.

02:51:06.000 It 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.

02:51:22.000 And so, at the beginning of your life, you're copying your parents.

02:51:27.000 Because that's who you love, and that's what you're copying.

02:51:30.000 When you're a young filmmaker, Very frequently, you kind of copy your parents, your cinematic parents.

02:51:38.000 And, 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.

02:51:52.000 I just love the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies.

02:51:58.000 I like everything about his work.

02:52:02.000 I do too.

02:52:03.000 I'm a huge fan.

02:52:05.000 If you love Fritz Lang, you can see that, oh, that's how he felt about Fritz Lang.

02:52:12.000 When I watch M, I can see the Kubrick shots.

02:52:15.000 Is Fritz Lang Metropolis?

02:52:16.000 Yeah, he did Metropolis.

02:52:21.000 Metropolis is wild.

02:52:23.000 Metropolis 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.

02:52:32.000 The movie I was thinking about was M, which is his movie with Peter Lorre about the pedophile who's...

02:52:38.000 And the movie's made just before the Nazis took power.

02:52:44.000 Oh, wow.

02:52:44.000 And so he's making a movie that's really about the rise of...

02:52:51.000 Hitlerian fascism in Europe, but he's doing it through this movie about a pedophile. 0.87

02:52:56.000 And Peter Lorre is fantastic, and it's actually his first sound movie.

02:53:02.000 Like, Fritz Lang hadn't made a sound movie, and so every single shot in the film is based on sound.

02:53:09.000 So 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.

02:53:24.000 So the whole movie is about sound.

02:53:26.000 So as a young filmmaker, if you want to learn how to use sound in a movie, that's the movie to see.

02:53:32.000 Because every single shot, like it used to be you would show an empty frame and it would just be a shot of nothing.

02:53:40.000 But, you know, now Fritz Lang is able to juxtapose like a woman has lost her daughter.

02:53:45.000 She's calling for her daughter.

02:53:47.000 And so she's looking for her daughter and she's looking for her and Elsa!

02:53:51.000 Elsa! 0.99

02:53:54.000 And they cut to an empty shot of a stairwell and you hear her.

02:53:57.000 Elsa! 0.99

02:53:58.000 And they cut to like, you know, an empty playground.

02:54:02.000 Elsa! 0.99

02:54:03.000 And then you see the balloon that she was carrying trapped in something, like whipping in the wind.

02:54:07.000 Elsa! 0.99

02:54:08.000 And it's super, super intense.

02:54:13.000 But all he's doing is he's using sound juxtaposed with images, which he couldn't do before.

02:54:18.000 Crazy that he just called it M. Yeah, M for murderer.

02:54:21.000 And this is an amazing, amazing movie.

02:54:27.000 So Kubrick, see that's a Kubrickian shot.

02:54:30.000 This is where he's, Elsa!

02:54:33.000 or Elsie Elsie I seem to remember more Elsies But...

02:54:54.000 I think I got the wrong part.

02:54:56.000 It's okay.

02:54:57.000 But anyhow...

02:54:58.000 So Kubrick had his forefathers who he used to watch and that he used to look to.

02:55:05.000 And so those would be like my grandparents in a way.

02:55:08.000 And so there's this lineage of cinematic grammar and vernacular that gets carried on from filmmaker to filmmaker.

02:55:16.000 And eventually, after you've made enough films, you start walking on your own.

02:55:21.000 you start coming up with new ideas.

02:55:23.000 But for me, it was Stanley Kubrick, John Borman.

02:55:26.000 He's the guy who directed Excalibur and Hope and Glory and Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific.

02:55:33.000 I mean, a number of movies.

02:55:34.000 I don't think Quentin's such a big fan of John Borman.

02:55:37.000 Some of his films.

02:55:38.000 I think you're a fan of his writing more than you are his films.

02:55:40.000 No, I have nothing but respect for John.

02:55:43.000 Yeah, and John Borman and then Roman Plansky.

02:55:46.000 I think those three guys for me and their work, not the guys, but mostly their work.

02:55:51.000 Like, I am a composite.

02:55:55.000 If you watch my movies, I'm a composite of those guys and other people as well.

02:55:58.000 And those were the filmmakers who were important to me.

02:56:01.000 Those were my parents, so to speak.

02:56:03.000 Kubrick was such an odd one. 0.73

02:56:05.000 Like, his films are so different.

02:56:07.000 And he was a weird guy, too.

02:56:09.000 He did, like, complex mathematics in his spare time.

02:56:13.000 I do complex mathematics in his spare time.

02:56:17.000 Nothing wrong with that.

02:56:21.000 Yeah, he's a weird guy, but he was also, I think, thinking three steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment.

02:56:28.000 I mean...

02:56:30.000 To be honest, I was just thinking...

02:56:32.000 I just pulled my script from Eyes Wide Shut.

02:56:34.000 I had a script that was from set, and I was reading it over the weekend, and I saw that it has this...

02:56:43.000 I mean, I've known this for a long time, but I started really thinking about it over the weekend.

02:56:47.000 It's missing a narration.

02:56:48.000 It's missing a third-person narration that was originally in the movie.

02:56:53.000 That's because the movie was recut and changed after his death.

02:57:00.000 And they will deny it.

02:57:03.000 But as a student of Kubrick, I'm watching the movie and I'm like, well, Kubrick wouldn't do that.

02:57:08.000 Kubrick wouldn't do that either.

02:57:10.000 Kubrick would have trimmed this scene.

02:57:11.000 I didn't know they recut it after his death.

02:57:13.000 Okay, so apparently...

02:57:14.000 I think they finished it.

02:57:16.000 Well, that's the party line, but I think that they changed the notes, the close-ups, the inserts of the notes.

02:57:24.000 I think those are changed.

02:57:25.000 It's missing a narration.

02:57:26.000 It's definitely missing a narration.

02:57:29.000 You know, a third-person narration.

02:57:31.000 Like, that scene where he sees the prostitute who's died, he's at the morgue, and he's looking at her, and he's, like, leaning over her.

02:57:37.000 It's a bed for narration.

02:57:38.000 There's this whole thing.

02:57:40.000 What they do instead, because they couldn't say that Kubrick finished the movie...

02:57:47.000 And so maybe they just kind of clutched it together, except there's an entire thread that's kind of been...

02:57:54.000 Squashed?

02:57:56.000 Squashed in that film.

02:57:57.000 And 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.

02:58:23.000 You see those two guys walking off with the daughter.

02:58:26.000 They're taking her away.

02:58:28.000 They've given their daughter to the pedo cult.

02:58:31.000 That's what's happened at the end of the movie.

02:58:33.000 And there's an incident where when they first screened the movie in England, people who were outside apparently...

02:58:41.000 This is all second-hand, by the way.

02:58:44.000 There 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!

02:58:50.000 You can't fucking cut my film!

02:58:52.000 Blah, blah, blah, blah!

02:58:52.000 Big argument going on.

02:58:54.000 Then he dies like four days later.

02:58:56.000 Oh, jeez.

02:58:58.000 So somebody went in and finished the movie, but I think when they finished the movie, they hid the film.

02:59:03.000 The movie got changed into something else.

02:59:08.000 And I would love to finish that film.

02:59:12.000 Have you ever made an attempt?

02:59:15.000 I've thought about it.

02:59:17.000 And reading the script over the weekend, I started seriously thinking about it.

02:59:22.000 Well, somebody should recut this.

02:59:23.000 Or somebody should...

02:59:25.000 So it would just be a matter of recutting it with narration?

02:59:27.000 Well, yes and no.

02:59:29.000 There's obviously missing.

02:59:30.000 There would be missing footage now.

02:59:32.000 Things have been removed.

02:59:34.000 And is that accessible?

02:59:35.000 Yeah.

02:59:37.000 Not unless you crack it open and there's no way anybody...

02:59:39.000 Well, here's the thing.

02:59:39.000 They would never...

02:59:40.000 But hold on.

02:59:40.000 Here's the thing.

02:59:42.000 Now we have AI. Well, I know.

02:59:45.000 You're one step ahead of me.

02:59:47.000 I'm one step ahead of me.

02:59:49.000 I've actually been experimenting a lot with AI. The newer versions are pretty stunning.

02:59:54.000 I've been working on Runway lately, which is...

02:59:56.000 The curve is insane.

02:59:58.000 Like the exponential curve of improvement.

03:00:00.000 I'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.

03:00:08.000 Okay, we got that tool on Tuesday.

03:00:09.000 We're going to give that to you.

03:00:10.000 And so it's like literally whatever you think you can't do, ask us because we probably will be able to do it in a couple of days.

03:00:17.000 Sure.

03:00:17.000 And so it's advancing so fast and so rapidly that I, without telling you, Quentin, I made a little claymation version of you.

03:00:26.000 And I have him talking and kind of funny looking.

03:00:31.000 I'm sure a claymation version of me would be funny.

03:00:35.000 But it's a claymation version of both you and me.

03:00:38.000 How 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.

03:00:50.000 That shit took forever.

03:00:52.000 The best work that I've seen of it lately.

03:00:54.000 It was the first time I've been kind of ignoring AI and like, well, I know what it is.

03:00:57.000 It's like form completion with visuals and I get it.

03:01:00.000 I understand what it is.

03:01:01.000 We'll see.

03:01:02.000 We'll see.

03:01:03.000 But I like tactile.

03:01:04.000 I like tactile.

03:01:04.000 And I do.

03:01:05.000 But I worked on Beowulf.

03:01:06.000 I made Beowulf with Robert Zemeckis.

03:01:08.000 Oh, okay.

03:01:08.000 That was fun.

03:01:09.000 And, like, that was a big, you know, video puppet tune type CGI thing.

03:01:15.000 That was a fun movie.

03:01:16.000 Motion capture.

03:01:16.000 Yeah, 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...

03:01:24.000 Really dirty.

03:01:25.000 I wanted it to be like an early Terry Gilliam film, like Jabberwocky.

03:01:30.000 That was actually the one Neil and I were thinking about when...

03:01:35.000 Neil Gaiman.

03:01:35.000 Yeah, Neil Gaiman, my co-writer on that film.

03:01:40.000 And the movie ended up getting made much bigger.

03:01:43.000 Suddenly it was like whatever budget I had was probably our craft service budget.

03:01:48.000 It's nothing like making a hundred million dollar movie.

03:01:52.000 It's like sushi every day!

03:01:54.000 Champagne!

03:01:56.000 Fly the plane to England!

03:01:58.000 Whatever you want!

03:02:00.000 It's crazy, but that was definitely not the movie I had planned on making.

03:02:05.000 However, When we made it, like, and it turned into this big performance capture thing, it was fun.

03:02:13.000 Like, working with Zemeckis and he's such a, like, an excitable, like, creative genius.

03:02:22.000 Like, he's...

03:02:27.000 He was like constantly taking, you know, like when he made contact, oh, we'll take that eyebrow off of Jodie Foster.

03:02:34.000 And I like that eyebrow thing she does.

03:02:36.000 And so put that on this take.

03:02:37.000 And so he was like messing with her face and doing all sorts of performance stuff.

03:02:41.000 Whoa.

03:02:43.000 Even when you go back to his earliest film.

03:02:44.000 That's crazy that you can do that now.

03:02:46.000 I Want to Hold Your Hand is almost a visual trick.

03:02:51.000 You know, having the Beatles there but not be there.

03:02:54.000 Even though he's not using computer graphics.

03:02:56.000 I think he's just a really super inventive guy.

03:02:58.000 And it was so much fun making the movie with him.

03:03:00.000 What year was that?

03:03:01.000 Inventing Technologies.

03:03:03.000 That was 2010 that I think the movie came out.

03:03:06.000 Jamie, pull up Beowulf.

03:03:07.000 Let's watch some of them.

03:03:08.000 I want to remember what it looks like.

03:03:10.000 It looks probably like a video game pre-cut scene at this point.

03:03:13.000 That's what's crazy, right?

03:03:14.000 I've thought about taking Beowulf, importing it into my system, and then just painting over it.

03:03:21.000 Let's fucking go, Roger.

03:03:23.000 Let's fucking go.

03:03:24.000 Which, by the way, you can do easily.

03:03:27.000 Yeah.

03:03:27.000 Easily.

03:03:28.000 I've thought about fixing...

03:03:28.000 So let me see what this looks like with the Beowulf cut.

03:03:31.000 Oh, jeez.

03:03:31.000 Yeah, I mean, it looks like a video game cut scene at this point.

03:03:35.000 Yeah.

03:03:35.000 But it was kind of cool because everybody looked like that, not just the monster.

03:03:39.000 Yeah.

03:03:40.000 That was kind of cool about it.

03:03:41.000 I mean, the difference is that this was actual, like, performances.

03:03:45.000 And so we could take, you know, Ray Winstone and have him...

03:03:49.000 Ray Winstone doesn't look like that.

03:03:52.000 He looks a little heftier.

03:03:55.000 And, uh...

03:03:57.000 Cuts his own fucking arm off.

03:04:03.000 Cut my own arm off.

03:04:05.000 It'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.

03:04:12.000 Do whatever you want.

03:04:16.000 He stabs a dragon in the heart.

03:04:18.000 Oh, no.

03:04:21.000 This movie is kind of a...

03:04:22.000 I mean, it's a little...

03:04:27.000 It's an interesting experience, what happened to me on this film, if you don't mind.

03:04:30.000 Yeah, go ahead.

03:04:30.000 So I was going to make this movie myself.

03:04:35.000 I had set it up initially at Image Movers with Zemeckis Producing, and then it fell out and the rights kind of reverted back to me.

03:04:45.000 I had to cover the turnaround on it, but the rights reverted back to me and I was going to go make the movie myself.

03:04:50.000 For nothing.

03:04:51.000 And I was trying to set it up.

03:04:53.000 And it was really...

03:04:54.000 I was broke at the time.

03:04:55.000 And I was not going to make money.

03:04:57.000 And I had to cover the turnaround expenses myself on the film, which were considerable.

03:05:02.000 But I wanted to make the movie really bad.

03:05:04.000 And I was working on Silent Hill, this other movie I wrote.

03:05:07.000 And I suddenly started getting calls.

03:05:10.000 And it was like the producer of Polar Express, this guy Steve Bing...

03:05:18.000 Wanted to buy the script.

03:05:19.000 He's like, I want to buy it for Zemeckis.

03:05:21.000 And I said, ah, too little, too late.

03:05:22.000 I'm making it now.

03:05:24.000 And I kept saying no.

03:05:26.000 And I was working on this film in Canada and I'm just trying to finish it.

03:05:30.000 And every hour I'm getting a call from agents at CA and they're like...

03:05:34.000 Jack Rapke, right?

03:05:35.000 Yeah, it was...

03:05:36.000 Actually, yeah, it was Jack.

03:05:37.000 How did you know it was Jack?

03:05:38.000 Did I tell you that?

03:05:39.000 Well, no, because he was Zemeckis' agent and became Zemeckis' producing partner.

03:05:44.000 And so I was getting a call.

03:05:46.000 And he's the guy who gets shit done.

03:05:47.000 Yeah, he is a guy who gets shit done.

03:05:49.000 Well, I was like, you know, no, no, no.

03:05:52.000 And, you know, no, I won't.

03:05:53.000 I'm doing it myself.

03:05:54.000 No, no.

03:05:56.000 And Steve Bing, and I said, if another agent calls me, I'm firing the agency.

03:06:00.000 And they're like, will you at least meet with the producer?

03:06:02.000 And so I went ahead and I meet with them.

03:06:03.000 And he says, listen, if I don't make this film with Zemeckis, with Bob, I'm going to miss the moment.

03:06:09.000 I'm going to lose the movie.

03:06:11.000 It's going to be over.

03:06:13.000 Just what's your price?

03:06:15.000 Just tell me what's your price.

03:06:16.000 And I said, I don't have a price.

03:06:17.000 I don't work like that.

03:06:19.000 He said, listen, everybody's got a price.

03:06:21.000 I said, well, I may have one, but I'm not going to tell you.

03:06:24.000 And he's like, look, why don't you just tell me?

03:06:26.000 Just discourage me.

03:06:28.000 So I said, okay.

03:06:29.000 You want me to discourage you?

03:06:30.000 And so I started, like, making shit up.

03:06:32.000 I need this.

03:06:33.000 I want that.

03:06:34.000 I want this.

03:06:35.000 I want this.

03:06:35.000 I tried to come up with how much money had anybody ever made on a script, and let's add some money to that.

03:06:40.000 I went over the top.

03:06:42.000 He's like...

03:06:45.000 Well, Roger, that is...

03:06:46.000 And 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.

03:06:54.000 All that kind of stuff.

03:06:55.000 I'm making the movie!

03:06:56.000 I'm a Viking!

03:06:57.000 He said, well, Roger, that is really discouraging, but we have a deal!

03:07:02.000 And I was like, well...

03:07:07.000 I'd never done something for money before.

03:07:11.000 I'd always done it for passion, and then the money came.

03:07:15.000 This was the first time in my life that I'd ever made a choice based on money.

03:07:21.000 This titanic amount of money, and I understand broke.

03:07:26.000 And I went home and I cried.

03:07:27.000 And then the check came and nothing dries tears like money.

03:07:29.000 And then Zemeckis invited me into the process, which was really great of him.

03:07:33.000 He really wanted me and Neil to be at his side and collaborate with him.

03:07:38.000 And it was a fabulous experience.

03:07:39.000 But to be honest, I was like, who am I now?

03:07:43.000 What does it all mean?

03:07:44.000 I just gave away something I'd wanted to do my entire life.

03:07:47.000 I've always been chasing this John Borman film, Excalibur.

03:07:50.000 I think it's one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the Arthurian legends.

03:07:55.000 And if you watch Beowulf and Excalibur, they're very similar, actually, thematically.

03:08:01.000 And so I was like, who am I now?

03:08:04.000 What does it all mean?

03:08:06.000 I don't even know if I want to make a movie anymore.

03:08:09.000 What do I have to tell now, now that I've just completely sold out?

03:08:15.000 And then I was at a dinner, a big dinner, and I was driving home that night, and I was giving somebody who was at the dinner a lift.

03:08:31.000 My wife was in the backseat of the car, and I told my daughter I was going to be home by midnight.

03:08:37.000 We lived in Ojai, and it was dark.

03:08:40.000 And I... So I was speeding.

03:08:45.000 I have a lead foot.

03:08:47.000 And I was speeding to get there.

03:08:51.000 Without getting into the details of what happened, I lost control of the car.

03:08:57.000 There was another vehicle, but they fled the scene.

03:09:00.000 I lost control of the vehicle.

03:09:02.000 I 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.

03:09:13.000 And I knew if I go in there, we'll die.

03:09:15.000 And so I turned into the thing and then I turned away from it to try to – the car spun out.

03:09:20.000 And I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was like a cow pasture.

03:09:24.000 And I was like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen there?

03:09:27.000 Well, it was pretty bad.

03:09:28.000 There was a telephone pole and I hit the telephone pole.

03:09:31.000 My passenger took the impact and my wife was thrown from the car.

03:09:38.000 When I came to, all I could hear was the horn.

03:09:41.000 My hearing is going to have glass in my mouth and I'm injured as well.

03:09:46.000 I climb out of the car and it's dark.

03:09:48.000 It's really dark.

03:09:50.000 But somebody's already arrived, the XDA from Ventura County, who did all the drunk driving laws and put those on the books.

03:09:59.000 And he was the first person on the scene.

03:10:01.000 I was right near the fire department.

03:10:03.000 They showed up shortly afterwards.

03:10:04.000 But when I jumped out of the car, I came running around to see what happened, and I saw my wife on the asphalt.

03:10:12.000 She'd been thrown from the vehicle.

03:10:14.000 And 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.

03:10:34.000 She looked dead.

03:10:35.000 And I just, in that moment, I dug down, I begged her to come back to life.

03:10:43.000 And I just, I said, I will give anything for life.

03:10:47.000 Just in any form, I'll take it.

03:10:50.000 And in that moment, she came back to life.

03:10:52.000 It was like...

03:10:53.000 The life came back into her.

03:10:57.000 Okay, it was a completely fucked up scene.

03:11:00.000 My other passenger is dying in the car or dead.

03:11:05.000 The police are suddenly there.

03:11:07.000 And next thing I know, I'm in jail.

03:11:09.000 And suddenly, you're like...

03:11:15.000 Suddenly I found myself in jail.

03:11:17.000 I found myself guilty of manslaughter.

03:11:23.000 And something that is absolutely irreversible happening, which is, you know, someone lost their life at my hand.

03:11:32.000 And so after that, I, you know, I ended up, I found myself in jail and doing time.

03:11:39.000 And suddenly everything that had come was gone.

03:11:44.000 Like, everything that I had made, gone.

03:11:47.000 It all went, you know, out.

03:11:49.000 All that money you made, gone.

03:11:51.000 To the settlement.

03:11:52.000 I didn't even have time to spend it.

03:11:53.000 I didn't even have time to register that it was there.

03:11:56.000 And it was gone.

03:11:57.000 Because it was like it was not real.

03:12:00.000 And then you find yourself in jail.

03:12:05.000 And suddenly everything is gone.

03:12:11.000 Career is gone.

03:12:13.000 Everybody stops calling.

03:12:15.000 It's over.

03:12:17.000 Two hit films?

03:12:19.000 Doesn't matter.

03:12:20.000 It's all over.

03:12:21.000 In fact, it was right in the middle of the publicity on Beowulf.

03:12:24.000 It was just toward the end of it.

03:12:26.000 And it was...

03:12:28.000 It's the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me.

03:12:34.000 And I... And I found myself then alone in jail, incarcerated, alone with my remorse and regret and really getting existential about things.

03:12:55.000 Really like coming to appreciate...

03:13:02.000 You know, simple existence is the best thing there is.

03:13:08.000 People don't appreciate what we have.

03:13:10.000 You don't appreciate it until it's gone.

03:13:13.000 First of all, we live in bodies of glass.

03:13:17.000 My wife was horribly injured, and it has been a decade to not just rebuild our lives, but to For her to come back to health, even.

03:13:35.000 What it did, though, because I would do anything to reverse that, to reverse what happened.

03:13:45.000 I would give anything to do it.

03:13:47.000 And I don't say this lightly, but having said that, I'm kind of grateful as well.

03:13:57.000 Because I was...

03:14:00.000 Like, asleep walking through life.

03:14:03.000 And it wasn't until that happened that I completely, like, it changed how I see everything.

03:14:12.000 It was like my third eye opened up.

03:14:15.000 I don't view anything the same way.

03:14:19.000 I, 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.

03:14:32.000 You 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.

03:14:40.000 I hope I never not feel this way, this appreciation for a cloud.

03:14:47.000 You know, to be able, like, when you're imprisoned, to be able to pet a cat, for example.

03:14:53.000 It's so simple.

03:14:54.000 It's such a nothing thing, you think.

03:14:57.000 Okay, to be able to pet an animal is, like, a gift.

03:15:02.000 The simplest things are gifts.

03:15:04.000 When I was in jail, it was also a little bit like a comedy.

03:15:08.000 You have people walking in circles, and everybody's trying to control the outside.

03:15:14.000 So you start really seeing human behavior up front.

03:15:17.000 I mean, when I was in jail, there...

03:15:22.000 Literally, during the Academy Awards, it's on the TV in the tank.

03:15:26.000 And I'm watching him win, like, for Django.

03:15:30.000 Win the Oscar for Django.

03:15:32.000 So while Quentin is, like, at the height of things, I'm pretty much at the bottom.

03:15:37.000 Watching through bars.

03:15:40.000 And 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.

03:15:51.000 And so I'm like, they're like...

03:15:57.000 To be taken from one point where you feel like you're at the top and you're like, oh, you think you understand things.

03:16:06.000 No.

03:16:07.000 I'm going to take you and put you at the bottom.

03:16:09.000 But let me tell you something.

03:16:10.000 In that moment, I was sitting on the asphalt and my wife came back to life.

03:16:13.000 I immediately knew what I had to say as a filmmaker after that.

03:16:17.000 It was like, whatever cynicism I had had about the movie and not making it, it just went away.

03:16:30.000 Evaporated, yeah.

03:16:31.000 It evaporated.

03:16:32.000 It evaporated.

03:16:39.000 And the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic that I had in jail, were like, I mean, you see things kind of for real.

03:16:47.000 When 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. 0.97

03:17:08.000 He's going to kill him in the yard.

03:17:11.000 I'll go lock myself in my cell.

03:17:13.000 Literally, I'll go lock myself in.

03:17:15.000 Shut the door because you know shit is going to go down.

03:17:18.000 And so, like, that was, like, every day.

03:17:21.000 And so suddenly it was, like, you know...

03:17:25.000 And also, you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens.

03:17:31.000 And 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.

03:17:45.000 That was our customer who did that.

03:17:49.000 And so...

03:17:51.000 Like, I value our customers.

03:17:55.000 And especially John and his family.

03:17:59.000 And Maggie, who I... It really is...

03:18:02.000 I talk about John a lot, but really Maggie.

03:18:05.000 She was really my big champion, I think.

03:18:07.000 And so, anyhow, I... You know, what it taught me, actually...

03:18:17.000 Because I was a filmmaker and I was up my own ass most of the time.

03:18:20.000 But what it kind of taught me was, you know...

03:18:24.000 Be compassionate to other people because you might not know it, but they might be going through shit in their lives.

03:18:30.000 You know, and God forbid it be something health-related, which is almost out of your control.

03:18:36.000 But, you know, people are suffering and people are struggling.

03:18:40.000 And I used to be a lot more cavalier about people and kind of fuck with people and be forceful with people and not really care as much.

03:18:50.000 Now I'm acutely aware of people and, you know, what they may be going through.

03:18:57.000 I think this is the best way to wrap this up.

03:19:00.000 Perfect.

03:19:02.000 Gentlemen, thank you very much.

03:19:03.000 This was an awesome conversation.

03:19:05.000 Really, really appreciate it.

03:19:05.000 This has been really great.

03:19:06.000 Thank you for letting us come back.

03:19:07.000 Three and a half hours just flew by.

03:19:09.000 Thank you.

03:19:09.000 Oh, my God.

03:19:11.000 I actually thought, oh, I guess he's wrapping it up quick.

03:19:14.000 LAUGHTER No, I think it's three hours.

03:19:17.000 I thought it was like 90 minutes.

03:19:18.000 Three hours and 15 minutes at least.

03:19:19.000 I thought it was like 90 minutes.

03:19:20.000 No, there it is.

03:19:21.000 The Video Archives podcast on Patreon.

03:19:26.000 Patreon.com.

03:19:26.000 Patreon.com slash videoarchives.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 10, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript