BONUS Marc on Movies - Sigourney Weaver, Movie Stars and Documentaries
Marc:What's up, Brendan?
Marc:What are we doing?
Marc:What are we talking about?
Guest:Oh, hey, Mark.
Guest:Well, we're doing some bonus.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:How are you?
Guest:Oh, I'm very good, thank you.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Good, good, good.
Guest:You got your hike in this morning and everything?
Marc:I did the hike.
Marc:I've done the caffeine.
Marc:I've done the panic.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Well, that's good.
Guest:We're loaded up then.
Guest:Well, we're doing some full Marin bonus stuff here.
Guest:And in fact, we've been doing this now for about three months.
Guest:And do you know what the most listened to bit of bonus material you've put out is?
Guest:It was the Marin on movies segment where we talked about your filmography.
Guest:For some reason, that's got the people's attention the most.
Marc:Well, that's interesting.
Marc:I guess it's stuff that maybe not everybody knows about me.
Guest:Well, that's true, but I also think people just like movies.
Guest:And I thought, well, let's give the people what they want and let's talk about movies a little more here.
Guest:And it's a good week to do that because we've had two guests on the show, one that just posted today that we're recording this on Monday.
Guest:That was Sigourney Weaver, a big movie star.
Guest:And then later in the week is someone who comes from a family of movies, but not exactly known in the same way as the rest of that family.
Guest:That's Abigail Disney, who directed this documentary about basically wage inequality.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And so I thought it'd be good jumping off point for both things for us to talk about some stuff.
Guest:And Sigourney Weaver is like a particularly fascinating one just because of how many iconic things she is involved in, particularly like because of her own role in them.
Guest:It's not like she's just a bystander in like a, you know, giant universe of things.
Guest:I mean, like she is Ripley from Aliens.
Guest:She is, you know, like an iconic character in people's minds.
Marc:Yeah, I can't.
Marc:Like, when I talk to movie stars, I'm always curious about what exactly makes them a movie star.
Marc:You know, why are they a movie star?
Marc:And I ask it all the time.
Marc:And I've asked it.
Marc:I think it's been on my mind since before we started doing the show.
Marc:Just because of my own acting and wondering, why don't I look like a movie star?
Marc:Like, I look at myself on TV.
Marc:I look at myself in movies.
Marc:I'm like, even with the big head, it's not quite working out for me.
Marc:I'm not...
Marc:Because, you know, you hear that they're all short and they got a big head.
Marc:I'm not particularly short, but I'm not tall about it.
Marc:I have a big head.
Marc:But still, it doesn't mean that the camera loves me.
Marc:Well, with Sigourney Weaver, do you think her height has something to do with that?
Marc:You know, I really don't know why, but I think that some people are just genetically simpatico with the camera.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I can't explain it.
Marc:And I don't think it's necessarily explainable.
Marc:Some people just fit on screen.
Marc:And that's like a big hurdle.
Marc:I mean, she's tall and there's something like I think in terms of her roles, certainly as Ripley, you definitely feel that.
Marc:I think Ridley Scott knew that and he shot that.
Marc:And I think that her stature and her height was a big part of the power of that character.
Marc:I mean, there's not that many movie stars at any given time, right?
Marc:No.
Marc:And there's just a handful of them.
Marc:And then there's like hundreds of character actors over the years that sometimes elevate to movie stars occasionally.
Marc:But to really hold the box office and hold the screen like a movie star, it's such a rare thing.
Marc:And all of them seem to be relatively conscious of the business.
Marc:I always think about that conversation I had with Jeff Daniels about learning how to use your face.
Marc:There's this consciousness of things that movie stars seem to have.
Marc:And I pay more attention to it because I've spent time on sets now and I hardly ever know where my camera is.
Marc:And these guys and women know exactly what they're doing with their face and how to do it.
Marc:And again, that genetic thing.
Marc:When I talked to Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt at the same time, it was undeniable whether it was something I was intuiting
Marc:or whether it's just because they are who they are.
Marc:I mean, you felt like you were in the presence of some sort of weird royalty.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:And they're kind of perfectly sort of formed.
Marc:And you wonder, like, are they constantly being coddled and manicured and paid attention to?
Marc:Yes, I think they are.
Marc:Even when Josh Brolin came over, he's a real fucking movie star.
Marc:And for some, like, I didn't even realize it.
Marc:But he had this weird familiarity with me, or that was just his disarming nature.
Marc:But I was sitting across from the guy, I'm like, this guy is totally a movie star.
Marc:And there's nothing I can do to explain that.
Marc:And even when I talked to George Clooney, there was this feeling that I was speaking to, I felt like I was talking to a president.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:And I don't know why.
Marc:But it's odd, though.
Marc:When I was on the set of The Joker, that was one of those things, man, where...
Marc:Oddly, De Niro felt like De Niro, but he was very human.
Marc:He was not very animated off camera.
Marc:He didn't talk much.
Marc:But when I saw his process at this age that he's at...
Marc:where he's playing that part in the Joker where he's the Johnny Carson guy.
Marc:And he can't remember any of his lines.
Marc:He has cue cards everywhere.
Marc:And he's doing everything in fits and starts.
Marc:And I'm sitting there watching Todd Phillips direct this, and I'm like, how's he going to put this together?
Marc:How is this going to even work?
Marc:But they both knew.
Marc:De Niro knew.
Marc:That whatever, like it seemed so, it was like, I couldn't believe that it would come together on camera or that the character had any depth at all.
Marc:But the thing is, his relationship with the camera and with filmmaking is what it is.
Marc:And it looked great.
Marc:It all worked fine.
Marc:But when I was watching it, I'm like, oh my God, this is...
Marc:This is going to be a disaster.
Guest:Yeah, no, they always seem to know.
Guest:I remember Tina Fey telling a story about, you know, someone was asking her what it's like to work on 30 Rock with Alec Baldwin.
Guest:At the time, too, it was like, seemed weird that Baldwin was going to television.
Guest:It was still not that age where, like, now everybody does television.
Guest:Television is just everything.
Guest:Television is Netflix and...
Guest:there's no real difference.
Guest:But there was this thing of like, whoa, Alec Baldwin, he was a movie star and now he's doing a television show.
Guest:And what's that like?
Guest:And Tina Fey said, you know, these people who are really good at that on camera, you don't know it when you're working with them because they know exactly how modulated they have to be for that camera.
Guest:So if, you know, you watch something on 30 Rock,
Guest:and he looks like what he just did was the most hilarious bit of acting you've ever seen, it was probably so subtle in the moment that she didn't notice it.
Guest:And she had learned to kind of play along with that because of the movie Mean Girls, where she was on the set of that as the writer,
Guest:And was watching it being shot.
Guest:And Rachel McAdams was like the lead mean girl in that.
Guest:And was an unknown at that time outside of Canada.
Guest:She was a Canadian actress and did a lot of stuff.
Guest:But, you know, for an American movie, it was a big deal for her to get that role.
Guest:And Tina Fey is sitting there watching on the monitor and...
Guest:and thinking, oh my god, this girl is giving us nothing.
Guest:It's like a dead zone.
Guest:And she spoke to the director, this guy Mark Waters, and said, do we have to do something about this?
Guest:And he was like, no, no, it's great.
Guest:Don't worry.
Guest:This is going to be great.
Guest:And then, of course, she watched it assembled.
Guest:And she's like, oh my god, this is the best actor I've ever seen.
Guest:She's amazing.
Guest:And she is.
Guest:Rachel McAdams can hold the screen.
Marc:Oh, she's great.
Marc:Yeah, I always like her.
Marc:Yeah, she's definitely a movie star.
Marc:But I mean, what's funny about that story is that that's a comedian with these observations.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:She's like, why isn't she doing the clown thing?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:She's not big enough.
Marc:It's not happening.
Marc:It's supposed to be funny.
Marc:Why aren't they being funny?
Marc:When you make your bones in improv, you have to get big and small and loud and soft, and you have to use every tool available to you to try to get a laugh.
Marc:I don't modulate correctly when I'm doing anything.
Marc:I'm always yelling.
Marc:I'm always playing to the size of the studio.
Marc:I have to be told to just talk sometimes.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Well, do you think that's what lent to De Niro telling Todd Phillips to have you tone it down a bit?
Guest:Do you feel like that was part of that?
Marc:It was just like, you know, I'd worked on my lines and it was a part of the movie that was cut out.
Marc:But I'm sure it had something to do with it.
Marc:You know, because I don't know that going into that scene with De Niro that I really had intentions or perspective of who I was to him.
Marc:But like, you know, going into this walk and talk, which was just office talk, you know, like, you know, did you do that thing at the place?
Marc:Did you call so-and-so?
Marc:It was just, you know, chatter heading into the dressing room where Joaquin was.
Marc:and you know todd was just sort of like you ready and like yeah and you want to rehearse i'm like oh let's just shoot one so so we go into it and i'm like you know and uh and yeah and and we he cuts and then i just you know i go to my chair and i see uh deniro i see deniro walk over to todd and then walk back to his chair and then todd comes up to me and goes hey you're coming in a little hot
Marc:You know, he's your boss.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, that makes sense.
Marc:I knew, like, on some level, but I had not placed him in that position in my mind.
Marc:You know, I was just a guy trying to run a show.
Marc:You know, and I was worked up.
Marc:So it changed the dynamic.
Marc:But I think the reason that I can tell, and I think Todd might have told me, was that the reason it was cut is that he did not want to have any...
Marc:scene in that movie that Joaquin wasn't in.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Which a lot of times doesn't become apparent until you assemble it and see where the point of view is coming from.
Marc:And I think the point of view was like, you're dubious at times in like, we weren't sure what we were seeing, whether it was real or not.
Marc:I think it was an interesting choice, but he just cut out all the fat.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And my guess is that, you know, De Niro, he just probably knows it's again, it's like that lifetime of doing and you understand the modulation of what's supposed to be happening.
Guest:He knows that that that your tone, whatever was versus his tone was not going to match.
Guest:And he's also not the director.
Guest:So he can't just say that to you.
Guest:So he went about it in the proper way.
Guest:But I'm sure it's just his level of experience of doing it.
Guest:He knew that those tones were were were not matching
Marc:But they were also, you know, it was not the proper relationship.
Marc:And he knew, I think, also that like one of a thousand two line players he's been on screen with, you know, he wasn't going to let me, you know, upstage him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, for this bit piece.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, also, especially if the bit piece pays off with him telling you that you basically have to follow his orders when you're in the dressing room with the Joker, that he's like, no, no, no, this is fine.
Guest:We're going to go ahead and do this.
Guest:And your objections are muted.
Guest:You know, like, so you can't start out with a scene where you're the guy.
Guest:I'm running the show.
Guest:Calling the shots.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:That's another thing about Sigourney.
Marc:These people that have experience with stage,
Marc:Have a presence in front of you that's different than, you know, just sitting there and looking amazing or shiny.
Marc:You know, they engage in a different way.
Guest:Well, I think that's why with Sigourney, it all goes back to Alien.
Guest:And really, I would say it mostly goes to Aliens, the Cameron sequel, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For whatever you're saying, which I agree with about the first Alien movie in 1979 and what Ridley Scott and the rest of the creative team of that, Walter Hill and everyone else, what they were doing was essentially making a genre picture that fit into the type of horror slasher films of the time.
Guest:I think Carpenter comes out with Halloween the same year, I think.
Guest:And, you know, it's a very fun play on the tropes of those genres, right down to ending with the final girl, right?
Guest:Like that's like the whole shtick of like the haunted house and your, you know.
Guest:the killer and it's finally down to Leatherface and the one final girl or whatever.
Guest:And I think what Cameron did with her in Aliens is what everyone identifies, not just about Sigourney Weaver as an actor, not just about Ripley as the character,
Guest:but about virtually all women in action films from that point forward, which was if you don't give this person the full stage, right?
Guest:And you let her take charge as though there's nobody else in the world that can defeat this problem, then you have screwed up, right?
Guest:Like that, the idea was like, you better give the, like just surrender everything to the fact that this is your hero and she's got to win that she's got to save the day.
Guest:And she essentially does it by being a mother in that movie, which is also crazy.
Guest:It's like the end of that movie is two moms fighting to the death, which is awesome.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:That was very smart.
Marc:And I just had this realization in thinking about her as a woman and in that first Alien.
Marc:And I just realized somehow that, you know, the Ian Holm robot.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When he tries to sort of, like, you know, jam that dirty magazine into her mouth and she knocks his head off.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's literally filled with semen.
Marc:Yeah, he's coming everywhere.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I didn't even put that together till now, that goo.
Marc:I'm like, oh my God, this robot's packed with cum.
Marc:It's coming out of his mouth when the head's on the ground.
Guest:Yeah, it's funny.
Guest:You don't think it was intentional?
Guest:How could it not be?
Guest:Ultimately, every step, even if it's something that wasn't intentional, it was talked about.
Marc:Just choosing goo.
Marc:Because that was a discussion.
Marc:What are these robots filled with?
Guest:Right, because they could be filled with red blood, like a human, right?
Guest:Like they could be, oh, we want to make them look humanoid, right?
Guest:I do think though there is a certain, like it's like, especially noticing this after you talk to like Rick Baker and Phil Tippett, like there are certain types of guys, of filmmakers, creative types, who just love dealing with goo and goop and sludge.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:Yeah, what was that guy, Tippett?
Guest:Yeah, Phil Tippett, yeah.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:Did you watch that thing?
Guest:I did watch that thing, but you know what else is really cool?
Guest:I was watching this thing on the Disney Channel.
Guest:It's called Light and Magic.
Guest:It's a doc series that Lawrence Kasdan made just about the early days of industrial light and magic and why Lucas had to create it in that.
Guest:Phil Tippett's all over it, as are all those guys who were like, you know...
Guest:Guys who made maquettes and stop motion and that.
Guest:But the way they make... Remember in the second Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, there were like those camel type animals that they ride through like the snow.
Guest:And the way they put real hair...
Guest:on these things is so metal.
Guest:Like these guys were like, they were like, the closest thing I've seen to it is like that guy we had on Dave Eggers, like making that Viking movie and just wanting everything to be like super authentic.
Guest:Like these dudes were like, this is,
Guest:Weird animal that does not exist in nature has to be so precise.
Guest:We're going to go hunt down the perfect hair to glue to this puppet so that it looks real like it's the level of guys investing in goop and viscera in movies is like that's a tale to be told.
Marc:And they like telling the tale.
Marc:They're full nerds.
Marc:There's a perfectionism to it that only they can understand.
Marc:But that's their Everest.
Marc:When they pull that off, they're just cheering on top of the mountains that they got the hair right and the thing moves right.
Marc:They're like creating worlds.
Marc:Yeah, and rightfully so.
Marc:They're like nerd gods creating worlds.
Marc:But tell me, movie stars, who are some of the other movie stars we had on, really, that you think?
Guest:Well, yeah, Leo and Brad and George Clooney, those are very big ones.
Guest:Nicole Kidman, that's a movie star.
Marc:Yeah, you know, I have a certain reverence, you know?
Marc:I really do.
Marc:And she was great.
Marc:Nicole was great, pretty candid.
Marc:Cate Blanchett.
Marc:That's a movie star.
Guest:It's interesting.
Guest:A lot of those people are people, we did it over Zoom and it still comes across, you know, their movie star-ness.
Marc:It does.
Marc:And, you know, I think we got some pretty good ones.
Marc:I don't think we would have gotten some of those interviews.
Marc:And I don't think they would have been as good if we hadn't done them when they were all sort of locked up in their houses.
Guest:Another shiny movie star person that you had in front of you was Anne Hathaway.
Marc:She really is a movie star.
Guest:Yeah, totally.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:And she was great.
Marc:I thought she was pretty candid in my recollection of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, definitely.
Marc:And she was definitely, you know, it's weird about her because she, you know, she goes all in, you know, she's kind of, you know, she'll take emotional risks.
Marc:As a movie star, which you don't always see all the time, you know, they seem like they're doing it.
Marc:But that's something I learned watching that sort of Paul Newman doc.
Marc:That is a very interesting sort of window into, you know, a guy who was naturally amazing looking and had such a profound presence and.
Marc:And he was already working with that, which is like 80% of being an actor.
Marc:But he was sort of an empty vessel and desperately wanted to figure out how to be great.
Marc:That was kind of an interesting journey.
Guest:It's really interesting that Ethan Hawke made that movie and his stated intention was like, these two are my heroes.
Guest:I would like to make a doc on them.
Guest:But from what you're telling me, it had a very precise focus and didn't pull punches.
Marc:No, it was really honest about both of their struggles as actors individually, but also as a couple.
Marc:And that goes to success, quality of acting, parenting, social causes.
Marc:I mean, he really sort of documented a life, but it actually, he goes from the beginning where Joanne Woodward was this sort of amazing person
Marc:kind of shape-shifting actress.
Marc:No one had done it like her.
Marc:She was full method and was kind of astounding in a way that you'd put on Meryl Streep or any of these people.
Marc:And Newman was kind of a sluggo.
Marc:He was third down the tier.
Marc:He was no Marlon Brando.
Marc:He was always in the shadow of Brando in any of those method cats at the James Dean at the time.
Marc:He was of an age.
Marc:And when he started going there, it just like he really it wasn't locking in.
Marc:And if you watch some of those early performance, he is not he's not doing the acting.
Marc:You know, he's you know, he's he's a studio player and they both kind of were.
Marc:But, you know, his star and he did a lot of bad movies and his star sort of starts to rise and she's having a hard time getting cast and they kind of deal with all that stuff.
Marc:But the thing that makes the doc great is they had this huge stack of interviews that had been transcribed miraculously because Newman had thrown out all of the recordings of them when he was in his 80s.
Marc:He burned them.
Marc:He was just done with whatever Paul Newman meant or was.
Marc:But they had all these transcripts and had all these actors reading from letters and interviews of all the people involved.
Marc:It was just an interesting look at the struggle of these creative people to become better and to continue staying engaged with it.
Marc:And for Paul Newman really to find what within himself he could bring to this craft of acting.
Marc:He was very hard on himself and he was a heavy drinker.
Marc:And, you know, and he wasn't...
Marc:I don't know, he was definitely a flawed guy and you don't think about that stuff.
Guest:Well no, it's interesting because of all the guys too, there was never any attempt to lionize him while he was alive because it was almost, there was this kind of understanding that this guy does this understated charity work
Guest:And he doesn't like to play it up.
Guest:And so let's just let him be.
Guest:And he can do the Newman's own stuff, which gives all this money away.
Guest:And he doesn't like to promote it and talk about it other than getting you to buy the food in that.
Guest:And I, you know, I always assumed like, oh, Paul Newman, he's like the ideal of the active, engaged movie star who's using his his
Marc:stardom and his uh profile for beneficial reasons and from what you're telling me about this doc it makes it very clear that he had to actively engage his brain to become that well right it happened in the 60s where it was sort of like you know you know i want to i want to make a difference i want to be a man of my time you know you have to make these decisions and like you're not born to do that stuff you have to you'll figure out what moves you and what you want to lend your name to and what you want to be in the service of
Marc:And he made choices and he was earnest about it.
Marc:But the stuff about the charity stuff, that comes so much later.
Marc:And I think Ethan sort of suggests that it was through the lens of losing his son.
Marc:to an accidental overdose.
Marc:A kid, his son was a troubled kid from his first marriage for whatever reason.
Marc:He carried a lot of guilt and he was always kind of writing and processing shame and he was very hard on himself.
Marc:And all the kids from the two marriages, he was a functioning alcoholic.
Marc:And, you know, and Gore Vidal talks about him and Joanne.
Marc:But the love, he really carries through the love that they had for each other.
Marc:It's a pretty... I was dubious about the doc because, like, it's Ethan.
Marc:Like, I like Ethan, but it's all done with Zoom and then these characters read.
Marc:But, you know...
Marc:A couple of things were just impressive is that he sort of really remained engaged with the material and talked to people that were engaged with the material and had all these great interviews to use as source material.
Marc:But also, he has a tremendous amount of glasses, frames, and he changes his facial hair a lot.
Marc:And this is when no one was going out of the house.
Marc:So I found that...
Marc:However long it took them to make this doc, I'm like, oh my God.
Marc:Has it been two years since the start of this?
Marc:Or did he just add hair to his face?
Marc:What are those glasses?
Marc:There was a lot of that.
Marc:What's his hair doing?
Marc:It's like he was so bored he just kept playing with his head.
Marc:I think we all kind of did that a little bit, right?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's relatable.
Marc:He was very earnest.
Marc:I think that...
Marc:You know, after interviewing Ethan, that was one of the greatest movie star things ever that, that he said, you know, and one of the most conscious, like, you know, he's, you know, he's a real deal, you know, actor and, you know, and he's a movie star, I believe really.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or he, you know, he had his time.
Guest:And he was married to one, like his wife was a huge movie, actual movie star.
Marc:Huge.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that thing he said about watching Denzel's movies like they were game tapes.
Marc:I thought that was... I've never heard anybody... I mean, that was as candid as one gets as a movie star.
Guest:And to identify what makes Denzel Denzel.
Guest:He's such a movie star, you're not going to get it by talking to that guy or figuring him out on set.
Guest:You better watch the movies and see what he did in the frame.
Marc:Yeah, but my...
Marc:What I heard was he just didn't want to get eaten alive.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:He just wanted to figure out a way to hold his own because he knew that Denzel was going to just try to consume him.
Marc:Especially that role.
Marc:I know.
Marc:That role is crazy.
Marc:I'll watch that anytime it's on.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, it's one of those movies.
Guest:Well, I want to go back to what you were talking about with the Newman doc.
Guest:We were talking, you know, before you even watched that, when we had Brett Morgan on.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You and I had a conversation about, like, the nature of documentaries.
Guest:And I think a lot of it was you, right after having seen Moon Age Daydream, trying to wrap your head around it.
Guest:And you were almost like, was this even a documentary?
Guest:And you and I had, I think, a pretty good conversation that informed that Brett Morgan interview about...
Guest:the different schools of thought around documentary.
Guest:And I think it was like Barbara Koppel who really kind of laid it on the line when you talk to her about docs, that she was like, I am not a journalist.
Guest:I'm not here to make a even-handed report.
Guest:I'm telling a story.
Guest:And that, I think, is something that probably has to be taken into consideration with all the best docs, even including this Paul Newman, John Woodward thing.
Guest:He's not trying to journalistically document the life of those two people.
Guest:He's trying to get across an emotional, resonant story.
Marc:Sure, but it seemed that one was...
Marc:there was some attempt to be thorough and an attempt to be journalistic to some degree in sort of, you know, because you're dealing with this mythic personality who everybody has a relationship with, but nobody really knows.
Marc:So, you know, and also what you get through by the end of that doc is that, you know, still most people didn't really know Paul Newman and that, you know, he kept, you know, that... So...
Marc:I think I still feel that there is journalistic intent even though the story is the story and whatever Ethan's emotional connection to them and to that story was that he was investigating and he was thorough about it and he had a lot of material to do it and a lot of the players were still alive and he could talk to people or he could have people sort of read what other people have said.
Marc:I feel like more than most there was journalism to that.
Marc:And the amazing thing about it is it really ends with, I've been talking about the verdict to people, where an older Paul Newman, who has been through a weird period of movies that were okay, and Sidney Lumet cast him in this thing, and apparently, after the first couple of days, Lumet was like, what are you doing?
Marc:I can't continue like this.
Marc:Because you're not, I don't know who this guy is, and you don't seem to know who he is, and you're not giving me anything, basically.
Marc:And he said, look, you know, this guy is you.
Marc:And given what you've been led up, the information you've been given throughout the documentary about, you know, his alcoholism and his sort of like his...
Marc:how he sees himself you know how hard he is on himself and stuff and you realize that the verdict he it's the first time he's put it all on screen who he was and that's why that thing is so amazing
Marc:Because that's Newman.
Marc:Like he said, the ice water in the sink was Newman's.
Marc:The binocchio was Newman's.
Marc:The eyedrops were his.
Marc:Like all the stuff that drunks do.
Marc:So anyways, I think that I still feel like the journalism, especially because Coppola was so defensive about it, that obviously it's something that is asked and it's something that is part of documentary history.
Marc:of the medium or the genre of documentary.
Marc:It's not unlike photography.
Marc:In photography, you have two schools that were established at the beginning of photography.
Marc:One was art photography.
Marc:The other was documentary photography.
Marc:And that's how you assess photographs.
Marc:From the beginning, you had Stieglitz and you had Jacob Rees, right?
Marc:So you had the guy taking pictures of children operating machinery and then you have Stieglitz shooting things that you can barely identify in the snow and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Marc:So it's always been part of the visual medium that what is this?
Marc:And obviously journalism is relative too in that is it serving an ideology?
Marc:Is it serving...
Marc:Is it propaganda?
Marc:Is it serving, you know, a social activism?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, my knowledge of this is that appropriately the line that was drawn was the thin blue line.
Guest:And that really there's a lot of people that come down in the camps that there was like an era of documentary film before Errol Morris and an era of it afterwards.
Guest:And he was largely responsible for breaking a lot of the rules, doing reenactments,
Guest:doing things that people within the documentary film community were angry at at the time, saying, you don't do that.
Guest:That's not what we do.
Guest:And his response was a full-on double bird and was like, this is absolutely what I'm doing.
Guest:I'm making the best possible movie of this.
Guest:And I do think Barbara Koppel is from that school of thought.
Guest:And I would be interested to find a documentary filmmaker who...
Guest:would come down on the side of it's gone too far or something.
Guest:Like just to hear their point of view on it.
Marc:But what would be interesting because not unlike photography, and I think this is relevant, that the sort of, you know, the argument about, you know, what establishes photography as...
Marc:an art form, how do we contextualize photography?
Marc:Obviously that conversation is long gone, but there was a time that it was being presented and looked at and fighting for its identity as an art form.
Marc:And then the big problem became is that once Kodak made the Brownie McGee camera and any idiot could take a picture, it became even more difficult.
Guest:Right, which is kind of what's happening now with documentaries.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And I understand that Earl Morris thing, and I've seen some of his stuff, but I was trying to remember today, because I studied film in college, what was the example of those original films?
Marc:of that form, it was the Nanook movie.
Marc:Nanook of the North, right, was one of the first documentaries.
Marc:And that was approached and set a standard, I imagine, for anthropological and nature documentaries.
Guest:But see, the interesting thing about that is that that to me falls in the same category as the Maisel's film Salesman.
Guest:Which you could say is a similar thing.
Guest:It's just this like, you know, point the camera and observe what's happening here.
Guest:And yet that movie is so poetic and, you know, basically a commentary on the failures of capitalism.
Guest:It was like Glengarry Glen Ross before it got written, you know, and it's just a...
Guest:verite look at the life of Bible salesmen.
Guest:Like, that's an amazing film.
Guest:It looks like Nanook of the North.
Guest:It looks like the black and white documentary films that you recognize from those days, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And also, the Maisel brothers are not stepping in
Marc:You know, they're letting the thing breathe on its own.
Marc:I think there was a time where, you know, I think with Errol Morris and this new sort of way of presenting documentary was like, look, I'm a fucking filmmaker and I'm not going to deny my point of view.
Guest:Or even more than just a filmmaker, I'm part of the film.
Guest:Like that was the thing that happened with Michael Moore jumping into the camera.
Marc:You know, and that to me...
Marc:I don't love it.
Guest:I don't love it.
Guest:I mean, but it works when it works.
Guest:Like Roger and me still fucking works.
Guest:Like that's a great movie.
Guest:And I think it works because Moore positions himself as this comedic character who draws your attention to the absurdity of things by his like almost like Inspector Clouseau stumbling upon him.
Guest:something that he wasn't supposed to stumble upon.
Marc:Right, and he's also representing the working class.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And he's doing that, you know, by virtue of coming from there, of having a history with the place.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:You know, he made a decision to step into his point of view as opposed to rely on his holding the camera to accomplish it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I mean, I don't mind that.
Marc:And I was just trying to think of docs that have had an impact on me, you know, and also... But like you said, that was interesting about...
Marc:about Salesman is that it did do that.
Marc:Was it the Maisel's intention to sort of provide a critique of capitalism?
Marc:Was that written down on a piece of paper that that's our agenda here?
Marc:So it becomes a question and not unlike decent kind of activist journalism.
Marc:You know, even when it's written, you know, you're still constructing your facts in a way to to have an impact.
Marc:So, like, you know, was that certain there was definitely poetry to it.
Marc:But that was, I think, journalism.
Marc:No.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:That's an interesting question.
Guest:Is that movie journal?
Guest:I mean, if anybody wants to watch this, it's on HBO Max right now.
Guest:Of course, you can always rent it digitally if you don't have HBO.
Guest:I don't need to do a full commercial for HBO here.
Guest:But I'd be interested if people watch that now, what they would think in terms of...
Guest:Is this a film with just a purely standing on its own artistic merits in terms of what it's shooting and what narrative story it's trying to tell or non-narrative story it's trying to tell?
Guest:Or is this an act of journalism?
Guest:That's an interesting question.
Marc:Well, I think it's always the question because that was always my problem in my mind when we approach this and why we have the same conversation again and again is that you look at a documentary
Marc:to sort of provide, you know, a fuller picture of a point of an investigation of something.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that's why it becomes such an easy kind of propaganda tool, you know, where, you know, like those idiots who made that doc about me and my failure and, you know, compared to Rogan, like, you know, you get a narrator, you put clips together.
Marc:It has an effect.
Marc:It's more of a, you know, a sort of nightline approach, a news program approach.
Marc:But the format itself lends itself to propaganda because it has an authoritative voice.
Marc:Like, you know, like a nature video is like somebody speaking like, well, if you put the facts together, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, what I would say, the counter to that is that my favorite documentary of all time
Guest:is American movie which is indistinguishable from a scripted comedy right like you know and an excellent scripted comedy at that and this was this was a documentary done in the late 90s uh director's name is Chris Smith and this was following an amateur filmmaker named Mark Borchardt if you don't know the film you've probably even seen clips of it or seen Mark and his friend Mike on they used to be Letterman and Conan and
Guest:It's a tremendous, uplifting, sorrowful, poignant, and ultimately life-affirming film that the best fiction films achieve.
Guest:And this gets it by examining something in real life.
Guest:And I don't get the sense, just the very nature of the fact that that movie has a subtitle,
Guest:It's called American Movie, The Making of Northwestern, which is a movie that does not get made in the course of the documentary, right?
Guest:It's the failed film that the guy is trying to make, and instead he has to make his horror film, Coven.
Guest:And Doc is essentially about him making this horror film.
Guest:That fact that they went down this path of trying to watch this guy make a film that he didn't wind up making tells me they didn't enter that for some agenda of trying to prove some point or investigate something journalistically.
Guest:They just wanted to observe.
Guest:And through time and diligence and then excellent editing...
Guest:they observed a full story of a life that is reflective of many people's lives.
Guest:Like people can watch that and the empathy machine gets churning and you go, oh, that's me, or that's someone I know, or I feel, I don't know any of those people, but I feel for them.
Marc:Right, and I think it set a, it created a school of docs, you know, because then you get like even that anvil doc, you get this doc of people trying.
Marc:Absolutely, yeah.
Marc:uh and and i think yeah i i'd forgotten the impact of that and how amazing it was and right that's not journalism it's portraiture in a way like it's sort of what we do yeah sure you know on a good day is that you've got a story in front of you of an individual and whether it's a doc you know whether this guy's engaged in in a in a journey or a task or you have a life in front of you that you know what you get to shape
Marc:is that guy's, you know, intentions and his attempts and his failures.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The Al LaBelle interview is our American movie.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I'm Alubel.
Guest:I'm Alubel.
Guest:I'm Alubel.
Guest:I'm Alubel.
Guest:I'm Alubel.
Marc:But yeah, man, I mean, that's the whole, that's the other thing too, is that you really start to think about, you know, where this stuff comes from and just the spectrum of possibility with docs and getting back to what we were talking about before as the advent of fantasy.
Marc:photography became something portable and something that was sold to people to document their lives and capture memories.
Marc:We're at this juncture where I've done jokes about it on stage about everyone's doing a doc with their phone.
Marc:The documentary, what used to be just photographs at a place are now full stories that can happen with action and editing on your phone for anybody.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:So that diminishes something, but it also adds something, the phenomenon of it.
Marc:It seems to be like this full spectrum of possibility and formats to documentaries now.
Marc:And the argument of journalism or no journalism is, I think, a valid one and also intent and also propaganda, to be quite honest.
Guest:Well, I mean, the interview that we're going to post on Thursday, it does not, you know, Abigail Disney's film that she co-directed, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, it doesn't shy away from that explicit intent.
Guest:It's an advocacy documentary.
Right.
Marc:right but there but there but it is an act of of journalism in the sense that in the same way that you know there are narratives that support uh the fact that there's wage disparity and people can't earn a living wage now you know whatever policy there is to maintain that in this country because of this stage of capital it's it capitalism it's a real thing you know people are suffering and she's able to focus on people who work at disneyland
Marc:Right.
Marc:And and her being a Disney brings more sort of weight to it in a way.
Marc:But she's not affiliated.
Marc:But but I would say if you're a correct thinker and believe that equality and fairness is something that needs to be enacted policy wise around wage earning, then it's journalism, isn't it?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Or it's a sense it's in the sense of like anyone who has a certain political point of view from whatever angle they're coming at it, you know, left, liberal, conservative, far right, whatever it is, if you're able to adequately and efficiently without trickery and lies, document real life situations to make your point.
Guest:What difference is that than just getting, you know, than a TED talk where you argue your point?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like it's just using the tools of filmmaking to to for for advocacy, for to to win your argument.
Guest:And in this case, the argument she's trying to win is get these people paid.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But also, I mean, the difference between that and a TED talk or whatever is that, again, because of documentary, because of what you're talking about, salesman again, too, in this in a way of poetry is that, you know, if you get into the car with a family, you know, who's driving to a food bank.
Guest:uh you know you don't have to explain much right right you know yeah well that's you know go back to roger me the the scene that i'll never forget for as long as i live was when he goes to that woman's door and because she's a sign about rabbits rabbit lady he says are you selling rabbits and she goes yeah pets are meat
Marc:He was just sort of like, oh, he's in the cutting room like, thank God for this lady.
Marc:Oh, we needed this lady.
Marc:We needed the weirdo, the rabbit lady.
Marc:Oh, my God, this is the best.
Marc:But, you know, recently we've dealing, I've been dealing and we've been dealing.
Marc:We talked to Brett Morgan, you know, and.
Marc:You know, I was starting to think about some of the documentaries that I remember, you know, clearly having impact on me.
Marc:Obviously, as a kid, as a Jew, we were shown documentaries about Nazis and, you know, and bodies being shoveled, you know, bulldozed into pits and piles of hair and, you know, all that horrendous stuff, you know, emaciated people.
Marc:uh all the concentration camp stuff which you know designed and and engaged my brain around the horror and sadly what needs to be i i need to remind myself of that you know those were real people but when you're like 10 when you're seeing these in hebrew school i mean it's devastating yeah you know and it's like you don't even know what to do with it it's you can't it can't be real
Marc:So I remember that stuff.
Marc:But as I got older, I remember seeing a movie I always remember.
Marc:It was a documentary about Dennis Hopper called The American Dreamer.
Marc:And it was shot when he was out at the D.H.
Marc:Lawrence Ranch in Taos trying to edit that movie.
Marc:The last movie?
Marc:The last movie.
Marc:And he was just like some mixture between Orson Welles and Charles Manson.
Marc:He's taking photographs.
Marc:He's in a bathtub with two women.
Marc:There's photographs all over the place.
Marc:There's editing equipment.
Marc:They're all wasted.
Marc:It looked like a goddamn commune.
Marc:And I just thought it was spectacular.
Marc:Because I didn't know anything about that guy.
Marc:And you're like, I mean, whatever the hell this guy is doing, he's out there, man.
Marc:And it was some document of a kind of like insane creativity.
Guest:You must have gotten the same feeling when you first saw Hearts of Darkness.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:What a great fucking movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I love it.
Marc:Like, you know, just to see how crazy, you know, that that Coppola is talking about how crazy Dennis Hopper was.
Marc:And Coppola's like, you know, out there with helicopters.
Marc:Like, you know, crazy Dennis Hopper's here.
Marc:I'm like, what about you, dude?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're hiring the Filipino Air Force to whatever it was.
Marc:The other one.
Marc:Oh, the Burroughs documentary, because I was such a fan of William Burroughs and I could never wrap my brain around him as a person.
Marc:And and there's this and I've got I've got a copy of it.
Marc:You can get it.
Marc:There's a Burroughs documentary that really sort of explores him as, you know, just a writer, not as some sort of, you know, spaceman.
Marc:And I thought that really had a profound effect on me.
Marc:And all these Ken Burns documentaries, the Vietnam one blew my mind.
Marc:The country music one was insane.
Marc:The jazz one was in education.
Marc:Those are terrific.
Marc:This new one that I'm watching now, America's Reaction to the Holocaust is like, it's reconfiguring my brain if they're good and they're provocative.
Marc:and they deal with something you're interested in or history, you can reposition your sense of that subject matter in your brain or enter it into your brain for the first time in a context, which is really the power of the documentary.
Marc:And then when you get into something like Morgan stuff, like that OJ one, or even David Shields did the Lynch one about that football player, which is similar,
Marc:which I thought was very effective.
Marc:And, you know, and I've become a big fan of Adam Curtis, which these are what you're talking about that come from that school of like, you know, I'm making a movie.
Marc:You know, I'm not responsible to anybody but my making a movie and what I'm interested in.
Marc:And the Adam Curtis ones are real pieces of art, as I think...
Marc:The Morgan ones, even the Bowie one is, and that Shields one, too, where it's a montage of things, of pieces and bits that create a feeling and provoke engagement around ideas and around history.
Marc:It's not suggesting a narrative.
Marc:It's using juxtaposition and montage to suggest something bigger than a narrative.
Marc:And that sort of is the power of art.
Marc:You know, you can't say you learned history from watching Adam Curtis.
Marc:You can a bit.
Marc:But, you know, his agenda is obviously bigger in the century of self or hyper normalization.
Marc:The century of self is, you know, it's really about the evolution of the public relations industry through the therapizing of America into the 60s and into what becomes a kind of like malignant narcissistic culture.
Marc:So...
Marc:You know, but he's not saying that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's also, it becomes impressionistic, right?
Guest:If he's going to give you enough of these visual elements, it's not necessarily on him to dictate what you're going to take away from it.
Guest:He's giving you tools and you can...
Guest:Take from it what you will.
Marc:See, I like that.
Marc:See, and that's my expectation from those type of documentaries.
Marc:And I think it's a way we judge documentaries.
Marc:Is this lean eel?
Marc:Is it on us to make the decision?
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:You've been presented.
Marc:Like the capturing the Freedmen's one, right?
Marc:I mean, you know, like, you know, who's the bad guy?
Marc:Is there a bad guy?
Marc:Did it really happen?
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I think there's a type of doc that does that, where you're presented, you have a moral conundrum, you know, and you've been given this information.
Marc:How do you judge it?
Marc:How do you reflect?
Marc:You know, what are you reflecting from this?
Marc:What are you seeing in this?
Marc:And I think that's...
Marc:I think that's a way of judging documentary.
Marc:Like, you know, were they, you know, was the documentarian too involved in being suggestive?
Marc:Were we able to do the thinking on our own?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, I think we've given people a lot of things to sift through if they want to go watch some docs or, I don't know, want to go watch some Sigourney Weaver movies or any other movie stars that we talked about.
Guest:That Paul Newman one is on, what, HBO right now?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a lot for you to watch, although I would recommend before next week, if you haven't seen it in a while, to maybe fire up your copy of the one and only Michael Clayton, because Mark and I will be back next week to do a very special look at that movie as we post Mark's interview with Tony Gilroy, the writer and director of Michael Clayton.
Guest:That guy was lit up, man.
Guest:Yeah, I feel like it was like a big day for you to finally get to talk to him.
Yeah.
Marc:yeah yeah he was excited and he's a he's a sharp guy and like you know real kind of you know new york trained man on the streets you know uh all right well we'll do more movie talk next week then okay great