Episode 1647 - Scott Frank
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:Nicks?
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:It's what's happening.
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast WTF.
Marc:It's been my podcast for almost 16 years.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How you doing today on the show?
Marc:I talked to Scott Frank.
Marc:He's a writer, director, producer and one of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood.
Marc:He wrote the screenplays for Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, Logan and a lot more, including dozens of uncredited rewrites on films like Saving Private Ryan and Gravity.
Marc:He's the writer and director of the Netflix series Godless and The Queen's Gambit, as well as the new crime thriller Department Q, which I watched all of.
Marc:You know, I've never been a binge watching series guy, but I've had a few guests lately where I get it.
Marc:I get how it's satisfying.
Marc:And Department Q is very satisfying.
Marc:And I also watched Friends and Neighbors.
Marc:And now I didn't get all the screeners.
Marc:So now I'm hanging out, just hanging here like everyone else waiting for Friday.
Marc:For the end of that thing, anyway, my buddy Jack came over and I love Jack.
Marc:I've known Jack for years.
Marc:We became friends back in the San Francisco days.
Marc:I guess that would have been, geez, when was that man?
Marc:92, 93, somewhere in there.
Marc:And we don't stay in touch as much as we should because sometimes, you know, friendships, it's not even that they get strained.
Marc:All of a sudden you just, time flies.
Marc:No, I don't even like that.
Marc:Time, you just kind of realize one day like, oh, fuck, I haven't talked to that guy in a month or two or three or six.
Marc:I can't even really remember the last time we hung out, but it had been a while.
Yeah.
Marc:And it's just an interesting moment when you haven't seen a friend in a while and your contemporaries and you look at him and you go like, wow, we are old guys.
Marc:And look, I'm not saying I'm old.
Marc:I'm not whining about it, but I'm 61.
Marc:You know, when I was 15 and someone told me they were 61, I'm like, holy shit.
Marc:That guy's almost gone.
Marc:But now I'm 61 and Jack's a couple of years older than me.
Marc:My buddy Steve, who I've known since college, he just turned 63.
Marc:There's a zone of aging that seems to happen in, you know, around 60 to 65 where you make this one of the major turns physically.
Marc:And that's just my speculating.
Marc:But it just was this moment where I'm like, oh, oh, man.
Marc:Because Jack doesn't have kids either.
Marc:And so we can't really judge ourselves against their growth or anything else.
Marc:So there's some part of us that are still 1994.
Marc:There's some part of me, I think, that's still like 1980.
Marc:But I think there's some part of me that's 1972.
Marc:They all exist within me.
Marc:And and a lot of them haven't really aged.
Marc:But there is this current of I don't know if it's youthful thinking.
Marc:It's just not really knowing if you're just spending most of the time alone or with one other person that you see a lot.
Marc:You just don't know until you see a pal you haven't seen in a year or so with that.
Marc:Like, oh, my.
Marc:It's happening, dude.
Marc:Look at us.
Marc:Because like so many of the cities I've lived in have changed dramatically over time.
Marc:So many of the people that I knew are either gone or have disappeared to where I don't even know where they are.
Marc:He was talking about San Francisco and we were there in the 90s and how amazing it was before it all crashed.
Marc:COVID really knocked the shit out of that place.
Marc:And all this stuff that him and I were brought up on, you know, we, you know, I grew up in, I mean, in terms of formative years.
Marc:So I graduated high school in 81.
Marc:And I was 10 and 60 and 73, 15 and 78.
Marc:And all the stuff that we were picking up was the stuff left over from the 70s.
Marc:And everything that San Francisco represented, all the free love and sort of celebration of weirdness and
Marc:the embracing of the gay community and all the sort of wild underground comics, underground art, all the weirdness of New York and L.A., all the freedom of expression that used to define some of these cities, all the beautiful diversity of creativity and just like pushing the envelope to find out, you know, what is the edge of the human expression, all that stuff is,
Marc:is exactly what's being steamrolled and buried today with anti-diversity policy, anti-diversity movement, anti-gay movement.
Marc:All this stuff, you know, moving towards this homogenization of mediocrity and thick-mindedness and bigotry is a fucking disaster.
Marc:For the arts, for creativity, for human potential, for things that are interesting and provocative.
Marc:It's all being pushed aside in the name of anti-woke policy or in the name of anti-censorship.
Marc:So we can do hack jokes about vulnerable, marginalized communities.
Marc:It's just such a...
Marc:It's so like when I was talking to Jack and what we kind of grew up with, you know, our crumb, weird records, all kinds of strange like the residents, like just just the entire expanse of and I've watched that Pee Wee Herman documentary, half of it, the world he came from, the arts of the 70s.
Marc:It's just all of that.
Marc:But it was defining and essential and interesting.
Marc:And now we're just moving into this zone of authoritarian boredom and fear.
Marc:And it's such a fucking shame.
Marc:It's such a fucking shame to have people on podcasts looking at some of the greatest art of the 20th century and going like, I could do that.
Marc:It's just so thick minded, out of context.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:without any sort of sense of open-mindedness or exploration.
Marc:And these are people that pay a lot of lip service to freedom of mind and freedom of speech.
Marc:And it just fits so snugly into a very fascist point of view.
Marc:And it's just, it's heartbreaking above everything else.
Marc:It's angering and it's scary, but above everything else, the sort of movement to erase...
Marc:the kind of progressive and truly edgy creativity that was evolving and progressing in music and painting and dance and writing in, uh, you know, live performance.
Marc:It's just, it's such a fucking heartbreaking thing to grow up with such an, an exciting, fascinating,
Marc:full spectrum of human expression and just seeing that just bulldozed also just by the nature of media in general.
Marc:It's just sad.
Marc:And I guess this is like an old guy talking, Hey, what about what's going on now?
Marc:It's not the same.
Marc:It doesn't have the same visceral connection.
Marc:It doesn't have the blood guts and soul and sweat of, you know, actually being around exciting things happening and
Marc:Is this just me being old?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I do know that I just did the beginning of the press junkets for the show Stick, which premieres June 4th on Apple TV.
Marc:Me and Owen and Mariana and Peter and Lily.
Marc:We're all doing sort of press tour stuff.
Marc:That's going to be exciting.
Marc:I haven't watched any of it.
Marc:I'm going to watch it with everybody else or maybe not watch it at all because that's what Owen does.
Marc:I can follow his lead.
Marc:It's not great to watch yourself.
Marc:Sometimes it is, but usually...
Marc:It's not great.
Marc:But everybody seems to like the show.
Marc:Also, if you're going to be in New York on June 14th or 15th and you want to come to the showings of Are We Good, the documentary about me, the premiere is on the 14th.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour to get tickets to that.
Marc:And I don't know, a lot of things going on, a lot of things going on, a lot of them bad.
Marc:But in my life, you know, if I can continue to celebrate what I believe real creativity is and just hope to God that people are out there still doing it, still pushing the envelope in a way that takes real risks.
Marc:God, I hope you're out there.
Marc:I'll be looking for you.
Marc:So, look, Scott Frank is here.
Marc:His new series, Department Q, premieres on Netflix today.
Marc:And it's good.
Marc:It's a good watch.
Marc:It's one of those kind of traumatized, angry police situations.
Marc:Cold cases.
Marc:You know, I don't know the genre, but it turns out that it's better that I don't binge these kind of shows because I can't stop.
Marc:And I guess that's the idea, but I've managed not to get too completely absorbed by too many of them.
Marc:But I really enjoyed this one and I enjoyed talking to Scott.
Marc:And so I'll let you listen to it now.
Marc:And also...
Marc:I got a pretty big announcement on Monday.
Marc:Got a pretty big announcement on Monday.
Marc:This is me talking to Scott Frank.
Marc:I think people get very, you know, very comfortable with their discomfort.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Mine manifests itself in catastrophic thinking and dread and, you know.
Guest:I catastrophize over everything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then I, I, it stays in my brain.
Guest:And then I also.
Guest:Spend the day with it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why not?
Guest:I would sit down to read a book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I, I would still feel anxious.
Guest:Like maybe I shouldn't be doing this.
Guest:Maybe I should be working.
Guest:Maybe I should be.
Guest:And then, you know, and then in our, our world, our business, nothing is secure, you know, and, and especially when with kids and everything.
Guest:And I, the more I, you know, and this is,
Guest:It didn't get better.
Guest:It started to get worse as I got older.
Guest:Just pile it on.
Guest:Yeah, that's what's happening.
Marc:It's worse.
Marc:Yeah, everything gets worse as you get older.
Marc:I know, but the odd thing is that now you're financially more comfortable.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's not necessarily that you have a guarantee of a job, but it seems like you do all right.
Marc:At some point, you've got to look at your resume and go, like, I've never stopped working.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But still, it's like telling a manic depressant to just cheer up.
Guest:Is it, though?
Guest:I think it is.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I think it is.
Guest:I think that for me, I couldn't, I tried meditating.
Guest:I tried a lot of different things.
Guest:And I hear meditation is great.
Guest:I was probably the wrong time to try it when I tried it.
Marc:I mean, I've tried it.
Marc:Yeah, I think if you get a practice going, like in, you know, like my late partner, you know, she would do it twice a day.
Marc:She was TM.
Marc:Twice a day.
Marc:But, yeah, she was strict, you know, TM.
Marc:I mean, that's what you do, 20 minutes twice a day.
Marc:And, like, 20 minutes twice a day, it's fucking nothing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there's some things become so big in my head.
Marc:Like, I don't have any sense of time.
Marc:Like, you know, you're coming.
Marc:You're supposed to be here at 2, but you're coming over, and I'm like, I'm up at 9, and I want to go to the gym before you come.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, fuck, do I have enough time?
Marc:It's like you have four hours.
Yeah.
Guest:So I am the same way.
Guest:And I feel like 20 minutes in the morning, are you fucking kidding me?
Guest:I need to get going.
Guest:That's my good writing time.
Guest:That's my, you know, and especially when I started directing too, you know, everything was too big in my head.
Guest:I realized, and my son said to me, my son, who's sober, a lot of people in my family are, and he would say to me, you're not...
Guest:Dad, you don't enjoy anything.
Guest:You have all these things, you have this great life, and you don't even seem to really enjoy it.
Guest:It's like you're in, you know.
Guest:I'm the same way.
Guest:Fight or flight all the time.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know if I'm in fight or flight, but I don't.
Marc:My whole new special that I just recorded has to do with this, about the inability, some of the jokes, inability to identify happiness.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And, you know, anxiety and SSRIs.
Marc:But like you're saying, this idea of identifying happiness, number one, and then sort of like experiencing joy, number two, I'm like, that sounds like bullshit.
Guest:Or being in the moment, being comfortable being uncomfortable.
Guest:Oh, I'm definitely that.
Guest:I can do that.
Guest:I don't know that I could.
Guest:I had to kind of fix everything right away.
Guest:And the irony is, in work, I'm a big believer—
Guest:You know, when it comes to writing especially, it's messy.
Guest:You have to be comfortable with it being wrong until it's right for a year or two or whenever, however long it takes.
Guest:I don't know how you do it.
Guest:It's just messy.
Guest:I don't know how you do it.
Guest:And you—it's why I hate all these, you know, a lot of the film school programs and books and podcasts and things that try to organize it and turn you into a good student.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I really think that the great stuff comes from the mess and the happy accidents, but you have to really—
Guest:You constantly tell yourself that this that eventually, like you have the flu, you know, you're going to get better.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Just tell yourself, I'm going to get to the other end.
Marc:But also, you've got to do the work.
Marc:You have to do the work.
Marc:You have to sit there and do the work.
Marc:I mean, that's I mean, I think that is the hardest thing.
Marc:I think that people that are coming into writing without really doing it.
Marc:You know, they're looking for a system.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So they can write within the system.
Marc:But if you don't have just the need or the compulsion or the discipline to just write the fuck out of things, what are you going to do?
Guest:No, listen, this is one of my favorite subjects.
Guest:And it's the talent or the way of thinking even.
Guest:And so they tell you if you just follow everything that's in here.
Guest:Yeah, and then you write.
Guest:You have an outline.
Guest:You have this.
Guest:And you read scripts and things where people are behaving because the script says so.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, but also it's just like, I hate it.
Marc:I hate writing and I'm, and I'm a good writer, but I hate it.
Marc:You know, I've written scripts.
Marc:I, you know, I do this weekly thing that keeps me engaged with prose anyways, and, and sort of, you know, first person stuff.
Marc:But like when I've done shows and I've had to write scripts, it's to me, it's like, Oh my God, it's hard.
Marc:It's hard.
Marc:It's miserable.
Marc:And it's like, I just want it to be done.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, like, I'm not, you know, I'm not.
Marc:But do you find, is there a point, like, I notice what I do with stand-up where I work and I work and I work.
Marc:And then it gets to a point where, yeah, you know, I'm in it.
Marc:I feel good about the work.
Marc:You know, I perform it in a way that doesn't require me to life or death it.
Marc:So is there a point where you're like, yeah, this is good.
Marc:I'm writing.
Yeah.
Guest:No, what it is, what it is, is there's a few minutes a day where it's going really well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where it's subconscious.
Guest:And I always talk about it.
Guest:It's like this ball of dough that lands on the board and you start rolling out that ball of dough.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And as it gets thinner and thinner, you're hoping for another one.
Guest:Oh, right.
Marc:Drop and hit.
Marc:But I mean, this is like, you know, you've written some great movies.
Marc:Little Man Tate was the big first one.
Marc:Get Shorty.
Marc:Out of Sight, which I just watched recently.
Marc:The Interpreter.
Marc:The Wolverine and Logan.
Marc:Marley and me.
Marc:The Interpreter for me.
Marc:Like there are certain movies.
Marc:I was trying to make a list for myself while I was on the treadmill today of modern masterpieces.
Marc:You know, in terms of like underappreciated movies.
Marc:And one of the ones that you wrote.
Marc:Which is out of sight, I think is one.
Marc:Michael Clayton is one.
Marc:Yeah, it's a perfect movie.
Marc:It is, right?
Marc:It's a perfect movie.
Marc:I cannot shut up about it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I get excited.
Marc:And I'll tell you something.
Marc:I'm going to put Sicario on the list.
Marc:I love Sicario.
Marc:I'm going to put Sicario on the list.
Guest:There are a few movies that I... There's nothing wrong.
Guest:They're absolutely perfect movies.
Guest:Sicario, I would absolutely... You can put that on the list.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Three Kings.
Marc:Love Three Kings.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then like... But Pollock...
Marc:You know, who, did he direct the interpreter?
Marc:He did, he directed it.
Marc:So you work with Sidney?
Marc:He was my mentor.
Marc:The best.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The best.
Marc:And some of the movies he directed, grown-up movies.
Guest:Grown-up movies.
Guest:For grown-up people.
Guest:Right, where they never get together.
Guest:The couple never gets together.
Guest:That was his thing.
Guest:And he, I've had some really good mentors in my life.
Guest:I've been really lucky that way.
Guest:Who was the first one?
Guest:Lindsay Duran, great producer, was the first one who taught me how to write.
Guest:Then Sidney, then Bill Goldman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, Bill Goldman, yeah.
Guest:Bill Goldman.
Guest:He must have been old.
Guest:This was 1990.
Guest:I was 29.
Marc:Just to blow some smoke up for a minute, like, absence of malice, The Firm.
Marc:The Firm is great.
Marc:What a great fucking movie.
Marc:Great.
Guest:Why isn't that celebrated?
Guest:It's a really good movie.
Guest:Random Hearts.
Guest:Random Hearts I have more trouble with.
Guest:The later ones, Havana, Random Hearts.
Guest:Even The Interpreter I have some trouble with.
Guest:Jeremiah Johnson.
Guest:I love Jeremiah.
Guest:That's a perfect movie.
Guest:Three Days of the Condor.
Guest:You haven't mentioned that one.
Guest:That's amazing for that day.
Guest:One of the greatest lines ever at the end.
Marc:Jeremiah Johnson, for me, because no one really kind of lumps it in with those kind of revisionist Westerns.
Guest:This is fantastic.
Guest:And it was.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:How about Will Gere in that, too?
Guest:Oh, the best.
Guest:Just unbelievable.
Guest:I love that movie.
Guest:That's a perfect movie.
Guest:I used to watch that and Outlaw Josie Wales on the same day.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Another perfect movie.
Marc:I watched The Unforgiven pretty frequently.
Marc:A perfect movie also.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:And you know what's interesting about it is like—
Marc:He gets all the motifs in, right, of all the Westerns.
Marc:And he does it pretty well.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Maybe not all of them.
Marc:That's not exactly true.
Marc:Like, there's some Westerns where, like, the ones that I think that are massive failures because of their need to—they overreached was, like, Silverado.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, Kazin's smart guy.
Marc:Yeah, very smart.
Marc:Smart writer.
Marc:But, like, I don't know what happened to that movie.
Marc:It should be good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it seemed like he was trying to do too much.
Guest:You remember it?
Guest:I do remember it.
Guest:I remember it being a lot of fun.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I remember it being a lot of fun.
Guest:I remember, and listen, when I wrote and made my own Western, I watched everything for a year.
Guest:I only read Westerns and only watched Westerns.
Guest:What, you mean Godless or a movie?
Guest:Godless.
Guest:That's all I looked at was Westerns.
Marc:a genre study yeah i thought i really i love them but i thought i don't i i'm if i can't make people talk i can't write it and i was worried about writing lines like let's rustle up a bunch of grub right right right right yeah yeah why you know it's i think oddly in my memory and i'll watch it again is sort of a very finite and kind of a perfect western is um a pale writer and
Marc:Pale Rider's very good.
Guest:It's very good.
Guest:I like Pale Rider a lot.
Guest:It's very much— It's a warm-up, though, more for Unforgiven.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Marc:Because he kind of limited the scope.
Marc:Outsider comes into the town, saves the town people, goes away.
Marc:Who was that guy?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Which is what?
Guest:Shane kind of.
Guest:Shane, which I love, is for me another perfect.
Guest:Searchers.
Guest:Searchers.
Guest:I get bored with the searchers.
Guest:I like it because he's like a flawed guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, he's a racist for starters.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And there's a great moment in it, too.
Guest:There's first of all, there aren't a lot of close ups, which I think is great because everybody shoots.
Guest:There are so many close ups today.
Guest:And that movie proves that not every other shot.
Guest:Well, that's because he was in love with the landscape.
Guest:But there's one moment, though, where when he shows up and the wife might I forget her name now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she takes his coat and you see her just rub the coat as she's about to put it on the chair.
Guest:And that tells you everything in that.
Guest:I love little moments like that.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:She's settled.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Butch and Sundance.
Guest:That's also terrific.
Guest:And that script is a ball to read.
Guest:In fact, that's what made me want to write scripts.
Guest:I read it when I was 11 and there's a line in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was at the it was at the Jemco checkout.
Guest:So I'm a little older than you probably.
Guest:But I'm 61.
Guest:How old could you?
Guest:Oh, you look good.
Guest:It's all that SSRI.
Guest:Or all your insanity.
Guest:They're both.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there's, you know, when you're 11 years old and you read in a screenplay, which I'd never read before, never read a screenplay before.
Guest:And it says, Butch delivers the most aesthetically exquisite kick in the balls in the history of modern American cinema.
Marc:And that was Goldman?
Guest:Goldman.
Guest:I went, I'm 11.
Guest:I'm a young kid.
Guest:This is what I want to do.
Guest:I want to do that.
Guest:And Dog Day Afternoon was the other one that.
Marc:Dude, I can't stop watching it.
Marc:I had them screen it at Cinematheque because they asked me, like, you know, you want to host a screening?
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, let's do that.
Guest:He's one of my favorite directors as well, the other Sidney.
Guest:And there's no score in that movie.
Guest:There's just the Elton John song at the beginning and then no music for it.
Marc:And also, it's just one ride.
Guest:Yeah, it's one ride.
Guest:It all happens in real time.
Guest:Yeah, and then makes this fucking left turn in the middle of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And the audience goes with it.
Guest:They go completely with it.
Marc:With the lover?
Marc:Yeah, he's got a wife who's a guy.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But it's just so, the intensity of it.
Marc:And just like that moment where Casale, is that how you say his name?
Guest:John Casale.
Marc:John Casale, yeah.
Marc:Casale.
Marc:He's like, did you mean it?
Marc:Because I'll do it.
Marc:I'll kill him.
Marc:I'll kill him.
Marc:And he realized like, oh, no, he's got to manage that guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like this whole.
Marc:What country do you want to go to?
Marc:Wyoming.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the fact that it's a botched robbery from the second the movie starts.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The kid who was supposed to drive.
Guest:He says, I can't go.
Guest:I can't.
Guest:I have to go.
Guest:Gives, throws him the car keys.
Guest:And the gun.
Guest:And the gun.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And then he tries to open the box with the flowers with the gun in it and in the bank.
Guest:And it's a mess.
Guest:You're laughing so hard.
Guest:And I remember sitting there in the audience and you're laughing at the beginning.
Guest:And when he gets to the point where he's chanting Attica, you know, the Attica, everyone in the audience is applauding and screaming with him.
Guest:And then it gets dead silent at a certain point in the audience.
Guest:audience it gets super quiet and um it was amazing and you're looking around there were three movies that i remember watching in that as a kid as a kid i was like i think dogged after i was probably 14 right there was that there was harold and maude which did that because hal ashby another of my favorite directors oh my god to watch uh uh uh you know being there and sure shampoo last coming home coming home the last detail and coming home fucking john voight what happened to that guy
Marc:Well, you know, who knows actors?
Marc:You know, we all make assumptions because of what they do.
Marc:But, you know, you don't know them.
Marc:You know, and I don't know.
Marc:I don't know what his dad was like.
Marc:I don't know what any of them are like.
Marc:But, you know, the gift of the actor is we never knew who they were as people.
Marc:Well, I wish I still didn't know him.
Marc:Well, that's the problem.
Marc:No one shuts up now and everyone, you know.
Marc:But he's particularly bad.
Guest:But that movie is great.
Guest:He's amazing.
Guest:Bruce Dern is amazing in that movie.
Guest:And the other one was that really, believe it or not, Robert Aldrich, I think.
Guest:The best.
Guest:The Longest Yard.
Guest:His version of The Longest Yard.
Marc:Was it worth it?
Marc:When you hit the game ball?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When he didn't know if he was going to win or not.
Marc:So would you call that?
Marc:That's the denouement.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's the beginning of the third act.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Is when he decides to win the game.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Oh, it's so good.
Marc:It's the best.
Marc:Eddie Albert.
Marc:Kill him.
Marc:Kill him.
Guest:Shoot him.
Marc:He's trying to run.
Guest:Shoot him.
Marc:He's trying to run.
Marc:And then that great character actor.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Ed, Ed, what is it, Ed?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I forgot.
Marc:But Aldrich did, he'd been around a long time.
Marc:Oh, yeah, Baby Jane, whatever happened to Baby Jane.
Marc:The Big Knife.
Marc:I don't think I've seen it.
Marc:Really?
Marc:No.
Marc:With Rod Steiger and Jack Palance?
Marc:I've never seen it.
Marc:Shelley Winter?
Marc:I've never seen it.
Marc:Oh, you've got to find it.
Marc:It's a Hollywood movie.
Marc:It's about an actor who does a contract.
Marc:An actor who had integrity.
Marc:Imagine because it's Odette's, he was part of the Living Theater and now he's in Hollywood.
Marc:And he does this contract with this studio.
Marc:And Steiger plays the head of the studio.
Marc:And he sells his soul.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Guest:It's one I've never seen.
Guest:There's a few that are embarrassing that I've never seen.
Guest:But he also did Kiss Me Deadly, which is great, which is fun.
Guest:He did the Frisco Kid.
Guest:Yeah, I'm the Frisco Kid.
Guest:I just watched that again.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:So funny.
Marc:All of those.
Marc:But, all right, so you read that at 11, and I imagine you saw the movie.
Marc:And so what is it that, you know, sets you spinning?
Marc:You mentioned there's some alcoholism in your family.
Guest:In not my immediate family, but in my sort of chosen family.
Guest:Oh, but how'd you grow up?
Guest:I grew up very boring.
Guest:I grew up, my dad was a pilot for Pan American.
Guest:That's not boring.
Guest:You get to go in the cockpit?
Guest:Oh, yeah, all the time.
Guest:That's not boring at all.
Marc:That's crazy to know what goes on in a cockpit.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:And he loved to fly.
Guest:And pilots are like cops.
Guest:All they talk about are flying.
Guest:They all get together and they sit around.
Guest:They talk about flying.
Guest:They love it.
Guest:They love it.
Guest:And they talk about when you listen to the black box recordings, my dad would always say there before they take off, they're always talking about the three S's, sex, salary and seniority.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, have you watched this new Nathan Fielder thing?
Marc:Yeah, I just started.
Marc:Wow.
Wow.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:They should probably manage those conversations better.
Marc:Yeah, they should.
Marc:Yeah, they probably should.
Marc:Because even when I'm on a plane now, and you know when a pilot has to take it out of autopilot and fly the plane and you can feel it?
Marc:I'm like, he's having fun.
Marc:I love it when they're flying the plane.
Guest:Well, they might not even be, you might not be right.
Guest:Yeah, they might be autopilot.
Guest:Because autopilot, they can, I don't think they do, but the autopilot, they can land everything now.
Guest:And I'm not sure.
Guest:It depends.
Guest:Maybe they are.
Guest:Maybe they are.
Guest:And I'm always wondering.
Guest:But he loved his job.
Guest:And it was great.
Guest:And he was a captain.
Guest:And he flew everywhere.
Guest:And it was before Pan Am.
Guest:He used to fly all over the Asian Pacific routes.
Guest:Those were his favorites.
Guest:Did he have his own plane?
Guest:He had a little Cessna that he used to pick me up at UC Santa Barbara in sometimes.
Guest:Where did you grow up?
Guest:Northern California, Los Gatos.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:In the Bay Area.
Guest:So you just fly down?
Guest:Just fly down.
Guest:So did you fly?
Guest:I flew, but then I stopped and I still could, but I stopped because I'm a daydreamer and I thought I'm a danger to myself and others.
Guest:I should not be in a plane because I find myself driving and I go, wait.
Guest:I was supposed to get off the freeway eight exits ago.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Guest:And flying, you can't make mistakes.
Guest:And you're so, you have to really go through the checklist.
Guest:And by the way, my dad was a lot like Sidney that way.
Guest:Sidney Pollack believed, because he was a pilot.
Guest:He was a really good pilot.
Guest:But if you just follow the checklist, everything will go fine.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And so you had to, you know, I can't, like, I don't know.
Marc:So you're in the cockpit with your dad.
Marc:Is he showing you how to fly?
Guest:He's showing me how to fly.
Guest:And just right away, whenever he takes anyone up, he just says, okay, you got it.
Guest:And let's go of it and let you fly.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:The panic.
Guest:And the story I would always tell, which just contributes to my anxiety.
Guest:I've told it a lot.
Guest:But it's, he would say, okay, the engine cuts out.
Guest:Where are you going to land right now?
Yeah.
Guest:Where are you going to land right now?
Guest:The engine's gone.
Guest:Where are you going to land?
Guest:And so it made me in my life and career always think about where am I going to land?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:This isn't going to, I have to think about where am I going to land?
Guest:Nothing, nothing lasts.
Guest:Also, you know, being a Jew, you're taught that nothing lasts because history has fucking proven that.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That you could be having a great life and in they come with boots and guns.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Off you go.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think we're probably a couple down on the list, but it's happening now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not to Jews.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I'm trying to look to see where I can get a foreskin quickly.
Guest:Otherwise, I'll see you at Guantanamo.
Guest:We can meet up there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Your identity's in the cloud, buddy.
Marc:You can't hide behind a foreskin anymore.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They know where we are and what we're doing, whoever they are, whoever they decide to be.
Guest:But it does teach you.
Guest:And also, my parents grew up, you know, they were products of the Depression, too.
Guest:So I got a lot of, you know, it's all going to be gone tomorrow.
Guest:You never know.
Guest:You might be doing well today, but you never know.
Guest:And my mom constantly...
Guest:You know, the other thing I love talking about is I would come home and she'd be watching Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin and to go, that's Bobby Sherman.
Guest:He's broke.
Guest:He lost everything.
Guest:He's almost dead right now.
Guest:That's so-and-so.
Guest:They lost all their money.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:They're all done.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I grew up with different, not that same kind of pressure.
Marc:For some reason, my parents were self-involved enough to believe that I had my shit together, which was its own problem.
Marc:But they always thought I would be okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:My grandfather was different.
Marc:He was like, maybe you should get a job at the post office because there's security and you get a pension.
Marc:That was my mom and dad.
Guest:What did your parents do?
Marc:My dad was an orthopedic surgeon and my mom was, I think she wanted to be an artist, but she ended up being some variation of a surgeon's wife.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:But they were just very, they were not equipped to parent.
Marc:They had me when they were very young.
Marc:So what I usually say is I don't see them as parents.
Marc:I see them as people with problems I grew up with.
Marc:And I needed things from them emotionally that I didn't quite get.
Marc:But, you know, you fix it or you live with it.
Marc:Whatever.
Marc:That's my anxiety.
Marc:It's like, who's going to take care of me?
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's a whole other thing.
Marc:And who am I?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Those two.
Marc:But not narcissists that way, just—or were they narcissists?
Marc:No, my dad, I think—like, you know, that word gets bandied about quite a bit.
Marc:But I think both of my parents had—
Marc:Empathy.
Marc:And I think that my father was pretty close to a narcissist, but he was also bipolar.
Marc:So that fortunately kind of breaks the narcissist shell in a way.
Marc:And now he's like, you know, mostly demented.
Marc:So he's become amazing.
Marc:The depression goes away when they have dementia.
Marc:Oh, that's what it takes.
Marc:Yeah, that's all it takes.
Marc:But the narcissism, not so much.
Marc:But yeah, no, he was definitely a kind of megalomaniacal guy.
Marc:Not really equipped to do that stuff.
Marc:But that's my life.
Marc:So you're growing up in this.
Guest:You got siblings?
Guest:I got two siblings.
Guest:I have a twin sister and an older sister.
Guest:Do they take normal lives?
Guest:Very normal lives.
Guest:Happy.
Marc:Not a lot of anxiety going on there.
Marc:Huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so you have a younger one and then a twin?
Guest:I have a twin sister and an older sister.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Marc:Almost four years old.
Marc:But you're the kid like, you know, you're interested in the arts early.
Marc:Yeah, very much.
Marc:So you're getting a pounding by them from day one?
Guest:Um, no, only when I wanted to take it seriously.
Guest:Only when it was, I'm going to school and it's, I'm getting a lot of, you know, doctors can write too.
Guest:Um, Michael Crichton is also a writer, you know, you know what, being an airline pilot, that's good.
Guest:I have sons of, I know a lot of pilots who are writing at the same time.
Marc:You have to get something with security.
Guest:What are you going to fall back?
Guest:You know, and I had a great teacher at Santa Barbara, you know, which was not a famous film program or anything.
Guest:But he was great.
Guest:And he was he used to be a vice president under Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was teaching screenwriting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great teacher.
Guest:And he said to me, you're 19 years old.
Guest:If you have a fallback, you're going to fall back.
Guest:You don't have a family.
Guest:You don't have this.
Guest:Just go for it, you know, and let's see if you know how to write.
Marc:And if you can write and you should chase it.
Marc:And then you get to the point where there is no more fallback.
Guest:There is no more fallback.
Marc:And you know what the fallback always is?
Marc:So when things get dire, let me guess, I could teach.
Marc:I could teach.
Guest:And they are.
Guest:Yeah, I could teach.
Guest:I mean, and so that is, that's the thing.
Guest:And so you just realize that you have to at least try.
Guest:Let the universe tell you that it's not going to happen.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not, you know, as a parent, you want to, I feel like,
Marc:But if you're delusional, which you have to be to pursue a creative life, you're going to push back on the universe.
Marc:Well, I would say reasonably delusional.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So how does that unfold?
Marc:Do you study screenwriting?
Marc:I studied film studies, which is... Yeah, I did that.
Guest:I'm minored in that.
Guest:It's good.
Guest:And so at Santa Barbara, because it didn't have a lot of money or production facilities, that's super interdisciplinary.
Guest:So you're taking art history or
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Other things, and you're kind of looking at other kinds of movies, and you're also really steeped in literature, art history, and film history as well, which is great.
Guest:And as a writer and even as a director, all that stuff I still think about all the time.
Marc:Well, what was the stuff where, you know, at that time—
Marc:Because I remember, you know, I grew up, okay, you're a little older than me, but there was, you know, I took a screenwriting class and I took a history of film class with Roger Manville.
Marc:And I took, I did an art history minor, you know, primarily focusing on the history of photography.
Marc:So, but, you know, there was always this kind of like, well, Chinatown, right?
Yeah.
Marc:I mean, Chinatown is Chinatown.
Marc:That's the script.
Marc:That's the easy go-to, isn't it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It is, right?
Marc:But then you sit there and you toil over it and you're like, yeah, I get it.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:It's pretty perfect.
Marc:Because of the levels, because of what it's really about is political and about greed and real estate.
Marc:I watch it once a year maybe.
Marc:But then when you get into Lumet, right?
Marc:Lumet also.
Marc:But he's very versatile.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like that movie is an anomaly for him.
Marc:I mean, like it is his movie.
Marc:Well, it's a New York.
Marc:Yeah, but still, but stylistically, you know, you look at the black and white, you look at 12 Angry Men.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then if you move through his filmography, he's very adept at different styles.
Marc:Yes, he is.
Marc:And he's not locked in.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But I mean, but that's as a director.
Guest:But I like directors like that.
Guest:William Wyler is another one I love.
Guest:He does The Heiress.
Guest:He does Best Years of Our Lives.
Guest:He's a really interesting filmmaker for me who they're just well-crafted.
Marc:Who is that noir guy?
Marc:I kind of went on a little thing with him, and now I'm forgetting his name.
Marc:What movie?
Marc:It was not the Kubrick killing.
Marc:It was another killing.
Marc:It was called The Killing.
Marc:Oh, Siad Mac?
Guest:Yeah, Siad Mac.
Guest:Yeah, he's interesting.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah, very interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just sort of like matter of fact.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, kind of blocks.
Guest:And that, when I went to college, film noir became the other thing like Sidney Lumet that infected me deeply.
Marc:Yeah, Out of the Past changed my life.
Marc:Lady from Shanghai.
Marc:That's one of the Wells, right?
Guest:Yeah, really, really big effect.
Guest:Yeah, that really was, for me, something amazing.
Guest:Just all the stuff going on and the stuff said and unsaid, and they're all fucked up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I really, really like that.
Guest:Touch of Evil.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Just unhinged.
Guest:Just totally unhinged.
Guest:Totally.
Marc:That was crazy, the famous tracking shot.
Marc:But also his sheriff was kind of something else.
Marc:Just batshit.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:But also, you know, the third man.
Guest:That's an amazing movie.
Guest:An amazing movie.
Marc:But in the arc of your life, though, what do you... I know this is kind of a shitty question.
Marc:What do you see as the...
Marc:the best screenplay that kind of like works for you as a model of a lesson?
Guest:I mean, that's a good question because it leads to the notion that...
Guest:you can be taught something.
Marc:Which is problematic.
Marc:Which is problematic.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also there's, you know, we're talking different genres and, you know, and screenplays have different intentions.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, story is, you have to, it's relative to the story.
Guest:But screenwriting, unlike any other kind of writing...
Guest:Seems to be one of those things where on every side of the equation, people think that there's a way of doing it.
Guest:And especially in this world where we game everything now from politics to marketing to all these things.
Marc:But everybody thinks that all you have to do is – Have an idea.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:An idea.
Marc:And then also, but there's also the bar has been lowered tremendously.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:I mean, only certain things can be successful in a mainstream way.
Marc:But any idiot can make himself a few bucks if he put some bullshit together.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you can't really bullshit with screenwriting because ultimately, I mean, there are bad movies.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But but, you know, if a movie sells, it sells.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And so you work within that.
Marc:And if you're willing to sort of say, like, well, I don't care if this sells.
Marc:This is my vision.
Marc:And then it sells.
Marc:You're like, wow, we got lucky or my new one.
Guest:So but I love the movie.
Guest:But I love the movie.
Guest:And, well, that's a good feeling when you're done with something and you say, I don't care what happens to this.
Guest:I love doing it and I'm happy with it.
Guest:But the problem is when you go to the movies, your disappointment 99.9% of the time is not with the cinematography or the acting or the direction or the music.
Guest:It's with the story.
Guest:Yeah, blame the writer.
Guest:But nobody even knows who wrote anything anymore.
Marc:That's really gotten kind of confused.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, but that's interesting.
Marc:You're saying it like that, given that, you know, you are part of like, you know, dozens and dozens of movies in a capacity of fixing scripts that and your name's not on it.
Marc:You just get to say it now.
Marc:And then people go like, really?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's guild rules, right?
Guest:It's guild rules.
Guest:But I don't even like to people dig it up.
Guest:People will say, did you do this?
Guest:Did you do that?
Guest:And I'll say no, because I didn't.
Guest:I came in.
Guest:Oh, you didn't do the story.
Guest:Or I came in and fixed something, but it's very different when you come in and you do something you're not.
Guest:90% of the time, the writer or writers I'm fixing deserve the credit.
Guest:I don't deserve the credit.
Guest:That just shows you the kind of peculiarities of creation in movie making.
Guest:And the other thing is, but that's a problem.
Guest:And those kinds of movies that I'm fixing are rarely sort of, no one's going to fix a Wes Anderson movie or a Paul Thomas Anderson because they're so singular and we're not taught to do that.
Guest:The movies that I'm fixing are often approached so mechanically that you can fix them or
Guest:Or the studio will say, you know.
Guest:Just do a pass.
Guest:Well, you do a pass.
Guest:Or actors are insecure.
Guest:Can you just do?
Guest:And writers might be good at structure, but the dialogue isn't good.
Guest:Or they have a great idea.
Guest:And screenwriters, because they've been taught this, I think, have confused participation with creation.
Guest:So they think, well, I was there first.
Guest:I should have a credit.
Guest:I was there first.
Guest:That means everything came for me.
Guest:Not really.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it depends.
Guest:It's more complicated than that.
Guest:And the fact that you don't know it's more complicated than that is kind of interesting.
Guest:And then, so that's, and it's a third rail of Guild politics is when you talk about that.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And then some people get their name on there, you know, one way or the other.
Marc:There's two or three names on there.
Guest:I share credit with a couple people that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of whom has a big award nomination.
Guest:Yeah, we're not going to go there, but it's fascinating to me.
Guest:And because I remember sitting there with the co-writer writing together,
Guest:For six weeks from a blank page.
Guest:And that was that.
Guest:And that happens a lot.
Guest:And then you have people shamelessly either arguing that they deserve credit.
Guest:There's a famous case, the movie, the Miracle on Ice movie, Miracle, the hockey movie.
Guest:The writer wrote the script for that movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:found out after the movie was done that somebody had written the same story and the guild and its infinite wisdom gave the first guy sole credit because it was based on a true story so he must have got and it's like stuff like that happens all the time because they don't want to get sued I think so they're so careful so they instead of playing to win they play not to lose all the time and so then it becomes ingrained and because I think
Guest:It's hard to have a career in Hollywood that lasts.
Guest:It's very difficult.
Guest:And I think that you think the credit is the thing.
Guest:And so there's a lot of fight over for credit.
Guest:And I understand because a lot of people are denied credit that deserve it as well.
Guest:But you listen to actors and directors going, yeah, I basically rewrote it.
Guest:I wrote the whole thing.
Guest:And it's like, no, you didn't.
Guest:No, you didn't.
Marc:No.
Marc:So how do you end up like, because you, you know, in terms of the type of movies that you've written, I mean, they're kind of, they go a lot of different places.
Marc:So when, but Little Man Tate was your first big movie.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I wrote that in college.
Guest:You didn't get made until 19.
Guest:And that's an original screenplay.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Original screenplay.
Marc:And that seems like an odd place to start.
Marc:What was the impetus?
Guest:It was a weird impetus.
Guest:I was home for Christmas my sophomore year of school, and I remember the Iran hostage situation was all going on.
Guest:And I remember watching it on TV, and I just woke up in the middle of the night, and I had this idea...
Guest:That I was going to write a series of columns for the Daily Nexus, the school newspaper, written by, called Little Man Tate.
Guest:And it was going to be, the joke was, it was a, you know, eight-year-old kid commenting on world politics.
Guest:Because there was such petulance, I felt, watching everybody screaming and this.
Guest:And I thought, I'm going to have a kid talk about world politics.
Marc:Now there's like thousands and thousands of Little Man Tates.
Marc:Yes, there are.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yes, there are.
Guest:And so that's how it started.
Guest:And then I got into this screenwriting class with Paul Lazarus.
Guest:Harry Cohn's guy?
Guest:Harry Cohn's guy.
Guest:Actually, it was a different teacher the first time named Chuck Wolf, who was also great.
Guest:And I needed an idea for a movie.
Guest:And all I had was the kid and his mother, because he was always going to be talking about his mother.
Guest:And I just started writing it as a script.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:And then it became a thing.
Guest:And it became a thing.
Guest:And that's what got you in?
Guest:It's what got me in.
Guest:But I had to rewrite it quite a bit, you know, because there were lots of movies being made, you know, Gary Coleman and the kid with the 200 IQ.
Guest:And I would just see it's not a really original idea.
Guest:So I have to do something else with it to make it more interesting.
Guest:Oh, and so in that script got you an agent and got you— Got me an agent, got me an office on the Paramount lot when I was 24, 1984.
Guest:Wow, so you're in, and Jodie Foster gets a— Ends up direct later.
Guest:She and Joe Dante was going to direct it for a while.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:And then— What would that movie have been?
Guest:It was actually—the original version of the script was a very black comedy.
Guest:Okay, cool.
Guest:And Jodi, and I really like her version of the movie too, but she was more interested in alternative parenting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And how that works.
Guest:Oh, and that made it a broader appeal?
Guest:I don't know what, it just made it a different movie.
Guest:And I think that, and I really liked the movie and I loved the experience of doing it with her, but it was different than what I had in my head.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we had a great time doing it.
Guest:Also, because it got made nine years later in some ways, and I'd written it at such a young age, it was a little like looking at a high school term paper.
Guest:I lost the feel for it.
Guest:I just lost the feel for it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But ultimately, once you write it and it's in the director's hands, I don't know.
Marc:What's your involvement generally?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It depends on the director.
Guest:It depends on me.
Guest:It depends on what the movie is and how it came together.
Guest:And I was there with her in Cincinnati while she was shooting it.
Guest:I came home because Ken Branagh was going to start shooting Dead again right after that.
Guest:So while that was shooting.
Guest:And he wanted you on set too?
Guest:He did.
Guest:And because he came from the theater, God bless him.
Guest:And again, Jody and I...
Guest:So two actors directing two of my early films.
Guest:The first movie was called Plain Clothes that Martha Coolidge directed.
Guest:You really don't have to seek out or look at it.
Guest:You really don't need to.
Guest:But Ken Marana came from the theater, so he wanted to have, and what was also interesting is they were two actors and we were all the same age.
Guest:And so that was an interesting experience for me.
Guest:And Ken would shoot a couple takes and say, anything you want me to try?
Guest:Anything else?
Guest:And I would look around wondering, who the fuck is he talking to?
Guest:It's not my job.
Guest:Yeah, wait, no, but it's great when he wants to do that.
Guest:And so it was interesting.
Guest:And then gradually, the more time I spent on sets...
Guest:I just realized it's so boring.
Guest:Tell me about it.
Guest:If I'm not directing it, I'm just sitting there.
Guest:You have a voice but no say.
Guest:I find that as an actor.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That the boredom is, yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I'm working on a script.
Marc:I'm looking to direct, and my buddy Sam Lipsight wrote this book.
Marc:And he hammered out, we've gone through, he's writing the script, but I'm kind of coming in, doing passes on it.
Marc:We've been through five versions.
Marc:And I was sort of surprised at my instincts about, you know, taking something from a novel, you know, in terms of how is this a movie?
Marc:Because you have, there's so much more you can do in a novel.
Marc:So you've really got to, you know, figure out what the story is and say, like, all these other stories...
Marc:Got to go.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I mean, I can't imagine what it's to have to do that with Elmar Leonard stuff.
Marc:But you had to deal with that.
Marc:I mean, you had to take that writer and figure out how to make a movie out of those books.
Marc:So what's the challenge there?
Guest:It was hard, and I had a lot of help.
Guest:I had a lot of help.
Guest:From him?
Guest:From, no, from, although he and I were always talking about it, and he, I'll tell you a story about the ending of Out of Sight that he really helped me with in a second, but I had on Get Shorty, both of those movies, I had Jersey films, and people don't realize that Danny DeVito's company, Danny was a real deal producer, an amazing producer, and we had Stacy Sher working for him, who's another real deal producer.
Guest:And so I had help.
Guest:I had help from Barry Sonnenfeld on Get Shorty.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the only reason I give the edge out of sight over Get Shorty is Barry did a broader version of Get Shorty than I had in my head a little bit.
Guest:He wrote a whole script?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:He directed.
Guest:Barry was the director.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And his sensibility, which works great.
Marc:He's a great guy.
Marc:I interviewed that guy.
Guest:He's so much fun.
Guest:And I love the movie.
Guest:So let's be clear.
Guest:I really love the movie.
Guest:Well, you got all those fucking actors, dude.
Guest:But it was different for me in a way than what I had in my... Same with Ken Branagh on Dead Again.
Guest:I had written what I thought was this dark thing, and he made it very theatrical in a way that works also.
Guest:And so I'm learning all of that early on with Jodi.
Guest:She made a different version.
Marc:So what, did Sonnenfeld make it funnier than you anticipated?
Marc:He just made it broader.
Guest:It was just a little broader in tone a little bit, but I really, I so enjoy it.
Guest:And then on Out of Sight, though...
Guest:I thought I did it because we had three kids all in one room and we needed a house, wanted to move to Pasadena.
Guest:And I grabbed it because I thought I had gotten away with one Elmore Leonard adaptation.
Guest:Because I remember when I met him, the first time I met, he was telling me story after story over lunch about all his books that had been fucked up as movies, one after another.
Guest:And so I thought, I don't want to end up another story and some other young asshole's story.
Guest:lunch yeah and so we did we got i got a lot of help on get shorty as i said and so the script the movie worked and but then i was in a panic because i needed a bigger house yeah it was getting ridiculous right so i grabbed that and i thought i'm gonna write this really quickly it took me over a year to do out of sight what heaven's prisoners didn't get you the house heaven's prisoners you know what heaven's prisoners got me a lot of things because it was a rewrite where i was paid a lot of money okay good yeah
Guest:I have a few of those.
Marc:When did you start getting that kind of work?
Guest:Early on.
Guest:Very early on when I was at Paramount, I got a call to rewrite a movie that Danny Houston was directing because we had the same agent at the time, briefly.
Guest:And he was doing a Disney movie of the week called Sasquatch, literally about Bigfoot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they paid me $11,000 to rewrite the whole movie over the weekend.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were happy with it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so...
Guest:Then Ivan Reitman had me rewrite, his wife was doing a movie, a musical at the time called Casual Sex based on the Groundlings show.
Guest:And he gave me the movie to rewrite and paid me some money and gave me like eight days to do it.
Guest:And the first thing I did is made it not a musical.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And rewrote.
Guest:And I was probably the wrong guy for that.
Guest:But I just started doing it and it just kind of escalated.
Marc:Well, I imagine that what helped that helped you in the sense that, you know, you could interpret, you know, the voice and and struck not structure, but at least the voice of other people's work.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And so that, as an adaptive skill, enables you to broaden your own ability to certainly adapt from fiction.
Guest:And in the case of someone like Elmore Leonard, who has a very specific voice—
Guest:So you're trying to catch that voice and you're trying to... Because in his case, there's a need always to invent a lot of plot.
Guest:You have to invent or invent some plot.
Guest:You need to invent some things because oftentimes in his books, he'll either introduce a new character toward the very end all of a sudden or he'll become disinterested in a character.
Guest:And so you're trying to find a movie shape to it.
Guest:And that's what was really hard about it.
Guest:Less...
Guest:But the ability to sort of catch a tone and do that, I don't know.
Guest:It was like those people who have a good ear for music and they can play the song.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I've always been that way with dialogue and tone.
Marc:Does it help when you have actors attached?
No.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes, but they're usually not attached while I'm writing.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Guest:Rarely are they attached while I'm writing.
Marc:Because those roles in Get Shorty are crazy.
Marc:Great.
Marc:That's Barry.
Marc:He's something, man.
Marc:He's the best.
Marc:I read his book and I interviewed him.
Guest:It was great.
Marc:Both of them are really funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I just watched out of sight.
Marc:I was like, I have to re-watch it.
Marc:And I'm sure I'm not the first to say this.
Marc:It was sort of a...
Marc:a throwback to a 70s movie that wasn't existentially challenging.
Marc:It was just, it's sort of like, it's a romance.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's set in this way where you used to see this, it's almost like, I don't know the leading guys, like Burt Reynolds.
Marc:There were guys back in the day that, you know, would carry these movies that were relatively serious and had some menace to them.
Marc:Paul Newman, Harper.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But they were so charming that what elevated the thing, you didn't care about the dark backdrop.
Marc:And I think that the dark backdrop of some 70s comedies is kind of like, have you ever seen how many people were killed in Freebie and Bean?
Marc:It's crazy.
Marc:It's crazy.
Marc:It's crazy.
Marc:And it's a comedy.
Marc:And that was when I had that realization, like, they're not killing people anymore.
Marc:You're not seeing that.
Marc:I mean, they destroyed a city.
Marc:In a cop comedy.
Marc:But nonetheless, I felt like it had that, there was a lightness to it because you had, you know, you can get lightning in a bottle with those two though.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I mean, Jesus.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And the thing with also, you know, Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, that was the right time for them and out of sight.
Guest:And Stephen, I remember him coming to my office.
Guest:Yeah, he would come to my office in Pasadena and we would sit there and just go through the script and act it out.
Guest:And it was an amazing experience.
Guest:And we would just sit there and talk it through and work it out.
Guest:And at one point, I panicked because I'd sent the script to Elmore Leonard.
Guest:And he said, I don't like the way it's all jumbled.
Guest:The time, what are you doing?
Guest:And I'm saying, well...
Guest:Oh, even going back?
Guest:Yeah, going in the book.
Guest:You know, you open with the jailbreak, but then you flash back in the trunk, you get 30 pages of history of this guy.
Guest:So I'm trying to figure out how to do that and give the illusion of the movie moving forward.
Guest:And I, being, you know...
Guest:basically easily influenced, strained it out, and I gave the script to Stephen all straightened out.
Guest:He said, what the fuck are you doing?
Guest:Put it back.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:He said, yeah, put it back.
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the greatest thing Elmore did was the ending.
Guest:I wasn't sure how to end it.
Guest:In the truck?
Guest:Yeah, the book ends where she busts him, and she calls her dad on the phone, and her dad says, you know, my daughter, the tough babe.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:That's all.
Guest:And in the movie, I thought,
Guest:In the book, she doesn't ever change as a character.
Guest:Karen Sisko is sort of the same beginning to end.
Guest:And she's defined by this kind of really sexy competence.
Guest:But he's really sad.
Guest:He's all about the road not taken.
Guest:He's like, if only I hadn't done all this stupid shit.
Guest:I'm such a fucking idiot.
Guest:So you took that out.
Guest:No, I put that in.
Guest:I really leaned on that and made the movie about him.
Guest:So it couldn't end right there.
Guest:But what was his regret?
Guest:That he couldn't be with someone like her.
Marc:Oh, you mean on the emotional level.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But he didn't regret his line of work.
Marc:No, no.
Guest:He just realized it was a stupid line of work.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know.
Guest:But he was good at it.
Guest:He was good at it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so at the end, I was trying to figure out what to do.
Guest:And I was just talking to Elmer one day.
Guest:And he said, you know, he had just hung up with this guy he's been corresponding with in prison.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was telling me that this guy's trying to write a book and he's talking to him all the time.
Guest:And he said, yeah, and Omar just throws out, yeah, and he's like broken out from like 11 federal lockups.
Guest:And I went, I have to go.
Guest:I have to hang up now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just need to go right now.
Guest:And I just, it just hit me when he just said that.
Guest:I went, of course, of course, I'm going to put him in a van with that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I'm going to do a different version of him.
Guest:I'm going to do, you know, the Muslim version of him.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But then it gives you a romantic ending.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And that, you know, and that, like, it seems like in the book, you know, she was not invested in her love.
Marc:No.
Marc:And in the movie, you're like, here we go again.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you don't even know.
Marc:Maybe he will break out.
Guest:Maybe he won't break out.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:But it's that look on her face.
Marc:Yeah, that look on her face.
Marc:And you wrote that in.
Guest:Yeah, that's all in there.
Guest:That's all in there.
Guest:But when that happened, then I realized, okay, we're done.
Guest:We're done now.
Guest:Now we got it.
Guest:Yeah, it was great.
Guest:And then how do you go?
Guest:And then you go to Minority Report?
Guest:The hardest thing I ever worked on.
Guest:It's a hard movie.
Guest:Really hard movie.
Guest:A really hard movie.
Guest:And it...
Guest:We spent a long time.
Guest:Originally, that was going to be a job where I was going to work for a few weeks and on the script.
Guest:And he, Steven Spielberg, was just wanted to work on, had a few things on the list he wanted to do with the script.
Guest:And it was a very different movie.
Guest:And it's a short story that's all of 11 or 12 pages, I think.
Guest:It's a very short, short story.
Guest:Who did it?
Guest:Not J.G.
Guest:Bower.
Guest:Who was it?
Guest:Philip K. Dick.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Philip K. Dick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it also, it's sort of, he was an interesting guy as a writer.
Guest:He seemed, you know, sort of seemed kind of to me almost fascist in some of the ways he thought about politics in his books, but also was really into drugs and experimenting and things like that.
Guest:I find him endlessly fascinating.
Guest:But the book, rather the short story ended with him sort of trying to support
Guest:Pre-crime, which is terrible.
Guest:And they had a movie version that was very good, but it was a different movie.
Guest:And it was about an America where everybody wants to live in the 1950s.
Guest:And so their houses looked like the cars.
Guest:Everything sort of felt like the 1950s.
Guest:It was a very different tone.
Guest:There really wasn't a mystery in it.
Guest:It was very different.
Guest:But it was this guy, John Cohen, very good writer, had done a really interesting job with it.
Guest:But it didn't quite...
Guest:didn't quite work and so we began working on it and then what happened is tom cruise is shooting mission impossible 2 in australia and his schedule they shut down to rework that script so now suddenly we have endless amounts of time in front of us yeah and steven said well let's let's really look at this so we ended up starting and and you'd worked with him before spielberg i worked with him yeah i had done a rewrite with him before
Guest:Of Saving Private Ryan?
Marc:Yes, yes.
Marc:And it was just the two of you?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:What were the fundamental issues that he was worried about?
Marc:The voice?
Guest:He wanted to give the characters more individuality.
Guest:Oh.
Marc:Sort of give them.
Marc:Yeah, you had a dirty dozen in it.
Guest:Yeah, he wanted to sort of give them so that they could be a little more specific.
Guest:And it's funny, I never, ever really talked about that movie until Patrick Raddenkief outed me in The New Yorker.
Guest:But it was a really good script and a really good idea by Robert Rodat.
Guest:And he deserves all the credit for it.
Marc:But it seemed like, you know, when a director or when you do rewrites...
Marc:Like in certain situations, it's really not about the story per se.
Marc:It's about, you know, elements of language or character.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And that's usually you read something and it's like the characters are not characters.
Guest:They're attitudes or types.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Or even worse, jobs or even worse, the actor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and so so they're always looking to to find a way to to give them something to do to make it because character is what makes you care.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, that really is the thing.
Guest:And plot should really come from that, not from sort of and then this happens and then that.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:You know, because you don't want people doing things.
Marc:You got to believe that the character is going to move through that plot.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And you don't want people.
Guest:My pet peeve is when you see characters doing something because the script said so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, where the, why are they arguing with each other right now?
Guest:Why don't they believe Jack Bauer?
Guest:He saved the world a hundred thousand times.
Guest:And now he's saying, I'm going to save the world again.
Guest:And then they,
Guest:You say, no, you're not.
Guest:You arrest him.
Guest:Lock him up.
Guest:You're like, wait, what?
Guest:Or the little kid says, mom, I saw a thing.
Guest:No, that's just your imagination.
Guest:And so that's lazy.
Guest:You need to go figure out why they wouldn't believe him.
Guest:Is it a boy who cried wolf?
Guest:Is it a this?
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Otherwise, you're just annoyed.
Guest:You're not feeling the tension of somebody not believing you're just annoyed.
Marc:Or worse, like in TV writing, certain things that I've had to come up against as an actor is that this wouldn't happen.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I mean, why do you have this guy doing this?
Marc:Right.
Marc:There's no way, no matter how ill-defined the character would be, he's defined enough to know that he's not going to do that.
Marc:So what are we going to do about that?
Marc:Because the outline has him doing that.
Marc:I know.
Marc:It's just a guy in a room's decision.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because it's funny or whatever.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it's like a lot of times it doesn't make any emotional sense or character sense.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so that is so that's something that you find yourself fixing.
Guest:And by the way, the other thing is the way movies are developed isn't helpful to writers.
Guest:So a lot of writers will get bounced off projects that.
Guest:There are things, I just read something not too long ago where I said, you don't want to get rid of this writer.
Guest:This writer can write.
Guest:You're just not, no one is having the right conversation about the script.
Guest:You don't want to get rid of them.
Guest:And I wish I had been mature enough.
Guest:Or smart enough to recognize that because there are probably many times where that had happened in of the 50 or 60 or so things I've done over the years.
Guest:There's got a lot of them and there are many jobs that I didn't do.
Guest:You didn't stand up for the other guy?
Guest:Not that I didn't stand up for the other guy, but that I didn't realize that they don't need me.
Guest:There's something else going on here.
Guest:You know, that this is another thing.
Guest:And listen, as writers, we're also frequently our own worst enemy.
Guest:Yeah, sometimes it's just a person.
Guest:Personal lack of communication.
Guest:Or they don't want to do it or they refuse to do it.
Guest:There are a lot of those where – or most of the time when I'm fixing things, there were already – listen, I wasn't the first one on Private Ryan.
Guest:Frank Darabont was in before me.
Guest:So there's a lot of times there are people who are working on a lot of different –
Guest:A lot of different scripts at the same—or working, rather, a lot of different writers on one script.
Guest:And so you come and you see your number eight on the list of all these people.
Guest:In that case, I'm there for the—you know, I don't really care.
Guest:I'm there for the money.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But also— And to do a good job, of course.
Marc:Well, also when you have somebody like Spielberg who, like, he knows that he makes big movies that are unique to him.
Marc:And he's obviously, you know, beyond capable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So anyone he brings in, it's like, can I make it better?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right?
Marc:It's not like the other guy fucked up.
Guest:No.
Guest:It's because he – that's really smart because he has – the thing, the good thing is that he has endless resources in terms of people he can talk to.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So there's always ideas coming in, all new things.
Guest:So if there's a way to make him better, he's agnostic in terms of who's making it better.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he has his ideas and he just wants to see those ideas, you know, made manifest.
Guest:And so so it's it's it's not really a personal thing for him.
Guest:It's just like I need this done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Can this person get it done or can that person get it done?
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know.
Marc:And then like the interpreter working with Sidney, what that was a book.
Guest:It was, no, it was an original script.
Guest:By you?
Guest:No, I came in later.
Guest:I came in, Charles Randolph wrote an original script.
Guest:And the problem with the script, from Sidney's point of view, is it had a very surprise ending, a kind of Sixth Sense-y sort of ending.
Guest:It was when they were all the Vogue at that time, you know?
Guest:So it no longer, it didn't work to kind of do that movie.
Guest:It wasn't a human story.
Guest:It was, but it also relied on this twist at the end.
Guest:Everything was built toward the twist.
Guest:And so what Sidney wanted to do, which was, I think, a great idea.
Guest:What Sidney really wanted to do was make a movie about someone who believes with her whole heart in diplomacy, but ends up with a gun in her hand at the end.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How do you do that?
Guest:How does that happen?
Guest:And he thought, and I agree, I think that was a great idea.
Guest:And he wanted to shoot in the U.N.
Guest:No one had ever shot in the U.N.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:You know, the way diplomacy works and how it's getting a bad name and how the UN was getting a bad name.
Guest:So wait, in the original script, her family weren't victims?
Guest:They were.
Guest:Oh, they were a lot.
Guest:All of that was there in the original script.
Guest:But but it was a very it was a very different kind of story.
Guest:And I think that what he wanted to do also was focus on the relationship between the two of them.
Guest:Sean Penn's character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I think that was a big thing for him, that he really wanted to, what is the dialogue they're going to have, the running dialogue they're going to have as this character?
Guest:movie goes on and is she really mysterious do you really could she be involved we want to know might she be involved what what happened we keep learning things about her that make her more and more suspicious she's acting like she's afraid of something and in the script
Guest:all the threats against her were fake she was making it up yeah and so you had to believe that she was pretending to be scared by herself sometimes and so the big change that we made in the final in the film was to to make it she's really under threat and yet he's not sure he needs he's trying to find out the mystery of who might be after her and why
Guest:And so we had to create a whole new subplot with other leaders from the country.
Guest:And we had to make the guy she wants, that they want to protect, we had to make him a real person.
Guest:So we really did, I read a lot about Mugabe and they called him the teacher and all those things that I loved and fucking sold out his country.
Guest:And so we just sort of started going deeper and deeper.
Guest:And Sidney guided you there.
Guest:He guided me there.
Guest:But we also, it was hard, and I felt like I couldn't deliver for him.
Guest:I felt like at a certain point I gave up.
Guest:He was very upset with me.
Guest:I kept saying, I don't think I'm giving you what you want.
Guest:And I don't, and it was interesting because his apartment in New York City overlooked the UN.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:It was on the East River, and out the window you could see the UN.
Guest:And I just was feeling,
Guest:Kind of stuck.
Guest:And I felt like, you know, maybe I should go home and do this alone and see if I can do it alone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I couldn't.
Guest:I just couldn't.
Guest:I couldn't figure it out.
Guest:And I remember one day, all three kids, my wife and myself, we all had the stomach flu at once.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Awesome.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yet nothing was coming out of me.
Guest:I was sick, but nothing.
Guest:And I thought, this is a sign.
Right.
Guest:You're blocked very deeply.
Guest:I'm blocked very deeply.
Guest:And so I said, you know, and so I left the project and then Steve came in and finished it because I just didn't feel like I was doing a good job.
Guest:I wasn't making it.
Marc:And did you and Sidney survive that?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Eventually, you know, he was really upset with me, but we talked later and made up.
Okay.
Marc:And then the next few movies, Marley and Me, what was that?
Guest:I know.
Guest:My son loves to make fun of me about that movie.
Guest:You know, if he's trying to dig at me, he'll go, yeah, well, Dad, you wrote Marley and Me.
Guest:It was a big movie.
Guest:I love that movie.
Guest:And we're big dog people, you know?
Guest:You needed a break.
Guest:No, it was weird.
Guest:I didn't want to do it.
Guest:Elizabeth Gabler, who was running the studio, said, I need a rewrite on this movie.
Guest:And Don Roos, who wrote the first draft of the script, is going off to make his own movie.
Guest:So he can't do this, which is usually a lot of very common reason for why they need somebody else.
Guest:Somebody is not available to finish or they don't want to finish.
Guest:But Don was going off to make his own film.
Guest:And I said, I've read that book.
Guest:My daughter knows that book.
Guest:And my daughter, every night we would take the dog for a walk, she would tell me another chapter.
Guest:That's so not me.
Guest:And she goes, you know, it's a story and the story needs fixing and finishing.
Guest:And I think you could do it.
Guest:Just take a look at it.
Guest:And so I read it and I realized, oh, this isn't about the dog.
Guest:It's about my marriage.
Guest:I'm going to make this about the messiness.
Guest:And when I think about the history of our, you know, 37 whatever years, I think all you think about are the dogs and the different dogs and the this.
Guest:And it's like this great metaphor.
Guest:And so I really...
Guest:Ended up having a ball doing it.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:And so that's how it happened.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:And then, like, I guess, I mean, I'm not a Marvel guy, but the Wolverine and Logan are pretty high up on sort of the list of great, you know, kind of different type of Marvel movie.
Marc:Am I wrong?
Guest:Logan, certainly.
Guest:Yeah, Logan, certainly.
Guest:Wolverine was, and, you know, I say this to Jim all the time, so it's no secret.
Guest:To Mangold?
Guest:Yeah, it was frustrating for me, because at the studio, I read the script, and...
Guest:I didn't know anything about Marvel.
Guest:I really barely do now even.
Guest:I had not read anything.
Guest:And so I read a script that I thought was really good.
Guest:And I go, I don't know why you want me to come on here.
Guest:And he said, well, I'm trying to do...
Guest:I'm trying to do something a little different, and he talked about it, and I said, well, the only thing I can think of is, you know, in the end of the movie, he loses his power for five minutes, and then he gets it back again.
Guest:I go, what if he lost his power in the first...
Guest:10 minutes or 20 minutes or even the first act say and now you have this guy who's immortal and all of his problems come from his immortality because you watch people you love die and now he's stuck in feudal japan hiding in feudal japan like witness harrison ford in the among the amish he's among the people in well not feudal japan but in rural japan sorry
Guest:And he's with this woman that he actually really cares for.
Guest:And the irony is he doesn't have any power to protect her.
Guest:I go, that would be really interesting.
Guest:And so we kind of wrote that all up and the studio said yes.
Guest:And the movie that was written ended with a giant robot at the end and all these things.
Guest:And I wrote the script, rewrote the script.
Guest:And.
Guest:Next thing you know, the studio was like, well, where's the robot?
Guest:Where's the this?
Guest:Where's the bullet train chase?
Guest:Where's the that?
Guest:And suddenly, so the first third of it is one movie, and then it just becomes a marvel.
Guest:So when Jim wanted to do Logan, I said to him, why?
Guest:After all that happened before, he said, well, it's a different studio regime now, and they're telling me I can do what I want.
Guest:And he would send me the scripts.
Guest:And I had just moved to New York, and I was working on my novel.
Guest:And I was at the writer's room in New York.
Guest:They have this place.
Guest:It's like across from Tisch School of the Arts.
Guest:It's just a room where you get a desk.
Guest:And I wanted to go someplace different to write a book because I wanted to feel, you know, what that felt like.
Guest:Because screenwriting, you have so many voices in your head.
Guest:And I thought this is going to... I want to try and purge all that.
Guest:And I had a deal with Knopf.
Guest:And so I thought I'm going to do this.
Guest:But he would send me... Two things would happen.
Guest:He would send me scripts...
Guest:all the time of what he was working on for Logan.
Guest:And I would go, this feels like a Marvel movie.
Guest:This feels like every other Marvel.
Guest:They're killing the vice president.
Guest:They're this.
Guest:He's a cage fighter at the beginning.
Guest:He's a, you know, there are all these characters from, you know, Touchstones.
Guest:And he had someone come in once and they did a version of it.
Guest:Then someone else did another version of it.
Guest:And the thing that was so annoying is the reason I bring up the writer's room is I was so happy
Guest:And I had told my agent I'm going to do nothing for a year now.
Guest:I have, for the first time in many years, cleared the deck.
Guest:I'd shot a pilot that wasn't going to happen.
Guest:So I had all this time in front of me.
Guest:I don't want to do anything.
Guest:And in the writer's room, you're not allowed to answer your phone.
Guest:So you have to get up and leave.
Guest:And you can't be walking out going, hello.
Guest:Or they have all these rules.
Guest:And then they have this little area.
Guest:So every time he fucking called me...
Guest:It was a hassle to get on the phone to talk to him.
Guest:I would have to walk out, call him back.
Guest:Maybe I miss him.
Guest:Maybe we, you know.
Guest:And then he would send me these scripts and I was just getting really annoyed with him.
Guest:And then finally he said, and I was about to go shoot Godless in two months.
Guest:And he said...
Guest:I need you to do this.
Guest:Can you do this?
Guest:And what had happened, the way he got me on Wolverine was he sent me a comic book.
Guest:And I'd never really read any of these comic books.
Guest:And it was a different one.
Guest:It was called Old Man Logan.
Guest:And it was Logan as Clint Eastwood.
Guest:And I loved it.
Guest:And so he sent me another comic book.
Guest:And it was him with this little girl who has claws coming out of her hands for this one.
Guest:And I thought, oh, fuck.
Guest:It could be a super violent, like, paper moon.
Guest:What if we did that?
Guest:And so it kind of, I despite myself, and so I said, okay, what if I write the opening scene?
Guest:And Jim is, he's the best writing partner imaginable.
Guest:He's so good, and he's so, and even if he's not writing, he's just giving you, you know, guidance as a director.
Guest:He's so smart.
Guest:A big brain.
Guest:And he kind of is...
Guest:Very clear with his intention all the time.
Guest:And it really is a kind of one-in-one-is-three situation for me.
Guest:I really enjoy doing it with him, and I hope we write some other things.
Guest:He's one of the few directors that I'd still love to write for.
Guest:But the last thing I was going to say is, I said, I'll write the opening scene, and if you don't like it, because it's going to be the key of the song, then we'll part company.
Guest:And he said, well, why?
Guest:What are you thinking?
Guest:And I said, well, I'd always wanted to do a James Bond movie that opens with not a giant stunt, but he gets the shit kicked out of him.
Guest:And that's what I want to do here.
Guest:And so he said, well, show me what that looks like.
Guest:And so I started to do it, and I was so mad that I had said yes.
Guest:As I'm writing, and I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but it's coming out in the writing.
Guest:I'm so angry that I literally stop and write this two or three paragraph obnoxious as fuck manifesto about this movie will not be this.
Guest:It will not be that.
Guest:It will be this.
Guest:If somebody falls out of a window, they're going to fucking die.
Guest:If somebody gets it, it was like this awful, stupid thing that is still to this day in the shooting script.
Guest:And then I wrote that opening scene that's in the movie and they were like, yes, let's do this.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:So you were in.
Guest:And then we just did it back and forth.
Guest:We just literally he was in California.
Guest:We just passed the script back and forth.
Guest:And I kept saying things like I just wrote a scene where this whole family gets massacred.
Guest:There's no way anyone's going to want to do this.
Guest:And he's like, I love it.
Guest:And then Shane, two things happened that were fascinating.
Guest:He decided to use Shane.
Guest:He was watching it and he said, we're going to use this in the movie in a great way.
Guest:And it completely organized everything in my head.
Guest:What was that element?
Guest:It was the idea that...
Guest:you know the mentor the violent mentor and then the young kid and the sort of the the using the the tone of shane for this and also the sort of western feel because jim loves westerns yeah so do i and so i thought that was a really good idea was so smart and then i had this weird idea that just came out of me one day when i was just writing on it which is
Guest:What if the whole thing this girl believes is true, this whole journey he's going on is based on a comic book, a Marvel comic book, where he realizes this whole place that she's got me taking her to, this Eden, isn't even maybe a real place.
Guest:And then the joke is it turns out, of course, to be a real place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Seven episodes, yeah.
Guest:So I finished after he did, and when I finished, he said, you know, I have a cut of the movie, and we tested it, and it tested incredibly high.
Guest:And I said, that's impossible.
Guest:And he showed it to me, and I watched it on my laptop.
Guest:He sent me a link.
Guest:I was so skeptical that I didn't even put it on a big screen.
Guest:I just watched it on my laptop, and I thought...
Guest:And oh, my God, he stuck to his guns.
Guest:He did everything he said.
Guest:Nobody got in his way.
Guest:They let him make this movie.
Guest:I can't believe they let him do some of the things he did in this.
Guest:And it's one of the – outside of the first time I saw Out of Sight, it's one of the happiest I'd ever been to see an early cut of something.
Guest:And God bless him for dragging me into that.
Marc:That's funny.
Marc:It's the closest you've gotten to an independent film.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:exactly you work with a guy who is in the biggest machine in hollywood yeah and you guys made an independent movie i don't know how we got away with it i have no idea how we got away with it so but you but you don't do like that thing the independent movie well the lookout was a small movie sure you know um but not i haven't really i have for i don't know why
Marc:Do you think it's because you work for a living?
Guest:That could be.
Guest:Could be.
Guest:The monthly nut, you mean?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But The Lookout was the first one you directed?
Marc:That was the first one I directed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then, what, you did one other film directing and writing?
Guest:I did A Walk Among the Tombstones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I did this pilot called Hoke based on these Charles Williford novels I love, but for FX that ultimately didn't happen, but it was a great experience.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:And then with Godless, you were able to shoot a lot of those?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you shoot all of them?
Marc:All of them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All of them and all of the Queen's Gambit.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because, like—
Marc:You must have learned something from focusing on the novel in terms of your own voice.
Guest:It freed me up.
Guest:It was like... I mean, two things happened.
Guest:One, I think going on Zoloft at that time.
Guest:Two, I think working on the book and just hearing...
Marc:freeing up my brain to just just to be loose yeah and more supple in terms of and not so careful anymore and also you weren't limited to like you know with uh queen's gambit was a very interesting uh environment or or world yeah right you know no one's gonna come up with that idea no you know what i mean and well godless you were able to exercise everything
Marc:You wanted in terms of Westerns.
Marc:It was a great sandbox to play.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I assume it's just interesting to me that as opposed to, you know, playing in the field of like, you know, being a big script writer and doctor and stuff to just pull out and go like, I'm going to do an indie movie and not care.
Marc:You know, you picked a fairly big audience.
Marc:Yeah, canvas.
Marc:Canvas to work your shit out with a lot of support.
Guest:A lot of support.
Guest:But this is where Steven Soderbergh comes in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because on A Walk Among the Tombstone and Tony Gilroy, you know, two of my oldest friends.
Guest:Oh, those are great friends.
Guest:And they're nasty when I show them stuff.
Guest:Tony can be brutal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's Michael Clayton, right?
Guest:Yes, he's Michael Clayton.
Guest:He's Andor right now.
Guest:He's unbelievable.
Guest:The best.
Guest:Yeah, I talked to him, yeah.
Guest:And, you know, we've known each other forever, and maybe even longer than I've known Stephen, I think.
Guest:But I showed them a cut of A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the two of them just ate my lunch.
Guest:I mean, I got vertigo walking home from that.
Guest:They were so brutal, but they were right.
Guest:In what way?
Guest:What did they say?
Guest:Every scene was a new movie.
Guest:I realized that there was a lot of...
Guest:I didn't have rules for myself.
Guest:There was a lot of look-mime directing.
Guest:And I overcomplicated.
Guest:And Stephen taught me.
Guest:He came into the cutting room with me.
Guest:And we recut the movie together.
Guest:And he said, I'll be your editor.
Guest:Let me be your editor.
Guest:And I said, well, I don't want to cut your movie.
Guest:I want to cut my movie.
Guest:And he said, well, we're going to cut your movie.
Guest:You have it all there, but you're using all of it.
Guest:And you need to simplify it.
Guest:And what I learned going through the process in just a couple days with him, I mean, we spent a week together in the cutting room, but is that simpler, the effort to make something simpler as a filmmaker makes it more elegant.
Guest:And in order to make it simpler, you need to have real rules for yourself.
Guest:And so after that, I did Hoke where I experimented on that.
Guest:And then Godless really solidified that for me and Queen's Gambit.
Guest:Well, Queen's Gambit, you had to be meticulous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Absolutely meticulous.
Guest:And it was really instead of trying to overcomplicate it, how do I really make this simple?
Guest:How do I choreograph or block certain things?
Guest:You make it about her.
Guest:You make it about her, but it's even the filmmaking.
Guest:How are you telling the story?
Guest:And I relied more and more.
Guest:And on Monsieur Spade, I really experimented with this.
Guest:How much story can you tell in a single composition?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How much can you tell?
Guest:And he's all insane.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And how much because you don't have to cut a lot.
Guest:And a lot of these young filmmakers already asked her.
Guest:I was watching Midsommar and I thought Midsommar, Midsommar.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But it was an amazing movie.
Guest:And he would just have these wide shots and the story would play out.
Guest:And I thought he really he really has there's there's clear intention in everything.
Guest:that he's he's a hell of a filmmaker hell of a filmmaker and a lot of these young horror filmmakers are doing that well that's where it's all happening it's fascinating to me and so in godless i shot almost all of it with a 25 millimeter lens and it's like what can we do and you still have to pace instead of cutting just to cut you cut when you need to cut you cut when you need to punctuate something or when you yeah but you're not making a gimmick out of it
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Marc:You're just utilizing the medium.
Guest:You shouldn't notice.
Guest:It's like I go back to William Wyler.
Guest:You shouldn't notice.
Guest:And it's still beautiful.
Guest:It's still got its own rigorous palette and a very strong look.
Guest:It's still got all of those things.
Guest:And the performances, you're still directing it.
Guest:But you're not running in front of it waving.
Marc:And also, when you do these series or these miniseries or whatever they're called now, limited series or whatever they're called, you know, you can make an eight-hour movie.
Guest:Yes, you can.
Guest:And I shoot them like that.
Guest:I don't shoot them episode by episode.
Guest:I did on Department Q recently, but that's just the way that came together.
Guest:But normally, I shoot them like a movie by location.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I think it must be very exciting to know the craft so well and then to engage in this other craft.
Marc:But being so adept at writing that it frees you.
Marc:You're not insecure about that.
Marc:No.
Marc:So you can really like, all right, if I'm insecure about being a director, you know, I can go to my own scripts or I can go to these peers that will, you know, inform me.
Guest:And again, Stephen said to me when he watched A Walk Among the Tombstones, he said, it's very insecurely cut.
Guest:You don't have, those were his exact words, and then talk about shriveling.
Guest:And so there are times I'm on the set where I'll be shooting and I'll realize...
Guest:Because it's all about the story, it helps you have a conversation with your actors.
Guest:Those conversations are better.
Guest:I know I'm OCD, anal, whatever you want to call it, but I'm always, I'm very, prepping is really important to me to know just so I have...
Guest:freedom to work with the with the actors yeah really it's my favorite part of directing i think but there'll be times i'll be shooting and i'll say to the crew we have to stop i made a mistake we're not telling the right story here right it's the wrong point of view or we're not focused on this and i'm gonna have to shoot my way back to so we need to stop right now rather than waste time so i'm gonna figure out to create a scene i can cut that's the wrong scene anyway yeah let's
Guest:And then I would tell the story to them.
Guest:I would remind them of what is the story here.
Guest:And everybody gets excited and we go.
Guest:And that happens at least once or twice on everything I've ever done.
Marc:Now, when you do like, you know, we'll talk about Department Q, but like just, you know, what did you learn from Goldman essentially?
Guest:Goldman was just a great yarn spinner.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And his instinct for going in the opposite direction.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Where they think you're going to go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To not do, to lead people on like this is what's going to happen and that doesn't happen.
Guest:Something else happens.
Marc:Department Q is all of that.
Marc:That's all of that.
Marc:It's all of that.
Marc:It's like I'm pissed off because I only got five fucking episodes.
Marc:That's all.
Marc:I'll give you the rest.
Marc:Tell him to give me the rest because now I'm in.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:The last four are the best episodes.
Marc:And is that it or you can do?
Marc:I would love to do another season.
Marc:But you shot this as if it was it.
Marc:No, we shot it like hoping it would be another season.
Marc:But this crime gets solved.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I need the rest of it.
Marc:And I can't wait for however fucking long.
Marc:When is it going to be out?
Marc:May 29th.
Marc:Oh, soon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Soon.
Guest:But I want to I don't want you to forget the first five because I'm locked in.
Guest:I got to give you I'm going to get you.
Guest:I'm going to get you the next.
Marc:Tell them to send it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But but like when you when you're going to write a movie, what do you know you have to do?
Marc:In terms of, yeah, we know there's a three-act structure.
Marc:Not necessarily.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, okay, so that's out the door.
Marc:But like in terms of like, you know, what are the essentials, you know, in terms of style or in terms of form that they're already ingrained in you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But if you were to tell somebody, you know, not to make it easier for them, but from your point of view, what do you got to do?
Marc:once you have the story?
Guest:So the idea is just the excuse to start with.
Guest:The idea isn't everything.
Guest:And when you put too much pressure on the idea, you're in trouble.
Guest:And so the thing I need to be really clear about is who.
Guest:Who am I writing about?
Guest:And if I can't make two people talk to each other, I can't write them.
Guest:I can't write characters.
Guest:I don't know them well enough, and so no plot is going to come from these people if I just know slightly of them.
Guest:And so that's one thing.
Guest:Character, character, character.
Guest:Who are these people?
Guest:Right.
Guest:I would say the other thing you need to know is you need to constantly be telling yourself, do you have the ability to spin yarn?
Guest:Can you do the once upon a time?
Guest:Every time you're writing a scene, what comes next?
Guest:What is surprising to you?
Guest:That's why I don't outline.
Guest:I outline a couple scenes at a time to know, but beyond that, I don't know where it's always going.
Guest:I have an ending maybe in mind.
Guest:I have an idea where it's going, but I feel like
Guest:I just want to keep making it feel downhill as I'm telling the story.
Guest:I don't know necessarily what the whole shape will be.
Guest:I get ideas as I go.
Guest:I'll spend months just writing about the script before I write it, not doing exercises or things, just writing whatever... Whenever it comes to you?
Guest:Yeah, whatever I'm thinking about, and then I'll reorganize that into kind of an order.
Guest:But I think the main thing is to keep yourself open and to not do things, again, to not...
Guest:Give yourself these tasks that are more about being a good student than being a writer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a lot of people, they love their dry erase boards and their cards and their this and that works for them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I have a very neat desk because I have a very messy fucking head.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that for me, I need to be able to just go off and try and write because that's how you get the happy accidents.
Guest:If you're careful, which I was sometimes early on, if you're too careful, it's going to feel that way.
Guest:And so I would tell people, when you start, just make it downhill.
Guest:Don't have expectations as to how long it's going to take you to write because that's always disappointing.
Guest:And it's going to take you longer.
Guest:And no one wins prizes for getting a script done.
Guest:The contract in Hollywood is 10 or 12 weeks for a first draft.
Guest:I have never in four decades ever made that decision.
Guest:deadline ever never once yeah because you can't i don't know how you can yeah and so so that's where i would where i would say that if you if you approach it with these little bite-sized things and you kind of make it downhill okay and with department q i mean is this all original no department q is based on a novel it's one of a series of novels from this danish author uc adler olsen
Marc:Because it's another one of these worlds where not unlike Queen's Gambit, where you're like, well, how are we in Edinburgh?
Marc:Right.
Marc:With a cop with PTSD because of a very specific thing that he might have fucked up and kind of moved from there.
Marc:But I don't watch a lot of that type of television.
Marc:And because of that, and also because it's so good, I'm like, oh, my God, why am I not watching more of this kind of stuff?
Yeah.
Marc:You know, it's like a little bit of a true detective element to it.
Guest:Well, I love those British procedurals.
Guest:And this is a Danish novel that I turned into a British procedural.
Guest:And I'm obsessed with like Happy Valley and Broadchurch and Line of Duty was this fucking masterpiece.
Guest:It's like their wire.
Guest:Blue lights, all these.
Guest:Or going back to Prime Suspect.
Guest:And they're great.
Guest:And what I wanted to do, what was so fun about doing Godless was to embrace every single Western cliche there is.
Guest:The gunfight, the breaking of the horses, all this, the crazy bad guy, all this, and then turn it on its head somehow.
Guest:And so I wanted to do a procedural that's also on tilt a little bit.
Guest:And so that was the fun of it.
Guest:And so I read these books...
Guest:The author just gave me the books 15 years ago.
Guest:He said, they're yours.
Guest:And I was never going to write or direct them.
Guest:I just wanted to watch them.
Guest:And so I kind of was trying here and there to get them made.
Guest:And I couldn't do it.
Guest:And I was in prep on Queen's Gambit when Rob Bullock, this terrific British producer at Left Banks, came to visit me in Berlin where I was shooting.
Guest:And he said...
Guest:listen, let me help you.
Guest:We'll get a writer.
Guest:You can work with somebody and you can develop it and you can, and then, you know, and I said, okay, but I'm not going to direct it or do any of it.
Guest:And we worked for a year with this lovely writer, Chani Lakhani, who I co-created the show with.
Guest:And then
Guest:What happened was everything got escalated super fast.
Guest:The strike came on and I had to stop working on the show, but the British writers were still working.
Guest:They had two other writers.
Guest:But the problem was I wasn't involved.
Guest:So through no fault of their own...
Guest:the strike ended, I'm reading scripts that we can't shoot because they're different than what I think the show should be.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I ended up writing and directing.
Guest:I wrote them all, co-wrote, well, wrote them all essentially or co-wrote with the other people and then directed six of the nine.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, no, because like, you know, it's one of these things where,
Marc:There's a few turns, you know, like within the last episode or two, or maybe even the fifth one that I watched, that it's not just penance.
Marc:No.
Marc:And then you're like, oh, God.
Marc:So all of this shit's connected.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And now I don't know how.
Guest:I'm right on the precipice.
Guest:Well, the good thing was, because I didn't shoot this, because I wasn't going to be directing it, it was set up to shoot in episode blocks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was writing it while we were shooting it.
Guest:I was building the airplane while we were flying it.
Guest:I've never done that before, and I don't think I'll ever do that again.
Guest:But because we were going in order, I could do that.
Guest:So there were times where I didn't finish writing the last episode until two weeks before we wrapped the entire season shooting.
Guest:And so I would say to the production designer, I think I need a...
Guest:I think I need a laundromat.
Guest:I'm going to have a scene in a laundromat.
Guest:I think I needed this.
Guest:I think I needed that.
Guest:And it was crazy.
Guest:And by the way, because of that, it was eight scripts that became nine episodes.
Guest:And I've done that a few times.
Guest:It happened on Godless Extra.
Guest:It happened on... Because I don't know what I'm doing in terms of that stuff.
Guest:I just do it all and then chop it up.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because...
Marc:It comes back around to, and it's sort of the way that I create comedy bits, is that you don't know where it's coming from.
Marc:So whether it's a muse or a gift or whatever, but when you're cornered and you've got no choice...
Marc:You've got to find a place to land.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's exactly it.
Guest:You've got to, where are you going to land?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, that's exactly it.
Guest:And sometimes when you're cornered, I find myself doing amazing work.
Guest:And sometimes I find myself so frozen.
Guest:Well, that's when you bail.
Guest:Nothing happens.
Guest:You eject with the chute.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I realize nothing is happening.
Guest:I can't, you know, you're hoping here's this facility that's going to kick in and it just doesn't.
Marc:Well, that's the risk, but it seemed to have worked out for this last one anyway.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:And that's why, again, going back to writing and listen, you're storytelling.
Guest:Your work is storytelling.
Guest:You are telling stories.
Guest:There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And that's what you're doing.
Guest:And the fun is that we can't guess where it's going.
Marc:And also the liability of that is that, you know, once you get it all done, a month later, you're like, no, I could have.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Well, that's just part of us.
Guest:Yeah, that could have landed.
Guest:It could have tied the two landings together.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:The people who feel that way are usually really good at what they do.
Guest:The people who say, I nailed it, are usually not.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:I never saw it.
Guest:No, I just watch and I think, oh, man, if I had 10 more minutes on that day, I could have.
Marc:Or if I'd written...
Marc:Because my comedy is so fluid, you know, in terms of how it unfolds, you know, in real time and then kind of builds itself, it doesn't stop building itself.
Marc:No.
Marc:Once I've shot it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So, you know, what are you going to do?
Marc:You can add.
Marc:You can do it later.
Marc:You can keep going.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Well, great talking to you.
Marc:Likewise.
Marc:Thank you so much.
Marc:Yeah, thank you.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:You can stream Department Q on Netflix.
Marc:It's a good show.
Marc:It's engaging.
Marc:I liked it.
Marc:Hang out for a minute, folks.
Marc:Hey, people, John Mulaney is back on the show next week.
Marc:And before his new episode on Monday, you can go back and listen to him on episode 551.
Guest:You saw my worst set ever, I think.
Guest:At that one man show?
Guest:No, in Aspen.
Guest:Did I?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You don't remember that?
Guest:Of course you wouldn't.
Guest:That was a huge moment in my life and not.
Guest:But I was there.
Guest:You were the host.
Guest:I met you that weekend.
Guest:I hosted for you and Tosh.
Guest:You guys were co-headlining a show.
Guest:This was... Oh, my God.
Guest:You were wearing American apparel jackets and overcoats a lot during that time.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:So you were very nice to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had just seen you on Conan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I really liked that joke you did about your mom calling you and asking you what you thought of this guy Sabu.
Guest:And you saying, Mom, do you mean Barack Obama?
Guest:so i told you that at the tosh i got to uh host for you and and tosh and i walked up on stage and i started to talk it was uh you reminded me of it when you said my laugh was up here i couldn't breathe at all hard to breathe there couldn't breathe at all though and my first joke i remember this died it died and then uh oh my god i remember hot panic rolled over me right but you were having trouble
Guest:I was having real trouble both in the bombing sense and also I couldn't breathe.
Guest:And to this day, I don't know if I was having a panic attack or elevation sickness.
Marc:But there was like concern.
Marc:Like you got off stage and it was like you were fucked up.
Guest:Yeah, you and Mike DiStefano.
Guest:were very nice to me backstage.
Guest:They got me an oxygen tank.
Guest:I remember this now.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Mike DiStefano sat with me for a little while.
Guest:You came and checked on me, which I always never forgot.
Guest:You were very cool in that moment.
Guest:And you came on stage and...
Guest:So I bomb and almost die.
Guest:You come back on stage and said some nice things about my set and kind of used one of my jokes to get into one of your jokes.
Guest:I remember hearing it and going, oh, he's really trying to make it seem like that went fine.
Marc:That's from episode 551, available for free on all podcasting apps.
Marc:For every episode of WTF ad-free, sign up for WTF+.
Marc:Just go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFpod.com and click on WTF+.
Marc:Again, John Mulaney will be the guest on Monday's show, and I also have an important announcement at the beginning of that episode.
Marc:And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by ACAST.
Marc:Here I'm just going to try to hold on to this riff.
guitar solo
Thank you.
Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.