Episode 1412 - Daniels (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert)
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast this is my podcast wtf how's it going today on the uh on the show i'm
Marc:The Daniels are here.
Marc:They go by the Daniels.
Marc:They direct movies.
Marc:It's Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinart.
Marc:They're the writers and directors of everything, everywhere, all at once, as well as the movie Swiss Army Man.
Marc:A lot of music videos, television episodes.
Marc:Swiss Army Man is a fucked up weird movie.
Marc:So I was excited to talk to them about this.
Marc:I made the kraut.
Marc:The kraut is good.
Marc:I actually had my buddy Jerry Stahl came over.
Marc:I unloaded some kraut on Jerry.
Marc:I'm giving kraut away.
Marc:I'm going to be the kraut guy.
Marc:I'm thinking about getting another batch of kraut going, trying to adjust to this vegetarian business.
Marc:And again, not a lifestyle choice.
Marc:Just wanted to see if I could do it and see if it's satisfying and it makes me feel better.
Marc:It does not.
Marc:The other day, I ate a plate of rice and beans and broccoli rabe and fake meat.
Marc:And I thought my entire system was going to seize up and I was going to die.
Marc:Like I ate it at two in the afternoon, could not eat anything until the next morning.
Marc:Now, maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm doing the research.
Marc:I'm trying to do it right.
Marc:But I think I feel better.
Marc:I feel like there's some part of me that, and again, this is not ideological, but
Marc:But I do think there's some part of me that feels like I've eaten enough meat for one lifetime.
Marc:And is it an ethical thing?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Maybe it is a little bit because nothing...
Marc:really upsets me more than when animals are in pain.
Marc:Like, I think if I'm in a movie, you know, God willing, I get another movie, and I need to cry, I'm just going to think of that polar bear floating around on that one piece of ice.
Marc:Always got left.
Marc:Just think about that polar bear.
Marc:I can make me cry right now.
Marc:Think about whales washing up on the beach.
Marc:Thinking about lost dogs.
Marc:I mean, it's fucking shattering.
Marc:And I get so upset with it.
Marc:More than people.
Marc:You know, people, like...
Marc:Fuck them.
Marc:They're the, you know, like, I, I mean, I understand everyone's going to die, but sometimes the discomfort and torture and pain of animals is so much more upsetting.
Marc:You know, I mean, I don't know.
Marc:I think people have a, you know, they've, they've had a good run of the world and they've, they've, you know, look, if we all go, we all go.
Marc:That's the other thing I don't understand who the fuck wants to live after an apocalypse.
Marc:There's so many people putting so much effort into,
Marc:into preparing like these bunker people it's like what why would you want to live like me personally like what would i want to live after an apocalypse no because i'm not prepared i have no canned foods i don't want to be the guy kind of running around you know talking to the bunker people saying like come on man gotta just get a can of beans all we've got is uh jerky
Marc:And canned meat.
Marc:I'm like, I'm kind of not doing meat right now.
Marc:Do you got any beans or any vegetables, canned vegetables of any kind?
Marc:And then they butcher me.
Marc:They kill me and butcher me and make me into jerky.
Marc:That's how it plays out in my head.
Marc:I'm just riffing here.
Marc:I feel OK today.
Marc:You know, I don't know what's driving me.
Marc:I got to be honest with you.
Marc:Sometimes shit has to fester for a long time.
Marc:You have to get good and ripe with a resentment, with a problem, with a secret before you fucking pop.
Marc:And then you're ready to go.
Marc:I mean, some people, they just automatically process it right away.
Marc:But look, man, you might just be a cauldron of emotional garbage that's starting to overflow.
Marc:And there's nothing, I don't know, goes either way.
Marc:Sometimes that's attractive.
Marc:You like sort of, hey, what's in that pot over there?
Marc:It looks like it's bubbling.
Marc:Or Jesus Christ, somebody get that off the fire.
Marc:Either way, if you're the cauldron,
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:You might need to talk to somebody.
Marc:I'm on the edge of it.
Marc:I'm on the edge of it right now because I'm feeling okay.
Marc:And that for me is scary.
Marc:It's a big problem.
Marc:Because in my past experience, people don't like me when I feel good.
Marc:I can just feel it.
Marc:You know, I have a friend, happened the other night.
Marc:This friend of mine, a comic who has known me for a long time, was like, how's your special?
Marc:And I'm like, it's great.
Marc:And they were like, oh, well, that's good.
Marc:You know, like, I knew that there was some part of them was sort of like, hey, where's old miserable Mark?
Marc:Where's old, like, hey, it wasn't that good.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'll try again.
Marc:You know, there's something about me feeling okay with myself that people that have known me a long time find unattractive.
Marc:So what I need to do, I guess, is really focus on what's upsetting me.
Marc:But getting back...
Marc:to this meat business.
Marc:So I don't know if it's becoming an ethical thing with me, the not eating meat, but I get it.
Marc:Like I've really eaten a lot of meat in my life.
Marc:When you really think about it, just break it down.
Marc:How many pigs, how many chickens, how many cows, how many fish, how many eggy waggies?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How much have you, how much have you ingested?
Marc:And then I start to think about, well, you know, it's not like with plants.
Marc:At some point, agriculture happened and mankind decided that we could just raise these animals and farm them and raise them to be eaten and raise them for dairy.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:But when it gets down to, you know, big agribusiness and just these sort of warehouses of pain...
Marc:That, you know, what goes into your meat.
Marc:I thought that a long time ago that the amount of terror, I would imagine that big agriculture of the animals on on big business farms, the amount of terror that is in those farms.
Marc:It's going right into your meat.
Marc:You're just eating a patty of fear.
Marc:You're just eating a nice prime cut of terror.
Marc:And I think I've talked about this before, but it never really bothered me.
Marc:It bothered me a bit, but not enough to be like, I ain't eating that.
Marc:Again, I'm not proselytizing.
Marc:I'm not moralizing.
Marc:I'm just coming to grips with the idea that maybe I've eaten enough animals.
Marc:And if it's possible for me to find a way to eat without eating them, and also, mind you, I'm also living out for my heart and my sugar and stuff, maybe that's good.
Marc:I don't want to eat the pain.
Marc:I'm tired of eating pain.
Marc:I'm tired of eating my own pain.
Marc:I'm tired of eating the animal pain.
Marc:I can handle the sadness of broccoli.
Marc:I can handle the sadness of cabbage, though I treat cabbage very nicely.
Marc:But I can handle the melancholy of vegetables.
Marc:I'm not sure I can handle the terror of animals or the pain of animals.
Marc:I just don't want, I don't know if I want another kind of skewer of fear.
Marc:I don't know if I want it.
Marc:Again, not moralizing, not proselytizing, not pontificating.
Marc:I just feel like I've eaten my share of animal terror.
Marc:But again, don't hold me to it because there will come a day.
Marc:I'm a weak guy.
Marc:You know, I can hold on for a while, but eventually I give in.
Marc:And then who knows how long it's going to go on for like this cigar disaster.
Marc:It's a fucking train wreck.
Marc:I'm fucking up on my porch in the morning, dude, puffing on fucking stubs from the night before.
Marc:This is where it goes.
Marc:Right.
Marc:This is like, you want to talk about addiction and compulsion.
Marc:I haven't had dessert in a month.
Marc:I had one piece of halva at a Middle Eastern place the other night.
Marc:The next day I'm like, holy shit, I need to fucking mainline some processed sugar.
Marc:It's that quick.
Marc:And to get off these cigars, I just can't, I have to just do a cold turkey.
Marc:But then there's that part of your brain.
Marc:It's like, but I'm enjoying it.
Marc:Look, I'm sitting down.
Marc:So look, I'm not saying I'm not going to, you know, kind of spiral and have a tomahawk steak and some bacon.
Marc:But I am saying this is my thought process right now.
Marc:This is my thought process.
Marc:If I feel so moved by the pain of animals, why am I eating that pain?
Marc:Again, not moralizing, personal.
Marc:And again, there will come a day where I will eat a whole fucking chicken.
Marc:But today, I'm thinking about this stuff.
Marc:Listen, the Daniels are here.
Marc:They just won the Director's Guild Award for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and are nominated three times at this year's Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
Marc:And I realize that sometimes I'm not as professional as I should be in terms of, like, I rarely have two guests in the place.
Marc:But if you want to ID their voices so you can keep track of them in this episode, the first person you hear, the first guy you hear respond to me is Daniel Kwan.
Marc:He says, wow, what a compliment.
Marc:That's Daniel Kwan.
Marc:And then Dan Scheinert is the one who goes on to talk about dressing nicer and feeling like a phony.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:There's your key for this episode.
Marc:Here we go.
Marc:Let's do it.
Marc:Me and the Daniels.
Okay.
Marc:You guys, how's it going with this roller coaster?
Marc:You seem pretty casual, like normal people.
Marc:I don't feel like the Oscar buzz and the momentum and the junket has at least changed the way you dress.
Marc:Wow, what a compliment.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:That was very intentional of me today.
Guest:Literally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm not going to wear the fancy shit.
Guest:Yesterday I was like dressed a little nicer and we did some interviews and I was really tired and I felt a little bit like a phony.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then today I put on clothes that I've owned for, you know, you went back to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm going to dress like myself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Relax.
Marc:What's, what's the phony attire?
Guest:I mean, it's still me.
Guest:It's still all my stuff.
Guest:It's just, like, nicer.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Sure, I have that stuff.
Guest:I don't have a button-up shirt.
Marc:You wear it twice.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You buy it to wear things.
Marc:And then are you guys set for formal wear?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Let's get straight into it.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:The funny thing is there's at least two – I think there's at least two award shows every weekend until the Oscars.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And so that adds up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did somebody step up and dress you?
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, actually, our incredible costume designer, Shirley Carada, who worked on our movie, she comes from the fashion world, so she offered to do me a favor.
Guest:So she's been helping me hook up every event.
Guest:Because otherwise, it's so much work.
Marc:And did she get the connection, so where they're getting you the free shit?
Guest:I mean, yeah, it's some free shit, but then also sometimes you just borrow something and that's great because then you don't feel like you have to put it in your closet forever.
Guest:It's kind of the best way.
Guest:A free rental.
Guest:It's a free rental.
Guest:It's amazing.
Guest:But the fun thing is she's known for dressing like hip-hop artists and just going very weird with her stuff.
Guest:So she's got some really good hookups.
Marc:Oh, so you guys are going to stand out.
Marc:You're going to be the youngsters with attitude at the Oscars.
Guest:We like color.
Marc:The youngsters with attitude.
Marc:Is that going to be our tagline?
Guest:I like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You guys are just going to walk down that aisle.
Guest:Or some people online, someone called us a soy boy, right?
Guest:And we were like, hell yeah, we are.
Guest:We're going to be like colorful soy boys.
Guest:Who the fuck called you a soy boy?
Guest:I can't remember.
Guest:Dan brought it up.
Guest:And I was like, I love soy milk.
Guest:Was it a troll?
Guest:Yeah, it was a troll.
Guest:It's one of those things where like- Maybe I don't even know the definition.
Guest:It's derogatory.
Guest:Sounds cool.
Guest:Hipster also sounds cool.
Marc:Hipster's fine.
Marc:Soy boy, beta male, those are the cuck.
Guest:Soy boy, beta male, cuck.
Guest:I'm into all these things, yeah.
Guest:We're getting right into it.
Marc:This is all- You can't hurt us.
Marc:Your arrows are just falling off our bodies.
Guest:Yeah, there's arrows that sting, but those ones I'm like-
Guest:Well, what the fuck are those guys coming at you for?
Guest:Well, I mean, it happens anytime you get too big.
Guest:And I think we were kind of lucky enough to exist in this industry just at the right level of success where we found our audience and those people were our people.
Guest:And it was kind of great.
Guest:And then, of course, with this movie, all of a sudden we are being exposed to all sorts of different kinds of...
Guest:Right.
Guest:And some people just don't want, I don't know, I think we're just like silly boys and some people don't think the world needs more silly boys.
Marc:But they can't really identify a political agenda in what you do.
Marc:It's in there, bro.
Marc:I'm fine with it.
Marc:But I mean, it's not like, you know, usually those guys are worked up about liberals.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That's their trip.
Guest:Yeah, we are that.
Guest:Of course you are.
Guest:Sorry.
Marc:But maybe I don't remember all of the movie because there's a lot in it where it's expressed as clearly as that.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:I mean, it's intentionally not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In some ways, like early drafts, it was in there.
Guest:I mean, the whole movie is sort of a reaction to how we felt with the Donald in office.
Marc:Donald in COVID?
Marc:Or no, it's pre-COVID.
Marc:It's pre-COVID, yeah.
Marc:So apocalyptic Donald.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Just like terror of Donald every day.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:But then like while writing, it's like we found ourselves like it's like really not helpful to just scream about that guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so we really tried to get at something more complex than just like bullies suck.
Guest:You know, it's sort of obvious.
Marc:So you guys went deeper to this sort of – that's the reaction in an angry way to what was going on or in a terrified way.
Marc:But if you go deeper into either anger or terror –
Marc:then the complexities of how you're reacting and how it affects your mind is where you guys went.
Guest:And how it affects our families, which is something so many people have felt over the last several years.
Guest:What do you have?
Guest:What do you mean family?
Guest:You're from Alabama.
Guest:I'm from Alabama.
Guest:You grew up in Alabama?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What part?
Guest:Outside Birmingham.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I like Birmingham.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, my experience there was shooting a movie for two weeks.
Guest:Yeah, store to trust.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I have a bunch of friends that worked on it.
Guest:You do?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was great.
Guest:Yeah, it turned out great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm so excited.
Marc:Do you know that store that we shot at?
Marc:That weird old pawn shop?
Marc:No, never been.
Marc:But I thought, like in any southern city with a bit of a population, you have an aggressive progressive.
Marc:Totally contingent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that's definitely something I think people don't realize is that like Birmingham is progressive as hell.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And it's like and it's like, you know, fuck you.
Marc:Look at that.
Marc:We're here, you know, totally.
Marc:So when you say family, do you have their brains break during Trump?
Guest:No, I mean, not my immediate family, but the community did.
Guest:And, like, it was a very divisive time.
Guest:It still is, you know.
Guest:And so, like, the more extended the family gets, you know, the more variety there is.
Marc:And what about when you were growing up?
Marc:Like, what was your world like?
Marc:What did your folks do?
Guest:Yeah, my parents were, they both were in like telecommunications and had like normal kind of office-y jobs for like companies that got swallowed up by AT&T eventually.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And funnily enough, that was my family's story too.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, both my parents are immigrants, but they both ended up in telecommunications.
Guest:In what capacity?
Guest:Well, my father was, he started out more as a programmer and then eventually he went into marketing once, especially once the languages started to get too advanced or like
Guest:He was starting to fall behind.
Guest:He became more of like a market or like a salesperson.
Guest:And my mother, she started out with like teaching local colleges, just like the basics of like windows.
Guest:And where'd they come from?
Guest:My dad's from Hong Kong and my mother's from Taiwan.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's just funny that both of our parents ended up in telecommunications because the same thing happened.
Guest:So many mergers and so many moments where different companies bought out the company that my dad was at.
Guest:That's why we moved a bunch growing up.
Marc:But do you think, can you track any sort of a specific way it affected your mind's telecommunications or is that just a coincidence?
Marc:Are you trying to draw a connection because, well, there's like, you know, we were involved in something almost psychic at the time.
Guest:I do think it – no, not that.
Guest:But I mean maybe.
Guest:But I do think that like my parents were exposed to more than just Alabama.
Guest:Right.
Guest:By being part of these companies and traveling, et cetera.
Guest:Like it wasn't like I grew up in like a super insular small town.
Guest:You only know your relatives.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, like my mom traveled a lot.
Guest:And so it kind of – I wasn't like –
Guest:just right stuck stuck in that in alabama mind and neither were they yeah so like they're interesting yeah i mean for me just the fact that my my dad was such a computer nerd yeah we had a um you know a desktop before most people did and we had internet before most people did so i was really tech savvy from a pretty young age like i was able to type when i was like i don't know can you program um i used to really it's all gone now like i can i can do the really simple stuff if i have
Guest:too.
Guest:There's some website redesign or whatever, but most of it's gone.
Guest:Or hack into my computer to figure out.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I'm not that good.
Guest:You couldn't do it?
Guest:No.
Guest:But what it taught me was just how to teach myself on the computer, which I think was so invaluable to us as filmmakers, because
Guest:The only reason why we kind of broke out at the time we did was because there was so much information online to teach ourselves how to film.
Guest:Right.
Guest:How to become filmmakers, how to do visual effects, how to edit.
Guest:All that stuff was, like, mostly learned online by ourselves.
Guest:Really?
Marc:I mean, a lot of it, yeah.
Marc:Because, like, well, that's one thing about both movies, about Swiss Army Man and...
Marc:and everything everywhere all at once.
Marc:You know, it seems like from a layman's perspective, like, how are they doing these effects, man?
Marc:It's like, how'd they shoot this in the time they shot it in?
Marc:This is crazy.
Marc:But I guess once you know how to do them, it's not daunting, and it's probably not as complicated as I think it is.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, that was our MO when we first started out, was we were the music video guys who could do all our own visual effects.
Guest:Do the Matrix shit?
Guest:Give us a couple thousand dollars, we'll make you look crazy.
Guest:We could do the cheap Matrix shit.
Guest:Yeah, very janky, but that was sort of the charm, was like, oh, our ideas are ambitious and we can figure out how to jankily...
Guest:Pull it off.
Marc:But when you were a kid, like when you were a kid doing your computer business, where'd you grow up?
Marc:Massachusetts.
Marc:Where?
Guest:Right outside of Worcester.
Guest:What town?
Guest:Westboro.
Guest:Do you know Westboro, Mass?
Marc:Yeah, I know all those towns.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Okay, great.
Marc:I started comedy and doing one-nighters in the New England area.
Marc:Oh, great.
Marc:That's fun.
Marc:So how...
Marc:It was weird.
Marc:I just got a text today about my HBO special from a guy who used to book those gigs.
Marc:No way.
Marc:Back when I was there in like 88.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:1988.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:That precedes me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, this guy was booking me on comedy shows.
Marc:Amazing.
Marc:It's Mike Clack.
Marc:Mike Clack.
Marc:Clack.
Marc:Lenny Clack's brother.
Guest:That's a classic.
Guest:That sounds like a. Yeah.
Guest:That sounds so close to like a prank phone call name.
Marc:Well, I think Mike Clack.
Marc:Yeah, and then his brother Lenny Clack, and there was a Mack Clack.
Guest:Mack Clack?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, Mack Clack.
Guest:All right, we're going to put that in one of our movies.
Guest:Someone's going to be called Mack Clack.
Guest:Mack Clack.
Guest:But it's actually M-A-H-C-L-A.
Guest:Yeah, that's good.
Guest:So you grew up around that.
Guest:Yes, yeah.
Guest:All of that, around just the frenzy of sports fans.
Guest:I think that's one of the things that really took me back when I first- Was it Patriots?
Guest:It was everything.
Guest:It was Patriots, Celtics- Sax.
Guest:Yeah, the Red Sox.
Guest:Everyone was obsessed with every possible sport and every possible team.
Marc:But you came out, you didn't get the accent.
Guest:No, I didn't get the accent.
Guest:You could have.
Guest:Not at all.
Guest:Westboro is, you know, it's a suburb.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yeah, we're pretty sheltered from a lot of that stuff.
Marc:There used to be a gig in Worcester at the Margaritaville.
Marc:Stitches, a comedy club had Stitches at Margaritaville.
Marc:And it was a Mexican restaurant.
Marc:Oh, that's fun.
Marc:I think in a mall.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:He was pretty beat up when you were growing up, I imagine, Worcester, right?
Guest:Yeah, Worcester was... That was where we would go to see punk shows at the Palladium.
Guest:That was my scene.
Guest:Yeah, it was so fun.
Guest:Yeah, we actually... At one point, we played a... Me and my really terrible garage band, we played a...
Guest:What is it?
Guest:A battle of the bands at the Palladium.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was very traumatic.
Guest:It's why I quit being a musician.
Marc:Is that true?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I had a traumatic music experience that kept me out of the game.
Marc:I was never in it professionally.
Marc:Yeah, me neither.
Marc:But it took one embarrassing...
Marc:Oh, I want to hear this now.
Marc:What was this?
Marc:I went to a music camp.
Marc:I played guitar.
Marc:I've told this story, but I'm just now getting over it in the last five years.
Marc:You were supposed to put together, there's a presentation, a show at the end of camp.
Marc:And I put together just this bunch of guys.
Marc:All we were going to try to do is get through a fucking Chuck Berry song.
Marc:It's just Johnny B. Good.
Marc:Can we do it, fellas?
Marc:But of course, these idiots, they all got wasted.
Marc:We were 15.
Marc:And everybody fucked up.
Marc:I couldn't get the key right.
Marc:And it was just so in the, we were in front of the entire camp.
Marc:But the punchline really is that the other group of guys who put a band together, the nerds, in my recollection, they got up on stage and played an entire Genesis record.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:They just destroyed you.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:And it really fucked me up in terms of singing and playing in front of people forever.
Guest:That is, I mean, that's not too different from what happened.
Guest:Well, we had a, like a really cute pop punk band in the time when everyone was called.
Guest:They were called.
Guest:Oh my God, this is so embarrassing.
Guest:Now people can Google it?
Guest:Is it Googleable?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Do you not know about this?
Guest:No, I do know.
Guest:I just wanted to say the name, which is the Captains of Cute.
Guest:All right.
Guest:They were called the Captains of Cute because we were, it was, it was,
Guest:It was two short women, like five foot tall girls who were harmonizing and they were our front women.
Guest:So they were the faces of the whole thing and they were adorable.
Guest:And you were keyboards and hype man, right?
Guest:I did synth and guitar, but at the time in Worcester, it was all about grindcore and just everyone was getting... What's a grindcore band?
Guest:Hit me, I don't know.
Guest:The Locusts were kind of big back then.
Guest:It's just like how loud, how technical can it be?
Guest:Sing a little bit of it?
Guest:Good luck.
Guest:Don't break one of your microphones.
Guest:But incredibly technical work.
Guest:It's like really hard stuff to play.
Guest:And sometimes people would mix it up with jazz.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:A jazz solo into a grindcore breakdown.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:And everyone was doing it.
Guest:Not you.
Guest:Not us.
Guest:And because of that, we really stood out.
Guest:And so we actually got a pretty big fan base within the school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had to sell tickets for the Battle of the Bands and basically...
Guest:The more tickets you sold, the better your time slot was.
Guest:And so this was a two-day festival.
Guest:The best time slot was around 7 to 8 o'clock on a Saturday night.
Guest:And we got 7.30 on a Saturday night because we sold so many tickets.
Guest:The spot.
Guest:The spot.
Guest:Set up for success.
Guest:And this was a big festival where it was more than just high school kids.
Guest:So high school kids, adults.
Guest:So people in their 20s and 30s were competing against us.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were just not ready for a stage that big.
Guest:We had only done garage.
Guest:How big?
Guest:It was, I mean, it was the Palladium downstairs at the Palladium, which is basically one of those opera houses that has like a couple thousand.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you get you get the balcony tier, everything.
Guest:It was horrifying.
Guest:How did you sell so many tickets?
Guest:I'm telling you, the freshman class.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I just had all these kid fans.
Guest:We were seniors at the time.
Guest:So you're in high school.
Guest:We were in high school.
Guest:So you get up there and choke?
Guest:Is that what happened?
Guest:We get up, and it's more than just a choke.
Guest:I mean, this is the through line here.
Guest:Our drummer got really high right beforehand because he was nervous.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And when the drummer's high, the whole thing falls apart.
Guest:And so we had to just stumble our way through four or five songs.
Guest:At one point, we did Twist and Shout by the Beatles.
Guest:That was our one cover song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And oh, my God.
Guest:It was...
Guest:it is so it is so humiliating we actually do it now i'm feeling it a little bit yes i'm glad you told your story first it's helping a little bit but but i remember just watching out on in the audience and seeing our friends and family trying to dance along to our music and not being able to find the beat and that was just like so hard trying to hide the uh the horrified reaction they can't even clap along
Marc:it was it was there's nothing worse than looking out in the audience and seeing concerned faces of peers yeah yeah of people who love you yes and so uh we all just kind of hid backstage for like the next three or four sets because we couldn't go back out um and uh that got you out that got me out without without that experience we wouldn't have the movies that you made okay thank you that's a good that's a good way to so now you share some trauma
Guest:Yeah, okay, do you want to hear, should I do my Tim and Eric or my high school theater?
Marc:Let's go back, high school theater.
Marc:Tim and Eric, that's embarrassing already.
Marc:I don't even know what happened, but there's no way you're going to win there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:What did they do to you?
Guest:I was an intern there, and I accidentally showed the entire cast and crew one of my testicles just popped out.
Marc:Just one?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:huh i just cut to this on camera it was on camera there's a there's a sketch called d pants where they pour diarrhea all over me and they needed someone to pour the diarrhea on these so you're the intern yeah i was the intern i volunteered because i was like i could be on this show that i love yeah and they put me in a dance belt which is like a skin tone piece of underwear so they can make it seem like i was naked so it's tight so i walked out and right when i got out everyone stopped laughing yeah and then the costumer took me behind the psych wall and was like adjust yourself
Guest:And then I could just hear Eric Wareheim giggling.
Guest:Otherwise, it was silent.
Guest:There were probably like 40 people.
Guest:And I didn't laugh about it or talk about it for years.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Until I bumped into Annie, another intern, years later.
Guest:And she was like, do you remember when that happened?
Guest:And I could finally laugh about it.
Guest:Yeah, finally.
Guest:It was so...
Marc:Testicle's good, but the full package would have been worse.
Marc:You've got to frame it correctly.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:In my brain at the time, I was like, that's worse because it's just like such a weird- A single testicle?
Guest:Just a ball?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One ball.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So there was no symmetry to it.
Guest:No.
Guest:No context.
Guest:Just that guy's gross.
Guest:Maybe that's all you have down there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's no way anyone liked it.
Guest:Nobody liked it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right now it's the high school theater one.
Marc:Oh, I get two.
Marc:Does this involve a testicle?
Guest:It's similar.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But is it the other testicles?
Marc:I got to balance it out.
Guest:This time I won't jump straight to the twist.
Guest:I did like a dance piece and I was like the lead dancer's like boy partner and learned a little bit of ballet.
Guest:I did a lot of theater.
Guest:And it was like opening night, you know, a couple of people.
Guest:And when I lifted her up and I wasn't very good at this,
Guest:I was supposed to slowly lower her and her leg just ripped my skirt off my weird little skirt and again I was wearing only a dance belt which means like in the front it's like a weird little package and in the back is my exposed ass and so I just nervously turned around and mooned the audience and then turned back and then tried to finish the dance while covering myself and my girlfriend's parents were in the front row my best friends were in the back row they made fun of me for years oh boy it sounds like you should just not be wearing dance belts yeah no dance belts cautionary tale are you wearing one
Guest:Are you going now?
Guest:To overcome the trauma?
Guest:To overcome it, I wear man thongs every day.
Marc:But now I love it.
Guest:Now I'm proud of them.
Guest:That's great.
Marc:So how do you think, like...
Marc:These experiences – because, like, I mean, clearly music plays a big – it's a big factor in how you approach the films.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I guess, like, there's some element – I don't know.
Marc:I just – when did it – when do you start to know that you want to be filmmakers?
Marc:Like, for you separate – I imagine it was separate until you got to college, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You didn't know each other as kids.
Marc:No.
Marc:No, we met in college.
Marc:When did you start – when you –
Marc:fucked up the music career through embarrassment.
Guest:What was the next thing?
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:This is, I was just talking about this with my mom because my mom's visiting from out of town.
Guest:She just flew in yesterday and she was telling me why she thought I should have been a filmmaker from a very young age.
Guest:Like before I- Oh, before you knew.
Guest:Before I knew she had the seed planted in her head that I would become a filmmaker, which is very funny coming from like a Chinese immigrant mother.
Guest:Like that's the opposite of what you normally expect.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Guest:But she had brilliant daughters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was covered?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then by comparison, she was like, this boy's different.
Guest:Are they doctors, the sisters?
Guest:They're in the medical profession.
Guest:One went into pharmaceuticals.
Guest:One went into medicine.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So, you got a break.
Guest:I mean, in some ways.
Guest:But also, credit to my mom, she could tell I kind of struggled at everything in life.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I was nervous.
Guest:I was never really good at anything.
Guest:The music thing is just like one.
Guest:That was the culmination of many failures.
Guest:You're like, finally, I'm good at something.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That was the first time I was just really passionate about something in a long time.
Guest:And so my mother told me when it was time to go to college, she's like, why don't you try going to film school?
Guest:And I was like,
Guest:I laughed at her.
Guest:I'm like, Mom, do you know how hard it is to make it in the film industry?
Guest:Like, that's ridiculous.
Guest:I don't even know how to pick up a camera.
Guest:I know nothing.
Guest:But she knew I liked to write stories, she knew I loved music, and she knew I liked photography.
Guest:So it makes sense that all those things might combine into filmmaking.
Guest:But it wasn't until many years later, after I'd already become a professional filmmaker, that she told me when I was in third grade, one of her friends, who was a very Christian friend of hers, and so she had a lot of friends who were in that world,
Guest:And one of them was a prophet, a self-proclaimed Christian prophet.
Guest:Not recognized by the church.
Guest:I have no idea how that works.
Guest:You have to apply.
Guest:It's a long process to be an ordained prophet.
Guest:And she came up to my mom after observing me playing for a while.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Again, I don't remember any of this.
Guest:I was not aware of any of this.
Guest:And she told my mom, that boy one day is going to be a very, very famous film director.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And my mom was like, wait, what?
Guest:Him?
Guest:And my mom was saying it yesterday.
Guest:She was watching me play, and she's like, you were really quiet and awkward and just looked like a very nervous kid.
Guest:And I was really much like an introverted, quiet kid growing up and had no confidence in anything.
Guest:I had the lowest self-esteem possible.
Guest:So my mom just kind of thought it was interesting and filed it away but never told me about it.
Guest:Why do you think that the...
Marc:Why do you think your self-esteem was so shattered?
Marc:I mean, it goes back to... Was anyone hard on you?
Marc:It sounds like your mom was okay.
Guest:Was your dad a fan?
Guest:You came out looking pretty weird.
Guest:Day one.
Guest:There's so many things that I've been unpacking with my therapist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I will say that one of the biggest things is the fact that I was undiagnosed with ADHD and I had no idea.
Guest:And so one of the weird things that happens, you know, I got diagnosed like five years ago as an adult now.
Guest:What are the symptoms of that?
Guest:I mean, it's different for everyone.
Guest:But the biggest thing is we have something wrong with our prefrontal cortex, which is basically our executive function.
Guest:Our ability to have self-control, to be able to regulate emotions, to be able to... There's so many different things that tie to it.
Guest:But for me, I just never could finish anything.
Guest:And because of that, I looked at myself as a failure.
Guest:And when you're undiagnosed, you're comparing yourself to everyone else who just seems like they're functioning normally.
Guest:And you feel like there's something wrong with you.
Guest:You have no idea why you can't keep up.
Marc:Do you know... Because for me...
Marc:I'm not saying I have ADHD, but I'm going to try to connect.
Guest:It's relatable.
Marc:If I don't finish something, when you don't finish things, you don't risk success or failure in a way.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:A lot of it is tied to this emotional sensitivity.
Guest:A lot of studies nowadays, people are realizing procrastination has less to do with laziness and more to do with...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Fear.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You want to protect your weird little ego.
Marc:Right.
Guest:If you can say I'm not done yet, you don't have to present anything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the funny thing about ADHD is all these things are things that everyone does.
Guest:Neurotypical people have all of these traits.
Guest:The only problem is ADHD people, it's constant and every day.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:So like hooking up with him enabled you to finish stuff because he would make you?
Marc:100%.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:No, I mean, you got it.
Guest:You hit it on the head.
Guest:The key to success is find a talented person with undiagnosed ADHD.
Guest:Convince them to finish some stuff and take half the credit.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Genius.
Guest:What a hustle.
Guest:You're a genius.
Guest:It's so wild.
Marc:You hear that, people who are...
Guest:Marginally creative.
Guest:Just attach yourself.
Guest:But it sounds easier than it is.
Marc:So when do you start?
Marc:Well, let's go to you in terms of when you're growing up and you had the theater fail.
Marc:But was there a point where visual arts was something that you focused on?
Guest:Yeah, I was kind of stumbling around it all the time.
Guest:In high school?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was always kind of interested in a million things.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But you didn't have ADHD.
Guest:I didn't.
Guest:But I do think I've always been attracted to weird people and love making stuff with them or convincing them to finish it or just like a very collaborative.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I do think there's something, yeah, like a track record of all of my friends.
Marc:But what do you think of yourself?
Guest:I think I had an overabundance of confidence at times.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:The first time I watched Rushmore, I was like, this isn't that funny.
Guest:And then years later, I watched it, and I was like, that was me.
Guest:That was a little piece of shit in high school, flirting with his teachers, getting in fights with the administrators.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Too many extracurriculars, tons of self-confidence.
Guest:I'm going to build an aquarium, yeah.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So you're an annoyed adult.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And my classmates.
Marc:But did you have friends?
Guest:No.
Guest:I did, but I wasn't – sometimes I wasn't interested in making friends.
Guest:I was like, I'm here to learn.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then other – it depended on the class, but yeah.
Marc:So you're both kind of – you have these odd dispositions that don't – they don't complement each other until they come together and it makes sense.
Marc:But then you don't really start pursuing – you don't do any short films or anything until you get to college?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, actually, I ended up going to the University of Connecticut for a year.
Guest:Where's that?
Guest:New Haven?
Guest:That's in Storrs, Connecticut.
Guest:It's in the middle of nowhere.
Guest:Is it spelled like a store?
Marc:S-T-O-R-R.
Marc:Is it one of those colleges that people that didn't succeed in high school go to?
Marc:Yeah, basically.
Marc:it's a party college it's a party college that's what it is but i did not succeed in high school so you know at least one person went that way so it's sort of like one of those colleges like like when i was my all through high school i just was i i kind of fucked off yeah and then i panicked the last year because i realized maybe i do want to go to college wow and then by the time i decide that it's sort of like we got to find one that'll take you yeah yeah was that that story
Guest:This was definitely my... Actually, it was the opposite.
Guest:I was doing really well.
Guest:I was a high-functioning person.
Guest:Oh, you did well.
Guest:But struggling.
Guest:It was like everything was... Oh, so grades were fine?
Guest:Grades were fine, but it's because I actually had gray hair in high school because of how much stress I was... Does that just go away or are you coloring it?
Guest:It went away.
Guest:Weird.
Guest:Yeah, I had gray hair in high school.
Guest:I just did not sleep well.
Guest:I was honestly very depressed, but it's because I was just struggling to get A's because...
Guest:that's what's hard yeah it's hard and then my last year i gave up i was like i i'm too tired and like i got f's and stuff like that on my report card i completely um blew up my my my college chances but were your parents concerned how do you not know you have a mental problem uh if you're experiencing these signs and stuff your parents didn't send you to doctors and stuff i mean no i mean immigrant parents don't really have that in their like dna yeah their
Guest:They just suck it up, pull it together?
Guest:They just like, hey, you come for me, and if I could do it, then that means you could do it too, right?
Guest:It's very much like that.
Guest:An appendage.
Guest:And the funny thing about ADHD is oftentimes, at least in my generation, it was the men or the boys who would get diagnosed because they would basically be running around, acting up, and that's how their ADHD kind of manifested.
Guest:Oftentimes in women and little girls,
Guest:it's a completely different thing where they're kind of quietly suffering.
Guest:And funnily enough, when I read about women's experience with ADHD, that was my experience as well.
Guest:I don't understand how it happened that way, but now a lot of my- It's because you're a soy boy.
Guest:There you go, exactly.
Guest:This is what's funny about this.
Guest:I ate a lot of tofu when I was growing up.
Guest:There is something real to this, but I'm a proud soy boy who is now diagnosed with ADHD because I think in a lot of ways I was the quiet, suffering kind of person.
Guest:But anyways, what ended up happening was I went to UConn.
Guest:I thought I was going to go to business school.
Guest:I was taking accounting.
Guest:I was taking economics.
Guest:And I was just miserable.
Guest:It was like the worst year of my life.
Guest:I just did not connect with anyone there.
Guest:I barely made any friends.
Guest:And so I spent a year doing this.
Guest:And I realized, oh, the only thing I can do is watch movies.
Guest:And so I just watched a movie every night for a year.
Guest:What was your movies?
Guest:Who'd you like?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I mean, here's the thing.
Guest:I grew up not really...
Guest:educated or film literate in that world.
Guest:So I just had to play catch up.
Guest:I was just watching all the classics and I was watching all the contemporary stuff at the time.
Guest:So you found a list?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was great because at the time the torrenting wasn't really a thing, but within college campuses, there was a local network where you could just download things really quickly.
Guest:So I was just downloading whatever the UConn campus had at the time.
Guest:Do you remember which one blew your mind?
Guest:The first one, it's very fun.
Guest:The first one that actually made me feel like maybe I could become a filmmaker.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Actually, it was watching Rian Johnson's Brick.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Just watch it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he did that movie for like, I don't know, $20,000.
Guest:How much?
Guest:I forget how much.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it all took place on the campus.
Guest:On the campus.
Guest:It was just so accessible.
Guest:But at the same time, there was such a specific vision in the tone, in the writing, in the world.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:Did you tell him that?
Guest:I did, yes.
Guest:I had the chance to tell him that a couple months ago, which was kind of amazing.
Guest:But after I watched the movie, I went out and bought it.
Guest:I went out and found the script.
Guest:I found the novella he wrote, because before he wrote a script, Ryan actually wrote a novella.
Guest:And so I just kind of studied it, and I was like, oh, this, I don't know.
Guest:If the rest of my life is going to be like what it is here at UConn, I don't want to live.
Guest:So I might as well take a risk and jump into film school.
Guest:I'll finally listen to my mom and go to film school.
Guest:And where'd you end up?
Guest:Emerson College.
Guest:And that's where I met the other Daniel.
Marc:And your journey to Emerson was just straight out of high school?
Marc:You didn't have a year off or a bad year at another college?
Guest:Yeah, I went straight in.
Marc:So you met sophomore year?
Guest:No, he meant my senior year, like close to the end.
Marc:You're older?
Guest:I'm older, but just by one year.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we really didn't become close until post-college.
Marc:I remember Emerson.
Marc:I mean, I went to BU after I went to the other school.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But, like, I had—I was undergrad for six years, but I knew a crew.
Marc:Like, some of my peers, like David Cross— Oh, yeah, of course.
Marc:—was there.
Marc:And, I mean, like, I think Dennis Leary was teaching there.
Marc:And Eddie Brill was teaching.
Marc:There was a stand-up—
Guest:Oh, I took an Eddie Brill class once.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Uh-huh, he came in and did like a little workshop, and I did stand-up.
Guest:Did a little shtick?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:We just met Jennifer Coolidge, and she was there as well.
Marc:Really?
Marc:I don't remember her.
Marc:She must have been there around the same time as those guys.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:John Ennis was at Emerson, Laura Keitlinger.
Marc:I don't know how many of them finished,
Guest:That's what I always like to point out to people, because I hate advertising overpriced film schools, is that there's a bunch of incredible dropouts from Emerson.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Marc:I don't know who finished, really, but I just knew when I was in college, it was basically one building.
Marc:Because now part of it's down on the commons, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, most of it.
Guest:It's all right off the Boston Commons.
Guest:There are these slick sci-fi buildings that cost too much money.
Marc:Yeah, no, it was like this one old building over off Beacon Street, I think, or Commonwealth.
Marc:It was right near Kenmore Square, a couple blocks down.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah, weird.
Marc:So you got there when it was high tech.
Guest:It was mid-transition.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:My dorm was one of the old ones, and then they were moving everybody into the more expensive ones.
Marc:So you were down by Kenmore?
Guest:I was on like 100 Beacon Street at first.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then all of it's off the Commons now, I think.
Marc:But do you like – it's weird with Boston.
Marc:I never really feel like going back.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Oh, I have a soft spot for Boston.
Guest:I really love that city.
Guest:We got to go briefly last year on the publicity tour.
Guest:Yeah, for this movie.
Guest:And we went on like a long walk.
Marc:Well, that's nice right here.
Marc:I guess because so much of what made it Boston when I was there is gone.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:You know, like, right, because I'm in the 80s.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And Kenmore Square was still this gritty, weird, shitty place.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I don't even know if Pizza Pad's there anymore.
Marc:I don't know Pizza Pad, yeah.
Guest:That's probably gone.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:It's true.
Guest:All my favorite places, yeah, are pretty much gone.
Marc:Yours too?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it's weird, right?
Marc:They're just erased.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that makes it a little, but it's pretty.
Marc:It's a pretty town.
Marc:It is.
Marc:It's a manageable city, which I love.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:College town.
Marc:So when you meet, what's that moment?
Marc:Is that depicted in a movie anywhere?
Marc:Was it like we knew?
Marc:We knew right away that we would be a genius team?
Guest:Yeah, we always say it was the complete opposite.
Guest:But it was very good rom-com material.
Guest:When they meet, they hate each other.
Guest:Lots of judgment.
Guest:We just gave you our backgrounds.
Guest:We were just so different in every way.
Guest:It was very hard for us to even imagine being friends, let alone collaborators.
Guest:If I was Max Fisher in class, who were you?
Guest:Who's the...
Guest:Well, here's the thing.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:Everything I'm saying is so sad and dopey.
Guest:But growing up, I used to lament the fact that I always felt like a side character in every movie.
Guest:When people were like, oh, which hero are you?
Guest:I'm like, oh, I'll just be Robin.
Guest:I would never really felt like the protagonist growing up.
Guest:So it is funny.
Guest:Things have changed, obviously, now.
Guest:But I'm trying to think of a movie.
Guest:It's like representation matters.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That's a big part of it.
Marc:But you're a sophomore.
Marc:He's almost a senior.
Marc:Like, why are you in each other's orbit initially?
Guest:He was a junior.
Guest:I was a senior.
Guest:And it was a 3D animation course.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:So it was a class.
Guest:And the funny thing is we both kind of got kind of turned off by the film program and by film classes.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Why?
Guest:For different reasons.
Guest:What were yours?
Guest:Mine was like...
Guest:I was making tons of movies with my comedy friends.
Guest:Who were they?
Guest:I was in a couple different comedy troupes.
Guest:Do I know any of them?
Guest:Yeah, one of them is called Swollen Monkey Showcase, but we changed it to Swomo.
Guest:But a bunch of them have come out here.
Guest:Sunita knows you guys, right?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Sunita was in the troupe with me.
Marc:Yeah, she was in Glow.
Marc:She's great.
Marc:And she's in that famous video you did.
Guest:Yeah, so she was there.
Guest:Anyone else?
Guest:Sanitha and some of her friends are like Talia Medell and Eleanor Pienta, and they're in like a dance comedy troupe.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:They're all like East Coasters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A bunch of comedy writers.
Guest:I came in right after Dave Horowitz, and a bunch of that generation kind of had just graduated.
Guest:My buddy Justin Becker is still out here writing a bunch of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Did you use a lot of them other than have you used people that you went to school with?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did that work out?
Guest:A mixed bag.
Guest:They kind of come and go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A lot of one of our most famous short films was kind of like co-written and starring like a ton of my college friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Interesting Ball is sort of a who's who of like friends.
Marc:Of Emerson folks.
Marc:So why did you have a problem with the film program?
Guest:Yeah, I just – yeah, I didn't like spending a whole semester making one bad movie, which is what – Too traditional.
Guest:It seemed like – yeah, and like just talking about it.
Guest:Yeah, I wasn't getting much out of it, and I was getting so much more out of kind of more specific courses and also interdisciplinary classes.
Guest:And the internet.
Guest:So I switched majors.
Guest:I was like an experimental media major.
Guest:Oh, that's good.
Marc:Well, that worked out.
Guest:Yeah, I mean I could just take whatever classes I wanted.
Marc:But like it's interesting when you talk about at that – when did you guys graduate?
Marc:2010 for me.
Guest:2009.
Marc:Because I have to assume that the shift into realizing that young people could learn almost anything online, how do you teach?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean it almost seems like they would have to teach in a classical way or a traditional way in terms of references because that's something that no one is seeking out.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean I think a lot –
Guest:Personally, I feel like my favorite style of teaching is more just guiding.
Guest:It's recognizing the things in your students that they're excited about and just pointing them in the right direction.
Guest:One of the things I realized early on going to film school was that while everyone else in my class was sort of competing against each other.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I was watching everything online and be like, no, this is my competition.
Guest:Whoever's on the front page of YouTube, whoever's on the front page of Vimeo, these are the people that I really need to be on the same level.
Guest:Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to survive in this industry.
Guest:And so I kind of like pulled away from classwork and just started to study what was happening online and
Guest:And I do think it has come true.
Guest:Any of those people who I was admiring from afar in college, a lot of them have now all built really good careers.
Marc:So between you pushing back on the...
Marc:traditional nature of how things were being taught and deciding your own curriculum and you competing with YouTube people.
Marc:The whole world.
Guest:And he had a similar thing.
Guest:But his thing was that he just realized he didn't like directing and wanted to just maybe become an animator.
Guest:You did?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because of your social skills or your innate shyness or the undiagnosed ADHD?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, a lot of it comes down to just feeling the weight of every crew member.
Guest:Everyone who says yes to a project of yours, that's a huge responsibility.
Guest:And you worry?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's incredibly stressful.
Marc:So do you have like a – is it like an overly –
Marc:Do you take on the concerns that you make up in your head for everybody?
Marc:Are you like overly empathetic in a way?
Marc:Like you can't get through a day knowing like, oh, I don't know if that gaffer's happy.
Guest:I mean.
Guest:It depends.
Guest:I mean, sometimes it just takes one thing to kind of send me down a spiral.
Guest:But yeah, I would say.
Marc:And that's the movie.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Several spirals.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:One of the funny things about this movie is we put it out in the world and so many different people who have depression or anxiety or ADHD, even though we never explicitly say any of those words in the film, they come up to me and say, oh my God, thank you.
Guest:This is what my brain feels like all the time.
Marc:But that was unanticipated.
Marc:It was not the agenda of the movie.
Marc:But before we get to that, how do you guys decide to pair up?
Guest:Yeah, so I was intensely collaborative in college, just constantly making stuff with friends.
Guest:And essentially, we had a summer job that we loved where we were summer camp counselors supervising kids while they make movies.
Guest:The two of you?
Guest:Yeah, there was a bunch of us.
Marc:So my friend- So it was an Emerson gig.
Marc:They reached a campus and said, let's go recruit them.
Guest:It was over on Harvard campus, but it was the New York Film Academy.
Guest:And I hate product placing all these organizations I don't really endorse.
Marc:No one's writing them down.
Guest:Yeah, they keep doing it.
Guest:I keep meeting kids.
Guest:They're like, I went to Emerson because of you.
Guest:And I'm like,
Guest:Are you okay?
Guest:How much debt are you in?
Guest:But it worked out for me.
Guest:It changed my life.
Guest:But anyway, we were jealous of the kids and made a short film after work.
Guest:And then when we put it online, neither of us expected it to go that well, but it got like Vimeo staff picked.
Marc:So this is when you were camp counselors?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it kind of like – and there was something about combining visual effects and comedy that worked and that's what it was.
Guest:The short was just like a silly like face swappy VFX-y like 30-second joke.
Marc:Was there a story to it?
Marc:It was just a joke.
Guest:It's about us playing on a swing set and then the swing set gets caught midair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's called swingers.
Guest:And you're up there and he's caught up there and then he swings into my face and we swap faces.
Guest:It's like.
Guest:And we scream.
Guest:The end.
Guest:There was no thought.
Guest:But it's sort of about, you know, it's sort of like autobiographical.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:It's us becoming each other.
Guest:Yeah, it's about the origin of Daniels.
Guest:It's really perfect.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:But literally, we just had a camera, and it was 2 a.m., and we came up with the idea on the spot just mostly so I could teach him After Effects because he wanted to learn After Effects.
Guest:It really is autobiographical, you know?
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:It's just like two guys playing around.
Guest:And then they switch bodies.
Guest:They become one.
Guest:Two guys were just goofing around, and then they became one.
Guest:Origin story.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Go see it.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Go see the origin story.
Guest:It's called Swingers, and I've never seen Swingers.
Guest:I still haven't seen the original.
Marc:It's our remake of Swingers by... And then what was the first steps to collaboration after the origin story?
Guest:I mean, everything we've ever done is just a series of accidents that...
Guest:that put us a little bit closer to our goal of becoming filmmakers so yeah um i think shiner was bored in la because he had graduated a year earlier and he was really anxious and so he wanted to make something you moved out here and you got lost or you just frustrated um i was just i was doing okay but i didn't like any of my jobs and then i was just making things on the side just throwing paint this one you were at tim and eric
Guest:This was after that internship.
Guest:And I got hired like every once in a while for part-time gigs there.
Guest:I liked that a lot.
Guest:But then I was like a runner at a VFX house where I made tea and filled parking meters.
Marc:Oh, that's terrible.
Marc:But it's interesting about Tim and Eric is that, you know, there's something that informs both of your features that is –
Marc:Abstract, absurd, you know, something that relies on just commitment to ideas as opposed to narrative.
Marc:And, you know, it's a certain type of mind that can really get into Tim and Eric.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Because that whole world – and I'm always impressed with it.
Marc:It does something –
Marc:With not only genres, but formats, you know, and it pays a lot of respect to, you know, public access and just there's a tone to it that moves through a lot of different worlds of media.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like it kind of you grew up loving that then.
Guest:It was something I discovered late in life, but it broke my brain.
Guest:I didn't like it at first, which is the best kind of art where as you learn to love it, you grow and change as a person.
Guest:And so I was like, wait, but there's no punchline.
Guest:It's just weird and that's the joke.
Guest:And then once I worked there, I realized that my hot take on that show is that it's like,
Guest:it's rare that a comedy show lets the editors make jokes.
Guest:And with that show, they would just collect material and then let the editors just do whatever they wanted as long as it made them laugh.
Guest:And so instead of being like, hey, here's the script, hit the punchlines, here's the coverage, the editors would turn it into a completely new thing.
Guest:And all these people who edited there have gone on to make incredible stuff.
Guest:They had all that freedom.
Guest:Yeah, it's such a different approach to comedy.
Marc:And were you fans of theirs or were you more animation guy?
Guest:I was an animation guy.
Guest:I mean, I loved Tim and Eric, but it was not quite as a defining discovery for me.
Guest:I come from animation.
Guest:Most of the people I fell in love with during that time are like, yeah, indie short film animators.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of whom you literally fell in love with.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:I actually, I married one of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But a lot of those people have now become really good friends of ours, and it's very cool to see them all do.
Guest:One of them actually got nominated for an Oscar last year.
Guest:Another one used to have a TV show on Cartoon Network.
Guest:It's very fun to see all of them.
Marc:So when do you start working together?
Marc:In terms of making money or getting jobs.
Guest:So yeah, so he was bored.
Guest:He wanted to do a music video for fun.
Guest:Neither of us had any interest.
Marc:Oh, and you came out here and you were like, okay, let's do it.
Guest:Yeah, he's like, hey, I'm doing a music video.
Guest:Do you want to help me shoot it?
Guest:Do you want to help me edit it?
Guest:Do you want to be in it?
Guest:Do you want to be in it?
Guest:So slowly the responsibilities built up until finally we're like, oh.
Guest:We accidentally co-directed it.
Guest:Yeah, I guess we're co-directing this now.
Guest:For who?
Guest:It's called Underwear by the band FM Belfast, which is like a dance band from Iceland.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:How'd you get that gig?
Guest:I made it for free, and I emailed them being like, hey, I'm making a video.
Guest:Will you post it?
Guest:And they were like, I guess.
Guest:That album came out a year and a half ago, but I guess.
Guest:It was not a gig.
Guest:It was basically a fan video.
Guest:But it turned out...
Guest:uh good and and got passed around in these kind of like internet circles yeah and then we got offered to pitch on another band's video and then they actually hired us and paid us yeah um and then you did the famous one and then oh that was a couple years later yeah that was a few years later
Guest:We had a slow motion build up.
Marc:But you're learning how to do things.
Guest:You're learning how to work with crews.
Guest:You're learning how to execute ideas.
Guest:That was the best film school.
Guest:Because what ended up happening was the first video was just us two and one person with a camera.
Guest:And then the next video, we added a producer and a production designer.
Guest:And then the next shoot, we added... So every single project, we would add a few more people and just kind of learn how it all works intimately.
Guest:in a way that we could really understand how to harness the potential of each crew member's position or whatever.
Guest:And I feel like that was sort of our intention moving through the music video world is just to learn.
Marc:How does the co-directing responsibilities work with you guys?
Marc:I mean, you have a DP or cinematographer that you probably have used a lot.
Marc:Yeah, Larkin Staple, yeah.
Marc:And so how do you guys work?
Guest:It kind of, there's like some generalizations that we have collected, but it also changes project to project.
Guest:And like the, my favorite thing to say is that like just whoever's most passionate to do something takes the lead on that.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And then we try to fill in holes.
Marc:But do you have strengths?
Marc:Like obviously animation is where he's coming from.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And with you, is it about timing or what do you, like what do you both seek the other's advice for when a question comes up about what you're shooting?
Marc:Right.
Guest:i love like logistically figuring out how to pull something off right like that's the gag how are we going to do it yeah so like talking to our department and figuring out like the stunt of it all but also like producer brain like trying to crack the puzzle of like this shoot's impossible how are we going to do it in a day and he's about efficiency and pragmatism and and or realism yeah yeah pragmatism yeah yeah you said that's a synonym that's a synonym
Guest:And then I feel more aesthetically inclined.
Guest:I love music, I love animation, I love design.
Guest:I was one of the main graphics designers at Emerson when I was there.
Guest:I was the guy who did all the motion graphics and things like that.
Guest:And so a lot of that stuff comes from me, but also we've taught each other so much that there's a lot more overlap now.
Guest:I used to work with actors more, and I studied acting in school, and then that is not the case now.
Guest:We totally share those responsibilities.
Guest:But it's like, you tell her.
Guest:Sometimes.
Guest:That's happened maybe once or twice.
Guest:We do sort of form relationships with actors and try not to just bombard them with twice the energy.
Guest:Two directors come in shouting things at you.
Guest:But we both really enjoy that part of the process.
Guest:And yes, it's not like I'm the actor guy.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And you have a shorthand, I imagine.
Marc:You understand.
Marc:There's a sort of...
Marc:A bedrock of understanding that goes on set at this point.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Marc:And so just walk me through the first feature because that sort of sets a tone for you guys in a way in terms of the fact that that story is there but secondary in a way, right?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I think what we realized early on when our manager was pushing us into all these general meetings around Hollywood was that we didn't belong in some ways.
Guest:It felt very funny.
Guest:We'd go on these first dates with studios and we'd pitch the ideas that we were interested in and mostly get like blank stares.
Guest:Was that Swiss Army Man?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we kind of developed this style of pitching crazy things because we got a kick out of them being weirded out.
Guest:They'd be like, oh, any IP you like?
Guest:And then we'd just pitch bonkers things and unproducible sequel ideas and stuff.
Guest:So Sorry Man was an idea that was genuinely interesting to us, but also one that I got a lot of joy out of making people uncomfortable when I pitched it.
Marc:What is the one-liner on Swiss Army Man?
Marc:Like if you were to say this is what this movie is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, in the meeting, we'd be like, oh, we have this movie that starts with a guy stranded on a desert island and he finds a farting corpse and rides it like a jet ski to freedom.
Guest:But ultimately becomes this like journey of identity as this, you know, amnesiac corpse learns about life and what that means.
Guest:And maybe they fall in love.
Guest:And they were like, I'm sorry, what?
Guest:And we're like, but he builds all the props out of garbage and it's acapella music.
Guest:And it's going to be beautiful though.
Guest:It's a fart drama and you're going to cry at the end.
Guest:And they'd be like, okay, are you fucking with me?
Guest:And we'd be like, a little.
Guest:But then one day one of the producers actually leaned in and said, have you guys written this yet?
Guest:Do you actually want to make this?
Guest:And we're like, yes.
Guest:And he's like, make it.
Marc:Make the farting corpse movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we had a lot of pushback and a lot of cheerleaders over the years.
Guest:But it became I think we had written a different script before Swiss Army Man.
Guest:But that was one that felt like no one else is ever going to make this movie.
Marc:Oh, you didn't have another script before that?
Guest:Before that, we wrote this one that was kind of like an action comedy.
Guest:But I was kind of like, it didn't... It was something someone else could have written.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Oh, right.
Marc:So that drives you guys a little bit to do something that had never been done before.
Guest:I mean, one of the things that stuck with me... I forget who told me this, but in film school, at one point, I heard the line...
Guest:To be successful, you either have to be the best or you have to be the first.
Guest:And in my head, I'm like, well, I'm never going to be the best.
Guest:Might as well go for that second one.
Guest:That's pretty easy.
Guest:That's like getting the Guinness World Record for, you know, how many Mentos can you chuckle with cats around.
Guest:Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Guest:But what's been really great about that is because we've been finding success with our creativity, we've actually been slowly practicing and working on our craft.
Guest:And I'm not saying we are becoming the best, but we are becoming better.
Guest:And the idea of becoming the best at something doesn't really drive us, but it's fun to see how it's naturally happening.
Guest:The fact that we're here talking to you now is really absurd in the middle of an awards campaign.
Guest:It's hilarious.
Guest:We were not trying to become the best, but just the act of just creating over and over and over again.
Marc:Yeah, and sometimes cosmic timing is real.
Marc:Yes, 100%.
Marc:And things fall into place.
Marc:But with Swiss Army, man, all these things that you were just saying, that was actually...
Marc:Your conception of it, you didn't backload the philosophical idea of that, that you knew that ultimately this was absurd, but you were going to be dealing with ideas around self-identity and philosophical ideas like that?
Guest:Totally.
Guest:It started as like a one-off joke.
Guest:that we would never make or that would maybe be one of our two-minute short films that we throw online.
Guest:And then it wasn't until like the amnesia corpse learning about life concept that we started coming up with like, oh, we could put everything we're feeling about life in here.
Guest:We could like talk and the idea of starting a movie in such a crazy way and then coming at real themes excited us.
Guest:And so...
Marc:Because you guys were young guys and you were dealing with a lot of issues around who you were in the world, I imagine.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And when we first started writing it, we actually had just done a music video for Tenacious D. And I was such a big fan from childhood.
Guest:And we were like, what if we wrote this part for Jack Black and he sang it and it was a musical?
Guest:How cool would that be?
Guest:And then as we wrote it, we're like...
Guest:where all these themes are about 20-year-olds.
Guest:We had written a script about ourselves on accident about weird boys who don't feel like they fit into society's expectations.
Marc:It's so funny because Jack is like a guy that knows exactly who he is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Completely.
Guest:So it was like, it was such a fun inspiration to chase.
Guest:And then we accidentally made it very personal.
Guest:And then we're like, oh, we need, we need someone.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because that's what drives that movie because the comedy in some ways, though it's never been seen before, it's, it's broad in a way, you know, like no one's ever carried a fart joke that far, you know, but, but, you know, farts are, are, are always reliable.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:It's just, it's all physical comedy.
Guest:It's like so much falling down and,
Marc:But because it was so informed by your own search, like there's a humanity to it.
Marc:And also the odd nature of how you shot – there's something grotesque and beautiful about him writing Radcliffe.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:So there –
Marc:Somehow or another, it doesn't come off as shallow or just a means to use these jokes, to make these extreme weird jokes.
Guest:In some ways, I really hated the fact that we were making a movie about farting.
Guest:It made me so uncomfortable.
Guest:And because of that, that kept me up at night most nights.
Guest:and pulled out all these themes yeah and pulled everything else out of it and so the film becomes a film about shame and and what it does to you and and in the end a lot of what um informed the movie was that experience at college that one year that i was miserable by myself sure so much of that experience kind of just fell into the movie and so it it was um it's almost like we made the movie in spite of the farts but like but because of them you just could but there's
Marc:no way like no matter how you felt about farts that you were going to let go of that device of using the farting guy as a jet ski i mean i would imagine that that was always when there was ever a doubt you're sort of like we're not we have to that's also what paul dano said was the reason why he said yes he read the first five pages and said this is the i'm gonna make this movie yeah he's like i don't want to see a different i don't see another actor do that
Guest:I'm going to be so jealous.
Guest:But as a writer, it was like we dug ourselves into this impossible hole by starting the movie from there.
Guest:And then it was kind of like it forced us to learn and try hard and write drafts because we're like, we got to get out of this hole.
Guest:Uh-oh, we started that movie.
Marc:Why did we do this?
Marc:But do you like...
Marc:Do you think when you're doing rewrites like that, is it bit to bit or are you thinking about the whole movie always?
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Because I can see in the new movie and in that movie that there are bits that are pieces that you have to execute because the comedy is so big and choreographed.
Marc:So are you thinking in terms of story or are you thinking in terms of like, well, this bit's a problem?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:All of the above.
Guest:We kind of have to bounce back and forth often.
Guest:I love thinking big structure and thinking about what we're trying to do overall.
Guest:That feels really important for both of these movies that we've done.
Guest:But that gets exhausting.
Guest:And the thing that really gets you excited are the bits.
Guest:And so you collect a bucket of bits while you're working on the backbone of the film.
Guest:And if you're lucky, the bits start to fall into place.
Marc:But you have a lot of surplus bits.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So many.
Marc:Now, did some bits from the Swiss Army Man make it into everything everywhere?
Marc:Ooh, that's a good question.
Guest:I wonder if any did.
Guest:Not that come to mind, but... I mean, Rakakuni... I mean, but that's just more just a Ratatouille joke.
Guest:But we did have, like, pulling on hair, weird kind of... There's a lot of body humor in both, obviously.
Guest:But, yeah, a lot of them we just never made.
Guest:Or sometimes we try to sneak them into short-form content and stuff.
Marc:So, I mean, Swiss Army Man puts you on the map, right?
Marc:And people were like, well, this is weird and good.
Guest:Some people.
Guest:It put us on a new map, you know, because we had been in this kind of commercial music video world.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it definitely suddenly kind of like shifted us over into like a world where people were like...
Marc:So that one video, the one for the falling through... Turn down for what?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're not a DJ Snake fan?
Guest:You don't know him by name?
Guest:I'm just old.
Guest:No, I'm... Yeah.
Guest:It's a great name.
Guest:You should really remember it.
Guest:DJ Snake?
Guest:No, he's so weird.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I mean, it was one of those things where it clearly...
Marc:Whatever the song implied, it didn't matter.
Marc:You just created this energy that you kind of blew up.
Marc:There was a sort of beautiful violence to the whole thing on all levels.
Marc:And people love it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was kind of like we heard the song and it's called Turn Down For What?
Guest:And then it's about like not turning down for anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we sort of just like we had been working on a screenplay and we're just like, what if we just let our id go?
Guest:What's the most like unhinged just id thing?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because that felt like the assignment from the song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was something so unexpectedly thrilling about doing that as a filmmaker and turns out as an audience to just see like this is just unhinged for.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But also challenging yourself to do that pays off in the movies.
Marc:I mean, for whatever, for you just to say, let's do an id thing and then push the envelope, you know, with all this sexuality and violence and weirdness and contortions.
Marc:I mean, it must have been exciting for the actors to just cut loose like that.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:But it also sort of gives you a parameter to work with.
Marc:And like if we've done that successfully, then you can sort of do anything, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It totally got Swiss Iron Man financed, because financiers would be like, this script sounds insane on paper, but your last music video was a hit, and it also is insane.
Guest:So I guess people like this stuff.
Guest:That has always been the case.
Guest:Everything we've done,
Guest:I always, you know, like helps the next thing get made.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It helps the next thing get made.
Guest:But my, my mother has to go through this journey where she's like, why did you make this thing?
Guest:It's so weird.
Guest:And like, what did you do?
Guest:And then she watches the, you know, general consensus form and people like it, you know, like turned down for what the first thing she said to me after watching it was like, Daniel, I think you need to read more books.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then a year later, we're at the Grammys because it got nominated for a Grammy.
Guest:And so now my mother's just having to just completely contort her vision of what the world is, what art is, who I am as a filmmaker.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:And so that's been really fun to watch as a journey is watching the world figure out what to do with our work.
Guest:The world through your mother?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, how does your mother factor into everything everywhere all at once?
Yeah.
Marc:I mean, completely.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do we want to get into it?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I mean, it just seems like that dynamic.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We realized while writing it that, like, the character of Jobu, the kind of villain, is, like, the character version of all of our movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And that Evelyn is our parents.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's just like, this is this weird, unhinged thing.
Guest:And then the parent is like, what?
Guest:What?
Guest:Why?
Guest:What is wrong with you?
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:She is the weird music video.
Marc:She's the part of you.
Marc:She's an archetype of you guys.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Especially our work, which tends to be our weirdest version of ourself that we're like...
Guest:This is in me, you know.
Guest:Yeah, but it's like every parent's nightmare to see their kid go out into the world and represent things until they explode.
Guest:And just represent something that they did not think was a part of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, you know, my dad actually showed, turned out for what, to his coworkers, and they were like, are you embarrassed?
Guest:Are you...
Guest:And so grappling with those ideas, the movie is a movie about our parents, in some small ways, learning to expand their minds to be able to include all of the messy, unexpected parts of us.
Guest:And about the kid learning to give the parents some space and grace and being like, it's not easy.
Marc:But this is the story.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:What you start with with this movie is there is a story there.
Marc:It's pretty basic about parents and kids and about the strain that parents' relationships go through, male and female roles, and then the immigrant experience.
Marc:If you pitched a movie without any of what you guys do—
Marc:They'd be like, well, that sounds like an interesting emotional movie.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Maybe we'll do that on the next one.
Guest:I mean, people ask us, like, how did you pitch everything everywhere?
Guest:And we're like, this is pretty easy.
Guest:You know, because we're like, hey, we're the Farting Corpse guys.
Guest:This one's about a mom going on an action adventure story and learning to love her family.
Guest:They're like, oh, my God.
Guest:God, that sounds marketable.
Guest:Thank God you got over the fart stuff.
Guest:No more farting weirdness.
Guest:And then we're like, oh, just wait.
Guest:This time it just takes a little longer and then things go in butts.
Guest:I think we realized the film was going to be about just generation gaps in general.
Guest:Every generation has to deal with it.
Guest:But what makes this generation gap between millennials and boomers so unique within the context of history is the fact that
Guest:Millennials are the first generation to grow up on the internet.
Guest:And to have parents not understand what it was like to be able to just accidentally fall into all sorts of awful, terrible things when you're 10 years old and the effect that might have on you growing up, that is a very bizarre generation gap.
Guest:And we realized the multiverse was a really good place for us to explore that.
Marc:Well, also what's interesting too, and I'm just thinking about this now because I had a conversation with my producer yesterday just about...
Marc:That generation is now becoming adverse to emotions.
Marc:That, you know, when they use words like cringe or awkward.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:That, you know, it's really in reaction to vulnerability.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So there's a guardedness that's happening around engaging in true emotional vulnerability that's a little disconcerting.
Guest:Totally.
Marc:And I think that there is something to that in the movie that what you come around to is acceptance and real vulnerability on both parts, right?
Marc:Totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Reflecting on the cringe thing is interesting because when you live your life online in social circles for the most part, especially ones that are driven by algorithms, there is no grace for any mistakes.
Guest:So...
Guest:I think that is why people are so guarded.
Guest:When you watch someone else make a mistake online, you feel their pain and you realize, I never want that to happen to me.
Guest:And so suddenly you have a whole generation of people who are fearful of looking like they made a mistake or fearful of being the cringe person online.
Guest:It's a problem.
Guest:How are they going to exist in relationship?
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:How are they going to identify...
Marc:you know, evolving vulnerability.
Marc:How do you grow as a person if you're just, you're transferring the possibility of your own mistakes onto somebody it actually happens to and you live in fear of that, how do you develop?
Marc:You have to listen to your podcast, WTF.
Guest:I do think on the other side, the internet has started to celebrate mental health and vulnerability in these ways that are like, oh, cool.
Guest:I sometimes wonder if millennials are going to be the jaded ones, but the kids are actually going to be vulnerable as hell.
Guest:And just thinking about with our movie, we never expected the thing that would go viral with kids would be selfies of them crying.
Guest:But on TikTok, people would post selfies of how much they cried at our movie, and that was the thing that they'd share.
Guest:And I was like, whoa, I thought they'd be talking about, you know.
Guest:Yeah, that was the thing that sold tickets because then someone would be like, oh, why is everyone crying at this movie?
Guest:I got to go watch this movie too.
Marc:It gives them permission to have the emotions that they're usually ashamed of.
Guest:I guess, maybe.
Guest:It's really cool.
Guest:But I thought it was beautiful.
Guest:I was like, oh my God, that's so cool.
Guest:I thought we had to sneak the emotion in there, but the emotion became the thing, the selling point.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because it's not like, you know, no one's at risk.
Marc:Hmm.
Marc:Like, if somebody shares it, like, this thing made me do this.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And then everyone's sort of like, well, I kind of want to do that if it's safe to do it.
Marc:Yeah, totally.
Marc:Wild.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But if you didn't cry, that's fine, too.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Some people, you know.
Marc:I cried everything.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know why that happens, but it's – I don't know if it's – It's great.
Marc:I was always kind of like that, though.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:It doesn't take much.
Marc:I love that.
Marc:So, at the core of this –
Marc:Tell me about casting.
Marc:I'm sure you've gone over it, but I just talked to Michelle two days ago.
Guest:No way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How was it?
Guest:Great.
Guest:I haven't heard it yet, obviously.
Marc:I didn't put it up yet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In order to hear, we'd have to sit here together and do it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But she's amazing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Did she roast us?
Marc:No, she loves you.
Marc:She's not doing any roasting.
Guest:Maybe after.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:We'll see what happens.
Marc:But there's no roasting going on.
Marc:But it was just we really went all the way back with her and her experience.
Marc:But how did you cast her?
Guest:I mean, when we first started writing this movie, we knew it was going to be about Chinese family.
Guest:And so we just asked ourselves selfishly if we could ask, have anyone played the mother and the husband?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Our first picks were Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, so she was always in there.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And we started rewatching their movies.
Guest:As the supporting character, originally she was going to be the Weyman character, if that makes sense.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:But long story short, we just fell in love with the idea of it being about her.
Guest:We ended up centering it on her.
Marc:It was going to be the man story?
Marc:What?
Marc:It was going to be the husband story.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:But the first draft, I like to say, was kind of like an obvious action comedy of a guy bumbling on an adventure.
Guest:It wasn't until it was centered on Michelle that the whole family dynamic clicked, the mother-daughter thing.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And his struggle with masculinity.
Guest:It suddenly was like a movie I hadn't seen before.
Guest:And before that, it was just like, you know, like a guy going on a misadventure, you know, but against character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But but yeah, so casting was just like we always dreamed it was her.
Guest:We were terrified what she'd say if she if she didn't like it, like what we would do if she didn't like it.
Guest:She was also up for it physically.
Yeah.
Marc:I mean, she could do that stuff.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Which was another huge thing.
Guest:Like, honestly, who else could have done all of that?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, but there isn't anybody.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we didn't want to do an action movie where, you know, stunt doubles do all the fun stuff.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so we, yeah, she was the very first person we cast, and she was, by some miracle, like...
Guest:Excited about it.
Guest:I mean, I think she saw in it that this was a role that she doesn't get offered every day, that she could show that she has more skills than people know.
Guest:And for us, when we first met her, we found out that she had a weirder sense of humor than we expected.
Guest:And we were like, oh, what a miracle.
Guest:Great.
Guest:She's singing a lot, dude.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think we had this mental image of a fancy lady who would be upset by some of our jokes.
Guest:And she just was like, let's talk about Deadpool.
Guest:These jokes are so weird.
Guest:And that was like, yeah, just an ideal thing.
Marc:It's interesting because in this – in dealing with the immigrant experience, specifically Chinese, to use somebody –
Marc:on a meta level of her, you know, status and the way she's seen by the world, especially the Asian world, is sort of, like, great.
Marc:It's incredible.
Marc:To sort of transform her.
Marc:And then, like, you've got...
Marc:James Hong, in terms of American film and the Chinese experience or what we grew up with, it's like, hey, there's that guy.
Guest:Yeah, he's the one and only face that has somehow lasted almost the entire span of cinematic history.
Guest:He's been working since the 40s or 50s.
Guest:Right, but he was in Chinatown.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He likes to say he was in 600 TV, film, and video games.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah, like 600.
Guest:It's unreal.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:He's in Airplane, Blade Runner, Chinatown, Wayne's World, Big Trouble, Kung Fu Panda.
Marc:Oh, he's in The In-Laws.
Marc:Oh, now we can just sit here and go through his- I know.
Marc:Just scrub through it, man.
Guest:True Confessions.
Guest:Honestly, you should bring him on.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:That would kind of be amazing, wouldn't it?
Guest:Yeah, it was wild to kind of see, to meet him, and you just instantly could tell, like, this guy hustles.
Guest:He's been hustling for 60 years.
Marc:Yeah, but also, like, you know, what it means, like, in the sort of meta way on how people look at film and look at Asians and look at, you know, the sort of core story.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's not just a family story.
Marc:It's an immigrant story.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Right?
Marc:And then getting Kwan.
Marc:How do you say it?
Marc:Yeah, Kihue Kwan.
Marc:Kihue Kwan.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, that guy is sort of like in all of our hearts, right?
Marc:Raiders of the Lost Ark, was he in the first one?
Marc:The second one.
Marc:Yeah, he was in Temple of Doom.
Marc:And then like all of a sudden this amazing story, like that guy's, you know.
Marc:So there's something about film and there's something about, you know, family.
Marc:And there's something about, you know, that's dug into the Chinese-American story.
Marc:Completely.
Guest:Yeah, the meta-narrative of the casting was never intentional.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With every person we found, that just happened to be their life story, a story of being overlooked or underappreciated in different ways.
Guest:But I was looking over my journals the other day, just trying to remember what we were thinking when we were making this movie.
Guest:And one of the things I wrote was just this idea like, oh, if we could make a movie that made it so anytime you walked into a laundromat and you saw like a middle-aged woman,
Guest:immigrant working there you would immediately just think of just the abundance of potential or life that exists in that human because I think originally in the movie we wanted Michelle Yeoh because it would be really funny if you see her and she's kind of living this very difficult life
Guest:struggling through trying to find the American dream.
Guest:And then you jump to another universe and she's literally Michelle Yeoh.
Guest:And there was a version, I'm glad we didn't go this way, but there was a version of the movie where every actor was going to have their real name.
Marc:So Jamie Lee Curtis would Jamie.
Marc:Well, then you get into sort of that, the,
Guest:John Malkovich movie.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But the idea is supposed to be just like any of the people that you're surrounded with every day when you're walking through the streets or driving to the store, any of those people in another life could be just the most important person in the world or just the most talented person in the world.
Guest:It's about looking at the potential inside of people.
Guest:And so the metanarrative of the casting was, like I said, not intentional with all the other characters, but with Michelle, that was kind of the goal.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But this multiverse thing, like...
Marc:Obviously, it's a great device.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But as a philosophical, do you believe it?
Guest:I kind of do.
Marc:You do?
Marc:Because I have these weird dreams.
Marc:Do you ever get in waking consciousness where you're kind of half awake, but you're living an entirely different life in that dream?
Marc:You have responsibilities and different pets and everything.
Marc:There is this little world in waking consciousness where I'm like, that must be the other mark.
Marc:Because they're never...
Marc:They're never dynamic things.
Marc:It's just another relatively mundane existence.
Guest:Right, but he likes dogs, not cats.
Marc:Yeah, something like that.
Guest:Weird, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, we're also big into neuroscience, so that just makes me think about, like, I'm just fascinated with how brains work and the fact that, like, your lived experience right now is just like a predictive model that your brain is just constantly kind of
Guest:Updating?
Guest:Predicting and updating based on like little inputs.
Guest:And so like, of course, as you dream, it would just start to predict other random stuff.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But that doesn't still mean, but then, but without getting into this sort of like, well, what is reality business?
Marc:Which I just can't even fucking do that.
Marc:Let's go.
Guest:Why not?
Marc:We got a couple more hours, right?
Marc:But I see like there's critics, like you're giving critics the opportunity to throw around words like nihilism, existentialism, absurdism.
Marc:And I have to assume that you, did you guys have discussions where it's like, this is nihilism versus existentialism?
Marc:Yeah, completely.
Guest:And we were a little scared of like, oh my God, we're so underqualified.
Guest:But also there's something exciting about getting audiences to chew on something juicy and kind of scary.
Guest:Oh, for sure.
Guest:I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that I used to be basically a fundamentalist Christian.
Guest:I believed that the Bible was the word of God and everything was true.
Guest:And to live like that for most of your life, I basically fell off around... Meeting me?
Guest:The second half of college, yeah.
Guest:I broke you.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I really didn't try to.
Guest:I didn't try to.
Guest:Poor guy.
Guest:To have all of that pulled away from me was terrifying and destabilizing.
Guest:And I spent the rest of my life, I'm still going through it, I think, just trying to figure out what do I truly believe?
Guest:But specifically with this movie, I found myself really grateful for the realization that maybe nothing has inherent meaning.
Guest:And I was like, oh, this is interesting.
Guest:It is existentialism.
Guest:Some people call it an optimistic nihilism or whatever.
Guest:I was like, this will be a fun challenge for us if we can start a movie where the main character is terrified of the idea of nihilism, that there is no inherent meaning in anything.
Guest:And so when her daughter says it, she's like, oh, no, you've become evil.
Guest:This is bad.
Guest:I got to save you.
Guest:And then for by the end of the film for her to realize, oh, there's something incredibly freeing about this because now I'm not hung up by all these definitions and rules and labels.
Guest:And instead, I can just see you as my daughter.
Guest:You know, there's something very freeing about having all that shaken away so you can just look at reality for what it is in that moment.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:And so that becomes the way that the barrier between the two of them is lifted.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because having grown up with that discipline and that kind of brainwashing, I didn't grow up like that.
Marc:So I realized that what's even weirder is if you don't have religion or you don't have –
Marc:You know, a structure dictating what is right and wrong in terms of how you're supposed to live your life.
Marc:You kind of self-generate it.
Marc:And so when you see yourself in routines, you realize, like, there's no one dictating this but me and my fear.
Marc:So how do I break out of this dumb thing I'm doing just because I'm afraid to let in something else?
Guest:And is this something that you were able to vocalize even from a young age, being someone who didn't have – No, I was just uncomfortable.
Marc:And I always thought that everyone else had it figured out but me and that I was always sort of awkward.
Marc:So I became funny guy out of reflex.
Marc:But I can't imagine the brain fuck of –
Marc:fundamental Christianity to be terrified on that level and to have that as, well, this is, this is how you're going to not go to hell.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, it's terrifying.
Guest:It's, it, it definitely fucked with me.
Marc:And your parents are still in.
Guest:Um, yeah.
Guest:I mean, my, my mother was always in and my father was actually an atheist.
Guest:So that was, thank God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A little balance.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I do think that like, the funny thing about that was like, as a kid that really, that really messes with you.
Guest:Cause every day you're sitting at dinner and you're like, if I don't save my dad, you're
Guest:If I don't save my dad.
Guest:So that becomes part of your agenda.
Guest:I got to save my dad.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And if you don't, you fail him because God put you on this earth to save him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it's the whole thing as a kid.
Guest:It was like, if you want to know why I had white hairs growing up and why I was always anxious and why I was always, it's a lot of responsibility.
Guest:It's a lot of things, but it's the Christianity thing.
Guest:It's being the kid of an immigrant.
Guest:It's the,
Guest:mental health thing.
Guest:I had suicidal ideation.
Guest:I don't know how I survived high school.
Guest:I was so miserable.
Guest:Do you think you're better at asking for help now?
Guest:Like when you're in a low place?
Guest:I am better, but that's only because I was so bad at it before.
Guest:I have a lot of room for improvement.
Guest:We were working together as you lost your faith, and we only talked about it through the work.
Guest:It wasn't like you were like, hey man, I'm really spiraling.
Marc:Well, that's the interesting thing about art, though, because I dated a painter for years who was a dark-minded person, but she would paint very bright, beautiful things almost as an antidepressant.
Marc:So I would imagine that the appeal of animation and having that kind of control to make things that made you feel good and took you out of...
Marc:the fear that there's something almost anti-depressant about the nature of that.
Guest:Definitely, definitely.
Guest:Filmmaking is incredible because you're playing God for a second.
Guest:For a moment, you're pretending that you actually are able to fight entropy and the chaos and organize it into something, and it can be very empowering.
Marc:Well, that's what this movie's about, because really entropy and chaos...
Marc:Kind of rain.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And then bring it all back to, like, you know, they're going to be okay, these two.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Good job, fellas.
Guest:Stop it.
Guest:It just makes me think, like, people listening, you know, you can ask for help.
Guest:Oh, yeah, there you go.
Guest:Or make a little art and explore it.
Guest:True.
Guest:But, like, don't just bottle it up and you're not alone.
Marc:Yeah, and don't be afraid of vulnerability.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:But why didn't you tell them you were spiraling?
Marc:That's just not my style.
Marc:It's funny.
Marc:You're going to suffer alone.
Guest:Even as we both do therapy, we still don't.
Guest:We still mostly talk about things through the work.
Marc:Do you go through to filmmakers' couple counseling?
Marc:We've talked about it.
Marc:Oh, that'd be funny.
Marc:Do those exist?
Marc:Is there someone out there?
Marc:I don't think anything... You dictate what a couple is.
Guest:That's true.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:totally I've talked about it a lot and I yeah I always joke that it's like we're work married yeah well you are I was just in therapy this morning and learning about this like work I have this homework to do this worksheet with my partner and I was like oh man I want to do this worksheet with Dan too you can yeah it sounds great yeah that'd be interesting yeah yeah well
Guest:You up for it?
Guest:I'll keep you posted.
Marc:You might as well do it now before you guys get to that point where you're like, I'm going to do my own movie.
Guest:There's this worksheet that I guess Brene Brown invented.
Guest:But you know the one, the worksheet I already showed you and John?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where you just go through this list of 100 values.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then you pick the two that mean the most to you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's just a way to kind of like figure out like, oh, where's my center?
Guest:And there's something so insightful about asking someone to pick these two.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And being like, oh, that's.
Guest:that's what you care about, you know?
Guest:Oh, like your largest value is fun and friendship.
Guest:You know, like, whoa, or my biggest value is like, you know, whatever.
Guest:Stewardship is what our producer picked.
Guest:And I was like, what does stewardship mean?
Guest:You nerd.
Guest:He's trying to be vulnerable and you make fun of him.
Guest:And then he explained it to me and it was genuinely insightful and kind of beautiful.
Guest:The sensitive bully.
Guest:That is definitely his role.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tough love.
Guest:I love like teasing people I love.
Guest:But like it actually was like, oh my God, that's the perfect value for a producer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Holy shit.
Guest:I'm so lucky I met a steward.
Marc:Holy cow.
Marc:It's nice to have a steward in your life occasionally.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:But the homework is to then pick a lot of them, figure out which ones you share, which ones you don't share.
Guest:I love her.
Guest:I interviewed her.
Marc:I remember seeing her TED Talk and I didn't even know what I was feeling, but I'm like, she has all the answers.
Marc:No way.
Marc:And I was so, when I interviewed her, I was like out of my mind.
Guest:Yeah, that's amazing.
Marc:Did you get all the answers you wanted?
Marc:Have you figured out life?
Marc:No, what I got was, and that would, you know, I didn't realize because, you know, my nature, especially with people that impress me is, you know, I idealize them.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:And, you know, part of this, the experience of doing this podcast is realizing like, oh, this is another person.
Guest:Barack Obama's boring.
Marc:Yeah, he's just some guy.
Marc:But the fact that Brene Brown was just sort of this Texan kind of party girl in college.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I was like, no, you've always been an emotional genius.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that was, I love that part.
Marc:I love that.
Marc:That's so funny.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Well, it was great talking to you guys.
Marc:And just the fact that you are where you are must be an amazing feeling.
Marc:But I do hope you win something.
Guest:The fact that we are where we are is so surreal.
Guest:We've already won too much.
Marc:I'm looking forward to seeing you at the thing on the television.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Thank you so much, Mark.
Marc:Yeah, thanks for talking.
Guest:You'll get to see me have a panic attack live on TV.
Marc:That'd be great.
Marc:Which one is going to do that?
Marc:Me.
Marc:Okay, good.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:You got one coming.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:That's fun.
Marc:I like when they started learning things about each other there at the end.
Marc:That's always great when I have two guests and when that happens.
Marc:Everything Everywhere All at Once is available to buy or rent on digital platforms and is streaming on Showtime.
Marc:Hang out for a second, people.
Marc:Please hang out.
Marc:Hey, folks, thank you for all the recent Ask Mark Anything questions.
Marc:We just posted a new episode for Full Marin subscribers, so you can check that out right now, which includes some revealing answers.
Marc:A few years ago, you mentioned accidentally sending a text about a famous couple you knew to one of the two in that couple.
Marc:It was a bit vague and you wouldn't mention their names.
Marc:Can you say who it is now?
Marc:Yeah, it was husband.
Marc:If you want to know who that was, sign up for the full Marin now so you can hear that and all our bonus episodes and get every episode of WTF ad free.
Marc:Sign up using the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod dot com and click on WTF plus.
Marc:Tomorrow, Brendan and Chris will be back on the full Marin for another Friday show.
Marc:Next week here on the podcast, we have Austin Butler from Elvis on Monday and Hong Chow from the whale and the menu on Thursday.
Marc:Here's something I'm working on.
Marc:Yeah, I'm working on it.
Marc:Don't tell anybody.
guitar solo
guitar solo
.
.
.
Thank you.
Guest:guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.
Marc:You know what's up.