The Year of Living Dangerously with Tracy Letts

Introduction

0:00a podcast caught in the fire of revolution so that's the part that's the i've been going tagline heavy on the series mostly um not because i'm trying to avoid doing an australian accent i

0:31could nail it if i wanted to you ever done an australian accent i haven't i'm told that the secret is really really really roily roily what's i feel like the one that's gotten really big when i see roily doing like australian accent uh instagrams is no no no we're doing it terribly but that they there's a no with an r we've been uh really upsetting the entire continent this entire

Movie Introduction

0:59series just so you know what you're walking into tracy luckily this movie isn't set in australia but we have been you know our our knowledge gaps about australian history and culture have been exposed a little bit look yeah i've heard some of this some of your australian prejudice i mean because i grew up in britain yes okay so you've heard yeah i'm copying to it you know and we thought it was a positive stereotype to assume that upon meeting every australian takes out a knife and compares whose knife is bigger than the others we did not think that was offensive have you

1:30ever been to australia i have you know what this has not come up much in this series you've been multiple times or just the one time i've been two times right both for work uh well no one once for fun i had a i had a good friend uh growing up whose family relocated to australia and i went to visit him when i was a teenager and then i went i went for work i was uh i was on a tv show uh which no one

TV Show Discussion

1:56should ever make uh i feel like you have some similar experiences or similar opinions on the process of making a tv show uh which is fairly brutal i don't know it depends on the show okay you're right you're right what show were you on it's called the tick it was a superhero parody and um uh we had an extended press tour that ended in australia oh wow and they were like you to australia they took me to australia and it was a thing where the cast it was a international press

2:28tour and every time we like jumped a continent or a country someone would drop off and be like either we're cutting the budget we're reducing the cast or i'm not available for another week of this and so it got down to australia and it was just me and the creator of the show and they were like

Australia Trip

2:44and you're down to do the australia stop right we'll fly you in it's just 36 hours and we'll fly you back and i was like i'm not going to australia unless you give me five days in a hotel it was one of my only flexes ever were you in sydney i was in sydney proper but then did some driving around uh not me people drove me around yeah he can't drive i can't drive i'm afraid of cars have you been to australia david never been uh would love to go uh in theory have you been i have been three times sure uh i went once somebody was doing my play killer joe at an independent production and so i

3:15went for that i was impressed for that my play august osage county uh was done at the uh national

Theater Experience

3:22theater when kate planchette and her husband were running the national theater so we took our production to so same cast like you yeah the whole the whole show went took our group down there and then the third time oh was when carrie was shooting the leftovers they shot season three there were only three seasons they shot season three in melbourne so i have a brother in uh singapore we went we got visited him in singapore got terrible food poisoning then went to uh melbourne and we got there earlier than

3:56she was supposed to start work but we were there at the same time the melbourne international film

Film Festival

4:01festivals going on a very good festival like milf as a milf uh and we uh we just became festival goers we got uh we got uh passes and just went to all the movies it was a great way to learn the city and learn the trains and stuff and we had a great time in melf sounds like a real filth festival i'd like to frequent um the thing you are teeing me up for here unknowingly tracy which i somehow have not brought up at all this series is uh my brother james newman boarded a plane on new year's eve 2025

Brother's Job

4:34and january 1st landed in sydney australia where he now works full-time as the general manager of the sydney basketball team i feel like you have brought this up i think i haven't within this series i can't remember because of recording order right but my brother is now like an australian resident or he at least has a work visa is is you know what does he do for the basketball he is a general manager the gm of the city men's and women's teams in sydney australia we are very different people but i love him very much and i'm very proud there are very uh healthy people the

5:08australians uh regardless of their physical attractiveness they're always running and jumping in front of you there's a lot of running and jumping and biking and positive stereotypes yeah he was calling me and saying like you're the only person i know who's visited like and i know you've only gone like you know short trips and work stuff and whatever but what's your takeaway and i'm just like the quality of life there seems unbelievable and on average not to stereotype positively people seem happy they do it is like one of the least tense major cities i have ever visited there's a lot of

5:42running there's a lot of jumping there's uh every every animal can kill you everything every spider around every corner is a scorpion yeah right there and they're just like running a restaurant we're we're out of anti-toxins so be careful when you're you know don't you dare bring in a green bean because they'll yell at you but that's why it helps to have a basketball in sydney though you can just dribble those motherfuckers uh i mean you know i have i have a friend who's from brazil and i was talking to her about like the stereotype you know that she the the you know the cute stereotype like

6:14right we're always just all on the beach all the time just dashing into the water that's how i feel like about australians too i know it's not true yeah but they're all just running up and down the beach and jumping in the water and i'm firing up the barbecue i mean i'm almost definitely going to visit this year and for the foreseeable future sydney is probably a place i go to more than most places i mean it's obviously a big commitment trip but like if he keeps working there i'm gonna good food surprisingly good food right they go seafood and some asian influence some spice in the food it's

6:45good david you held up one finger some of and we're it's funny just because we're talking about a film that was largely filmed in the philippines yes although they did shoot some in australia it was basically an australian production he treats witness as his first hollywood film even though a hollywood studio came in and rescued this movie at the last moment before production started uh but we're also talking about uh an australian filmmaker yep uh one of the canonical australian filmmakers and this is his departure from australian film like this is really the full well right yes and we've been nailing all discussions of australia up until this point

7:18and is continuing on this episode what we take a moment to pat ourselves on the back for how good of a job we've been doing yeah ben can you uh cut in like the loudest thumping sound of all time

Podcast Introduction

7:28or maybe toilet flush what's this miniseries this is blank check with griffin and david i'm griffin i'm david it's a podcast about filmographies directors who have massive success early on in their careers such as basically leading the australian new wave being certainly one of the leaders vanguard i'm already throwing a flag on this yeah really yeah he was not a massive success well well well well you don't think he got there well he got there yeah but i what the way you describe the ethos of blank check makes it sound like he had a massive success and now he's but

8:03tracy has suffered it's 12 years into this show we're a little bit out of those guys not completely out and some of those guys were saving some of those guys were saying mostly we want to discuss interesting filmmakers and we're he doesn't quite i mean his what's his most runaway success truman show it's truman i'd say witness is his guarantor it happens right after this witness is the that's the breakout right the guarantor is what we call right the hit that convinces them to hand you the blank checkbook and then i think he is a bit of a blank check

8:36filmmaker i do think his studio run even though to a certain degree he was a hired hand green card obviously more his personal passion project right look the thing is tracy if we had a director on and we said we think that hollywood gave you a blank check they would be like shoot us in the face do you know how hard it is yeah even guys we talked about like nolan or m night shamalan who really did get you know a lot of power and i'm still like this is still very hard m night shamalan now literally funds his own movies and would be like there is no such thing as a blank check right right but george

9:09lucas i mean he's the close he's the he's that's where we start original and you love him in his films sure especially right here he's got water look this is a a massive success early on the careers are given a series of blank checks make whatever crazy passion products they want and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby this is a film a mini series on the

Peter Weir Discussion

9:28films of peter weir is called pod nick at hanging cast that's right which i approve of thank you okay so then i give up because what was the other one podster and cast mander colon the pod side of the cat really fucking bad okay i i you know what i can't fight that this is a man of letters here this is a fucking pulitzer prize winner i'm not gonna argue my writings better it's pod nick at hanging cast you will hear no further gripes from me who did gallipoli but will have already aired by

10:03now yes you can say right jennifer kent the wonderful filmmaker jennifer kent who made the babadook and uh the nightingale yes uh we wanted an australian filmmaker especially for gallipoli yes we tried for several what's tough is that they live eight trillion hours away right we did it what it was like 9 p.m our time and it was like the next morning her time yes she was she was on zoom we were taking nightfall and she was drinking coffee right but she rocked she was awesome do you like gallipoli very much gallipoli i think is phenomenal had never seen that before had never

10:33seen this one before both of the mel gibson films were blind spots i do have holes in my peter weir what are your holes i mean sorry bit of a bit of a aggressive question there who are your holes master and commander you've never seen master and commander interesting as i learn more about you you've been on our friend sean's show obviously you've you know i'm third chair on the big picture let's just say i'm third we should we should let's let's introduce with proper titles here not only is he third chair on the big picture not as only is he a pulitzer prize winner in drama yes

11:05this is true tony award winner as well as both writer and actor correct correct gotta flex it but most importantly he is the king of physical media i also at one point called him a bad bitch on this podcast excuse me i didn't hear that i believe we called him the boss bitch maybe a boss bitch in our awards show episodes we do annually i nominated you best supporting actor for indignation and i believe david responded tracy let's the boss bitch because you'd had a good really good year it was a good year you'd been in a lot of stuff that that's when you're in like

11:36oh christine and like wiener dog and the lovers i don't know it was like very very sort of exciting when you meet hit maker and he gives you the secrets he's like here's how you make a hit wait when did he meet when when what did they christine christine right right right yeah yeah and he was like the women have to be little and it will go over a hundred million dollars and you run to greta gerwig i'm holding the hot hand tracy let's is here in the studio thank you very much for having me thank you on the blank check now you're saying that you've never seen

12:07master and commander before i was happy that this is the series that you came on for it is one of our great joys in life for david and i when we pick a new director we put them on the schedule we immediately crack our knuckles pull up blu-ray.com and go what do i already have and what are the holes i have to fill and then what's the best addition and it used to be oh no domestic release of this too bad i'm not going to have it i've started being a no matter what by any means possible i'm getting all of them and this is this is a varied stack here we got levoitur or monge paris

12:43right this is a french copy of the cars that ate paris uh who's who's even the distributor here eska editions yeah bfi about to reissue this in 4k got this fucking mondo second site picnic at hanging rock i got that that's very nice it's a good box i just have the criterion of that but there's a very that only has the director's cut and this is theatrical plus the book you get it's kind of like a better audition yeah i got them both i tried to convince i use this specifically to try to convince amanda that physical media isn't ugly i was trying to combat your i live in a game

13:17stop thing by being like but look at this is nice and no there are nice there are nice ones but sometimes are you a little skeptical of the really nice ones sure i mean i have giant boxes right of movies that are like freaking congo i mean maybe congo is rude because i know the boxes are great but then you're like inside is william freaking's you know jade like which is a movie i like but doesn't belong in this i finery i just bought the umbrella 4k of the live action super mario brothers which i think is a hundred dollars and contains more literature than like the encyclopedia britannica

13:49a film that has four separate books a film that i enjoyed but like that most people involved with are like a stain on my reputation it is objectively dog shit and i want to be clear i love that film it is objectively dog shit and it comes with a book that includes two different scripts two rejected scripts for that movie and that's one of only three books included in that box last wave from the aforementioned umbrella the fine folks yep i got that we got gallipoli has just a paramount a pretty basic blue that only came out recently i'm glad they finally put it out

14:21i've got gallipoli but i i'm gonna look at my okay i wonder if i'm wrong and this is just a reissue what do you use this has a 2023 i use uh something called clz i use that too oh yes there you go very fond of that uh let's see gallipoli how do we spell that g-a-l-l-i-p yeah that's what i got yeah from a place you've never heard of comes a story you'll never forget we both agreed in this episode kind of a rude tagline yeah a bit but then i saw you on your letterbox log where people were

14:54getting excited oh fuck is tracy let's doing your living dangerously sorry i didn't realize when i when i logged it that's the fun of the sport oh no it's good yeah it's good um you like that but you you were posting in anger yeah that you had to watch it on youtube premium because it was the only better option than the dvd you had the dvd i i actually played them side by side you're aware of this what is that this is a spanish blu-ray i've been a little suspicious that it's a bootleg but

15:26it seems like it's not have you watched it yeah it looks okay well there's the whole thing i would not say it is reference quality no right it looks like probably youtube premium just on a disc why isn't this movie at why fucking why do i have a fucking box for congo on my shelf and not the year of living danger this is underground pictures they put this out what's the copyright here for the disc release i'll figure it out i mean this is yeah it's got this is 2014 i feel like often with this is the only country in which any blu-ray release of this movie has happened it was

16:0012 years ago these mgm united artists like you know that's sort of tricky period for this right like the rights will get weird right that's always isn't that always the answer it's like no one can untangle sometimes i also want to like we'll get into this but i wonder if there's a feeling of touchiness around this movie of if we restore this too thoroughly and spotlight it too much are people going to get up in arms william freaking's jane they're not touchy about jade sorry yeah you know like there's other movies that get well that's a touchy movie that's moving people touching each other the whole time versus grabbing everyone and i got the rest of i got the the arrow witness i got

16:32the dead poets the basic uh disney release screen card i don't i don't own dead poets do you not like it it's sims is on the same page it's my least favorite weird film yeah i think mine too fearless i think is a warner archive truman basic paramount 4k master and commander got the steel book but i assume you don't have that yet i have it i just haven't bought it yeah interesting and then way back's an image release so i have that as well yeah i i don't think i've seen the way do you like brit shit you know what i mean like so like did mastering commander kind of pass you by just because it was like sort of a big blockbuster at the time and you were like

17:06like like like how did it pass you by i wonder based on those books right i have no i've never had no grounding in the books to those books i i don't go out to see a movie just because russell crowe's in it i don't not see a movie because russell crowe's in it but i don't see it because he's not an automatic guy do you go out to see exactly what about the sea you know the shiny yeah is this the midwesterner in you you're like oceans they're thousands of miles away i have no good reason for not having seen master and commander maybe i'll go home and watch it tonight

17:40so it's the it's the best it's so good it's one of david's favorite movies i have not re-watched it since i saw it in theaters we have not done that episode yet can you say what your favorite where is my that one is certainly my favorite yeah my favorite is but i love a lot of his films huh yeah what's your number one bud is it truman show that feels kind of lame but it feels like that might be my answer what's your favorite is it this it's year of living danger yes right i mean we we talked to you when we were planning this series being like peter weir does he spark

18:11interest in year of living dangerously was your you know i believe you said it's one of my 50 favorite movies of all time you know i made a list recently of my favorite movies i was going to be my top 100 list and it turned out to be about 160 something is it ranked or is it not ranked okay just what's in the pot chronological order and uh yeah year of living dangerously is on that list so it's basically at this point it's like this is the canon these are the movies you were just sort of going through everything you've seen being like my these are my favorites these are the

18:42things i will watch again that i know and love now you might have sensed david and i both trying to sniff out some of your movie blind spots right what don't you like as much what what haven't you seen him for what reasons it's because we came into this loaded with a challenge ben producer ben who is not a physical media guy i've gifted him a couple discs over the year but this is not his beat when we lock down a day and a time to record i should say i have vinyl i have a big vinyl collection

19:13love music but as far as yeah movies i only really have a handful yeah and he says you know what would be fun if we tried to gift tracy with a disc that he doesn't already have and i said ben you don't understand the scale of the challenge you just proposed that's impossible and then the more we got into talking to him about how hard that would be the more we were like wait a second you should try you should try ben you should see if you can pick out a movie he hasn't seen and or placed in his

19:51collection and then he bought three and it sparked a competition in david and i and we have also each bought three movies for you wow and this is the tracy let's challenge there are nine discs that are about to be presented oh and we want to know are any of these not already in the collection oh great ben i feel like you should go first since you spurred this whole thing so i want to shout out we went to night owl video you ever been there it's in williamsburg great place no lovely little place nice it's about a year old it's finally bringing physical media stores back to uh shout

20:25out shout out to night owl video they got a very nice used collection very you know and all the new stuff obviously uh and their motto is death to streamers physical media forever so they're definitely going for it i was trying to give ben some some help in strategizing he also went with our friend ben david grabinski past and future guest who was sort of guiding ben through the understanding of certain labels have subscription programs tracy might be pre-buying a full year yeah right yeah yeah he had mentioned your uh your subscriber to vinegar syndrome so i i avoided those

20:56releases and we're looking for you want rigorous honesty rigorous honesty please complete honesty absolutely because you have about what 20 000 no no that's crazy 11 000 plus still a lot but as i appreciate you throwing out the number 20 000 makes it seem reasonable 20 000 we're sort of starting to approach like the amount of movies that might exist this is why the challenge is fun right but you buy a lot of stuff and kind of are like i'll get to it or i have a completionist surge

21:28or whatever i've seen uh perhaps 30 of the movies on my right because i'm currently in this project like i gotta fucking watch everything i own on disc that i've either never seen how many discs do you have i have over a thousand i think i'm nothing like you but i have a lot i think i'm similar and my wife is it goes in one room and so it's a little mysterious what's going on i think to her but like then she'll glimpse like what's uh and i'm like no no no you live in brooklyn i live in brooklyn so your space is somewhat you have some somewhat limited there's gonna have to be i'm gonna need

22:01there's some shelving conversations i'm gonna need to have some choices that need to be made see we bought this house and it had a basement and it looked like a marriott ballroom and it's just like oh well this is where we can put everything i mean i'm very jealous tracy i need you to know that i now often repeat the phrase all i want is the type of success where i can have a tracy let's basement it has become basically the driving force of any professional ambitions i have is if i can just get a tracy let's basement imagine having a home where there was space for all of my

22:35sickness is the way i think about and you can pass your sickness on to your family well that's the real thing yeah all right well and so i want to preface as well um as far as curation you saw my porch yeah so just keep that in mind as a like a kind of lens these are kind of three porch movies if this helps you understand the kind of subgenre of porch movies so of course first here i have a limited edition steelbook of ace ventura pet detective i do not own this film you do not own

23:07this film have you seen it before i don't think so wow wow you're in store for a good time oh great how do you feel about james carrey uh funny funny well then you probably at least get a couple i mean i mean obviously not so funny that i've ever sought out ace ventura which i think would be one of the touchstone films and his it's his launch pad right i will say this was part of my strategy was thinking the 90s might have been the era where you were dismissing certain commercial

23:39films definitely definitely it started in the 80s but certainly extended well into the 90s we'll get in more into the 80s 90s discussion great i will say that i just worked with peter farrelly i shot a movie with him called i play rocky yeah it's coming out later this year and uh at one point i got a note uh from him to take it down and i said wow the director of dumb and dumber just told me i was a little too broad that's incredible in a movie about making rocky who do you play and i play uh i play

24:14a fictional okay uh bad guy you'll never make this movie boxing movies don't amount to shit i'll tell you rocky will never win best picture you might have actually quoted a few of my life do you do you like to get that call because like four versus four great movie and you're very very good in it but like where it's like oh fun racing well no no you're the guy who shits on everyone in the office i think this movie sucks i wish this movie weren't happening but then what's great about four versus ferrari is you get the scene of the emotional breakdown and the best version of that character

24:46i uh i turned down a lot of those things unless it's got that extra thing in it that i go oh this is this is good i want to do that extra thing yeah and so uh i play rocky has that no i'm excited for i play rocky i am a sucker for that kind of movie i like i like early word is good i'm excited about do you know that the young actor playing sylvester stallone in the movie is the same young actor who played al pacino in the offer one of my obsessions of the last decade i have not seen it but he's very good i almost bought you the offer on dvd and then i was like it's tv and it's dvd this

25:21is offensive this is rude but the offer is one of the more bizarre things ever made thank you for the ace ventura i will gladly wait and it's one of one right now one out of one and so that i should mention that was a shout release next we have this is arrow video it is a 4k of spawn i do not own that wow that doesn't shock me have you ever seen spawn i have not mark az dipay's spawn are you familiar with the character uh is he a vampire or a vampire hunter oh he's from hell more demonic

25:54hell spawn yeah he's a former uh like a soldier yeah like he dies he goes to hell and satan is sort of like i'll let you go back to earth but you do have to be kind of like a hellish superhero was he originally a comic book correct it's come todd mcfarland t-dog 90s very 90s a lot of chains and who directed the film mark az dipay who's a legendary special effects artist he's widely credited as being one of the two guys who really cracked cgi for jurassic park and they were like

26:26well that means you should make a whole movie and he did this and i believe he never directed a live action film ever again he directs direct-to-video garfield sequels now yeah then you're two for two man wow i'm thrilled by the way this has theatrical and directors cut on it i recommend directors thank you i appreciate it and there's some really great special effects and that's all i'm gonna say okay okay roger ebert gave this movie three stars and then here lastly we have trash humpers by harmony current i do not own trash humpers wow

26:58i knew that was gonna be okay i was i believe that was the one that was borderline harmony doesn't feel like quite your taste zone but i also got a couple of harmony corinne on the show uh so i'm glad to have trash humpers on disc hell yeah yeah i'm a big fan of his work and i'm i just i can't believe three for three well done man incredible well done david would you like to go next sure why not all right okay first off this is the most obvious one you might have this one this is arrows yes uh 4k release of dominic senesfilm swordfish okay he's checking

27:32his database here which is what i thought where you i doubt you've seen swordfish i have seen it all right you've seen it okay so i was wrong but one of those where i was like did you buy it just because there's a nice new addition out of a sense of completionism i do not own okay okay jackman cali berry uh of course john travolta don cheadle yeah don cheadle a role that you would play now in this movie where it made today is sam shepherd's role as the u.s senator who's sort of like stop yay travolta you gotta cut out your whatever it is i don't like these computers

28:05right and travolta's oh it's interesting and shoots him to death in like utah or some you know some extravagant location uh just to make sure i'm thinking of the right film halle berry nude scene very famously they um uh they leaked this this oh a terrible leak came out from the studio like oh she's filming a nude scene an extra scene has leaked oh who could have spilled this info there was also a moment clearly someone sent them a long-range tracking report and they were

28:35like can we leak the can we pay halle berry another million dollars there's a moment in the trailer of her undressing and i remember being surrounded by teenage boys being a teenage boy at the time people being like i hear she keeps taking clothes off like there it was the buzz was really strong it's a scene in the film her nude scene that i would say uh doesn't feel entirely dramatically central to uh but she's sunbathing and then she just drops the cover again i have seen the movie for about 60 seconds and then honestly the nude scene is what it's sort of known for i think this is a crazy text like this is a bizarre like when hollywood was sort of like

29:10we should be doing like cyberpunk tarantino movies and then like one year later they were like enough of that like we gotta stop who directed dominic senna who also made uh gone in 60 seconds remake uh he did he was he was a fincher guy he was one of the fincher stable i always get senna and simon west confused right well they were both fincher guys they're both yeah he did that kind of nasty brad pitt movie california if you remember that like a serial killer movie yep he was you know all sizzle uh no say mediums medium to small state you guys are four for four all right let's see

29:44what oh he did season of the witch which i love have you ever seen season of the witch i have great movie one of our finest all right next up this is this is a strange one this is dvd use dvd because i was really trying to get wow scott alexander and larry karaszewski screwed let's check in the database now this is griffin yeah an exceptionally strange movie i agree with that yes i believe it has never been released on high down on it wow don't know have you ever seen it no it looks uh light to medium use here we've got some crinkling on this i'm sorry to give you this

30:16it is an odd kind of blank check movie because they'd had such success as screenwriters that people went we should let these guys make a whole film and it was trying to launch arguably three comedy stars at the same time it's trying to launch it's sort of trying with norm again norm mcdonald around the dirty work era right like our little after i think it's almost contemporaneous and then dave chapelle it's sort of half-baked era yeah dave chapelle i'm talking and i mean i was arguing sarah silverman yeah yeah sure sure she's in there but larry doesn't disown this

30:47movie right i mean larry no he's fond of i think they're both it was it was one of those movies they had no idea how to market it has one of the weirdest trailers they clearly just have no idea what to tell you about this movie it is so it's quite odd and kind of vulgar i was gonna say it's in this category i would classify as like big budget studio versions of john water's material you know and i think it's a little post like something about mary people want gross out it is very dark it's very odd oh thanks five for five davido is great man doing great finally

31:23crank high voltage i i've not seen crank high voltage have you seen crank uh i haven't seen crank i've actually been on a bit of a statham uh tear wow and you hadn't gotten to it yet uh i've not gotten to it yet both vital i'm sorry that i went for high voltage here because the completionist in you now means you'll probably end up buying crank as well this is the sequel crank high voltage is joan allen in one of these movies joan allen is in death race movie a movie i really fight for she she plays the i know i was gonna say she plays the tracy let's i don't want you doing death

31:58race it is the opposite she is the evil prison warden right she's like you motherfuckers better death race and there's a bit in that movie that i love where joan allen goes on like a 30 second terror and says every american curse word six times nice because she's angry at how i've been breaking her system for for a while the my uh uh treadmill watches were uh tv shows keeping up with the tv shows but it just became too painful and so what i've been doing because you're gonna fall asleep watching these shows the 10 episodes before they do any plot right it wasn't an enticement to

32:32get back on the treadmill right so i've been catching up on a lot of action like trashy action for a 90s 2000s action like i've watched the equalizer series i saw you logged out yeah extremely good tracy extremely solid i had considered buying you the equalizer trilogy so i did some cross referencing we were just talking about those movies i love them so much they make me so just to pitch you on crank crank the first crank uh the idea is it's speed but with his heart so he has to keep his heart rate above his third in crank heart voltage i believe he's been in given an artificial

33:03heart so he has to literally like grab onto like uh like use electricity electric cords and bite them to just wait really yeah the first that sounds fun ends with him dying right and it was enough of a hit that justified the sequel well what if they put an electric heart in him but it resulted in one of the greatest taglines of all time which is which is he was dead but he got a lot better yeah he got better um mr statham never made a movie that he he he couldn't find his way to make a sequel absolutely all doors are open in the world of jason statham i like this era of his better which was

33:36more martial artsy versus this new one where it's like he's a gentle gardener but he used to and then like some nice old lady dies and he has to go kill hillary clinton or whatever yes but beekeeper is incredible beekeeper have you seen beekeeper i have seen beekeeper is just so insane in in the world it establishes i forget which crank it is one of the cranks has one of my favorite gags which is uh japanese guys talking to him and you see the subtitles and statham is so out of it that you then cut to a reverse of statham looking at the subtitles like the shot is reversed going like

34:07neville dean and taylor all right so i got i got three for three six four six okay wow i i took a very specific strategy and i was like i feel like the 90s or the zone where you were maybe not keeping up as uh omnivorously with all the commercial cinema i think that's true and b also you talk about on your on your physical media episode so big picture the things you were watching with your children and i was sort of trying to triangulate your children's tastes where things are going and i'm like are there movies that i grew up with that you would not have seen at the time but that might be

34:40good to introduce your children to i like they can come griff stamped they can also maybe then it knocks these discs a little higher up on the watch list because there's a little bit of an activity okay okay so first of all joe dante's 1998 picture small soldiers have you seen it i have not seen small soldiers and i assume that means you don't own it i do not own okay nor have i seen joe dante i didn't even know it was a joe dante you're making a sherman-esque statement tracy that's exactly what i was betting on because i went i bet tracy has respect for joe dante

35:14sure but he lost track of the last couple i did i did not know that was his film this incredible film about the military industrial complex uh about uh the the corporatization of america is that a person on no these so it is about a tech company a military tech company that buys a toy company and they're endless sort of gobbling up a conglomeration of everything and decide to try to make this film's very relevant now basically ai toys what if gi joe's could actually do shit and they put military uh microchips in them and they start literally waging war on our backyard

35:50but are there people in the film yes there are it's not an animated film it's a live action film this is major chip hazard who is the main villain toy voiced by tommy lee jones and frank langella archer leader of the gorgonites uh but this film stars uh kirsten dunst gregory smith great kevin dunn phil hartman's final film performance dennis leary david cross uh and magnuson it's it's got a really good cast uh jay moore of course it was that era where we were trying to make that happen but it's it's a it's a wonderful film i think i think it's

36:22a razor sharp satire you guys are very funny you guys are killing it uh big action i'm gonna show that to my son yeah i think i think he will uh like it it's got it's not a i know he's very into kaiju film i know it is not a small not big right there's a similar yeah energy of chaos creature featurey kind of he likes the first question is always is there a creature it is mostly very small animatronic puppets yeah you know of monsters fighting army got it um and

36:53humans being like the fuck is going on um one of the best films of 1998 similar this comes from this was dreamworks when dreamworks was launching and spielberg was like we need a family slate we need amblin-esque pictures and he greenlit odd versions of amblin-esque pictures that didn't quite perform as well as they should have at the time gore verbinski's mouse hunt his first film i do not own mouse hunt nor have i ever seen wow you'll like that this is quietly one of the best film craft films of the 90s yeah if this movie came out tomorrow best cinematography best art

37:28direction best sound best editing people would be like nothing has looked this good since the 50s who directed mouse hunt gore verbinski oh you just said it is his first film it is him cashing in the heat of directing the budweiser frog commercials and it's a script that's just these two guys are trying to catch a mouse and he's like what if it has the aesthetics of delicatessen he built an insane house he insisted on doing almost all of it with real mice they had like 60 mice who they trained as actors it's uh nathan lane and lee evans lee evans but it's also it's uh christopher walkens in it

38:04maurie shakin's in it sure it's uh william hickey's last performance ever oh yeah wonderful film saw recently a film form a screen it's a beautiful 4k this is reference quality if you if you score this last one nine for nine this is my biggest swing because this is more recent but i had a feeling that you just kind of opted out on this whole series this is i picked it's an excellent adventure picture it's it's a family story done in a style i'd say almost heightened to melodrama uh with the broad um kind of uh allegorical storytelling of your biblical epics of yore

38:40um it is called avatar the way of water i've never seen avatar the way of water did you blind buy it i did not blind buy it i do not own it nine fresh discs now did you see the first one did you see the first one i've never seen uh one of the my guess that you just went not my thing right i've not yeah i haven't there's a rip-roaring adventure about how we have lost touch with nature so now i have to go buy the first one this is the problem we're we're making homework for you

39:12here buying these sequels it's a boy and a whale yeah mighty piacon who you will be thrilled to meet how long is that movie let's not talk about runtime runtime what is a runtime well just in terms of showing it to my son there there are uh your son will be into it i would imagine it might be split over a couple nights 192 minutes long 192 fucking minutes i it's longer than lawrence of arabia it's similar to lawrence of arabia longer than lawrence of arabia but has

39:42your son seen lawrence of arabia that is actually you know what lawrence of arabia is longer lawrence is almost four hours long is it really yeah it's really really long this is four discs so after you watch the movie you can go into the making of you know recently sean and amanda uh on the big picture podcast we're talking about how even if you're not into it it's undeniable that the the the specialness of the special effects are in fact kind of jaw-dropping and beyond what you're

40:13accustomed to seeing when you watch a lot of ai slot i would agree or cgi slot it is it is very much yes it stands in opposition to that and i we we agree that it is the best of the three uh yes absolutely really yes i think this sequel is the best i do think you could watch it cold it does a pretty good job of table setting at the beginning of the film and there's such a big time jump between the first and the second that there is a bit of a clean entry point now i have to say you guys have done absolutely beautiful work in uh collecting these nine discs i'm really impressed and i'm really

40:50happy to have them in my collection and i'm happy to give all of them a spin all of them does anybody listening to this give a shit about what we're talking about yeah oh very deeply are you kidding me oh yeah you go on sean's podcast which is bigger than this podcast and you guys you know speak at length on these matters i always assume that those episodes are just very niche that there's just a very there's a small but dedicated number but this is a growing area of interest for

41:23people i feel like i do feel like there's this general person you know like there's just feeling amongst film fans of like it's just not good out there it's bad and we need to take a stand and we need to do something it's so annoying sifting through these streaming services it's so annoying kind of like trying to find the best version of it you know and like it's so satisfying to own something i don't know i don't know i can just hear a lot of pissed off film guys going what do you mean he's never seen ace ventura what who is this ass the balance of these things people got to come to blank check and understand this is the flow this is the natural order you

41:56ever had anybody on this show older than me yes your father my father are you willing to say your age on mic 60 yeah my father my father has been only on patreon but he is 73 now he's 73 uh i believe uh clint mcelroy oh sure amy irving amy irving the great amy she was only on patreon though uh colin quinn i believe do you know i think colin quinn is older than you i would think i think so maybe a little colin quinn is six years older than you yeah there you go yeah you're

42:27rubbing in his face next time yeah so unfortunately you don't get you get to retain the crown as king of physical media let me tell you a few people who are older than me i'll surprise you yeah um we do there's one last uh disc reveal oh yeah the remainder of the bag you mentioned of course your your physical media episodes on the big picture which started out as just you and sean and then grew to include chris ryan and and tim hitmaker simons as well there was one person who has been desperately trying to make his way onto the physical media high council well i'll read this

43:02note he left mr let's please accept this meager offering of physical media sorry it's hard to read his handwriting it's really chicken scratch here representing some of my movies only to our reference quality it's less about hoping you watch and enjoy and more the honor of contributing my work to the definitive archive alex ross perry oh alex ross perry how lovely and what did he send he gave you three of his films which is her smell pavements and listen up philip yes i own listen up

43:40you own this same eureka edition yes wow i own that i'll take wow i mean this is this is like an epic l for arp that we went fucking nine for nine and arp gets up to bat and immediately you fucking imported one of his movies uh i haven't watched it i should watch it it's next i think you'd like it incredible johnson price performance yeah yeah price is incredible in it i don't know if you i'm another you know a theater legend uh in his own right who also did yellow face which uh i was gonna say it's important to our discussion today over the year dangerously

44:13david what's the matter i'm gonna share for you a horrifying tale a tale of woe and suffering whoa this is scary it's a tale of human error of failing on my part tell me we went to the wisconsin film festival sure visited our dear researcher jj burge i'm scared already participated in a screening we we dined out we had fried cheese curds we drank wisconsin beer what was the mistake

44:47tell me i forgot to pack my oh jesus ag1 you didn't bring your ag1 to wisconsin this is a fuck this is an ad read this is a personal endorsement from experience they got the travel packs because the thing i love about ag1 they give you different form factors they different give you different ways to handle it i forgot to pack any ag1 i was there for 72 hours it it took a week to undo a week to undo i'm not gonna get graphic about this but it just goes to show as i always say in these ad reads

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46:59been shown to support digestion immune function and alleviate occasional bloating go to drink ag1.com slash check to get an ag1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin d3 plus k2 for your free ag1 welcome kit i love to drop in that k2 with your first ag1 subscription order that's a 72 value yours free only watch supplies last go to drink ag1.com slash check david yes you look like a man who doesn't know that fast growing trees is america's largest and most

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48:12all-inclusive i'll take any kind of tree you got griffin i know you're you know a green thumb yeah and i think all my fingers i got 10 green fingers yeah i think you're gonna agree with me on this that you know you go to a garden center and you just find it so overwhelming and inconvenient you took the personal statement out of my mouth ben that is how i feel and then here's the other thing you try to hire some landscapers it's too expensive i'm so tired of spending every day of my life on the phone with landscapers listen with fast growing trees it's just so reassuring that you know you're

48:45going to order plants and they're guaranteed to be healthy and to thrive but let me guess when the trees arrive it takes a really long time for them to grow they have their alive and thrive guarantee it promises your plants arrive happy and healthy no green thumb required just quality quality plants you can count on plus get ongoing support from trained plant experts who can help you plan your landscape choose the right plants learn how to care for them every step of the way can you imagine if wally had a promo code for fast growing trees that movie would have been solved it never would have

49:16existed right now they have great deals on spring planting essentials up to half off on select plants and listeners of our show get 20 off their first purchase when using the code check at checkout that's an additional 20 off better plants have better growing at fastgrowingtrees.com using code check at checkout fastgrowingtrees.com code check now's the perfect time to plant let's grow together use check to save today offer is valid for a limited time terms and conditions may apply by the way uh there the big picture has come up a couple of times here they did a 1988 draft

50:03i was i'm in the middle of listening to it as we speak i was not invited and i said to them you know i'm going on uh blank check tomorrow right and maybe if the blank check guys adopt me uh you know we're we're all new yorkers we're new york yeah it's true i was like maybe maybe maybe i wind up jumping ship and let me tell you the uh the text i got from sean was pretty definitive if you even think you're fucking around for one fucking second uh i was having a fun time listening

50:34to that it's an interesting year 88 uh and i i really i respected chris chris's bind there chris ryan's binder of getting the number one pick where it's like you're on the big picture you know it's like you have to pick die hard that's sort of like the the and he he lost midnight run and i felt for him is midnight run well i sent them immediately upon conclusion i sent them a few movies they left off okay 1988 draft that i would have such as glad well uh thin blue line would be top of great definitive me uh and uh it was just like how is this not i mean would be a beautiful use of a wild

51:08card pick yeah did it get snubbed for best documentary yeah of course yeah it was he was right he wasn't doing what that branch appreciated you know like he was doing something new so he was they never liked so you'd have to take it in wild card i think did he eventually win for fog of war like i feel like they eventually gave errol morris an oscar and then he also did the fucking the stuff for the oscar he did those were fun yeah he won for fog of war though that's his only ever oscar nomination like they were you know they were always kind of like too snooty for him it's just one of the most incredible lasting cultural artifacts is from errol morris doing those uh that oscar intro one

51:45year where he interviewed people about their favorite movies we have the clip of donald trump looking into the otero interrotron is that what he calls interrotron yeah right and talking about why he loves citizen kane and misreading it confident right it's a movie about a guy who gets everything in a big house i think he literally says it's a movie about a guy who gets everything that reminds me i was at a uh i was at some uh party in los angeles and david zasloff i was with carrie and some of the other favorite gilded age of course carrie's in the hbo family

52:17of course yes the queen of the hbo family she's on gilded age and zasloff came up and he was so excited to see them and we came to realize after a while i was like oh the robber baron are his heroes of course i love how you're ramming that railroad right across america yeah i god my favorite thing in the gilded age is anytime uh morgan specter's character is just like i feel like i need to go you go kill 10 000 railroad guys just to just to get my rocks off you know just really gotta like go fight with jp morgan about something um i love the gilded age where gilded age is

52:53number one kind of show for me where uh i can google after and like actually and learn about the david just said this in our way back episode with with alex ross perry have you seen peter weir's the way back one of his least seen films his final film the film about uh escapees from the gulag who trekked across the gobi desert all the way to india i remember my mom watching it uh and saying this is really good how come i didn't see this fucking it's a it was completely ignored on release it's a fairly handsome like you know solid it's not his best movie but david was saying he loves

53:27anything any watch that can cause him to open up some wikipedia tabs and start digging you know afterwards i'm like so mongolia in the 50s what was going on you know like stuff um i want to hear your other uh 1988 snubs uh let me consult uh my thing i'm guessing akira wasn't picked i haven't finished the episode was not picked it's also i'm trying to think of like definitive 88 movies that probably are too niche sure they keep complaining about how bad the sequel slate is it was very bad and in fact amanda asked me specifically what my uh pick would have been it's really bad i suggested

54:01lady terminator which is not actually canon uh right that one's not canon you have halloween 4 hellraiser 2 nightmare 4 but i'm just immediately here no one it's not great even with thriller open no one picked child's play and no one picked dead ringers dead ringers was definitely on my list i think they mentioned it in their honorable mentions but not good enough another woman uh the woody allen uh movie another woman which you know that would have been a surprising pick it would have been but because i'd listened to the new york draft well we had to dance between the raindrops on that one

54:36didn't pick woody allen did nobody pick woody allen no one picked woody allen i want to make it woody allen's name was never said a little new york movie suspicious we are in front of a live audience we were in front of a live audience backstage there wasn't like a blood pact like we all agree no one's gonna utter his name it did not happen no no i think if we were not in front of a crowd i don't know though like who knows because the whole populist agenda of the drafts of like you're supposedly trying to win the audience's favor i certainly thought i see right the other thing i

55:07will say the other thing with woody allen in a new york movie draft is it's like okay well so do you figure manhattan is the pick there there's other definitive new york movies well you know almost all like like what's the new york right it's more the canon than the idea if he has one film that feels most representational of new york other than the one that's named after a borough and has a poster and has a great and has some great fucking photography manhattan but like what's the new york movie yeah well i would probably pick manhattan but uh certainly if somebody picks uh annie hall

55:40in comedy or henna and her sisters these are not these are not shocking no uh not wrong henna and her sisters the bear 1988 john jacques yeah the bear the bear the great the bear actor it's a great yes bart the bear plays the bear it is a it's a nature film uh shot really from the bear's perspective it's very good i have never seen he was a good director oh and that is a genre of movie that doesn't exist anymore the sort of gentle nature focus plot light you know it's not that gentle that's

56:14the good thing right we've got some peril yeah yeah there's a there's there's fucking in it there's uh psychedelic drugs there oh yeah yeah no the bears kind of but like the the animal drama doesn't exist anymore right right on a tapestry from like you know black stallion to the bear it used to just be like once or twice a year yeah we went to the jungle you're gonna love it and we're like we think we got this animal to act uh never cry wolf do you guys know that oh yeah i've never seen it i know

56:44it's a beautiful movie and there's no good uh physical media that's carol ballard right that's the kind of king of what we're talking about terrific yeah uh i had my neighbor totoro but then sean informs me maybe that's not quite the right release it's tough i you can call it an 88 movie but i to me that's one where it's like you can't go by the american date because that movie was never properly released in america it got a fucking trono release yeah right yeah hairspray hairspray is a great movie uh things change never seen never seen david mamet joe mantania and don amici a very

57:18good it's the poster where they're in the back of the limo right yeah yeah that's a very good movie and there's a good disc of that too i think it's a indicator has a nice disc of that and then delancey did that come amanda i fucking drafted the shit out of my comedy pick uh chicken and duck talk chicken and duck talk never heard of it looking it up okay looks like it's a a chinese film uh hong kong hong comedy yeah yeah michael hui very funny don't know it chicken and duck talk okay i'll

57:50check it out i was pretty astounded that uh fantasy didn't pick police story 2 he mentioned it as i considered it i'm like yeah you should have considered it and then picked it that's a good move mystic pizza did that get picked amanda chose crossing delancey over mystic pizza this is really fun how we're re-litigating and i will move off this right now but my last uh clint eastwood's bird i think one of his best movies is an 88 film that's an incredible film they did not draft that they did not a little quite the one i want to ask you about tracy because i feel like a couple times now

58:22big picture has done sort of a drive-by of apathy towards this movie and i like it quite a bit clean and sober the michael keaton film i like it quite a bit i think that's a very good film i think i mentioned it actually on their podcast on one of the physical media podcasts because i was talking about the the value of warner archive yes right which puts out sort of standard issue releases they're very clean there's no extras to speak of there's no giant boxes it's just here's the movie in a nice clean presentation and it might not have been kind of a big deal movie at the time

58:54but i really like clean and sober i think it's a very good movie and i as a person sober for a long long time i have to say clean and sober is one of the movies that gets it right get for psychology of that right i was on the michael keaton fan uh michael keaton's maybe my favorite living actor but um i was on the michael keaton mount rushmore yes it was kind of a bad episode like it was a fun episode with you guys talking about keaton but like the the four big keaton movies was actually fairly easy for you guys to arrive the problem is it's easier and more interesting to pick eight

59:27to ten keaton movies than it is four because the four are always going to be pretty chalk um but they they were just like it was not in the conversation for them and i went in there being like clearly this is one of his key texts well they get weird about some of that stuff and i can say in fact to bring it back to peter weir please it comes up with witness you know amanda and i really love witness i think it's a great movie we will spoil we'll be on the witness episode next john gets amanda's going to be on the witness episode absolutely fantastic we recorded it it's in the

59:58well there you go yeah sean gets a look on his face like his ass is sucking lemons and he says uh is it a great movie yeah and i go now look uh depends on where you know it's all relative right we could say uh seven samurai and uh uh bicycle thieves are great movies and these other movies but if you're going to live in a world where you're telling me that a few good men and pelican brief are great movies and goddamn right witness is a great yes yes i also this is also definitively a great

1:00:29movie i think that's it is analogous to uh kurosawa where you're like well like making samurai movies in the japanese film industry at that time was akin to doing like a programmer and he was elevating it to such a high level i'm not saying witness is the seven samurai of cop movies but i think there is a similar okay but what is the most thoughtful intelligent deliberate nuanced detailed lived-in version of

1:01:00this and it is what makes peter weir a blank check filmmaker arguably i would say not in this film where he had a little bit of a blank check in the australian film industry up until this point this starts to transition him especially with mel gibson being a guy who had crossed over but then once he makes witness work at that level and here's just what should be a cop action movie drama that is now nominated for best picture best director gets harrison ford is only acting nomination it's like every a-list actor in hollywood wants to work with this guy they want to bring their

1:01:32passion projects to him because he can lend integrity to them but that is the next chapter of his career that ends with the film we're talking about today well i think he showed uh a particular skill at a kind of stranger in a strange land story which seems to be uh a theme running through a lot of peter weir's work even something like dead poets society like which is ostensibly an inspirational teacher but you know robin williams is the stranger in a strange man there yeah i i i have card for

1:02:06sure yes i i have uh you know continued to say this kind of quickly because i lack the knowledge and the intelligence to make this point more thoroughly let alone the historical context but especially watching his early australian films it feels very informed by a man who has spent a lifetime trying to reckon with his relationship to the country he lives in do i belong here what is my ownership over this place does this place own me who has been disposed in my favor you know and it feels like his films are

1:02:40constantly cultures kind of butting up against each other interrogating each other and and people crossing those lines and feeling out of sorts in their world did i read correctly that this year of living dangerously is a recent rewatch for both of you he'd never seen it i saw this film several years ago um but i did rewatch it for this show and uh when did you watch it for the first time for the first time ever last night yeah i like to be fresh fantastic yeah that's great well what'd you think

1:03:13i liked it quite a lot it is it is an interesting film i have so greatly enjoyed uh you know the exercise of this show where we cover someone's full filmography at times even when it's a great career you start to get into a feeling of oh for like months i've just been on this one guy's wavelength and it's starting to get a little samey even if i can extricate the values of each individual film i'm in a bit of a loop here uh and other times it the the filmography is so disparate that you're just like i'm swinging all

1:03:49around here i don't have any grounding force i have just by and large felt the the cruising altitude of peter weir movies is so comforting to me there is this kind of like thoughtful patience to his films i i love movies that feel like they have some answers that they're not sharing with you both in terms of actually the text but also the craft that you can feel the intentionality and the thought and that's forced you to sort of lean in and try to interrogate what the person is doing

1:04:21and this movie does have just such an incredible vibe to it in in a very basic fundamental way i don't know how many films i've seen that more accurately capture the feeling of being in a foreign country just the basic feeling of i have landed in a place and i'm trying to acclimate to how this place works and so much of this movie is the interrogation of who are the people who landed here and act like they already own it who are the people here who are trying to claim ownership who are

1:04:57the people fighting to be seen within it and i i also love anytime it can be pulled off a movie about a fairly um how would i put this he's not a weak lead character but he's almost irrelevant to the movie in a certain he does not drive the action no it's a he's he's changed by the action he's changed by the action and the movie is okay i guess i'm leaving this now he's pretty shallow he's pretty shallow yeah and he gains obviously some depth right it goes along and he gains some understanding of the

1:05:32way things really work which is what i love about this movie i think yes okay we're early films which this thing we've discovered in doing this is that like he came out of a background of sketch comedy like performing and directing and then directing sketch comedy leads to directing theater and then directing film and his early works especially his short films feel way more kind of barbed and and pointed in their kind of satire of this kind of guy a sort of uh well-meaning liberal

1:06:03uh white man who uh wants to be involved in causes who wants to help and doesn't quite get it and this feels like this interesting i mean this movie is just the transition point of like everything in his career but he's basically removed any of the satirical edge from the character he is presenting it very earnestly but he is also presenting kind of how unimportant he is and even in the framework of it being like oh right he's not telling the story but i think it's also like

1:06:36about an australian becoming alienated from like where he like it's about australians becoming alienated from like the western world or like the way the western world works and the way the western world operates on the rest of the world right and he's going in there being like i'm like these british guys and he's america right like i'm i'm in this mix and then becoming alienated from which i think is so interesting especially that it's weir's last australian film before he joins hollywood and he does so well in hollywood and i don't ever feel like he like you know he never

1:07:10like made shit there right like he always did his own movies um but it's interesting that he sort of says farewell to australia by with that and the first four films are just so thoroughly about him interrogating his own sense of identity as an australian of his generation and how he sees the world from that experience well i mean the character of guy makes basically one ethical decision in the whole movie and it's the wrong one right totally uh fed by his ambition and without any

1:07:42sense of uh context it's like i'm here to do this job and i don't care who gets hurt as a result of me doing this job as long as it gets me what i'm what i'm after and yeah i think you can read that as personal on the part of weir uh especially given as you say he's about to go to hollywood he's about to leave australia he's about to become that i mean he's going to become quite a quite a player on the world cinema scene i don't know if he's making this film because you keep we can we have a dossier

1:08:13of research i'm going to open it up but like he'd been trying to make this for years this was a long-standing passion project of his so he's not making it in this sort of swan songy way um but uh it's interesting how it sort of uh worked out have you ever read the book the christopher coach book i have i think it's kosh i was about to say unit with that spelling you never know how right christopher coach's 1978 book which is based on his younger brother's life his younger brother was a reporter in indonesia during is this the dossier have you opened i've opened it yeah it's

1:08:44not physical you seem disappointed yeah i was a google doc i mean especially given the year of living dangerously you kind of want yes right a big manila folder right out of shadow puppets so uh his brother you know was in indonesia for the fall of the sakarno regime weir reads the book and buys reads in a single day and will inquires for the rights like immediately his quote is i could smell the now he what's this word sate satay i don't know what that is s-a-t-e yes interesting not sure

1:09:15i think it's just a different spelling of satay uh the tang of clove cigarettes the distant sound of the gamelan the exotic japanese atmosphere like he he you know his whole thing i feel like with weir is he has these like aesthetic reactions to stories or whatever it's like he'll read a script and be like yeah that's interesting but then once in a while he reads a script where he's like oh i can't stop thinking about the world like the how you know and that's always seems to be why he pursues a project he reads a thing he goes this is overwhelming i could never touch this and then

1:09:47he can't stop thinking like gallipoli is him walking on the beaches right in in turkey yeah and seeing this like hand from an australian medication bottle right yeah and being like oh my god and like then not being able to let go of like right our boys were here with their shit and then last wave was basically the same thing like literally finding an object in a space and then going like oh so who is the person who left this here david it scared grilled meat yeah right it's satay okay right so it was just spelled differently probably jj's fault yeah it's probably fired uh have you seen

1:10:17the last wave obviously we've seen gallipoli have you seen yes last way is pretty cool yeah and that was recently put on a disc wasn't it umbrella has had a disc out for quite a while i missed out on the deluxe edition i had criterion is now also re-releasing criterion i had the old criteria the dvd yeah right they they only have it on dvd they haven't announced i think a blu-ray or 4k yet it is a movie that they own outright yes like it is a movie that domestically is owned by criterion so i think it is coming soon hopefully so we're uh was trying to make the thorn birds which of course

1:10:49eventually got turned into a mini series i don't know if you know this uh and then uh he gets sort of diverted on to gallipoli but then uh the the investors withdraw from gallipoli so then he turns to your living dangerously then rupert murdoch himself funds gallipoli and so he gets put back to gallipoli so your living dangerously is backburnered he had visited asia in the 60s uh briefly i guess in his sort of he went to colombo which is the capital of sri lanka while he was traveling up through europe uh he was very intrigued by it uh bali had become a vacation

1:11:25spot for him so bali is obviously a different island in indonesia i've never been to indonesia i will admit now i have not either i have not of course has been many times no again ben yeah you're always i would love to someday yes uh my wife's been to indonesia but she lived in china for years so she's been everywhere in china for years yes do you not know that no uh do you not know that my wife is fluent in mandarin this is so surprising for someone i'm so close with griffin has known my wife since since they were teenagers i went to high school with david's wife so i like to contend correctly that i'm actually closer with her than he is because

1:12:00i've known her longer is that how you guys met nope no complete coincidence we became friends and he was like you want to hear something funny i'm going on a date tomorrow with someone you went to high school with oh wow oh so you guys your friendship actually predates your relationship with your wife correct very much here is the order very much i meet his wife i meet david they meet each other i know both of them better than they know each other so true three kids who cares but you don't know that she's fluent in mandarin or that she's lived in china that she

1:12:31lived in china uh is it working as a teacher living in hunan province okay um but uh because she lived in china she was like oh i'm in fucking china i'm gonna go everywhere yeah right and so she's been to indonesia she's been to thailand and cambodia japan was this right after college yeah right after okay so those are the years we fell out of touch well she was in freaking china it was hard to contact her i think um but she says it's very cool uh you know she's yeah anyway can i circle back to a thing i know we'll have covered this in gallipoli but i think it's important kind of restating rupert murdoch invested all this money into the idea of uh we we gotta start weaponizing what's coming

1:13:09out of the australian new wave not out of as much a sense of cultural pride national pride as i think there's money in them hills all these good filmmakers seem to be making interesting stuff at an industry that is still so small can we turbocharge that by throwing money into it and so that's how he ends up fully financing gallipoli and it was part of what was supposed to be a company that was going to be making this a larger project it is the only film they ever make but gallipoli gets all this fucking investment his budget jumps way up from what he had done before because of

1:13:40murdoch and the other thing is that there's this energy it's why gallipoli gets more of an american distribution deal up front with everyone post mad max being like how do we get mel gibson to hollywood how do we cross this bridge this guy is just clearly like a raw element of movie star if an australian filmmaker has mel gibson they've like opened a bunch of doors into our offices do we have a timeline for what is considered the australian new wave uh great question i think it's basically

1:14:14like the first uh film that is marked as like you know the australian new wave is like wake and fright or the the comedy stork and those are both 71 as we've been corrected yes wake and fright is directed by ted kocheff who is not in fact australia this is the whole thing walkabout is also marked as an early one but that's also not directed but it's like at least those are films where it's like they're filmed in australia and then the adventures of barry mckenzie which is 72 which is a bruce beresford movie which is like a silly comedy but that's that's starting to spark like independent australian

1:14:49cinema again right like yeah homegrown this is so early 70s is where you market cars that ate paris is 74 right and that's a really you know that's a real kickstarter and then that leads to mad max but this scene is kind of the beginning of the end because right after this you get into sort of like uh uh brian trenchard smith more kind of like just genre plays mad max sequels crocodile dundee like the thing has become commercialized correct and and most of the breakout directors have gone to

1:15:20right that makes sense because you know i grew up in a small town in oklahoma and i probably heard first heard of the australian new wave around the year that this comes out so this comes out in america in 83 right and by then there have been mad maxes i don't know if road warrior had like made it to america but it's probably around when i had seen road warrior in the theater definitely right for this and then like beyond thunderdome is 85 and that's that sort of thing where it's like well now this has gone hollywood and then dundee is 86 dundee is 86 yeah i mean after that it's over

1:15:53right and and like you're saying like all those guys so like beresford russell mulcahy like even the the the sort of lower level guys they've all gone to hollywood yeah and they go philip noyce right and they go make genre stuff mostly right and then you have peter weir and george miller is the kind of like esteemed you know whatever like hollywood big shot version yes i mean george miller's the the odd one because he figures out how to basically keep but he still makes like witches of eastwood like he's still it's the one that's the one that like broke him where then he's like if i'm doing this i'm doing it on my own terms even if i'm ultimately handing the product over to

1:16:27hollywood at the end of the day now did you see this film when you were you know in 83 like in theaters yeah yeah so you would have been what 17 18 years old yeah and what what drove you to see it or was it just seeing everything well at that time i saw everything uh i uh knew who peter weir was uh and you know mad max or i should say the road warrior had announced uh mel gibson as a movie star in the most profound way just a theater full of people going that guy's a fucking movie star and

1:17:02i'll follow him anywhere and i want to see what he's got and of course year of living dangerously was quite a calling card for him in that it's like oh he's not just he's not an action star he's not dolf lundgren up there he's smart he's uh he can he can play the male action star but he can also play the romantic lead he's smart he he can also play a guy who's a bit of a son of a bitch right he there there are a lot more arrows in his quiver we realized with year of living dangerously i was thinking

1:17:33watching this and not having seen it before this maybe feels like his most normal performance ever because obviously here he's fighting against the mad max thing right and trying to show his range he has but then i feel like when his hollywood persona as a movie star settles it's still using 10 of the mania you know it's the lethal weapon it's the caged animal thing and then he can also still be in rom-coms or dramas or whatever but he does have that odd kind of manic energy to him and this

1:18:06he is just so fucking steady you know he's not charming and schmoozing in the way he is in gallipoli where he's such an exciting kind of playing like an innocent sort of which it's like not something he really did much ever played someone this kind of like simple in a way not simple in like a backhanded way i never saw the river that it is he playing a kind of this kind of guy in that like i'm trying to think of a comparable no the river he's playing a midwestern farmer not completely convincingly but it's not an embarrassment either but yeah he never really

1:18:38did the kind of slightly bright-eyed you know it was just making me think of how different sort of hollywood sees development of movie stars now where like you have a foreign export movie that crosses over here everyone points and goes that guy's a fucking movie star and hollywood's like okay collectively how do we do this you know and there is this feeling of it's not like one studio signs him to a 10-year deal but everyone's like it is worth continuing to throw money at movies that

1:19:10have mel gibson in them so we can test them out and grow him incrementally like he needs to be in spring training right it helps if he's in a drama audiences need to meet him in different flavors we need to test what he's good at and bad at at a low enough budget level that this will ultimately help all of us versus your taylor kitsch you're on friday night lights and then they're like great you're the star of three 200 million dollar movies but nobody's actually have it nobody's actually saying that right they're all individually circling it but it did feel like there was a kind of i don't know you

1:19:45read about these things like a collective unconscious in the period between when the studio system kind of collapses and the star contracts where you know people are literally saying we're buying this guy we're sending him to charm school we're molding him in our image things uh dissipate but still there is a sense of like movie stars are rare if there is one potentially on the board it benefits all of us to just chip away at this guy part of it i'm sure is also selfishly like will mel gibson look fondly upon

1:20:16us 10 years from now because we financed one of his early films not to mention what mel himself wants right because he wants to be taken very seriously you know eventually he's going to wind up making hamlet he's going to wind up making braveheart he wants to be taken seriously in this way so of course he's not going to follow road warrior with uh i can't think of anything stupid enough well right oh you're trying to think of like what's the dumb thing what would be the dumb thing he could do what's interesting is that he follows road warrior and year of living dangerously

1:20:46with three prestigy pictures none of which i feel like were quite it like there's the donaldson bounty film right just like pretty good it's like pretty good everyone's he gets to be opposite anthony hopkins everyone's all dressed up and yelling and it's fine he does the river which i feel like didn't really make an impact but on paper made sense who directed the river mark rydell all right so like you know he'd done the rose that had gone oscar noms he'd done obviously on golden pond

1:21:16and then he does that thing mrs soffle with diane kee which i've never seen but it's a million armstrong's a good director but right like a bond that feels like he gets stuck in he's a little too earnest yeah and it feels like these are movies that the bigger guys had passed on right and it was like well let's gamble on the this australian guy who's so handsome like he'll make sense and playing him a little more romantic maybe and then he does thunderdome and then lethal weapon right and then and then it's like okay the races well it's off to the races but it is him doing action for a while

1:21:46it's like tequila sunrise era america like those and then but i think he grabs the prestige with like hamlet and i think what they dialed in with lethal weapon and with thunderdome in particular where he's older where he's like a more haunted max and everything is like what's the right level of crazy we want here maybe we cleaned him up too much you know with like your mrs soft tells and stuff like let's get a little bit of the energy back in there and then those two movies it's like we got it we know who he is we have a handle on him off to the races how old is he when he does uh year of

1:22:21living dangerously still good question uh young if that film is made around 81 82 he's let me do the math here 27 no he's older than that uh he was born in 56 yeah no you're right at 26 he's really young yeah yeah he's only 70 now yeah and it's obviously he's been famous my entire life i mean he is so pretty in this it is kind of astounding just the serenity of his face it's look it's the magic of aging it means if you're pacino or whatever that i can show someone like the godfather

1:22:54and they're like i didn't realize he used to look like this and you're like yeah take a look like there was a reason everyone was going insane about this apologies for the tangent but i i found recently i through doing some wikipedia rabbit holes do you know that al pacino is actually on the record as far as we are able to historically document these things as one of the 25 oldest fathers in human history oh wow okay well good for him good for no i didn't know that everyone was like oh he had a kid really old i'm like yeah doesn't that happen like a lot though and it was like no he's like

1:23:28he's up there here is a wikipedia entry list of oldest fathers on record and a couple of them are questionable like the top guy they're like that guy might have been adding two decades to his age and i'm like then throw him off this fucking list let me tell you the top 25 you don't know about they're not they're not they're not bragging about it on record there's one guy also tony randall is on this list tony randall he had a child at 77 yes he was married to one woman for like 40 or 50 years she passed away he married a 20 something they pumped out two kids really fast and he passed away

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1:26:43david yes oh god this is life throwing another thing at me oh no did you catch it no i got hit with it i got pelted pretty hard it's gonna leave a bruise how's that to-do list it's tough it's tough and life keeps throwing more things at me okay well is there maybe something that we could take off your plate have someone else help you out with perhaps a trusted tasker from task rabbit david i would

1:27:19love nothing more my ideal life is to do as little as possible as much as can be off my plate the happier i am i have children i have logistical responsibilities often of like i need to build a piece of furniture i need to whatever you know hearing about this for the first time but sure i'll buy into the premise the bit of this ad and uh i've used task rabbit multiple times for it is literally always like that is the best money i ever spent in my life you know what i mean where you're basically like it would have been six hours of me building this bookcase and instead like i did whatever the

1:27:55other task i had to do you know like sleeping could be sleeping eating a meal of food shopping for food or whatever but like while that got done and it's like it's always just so rewarding i had a tasker uh come and build a grill for me when i bought my grill well my ears are burning or should i say smoking and that was one of those things where i was not only was i like this will be this will take a long time i was like looking at all this you know masonry all these like bed where i was like i will mess this up like i just won't do this right hey david no need to speak in generalities to me

1:28:31what kind of bad boy we talk about here what model you buy it's a weber grill i'm not going to tell you the model okay we can talk about it off my look taskers have assembled over 3.4 million pieces of furniture completed 700 000 home repairs have handled 1.5 million moves and counting that's quite impressive obviously you know you guys probably know already but you can search on task driver for tasker based on cost skill set availability past client reviews you know exactly who's showing up you can have confidence that they know what they're doing so when life happens

1:29:01your to-do list grows get ahead of it now and get 15 off your first task at taskrabbit.com or on the taskrabbit app using promo code check taskers book up fast especially for same day tasks so book trusted home help today that's 15 off your first task using promo code check with the taskrabbit app or at taskrabbit.com so the screenplay is written by three people right uh so we're and david williamson are one team they

1:29:37already had written gallipoli together playwright playwright right playwright a great playwright i feel like of the you know um and then sorry it's coach or coach coach i think it's coach right coach wrote his own script and they kind of merged them but we're describes the relationship as bumpy but it was a little not exquisite corpse but like uh these things were happening siloed processes that were then mushed together as it usually is i think when you see multiple screenwriters on a thing

1:30:07somebody didn't meet somebody else i just think sometimes it's more uh iterative right where it's handed off from one person i guess that's more exquisite corpse whereas this it was more like a frankenstein's monster where they're like we got four bodies which parts do we want to pluck from each of them though the movie is not does not differ from the book in any interesting great way yeah a different narrator i suppose probably the biggest change it's it's not billy in the book it's not billy in the book yeah it's a it's a it's another journalist okay in the book okay but that that feels very

1:30:42telling right whether that was weird decision or that we are responded to someone else suggesting that yeah it does feel like kind of no it's a big that's the most important framework the movie provides yeah yeah for how to read it in my opinion so uh coach says you know uh and there was initial publicity that left his name off he he says he sort of fought for the screenplay credit and uh that you know as as it always is with these sort of screenwriting disputes everyone's got their

1:31:14story um but we're uh he coach says i gave we're a screenplay he liked it he took it to cbs in america they didn't like the script and so you know there was a polish it turned into a rewrite and coach is like i know i'm not trying to be like the sensitive novelist here but like you know they they had fucked up my story and i fought to put stuff back in and so we're kind of rewrites the rewrite the rewrite was done by a guy called alan sharp who is uh you know wrote night moves like a

1:31:46hollywood guy uh we are rewrites the sharp script more in the direction of what uh coach is interested in cbs drops out uh williamson then comes on board uh coach's final estimates is that the script is 55 percent williamson weir 45 me sharp excised which was the stuff he really didn't like so you know he's moderately happy peter weir's take is i ate the novel i digested it and it was delicious i can only recall the taste but what i then spoke as a result of the experience was my

1:32:21way of telling the story he really has a way with words like a lot of guys sat down in front of a dwga panel or whatever and was like well i ate the script and it tasted i will say in in our months of reading and watching interviews with peter weir and as someone who loves to just drive a bit into the ground his commitment to metaphors in talking about his process he will pick one and he will really stick with it and ride it out to the end of the thought right yeah uh so great they

1:32:51altered the kwan character uh um weir says he's much less likable in the novel would you agree yeah um and i guess he wanted sort of to alter the balance of that so in what way is he not likable is he just like more of a cynical kind of yeah i think my my recollection of it is that he's uh kwan is more uh manipulative yeah because like this movie frames it is a film that positions

1:33:23kwan as the hero of the story it is almost kind of like a big trouble in little china in many ways of sort of like here's your like fake lead at the center but actually this movie is being driven by this person who would never be allowed to be the center of a story he also says he filled out jill's character more um in the book the character's pregnant he felt like that was a little too much like essentially why would she be sort of throwing herself into all of this why would hamilton be interested you know like in a further complication of that you know like so they removed that and you

1:33:58know it's just essentially like i assume this is correct and we were saying the book is more very much about the politics of the time and the movie is not really not that it's it's how am i trying like it's like this movie could be set in other moments of sort of critical change in a country i guess you don't need to know anything right indonesian history which is politics in order to uh enjoy the movie the year of living dangerous you need to you're you know that there is essentially

1:34:28a sort of coup that happens at the end of the film but like this is a crazy and fascinating moment in indonesian like history and it's only and like the point is that he's only grasping little bits of it anyway i guess i will say i'm the opposite of david in this regard where i more than anything value a movie that can be in conversation with real historical events but not require you to open a bunch of wikipedia tabs i don't look to those films as educational resources i don't walk out of them going clearly i know everything but i like the ability to sort of tell a story adjacent to in tandem with

1:35:05real hard history that just kind of works as a complete closed loop on its own dramatically well how well do you know uh vienna uh post world war ii how how well do you need to know it in order to enjoy the third man yes right i mean uh we're going to give you just enough context so you know what the fuck is going on right right and then we're going to do any movie yeah and i think we're is in particular very good at that almost all of his films are like in conversation with larger

1:35:37thornier issues that are too hard to compress down narratively but he is telling one very clear emotional story within that but of course you've also got the problem uh the the issue of uh peter weir and david williamson and cj kosh and mel gibson and sigourney weaver telling you a story set in exotic indonesia yes and i think that's a lot of this movie's tricky like uh standing at this present

1:36:08moment is just taking a little cursory view a letterbox i feel like there is a conversation for a movie that's a little bit lost and part of this is no proper physical media representation not streaming in the regular places cruddy streaming right like um yeah is is this movie a peak example of kind of hollywood exoticism even though it was not fully a hollywood movie or is this a movie that is actually kind of interrogating that which does not mean is not guilty of any of the attributes

1:36:40but i do think and i i especially think this in having watched the earlier australian films up until this point i do think that is very deliberately what he is doing i think he is very skillful at making movies where he is owning what his perspective is and the limitations of his perspective and working that in textually and narratively and commenting within that but i think everything we're saying about the recentering of the billy kwan character which we will get to momentarily is its

1:37:13own major conversation is what he's really trying to say here of like here's a story of a guy who lands in a foreign country that is under great turmoil uh and is primarily focused on advancing his own career with a sense of kind of back patty i want to be doing the right thing uh and falls in love and has a hot fucking two movie stars at the prime of physical specimenship i mean sigourney is

1:37:43love affair stunning the two of them look unbelievable in this but it's like they're just getting it on while people are really fucking suffering right and you know the movie's very conscious of right and and the actual story is this billy kwan character trying to push these kind of useful idiots into helping you know rather than hurting and but without um but billy never wants to tip his hand like he cares too much that he's paying too much attention to everybody that he's keeping his files

1:38:15right yeah yeah right i mean even the question of like why why do you have access to the president you know why do you have his ear that he's just sort of kept tabs on everything for any moment he feels like he can move the chess pieces around the board to help the cause but of course the tragedy of this movie is like billy kwan falls out a window and sigourney weaver and mel gibson get on