Episode 826 - Jeff Baena / Dave Anthony
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck, publicans?
Marc:What the fuck, crats?
Marc:What the fuck, nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:I hope you had a pleasant fourth.
Marc:I hope you have all your digits.
Marc:I hope you didn't wreck your car or black out or make any family members cry or burn your hands and face.
Marc:I hope everything worked out for most of you and you reflected and were thoughtful or you were just aggravated and excited.
Marc:Whatever it was, welcome.
Marc:I hope you had a pleasant Fourth of July.
Marc:I find that, well, you know, first let me deal with some sadness.
Marc:There's some sadness of a couple of days ago since I last talked to you.
Marc:I got confirmation that one of my ferals, one of my old outdoor buddies, one of the one-sided relationships I have with wild animals, with wild cats, who I feed, is dead.
Marc:And...
Marc:I've talked about this guy for a long time.
Marc:This is a deaf black cat, RIP, DBC.
Marc:He was an amazing cat only because, if not only, how do I want to say it?
Marc:He was an amazing cat in a lot of ways, but the primary one being he was completely wild,
Marc:And he couldn't hear shit, could not hear anything.
Marc:It was a miracle that he lived.
Marc:He was an actual spirit animal.
Marc:I thought he had a mystical quality.
Marc:I was always amazed to see him when he'd show up.
Marc:And he'd go away for weeks at a time and go eat somewhere else.
Marc:And he didn't eat for a few days.
Marc:I just had a bad feeling.
Marc:But I always have a bad feeling.
Marc:uh about that stuff and and then my neighbor adam confirmed that uh that his daughter his little girl isabel had found the uh the cat under a tree over there next door down on the hill uh dead and um
Marc:He didn't look sick, and I don't know.
Marc:I don't want to get too grisly about it, but somehow or another, I've been blessed with not having to find the animals in my life.
Marc:Dead.
Marc:You know, Boomer disappeared.
Marc:Butchie died when I was away.
Marc:Scaredy Cat 1 was dead out in the street and then disappeared.
Marc:Deaf Black Cat is now dead in a grave down on the hill next to another feline in Adams' small feline.
Marc:burial site the truth of the matter is that cat's been around for at least seven years that i can remember and uh you know i did the best i could and gave him a good life he lived under the house it was a miracle that he lived for so long but he did he was sort of a symbol of strength for me deaf black cat
Marc:And now he's gone.
Marc:I remember I took him to the vet once.
Marc:I had to trap him and take him to the vet because half his face was bleeding and swollen and full of pus.
Marc:I thought he lost an eye.
Marc:And I thought this cat cannot afford to lose any more of his senses.
Marc:And it wasn't.
Marc:It was an abscess, and I got him back.
Marc:But the vet said, I've never seen a wilder cat.
Marc:He was a tough little fuck.
Marc:And he managed to dodge death for many years, and now he's gone.
Marc:So rest in peace.
Marc:Deaf Black Cat, I'm sorry to see you go.
Marc:Today on the show, I got a short talk with my old writing and acting comrade, Dave Anthony, about his book that apparently he didn't really want to sell.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:He wrote a book drawn from his dollop podcast, he and his co-host, Gareth Reynolds.
Marc:It's called The United States of Absurdity, Untold Stories from American History.
Marc:You can get that wherever you get books, but apparently Dave didn't think to give me a call.
Marc:Maybe this platform was not enough for Dave.
Marc:I'll talk to him about it, but he's here for a minute.
Marc:And then after that, I talked to Jeff Baina, the filmmaker.
Marc:Maybe you're familiar with some of his movies.
Marc:I guess the biggest one that got a bit of attention a little while ago was Joshy, which I enjoyed.
Marc:He's got a new movie out with my co-star in Glow, Alison Brie, and...
Marc:Her husband, Dave Franco, and Aubrey Plaza, and Kate Micucci, and John C. Reilly, and Molly Shannon.
Marc:And there's a lot of people in it.
Marc:Nick Offerman's in it for a second.
Marc:Paul Reiser does a great job in it.
Marc:Fred Armisen's in there for a second.
Marc:A lot of people in the movie, and it's an odd, dirty, little period piece based in medieval times at a nunnery.
Marc:But Jeff Baina is a very engaged, intense, smart dude.
Marc:And it was good talking to him.
Marc:So this year I went over to the regular party I go to at Dan and Jen's house.
Marc:Dan from Gimme Gimme Records and his wife, Jen, a acupuncturist.
Marc:Is that what you call him?
Marc:Is it?
Marc:Yeah, I think that's the proper term.
Marc:It's nice.
Marc:Nice gathering people.
Marc:But, you know, there's a lot of good conversations around, a lot of good food, a lot of roasted pork.
Marc:My statins are working overtime today because I did make the exception.
Marc:I did.
Marc:You know, it's weird when you eat shit like that after a certain age.
Marc:And I don't know if it's trackable or you just start to wonder which burger did you in?
Marc:Which burger just filled that tube going into your pump?
Marc:Which one was it?
Marc:Which was the last straw?
Marc:Which piece of pork?
Marc:Which rib?
Marc:Which burger?
Marc:Which egg?
Marc:You know, which one was it?
Marc:And was it worth it?
Marc:If you could have avoided that one burger that finally spackled your pipe, you know, would you have done it?
Marc:But, you know, I've been good and the pork was good and the desserts were good.
Marc:Pie, a lot of pie fucking happened.
Marc:I think I annoyed Dan's wife, Jen, because she makes this huge, she slow cooks this pork all day.
Marc:So, of course, I'm just going to be lingering around the kitchen, helping out until the pork comes out.
Marc:And then again, I go back and I'm lingering, just hanging around, waiting for the pies to come out, offering some help.
Marc:Can I put that pie on the table and watch you slice it and take the first piece?
Marc:Is there ice cream?
Marc:Is there any shame in that?
Marc:Why have decorum?
Marc:I don't want to be cut out of the pork or the pie.
Marc:I went home and I felt like maybe I should try to behave like a fucking adult, but I've never been cool or an adult or anything else.
Marc:I'm either sort of withdrawn or kind of aggravated or just running around like a fucking child.
Marc:That's a pretty good range, though.
Marc:Spent some time talking to a guy I kind of know, Joe Wong.
Marc:A lot of soundtrack people.
Marc:He does movie and TV soundtracks.
Marc:But Joe Wong has a podcast that he only talks to drummers.
Marc:He's a drummer.
Marc:It's called The Trap Set.
Marc:So if that interests you, musicians and drum aficionados, go check out Joe's podcast.
Marc:He claims he based it on this, but it's just drummer-specific.
Marc:All right?
Marc:so dave anthony dave anthony is a friend we should be spending more time together he lives close by we should be hanging out but for whatever reason we don't and when i told him i said i can't you know i saw his book in chicago at a bookstore and i was like why the fuck wouldn't he come over and and try to talk about his book and maybe get people to buy it
Marc:I don't know, but I'll get to it with him.
Marc:So this is me and Dave Anthony having a tense reunion, a friendly tense reunion, which is every time we get together.
Marc:Wait, where do you record your podcast?
Marc:The, uh, the, uh, what is it?
Marc:Dollop.
Marc:The dollop.
Marc:You're supposed to know the name.
Marc:Dude, I just.
Marc:How long have we been, how long have we known each other?
Marc:Okay, I know the dollop.
Marc:Of course I do.
Marc:I just had a brain fart for a minute, but I thought you were going to say that I was supposed to have done research for this particular conversation.
Marc:I don't, I don't think.
Marc:Let me give the backstory.
Guest:I'll give the backstory.
Marc:Okay, go ahead, go ahead.
Marc:So I don't see you for a long time for whatever reason, you know, you're.
Guest:We're both busy and we're both, uh, we're both isolating.
Yeah.
Marc:so it's nothing personal so so well we've worked together a lot we like each other we have a good time when we hang out yeah for a little while and i'm in fucking chicago doing a shoot and one of the locations is a bookstore and i'm looking at their table of new books and i'm like the fucking dollop book what does dave not want to sell the book i mean like i'm down the street i have people who i like on my show to maybe help sell the thing they made but i guess he doesn't
Guest:want to sell the book at all do you so you have a podcast that you do stuff yeah no i'm sorry did i need to shoot your reminder that we're still on the air over here i i remember uh i remember i had a list of people and then what was on that list and then you were on the list in parentheses did you never get a book no i didn't get anything that's this all seems very weird
Guest:Because I think what happened was I had a list of people and then I think I got... I know what I did.
Guest:I got to you and I've seen all the shit you get.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was like, well, I have to hand deliver this to him because if I sent it to him in an envelope, it's going to fucking sit there on the ground.
Guest:Oh, that's what you thought?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I didn't get a text from you or anything.
Guest:No, well, that's a complicated and involved process to reach out to another human being.
Guest:Really?
Marc:To say, like, I got a book coming out.
Marc:Yeah, I want to send you one.
Marc:Maybe I can come on and talk about it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, so right there, there's a lot of levels to that.
Marc:Well, let's talk about those levels.
Marc:First of all, I'm leaving my house.
Marc:Well, what about the level of sort of like, I'm not going to give them that.
Marc:No.
Guest:i'm not gonna let him have any what about that level fuck maron i'm not gonna put myself in that position where i gotta kiss up to that guy there's a lot of i think there's a lot of jealousy with my uh book because i don't think your book has the same sort of pictures no pop-ups we have uh we have we have a lot of draw drawings in here
Guest:So you didn't buy it in Chicago.
Guest:You just looked at it and then you were a little bit angry.
Guest:That was weird.
Marc:My anger was so stupid because I'm like, well, fuck him.
Marc:If he doesn't want to let me help him out, I'm not going to buy his book.
Guest:It was convoluted.
Guest:I was just like...
Marc:although i remember thinking i have to i have to actually hand this hand deliver this to mark but then i never i know yeah and it just sits there and i get it and then and then you sit at home and go like i don't know why isn't this book selling yeah it's not so what's going on and then everything just it works out exactly as you expected yeah then it's like i told you we shouldn't have done the book i told you i should i told you we shouldn't have tried to sell it i told
Marc:The convoluted plans on both sides.
Marc:Have you ever heard the podcast?
Marc:That's the thing.
Marc:Have you listened to it?
Marc:I watched you do it live once.
Marc:Oh, that's right.
Marc:And the thing, I like it, but I wouldn't take that personally.
Marc:Ask me a more broader question.
Marc:Do you listen to any podcast?
Guest:Try that one.
Marc:Do you listen to any podcast?
Marc:I don't, Dave.
Marc:I don't know why.
Marc:I don't listen to one podcast.
Marc:You know why?
Marc:Here's how I take in audio material.
Marc:I'll put on my Sonos occasionally.
Marc:For the last three months, I'm so engaged in the news in print that I don't even listen to NPR news.
Marc:And most of the time, I listen to records or I listen to music in my car.
Marc:I primarily listen to music.
Marc:And that's it.
Marc:That's the story.
Marc:Even when you're traveling, you listen to music?
Marc:I do.
Marc:A lot of times when I'm traveling, I don't listen to anything.
Marc:Like, I'm so inundated with music on an intentional basis.
Marc:Sometimes when I travel, like on a plane, I'll watch some movies, or I'll just sit there and listen to the plane engines in this mild panic.
Guest:Yeah, that's... First of all, that's not good for you.
Guest:I know.
Guest:You should always have some sort of noise happening that can distract you from your own thoughts.
Marc:And sometimes if I'm interviewing a musical guest, I'll be busy listening to their entire catalog for no reason.
Oh.
Marc:Yeah, you got to pretend like you're doing research.
Marc:Well, I'd like to get a handle on something.
Marc:I'd like to know where it went bad and why I don't know the most recent 20 records.
Marc:Well, you never know the recent 20.
Guest:I mean, after a certain point... Why is that?
Guest:Because after a certain point, you go, I get what you do.
Guest:Right, and then you're done.
Guest:And then they think they're doing something miraculous and amazing, and sometimes they are.
Guest:Sometimes they do put out good stuff when they're older, but just no one's listening at that point.
Guest:So the podcast is you take bizarro American... It's not even bizarro.
Guest:It's just sort of...
Guest:You know, I guess the best way to describe it is, like, History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I sort of took that model.
Guest:People's history.
Guest:A people's history.
Guest:So I try to look at history from the people who were being persecuted or, you know, shit on.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:But sometimes you do smaller stories, too, right?
Guest:Yeah, we do smaller stories for sure.
Guest:I think the book is mostly full of stories.
Guest:So these were all stories that were featured on the podcast?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, except for one that we threw in there.
Guest:So you got sports stories?
Guest:Yeah, we got a lot of sports stories.
Guest:Medical breakthroughs?
Guest:Well, there's a lot of medical.
Guest:What's the lobotomy one?
Guest:Freeman's lobotomy?
Guest:That was a guy who basically started...
Guest:a lobotomy craze because they had a lot of people in hospitals that it was just packed full of people they didn't know what to do with is that when francis farmer got hers um no i think she came later but it might at the tail end that was like the new the new great psychological breakthrough totally
Guest:This will work.
Guest:And this guy went around like, I mean, he was like a rock star.
Guest:With his little ice pick.
Guest:Yeah, and do a bunch at once.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And people will be lined up.
Guest:Just stick that ice pick up into a frontal lobe.
Guest:Just knock that person into dumbness.
Guest:Just like blender it.
Guest:Just like.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then like, you're fixed.
Guest:And then the doctor's like, this is great.
Guest:Now he sits in a chair and smiles.
Guest:Perfect.
Guest:Thank you for doing that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wish you would have left the ability to use a fork in there.
Guest:That would have been helpful to everybody.
Guest:yeah so he he went around doing that and i think he at one point he had a gold gold plated pick and a and a hammer and like yeah he was like henry ford setting up a factory no no he was just rolling him through and he's doing a bunch and so what was the commentary angle on that i mean like why why that story
Guest:Well, for us, there's a big emphasis on what medicine started out as and what it became.
Guest:And the fact is that it was a crazy, barbaric thing that he did, but at the end of the day, it helped lead us to chemical fixes for these problems.
Marc:Well, they were able to, like, well, he got the area right.
Guest:The lobe seems to be where things are happening.
Guest:How do we leave their personality intact?
Guest:How do we not do it with a hammer?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah so all that stuff uh and what's the uh the death of george washington well they bled george washington to death oh that's how george washington died he had they believed in in bloodletting then and three different doctors came in to treat him in one night and they all they all bled him and at the at the end they had taken half of his blood and that's how he died really yeah
Guest:And was he sick with something, though?
Guest:He'd gotten a really bad cold, possibly pneumonia.
Guest:He was just out.
Guest:Hilariously, he- He was in his 70s, though?
Guest:Was he old?
Guest:He was in his 70s, but he went out on his farm for whatever reason in a storm, and he got soaked, and he was in his dinner clothing, and he refused to be late to dinner, so he just sat there in his cold, wet clothing eating with his wife.
Guest:And after that, he went upstairs to change, so he got really sick because of that.
Marc:maybe at that point the president was uh not didn't have his full capacity or slightly stubborn to the point of death you know and uh and what was your angle on that what was the commentary like even even the father of our country was a dummy no that was another medical one of just of just you don't hear about that but they bled our president to death our first president
Guest:Because they thought they were doing the right thing when they were clearly.
Guest:What's the Kentucky meat shower?
Guest:That's just crazy.
Guest:No, I wouldn't have known that from the title.
Guest:A lady was just out in her yard doing a little laundry and a bunch of meat fell out of the sky and then everyone was trying to figure out where it came from.
Marc:What about, what's the Tim Doc Anderson story?
Guest:That's a guy that's still alive.
Guest:He is a boxer, was a boxer in Florida, and he was part of this manager who kept wanting to take falls, and he was trying to build up another boxer, so he told him to take a fall, and at some point the guy wouldn't, so he drugged him.
Guest:and that whatever he drugged him with it lasted for years oh my god and he confronted the manager and like this guy yeah because he didn't know what was wrong with him after a while he confronted the manager yeah and the manager's like i'm gonna kill your sister whatever and then he ended up shooting the manager killing the manager so now he's in jail right but it's one of those he didn't know he was gonna die you poisoned me
Guest:like oh my god yeah so he got life in jail but i kind of think a bit much you and gareth reynolds do you who does the primary research i do gareth gareth is uh the funny the funny uh part of the thing yeah it's all it's important that you have one of those guys i'm the straight man you know that
Marc:No, you can be funny.
Marc:I've seen you be really funny.
Marc:But I understand you needed a different type of funny.
Guest:Well, I mean, it's not like on your show, I would sort of carry the... You were psychotic.
Guest:Yeah, so I would carry the scenes with my hilarity.
Guest:All right.
Guest:And now it's sort of the opposite on the podcast.
Marc:I think what really happened was we both added to a certain dynamic that created the humor.
Guest:Yeah, there was a relationship that sort of accentuated our issues, and then from those, I got to come in and steal scenes.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I knew that that was a wind-up.
Marc:You know, like, I know...
Marc:that it was going to start out pretty good.
Marc:Like, right when I heard you started, I'm like, is it going to end the way it always does?
Marc:Yeah, it doesn't.
Marc:I mean, don't give me room.
Marc:Why don't you give me room?
Marc:But what is the process of, like, you do two of these a week on the podcast.
Guest:Yeah, so I do a lot of research.
Guest:It's a lot of work, and I write them up, and then he's never heard of the subject, so I just sit down and read it.
Marc:And the only context is you just think it's weird or you think it's an interesting story.
Guest:Or it has something in it that relates to today.
Guest:There's a lot of stuff I do that I try to parallel whatever's happening.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, because I initially thought that, because I don't listen to it regularly, that it sort of has a tabloid element, but it doesn't really.
Guest:Some of it is.
Guest:It's more of a social commentary element than a tabloid element.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, look at how fucking weird people are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And look how fucked up things weren't.
Guest:Oh, shit's not that different.
Guest:It's still fucked up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's not that great.
Guest:I don't know if you've noticed what's going on.
Guest:It's not.
Guest:It's not really that great.
Guest:People are telling me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know what drives me nuts?
Marc:Is there people out there in the world who are just going about their lives and are just sort of like, yeah, I don't know really what's going on.
Guest:I was in the gym today and the lady next to me was watching Extra and I was like, how do you do that now?
Yeah.
Marc:i know i i feel that too but like there's also a part of me that's sort of like well i have to remember to do that occasionally yeah check out and just kind of well i don't know if it's checking out it's like by being checked in ultimately unless you're actually you know uh taking action all you're doing is just heating your shit up yep and just going like we're fucked yeah we're screwed yeah and then you just sit around and that's what you're doing that's what you're living in yeah
Marc:So unless you're, like, taking it in and going, like, well, I'm going to send some money or write some emails or go out into the streets, all you're doing is, like, it's not getting any better.
Marc:You don't...
Marc:Why did you watch an extra?
Guest:Well, what's the point?
Guest:Yeah, why?
Marc:What's the point?
Marc:It's over.
Marc:It's over.
Marc:Why would you want to watch that?
Marc:No one cares.
Marc:Well, I would never watch that anyways, but I do try to have conversations with people and stay on top of things.
Marc:It's very hard for me, knowing I have a platform.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:to not just become one of those kind of strident, existentially panicked, aggravated people that's just sitting reeling off the news and reacting to it because there is humanity still going on.
Marc:So I'll choose to pick stories that sort of like, well, this is where the human spirit kind of won.
Marc:Or I kind of related to that.
Marc:Because just ramming up against this fucking doofus, it's just feeding it.
Marc:Oh, it totally feeds it.
Marc:Yeah, it's like he likes any kind of attention.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Doesn't matter what it is.
Guest:Any sort of swirling madness, he's like, this is great.
Guest:So what else is going on?
Guest:How's the kid?
Guest:The kid's good.
Guest:The kid's a little baseball freak.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:We talked a little bit about that.
Marc:I just feel like you on the field, you're coaching, too?
Guest:Coaching, getting into arguments and possible fights with other coaches.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I may have told a guy to fuck off on the Little League baseball field after he screamed.
Guest:I can tell you that's the one in the story.
Guest:You're not going to deny or confirm it?
Guest:I'm not going to deny it.
Guest:That's what happened.
Guest:I went over to them to, hey, can you talk to your team about misbehaving?
Guest:They're being kind of bullies.
Guest:What were they doing?
Guest:They were badgering our kids, yelling at them, you pitch slow.
Guest:Just that kind of stuff you don't want to happen with little kids.
Guest:And I went over to say, hey, could you talk to your kids to...
Guest:make him stop and he got in my face and screamed at me and i thought we were going to get in a fist fight so you knew exactly where it was coming from like not only were they not going to stop but he was probably encouraged i immediately realized oh this is actually coming from the top
Guest:It's a top down thing.
Guest:And so he was screaming at me.
Guest:So I did what I always do, which is I looked at him and I said, fuck you.
Guest:And then he got more mad because I swore around children.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And then he said, what did you just say to me?
Guest:And I said, I said, go fuck yourself.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:And then he didn't know what to do because he thought I wasn't going to
Guest:He thought I'd be like, oh, I'm sorry, but I didn't.
Guest:I doubled down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he got very angry and he wouldn't shake my hand at the end of the game and all that stuff.
Guest:And then I went home and I looked him up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he used to be Jeb Bush's press secretary.
Guest:Oh, see, it all comes around.
Guest:Everything is political.
Guest:Yeah, it really is.
Guest:And he used to also, when he was in college, he was the college mascot, Bobby the Bear.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he's got a lot on his plate.
Guest:He's got a lot on his plate.
Guest:A lot of baggage.
Guest:And I know if I see him around town, I can go, Bobby the Bear, and he'll lose his mind.
Marc:That's your ace in the hole.
Marc:You're ready to...
Marc:All right, so this book, The United States of Absurdity, Untold Stories from American History, Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds.
Marc:And this is with a forward by Patton Oswalt.
Marc:I might as well mention that because that was your big idea, wasn't it?
Marc:What, Patton Oswalt?
Marc:Oh, yeah, that was going to sell it, right?
Marc:Yeah, I think.
Marc:Did it?
Marc:Do you know?
Marc:Books are hard.
Marc:It's been, yeah, the publishing company's happy.
Marc:You get these quarterly sort of invoices that just show you how much money you didn't make.
Guest:It's just like in parentheses against your advance, how much in debt you are still.
Guest:I just assume I'm going to get something that says almost.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's about it.
Guest:You'll get them for years unless a miracle happens.
Guest:But this one, they ordered a second printing because they didn't think it was going to sell that well.
Guest:And then it did.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:So it's who knows what.
Guest:I don't know what the numbers are.
Guest:And the podcast is popular?
Guest:Yeah, the podcast is doing well.
Guest:We're not.
Guest:Is it still limited to Australia or is it spreading?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:We're actually more popular in America than Australia now.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, we came around and.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Yeah, it's exciting.
Guest:Well, it's good to see you.
Guest:Nice to see you.
Guest:We should see each other more than once a year.
Guest:We live down the street.
Guest:We do live super close.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:I'm not, you know, I don't know what it is or who you hang out with, but I know you long enough and I've heard you talk about enough people to where like, I'm one of the better ones that gets, I understand you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, you do.
Guest:And that might be the problem.
Marc:You understanding me might be the issue.
Marc:Oh, I'm sorry.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You'd rather just sort of like, hey, can you just let me be a dick?
Marc:Can you just, that's sort of what I do publicly and with most other people.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you still work out at my gym?
Marc:I belong there.
Marc:I'm still able to.
Marc:I never see you in there.
Marc:I know.
Marc:She goes to the yoga classes sometimes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I tend to work out with this woman who trains me down the street over here.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But I do want to go up there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you do there?
Guest:I just mostly ride the bikes.
Marc:Maybe a little bit... I tend to, like, run outside.
Marc:On the circle thing?
Marc:Up above the... No, no.
Marc:Like, I tend to run out here.
Marc:Oh, just outside.
Guest:Just outside your house.
Marc:Out in the world.
Marc:How is that?
Marc:It's great.
Marc:It seems terrifying to me.
Marc:Well, it's quiet up here.
Marc:Like, I can go up in the hill.
Marc:There's no cars.
Guest:But there's enough room to run around up here?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:There's, like, hills.
Marc:Like, now I'll run up the street and run down.
Marc:Then I'll walk up this big, steep hill and run a little bit and come back around.
Marc:And, like, running on the machine, like, it's just sort of like... Now, running on a machine is...
Marc:Tedious.
Marc:But if I could get into the habit, so the other stuff, like the working out business, I do with her.
Marc:But I should go and do some classes, like some yoga, man.
Marc:I was in yoga for a while.
Marc:I'm thinking about jumping into a Pilates thing.
Guest:Yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's hard.
Marc:With the machines?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It's subtle.
Marc:Like, you don't realize it until the day after when you can't stand up and you shit your pants.
Guest:And you're crying.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I got to go easy on this.
Marc:Lost control of my digestive system.
Marc:He's got...
Marc:I think I pushed it too hard.
Guest:That's the kind of workout I want is when I stand up and just evacuate my bowels.
Guest:Preferable to get to the bathroom first or you don't want to go back to that class.
Guest:You don't want to be the guy who shit his pants.
Guest:Well, if I stand up and shit my pants, I go, it's working.
Guest:I'm getting in shape.
Guest:To the shocked look of housewives.
Guest:Who let that guy in?
Guest:All right, buddy.
Guest:Well, maybe I'll see you up at the gym.
Guest:Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Guest:Yep.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:So go get the, go get his book.
Marc:It's fun.
Marc:There's pictures and you know, it's a nice, maybe, you know, a, like, you know, I'll take this into the bathroom book.
Marc:You know what I'm saying?
Marc:So Jeff Bain, uh, uh, is a guy I met, you know, I went to, where'd I meet him first?
Marc:Oh, yeah, we were set up on sort of a coffee date by the agency, and we had a great talk, and then I had him on, and I went to a screening of his movie.
Marc:It was very funny.
Marc:While The Little Hours was still in post-production, when they were still tweaking it,
Marc:Jeff let me come watch it where they were doing the editing in a screening room.
Marc:So it was a screening.
Marc:And you never know what a screening is going to be, how many people are going to be there, who's going to be there.
Marc:And I remember I showed up and we were waiting.
Marc:I was waiting for Jeff.
Marc:And then another guy walks in and it's Father John Misty.
Marc:So it was just me and Father John Misty at a screening with Jeff.
Marc:And it wasn't awkward, just, you know, very small and kind of interesting crowd.
Marc:Me, Father John Misty and the director.
Marc:But the movie is funny.
Marc:It's raw.
Marc:It's good.
Marc:It's it's it.
Marc:It's a unique thing.
Marc:That's for sure.
Marc:And it's based on some, a very old piece of literature, which I found compelling.
Marc:And I talked to Jeff about it, but this is me and Jeff Bain of the movie is the little hours.
Marc:It's playing in New York and LA.
Marc:It's going to be expanding throughout the country this month.
Marc:So this is me talking to him, to Jeff, the director and writer of the thing.
Yeah.
Marc:It was very funny to me that, like, I'm going to see the screening of this new movie, Alison Brees in it, who, you know, I just worked with, and John C. Reilly, and Aubrey Plaza's in it, who is your girlfriend.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Molly Shannon.
Marc:Kate Micucci.
Marc:Kate Micucci.
Marc:But, like, I didn't know what to expect.
Marc:I know that you told me it was based on the Decameron, which is a big book.
Marc:and this is one story in that book i read the decameron i think when i was in a satire class in college right who wrote the decameron giovanni boccaccio so so you invite me to the screening and i didn't know who was going to be there and it turns out it's just me and father john misty sitting there what's his real name again josh tillman josh tillman who i've met and it's just me and tillman well you did you did it the wtf with him i did yeah
Marc:And it was just an odd thing.
Marc:Like it was just to me, it was very odd.
Marc:It's just like going to be me and Father John Misty watching a movie with you.
Marc:Perfect audience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Are you guys real tight?
Guest:We're friends.
Guest:I wouldn't say we're super tight.
Guest:He's better friends with Aubrey.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:She's known him for years.
Guest:She did a music video with him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the movie is, it's kind of raw.
Marc:It takes place in, what's the date?
Marc:1347.
Marc:1347 at a, it's not a convent.
Guest:It's a convent.
Marc:It is a convent.
Marc:It is a convent.
Marc:And the premise is that, you know, some of the stuff that I didn't know about that time was that some women were sentenced to convents in a way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Most women.
Guest:I mean, the way it kind of worked was a convent was a school.
Guest:So, you know, especially if you're a noble, you'd go to a convent and then at some point you come out, you know, graduate.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Either get married or you just lead your life.
Guest:But there's a bunch of sort of considerations that I guess we don't have now about people, the way people are treated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so if you were the youngest kid, generally a man or a woman, you'd be a priest or a nun.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If you were not married, you'd become a nun.
Guest:If you were divorced, you became a nun.
Guest:If your husband died, you became a nun.
Guest:And then generally, if your father wanted to have favor with the church, the more daughters or sons he had in the church would be better.
Guest:So there's all these different versions of how you end up becoming a nun.
Guest:That's the Middle Ages.
Guest:Middle Ages.
Guest:Then a little bit later, I think around 1410 or 1420,
Marc:yeah um women started almost doing it as a feminist movement where they would like choose to become nuns yeah and it was very funny because allison breeze character is there because her father wants to have uh you know a relationship with the church right yeah and the father could be it could not be any more jewish than paul riser even in the scenes which i thought was funny yeah and when i talked to you afterwards
Marc:About this, because it's really about sex in this convent mostly.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Would you say?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's directly from Decameron.
Guest:The sex aspect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:So what I told you afterwards was it felt somewhat like Alex Cox's movies or specifically Walker for some reason, because there was something about anachronism.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also that there seemed to be not as much of an intentional infusion of modern sensibility into the dynamics between people.
Marc:But it was definitely there that you felt like the setting was what it was.
Marc:The premise and the story was what it was.
Marc:But there was the activity and visceral type of engagement between these characters seem sort of modern and raw.
Marc:Well, I just think it's timeless.
Marc:I think that's that's human humans.
Marc:I guess that's probably true.
Marc:And I guess we don't usually think about that time like that.
Guest:I mean, that was pretty much my intention was to sort of bridge that gap.
Guest:So that when you're watching that time period, you don't have this sort of hazy sort of buffer between you and that time where you're not connecting with these people, but they're just people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, obviously they don't have technology and they're, you know, nuns, but they're just people.
Guest:They have the same desires and same hopes and dreams.
Guest:And they're filthy, just like they've always been people.
Marc:Filthy animals which struggle in conflict.
Marc:And now what, how did this work out?
Marc:Because I mean, you don't spend a lot of money on movies.
Marc:So how do you get to shoot in Italy at this beautiful place?
Guest:It worked out really well.
Guest:So we, so just sort of like going back in history, I guess, and I sort of preface all of this.
Guest:I went to NYU, I got a degree in filmmaking.
Guest:I also got a minor in medieval and renaissance studies, which wasn't on purpose.
Guest:I took a bunch of random ass classes.
Guest:Like I took a class on harmony of the spheres, Arabian nights, Jewish mysticism.
Guest:And one of the classes I took was called sexual transgression in the middle ages and renaissance.
Guest:And we studied the decameron and the heptameron and the penitentials and just sort of the whole history.
Guest:And what it did was it opened my eyes to this time period.
Guest:You always think of nuns and priests and all these people sort of just being these like religious robots that are just going through their day and almost so unrelatable.
Guest:And the penitentials are sort of the punishments, the church levies against people, you know, for different transgressions.
Guest:And there are so many of them.
Guest:And it was so specific and rich that you just realize people were just doing fucked up shit all the time.
Guest:And, you know, my teacher explained to me is nuns weren't obviously wanting to be there.
Guest:They were just kind of stuck there by circumstance.
Guest:And sometimes like the mother superior isn't the most religious or the, you know, the most...
Guest:I guess rule oriented.
Guest:They sometimes were just the oldest people that were surviving and they were like party girls.
Guest:And so it was almost like they were having these like crazy orgies all the time.
Guest:And it was, you know, hoping no one would look.
Guest:And it was, there was a crazy bureaucracy to the church, obviously.
Guest:And the higher up you are in the church, you know, you kind of want to look better.
Guest:So you, you, everything that's below, you kind of like,
Guest:you know pushing under the rug right and so there was just there wasn't a lot of accountability it was just like this shit show happening and so which you know obviously in the the more demonic and evil way it had been happening with the the pedophiles for sure for centuries yeah
Guest:Yeah, you just brush everything under the rug and you just hope it goes away because people are fallible.
Guest:And so that just, I always wanted to make this movie.
Guest:And then Joe Swanberg, who I know you've worked with, he was crashing at my place and I was telling him this idea and we were actually watching dog TV and he was like, this is amazing.
Guest:You got to make this movie.
Guest:And so I called my producer and she, she, she did my first two movies and she's like, what were the first two life after Beth and Joshy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, she's like, you're not going to believe this, but one of the investors who's invested in our last two movies, she's, she's this Italian lady who's in Tuscany and she's been asking for, for like four years for them to shoot in these medieval villages and,
Guest:And you're literally asking to shoot in a medieval village in Tuscany.
Guest:And within like a month or two, we were in Tuscany scouting.
Guest:This woman, Marilena Marcucci, her family was like loaded from, I guess they're in the plasma business from the 20s or something.
Guest:Like in pharmaceuticals.
Guest:Plasma, like fake blood.
Guest:And then she brought MTV to, or she did some version of MTV for Italy.
Guest:Her family's just loaded.
Guest:And her brother's a senator who runs the film commission.
Guest:We were so crazily hooked up that, I mean, we didn't have to spend as much money as we normally would because we had access to
Guest:We had this one guy, Alessandro Bertolucci, who was sort of our liaison.
Guest:He was kind of our line producer.
Guest:And he knew all the mayors of these little towns that had all these relics.
Guest:Any relation to Bertolucci, Bertolucci?
Guest:No relation at all.
Guest:It's just a common name.
Guest:I thought, I figured, but it's not.
Guest:And so it kind of just snowballed really fast from this conversation I was having with Joe to we were actually in Italy on the ground scouting locations.
Guest:And then a couple months later, we actually were shooting it.
Guest:And now how heavily scripted was it?
Guest:Not that heavily.
Guest:It was maybe like a 25 or 28-page outline.
Guest:So a lot of improvising.
Guest:Dialogue was improvised.
Guest:The story was not improvised.
Guest:But a lot of the dialogue... And the specific dialogue.
Guest:So the scenes were written out.
Guest:It's what each person was going to say and what was happening in that scene.
Guest:But I...
Guest:After doing Joshy, I sort of changed my process and I start off as a writer.
Guest:It's like a hardcore writer where you almost don't change a word at all.
Guest:There's no improvisation.
Guest:And you like the control of that at that time.
Guest:At that time?
Guest:No, it's just how you were taught to do stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I actually don't.
Guest:I don't mind.
Guest:I like freedom and I like things kind of like bleeding and sort of getting blurry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I also like how honest and authentic it sounds when people are saying their own lines instead of forcing someone to say something that doesn't sound real.
Guest:There's something more present about it, certainly.
Guest:Well, they're looking each other eyes and connecting, not knowing what the next person is going to say.
Guest:So they're really present.
Guest:Yeah, you have to.
Guest:And that's for acting.
Guest:That's the most important thing.
Guest:It's not just waiting for the person to finish the line.
Guest:Like you see like really bad movies, you know, like Ed Wood stuff.
Guest:And you almost see like the person like kind of mouthing the other person's lies, waiting for their line.
Guest:Some people have that weird habit.
Marc:I know people that do that while you're talking in real time.
Marc:Really?
Marc:It's very odd.
Marc:Yeah, my friend Sam does it.
Marc:Like if I'm just talking to you now.
Marc:Like finishing your words or?
Marc:Not really finishing, but like just like a half a beat after saying what I'm saying.
Marc:He's like processing it?
Marc:He's got like a delay?
Marc:I think so.
Marc:I think he's listening.
Marc:And as he listens, he mouths it.
Guest:Maybe he has like some coping mechanism because he's got some ADD or something.
Guest:He's like trying to figure out how to like.
Marc:I just noticed it as being a weird habit.
Marc:I think some of it's finishing sentences, but some of it is just kind of like the way that people listen.
Marc:It's interesting.
Marc:It is interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I just found that that creates a more real dynamic.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And now, how much did you shoot?
Marc:Like how many days?
Marc:Well, I mean, how much footage did you shoot?
Marc:The weird thing about digital, and after working with Joe, I think the real challenge is that you sort of have an embarrassment of riches usually.
Guest:usually if you have a lot of time we were under the gun so you know we shot the whole thing in 20 days um pretty much if with the exception of just stuff that takes place in the convent if you see a location like for instance a church or a field or every single thing that takes place in that field was that day yeah so sometimes we're stacking like eight or ten scenes a day yeah so sort of jamming through it so we didn't have a lot of coverage so you know generally it's the first three takes is sort of a master yeah you know something kind of wider yeah and then after that we just punch in and we're pretty much replicating what we did
Marc:So now tell me exactly what you were like.
Marc:I mean, I remember after we watched it that, you know, talking about it as a comedy or as necessarily trying to put it into a genre that it was not something you I didn't feel like you wanted to do that.
Guest:I just don't want to do that ever.
Guest:I mean, I think what happens, especially with the way media is sort of like disseminated today.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everything is marketing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so everything is labeling.
Guest:Everything is sort of compartmentalizing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so your experience is almost pre-digested before you experience it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the only reason I'm doing this is to kind of do new stuff.
Guest:So it creates expectations.
Guest:Creates expectations and it creates disappointments.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because if you're like, oh, I'm going to see a comedy.
Guest:It's the same thing really, isn't it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it leads to that.
Guest:Yeah, it's one lead to cause and effect.
Guest:But I think especially with comedies, that word comedy is so vague.
Guest:And, you know, there's like there's obviously like, you know, levels to it.
Guest:There's dark comedy.
Guest:There's broad comedy, all that kind of stuff.
Guest:But I don't think of it as like I'm going to write a comedy or I'm going to write a dark comedy.
Guest:I just I'm trying to make my own thing.
Guest:And then what ends up happening is people try to sort of put their, you know, like figure out a way to describe it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then that is not really the best, you know.
Marc:But you knew going in like that's what the interesting thing about that is, however you want to describe it.
Marc:You know, you've got, you know, the actors I just mentioned.
Marc:And then in bit parts, you have, you know, Fred Armisen, you have Offerman.
Marc:These are, you know, comedic actors.
Guest:They're comedic actors, but for me, a comedic actor is someone that can do comedy, that isn't always doing comedy.
Marc:No, I know, but they're known for that.
Marc:They're known for that.
Marc:Right now.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I'm curious to know, because it was hard to sit there with you in looking at a rough cut, which wasn't really a rough cut other than, I guess, the credits, so it was pretty tight.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then to have to talk about it, there's a sort of, you have to be, I didn't really know you.
Marc:So it wasn't that I was diplomatic, but I was certainly trying to figure out how to talk to you about it.
Marc:Now that you showed it for large audiences, what was the feedback?
Marc:Was there something more specific that you found resonating with people?
Marc:Did people say more than like, that was interesting or fun or, you know?
Guest:I mean, the good thing, when you do it at Sundance, that's your real first time anyone's seen it.
Guest:So no one's bringing in any expectations other than, like you said, the cast.
Guest:They're hoping that something is different and weird and new, and they're surprised.
Guest:Completely.
Guest:And to some extent, I'm not at a place now where I'm a recognizable brand.
Guest:But when people have seen a couple of my movies, they know what you're getting into.
Guest:It's not going to be a straight-up comedy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I think one of the things that was really great is I was hearing a lot of people saying, like, this isn't anything like I've seen before.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's a couple of sort of, I think, stale comparisons.
Guest:People, I think, automatically go to like Monty Python or Brooks because those guys were doing period piece comedies.
Guest:And so that is something that people can glom onto.
Guest:But in terms of, I think, like in terms of the craft or anything like that, I don't think anyone that kind of knows their way around stuff will identify that as sort of like a marker.
Guest:I think it's more just sort of an easy way to digest it.
Marc:Now, let's go back a little bit.
Marc:I know we talked a little, but I don't... I mean, I retain some things.
Marc:But you grew up in Florida.
Marc:In Miami.
Marc:Right in the middle of it.
Marc:And what... I can't imagine... Miami's a chaotic place.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, especially when I was growing up.
Guest:Yeah, why?
Guest:Because, what, was that the 80s?
Guest:Yeah, it was the 80s.
Guest:I mean, I grew up pretty much at the height of the cocaine boom, so I got to see a lot of that stuff.
Marc:Like just people being gunned down in the streets and insanity and coke money everywhere?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What do you remember about it?
Guest:I mean, I remember my neighbor across the street was murdered.
Guest:I remember a lot of my friends in school, their parents were busted for either being smugglers or I went to private school for one year in eighth grade.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then there was a bunch of actual drug deal.
Guest:Like I got to go from public school where everyone's like, you know, the closest you got was like maybe their dad was a smuggler.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, like riding the boats at night.
Guest:And then when I went to the private school, it's like their dads were the kingpins.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just for that one year.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, everywhere you look, there was coke and it was, yeah, it was pretty gross.
Guest:And it was Miami Vice.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:That was the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what did your dad do again?
Marc:He's an attorney.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:Yeah, but he stayed above it somehow.
Guest:Sort of.
Guest:I mean, I don't, like, I might be speaking out of turn, but he's from, all my family's from New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the only reason we were in Miami is because my dad got a job down at a law firm right after he graduated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the guy whose firm that he got a job at was this guy named John Halliwell.
Guest:And this sounds like conspiracy theory shit, but the OSS is the precursor to the CIA.
Guest:So the OSS was started by John Halliwell and Wild Bill Donovan, I think his name is.
Guest:And a couple of other guys.
Guest:And so they were, you know, doing sort of, you know, crazy stuff in Italy and Germany, like with partisans to try to take down the fascists.
Guest:And then that ended up becoming the CIA.
Guest:And so this guy ran the CIA for a little bit.
Guest:He was a lawyer.
Guest:And then after he left the CIA, he started this law firm, Hallowell Melrose and DeWolf, where my dad got a job.
Guest:And effectively what they were doing was opening banks in the Bahamas, in the Caribbean.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For the CIA and drug dealership.
Guest:They would take the drug dealer money and then use that for CA operations.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And then I guess towards the end of it.
Guest:That's like the contra thing, right?
Guest:We talked about it.
Guest:Yeah, definitely contra thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think like a couple of the lawyers in that firm were busted for various.
Marc:So they were running covert operations at the behest of the intelligence agencies outside of the parameters of government.
Guest:In fact, the FBI came after John Halliwell because they saw what he was doing.
Guest:And, you know, the CIA and the FBI are not best friends.
Guest:And they were coming after him.
Guest:And I guess the CIA kind of prodded them and like, just leave him alone.
Guest:He's an older guy.
Guest:He's about to pass away.
Guest:This is like, cool.
Guest:Just let it go.
Guest:But yeah, my dad, that's how he started off doing law.
Guest:Is he still around?
Guest:Yeah, he's still around.
Guest:Like he, I know he deposed Samosa.
Guest:oh and he helped extradite vesco and he he was involved in a lot of weird latin-american stuff when you were a kid when i was a kid yeah so you didn't quite grasp it and you still don't because you can't or they'd have to kill you exactly keep my kid out of it yeah stay in the dark and what'd your mom do just during teacher well she when i was a kid growing up she was just a mom and then she went back to teaching how many brothers and sisters
Guest:One brother, little brother.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Is he out here?
Guest:No, he's a detective.
Guest:He's a sergeant in the police in Florida.
Guest:In Miami?
Guest:In Coral Gables, yeah, in Miami.
Guest:That must be exciting.
Guest:Yeah, it's definitely.
Guest:I mean, he gets high-speed chases every once in a while.
Guest:I mean, I don't know if he's actually pulled his gun.
Guest:I mean, Coral Gables is like Beverly Hills in Miami.
Guest:Sure, sure, yeah.
Guest:So, it's a lot of robbery.
Guest:Are you guys close?
Guest:Yeah, we're close.
Guest:Oh, that's good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, we're super different, but yeah.
Marc:And you, like your grandparents were New Yorkers and that kind of thing where you always tapped into New York, so you're always going up there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because how do you, you know, in order to be a kid that had your interests, something had to spark you.
Marc:In terms of like film stuff?
Marc:Well, just like, you know, being a 14-year-old who finds Eno, I find that's a specific thing.
Marc:That like, you know, because I'm the same way, and I don't know whether it was...
Marc:my mother was an artist and you know and i always felt that that was important like there there's something that hits you when you're younger where you're like you know art is where it's at whatever the fuck it is yeah you know being outside of whatever this norm is yeah to find truth and to find yourself is is is something you don't have much control over either it happens to you or it doesn't and usually there's somebody that just delivers the message to you somehow yeah i think i got lucky i had a bunch of those things kind of happen to me yeah like what
Guest:I remember when I was like 11 we had a way cable in my bedroom so I was always watching TV but I was watching movies all the time and one time A Clockwork Orange was on TV and I caught it in the middle of it and my dad walked in and he's like oh you're watching that fucking weird movie I'm like what is this and he goes I think that's A Clockwork Orange and I'm like this is crazy and so the next day we went to the video store and I'm like dad like what's another crazy movie I want another crazy movie and he's like I don't know eight and a half is supposed to be crazy I don't know
Guest:And so we rented 8 1⁄2 and I watched it.
Guest:Different kind of crazy.
Guest:I mean, for him, it was just weird movies.
Guest:It's just this one genre.
Guest:Right, sure.
Guest:And yeah, that's what made me want to do film.
Guest:So you rented 8 1⁄2?
Guest:I rented 8 1⁄2.
Guest:It blew me away.
Guest:I mean, I was probably too little to fully grasp it, but I knew something.
Guest:It was sort of like Eno stuff where you're listening to it and it's pushing you in an uncomfortable space.
Guest:you can either like shy away from it and turn it off or kind of give into it and sort of see what happens and just trust that this artist knows what they're doing.
Guest:And that's what I did.
Guest:And then- Because you were a kid and they were grownups.
Marc:Why would you question the artistic integrity of either of those things that like, what, how old were you?
Marc:11.
Marc:Yeah, you're like, this Fellini guy's a hack.
Marc:Yeah, I definitely didn't have that sort of critical ability.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because both of those movies visually are so, you know, unique and fucking, you know, they really punch you in the head.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like eight and a half, even if you don't know what's going on, you're going to be like, what the fuck?
Guest:Yeah, you're just, you can just be absorbed by the style of it.
Guest:Yeah, you can't, you don't even have to listen to it.
Guest:But the themes are obviously where it's at.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think also my mom, right around that time too, she was a really big fan of Metamorphosis by Kafka.
Guest:And she's like, you should read this.
Guest:And I read it and that blew me away.
Guest:I was too young doing this stuff.
Guest:Like I, I was watching radar movies when I was like six or something.
Guest:Like I definitely was, you know.
Marc:So you read metamorphosis.
Marc:I mean, I remember reading that and I, and I still couldn't grasp it completely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember reading it and thinking it was actually funnier than it was supposed to be.
Guest:I was, I thought it was supposed to be kind of sad and messed up.
Guest:And then I was like, this is actually kind of, the guy's a bug, but sort of just the matter of fact dryness of it.
Guest:I was really drawn to it.
Guest:So that was the trinity.
Marc:Kubrick, Fellini, and Kafka.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That blew your mind initially.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:And you're like, there's something else out there.
Guest:I remember Time Bandits was a really big thing for me when I was a kid.
Guest:I don't know if you know that Terry Gilliam movie.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, the end of it really kind of messed me up in a good way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where his parents, they have the, it's like a toaster, and the demon's head is inside of it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he's like, don't touch the head.
Guest:And they touch it, just defying him.
Guest:And then they explode.
Guest:And I remember how dark that was.
Guest:I'm like, you can get away with that kind of stuff.
Guest:Like you can have the parents just die at the end like that.
Guest:And yeah, that definitely stayed with me.
Guest:You sure you can get away with it?
Marc:I mean, is it going to be a popular movie?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So then what do you do to begin your artistic journey?
Marc:Do you pick music or drawing or what?
Guest:All of it.
Guest:I mean, I was drawing all the time.
Guest:I was painting.
Guest:I took painting classes.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you were like, I'm going to find it.
Guest:What's going to stick?
Guest:Yeah, it wasn't even like I'm intentionally trying to be, I didn't even think I wanted to be an artist.
Guest:I knew when I was 11 or 12, I can't remember when I was like, I just want to be a director.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But before that, it was always just, you know, I don't have a good singing voice, but I like playing music.
Guest:Like I'm not good at any individual instrument, but I'm like decent at all of them.
Guest:Like I can like play drums or guitar or whatever.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, yeah, I was always writing.
Guest:And it just sort of seemed like film was the thing that kind of brought all these things together that I had, like, a sensitivity to.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And when you went to high school, what sort of, what were the kids you were gravitating towards?
Marc:I mean, because, I mean, we went to high school.
Marc:When did you graduate high school?
Marc:95.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I graduated in 81.
Marc:It's a whole different fucking world.
Marc:So by 95, you definitely had enough like-minded people around, I would think.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And my school was a super outlier, too, because...
Guest:I don't want to get in trouble, but the principal at the time, there were rumors that he was a Coke dealer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he actually helped me skip school a couple of times.
Guest:It was completely a Bill Clinton style school where it was definitely corrupt and sketchy, but it was ultimately utilitarian and for the greater good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I would, it was really like, it could almost be like a TV show the way it went down, like the jocks and the drama kids and the nerdy kids and like the artsy kids, everyone was cool with each other.
Guest:It wasn't like bullying.
Guest:And so it was like a really kind of, I went to a school of like 5,000 people.
Guest:Like it was a massive public high school.
Marc:You had a big one too, like 3,400.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there was definitely like, you know, gangs and fights and stuff, but there was an overall vibe of like, we're kind of in this together, which I didn't exist for any of the other classes.
Guest:It was just my year.
Guest:I think we somehow figured something out that was kind of cool.
Guest:And the teachers were pretty cool.
Guest:There's just one guy, Mr. Hood, who he actually passed away like 10 years ago, but he, he started a cinematography class.
Guest:So we would actually make movies in class and watch movies.
Guest:I would go see, I remember I saw Kozlowski's Red with him and
Guest:Um, you know, he was always making me dubs of, you know, the, the Todd Haynes superstar.
Guest:And he gave me blow up on VHS and he just gave me some really cool movies.
Guest:Um, he was a big Fellini fan.
Guest:And so, and he was also a really big Bowie fan.
Guest:We like tripped out on like low and he's, he was awesome.
Guest:Did you ever like watch any of those other ones?
Guest:What, Red Desert?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Passenger.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They're hard movies.
Marc:They're great.
Marc:I just remember like just wanting it to make sense.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Like I had this expectation, which it seems like you were able to sort of jump over fairly young just by virtue of what you were taking in, where if I didn't get it or it didn't make sense to me that I was missing something, that I couldn't just take it in.
Marc:You couldn't just have like a holistic experience.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Could you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, because I think I'm able to zone out sometimes and I don't get kind of caught.
Guest:I'll watch movies multiple times.
Guest:I'll watch a lot of movies more than one time and just kind of like let it wash over me sometimes.
Guest:Yeah, pick up the pieces.
Guest:One thing I learned about the way you should see art isn't you don't go to a gallery and see every single painting and just stare at it and give it an assigned amount of time.
Guest:You just sort of drift to what draws your attention and then focus on that.
Guest:You're not doing a chore when you're watching art.
Guest:You're experiencing something and whatever resonates with you, you should kind of go with that.
Marc:And also, like, sometimes I have found that things that may have caught my eye or resonated with me when I was younger, or even if I didn't quite get it or like the artist, whatever medium it was, that as I get older and I go back to things, I'm like...
Guest:now it yeah i mean i just happened with the roxy music i i love roxy music especially the early stuff yeah speaking about you know but the later stuff i always i think i had like a reaction to kind of reject it because they rejected you know and i kind of was defensive for him so there was a lot of sort of suave suits and yeah it's a little cheesy roman yeah yeah it's beautiful i love it that's great it's so good so yeah i don't know if it was like there was there was yeah there's a problem with brian ferry you know in in in terms of like taking him in
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:As an entertainer and as an artist.
Marc:Like there's something about his stature that's sort of like, eh.
Marc:He's almost like trying too hard to be charismatic.
Guest:Something.
Guest:It's like Bowie, it's just effortless.
Guest:And with Brian Ferry, it's like, he's like, check me out.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:He's like, I'm smooth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had the same reaction to him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like with Leonard Cohen, like I'm just now, like it's now connecting with me.
Marc:Oh, he's connected with me from the beginning.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's like one of my all time people.
Marc:What was it?
Marc:It's so sparse to me.
Marc:It's so raw.
Marc:McCabe and Mrs. Miller is really one of my favorite movies ever.
Marc:I love those songs, but to take on the whole Leonard Cohen catalog, at the time I watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I just couldn't...
Marc:I love melancholy stuff.
Marc:Yeah, me too.
Marc:But I still couldn't, like, I just, there was something about a lot of it that I didn't quite get until not too long ago.
Marc:That movie, like, the more I watch that, it just blows me away every fucking time.
Guest:Oh, it's so good.
Guest:I mean, that's...
Guest:to some extent, what I was trying to do with Little Hours, which is, you know, find a historical period and kind of just tell it in a really contingent way.
Guest:Instead of having it hit all those, like, points that you're expecting it to hit, kind of, it's fallible people and just sort of watch it play out.
Guest:I mean, that's obviously Altman, who's a master, doing his thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, yeah, that movie's super inspirational.
Marc:It's an insane movie to sort of, like, I feel like I need to watch it again.
Guest:Yeah, it's... I could watch that movie.
Guest:Altman movies I could watch...
Guest:You know, California Split?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's probably my all-time favorite movie.
Guest:I could watch that movie every week.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:His movies, for me, are just the easiest things to watch.
Guest:They're just, like, the language he's speaking, it's just, I digest it instantly, and I just love it.
Guest:Like, I love it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and in the, if he picks the right period, like, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, that juncture of commerce and the wilderness and the, you know, the death of the Old West, it was so fucking dense.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like it, but yet, you know, you can watch it casually, but you know, if you just want to investigate, you know, that guy who's building that church and really, you can write a paper on that.
Guest:And it's also like McCabe is that a general Western would have McCabe as the gunslinger and we don't know his exploits.
Guest:We don't know how talented he is until the end of the movie.
Guest:In a minute, in a second.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but up until then, you're sort of just watching this guy kind of hiding out.
Marc:And also, but he's also like not only a flawed character, but bordering on a comic character.
Marc:Like, you know, I had a discussion with somebody about the choice of the derby.
Marc:That he's wearing?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because that's a comedic hat on some level.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that he was sort of- It's like a fancy hat and-
Marc:It's a fancy hat, but it's also a chaplain hat.
Marc:So, you know, when you start thinking about his bumbling around and his inability to connect with this woman and his mumbling to himself that there is there is an almost slapstick nature to him.
Guest:And it's so tragic as well, like his inability to connect with Julie Christie completely.
Guest:You know, the fact that they're simpatico, but there's a limit to how far they're willing to go.
Guest:And the sort of unsavory choices they've made in their lives have sort of, I guess, metastasized into who they are that doesn't allow them to connect.
Marc:So the first time you really learned about film in terms of practical, in terms of technical things was in high school with the cinematography class?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I was always messing around with video cameras and Super 8 cameras.
Guest:Do you have that stuff still?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you have your movies?
Guest:Yeah, I still have some.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did you digitize them?
Guest:Not yet.
Guest:No?
Guest:No.
Guest:I actually like how they're falling apart.
Guest:It's kind of amazing.
Yeah.
Marc:What did you shoot?
Guest:Like what kind of short films and stuff?
Marc:Was it stop action stuff?
Guest:No, it was always dramatic, comedic, you know, like stuff with people.
Guest:Not a stop motion animation.
Guest:I remember when I was a kid, I was watching Nickelodeon, and this is like a stupid story, but...
Guest:there there was a show and i can't remember the name of it like this is not really like a great reference but there was a show where it's like a bunch of people in leotards would get on top of each other and make shapes like they would turn into like elephants or whatever right just by working together as a team yeah and so they would always ask for suggestions which would basically be like hey send us a thing and we'll you know be a tank or something and then they could do it i sent them this like four page and this is when i was like five or six years old i had my dad help me but like a courtroom drama yeah and they're just like we can't you know this is not gonna happen
Guest:So I was always trying to do something a little bit more dramatic, I think, than probably, like, I was capable of doing.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:A courtroom drama?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're like, this is not exactly for us.
Guest:And they sent me, like, a black beauty VHS tape as, like, a consolation prize.
Guest:But, yeah, we don't act.
Guest:We just sort of mix shapes with our bodies.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you picture them in your courtroom drama doing what they do?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, I was so into it.
Guest:I was, you know, because, like, I think, you know, my dad's a lawyer, so I was looking up to him, and I probably wanted to be a lawyer at some point.
Guest:And then I was like, this is a great story I'm going to tell.
Guest:And they just were not having it.
Marc:So what was the first piece of cinema that you put together that you thought had, you know, was solid?
Marc:That I directed myself?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was it before NYU?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I did a short film to get into NYU.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was with my teacher, Mr. Hood, who I referenced before, about a kid who realizes his parents are cannibals.
Guest:And that was pretty fun.
Guest:yeah that was like the and it was like the most i guess uh professionally done thing i did a contest for twinkies they did a they asked us to do like uh um or they asked us they asked people to do uh like a short piece for for like something they have to do with twinkies yeah and i did some random ass like uh mixed together a bunch of short film tropes you know like felini and bergman and um truffo yeah when i was in high school and we got second place i think second we got a lot of twinkies what what won first
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It wasn't like there was no internet back then.
Guest:So it wasn't like you really were able to like do that.
Guest:I feel like to do that kind of research, you have to go real deep.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Before the internet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you know a guy that can get me the tape of the winter?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So when you went to NYU, when you moved to New York, you know, was that the big, um,
Marc:what were you setting out to do?
Guest:I wanted to be a filmmaker and I wanted to not go to a campus school.
Guest:I wanted to sort of be in the world.
Guest:Growing up in Miami is great.
Guest:The beaches are amazing.
Guest:All my friends are great.
Guest:But I just couldn't wait to get out of there.
Guest:It was, to me, not a cesspool, but it was definitely something that was limiting.
Guest:There was no cultural element.
Guest:I think...
Guest:Now that you have, what do you call it?
Guest:Art Basel and Wynwood is kind of becoming a thing and, you know, the design district.
Guest:There is an element now of, but back then it was, you know, everything was Romero Brito.
Guest:I don't know if you know that artist, but he's like a bad version of Keith Haring that's really colorful.
Guest:Like there's a lot of money, but not a lot of taste.
Guest:Not a lot of taste.
Guest:It's like LA minus the mountains and minus the entertainment and culture.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you just get all the negative stuff.
Guest:You get, literally get people driving around in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, you know, mesh shirts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So like I was looking to get out of that and go to a place.
Guest:I mean, New York for me always was a place I wanted to live.
Guest:My parents are from there.
Guest:You know, every, every piece of film that I really like.
Guest:Do you have family there?
Guest:Yeah, I still have family there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did you then where you're like, was there anyone when you went to college?
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:I mean, all my cousins and my aunts and uncles live there.
Guest:I mean, pretty much everyone in my family was in New York except my grandparents and my parents.
Guest:Everyone in my, everyone else was up there.
Guest:So, all right.
Guest:So, you go to NYU and what do you learn?
Guest:I mean, more than anything, it's just how to be on a set.
Guest:You know, they don't teach you how to get a job.
Guest:They don't teach you, you know, how to write stuff.
Guest:They just teach you the formats.
Guest:How it breaks down.
Guest:How it breaks down and how to do it.
Guest:not not specifically what to do yeah and so for me that was really invaluable i don't i don't i didn't want people telling me how to make stuff i mean what to make yeah i always had an idea of what i wanted to go for but how do you how to load a camera how to light something you know how to record sound all that stuff is really i have a good memory so i'll remember all that stuff like i ended up shooting everyone's movies in school so how to format a script
Guest:how to format a script yeah what program to use yeah all that stuff was like super important but i never was you know i never thought of it as a lot of people i know that went to school they're kind of like talked down on it yeah as if it was like i don't understand why i thought it was great like to be able to live in new york city as that at that age yeah to be anonymous you know kind of blend in but also be able to i mean then that was in the 90s and there was a lot of really cool creative stuff happening and especially with independent film and who were your classmates who were your teachers who
Guest:um do anyone we know i had a teacher for italian cinema called antonio monda yeah did the um he ended up doing the the um commentary on eight and a half the criterion version i had a couple kids that i went to school with that kind of became stuff like um jonathan liebsman he directed clash of the titans or one of the classes oh yeah were you shooting stuff i was shooting stuff for sure who were you using as actors any new york people
Guest:that you know you actually rob delaney do you know him so he we went to school together i know him since i was 18 so he was in a lot of my stuff like he was my guy so you knew him through the whole crack up i knew him he actually even talking about when he got into his accent yeah he was leaving my house well he so we were hanging out that night and uh we had a friend who's i who he grew up with and they were kind of hanging out at my place it was like two in the morning i i didn't really i mean i was too young i was like 22 i think at the time so i wasn't
Guest:I didn't see all the warning signs of what was going on, but, um, yeah, he left my house and went to a friend's house that was having a party at two in the morning.
Guest:And he was one of those guys like that would bring over a six pack for himself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you know, we're that, when you're that young, everyone's just kind of partying and doing stupid shit.
Marc:You knew they're like, wow, that dude can drink a lot, but you didn't connect it to like, he's a problem.
Guest:Yeah, the weekend before, it got a little dark because I was doing this documentary on World's Strongest Man competition.
Guest:I found this pocket of guys up in Sacramento that were trying to do the same thing, that were trying to go pro.
Guest:And he came up with me and helped me work on this documentary.
Guest:And he was drinking a lot.
Guest:And then it got a little bit dark.
Guest:And then we came back.
Guest:And then he left to go to this party, basically, at 2 in the morning.
Guest:I'm like, what are you doing?
Guest:And I guess he...
Guest:started drinking and blacked out and then it just took off at five in the morning.
Marc:Drove it into the water building or something.
Marc:He took a bunch of meters out.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, I mean, I've talked to him, you know, and he used to be sober a long time, but, you know, we went into depth about that event.
Guest:Yeah, no, that was, I mean, I've never seen something as transformative for a person as that.
Guest:I mean, that, it's, there is a chapter shift.
Guest:Like, things change after that.
Guest:Of course, yeah, he got sober.
Guest:He got, well, but, I mean, it,
Guest:On all fronts, like he had a lot of stuff going for him.
Guest:Like he was, he started getting casting callbacks and things were happening.
Guest:When you were like 22.
Guest:When he was 22.
Guest:And then, you know, after that, you know, his knees and his elbows were busted and he couldn't go out.
Guest:And, you know, it's like when you first get into AA, you become like a true disciple.
Guest:You know, it's like there's no Catholic, like a new Catholic or whatever.
Guest:And so, you know, it became his whole life.
Guest:And then, you know, I think slowly he sort of got a little bit more balanced and stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, he's one of my favorite people in the world.
Guest:And you used him in college in movies?
Guest:Yeah, he's in my first movie for a second in Life After Beth.
Guest:Yeah, and I always want to work with him and I love him.
Guest:Yeah, he's doing well.
Guest:Yeah, he's doing great.
Marc:So you did one big film in college or short films?
Guest:I did a bunch of short films, yeah, and my thesis film didn't happen.
Guest:My teacher didn't turn in my insurance form and it just disappeared like two days before we were supposed to start shooting.
Marc:Your teacher disappeared?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This total jackass.
Guest:Like he, he was supposed to pretty much, they give you an allotment for film, like, you know, equipment and stuff.
Guest:He, you, you got the insurance for that.
Guest:He, but you end up getting other film equipment.
Guest:Like you rent out for rental houses and you need the insurance form in order because you're a student, like no one's going to cover your shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he never turned it in and then like went AWOL.
Guest:And so NYU felt bad and they're like, hey, why don't you just come back for another year and we'll guarantee you an allotment.
Guest:But like they wanted me to spend 40 grand to go back to do senior year of again.
Guest:And it was just... Why would you do that?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:It's like, I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you left film school and came right out here?
Guest:Came around here.
Guest:I started working for Robert Zemeckis.
Guest:What movie was he doing then?
Guest:What Lies Beneath and Castaway.
Guest:I got really lucky because a friend of mine that had moved out here showed me what his resume was, which was like ridiculous.
Guest:It said where he was born and stuff.
Guest:And I didn't know what you're supposed to do on a resume.
Guest:Who does?
Guest:So I put down that I was born in Miami.
Guest:And it turns out the guy who runs Jack, this guy, Jack Rapke, who runs Zemeckis' company, he was from Miami and went to NYU and thought I was like his second coming.
Guest:So he hired me.
Guest:And so I got to work on, well, Lesbian Castaway, like a PA.
Guest:And it was really fun.
Guest:You were on Castaway as a PA?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not in Fiji or Bora Bora.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was just the LA stuff.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you're right in it.
Guest:Yeah, I was right in it.
Guest:Huge.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like I grew up, I was a big time Zemeckis fan.
Guest:Like I love Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I really loved Used Cars for some reason.
Guest:I don't know why.
Guest:Used Cars with Kurt Russell?
Guest:Kurt Russell, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So good.
Guest:Did Zemeckis take a liking to you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was really sweet.
Guest:Like whenever I would go, I mean, I was pretty much just doing go, you know, go for runs kind of stuff, but he would always let me kind of come and sit and watch them work.
Guest:I remember one time he's like, Hey, do me a favor, go get Steven at the gate and bring him to me.
Guest:I'm like, great.
Guest:And there's a guy named Steve Starkey, who's his producer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm just assuming I'm going to go get, this is like literally day one of my job.
Guest:And I see this like turquoise, uh, Explorer pull up in a Steven Spielberg.
Guest:So I have to take Steven Spielberg to him.
Guest:And like, I mean, that was like mind blowing.
Guest:I remember Steven Spielberg was giving me like a pep talk and you know, like
Guest:oh bob's great guy and you're in great hands and all this i mean it was just so surreal and and so but they knew you were lit up and intelligent right yeah but that's not the best combo for like an office worker like or a pa sometimes it can work against you like i'm sitting there like looking at all the film stuff and they're like well can you go get the dry cleaning and like make sure i have enough oranges and you know make sure i have my petty cash like that's that's like your job is right but like i'm like okay cool but i just want to sort of stay here for like a little bit longer so yeah and how long did you work for zemeckis
Marc:like almost a year and then i started working with david russell so so you're 21 20 22 where are you living in list fields i've lived in list fields the whole time i've been in la that's pretty good move yeah and you're like connecting with people of your age and like you got a crew out here yeah and like everybody was doing their pa work or getting their little breaks here and there yeah like who were your crew
Guest:uh a lot of nyu kids um some i hung out a lot of actors honestly yeah i don't know why it's always i'm friends with tons of actors and yeah it's like fun watching them sort of like kind of find their way or not find their way and like become pastry chefs and stuff and just sort of like find their own thing but yeah yeah yeah yeah but it was definitely fun so you go right from zemeckis to david o russell how'd you get the job with david o russell
Guest:I applied to a job list ad for a director who was looking for an assistant editor and I know how to edit.
Guest:So I applied and then I met him and we had like a, you know, he interviewed me and it was, I was actually putting Flooring with Disaster on Laserdisc, which is like super dating it.
Guest:But I was putting the Laserdisc on as he called to say, will you come in and meet with me?
Guest:I had no idea who it was.
Guest:And so he was working on some online documentary that ended up nothing, nothing ever came out of it.
Guest:But I would just start editing stuff for him.
Marc:So, by the time when you started working for him, he had made Spanking the Monkey.
Marc:He had made Falling with Disaster.
Marc:And he had just finished Three Kings.
Guest:Falling with Disaster is a great movie.
Guest:It's amazing.
Guest:It's perfect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's some of the funniest shit ever.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know that people talk about it enough.
Marc:And there's some great acting in it, too.
Marc:I mean, I think that's my favorite movie of his.
Marc:That's with Ben Stiller.
Marc:Ben Stiller.
Guest:Taylor Leone.
Guest:Richard Jenkins.
Marc:Josh Brolin's in it.
Guest:Brolin.
Guest:Alan Alda.
Guest:Lily Tomlin.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like, it's an ensemble comedy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, it was like, it's almost a genre movie in a way.
Guest:Right?
Guest:It's like a road trip, finding yourself movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he's finding out who his parents are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's adopted.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I got to watch that again.
Marc:Oh, it's so great.
Marc:Because, like, you know, Spanky the Monkey I've watched a few times, Fortin' with Disaster a couple times I like, and Three Kings I watch whenever possible.
Marc:I should probably own it because there's something so – that movie to me is sort of a masterpiece somehow.
Guest:Definitely.
Guest:I mean, it's, you know, talking about not having a real genre.
Guest:You know, it's an action movie.
Guest:It's political.
Guest:It's funny.
Guest:It's got pathos.
Guest:you know it's it's it's shot really well you know it's it's whip smart yeah it's really amazing movie and so time i mean i guess it's timely i mean i would say timeless because it's applying to everything and you know what i remember about it always in you know getting back to blood and guts and getting back to satire which i think three kings probably is in a way definitely i would definitely satire yeah army and sure oil is that um
Guest:is that weird cutaway to the inside of the body.
Guest:Yeah, you know, David thought that CSI ripped him off with that, you know, because it shows the sepsis, you know, where the bolts go in and you start seeing the effect of... Yeah, he was pretty convinced that CSI ripped that off.
Marc:Well, whatever he may have been convinced of or not, that I thought that as a specifically satirical device, that, you know, there's something...
Marc:you know, that goes beyond humanizing by just making that choice to do that, by taking the time to show a bullet entering inside the body that is so like, you know, specific, but you know, the humanity of it is disturbing.
Guest:I mean, it's like the, I guess the more grounded version of when Austin Powers, when he runs the guy over with the steamroll and then you see the wife get the call of the henchman, the henchman's wife getting a call that he died and she's like super distraught.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is like, you never go that far.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and that, like, you know, but it also, it's sort of like, you know, it's just the raw goods.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The animal goods.
Guest:It's like, this is what's happening.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It gets glossed over.
Guest:I mean, I remember I had a panic attack one time when I saw Avatar.
Guest:You know the movie Avatar?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I saw that and I started tripping out on the fact that you're seeing thousands of people die and every one of them has a life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it's what's called sonder when you sort of project yourself into all these different lives.
Guest:Right, right, yeah.
Guest:And then just the, the sheer, I guess, number of people that are dying in the lives that are, I just, I like literally lost it when I watched that movie.
Guest:I'm like, this is like a nightmare.
Guest:I hate this.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, when I have those feelings, it is overwhelming, especially if you have, you know, uh, uh, an, you know, brain, which is sensitive that, you know, the amount of anxiety available, if you open yourself up to those possibilities is like, you know, can be, uh, annihilating mentally annihilating.
Marc:How'd you pull out?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:How did I pull out of Avatar?
Guest:Yeah, a panic attack.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I just realized I never had a panic attack before.
Guest:It was literally my only panic attack.
Guest:I knew I was having a panic attack.
Guest:I know when you're having a panic attack, you're supposed to realize you have a panic attack and breathe and it will end.
Guest:You're not having a heart attack and you're not going to die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it took a while.
Guest:It was definitely like a nightmare.
Marc:So, what would you learn with David O. Russell who is notoriously difficult?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, when I came on with him, we were basically tight.
Guest:We were super tight.
Guest:He took you under his wing-ish?
Guest:He took you under his wing, but at the same time treated me as an equal, which was insane because I was like 23.
Guest:And how old was he?
Guest:He's 20 years older than me.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So he had done four movies, I guess, at that point, or three movies.
Guest:I don't know if it was three movies.
Guest:And he's a genius.
Guest:Super genius.
Guest:And, um, I mean, so talented.
Guest:And I, like that time when we were writing together to me is like one of the highlights of my life.
Guest:Cause he was, we, we were on the same wavelength and he's so talented and he just taught me how to sort of have an ear for things.
Marc:How did you get to a point where you said, let's write together?
Guest:You know, you're entering as what, a glorified PA or.
Guest:I mean, I was an assistant, assistant editor, assistant editor, assistant.
Guest:Um,
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What really happened was I, I mean, this is like, this is, I don't know if this is like too much, but I had this weird dream.
Guest:Um, this one night that I was driving in a, in a car and I saw this big, uh, white sphere and I, it looked like I knew it was a motorcycle and I clipped it and I got like, I made a little like dent on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, oh shit.
Guest:And as I was driving, I saw a cop behind the thing and I saw him put his lights on.
Guest:I'm like, oh shit.
Guest:And then just as I look at my rear mirror, I saw this green truck lose control and hit me.
Guest:And I was like, great, now the cop's gonna be more focused on that accident than the little thing I did.
Guest:So the next couple days I was super paranoid about getting in a car accident.
Guest:Cut to two days later, I was at Franklin Western on a stoplight and I looked at my rear view mirror and I saw a green truck lose control and hit me from behind.
Guest:And I got out to like deal with the accident and there was all this dust in the air and some of it got in my eye or whatever.
Guest:So I went to David's house, told him what happened.
Guest:Everyone was like tripping out about this dream because I had told my girlfriend at the time about the dream and then like literally got hit by a green truck.
Guest:And David was like so fixated on this, what is the white thing that I hit?
Guest:Um, you know, this white sphere.
Guest:And then as the day went on, my eye got really messed up and I had his wife took me to the eye doctor and it turns out I had an ulcerated cornea because I wear contacts and I guess like a piece of dust gun in there and start eating it away and I would have gone blind.
Guest:And then we realized like me, like knocking off the cap of the white thing was my eye.
Guest:And it was just this whole crazy thing.
Guest:So for like two weeks, I had this ulcerated cornea.
Guest:So I had to put these drops in every hour in the hour and I couldn't really sleep and I was losing my shit.
Guest:And I think he felt really bad.
Guest:So he started telling me about some of these ideas he wanted to work on.
Guest:Told me about the Huckabee's idea.
Guest:There was another couple of things that we worked on.
Guest:And then he started like spitballing ideas at me.
Guest:And we had like, especially when we were doing the editing stuff, we had like a real easy sort of rapport in terms of creative stuff.
Guest:What, you were editing that online thing he was working on?
Guest:Yeah, because like when you're missing a scene or when you have a scene that leads to another scene, it's not exactly working.
Guest:You got to find the glue between it.
Guest:So I would start pitching ideas, you know, and he and so he just started kind of spitballing ideas off me.
Guest:And then we just started writing together.
Guest:And then I don't know, I was like 24, 25.
Guest:And then I was working with him, you know, nonstop.
Guest:We wrote four scripts together.
Guest:You wrote Huckabees?
Guest:Huckabees.
Guest:We did like a Meet the Fockers version, like a Meet the Fockers version.
Guest:Meet the Fockers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we did this script that I love that I think is the best thing we wrote about this dermatologist who like joins basically the forum.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, you know, becomes a mess.
Guest:And I can't remember the other thing we did.
Guest:Never made it to screen?
Guest:No.
Guest:New Line got it and sort of in turnaround.
Guest:But yeah.
Guest:It's still in the works?
Guest:No, there's no way it's going to happen.
Guest:They have too much money against it.
Guest:But we, yeah, we just had, like, a really good way of working.
Guest:Like, we would sit next to each other and just pass the laptop between each other, and it was like we shared a brain.
Guest:And I just learned so much from him.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:I mean, the main thing I learned is just sort of how to juggle characters at the same time.
Guest:You know, how to create...
Guest:distinct characters put them in a situation he calls them confabs like confabulations yeah and sort of just like let that scene play out and so i've always been drawn to like chaos and you know large groups and but i don't like just arbitrary chaos i like where you kind of are able to track like you can actually parse through it and say like oh this is that tack and this is what this person's doing and this is where their motivation is and how it all kind of collides and that it actually works out in a way that right is chaos but there is a logic to it right and so i think um well huckabees is all about that in a way
Guest:Yeah, I mean, ensemble comedies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, people coming together and crashing into each other and just all the stuff that happens.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I learned a lot about that from him.
Marc:And you saw a movie all the way through.
Marc:I mean, you guys rode Huckabees and then you were on set with it.
Marc:For the most part, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, that's a difficult movie.
Marc:I like that movie a lot.
Marc:And I don't know why necessarily.
Yeah.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Like I watch it and I like right when the first time I saw it, I'm like, well, this is like absurdism.
Marc:This is like a Eugene Ionesco play.
Marc:This is a farce of some kind.
Marc:And I don't know that I could completely understand it.
Marc:I don't under, you know, like in my recollection, the thing that triggered my, my analysis of it was that Marky Mark's a fireman.
Marc:I don't know why, but he just showed up as a fireman.
Marc:And I, what was the construction?
Guest:What was the intent?
Uh,
Guest:I mean, David had a dream about a detective following him around in his everyday life.
Guest:So he wanted to do something where a person is sort of charting your every move and sort of doing an existential analysis instead of, you know, a legal or I guess anything like that.
Guest:A philosophical analysis.
Guest:A philosophical analysis, but, you know, a metaphysical philosophical analysis.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he kind of pitched that idea to me.
Guest:And I was always drawn to philosophy.
Guest:I read a lot of philosophy and studied it a little bit.
Guest:And I've always been interested in that.
Guest:And I think the timing of it was auspicious in terms of sort of the zeitgeist.
Guest:You know, a lot of people were coming out of 9-11.
Guest:And there was this shift, I think, in terms of comedy, especially with Sincerity, where after 9-11...
Guest:it was okay to be sincere again.
Guest:I think coming out of the 90s, everything was so ironic and so glib and so sort of harsh and acidic.
Guest:And I think all of a sudden people had a moment to kind of come together.
Guest:And, you know, the reason why Wahlberg's character is a firefighter is obviously 9-11.
Guest:And so he's the kind of person who up until that point would have just sort of been coasting through life and kind of doing his thing.
Guest:And then all of a sudden someone that you don't associate with having deeper thoughts and sort of going deep, not that firefighters don't have deep thoughts, but in general, we sort of don't attach that.
Guest:Our idea of them changed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Our idea changed.
Guest:And then, you know, especially after the way it all kind of played out and then we go to war and like, why did we go to war?
Guest:Was it because we want justice is because we're just, it's socioeconomic petrodollar stuff.
Guest:Like what, what are we doing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I think a lot of people have those questions and I think it kind of, and there was also, I don't want to call it new age because I kind of, it's sort of, I think cheapens it a little bit, but there is sort of a metaphysical sort of openness that sort of occurring, started occurring around that time as well.
Guest:You know, you saw the, the, how yoga started blowing up and
Guest:You know, people were more conscious about their diets and stuff like that.
Guest:Everyone was just sort of taking stock, I think, after that.
Guest:And the reverberations, I think we're still feeling them, obviously.
Guest:But yeah, at that time, it sort of felt like that was what we were kind of connecting with.
Guest:And David and I, well, David specifically was really on a Buddhist path, you know, at that point.
Guest:I don't think he is anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were studying Zen and we got way into Zen and sort of these ideas were sort of percolating.
Guest:And I think we just created a sort of mishmash, like a pastiche of all these different things that we're like culling from.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And yeah, I mean, the craziest thing is that was a studio film.
Guest:Like, can you imagine?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like at one point that was going to be a Warner Brothers movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like Warner Brothers was supposed to make that movie.
Guest:And then they just like, obviously like we're smart and you know, for them, like that doesn't make any sense.
Guest:But who ended up making it?
Guest:Searchlight, Fox Searchlight.
Guest:And how did you guys feel about it?
Guest:Um, I think it's cool.
Guest:I mean, I haven't seen it since it came out, you know, like it, it was definitely, there's what you intend to make and then there's what ends up being made.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I mean, truthfully, I wasn't on set at the end of it.
Guest:You guys had a falling out?
Guest:A little bit.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, because I've heard rumors about what happened on set and that he kind of lost his mind and whatever.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know that you can speak to that, but whatever, you guys grew estranged?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I don't want to get too gossipy, but yeah, we grew estranged.
Marc:And still?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was, you know, it was a lot of stuff happened.
Guest:A lot of crazy shit went down.
Guest:So like it's not, I always respect him and love him for who he is because he's a true visionary and a rebel.
Guest:And it's hard to sort of separate someone's art and their soul and their actions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, he's a true artist and he's a super genius.
Guest:And when we were writing together, it was one of the highlights of my life.
Guest:Like I remember one time we were he got an award from Amherst because he went to Amherst.
Guest:And we got wind of Antonin Scalia was giving a speech to this like pre-law class there.
Guest:I can't remember the name.
Guest:I think the guy's name is Arkeys.
Guest:The teacher's name was Arkeys.
Guest:He was like a pre-law or whatever it was.
Guest:So we snuck in and it was horrifying because he's not my guy.
Guest:And Scalia was going off about the Constitution and how, you know, you're not supposed to, obviously his whole take on it is it's not a living, breathing document.
Guest:It's a set of laws that are very clear.
Guest:And, you know, you think about what the framers were thinking of and just apply that.
Guest:He's an originalist.
Guest:Yeah, you don't think of it as something you can interpret because you can't interpret a law because then anyone can interpret a law and it's subjective.
Guest:So anyway, he was saying like back then a felony was, if you committed a felony, it was instant death.
Guest:And he goes, not like now, so that's pretty effective, huh?
Guest:And it was like, so like, ugh, like you're just going to kill someone for a felony?
Guest:And then I remember he...
Guest:So at some point we were being rushed out and David goes through something at him like, you know, how dare you with, you know, the Gore election.
Guest:And then I remember he goes, Scalia goes, have some dignity.
Guest:Like, how dare you interrupt my process?
Guest:And then I said, well, you interrupted the election.
Guest:And then like, who are you guys?
Guest:And they started screaming at us.
Guest:And then we ran and I remember running through the quad, like just running for our lives away from this thing.
Guest:It was like so much fun.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You and David O. Russell running from Scalia?
Guest:Scalia and his, like, cronies.
Guest:Yeah, it was awesome.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:So, like, there was a lot of fun stuff that happened with us.
Guest:And, like, honestly, creatively, I don't think I've ever met anyone that I've identified with as much.
Guest:And it was like a real education.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But you think you guys will ever bring it around?
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:I mean, I'm not opposed to it.
Guest:It's just, you know, people change and people do stuff that's kind of hard to swallow.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when that happened, it sort of, you know, whether the timing was right or not or whether it was a good thing, how it felt at the time, it kind of, what, that's when you took up on your own.
Guest:yeah I mean it was directly related to that so the pretty much I think it was like the fourth week of filming is when I kind of pieced out I started writing my first script on my own that ended up becoming my first movie Life After Beth and you made that I made that I ended up making it 10 years later I wrote it in like 2003 what did you do for 10 years
Guest:I was just running studio jobs.
Guest:I was, like, doing, you know, rewrites and stuff like that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's what you were able to get from working with David, that you had done some rewrites?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, my first thing I wrote became a feature that got produced, so, like, you get an exclusive core.
Marc:Did you share the credit?
Marc:Yeah, it was me and him.
Marc:And, like, what kind of rewrites were you doing?
Marc:Because rewriters are sort of unsung, sometimes heroes, sometimes guys just making a buck.
Marc:But it's amazing how many people I know that are uncredited for anything but did a pass on big scripts.
Guest:I did a pass on a bunch of stuff.
Guest:I can't remember anything that, like...
Guest:It was a lot of stuff that there was a couple of originals that, I mean, I'm dealing with studios and I mean, I don't know if you, like you can tell by my last movie, it's, I don't have necessarily the most like.
Marc:Is that just a fee thing where they're like, give this kid 25 grand or 10 grand and let him do a pass.
Marc:And that's that.
Guest:No, I was doing like originals too.
Guest:So like you're getting paid a lot of money to.
Guest:You're writing, writing original scripts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's not like I'm doing a polish.
Guest:So you had a script, you had a script deal.
Guest:Yeah, I was always doing scripts for years.
Guest:And I think, you know, coming off of that experience, I was in 2003, I wrote Life After Beth to direct, almost made it with Searchlight.
Guest:It got really close and then it kind of fell apart the last second.
Guest:I think I was discouraged and I'd never wanted to be a writer.
Guest:I wanted to be a director.
Guest:But when you have a script deal, what does that mean?
Guest:It's like you got a three script deal.
Guest:I didn't have an overhead deal.
Guest:I would just do job to job.
Guest:They'd send me scripts, and then if I identify with them and I thought I could fix them, or if it was an idea that I thought would be fun to work on, I would do it.
Guest:But eventually it kind of wore out its welcome.
Guest:And then I just started getting back into trying to direct.
Guest:But I think that whole experience, that whole time period was a little bit dark.
Guest:And so I try to... Because of what went on with David?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And just sort of like, yeah, the whole time was like, slight disillusionment.
Guest:Definitely more than slight.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:About like what you could and couldn't do in this town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like what you can get away with, what, what people were open to letting happen and also like what wasn't allowed to happen.
Guest:And how can you make what you want to do happen?
Guest:yeah and then you're just sort of like okay i got it and then obviously the as the economy started going south and if if you start tracking that time period was sort of this like highlight creatively i think of the mini major studios you have all these different guys you know like wes anderson david um alexander payne spike jones they're all kind of blossoming around that time and then a little bit after that those companies started shutting down like there's companies that don't exist anymore like warner's independent doesn't even exist anymore right
Guest:Tons of places that were outlets for that kind of style of filmmaking.
Guest:And I think now you're starting to see it kind of come back.
Guest:Like it's coming back in vogue and you see a new generation of people trying to do this thing.
Guest:But for a good run there, it just disappeared.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, that's when you start getting all the superhero kind of comic book things.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Action movies and science fiction stuff.
Guest:They need to make the big bucks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, like everything's much more reductive.
Guest:And especially when the economy went south, like I guess in between 2007 and 2009, that was like the death knell for all those guys.
Guest:You know, like everyone had a harder time kind of making that stuff happen.
Guest:So how did you pull yourself together to make your first movie?
Guest:It just kind of happened.
Guest:Mike Zakin, who ran American Zoetrope, he kind of figured out this system with the tax credits in Los Angeles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's like, dude, we can make a movie for a million dollars.
Guest:Do you have anything you want to do?
Guest:And ultimately, Joshie was what I had wanted to do.
Guest:This is back in like 2011 or something, 2012.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wanted to make that movie.
Guest:And I got together Chris Pratt and Pally.
Guest:It was Pally and I, you know, it was our thing.
Guest:Adam Pally.
Guest:Adam Pally, Chris Pratt, Jake Johnson, and Ben Schwartz got together and we were going to make this movie.
Guest:And then Pally's mom passed away.
Guest:And so I had this tax credit, and then we're like, well, what are we going to do?
Guest:And then Aubrey's agent remembered this script that I'd written, Life After Bath, and he's like, what about that?
Guest:It would be perfect for Aubrey.
Guest:And I was like, holy shit, I wrote it for her, but I didn't know her.
Guest:It was like seven years before I even met her.
Guest:And I don't know who else would have done that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was, like, I think Zooey Deschanel or something we were talking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, like, no one can do what Aubrey did in that movie.
Guest:I know you haven't seen it, but it's, like, it's basically, like, a vehicle for Aubrey, even though I didn't know who she was.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then we just jammed that through, like, at the last... A lot of my movie moves have been, like, last second, like, jumping on opportunities instead of, like, careful plotting for years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's almost just, like, sort of reading the tea leaves and being, like, okay, this can happen right now, and I got to move real quick.
Marc:Uh huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I thought Joshua was great.
Marc:I enjoyed it.
Marc:But but, you know, this this idea of, you know, fate comes and goes like, what did you study when you studied Jewish mysticism?
Guest:Like what specifically?
Guest:I mean, what did you take from it?
Guest:I got way into mysticism at one point.
Guest:I don't know how that went down.
Guest:I think when I was a kid, I was studying about the history of Spain and all the different words that come from Arabic words, from the Moors.
Guest:There's zero and zenith and nadir.
Guest:And one of them was alchemy, where chemistry ultimately came from.
Guest:And I was just so blown away by this idea of alchemy, that there are people that think they can turn lead into gold and live forever.
Guest:As a kid, that's amazing.
Guest:But I never let go of that.
Guest:And so, especially as I got into high school and college, I was always reading...
Guest:you know works that had to do with alchemy not not like new agey stuff but like literal original works and um the kabbalah which is like the jewish mysticism features prominently in that stuff like that worldview of this idea of repairing there's this thing called tikkun yeah where you um you find the sparks of divinity and trash basically and elevate it to make it divine is the the basic premise of alchemy yeah and so i i was definitely you know into all that kind of occult shit when i was in college and
Guest:like like how far like what how did it influence your life i mean at one point did the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram yeah so like shit like that but yeah i mean i was i wouldn't say like i'm an occultist right but i there's something poetic and beautiful about it almost artistic yeah um and i think as an artist i think opening yourself up to that process where i i mean i think ultimately all that stuff is a metaphor so if you're a full if you're
Guest:talking about the you know mystical philosophy of the middle ages and renaissance it's i don't know what percentage of the people thought they were going to turn lead into gold but it's you're transforming your soul i mean you look at carl jung stuff yeah carl jung super identified how that is completely mimicking or not mimicking but mirroring what's going on in our brain oh yeah and how our unconscious works with our conscious mind and so there is something to be said about that and i think opening yourself up to that kind of like logic is
Guest:Or I don't know if it's logic, but sort of that imagery and that sort of allegory, allegorical stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It allows, it kind of creates a conduit for, I guess, creativity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you also have to be careful that you have some context in place or it can get pretty crazy making.
Marc:Like Alistair Crowley, Golden Dawn style.
Marc:Well, I mean, well, that had a context, you know, that practical magic business.
Marc:But even in reading, you know, mystical texts and, you know, looking at it as allegory that, you know, sometimes, you know, the dark side of that, if you get hung up on it or sort of crossing over it into being like, well, this is real, you know, where you get into Da Vinci Code land.
Yeah.
Marc:That can kind of crush you in the same way that Avatar does.
Guest:For sure.
Guest:I mean, I definitely read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but I also had read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which is poking fun.
Guest:It's satire of all that kind of stuff too.
Guest:I mean, I always had a sense of humor about it.
Guest:I was never like, you know, wearing robes and, you know, trying to conjure demons.
Guest:And if anything, it was more just...
Guest:For me, it was more just kind of coming up with a cosmogony, like trying to come up with a worldview, trying to come up with like some structure to the universe that isn't as obvious as religion or science.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That there is something like I feel like you can tap into that is a little bit bigger than us that has a structure to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that was always what was really interesting.
Guest:I never really wanted to manipulate it from my own ends.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But I did feel like there is some kind of sympathy there.
Marc:But you do believe in the prophecy of dream and the dubious timing of things that transcend coincidence?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I mean, I've had dreams that have come true, like obviously with the weird eyeball thing.
Guest:I've had weird out-of-body experiences that I was able to verify with people.
Guest:I was able to see people doing stuff as they were doing it, and they were able to say that actually happened.
Guest:So I don't necessarily think that that's supernatural.
Guest:I think it's natural.
Marc:We just don't understand the extent of it or the, you know, what parts of our brain have been shut down out of necessity to, uh, function as humans.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I think it was, uh, was it Seneca or maybe not even necessity.
Marc:Maybe that were shut down for us to be civilized.
Guest:I think it was like Seneca said, the only thing that's stopping us from walking on water is our doubt.
Guest:You know, like I obviously like then you can't not think of it.
Guest:But yeah, I think like the ability of our minds are obviously we don't know to what extent what we're capable of.
Guest:So we're connected to how we're connected or, you know, like I've read all kinds of stuff.
Guest:You know, there's ideas that our brains are just basically antennas and we're just picking up.
Guest:you know, signals and that's what we are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I don't know.
Guest:I'm just, I don't have any answer.
Guest:I just know there's a lot more going on than when we explain.
Guest:Good.
Guest:Good.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:I'm happy to know that.
Marc:Thanks for talking to me, man.
Marc:Yeah, of course.
Marc:All right, man.
Marc:That was a high-octane conversation.
Marc:Intense and engaged and good.
Marc:I like that guy.
Marc:Smart guy.
Marc:Good director.
Marc:Interesting fellow.
Marc:As I said earlier, The Little Hours is now playing in New York and L.A.
Marc:It's going to be expanding throughout the country soon.
Marc:Maybe I'll play some guitar.
Marc:It's been a few days.
Marc:I know a lot of you are just clamoring to hear me fucking noodle and repeat myself.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:Dead, deaf, black cat, blues meditation.
Marc:I think.
Marc:I think we'll try to do that.
Guest:.
.
Marc:Goodbye, deaf black cat.
Marc:Boomer lives!