Eyes Wide Shut with David Ehrlich

[00:00:01] Blank Check with Griffin and David, Blank Check with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Check

[00:01:04] True, that's a perfect example of a, that's what you do on the 800th. Right, 100%. It grows for me every time she, because I always forget that she says titties like that and I'm always like, oh damn! It's the Pacino.

[00:01:16] I'm so tired of saying this line over and over again. I don't need to know what grows for you every time when you watch that scene. Hey, hey now. Victor Ziegler says,

[00:01:24] Bill, I don't think you realize how much trouble you got yourself into last night just by going over there. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just some ordinary people. If

[00:01:31] I told you the name of their podcast, no, I'm not going to tell you the names, but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well at night. Red scare. And finally, the truth is nothing happened to her after you left that party that hadn't

[00:01:42] happened to her before. She got her brains podcasted out, period. I've seen one or two things in my life, but never, never anything like this and never such podcasts. You know what? I may have to see the podcast. This movie has good lines.

[00:01:58] It does have good lines. They're just all delivered in a way where you're like, huh? Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't think to say that that way. And that's part of the magic, right? No, there was a, uh, uh, JJ, uh, Bercher, our beloved researcher in his dossier,

[00:02:12] uh, included a lot of the negative reviews from when this movie came out by top critics at top outlets. Like this is not a well-reviewed film. No, no, it was dismissed by almost everyone at

[00:02:23] the time. Um, we'll talk about it, but there was a, I want to just get this verbatim because there was a negative review that had, I think one of the best positive descriptors of what

[00:02:34] I think works about this movie. It's right at the bottom here. I'll find it right at the bottom of the DOS. Uh, are you talking about Gleiberman's review or Denby's? I can't find it. There was this fucking review line. That's like,

[00:02:48] it feels like a dream that's already been analyzed by your therapist. Yeah. You're not even watching a dream like state. I'll give it to you. It's from Gleiberman. Thank you. Our cohort in the New York film critics circle. And I shall say no more. Brother in arms.

[00:03:04] I've always been a Cuban fanatic, but eyes wide shut a movie that views sexuality is not just an experience, but a ritual has an oddly formal closed off quality, like a dream that has already

[00:03:13] been analyzed on a shrink's couch. Yeah. I mean, and yet I disagree so fundamentally with that because I found in returning this movie on virtually a daily basis or I disagree with Owen

[00:03:22] Gleiberman. I mean, no disrespect to every day, you know, for the last 23 years that this is a movie that I find so open and inviting. You know, it's such an invitation to project yourself onto

[00:03:33] Oh, which is by design and goes back even to the casting. We'll get into that. But absolutely. But I think to other David's point, we got two Davids on the show today. Not to front load the material

[00:03:45] here. I don't view that as a negative quality, but I think when David's talking about like how odd the delivery is in this film, the visual look of this film that's so unlike anything where

[00:03:55] you're like, what is the weirdness hanging over this movie? It is that thing where it like it doesn't quite feel like a dream. It feels like an analytical exploration of a dream. The whole movie exists in that liminal space between dreaming and reality. You know, by design,

[00:04:09] it's not supposed to feel too much like either at any point. And the performances are very keyed into that, whether or not, you know, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise knew at the time

[00:04:17] that's what they were going for. It feels like describing a dream to someone before we do anything. Yes. One. We have to fuck. We do have to. We should. How many years in? Eight. Almost eight.

[00:04:29] Let's just do it. They won't. The attention has been driving people up the wall. Ben and I are sitting on the other ends of the table to put on the Jocelyn Poofy. And you know what you guys need

[00:04:39] to do? Well, I'm the peeper. So I'm. Yeah, you just watch. Yeah, we got a closet. Only one awards body dared have the bravery to give Sidney Pollack a supporting actor nomination. The Hollywood Film Critics Association. No. Hmm. Only one. Pollack gets one total.

[00:04:59] Obviously, this film was not like lauded and did not get a ton of critical or whatever nominations. But. But that's the thing that should have happened. New York film critics. The Blockbuster Entertainment Awards nominated Sidney Pollack for favorite supporting actor,

[00:05:14] drama slash romance. He lost to Dennis Leary for the Thomas Crown Affair, an underrated performance. Sure. No argument that. Three nominees. Yeah. Leary, Pollack and Paul Newman for Message in a Bottle. Can't say I remember he was in that one. They did so many

[00:05:31] genres. But nonetheless, nonetheless, Pollack got a block. Do you think he got a phone call from his agent? Sidney, I know you're hard at work on The Interpreter or Random Hearts or whatever.

[00:05:42] I've been watching a lot of Inside the Actor's Studio recently. I brought this up on other episodes. It's been like a go to sleep YouTube rabbit hole of mine. Lipton, when he does his

[00:05:53] introductions because the first couple of years of the show, it's mostly people who are in the actor's studio. Right. And then the pedigree is high enough. The clout is big enough that he can

[00:06:01] get the biggest movie stars in the world. Right. So when he has someone like Cruise on, he lists like all their accolades and he will say Mission Impossible 2, for which he received a fifth Blockbuster Entertainment nominee. He does information that Cruise is learning for the

[00:06:16] first time. So many of these. He always fucking mentions their MTV Movie Awards, their Blockbusters and sometimes even their Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards. Like if someone like Cruise has like two

[00:06:25] nominations, three nominations, but he wants to pad it out to put him on the level of Paul Newman. What's the statue for the Nickelodeon Awards? It was a blimp. Hell yeah. It was a blimp. I believe

[00:06:34] the Blockbuster was sort of like a big clear, yeah, sort of like Perspex, you know, video tape, wasn't it? Oh yes, yes, yes, you're right. I should get one. I want one. Nickelodeon was the blimp and it was a

[00:06:47] kaleidoscope. That was the thing when people went and accepted it, they'd always hold up to their eye and go, whoa. And I'd be like, what the fuck is inside there? And the answer is it was just a

[00:06:55] kaleidoscope built into a blimp, like a fiberglass blimp. Feels like something you could like buy on eBay for a hundred bucks. We heard a studio that desperately needs to be decorated, but what a space.

[00:07:05] I mean, this is my first time here. I do want to say the first time I was on this podcast. Beyond Name Blank Check Studios. Yeah. First time I was on this podcast, we recorded it in like a

[00:07:16] sock drawer. We recorded it in a space that maybe covered this table we are sitting around. A closet at the now defunct UCB offices. And now we are sitting in a building made out of marble.

[00:07:26] Not the whole building is made out of marble, but there are parts of it. I took an elevator. You sure did? Yeah. I'm sitting in a chair where Richard Lawson himself once sat. The seat is still

[00:07:36] warm. He hasn't sat in this chair yet. He's not done warm this year. You are our first in-studio guest. Right? Yeah. Because you're the first person I texted to say like, hey, you know,

[00:07:49] take the elevator to the floor. You know, yeah. So you're you're christening this seat guest wise. I'm breaking it in. All right. Yeah. We should put that new podcast. Yeah, we shall. It does.

[00:07:59] It does. And we got we got a couple of things. We got a movie shirt. Yeah. That's Chris White's. Chris White. Wilson the volleyball from Castaway. We got a Hello Fennel embroidery there. We got Ben Hosley. We got King Ralph on VHS.

[00:08:12] We have the envelope. The Griffin will make a joke about beta. We sure do. That's up there. We've got a little collection. Yeah. Yeah. Just one of my red boys. Remember the red boy? Yeah. And some Legos and the Wreck-It Ralph arcade. The what's his fix it, Felix?

[00:08:28] Nothing like describing something visually. We'll post pictures. People love it. I've been trying to one up the envelope it not in this podcast, but in real life and life. And the only way I think I

[00:08:40] could potentially do it is I when I learned that a friend of mine is having a child, I wrote the name of the child to our other friends on a text message thread. And I'm

[00:08:49] waiting until a few weeks from now. Oh, wow. To finally find out. I'm very confident. Wow. But we'll see. That's cool. We'll see. I mean, yeah, cool. I should mention this is a Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David.

[00:09:00] Podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on. David's like miming jazz. I'm like John Holt. I'm like doing karate. Yeah. Or Elvis. How quickly he did it. Yeah. Podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive

[00:09:14] success early on in their careers, like being arguably the most inclined, revered, studied, analyzed American director of all time and are given a series of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and

[00:09:28] sometimes they bounce after their premature death. People are befuddled by the movie. And then like 20 years later, basic consensus comes around to it being a masterpiece. Yeah. Well, I would say by and large, I feel like 10 years ago it was. Oh,

[00:09:44] there was like, you know what secretly is kind of the best? Yes. Yes. Right. And now I feel like it's almost widely accepted as like, oh, no, I sweat shut rules. Yeah. I don't think it

[00:09:53] was ever like quite bonafide film status, you know, where it was like this really cursed thing. I think it was sure. The fuddling was exactly the right word for it. But yeah, it's definitely

[00:10:03] quickly sort of after the first wave of critical, you know, machinations went through and people sort of got it out of their system and were able to reckon with what the movie actually is and not

[00:10:12] what it was sort of mythologically meant to be in their minds. I think its reputation has gone way up. And then yeah, now you see a topping list of the best films of the night. You know, it is

[00:10:23] the first and no disrespect to John Carpenter's vampires or Indiana Jones, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But of the various movies I have been on this podcast to talk about, this is the only one that is on my sight and sound list of the 10 greatest films ever.

[00:10:36] Crushing Tiger. You put it on your sight and sound? Not on the ticker. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, there are actually and I think there are like two other films that this podcast has covered that were on my top ten. Are you willing to say?

[00:10:46] Can we guess? No, what's the fun in that? Okay, one of them's Pinocchio. And the other one. The other one. To be clear. Yes. You had to call up in a fury, run to the doors of sight and sound, knock. I need to make

[00:10:57] a change. I bought a transatlantic flight just so I could go and knock on the door myself. Who thought that in arguably the greatest film of all time would be released on Disney plus one week after submitting your ballot? You couldn't have known.

[00:11:09] I should have waited. It was really, uh, we all should have seen it coming. The writing was on the wall. Yeah. I thought about putting this on my sight and sound ballot, but I did not.

[00:11:17] I expect that this is a movie that will make a imprint on this year's list. Like it feels like this is the first time the movie's reputation has crested enough to... Yeah, it was. I mean, certainly a few people, both filmmakers and critics had

[00:11:31] cited it 10 years ago, but I do think it's going to be a lot higher. That's interesting that they put that on there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. My experience with this movie is just that, uh, and we can

[00:11:39] get like the details of it for us all later, but I think that, you know, there are, I really have no time for the best versus favorites dichotomy. It's just not how art works to me. If something

[00:11:48] is your favorite is thereby, we're talking about a subjective art form here. It is, uh, therefore the best, but I do think there is a discrepancy between, uh, the best films that like the films

[00:11:57] that you have recognized as great and the ones that sort of become like focal points on the horizon for you over the course of your life that you can sort of measure where you are in time

[00:12:06] based on your distance from them and what they reveal about you. And you return to for unknown reasons, time after time after time. And this is definitely one of those for me. It's like this forgetting Sarah Marshall. Did you put forgetting Sarah Marshall on your test?

[00:12:20] I certainly thought about it, but I chickened out part of your wedding. Yeah, it was in the wedding. It didn't make the wedding. It didn't make the top 10. Can I reveal anything for about

[00:12:28] your list? Uh, I mean, I don't really care. You put Titanic on it, right? I sure did. Cool. One director put eyes wide shut on their 2012 ballot. Mia Hunson Love. Oh, and did any critics put it or critics? None of whom I know. But, um, just a little,

[00:12:44] just a flutter of interest, but I'm sure that I think it will have a lot more mention. We should say miniseries on the film, Stanley Kubrick called pods wide cast. We finally got into the

[00:12:53] titular movie and his final film, his final film due to death. Yes. Uh, greatest career killer, the ultimate cancellation. It really will set you, set you down. You know that it's really hard

[00:13:05] to get a project together after death. So canceled them. Why are we still talking about him then? I mean, well, also Orson Welles, you know, put out a movie after he died. So waiting on you.

[00:13:13] Well, Stanley did put a movie out after he died. He just couldn't get another one. That's true. Greenlit. That's true. Yeah. But we did, we did get AI, which is sort of a happy medium.

[00:13:23] I was thinking about this recently. If I told Spielberg that AI is maybe my favorite Spielberg movie, would he be offended in that kind of way of like, that's half Stanley's movie.

[00:13:32] I also don't think, I think he would be more offended by you calling it half Stanley's movie. I wouldn't say, I just wonder, he would say like, you know, I was doing that for Stan.

[00:13:40] I think he'd be happy, especially cause it was so right. We had a very similar reaction to this in the early nineties when he was so fucking fed up of Stanley Kubrick faxing him and faxing him

[00:13:50] and faxing him. He would text him, but you would just text him. He was like, you know what? I don't need this in my life. And he moved on from Stanley Kubrick. Our guest today is David Ehrlich,

[00:13:59] of course, from IndieWire fighting in the war room and our Crouching Tiger episodes. What were the, I'm sorry. We were just going to keep the crystal skull. The village, which is where it was.

[00:14:10] That was in the UCB. The village. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yeah. Howl. Moving Castle. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Yeah. And Vampires. John Carpenter's. So now you've got seven appearances. Gentlemen, seven. Plus a

[00:14:25] Patreon. Yeah. You were on Guardians of the Galaxy volume two. You were? Sure was. Yeah. Oh yeah. Good movie. Yeah. It was back in, wow. Back in Halsey Street. Spielberg's gonna be offended to

[00:14:36] hear that. You can now say where you used to live. Yeah. I lived on Halsey Street. Yeah. Oh shit. I mean, it's a long ass street. Yeah. No. All lovely memories. This is,

[00:14:48] this is, as I guess we've already sort of recounted talking about Sight and Sound. I think my favorite of the films that I've been on to cover. This is my favorite of his movies. I said

[00:14:57] that going into this miniseries. Barry Lyndon was the biggest outlier I hadn't seen. Seen Barry Lyndon for the first time in theaters. I was like, fuck, run for its money. Tough. Rewatching this

[00:15:06] last night, I was like, I just think this thing has a hold on me that, that is rare. I'm obsessed with this movie. Yeah. And I have been for a very long time and I've often also said it's either

[00:15:18] this or Barry. Yeah. We'll do our, we're going to do our list. We'll do our list and we'll forget Darkman. Great. What if, what if to correct the mistake? Put Darkman on here. Let's put Darkman

[00:15:27] in. Okay. It'll be sort of around number nine. Darkman's like, I have to go against 2001. Fuck you Darkman. Darkman is better than fear and desire. And he can feel good about that. I think Darkman can take fear and desire in Lolita and probably killer's kiss. Yeah. I put

[00:15:40] it above those three. I think I put him over Spartacus. I do too. I would. That's my taste. I would watch them fight. That would be fun. Absolutely. Watch them fight. And then Darkman

[00:15:49] could put on Spartacus's face and say, I'm Spartacus. And you kind of like, well, hard to argue with. Right. Yeah. And then the winner has to take on Arnold Vosloo. That'd be cool too.

[00:15:58] They should've done, uh, uh, Spartacus, the return of Durant. I just watched out the return of Durant. What if Universal started pumping out? Cause they obviously the, the universal home video department is the one that really is holding the torch for like the jarhead sequels, the Rob Zombie

[00:16:14] Munsters movie, the recently announced RIPD2. Oh yeah. The 47 Ronin 2, like every forgotten movie they went full Disney plus on the eyes wide shut extended universe. Well, I was going to say Spartacus. It would be funny if they today announced like Spartacus to ring a fire. I mean,

[00:16:31] there was, there was a very successful Spartacus TV show. I'm not talking about that. I'm saying this is the proper direct to video sequel to Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus recast all roles. I'm just saying if Disney plus dropped tomorrow, just a title card that said nightingale,

[00:16:43] I would fucking lose my pants, lose my pants, lose my mind, shit my pants, vomit. I would definitely lose my pants. No, but I mean, I like the brazenness of an eyes wide shut sequel, eyes wide shut to like, you know, the masked guy in red or whatever.

[00:16:59] They should have put the fucking Fidelio party people in space jam and new legacy. That's a real and they already had the reds from the censored cut. They have those. They should have put the PS2. He's like, he's like running through the algorithm. He's like, what's this place?

[00:17:16] And everyone's fucking. And he's like, I gotta get out of here. Like fake censorship, like Jimmy Kimmel style. But funny, but like, you know, just like fake silhouettes in front of completely anodyne thing. Yes. Like LeBron's going through that. Like who's singing backwards

[00:17:31] here? This is weird. I was watching this on iTunes and it was Stanley Kubrick intended. It was the R rated CGI. Oh, it had the body. Because for the last 15 years or so, the unrated cut is pretty much what exists in circulation. So then I was like, look,

[00:17:48] it's on Netflix. Is there any chance Netflix has the nastier cut? And they did. They do. The Netflix Netflix has the unrated. It's wild that Apple doesn't. Yeah, it is wild that Apple doesn't. I'm shocked by that. I'm sure until until Leon Vitali died

[00:18:05] earlier this year. I mean, you could have gotten a very detailed answer as to why that is. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'm actually now wondering if I've ever seen it's really just that there's just

[00:18:14] kind of like robed figures standing in front of the action. Right. A lot of the time. First time they introduce it. Oh, and there's some naked ladies. That's the one. That's the one

[00:18:23] where I think I had not seen this version before. Famously, this movie when it was Kubrick died. Delivered final cut. We'll get into all of it. Yeah. Yeah. Contractually, he had to deliver

[00:18:35] the movie in R and they submitted to the NPA his cut and they were like, there's too much onscreen sex acts. Here are the things you need to cover up. So rather than cutting it, they just put a

[00:18:43] digitally placed mostly robed figures. The naked ladies are the ones where you're like, that looks fake. That looks weird. The robed figures are kind of seamless, but you are like compositionally. That's weird. I don't think he would have framed that. No, he probably would not have appreciated

[00:18:58] any of that. Yeah. Although some people have said like, well, we can talk about it. There's some speculation that he was planning for because there were these digital renders of the bodies. Right. That he knew that was something that might happen.

[00:19:09] A digital render of the body in no time. Yeah. Kubrick's got those lines. Controlled C. I don't know. That's actually means something else. You saw this film in theaters. July 16th, 1999. You know, I knew that about you. I tend to leave with it. It was my

[00:19:26] dating profile back in the time. Your bar mitzvah present. Oh, sure. I mean, it was the theme of your party, right? It was. I was actually, it was several years before this movie came out, but I knew.

[00:19:36] I knew that Kubrick had been thinking about making it for almost 50 years. Yeah. So I figured it was going to. And you've been thinking about becoming a man for almost 15 years. Yeah, I still am. But the, you know, we're talking about the movies

[00:19:47] that sort of orient you in time. And this is something I think about when I listen to this podcast a lot because Griffin has this sort of like eidetic memory of, you know, not just the

[00:19:55] box offices, but where he saw things and whatnot. And my memory is spotty, but it can be. It's not a competition. Well, not about the box office, but where I saw things. Yeah. I'm good at that. But it's like, I don't remember.

[00:20:05] I'm not good at the box. I don't remember like when I became X and Y part of myself when these things happened in my life. But I remember that when Eyes Wide

[00:20:14] Shut came out, it was important enough to me. I was at a certain point in my interest in film that I took the risk to go to my parents and be like, listen, this is opening the Majestic on Friday.

[00:20:26] That's the place where the movie Nazi works. He'll boot my ass out. He's done it before. This is too important to me. No, dead. And I was like, I know this is gonna be

[00:20:36] uncomfortable for everybody, but you guys have to take me to see this. And sure enough, they did. I sat between them. The Majestic. Crazy that you sat between them. You know what? I just thought that I would further ensconce myself away from the movie

[00:20:46] Nazi's flashlight and also wanted to hold each of their hands. No, it's not raining. You're allowed with a parent. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I just but he would look for people for teens who didn't seem to have chaperones. And he would be like interrogated.

[00:21:03] I mean, he called the movie Nazi for reasons what's said on his regal name tag. And he yeah. And so I did it and we had all sorts of fun conversations the way home. It was worth

[00:21:12] it. But did they like the movie? I think they were to go back to the familiar word we've established befuddled. Yeah, I'm sure it was as well. I have some very embarrassing flashbulb

[00:21:27] memories of like what I was thinking in certain scenes. Sure. I think it was the first time since puberty that I had seen a woman pee. Yeah, it didn't manifest in any sort of fetish or anything.

[00:21:39] I just remember being struck by that in the because it's not and we'll talk about this. It's not a particularly raunchy movie. No, it's just one of the things erotic that kind of doomed this film upon release. But it was it was certainly something I didn't regret was

[00:21:53] forcing my parents to take me to see this. And we all had a grand old time. I assume you did not see this in theaters. I did not. I remember like 11. I was 10. You know, even with movies that I

[00:22:05] knew no go, my parents aren't going to take me to this or I'm not specifically interested in seeing this. You know, my parents went out for a movie night and came back. I was like, tell me every

[00:22:13] give me the report. I want I want the report. I want to be able to talk about this. Yeah, right. And I just remember them being like, it's like a mess. It's embarrassing. It was just the truth.

[00:22:25] Right. They were just kind of like doesn't work at all, which I remember them having a very similar take on a I. But the difference was I had seen that movie before them and was like, you're wrong.

[00:22:36] It was the first time I was able to sort of push back on something like that. But so I just most of the adults in my life were that sort of befuddled and dismissive and like, well, it's a

[00:22:46] shame. It's a shame. That's his last movie. Sure. What a mess. Made a mistake casting Tom Cruise. Didn't see it until probably about seven years ago. OK, I got to see it for the first time in

[00:22:57] a theater. Oh, cool. With with the the unrated cut, the non CGI body. It's become a perennial here in New York. Well, because they showed a Christmas. Yeah, yeah. It was seven. Maybe

[00:23:07] even a little bit more than that. And I've watched it a couple of times since then. But it was one of those things I feel like when I saw the tide was starting to turn on it. But it was like, oh,

[00:23:16] some people stand up for this. I don't know how I'll feel about this. And I saw it in the first like 30, 40 minutes. I was like, OK, I get it. It's interesting, but it's obviously not at the

[00:23:25] level of the best Kubrick movies. And by the end of it, I was like, this thing fucking rules. It's his best film. Everyone who dislikes this was dumb. Ben, did you see it in theaters? No. Had

[00:23:34] you seen it before? I had seen it before, but I saw it so like late in life. I kind of like wrote it off because of the reputation. I wrote it off for so long. And not only that, when I met

[00:23:48] someone who liked it, I'd be like eyes wide shut. Weird take. Yeah, I was like, I haven't fucking seen it. Shut up, Griffin. But some girl I was dating convinced me to watch. Oh, yeah. And I

[00:23:59] was like, wait, isn't this movie freaky? Wait, this movie is full of tang ass freaks. What the fuck? But I love it. You want to watch that crazy movie with me? That's what you were like. Yeah.

[00:24:10] The one with all the Shostakovich? That's wild. I didn't see this film in theaters. Roast Me Now because I lived in the United Kingdom. I'm sorry. Britain and Northern Ireland. What? And it was rated. They're united? They sure are for who knows how much longer. And it was

[00:24:27] rated 18. So I couldn't go even with an adult chaperone. Sure. You had to be 18. It was a no choice. And I do remember my parents seeing it and having, I think, a fairly. So my mom was very down

[00:24:39] on Cruise and Kidman generally. Sure. My dad may have been more neutral, but my mom was just sort of like those are not serious actors. Those are movie stars. She loved like Jerry Maguire. But

[00:24:48] she's just like, get out of here. Big thing with my parents, too. I think Jerry Maguire was the only thing they liked a man. And and I mean, the most specific takeaway I remember from them was

[00:24:56] just like he made a mistake casting them. Right. They're out of their league. They can't handle this. They're like, it's a problem for minute one because of that. Have you guys talked about how

[00:25:03] Kubrick basically did a reverse Sims in the trajectory of his life, moving from New York to London? I know you weren't born in London, but moving from New York to London and then

[00:25:11] literally never leaving and also being terrified to get on. I mean, he did not come. I think the last time he was in the United States was at the premiere of 2001. Yeah. The man didn't like planes.

[00:25:21] It is crazy for what a notorious, you know, a control freak obsessive about every detail of his film was like, you guys go shoot second unit establishing shots in New York City without me.

[00:25:32] I cannot be bothered to get on a plane. I wonder how much into the weeds to get. But there's two things that are interesting to me about that. One is that one of the few things that he was still

[00:25:42] tinkering with that we know for sure at the time of his death was some establishing shots. Yeah. Second unit shots, which ones you want to use of like Ziegler's house and whatnot.

[00:25:50] And the other was that Leon Vitale, who became the man we talked about Barry Lyndon, I'm sure, you know, plays the red cloak here. His first big job was to go to America and look for kids

[00:26:03] to play Danny Torrance for The Shining. So like, yeah, it's interesting the way that he thinks about New York remembers New York. We'll talk about that in the vision of New York in this

[00:26:12] movie. But it's so predicated on him in the way that the city lives on his memory, but not in the present tense. Yeah, I just want to say I had like friends. I think I had a friend who saw it

[00:26:21] when it came out on video because it was like, well, doesn't that movie have like an orgy in it? And I remember him being like, I, you know, we're talking about like 14 year old. It was

[00:26:31] boring. I couldn't really. And so I never went to it as a teen because I was like, I heard it's not even like sexy. I would have those friends growing up because my mother was so overprotective about

[00:26:42] what I'd watch. And there'd always be the kid at school whose parents let them watch anything. And there'd be the kid who liked the coolest. Yeah, I was about to say that kid was me, but I

[00:26:51] was not the coolest. But sometimes there'd be the kid who got to see a serious minded art house, you know, or tour film just because they loved R-rated movies. Right. And everyone else was

[00:27:03] just like, how are the boobs? And I'd be like, is it well made? Right. And Eyes Wide Shut felt like one of those movies where even the kids who could get away with seeing R-rated movies,

[00:27:11] I would see everyone deflaunt it. It's like a married couple arguing. Right. But just be like, I don't know, the boobs are kind of sad. Yeah. I felt weird. And so I didn't see this movie until

[00:27:21] college. I rented it and I watched it on my eight inch square CRT computer that I had by my bed. As Stanley intended. As Stanley intended. And I was like, it really did kind of feel like

[00:27:35] a secret dream movie. Like that's it was it was even though it's maybe not the best way to watch that movie. That it was very special to me as just like I just watched this like secret movie about

[00:27:45] like a secret world. They are so some of my best first time movie watching experiences were my like, yeah, like tiny eight inch by eight inch TV VCR combo I had in my bedroom and watching certain

[00:28:00] movies late at night when I should have been sleeping. I saw Schindler's List for the first time when I was working at a wood shop at camp over the summer on like a 13 inch TV with the VHR

[00:28:08] built in. Yeah. The VCR built in. Yeah. And over the course of like three days as like younger kids, I was like 12 were making wooden cars in the background and I was not paying attention.

[00:28:19] They were like using buzz saws and stuff. I watched The Godfather on a porch. Yes, of course. We know that iconic moment in American history. Right. We all learned about that. Any serious

[00:28:27] film was watching the porch. No, but that feeling of like I'm I'm like five inches away from the screen because it's too small. I can't see it otherwise. And with me also, it was like

[00:28:38] the volume has to be low enough that my parents, if they get up to get a glass of water, won't hear that I'm awake. I had headphones like this that I'm wearing right now. I would do headphones.

[00:28:46] To the front of the TV. Yeah. Isn't that a weird thing to think about? Yeah, it's all like I watch so much stuff on that tiny TV that I bought at Argos. Shout out Argos. Nobody knows. Argos, fuck yourself. Yeah, Argos, fuck yourself.

[00:29:00] That was a great little thing. I wonder what happened to it. I think I gave it to my roommate. Argo won best picture. It did. Yeah. That little thing is a great little thing. Let me give you some context on why it's shot. Please.

[00:29:13] After Full Metal Jacket, one thing that Kubrick wants to make is this Holocaust novel, Wartime Lies, right? It's going to be called Aryan Papers. That's one of the sort of lost projects. Full Metal Jacket comes out of him searching for the right Holocaust material.

[00:29:25] It was a thing he was stewing on for 20 years how to make his Holocaust movie. Bumped him out, right? Stanley Kubrick stewing on something for 20 years? That doesn't sound like him. I know. But like supposedly the research for that movie was a depressing affair. Unsurprising.

[00:29:37] I don't really know much about that book. Like I don't know what the hook of Wartime Lies is. Do either of you? No. Obviously Schindler's List kind of killed it. This town's not big enough for two Holocaust pictures.

[00:29:49] It's about Polish Jews who get Aryan Papers and elude arrest. So they're trying to survive, I guess, their passing. But so often he was not picking obvious material to adapt. He'd respond to one specific thing that

[00:30:04] to other people was inscrutable. And then it's like he goes through 20 different writers trying to see if anyone can crystallize the thing that jumped out to him. The other thing obviously is AI, which he continues to tinker away at. He continues

[00:30:17] to throw it to screenwriters and he keeps saying like Pinocchio, Pinocchio. And they're all like everyone is like I don't want to do Pinocchio. Only Zemeckis can get that right. And he even I mean. That's when he hooks up with Spielberg.

[00:30:31] He's a short story writer. He was like I want to take your story and combine it with Pinocchio. And he's like, don't fucking do Pinocchio. Right. Come on. I wasn't going for if I'm Brian Aldiss,

[00:30:40] I am probably pissed off where I'm like just because he's a little boy doesn't mean he's Pinocchio. We talked a lot about the history of different people trying to or successfully making the auteur obsession with Pinocchio. There were points in the process where he was like,

[00:30:53] maybe I should just fucking do Pinocchio instead. Like he did toy with the idea of just doing straight Pinocchio at different points. Yes. I think especially when the tech felt prohibitive. I'll never understand it. I mean, and I am.

[00:31:05] I remember like celebrating the day that PTA's Pinocchio fell apart. It was announced it wasn't going to happen. I was just like, thank God. Go on and make, you know, the master. Yeah, I do. I would like to just see for experiment's sake what would happen with

[00:31:20] him making a studio movie at that budget level one time. I want to do it one time. I would love for that to happen as long as it's not a Pinocchio story. Pinocchio is put him in the box. We don't need right.

[00:31:32] Sand him down. Yes. I wish he made do with him. But obviously the things with AI are he's knows that he's going to film for two years, so we can't cast a real child actor because the kid will grow and age too much.

[00:31:46] Yeah. So he wants to build a robot. He's going to Spielberg being like, can you build a robot child? And Spielberg's like, probably not. And he's like, you've cracked it. And he's like, he has to look like a potato.

[00:31:56] Right. And then you see Jurassic Park and he's once again like, well, wait a second, CGI. And it's like, you know, several months before Bicentennial Man came out and his dream was finally the Bicentennial Man actually killed him. That's in the books here.

[00:32:11] Bicentennial Man, murder mode. I mean, his eyes go red. This movie, knowing it's his final statement, I kept on thinking about things that Stanley didn't live to see. Oh, sure. Right. In like a good way. 9-11. He missed out on that one.

[00:32:24] Thank God. You know, there's the thing that people say with like certain actors who are not well cast in period pieces where it's like, that's a face that's seen in iPhone. You can't put him in. This is the shorthand that people use today.

[00:32:35] I'm like so grateful that Kubrick never saw an iPhone. Never saw an iPhone. Never saw an iPhone. And he never saw the film Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher, which would have helped him understand the iPhone. He never knew you could have a thousand songs in your pocket.

[00:32:46] He did see Steve Jobs. He did. Well, because he gave notes on that. He asked Vitaly to give me a screen. For a movie that's coming out in 16 years? Yeah, sure. Why not? Just do it. It is unclear when Kubrick first read Trom Novel aka Dream Story,

[00:33:04] the Arthur Schnitzer novel. You know, Kirk Douglas claims he gave it to him during one of their like shared therapy sessions when they were so mad at each other making Paths of Glory or Spartacus. There's other people. Some people thought maybe Ruth Sabaka,

[00:33:18] who is Kubrick's second wife, who is Austrian, and the novel is Austrian. Maybe she gave it to him. Has anyone read Dream Story? I have not. Have you? Yes. Oh, fuck. I picked it in book club once. It's like, it's a slender tome, like 110 pages.

[00:33:32] And it is very similar to Eyes Wide Shut. To the point that when people are like, Stanley was trying to tell us about Jeffrey Epstein, I'm like, read Dream Story. It's the same. Like, yeah, you know, not... Arthur Schnitzler was trying to tell us about Jeffrey Epstein.

[00:33:44] Yeah, exactly. Schnitzler was on the case 100 years ago. It's modernized. Of course it's modernized. And of course he is talking about, like, the weirdness of the upper crust of society. But so is Dream Story. But like, the plot of the movie is very, very much the novel.

[00:34:01] It's also how much... It's modernized technologically and culturally in some ways, but it's also very pointedly set at the end. No one in Dream Story wears Uggs. Right. I mean, still shocks in my system to this day that one character... It's fucking crazy. And he wears them inside.

[00:34:14] He's wearing Uggs and he's drinking a beer out of a high glass ball. It is so... Highball glass. Sorry. How obsessive Kubrick was about every detail. You know that he was, like, torturing himself about the Uggs and he made a conscious choice. Yeah.

[00:34:27] He was like, the Uggs day. They just look comfortable. What if we found out that Stanley Kubrick developed Uggs? They were like, Uggs came out of his obsessive pursuit. It's like how we have nylon because of the space program or whatever. It's like, he accidentally invented Uggs.

[00:34:39] I don't know what to tell you. He was trying to find the right shoe to find this character and accidentally... But, you know, it is a turn of the century novel, a fin de sicla... Yes. A novel and a fin de sicla film. Have you read Dream Story?

[00:34:51] I haven't, but they both are set at the sort of the precipice of a new age. It's this thing. At the lip of a chasm that's sort of stretching out below the characters. It feels like fundamentally kind of right that Kubrick didn't live to see the 21st century

[00:35:05] and that this is his final object, which is like really at that precipice. But he never got to own a sidekick. He never did. He would have loved the end gauge. He would have fucking loved. He would have been a big believer. He would have been so...

[00:35:17] He would have... I really... I always have said that. So into the Minions. Yes. He would have fucking flipped for the Minions. He would have been doing Minions memes. The Minions are brilliant. He's like a phone with a beer cup fan. The thing is, he absolutely would have...

[00:35:28] Right. ...always wanted to make a movie about Minions. He would have been typing Yogi Berra quotes and MS Paint over random Minions images and acting like they had any correlation. Fuck! Posting them on Twitter. Posting them to his Facebook groups.

[00:35:42] You know how there's just so many legends of Kubrick, like, calling out... Yeah. ...Rubber Brooks and being like, modern romance. But, you know, it's just funny to think about him doing that for, like, whatever, Transformers 2. This is what I'm saying, though. Like, I'm like, if...

[00:35:53] Everything in culture becomes dumb in a way that is inescapable. Right. It's because he left us. Right. I mean, culture got dumb because he wasn't watching over it. I mean, you hear about him just having, like, eight-hour phone calls and faxes and letters and all this shit.

[00:36:09] You're like, I don't... I'm glad that Kubrick never texted anyone. He didn't live to have David Zaslav tell him that his... The film he's been working on for 23 years is going direct to HBO Max. Right. Or being pulled directly from HBO.

[00:36:26] I think he would have minded that a lot less. Yeah. In 1971, he mentions Tromneau as a project he might work on along with Napoleon. So that's how long it took him, right? To actually make it. To your point about the book being very similar to the movie,

[00:36:41] it is fascinating for how long this movie was in the works in his mind. It was this thing he would go back to. He went through so many different writers. It felt like at different times he was trying to use it more

[00:36:53] as just a starting point for something different. Sure. And then ultimately got back to a much closer adaptation. It's like you said. I mean, it's worth noting that the book is not, at least according to its title treatment, it's not adapted from Schnitzler. It's inspired by. Right.

[00:37:06] And as you were saying, I mean, he pulls so many different pieces from not just like Schnitzler's entire body of work. Yeah. But like so many other things that he had recorded and jotted down and kept and took little bits and pieces from over the years

[00:37:19] until it becomes this collage of ideas that he'd filtered through the filter of the story. But it's also, I think that had always made me think that it was just loosely inspired by as a starting point. Sims is leaning over into my face space and glaring his eyes.

[00:37:34] I haven't read the book, but I read the Wikipedia page for the book where they're breaking down the differences between the book and the movie. And I was surprised by how much they were not superficial, but like surface level elements. Little things.

[00:37:44] And then there's things that he adds, certainly. Sure. But the motions of the story are pretty one to one, right? Like fucking, you know, the piano player, you know, the whole thing with the patient daughter trying to kiss him, you know, professing her love for him.

[00:38:00] All the, you know, the story beats are like prostitute, you know, all that stuff. Tom Cruise, this is from Tom Cruise, famed actor. Thomas Cruise. He's in the film. Says that Kubrick had told him that Christian Kubrick

[00:38:13] had not wanted him to do it because they had just done Lolita. Oh, sure. And she said, please don't, not now. We're so young. Let's not go through this right now. Now that's Cruise relating a quote from Christian, but it is funny for her just thinking,

[00:38:26] an orgy movie? No, come on, man. Like, can we just do something else? And it said, you know, around the same time, this was going to be the hardest film for him to make. And it's funny that I'm sure he believed that

[00:38:36] until, you know, the day he died, when he finally finished making it. That, you know, even compared to a Full Metal Jacket or 2001 or a Bacow adaptation, like this was for him the hardest movie he had to make. But you've already mentioned it, but that famous story

[00:38:50] of he like reached out to Albert Brooks after seeing Modern Romance and said like... It was about jealousy. Right, and he was like, how do you do this? This is this thing I've been trying to bottle. This dynamic, this exploration of sexual tension, relationships between men and women.

[00:39:04] I can't figure out how to do this. And all the stories you hear about the development process for this movie over decades were him waffling back and forth between like, is this a comedy or a tragedy? Or is it somewhere in between? Right.

[00:39:14] And he often would defer to, like at different times, he wanted to make a Woody Allen version of this movie. Bill Murray, Steve Martin. Adam Sandler. Steve Martin's a big one. But Woody Allen, right, that was the earliest, option, right?

[00:39:29] Who said that he was never contacted by him. He only heard about it later. Correct. Kubrick had wanted... Never told Allen himself. Steve Martin, I believe he like met with, had talks with. They, and they had conversations on, basically there were how funny should this be.

[00:39:42] And this was before, you know, Kubrick had decided that he wanted to make the movie as non-Jewish as possible. Right. Obviously. Right. But Steve Martin, he was off of the jerk. Like he had only made the jerk. Wait, let me go through this. No, it's fine, it's fine.

[00:39:56] I'm sorry. He asked Anthony Burgess to read the novella at one point. He asked Dianne Johnson, who co-wrote The Shining with him, to read it. He basically would show it to like every writer he met being like, you have a take, you have a take. Terry Southern.

[00:40:08] Right, exactly. He goes to her who's like, I just got a full metal jacket. It's taken me 12 years to recover from this. I don't wanna do another thing. Right, Neil Simon. Neil Simon. Steve Martin, he loved the jerk. So he talked to Steve Martin about it.

[00:40:22] Terry Southern, he told Terry Southern he wanted to do a sex comedy with a wild and somber streak running through it. And then he goes to Full Metal Jacket. He reaches out to John Le Carré, one of the great novelists alive at that point.

[00:40:35] He's not alive anymore, rip. And Le Carré said like, I don't know how to figure this to update. I don't know how to modernize this, right? Like I don't know how to, because he was very much like,

[00:40:45] it should be contemporary, not like set in 19th century Vienna or whatever. But the phrase Eyes Wide Shut, it may have been inspired from Tinker Tailor's Soldier's Bind. Which is a fun little bit of factoid. Can I just step back to Steve Martin for one second here?

[00:41:00] The thing I find fascinating is by the time he makes this movie in the mid 90s… Steve Martin would be great for it. Yeah. Yeah, great hair, Steve Martin. For him to call that in 79 when his persona is just wild and crazy guy doofus.

[00:41:12] It's big like casting Bill Murray in Lost in Translation Energy. No, it would have been cool. I mean, God knows what the movie looks like. I think Tom Cruise is going to love this movie. It's an entirely different film. It's an entirely different film.

[00:41:21] It's a very different movie. But yeah, we're talking like… Post Father the Bride. He makes perfect sense. You see the version of this movie. Yeah, for sure. And a moment earlier you're like, why would you cast him? What are you talking about?

[00:41:32] I just love this idea that John le Carré's note was like, why don't we set it in like a medieval walled city? And Kubrick was like, quick. But then finally he finds Frederick Raphael. He meets him at a dinner party hosted by Stanley Donan. That sounds fun.

[00:41:50] Cool. He wrote Darling. He wrote… He's like a veteran screenwriter. He has an Oscar, I think. He gave a bunch of graphs of the screenplay to him. And he puts it, this is Raphael's quote, he does not want and never wanted a collaborator.

[00:42:05] He wants a skilled mechanic who can crank out the dross. He will turn into gold. Yeah. So I guess he just, like you say, he just wants someone who's like, well, here are the bricks of it. Like, here's how this can work. He wants like a contractor. Yeah.

[00:42:16] Yeah. He really didn't want it to be Jewish, as you say. Yeah, we'll get into that. We'll dig into it. What? I'm sorry, what? Well, the dream story is about a Jewish person. The novella is about a Jewish person. Got it. Kubrick wanted it to be upper-crust wasps.

[00:42:30] Vaguely Jewish. It's not like the character is Jewish, but it's not, to my understanding. He's not like, oh, my bagels and schmear! But like this scene… This orgy's got no white fish salad! I'm leaving! I say this as someone who just read the Wikipedia page. Sure.

[00:42:44] But the scene in the movie where the bunch of like frat boys yell at him and throw a bunch of gay homophobic slurs at him. Yeah. In the book, there's a recurring thing with people yelling anti-Semitic shit at him on the street.

[00:42:55] Because it's, you know, it's a fraught time for the Jews. Right. So it is like, it's part of the texture of the thing that there's this sense of otherness from him being Jewish. Got it. Okay. But here, this movie replaces it with a sense of emasculation.

[00:43:06] Yeah, he's looking for like the most sort of like waspy aspirational, every man kind of qualities. Tom Cruise is playing a wasp who's handsome and who is a high-powered doctor, but he's still like, he's not in that like further upper crust. And he's sort of glimpsing.

[00:43:22] He's like brushing against. They are sort of the platonic ideal of like the James Gray family in Armageddon time, which is a movie that will be out by the time this podcast drops. But like very aspirational in their social status.

[00:43:33] Of course, but he is like the, like he has achieved success, but he still... He gets to go to that party, but he doesn't know anyone there. He's what every Jewish mother wants their son to be. Right. But he's not Jewish.

[00:43:42] But in this, but he goes from like his status is... That'd be good or bad for the Jews. And it's funny because Kubrick was saying that he wanted like a Harrison Ford type goy in the role of Harrison Ford, not a goy. But he wanted that type.

[00:43:55] But like, you know, the character Bill Harford goes from high status at the babysitter to low status at the party to super high status, you know, for the like portion of his night. And then the lowest that it's an interesting journey goes on.

[00:44:08] But he is not sort of he inside and outside. He exists in this liminal space like the whole film does. And I think while there's an element of like passing that being a white Jew can bring to the

[00:44:18] table, I think he wanted it to be less sort of barriers to entry for people. He wanted to be more holistic idea of this character, you know, being able to go into all these spaces without being othered. Harrison Ford's a quarter Jewish, right? Not too shabby. Okay.

[00:44:33] I was just trying to remember that. Is he a quarter or a half? I mean, a quarter Adam Sandler, it's a quarter. He has the thing where he has that quote where he's like, as a man, I've always felt Irish and as an actor, I've always felt Jewish.

[00:44:44] Where you're like, all right, Harris. What does that mean? I don't know. Ding! You're just flipping a coin. Okay. Comedy point. Eyes Wide Shut. Warner Brothers co-chairman Terry Sammel says, could you cast me a movie star, please? Right. There's the weird quote that's sort of…

[00:44:59] He says, you haven't done it since Nicholson and the Shining. It's like, well, he's made one fucking movie. Yeah. And also that movie, you know, does have Matthew Modine in it. It wasn't like a movie movie star. What is his name? No, but you also… But yeah.

[00:45:08] Matthew Modine is the biggest movie star I can think of just in terms of height. Very tall. Very tall. Yeah. Skinny. Right. But even at this point, 1996, Hollywood is moving more and more in this direction where it's like,

[00:45:20] if you're going to do something weird, get one of the 10 bankable names. Yes. A hundred percent. Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, and Bruce Willis to me more both supposedly considered… We're talking about… Makes sense. Hot couples of the 90s.

[00:45:34] He seemed very into the idea of casting a real couple. Would have been like Chris Pratt and Anna Faris. Well, not today. Not today. That would be interesting though if they were in it. Why were they the first couple to come to mind? Who would it be today?

[00:45:47] Olivia Wilde and Hanson. Tom Holland and Zendaya. Wow. Wow. Well, we sort of already got this with that Netflix movie. Malcolm and Marie. But they're not together. I know. I think your doctorate in Washington is really good in Death of a Salesman. I mean, sorry, in The Panelist.

[00:45:59] Yeah. In what? Not in Malcolm and Marie. Someone was just telling me he's in a play on Broadway right now. I was like, he's in Amsterdam. That's definitely not what you're talking about.

[00:46:07] Yeah, he's in The Piano Lesson on Broadway and someone was telling me that he's the standout. And I was like, that I gotta see. I'm interested in seeing him be the standout. Has anything in hindsight made more sense than Tom Cruise dropping everything,

[00:46:19] including his 20 million dollar payday to, or salary at the time, to be in this movie? It's incredible. It's so clear to me now, having seen the last 20 years of his life, that he would drop anything to be like, I need to do this.

[00:46:32] He would never do it now, which is so sad. Well, I'll say this. It's hard to even imagine the person that would hold that sway over him. Right. Right? I think it needs to be someone who he grew up revering, who felt unattainable to him,

[00:46:48] especially for a guy who was already checking off so many major directors, but they were directors who were closer to being contemporaries. There is the Cruise thing for so long, it was like, I'm fighting to be one of the great movie stars of all time.

[00:47:04] Fighting to be serious, but also it felt like the thing he was in competition with was, I want to be talked about someday in the same tones as Paul Newman, as whoever. You know, these great movie stars worked with great directors, developed great projects, whatever.

[00:47:17] It is fascinating that right after this movie, I mean, Magnolia obviously comes out the same year as this. Sure does. Is the thing he jumps to. But his first movie after this properly is Mission Impossible 2. Right. And then it's like Vanilla Sky is there, Last Samurai, Collateral,

[00:47:37] like Minority Report, War of the Worlds. He goes much more into blockbuster. Yeah, but he's still working with major filmmakers until he jumps the couch. I'd argue phase two is he's doing big genre, epics, things that have more blockbuster appeal, but he's doing them with A-list auteur directors.

[00:47:57] And Vanilla Sky is very much like, can we do all that dream shit again? That was fun, but just with none of the effort. It's just fascinating that Vanilla Sky is like the one outlier in that run, because it does feel like post Eyes Wide Shut,

[00:48:07] he's like, I need to make movies that have a commercial hook. I can't do total art. The couch jumping thing was not long after that. It was 2005, if memory serves, you know, around there for Mission Impossible 3. And so that period that he had to really fuck around

[00:48:20] and the flexibility was not long lived. It's that phase of 2000 to 2006. But I don't know if he was, like, I can't imagine him ever being happier than he was during like a day on set acting opposite Sidney Pollack in a Stanley Kubrick movie.

[00:48:34] No, but it's also it is fundamentally the most fascinating thing about this movie, where it's like, here's this actor who is obsessed with being able to accomplish anything, right? Is just the most like, tell me what to do, sir. I can fucking put my mind to it.

[00:48:49] I can get it done. Like prostrated himself in front of Kubrick. He was like, I'm your tool, use me. Right. And it's like he's finally found the challenge. He cannot beat, which is what Kubrick is trying to harness for this movie.

[00:49:01] This guy who is so desperately trying to be in control of the fucking situation and Kubrick's process is so intangible that he's like, if you told me what to do, I could execute it. And if I don't know what we're searching for

[00:49:16] and I don't even know what the movie is. It's like, that's what I want. Right. I want you to do that. I mean, he has the ultimate Hollywood extrovert playing this implosive character who is blowing up on the inside. And yeah, I mean, that's exactly the phenomenon

[00:49:28] that he's hoping to sort of bottle up. And, you know, the irony to what you're saying is that he ends up giving, you know, one of his greatest performances as a result of that. He does end up sort of mastering the challenge, just not on his terms.

[00:49:39] Yeah. Yeah. It is that thing too where, you know, you hear all these stories that Cruise would be like, what do you want this character to be? And he was like, just you. I think you're right for the part. And Cruise was like, I'm nothing like this guy.

[00:49:50] I'm nothing like this guy. Right. Sure. Don't say that. And I need to create a character. And he's like, no, I just think your face is right for this. You have the right voice. You should just like act like you in these scenes.

[00:49:58] It's the exact thing you can say to Tom Cruise that will drive him insane. Yeah. That having been said, he by all accounts loved working on this movie. He did. He's very positive. Very easy, right? It was incredibly easy. Well, I'll read all this stuff.

[00:50:10] But he starts calling Sidney Pollack a friend of his. Because he had just made The Firm. A fucking six-star masterpiece. Better than Eyes Wide Shut. But so it's better than every film I've ever made. Pollack said they had...

[00:50:21] The Firm is one of those movies where you put it on and you're like, yeah, I know this is like not good. But like, this is the best movie I've ever seen. I have Tom Cruise on speakerphone right now to yell at you for saying that.

[00:50:32] It's a great movie. Pollack and Kubrick had a phone friendship over years. And he said that Pollack, he would sort of use as a sounding board to keep tabs on what was going on in Hollywood. Because he was so removed from all of that.

[00:50:48] So anytime he worked with actors, worked with different people, he'd ask them about him. And from the time he was working on The Firm, he was very fascinated by Cruise. Right. He would ask thousands of questions. What's he like? What does he eat? What does he do?

[00:50:59] What does he dress like? So I... And so Pollack's like, I really feel like I have convinced him to use Cruise because Tom's a wonderful guy. And then he would go to Cruise and say like, Kubrick's always calling me about you. You should work with him. Right.

[00:51:12] You know, and then Cruise... Cruise just always talks about it in every interview in this like very hallowed way where he's like, you know, we were honored to work with him. We did whatever we wanted. We do whatever we could to work with him.

[00:51:23] We knew it'd be difficult, but I would have kicked myself for not doing it. And Kipman has all that thing where she's like, it was a good time. Like, it's so interesting because obviously they get divorced not long after, but they get divorced like two years later.

[00:51:35] And people wanted the narrative to be this movie broke their relationship. He like ripped their marriage open in front of them or whatever. I mean, that's what I thought. Yeah, but like Kipman has very much been like, we were all on set.

[00:51:47] We all lived together with the kids. Like, it was obviously took a long time, but we like, it was a nice... I can find... I'm going to find the quote. It's like a kind of normalcy for them. Actors at that level and the schedules

[00:51:57] and the traveling demanded upon them to be in the same place, to have their kid go to school regularly. This is much more demanding of Cruise than Kipman. Not that it's not demanding of her, but he is all over the place. In every frame. Yeah.

[00:52:09] And by all accounts, by the way, like I'm going clear, the book covers this a lot. But like right after this movie is when Scientology is like, Cruise has kind of drifted away. We have to get him back in. Yeah.

[00:52:20] That seems to be the main culprit that broke up their marriage was for the first whatever years of them being together, he had sort of stepped away and Scientology really like lured him back in. Scientology would never interfere in the lives of the people who are...

[00:52:33] No, of course not. Scientology is just saying this as a friend. Like, do you really think she's right for you? We loved... This is the Kipman quote. We loved working with him. We shot it for two years. We had two kids.

[00:52:41] We lived in a trailer on the lot. We made spaghetti because Stanley liked to eat with us. We were working with the greatest filmmaker, learning our lines and enjoying our lives. We would say, when's it going to end? You know, we thought it would be three months

[00:52:52] and it turned into a year and a half. But you go, as long as I surrender to what this is, I'm going to have a great time. Stanley wasn't torturous. He was maybe arduous, but you know, like they liked him or whatever. They like enjoyed him.

[00:53:04] And this is the best part. We are happily married through all of it. We'd go go-kart racing after scenes. We'd rent out a place and go renting at three in the morning. I don't know what else to say. Maybe I don't have the ability to go back,

[00:53:15] look back and dissect it or I'm not willing to. So she's sort of like, look, maybe my marriage was crumbling, but I don't think of it that way. Right. Like, and I believe her, you know. I think it feels like that was maybe the

[00:53:25] healthiest time in their relationship. It is that thing. I mean, we talked about in the Full Metal Jacket episode Gabrus made this point where it's like, if I got hired to be on a Stanley Kubrick movie for a year, I'd be thrilled that I had a year's employment.

[00:53:38] And I think it is that difference of like, are you, you know, some actors are control freaks who really want to have a complete understanding of the situation and the structure of what they're doing and get it done. But it's what she says of like,

[00:53:50] if you surrender yourself to the thing, it's like you now just have this ecosystem that you're existing in for like a year and a half. Yeah. That sounds kind of peaceful. If you're not Tom Cruise going like, what do you fucking need from me?

[00:54:02] You know, if you're like, my job is to show up every day and we try stuff and it works or it doesn't. If you're not frustrated by that process, it does sound pleasant. I mean, I would bet that their marriage, not that I'm super invested in this,

[00:54:14] but I would bet that their marriage was sort of in a place similar to the place that the Hartford marriage is in at the end of the movie, where they've sort of gone through this trial together and survived and they've been like forever.

[00:54:23] And like, I don't know about forever, but let's go fuck. But the thing that is most frustrating about filmmaking is fighting against time. You know, I think above all else. That's the one thing they had, right. Right. It's that feeling of, you know,

[00:54:38] are we, do we need to move on before we've gotten the thing? Coming up against the constraints and everyone just says like, the main thing he fought for was time and that he really, he tried to alleviate pressure from his actors as much as possible.

[00:54:54] As much as people want to believe in this sort of like Taskmaster Kubrick thing, that it was sort of like, this is all exploratory. I'll know it when I see it. There's no pressure on this. If you're not feeling it today,

[00:55:06] if you're not in the pocket today, it's fine. We'll just shoot it again tomorrow. I don't feel the need to get this scene done today. But the irony is that they were ultimately under sort of the ultimate clock. They didn't know it at the time,

[00:55:18] but they had a drop dead date quite literally. Yes. And you know, there's sort of this thing that I was wrestling with recently is like, was the notion of making Eyes Wide Shut, keeping him alive or, you know, like was finishing it,

[00:55:31] you know, what he needed to sort of kill him. There's so much stuff from like his family of like, oh, at the end of filming, he seemed like he was dying. Like it was the first running and started to age. Yeah.

[00:55:45] Vanessa Shaw has a very cute quote about how there was one very long winded line that she couldn't get. And he was like, I'll give you a cue card. And she was like, I don't want to do that. You know, and he gave her a little,

[00:55:56] he said, she says, he gave me a sneaky smile. And then I forgot the line again. And in the middle of the take, he just held up the cue card and she used it. And he was like, if you need it, don't be embarrassed.

[00:56:06] So like, it's like one of those things where it's like, it's so far from the, you know, scary exacting Stanley Kubrick. Don't come to set tomorrow, but don't be embarrassed about it. Just the idea of this little like bearded gremlin

[00:56:16] in a raincoat being like, here's your cue card. You know, it's just crazy. Todd Field tells a story about when he was happy with a take, he'd walk out from behind the camera and like give them a handshake and just sort of say like, thank you so much.

[00:56:28] Like a real, you know? Yes, right. Yes, that's, yeah. He would, he would take you to the side, shake your hand and say congratulations. Like you'd finished a long journey together. All the anecdotes from this sound like he was really appreciative of actors

[00:56:39] and tried to use the clout he had to create a very safe space. Where they take as long as it means. They were insulated from any of those, right? Because there it is that feeling of just like,

[00:56:50] oh, it's the big, it's the big scene and I have a fucking head cold and we have to get it done today. And who knows if they'll let us reshoot. And if we reshoot six months from now, is it going to be the same? We missed it.

[00:57:00] And it's like, it sounds kind of incredible to be able to. A production like this feels like it was a, it was a healthy stop on the synecdoche scale. Of it starts to become its own universe, its own world. Right.

[00:57:16] I mean, and like the only thing I can think of that ended up shooting for a more continuous, longer continuous period of time was like the Dow project, which was not on the healthy end of that scale. So that is what ultimately eclipsed it.

[00:57:26] But you know, he didn't, wasn't always, as I'm sure you guys discussed in the shining episode, which hasn't come out yet when we're doing this is not, wasn't always creating such a safe space. No, for his actors, maybe we didn't always have the time.

[00:57:37] Yeah, we talked about it. But when you read about people talking about like shooting the orgy sequence here, which would one would assume might be the most fraught with potential for things to go awry or be uncomfortable. Apparently it was like the most pleasant time on set.

[00:57:49] And Kidman said, you know, he was describing to her, you know, I how he wanted to shoot this sort of fantasy sex sequence that's intercut her pieces throughout the movie. And she felt uncomfortable doing full frontal nudity. And he was like, anytime you're naked,

[00:58:05] I will give you full editing approval. You show the footage, any footage you don't want out there is killed. You tell me what's in it or not. And she said like, that was not a thing that anyone was offering at that point in time. Uh, right. No, right.

[00:58:17] That's in the nineties. It's like, shut up. Come on. It's in your contract. Do what I tell you. Right. Paul Verhoeven, like tricking Sharon Stone to take her underwear off because, Oh, you're reflecting the light. The light is bad.

[00:58:29] Um, the Todd Field thing that I really like is that he was like, I was so freaked out because it was Tom Cruise and Kubrick. And at a certain point he got better. And Kubrick was like, he got over it.

[00:58:40] Yeah. And he was like, and then he made tar. But the better story there is that he did a take. He nailed the take. He goes over, he shakes his hand. He was like, thank you so much. And he's like, yeah, sorry. It took a little while.

[00:58:51] And Kubrick was like, first couple of takes fucking stunk. They were bad. Yeah. Why were they so bad? But he was like, you freaked out. Yeah. You know, so we know that fucking Keitel was in this movie, obviously, and got fired.

[00:59:04] Keitel was not apparently super enthused about anything. Yeah. How things were going. Well, Kubrick was a genius. He did some things I objected to. I didn't like it. I thought they were disrespectful and I won't be disrespected by him or anyone else. I mean, like, all right, Harvey.

[00:59:19] Yeah. There are a million urban legends around what led to the firing. Well, because like there's this weird like thing like that he had like come. He came on Kidman's leg, but then everyone's like, well, no, he didn't. That's not a thing.

[00:59:32] For so long, that was the story was he insisted that he insisted on masturbating for real and the ejaculate hit her leg. And it's like in what scene? Like, what are you talking about? They filmed this movie for a year and a half.

[00:59:43] Certainly there are entire scenes that are not. Everyone's ejaculate was getting on everyone's legs. Right. But that was always the story. Like Keitel was such a method actor that he said he had to do this. That feels like it's bullshit.

[00:59:53] There's the thing that JJ put in the in the dossier that like, you know, he they need to build a new set. They want to keep Keitel on hold and they weren't going to pay him for the whole.

[01:00:04] Right. I think it's what's difficult about working on a Kubrick film is he's essentially saying, I want you blacked out for these dates into eternity. And Keitel wouldn't surrender. He wouldn't surrender his body. We spend our time.

[01:00:17] Right. And like, you know, Kidman and Cruise are in a position where they're willing to surrender because they're like two of the biggest movie stars in the world. They have so much fucking money. They don't they can take the break.

[01:00:27] They can remove themselves from the circuit for a couple of years. If you're Keitel and you're like, I could be doing fucking 12 movies this week. Why do you want me to stay in a goddamn room? This is holy smokey or Keitel. He was born.

[01:00:40] And also he's like, it's an orgy and you don't want my you know what the call 45. I snubbed those. Jennifer Jason Lee's the other one, right? Who is that was literally when they went to reshoot it. She was like, I'm sorry, I have a bone gun.

[01:00:52] I'm in existence right now. And so they read. So she was the woman who the daughter of the right. It's funny. Just giving her a bone gun and kept her. It's funny. She was like, you told me I was going to be wrapped out in three months.

[01:01:02] It's like three months. She's in one scene. And he was like, I'm sorry, it's gone from three months to six months. I need you to re up. So I'd love to see her, though, in this movie. She'd probably be amazing. Yeah, it's kind of she would. She would.

[01:01:14] It does. I really like this scene. Like, yeah, I really like what Marie Richardson is that? Yeah, I I think the scene would have played differently. I don't know if she could have done the watered eyes, you know, total vulnerability.

[01:01:30] I'm throwing myself at you sort of act in quite the same way. But also, I think it's to this movie's advantage that outside of Keitel, Keitel, as a cruising kid, man, most of the actors are not really bringing previous baggage to the table for sure.

[01:01:46] Even the actors who've had bigger careers after this. Roddy, Sergio Bisa. I don't know how to say his name. I do not understand. So Mission Impossible two. Yeah. Well, but also he gets Batman a coat or no, he gets a coat from Batman.

[01:01:57] Here he gives Cruz a coat. Yeah, he gets a coat from him. Well, I mean, a truly iconic performance is just about anyone. Oh, fucking good. It's in the story is Alan Cumming. You love to see him.

[01:02:08] I mean, I had been actively following the Orgy Masters acting career for several years before I was checking out. I loved him in little, little big league. Yes. And that. So, yeah, let's talk about the movie.

[01:02:20] So I just wish is about one crazy night in the life of Dr. Bill Harford. Ben, by the way, we're not exaggerating. This movie started filming in 1996 and wrap production in 1998. Yeah, it was. It was a it had the record for the longest continuous shoot.

[01:02:35] And it still does. Because it was certainly the record holder as long as I ever knew. Yeah. I mean, I think Dow would technically beat it, but that is sort of not a single. It feels like it doesn't.

[01:02:48] And I guess it's at this point, it's just what you're saying. It's like the man just won't work under the gun. He's just going to take as long as he needs on everything. Right. So that's how it just gets so, so expansive. Right. Yeah. Watch Eyes Wide Shut.

[01:03:02] And you're not like, I can see why this took two years. Like when you watch Apocalypse Now and then you hear like that was like a really brutal shoot. You're like, sure. Yeah, sure. What? And this movie ended up costing 60 million dollars. It sounds like maybe 65 million dollars.

[01:03:17] Most of that was Christmas lights. Sure. The rest was, you know, paying off the Illuminati. I understand it's 1999. So it's like you just have the rights to being the Illuminati. You can't just put us in movies. Oh, fine. Fuck. What do you need?

[01:03:30] Write a check to the Illuminati. I just remember at some Bank of America. At some early point in the podcast, Ben, when we were throwing out budget numbers, you were like, can you guys explain to me why movies are so fucking expensive?

[01:03:44] And we broke it down for you. That's like the thing that doesn't get accounted for very often is that you're essentially like starting a company. Right. The amount of employees you need in all positions.

[01:03:54] You've set a company in another way that's been helpful is like describing even as like you essentially have like the budget of a country. Right. Right. And you need. You're like founding a country. One of many similarities between Eyes Wide Shut and Blank Check.

[01:04:09] You need doctors like you need your it is sort of like building a country. So it's one of those things where you're like to essentially operate an independent sovereign nation for almost two years. Sixty five million dollars is surprisingly low to me. Yeah, it was expensive, though.

[01:04:26] Yes, no expensive. Yeah. And they had to build across days. No, I know what you're saying. Cheap movie per day. I mean, he I mean, he was very thrifty, not maybe as extremely as like a Clint Eastwood type,

[01:04:37] but he would have Liana Vitale, who played one of my favorite characters. I've mentioned him again, the orgy master. He had him play like eight other characters in the orgy just so they could save money on extras. Yeah. Like that's the kind of penny pinching.

[01:04:49] And also in the orgy, I feel like he especially he used his guys because he was like, this is the most complicated thing. It's I want my guys. I want my guys. Well, so he knew they fucked good. Yeah, he did. Um, he Stanley liked to orgy.

[01:05:03] The great anecdote is that, like, you know, Kubrick wasn't a guy who really wanted visitors on set, but Cruz snuck Paul Thomas Anderson on because they were meeting about Magnolia at that point, knowing that Magnolia was going to be what he did next. Right.

[01:05:15] And introduced Kubrick to PTA and was like, this is incredible. You have like five crew members here. Like, is your crew always this small? How do you keep it this small? And Kubrick's response was like, how many people do you have on set?

[01:05:29] And PTA is like, I felt like such a Hollywood asshole immediately. Right. But it's amazing to think about like 27 year old PTA. Right. Like, how do you only have five guys? And Kubrick is just like, what do you mean?

[01:05:42] But like when he gets to Phantom Thread, it feels like he sort of as his career went on, tried to find a way to minimize, you know, simplify in that way, even down to him being like there isn't a DP.

[01:05:53] It's just me and a couple camera guys and whoever picks it up. Like, you know, the Masters, one of those things where it's like they're all just on that boat for however many months.

[01:06:00] And Amy Adams was called to set and put in wardrobe even when she wasn't in the scene. It feels like PTA sort of learned some lessons from being on the set that took years to seep in.

[01:06:09] The DP on this movie, he'd never been the cinematographer on a movie before. I mean, he'd done lighting work for Kubrick before. Right. But I can imagine this being a movie. We had 20 Kubrick scatchers. Yeah, I shot Kubrick.

[01:06:16] Called him over to his place to talk about visual concepts and went like, so I don't know, do you want to shoot it? Yeah, I mean, and he went on to make, you know, Beer X. No, let's see. He's actually had interesting careers. He shot Marmaduke?

[01:06:30] No, he does the John Michael McDonagh movie. So he does like The Guard and Calvary. Calvary looks beautiful. We were talking about that the other day. And he did Bronson. He did a couple of record movies. Only God Forgives, he did. So that's funny. Yeah.

[01:06:46] Recently, he did that movie Dark Harvest that's coming out this year. Anyway, David Slade's new movie. But anyway, so this movie starts with David Slade. He's trying to get production ready on 30 Days of Night. No. It's a weird opening. Right. And then we cut to Bill Harf.

[01:07:00] Sun can't come up at all. It's Bill and Alice go into a party. But first we see Alice dressing. Is that the first shot of the movie? The first shot's for Tush. Nicole Kidman's Batox? That is. That is one of those...

[01:07:14] It's one of those flourishes that is controversially maybe added after the fact of Kubrick's death. The world's longest back, can I say that? No, I would not. She looks about as tall as anyone has ever looked on screen in this movie.

[01:07:25] It is disorienting when Cruise stands next to her. Because especially when she's undressed and you're not seeing any... She is a tall woman. She's like 5'11". But you look at the way she's built and she looks like an NBA player.

[01:07:38] Whether it was Kubrick's idea or not to open the shot with that movie, beyond just the instant sex appeal of it, I think it works so well because the first thing that we hear Bill say to his wife when the movie starts proper

[01:07:51] is she's saying, how do I look? And he's not looking at her. And he says, you look beautiful. It's already that sort of... He's nagging her hair. We've been sort of struck by the physical beauty. And he's not even paying attention.

[01:08:02] Then we meet this man who's taking it for granted. He is taking it for granted. I also think, look, it is important to mention just right off the bat, as we start digging into the plot of this, this movie per Kubrick's wishes had like very limited elusive marketing.

[01:08:17] The teaser was famously just sort of the moment of the two of them in the mirror together naked. They did a bad boundary thing. And then it was just like Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick, eyes wide shut. Pretty good show effect. Everything about this movie was like fucking mysterious.

[01:08:31] I remember like just as a kid would watch fucking entertainment tonight. They were breathlessly reporting on rumors about this film, which is... They dropped the trailer at Comic-Con, right? But it truly was like talked about as if it was a Marvel trailer to be scrutinized.

[01:08:45] And there was all this rumor mongering of like, they're going to have full penetrative sex on screen. Yeah, right. People are like, I hear it's the craziest shit that ever happened. It's going to be the craziest shit in the world.

[01:08:53] So even just opening with her fully naked feels like here we fucking go. But it's... And then people, I think, are flummoxed the more this movie goes into this weird, austere, sad world. Like, you know, vintage Hollywood and something we still do today.

[01:09:06] We see it to a degree with Blonde. You know, where you put... You won't believe how fucked up this thing is. And you get people excited for the movie, but it fits it in a very particular prism.

[01:09:14] And then the actual movie ends up contraventing, you know, what they were trying to make. You know, I don't have any great love for Blonde, quite the opposite. There was so much fascination with the two of them as a couple,

[01:09:25] and how weird and secretive and protective they were that this idea of like, oh, we're going to see something really intimate. But how... You know, it's not like Amsterdam where, I mean, you can't... It's like, how did anyone fuck up the marketing for this movie so bad?

[01:09:37] Because it's such a clear story to tell. How would you sell Eyes Wide Shut if not on The Mystique? I mean, you can't. It's about a guy who is kind of cucked. No, you know. You can't.

[01:09:47] It just it sort of was a don't worry, darling of its time where people were so fascinated by all the different stories about what was or wasn't happening on set. And especially because the director then died and couldn't put his foot in his mouth in the press.

[01:10:00] Not that he was ever going to do press for it. That like things like the Keitel ejaculating story, it just like became this box of like, what is in this movie?

[01:10:09] I just want to put a button on the side note that no one wanted in the first place, which is the reason that I pick up Amsterdam is because the reason they couldn't mark that movie is because the whole plot. Stay quiet. I don't care.

[01:10:19] And they didn't want to include that. And so they were just like, we're just not going to tell anyone what the movie's about. It's a mess. I haven't seen Amsterdam. Yeah, well, you don't need to. You're going to bleep it up. But I was texting.

[01:10:27] No, it'll come out by now. We just everyone in their grandma will know Amsterdam by heart by the time I saw it. I was texting with David and Marie and they were like, what is the movie even about? And I explained the plot to them in three sentences.

[01:10:39] And they went, are you kidding? That is what the movie is about. It's a real life situation where it's like they know what I could explain. We're talking eyes wide shut. I can't believe we went on Amsterdam tangent. I'm actively angry about it.

[01:10:51] Bill Harford and Alice go to a party. Damn. Let's talk about the Christmas party. This is the first major sequence of the movie, correct? Truly more Christmas lights than an NYU freshman. So many lights.

[01:11:02] Can we talk about the look of this thing, which I have seen people break down in technical. I can give you what they did, but obviously I am no master of lighting. What they did was they shot faster. Right.

[01:11:15] And then they would force develop it down, which is something you do usually like in a pinch. If you're like losing the light, I think. Correct. It's and it's usually seen as like, well, that's not going to look as good.

[01:11:27] The backlighting was too intense because of all the Christmas lights. And so they had to drop a few. Desperate fix. Yeah. That is seen as like a little bit of a cheater and unseemly thing. And they like lean into it.

[01:11:38] And then it's all this sort of very soft, diffuse lighting. The Christmas lights, china balls, worm bulbs. But but trying to avoid standard Hollywood lighting set up. You create this very already, even though we haven't gotten into the dream element of the

[01:11:55] story, you already you have this sort of like dreamy St. Elvis choir of a glow. Right. But one of the things like Christmas, it really, it really feels like the Jewish element of the movie to me is that it feels like a Jews idea of Christmas.

[01:12:08] It's all the aura of Christmas. And none of this symbology. Yes. It's like it's all just that the feeling of it. And that's why, you know, they have those lights that look almost like a menorah. You know, there's like a triangular Christmas ornament, like with lights. Oh, sure.

[01:12:23] You know, they have that and I spot it. I'm like, wait, they're not Jewish. Like, but then I realized like, oh, that's not a menorah. You know, things like that. Obviously, the Pollock character is Jewish. Yes.

[01:12:30] I mean, he is, you know, potentially like a collection of very vile Jewish stereotypes. But I think Sidney Pollock's able to weaponize it away from the fact that it was Keitel at first too. You know, I don't know.

[01:12:42] It gives me a level of solace where I'm like, well, so it wasn't intended. You know, a lot of that is just Pollock bringing his own aura to the table. But the thing I love so, I mean, this movie has so many great lines.

[01:12:52] Obviously, Stan is a Jew as well. Oh no, no. I mean, he was, he, I think, had his, you know, complicated relationship with his own Jewishness as any of us do. But the thing I love about that first scene is it sort of epitomizes how well coded the

[01:13:05] lines of dialogue in this movie are. They say something, they mean another, but they're not always insufferably on the nose about it or ever. And I love how, something I was just thinking about last night watching this movie for,

[01:13:17] I truly have no idea what number of times when Bill and Alice are dancing and she says, do you know anyone here? And he says, not a soul. And he's like holding his wife.

[01:13:27] And he's, you know, it's sort of the precursor to this idea of mystery in a marriage and these like the blind spots that you have between two people who spend their lives together. But I love how physically close they are when he's saying that.

[01:13:38] Yes, I love this whole thing so much. This opening sequence you're saying? Yeah. I mean, I love everything in Eyes Wide Shut. The Pollock stuff is all my favorite. I don't know why.

[01:13:49] It's just that weird veneer of like respectability and the way that quickly he's in the bathroom with a naked woman who has overdosed. Well, you're at this party, you're introduced to him with his wife. Thank you for coming. We're entertaining all these people. Enjoy.

[01:14:05] I have a marble staircase lined with lights. It's so fancy. Everyone here is some sort of fucking count or whatever. I think what I like about his performance is that we feel the same welcoming, welcome to the fold sort of warmth that Tom Cruise does.

[01:14:21] He's not even like gregarious. But there is something kind of real about him that's not real. And you know, but like, you know, like whatever. He doesn't feel like he's laying it on too thick.

[01:14:31] No, well, it's that thing too with like, you know, famously the reason he ends up playing the agent in Tootsie, which was his first acting role in 20 plus years at that point. He was no interest in being back on the camera. He's so good at Tootsie.

[01:14:44] Incredible on Tootsie. He's always, I mean, he's so fucking insanely good at Michael Clayton as well. Like anytime he shows up. We talked about this in the Death Becomes Her episode where it crystallized for me where

[01:14:54] I'm like, he's the exact actor I would like to age into being. And that wasn't even his main career. That was just something he would do as a goof. But I look at the Tootsie to Michael Clayton run of Sidney Pollack, sometimes character actor, working with great directors.

[01:15:10] And I'm like, that's the exact body of work I would like to have. I would like to age into him. I can't wait till my nose gets bigger. You want you want a little more hair on the chest than you first suspenders over the bare chest.

[01:15:22] The Tootsie thing, though, is important. My ideal male body, I think, is Sidney Pollack in this movie. I'm aspiring to what men what's preventing. I go to the YMCA and I bring a little photo and I just shove it, show it to the people at the desk

[01:15:34] and make me into that. Make me into this. No, I want I just want to be him. But the Tootsie thing was famously that Hoffman was like, I need you to play this because I need to be someone I'm intimidated by.

[01:15:45] I'm going to feel like I can act any actor off the screen because I'll be scared of you because you're the director. Right. It'll work. And similarly, it's very smart to cast Pollack in this because Pollack is a director who's

[01:15:56] worked with Cruise before and Cruise is still going to be a little a little deferential to him. And just like the audacity of bringing the doctor into the bathroom and saying, like, look, she had a bit of an accident with a speedball to a fucking unconscious hooker

[01:16:11] who's apparently been out for five minutes. This is what I want to unpack for him. And he's just zipping up his pants. And the way he talks about it, you almost are like, ah, poor Sidney Pollack. He's really this is a tough situation for him.

[01:16:23] He almost gets you on his side. Right. The time that elapses between Pollack and his wife welcoming them to the party. Right. And suddenly just guy in a suit come upstairs. We need you immediately. Very calmly door open. Here's one passed out.

[01:16:39] Pollack putting fucking suspenders over his bare chest, casually saying, you know, it's one of these things where we were fucking and I, uh, the speedball snowball, whatever the fuck the thing, the heroin and cocaine. What can you do about this?

[01:16:51] That thing where he's so nonchalant about it that he makes it feel like you're weird. If you act like this is weird, it is a thing I think this movie captures so well.

[01:17:02] But I think it is so good at not above all else, but one of its main strengths that I don't think most films are able to convey this very peculiar feeling of when you witness something or someone says something to you that in an instant fundamentally changes your

[01:17:20] perception of reality. There are those moments in your life where someone says something to you, the weird unspoken thing under the table that you never even sensed, where suddenly you have to re sort of engineer your entire sense of self, your past, everything you knew about this person

[01:17:34] yourself, or when you witness just a very bizarre act and you have that sort of disassociative moment, the speed at which Cruz just gets to work doing this part of you goes, well, here's this dude. He's this doctor for these upper crust people.

[01:17:49] Maybe he's constantly getting called in as like, you know, the Michael Clayton of physicians to clean up rich people's messes. But part of it is just everyone's acting like this is normal. But it's not right. Right.

[01:18:00] The fact that this is happening upstairs at the party where his wife is with all these people entertaining, you're just like, this isn't a house call happening at a Sunday at 3 a.m. It's like he's saying, I fucking dropped a lamp. Can you help me?

[01:18:09] I can't find the pieces. You know, why is this happening now? The nonchalance of it. Right. This is a movie about... When Cruz is like, give her another hour. He's like, oh, I shouldn't put her in a cab right now because she's just like, right.

[01:18:22] And he's just like, no, I would give her an hour. But he doesn't say it in a chiding way. You think of the Dennis O'Hare scene in Michael Clayton where he's like, you need to fix this right the fuck now. And talks like, so what do you recommend?

[01:18:33] What's the protocol? The difference between Bill Harford and Michael Clayton is that this is a movie about seduction. It's a movie about desire. And it's about in the scene what Ziegler recognizes the weakness in Bill Harford, which is like,

[01:18:45] this is a guy who's so horny for access into this kind of society. Right. He is so in awe of the power that I wield. Yeah. He is so at my mercy. Yes. That I can bring him into these secrets that he won't tell. It's a dominance display.

[01:18:58] Yeah. Yeah. In a way where he's just like, right, you get to see this and do me a favor, which I will appreciate. Yes. But you know, you can't do anything about this. But this is a guy who...

[01:19:09] You know, you can't be like, this is really fucked up situation, buddy. Like, what the fuck is this? But it's fascinating that the Cruise doesn't play a moment of that. He's inscrutable.

[01:19:18] It's really hard to read if he's going to that mode by default or because he's made a career out of doing this regularly. The one thing you sense is this is a guy who hates the idea of a closed door, right? Yes. Nothing will turn him on.

[01:19:30] Showing his doctor's card everywhere he goes. He needs to be able to win people over, to achieve enough, to succeed enough that people will open that door for him. And the ultimate sort of message of the Sidney Pollack character is like, you're so much better off not knowing.

[01:19:47] There are these questions that you think you want to know the answers to. And the reality is some of them, the answers are far more banal than you think. And some of them are so much more fucked up than you think.

[01:19:57] And you'll be disappointed or horrified by both. That's a very generous reading of that character. I also think that he probably takes some pleasure in putting a Bill Harvard in this place. Absolutely. But he recognizes like, you're not a guy who can exist in this world. Yeah.

[01:20:10] But it's also the whiplash. You talk about Cruise's performance in that scene and how sort of unflustered he is. I mean, it's the whiplash of him going from being so high status that he doesn't even

[01:20:18] remember the babysitter's name, even though his wife told it to him like eight seconds earlier. To going into a party where he is the low man, you know, he's sort of like in reverence to Ziegler.

[01:20:31] I mean, it's like that constant checking where he is in the scheme of things and orienting himself. Anytime Cruise is low status in a movie, it is solely so that eventually he can have

[01:20:40] his just desserts by proving everyone fucking wrong by being the one person who can fucking fix anything. And the fact that this movie just distorts reality around Cruise, who never loosens his grip. Right? His palms just get sweatier and sweatier, like clutching onto anything he can.

[01:20:57] But he just becomes more and more pathetic. And just sort of you just by the final scene, you just feel like Pollock where you're just like, dude, did you just fucking back away from the only other movie that fits that description

[01:21:10] for Cruise is Magnolia, which was filmed right after. Yes. Obviously, the other thing happening at the party is that Nicole Kidman, Alice is dancing with a Hungarian who's basically like, come on, let me take you away. Cruise has this flirtation with the two models. Yes.

[01:21:27] They each have their brief. Those both happen before he gets called into Pollock's office. Right? Well, it's like he's with the models when he gets called in and then she just keeps dancing with the Hungarian while he's dealing with this. I mean, she doesn't know what's happening.

[01:21:38] And he is clearly delighted at the thrill of being able to pass up this opportunity to have sex with these two young models because he's so happy and secure in his marriage. And yeah, do you think the Hungarians hot? I don't know.

[01:21:51] Kind of getting a he's going to disappear me after this. Yes. He is a cartoon of hotness is of a certain he's a cartoon of like a sophisticated rich guy who are very European, right? Show you a good time. Stephanswag novel.

[01:22:04] This is sort of the New Yorker cartoon of, you know, or Mad Max. But he doesn't even have like some sense of like the Stellan Skarsgård kink to him where you're like, this guy's a little interesting. Absolutely. Stellan Skarsgård I will throw down.

[01:22:17] I will if the table was between me and Stellan, the table's going against the wall. He is outmatched by Nicole Kidman in terms of just like who has the upper hand. She, by the way, just looks so good in this movie. It's crazy.

[01:22:28] This whole aesthetic, the little glasses, the up hair. When the hair was still curly. I think that she's so good. Yeah. Why did she abandon the curls? I don't know. When was the last time she was curly haired in a movie?

[01:22:40] Does she have some curls in rabbit hole? I felt like that was her trying to strip it back again. I don't know because I've never seen that because I didn't want to because it seemed like a depressing. I would not recommend starting now.

[01:22:52] It looks like she's got a little bit of yeah, I'm not going to want. She's kind of just got standard like Nicole Kidman of the 2000s. She's one of those people where it's like the amount of time she's dyed her hair, done different treatments to them.

[01:23:05] I don't think she could make her hair look like this again if she wanted. And it's you look at like BMX bandits where she has like, you know, fucking a slash. Yeah, her big orange, you know, bushy hair. It's so good.

[01:23:18] This is pretty much the last vestige because I feel like when you get to Moulin Rouge and the others, everything's become straightened out more black. It's hard to remember now. Moulin Rouge is red, but cartoon red.

[01:23:28] It's hard to remember a time now when people didn't take her seriously as an actress. But this for me was really sort of like the ultimate dividing line of like anyone who

[01:23:35] says that is wrong because she so I hate to use this phrase because it's been so played out, but like so understands the assignment, you know, however, she had to get there. Like the kabuki of the performance, the intonation, the way that she talks.

[01:23:49] It's so clearly building towards this particular mode and she embraces it and owns it. It feels like very serious. It's also just funny that she doesn't get the credit for it at the time. The validation happens right after that. Right after she becomes serious.

[01:24:02] Everyone's like, oh, you know what? She's proven herself. It's the others and Moulin Rouge. Those two in one year. And by the time she wins the Oscar the following year, she's almost viewed as overdue. And overrated.

[01:24:11] I would say pretty quickly people turned on her and that sort of Stepford wise bewitched your people are like, oh, what the hell did she just win? Because she had a big nose in the hours or whatever, you know, so quickly went from like, is she just famous?

[01:24:23] Is she a movie star to die for? Was she just cast right? Right. Right. Did Vincent get a good performance out of her? Did she really want to chase Batman and Batman forever? Or was her character's name just chased? Was there any correlation between the two?

[01:24:36] People get obsessed with all the symbolism in this movie, obviously, but this party is filled with all the weird like shapes in lights and all that stuff. But anyway, I mean, that's also filled with Nick Nightingale. Oh, he's there playing the piano. That prick piano player.

[01:24:50] What did I say? Never a doctor, never a doctor. Great line. But speaking of doctors, if Tom Cruise was your doctor, my feeling is you would literally never die. But yeah, well, I would also be like, can you check my boobs again?

[01:25:02] And he'd be like, I did that like 10 minutes ago. I don't know. Maybe you should check it. But the thing is, I would be like, could I please have any of the several prescriptions I need to function as a human being?

[01:25:10] And he would be like, get out of my office. Right. So it'd be a real balancing act. Yes. Todd Field is someone I would like to see. I'm very excited to see Todd. I just met him for the first time, which I never thought would happen. Very exciting.

[01:25:24] I would. Hey, David. Yeah, he already told me about me. I liked about your eidetic memories. So, you know, now we're all talking about ourselves. I would love to see Todd Field do a little Sidney Pollack sidebar. It's been 20 years plus.

[01:25:41] I'm like show up in other good directors movies sometimes. He's so good in this. He is great in this. He's like genuinely great. Obviously his last acting part. No, well, he was, of course, in Yann Debant's The Haunting after this. The same year. Same year.

[01:25:55] And then he was in like three movies that do not exist. So it is the tale and obviously he makes In the Bedroom in 2001. Right. So like he's about to work on being a filmmaker. Yeah. And Leon Vitali, this is such a big moment for him.

[01:26:11] Like Leon Vitali goes and produces or so she could go marry Leon. I would love to. He's no longer with us. But I don't know if they'll send me. And he produces little children. Yeah.

[01:26:22] And Kubrick was, I think, by all accounts, recognized that he had potential as a director, that his interests are going that way and brought him into the process a little more in a Vitali sort of way of like, I'm gonna let you learn.

[01:26:35] I mean, what cooler thing, especially given how long the production was. And, you know, Field has essentially like, he's in a lot of the movie because he's the piano player. Yeah. He has the two big scenes, but then he's also in the fucking orgy. Right.

[01:26:48] So he must have been on set a ton. A ton. Right. Yeah. Like, which is probably pretty cool. Yeah. I really, I've said this to Griffin, I need to rewatch In the Bedroom and Little Children. I don't think I've seen either of them since theaters. Yeah.

[01:26:59] Do you remember the little children trailer? Yes. The trailer is unbelievable. Well, because we were all, that's the thing. We were all like, oh, shit. Here we go. Like this is gonna win Oscars. Yeah. And then it came out and everyone was like, hmm, pretty weird.

[01:27:10] What's with the narrator? You love that movie? I do. This is also gonna be. But this thing, I remember liking it. I don't remember it that well. I mean, the trailer really captures the vibe of the movie, which is surprising even how sort of particular the trailer is.

[01:27:22] But this is gonna be the least cool thing that anyone has ever said on any podcast. But I literally, we had like six or seven people over our house the other night. And we just like, I put on the little children trailer.

[01:27:31] We were not just like out of the blue. We were watching trailers. Yeah. For like new films. But I was like, hey, I had tar in the brain. We watched a tar trailer. That's what it was.

[01:27:37] And I was like, we got to put on the little children trailer. Like 240p on YouTube. Yeah. And I was like quietly losing my mind. People were like, all right, trains. I mean, what tar is his first movie in 17 years? What's the time span there? 16. Yeah. 16 years.

[01:27:53] When we were promoting The Tick, Jackie Earl Haley, who was on the first season of The Tick and obviously was in little children. Oscar nomination. But not in the trailer, which is so weird. Anyway. Yeah.

[01:28:05] But an interesting thing where it felt like they were really kind of hiding. Like your exposure to him had to solely happen within the context of seeing the actual movie. We were talking. I was asking him questions about that movie and that performance.

[01:28:16] And he went, that guy's such a good director. Griffin, if you ever get a chance to be in one of his movies, you should not turn that down. And I think about all the time where I'm like, the generosity of that statement.

[01:28:27] I can like first of all, here's a guy. Acting like you would be like, eh, Fieldwands for his first movie. I'm like, for some reason I'm in a movie in 10 plus years. Griffin, I wrote this film for you. It's called Tar. You play an embattled conductor.

[01:28:39] It's just like Griffin, I really would encourage you to, if you can get cast in one of his movies, do that. And I'm like, yeah, yes. If I can't get Newman, Blanchett apparently said she'll do it, but I really want Newman. Todd Field great in this movie.

[01:28:51] Nick Nightingale, what a G. Yeah. Seriously. By the way, if I'm Nick Nightingale, I'm dropping Fidelio to the first friend I see where I'm like, I have to tell you something. You're getting murdered. I know. I couldn't keep it to myself. There's no way. Is not that hard.

[01:29:11] No, no, no. The music he's playing, yeah, they could probably get a player piano. Like it's more complicated than the score to this film, but it's not. I'm saying he's like an accomplished jazz pianist. Like sure. What he's playing at that orgy is not that.

[01:29:25] But do you feel, but you'd need, this is the exact level of guy you need is like a journeyman. I mean, I just love Cruz's like confusion by his existence where it's like you have four kids. Yeah. You're in Seattle. You're in Seattle.

[01:29:39] And it's like, is this your usual band? He's like, I met these guys an hour ago. But this is where do you usually play wherever they let me? And it's like, how do you have this little control over your life? This is my question.

[01:29:47] Do you think he plays the orgy? He gets like 200k no questions asked. That's a lot. But it's a fucking orgy from the richest people. Yeah, but I feel like you just do that twice a year. You come out to New York for the orgy twice a year.

[01:30:04] You get a briefcase full of money. And then so then the rest of your life can be like, I play in jazz. My guess is, right? My guess is he gets 20 to 40,000 for playing the orgy.

[01:30:15] And the reason they hire him is they know he's the kind of guy who doesn't think to ask for 200,000. Yeah, well, that probably is true. So he gets 20k. Right. He gets like 20k and he's like, can you believe they pay me 20k?

[01:30:26] And to be fair, he does just have to sit blindfolded and go like do do do do do. But if someone had a better sense of like, this is your crazy sex orgy. I'm holding secrets. You should hang me out the nose. And they don't want him.

[01:30:39] No, but I think if you say, hey, I know some secrets there. Like, well, I know a secret. This is a gun. You know, like, you know, like I think it's you need someone who's kind of not good.

[01:30:47] Yeah, I like the interview process is all that longer involved. Right. And that the thing that like he's most the one thing he belies to Cruz is like, they're like great hits at this party. But he's not really upset. He understands this is a man has four children.

[01:31:03] Right. He'll take what he can get. This is a secret thing. But he's not like there's some fucked up shit going on here. He's like, you wouldn't believe the nips in this place. Like, he's just basic enough to not really be a risk to them.

[01:31:14] My big question about the orgy, and I don't think we're quite there yet, is just, you know, it's supposed to be all these like 40, 50, 60 year old masters of the universe. They don't start fucking until the OK, they don't get there. Ram man.

[01:31:27] They don't get there until 2 a.m. They don't start fucking until maybe 3 a.m. Yeah. I don't believe it. I'm asleep at like 11. Like, there's just these guys are doing snowballs or like dropping dead. Yeah, that's that's a lot to ask of an old man. No, it does.

[01:31:42] It does feel like this would be an afternoon activity. I know it's less mysterious and cool. Yeah, but like you guys kind of want to stay away from. Well, I think it's like David says, though, they do it maybe once a year. Yeah.

[01:31:52] You know, so it's like it's a conference. It's a sex conference. Right. You get you get yourself. You have to prepare yourself ahead. Also, a lot of Internet hype like a midnight movie at a festival, I don't have to do this every day.

[01:32:04] You know, a lot of international members. I think a lot of people are in different time zones. They're trying to find a neutral. Oh, that's the move is that you fly in from I have to do the math in my head where it would work best.

[01:32:14] I don't Minsk or whatever. Yeah, it's like, well, for me, this is 10 a.m. or whatever. Yeah. I'm ready to bang. 10 a.m. The perfect time to bang. The banging hour, I call it. So you have always said that it's weird. I have always said that.

[01:32:27] I say that the first time I meet anybody. Usually wildly out of context. My child, the first time I said, hey, so 10 o'clock is the bang now. He goes to bed late these days, doesn't he? I mean, you'd be real.

[01:32:39] Asa awake at hours from like, no, no, no. He says, Daddy, you know, when the orgy master comes in. Yeah. Also, I know David. I would think it was fun if the guy in a big red cloak was walking around. All right. Yeah. What are you doing?

[01:32:53] Sims prides himself on being a top tier texter. It's one of the aspects of your life. I feel like you show the most pride. Embarrassing that I take any pride in that. But yes, it's right. I'm calling out our own Marie Barty recently posted a screenshot

[01:33:08] of her social media of her text exchange with your son, Asa. It was so good. Asa, well, he'll text like Asa. Well, the first text was Marie. And Marie responded, David. Right. And then the next text was poop. Yes. Yes.

[01:33:23] And then Marie said, is this my friend Asa? And then he responded, Asa. So are you typing these for him? Is he dictating? No, this is a sad symptom of me letting my son spend too much time with my phone

[01:33:35] is that he has taught himself how to read and write on the Bjork Spotify page for the most part. Cool. But he had ordered an Uber the other day. To be fair, my daughter also once ordered an Uber. It does not require reading and writing.

[01:33:47] But I got there just in time. I had to pay $3 for it. He'd also sent the Uber driver nonsense. Like pages of nonsense. That Uber driver's probably like easy. Another baby. Does that happen? Like, maybe this is a baby. But my mom will be like, grandma.

[01:34:01] And so she'll know it's a second. Her name is Fran. He calls her grandma. And then he'll just be like poop and I'll be like, I love you. It'll be like pee. It's a good bed. It's a good bed. Asa rolls. They go home from the party.

[01:34:17] They're smoking some pot. Yes. And they just fucking get into it. The two of them. She delivers really upsetting news. Which is? Which is this vision. This like sex dream that she has. She had a fantasy about a hot Cod Navy man.

[01:34:36] And it was so hot that she thought about leaving her husband. Yeah, but it's after her doing 10 minutes of like, come the fuck on your horny. Admit it. And Tom Cruise is like, I don't know what you're talking about. Right. She's goading him. I can't engage with this.

[01:34:51] The pot is making you aggressive. It's kind of turning her on. Those women wanted to fuck. Yeah, yeah. And then she reveals this thing that completely changes his understanding of reality. It's so good that it's not an actual affair.

[01:35:03] That it's not even like a close brushed misconnection, like the dance with the scary Nordic man that it is just like I had this notion and it got me really worked up. And I've thought about it a lot. But what's crucial about that is it's not about sex.

[01:35:18] If it were about fucking someone else for real, that would be push it more into explicitly sexual territory. This is about desire. And in Bill's case, the idea that she's incepting him with that his wife has this like life of the mind outside of him in their marriage.

[01:35:33] Right, because if it was she cheated on him or came close to cheating on him, he could frame that as a moral failing. Right. But this is like this is your unconscious mind.

[01:35:41] And it's not just like you don't get the sense that he has turned her into like a don't worry, darling style, like two dimensional figure. Like he knows that she has a really good movie. Yeah, well, you know, everything's going to look that bad in comparison.

[01:35:52] Dyes white shot, but don't worry, doesn't need the help. But like he I think you get the sense that he respects her as a woman and a person and a partner and that she's an accomplished. She's, you know, has done impressive things in her life and so on.

[01:36:04] But he is the mind blowing realization for him is is that it suddenly opens the door just enough into all these alternative possibilities. Right. Of what life could be. She thinks it's like we're stoned and we're saying shit we usually wouldn't say. Right. It's sort of the game.

[01:36:23] Let's do come on. We were just at this party. We were flirting with other people. Let's fucking like, come on. Will you react to this? And it just immediately destroys his complete understanding of reality and her. And her too.

[01:36:33] But he's really going through the like, wait, should I have fucked X people in the past? Right. Should I be doing this in the future? Does my is my wife going to leave me? Am I even a man?

[01:36:43] The pot is make sure I put those hugs back on. They were so comfy. The pot is making me aggressive. Yeah, the pot's making everyone aggressive. Yeah. It is the their performances are so strange in this. So strange. And it really is. Imagine you this movie in 1999.

[01:36:58] You're going to see it. You're like, what's this about? When they're doing this, I can really imagine the most of the audience is just so turned on. Seeing this movie for the first time. This is the scene where I go, okay, so this is an interesting failed movie.

[01:37:10] And then it starts to build for me after this and get to the point where I'm like, this is a masterpiece. And even every time I've rewatched it, when I get to the scene, I go like, am I overrating this a little bit in my mind?

[01:37:20] When I got to the scene last night, I was like, so Barry Lyndon is better than this by a hair. But but part of it is their performances are so strange. They're operating at a frequency they do not for the rest of this movie, a frequency that

[01:37:33] I would argue is not matched by any other performance in any other Kubrick movie. It's so weird, but it does sort of make sense in this way of when you are very stoned and suddenly find yourself in a serious conversation. Right. And your grasp on reality. Yeah.

[01:37:50] Your voice, your body. What argument can I even make right now? I don't understand. But it's also one of the first scenes of the movie that's really imploring you, forcing you out of looking at it through a realistic lens. Yes.

[01:38:01] It's all about for me, the most important detail of their apartment beyond the fact that literally every fucking square inch of wall space is covered in a painting. I mean, many of them by Kubrick's wife. But like it's just like a little bit much.

[01:38:13] You guys learn about negative space. But there is the windows. The windows reveal every time you look at them that they are on a soundstage. They make no real intent or attempt rather to make it look like a real cityscape.

[01:38:25] It's just is blue and black with little squares of yellow. It is incredibly easy to do. Like the amount of times you were watching movies or TV shows where, you know, especially

[01:38:35] in a pre green screen era, it is just a still backdrop behind the window and your eyes never clock it. He is choosing to let it look this other world. He doesn't want you to think about this scene as if it's super realistic.

[01:38:49] He also doesn't want you to think about it in like a sort of lynching and like this is just a dream. It's like, you know, it's unmoored from reality sort of way. It has to occupy that middle space, which it does. Yes.

[01:38:59] But as we're saying, I mean, Cruz is just going more and more into like Philip Seymour Hoffman is threatening me with the rabbit's foot to kill my girlfriend. Well, it's like you were having a fucking argument with someone on the playground and

[01:39:12] then suddenly you're like in a courtroom or what? It's just like the shift of it to something really existential for their marriage is frightening. As we're saying is like every line reading is 700th take energy of just I need to do something different.

[01:39:25] But it is this is where you feel it the most. The likes of many takes. It just feels like they're trapped in this argument. They can't get out. You would believe if you were told that this scene was six months. This is straight in and of itself.

[01:39:37] TMI for a podcast is popular, but like my wife recently. Wait, you're going to be TMI? Okay. But my wife recently ordered that exact lingerie set that Nicole Kidman is wearing with like no, I didn't say anything. Shout out Elise. Bought it. And I was like, what's up?

[01:39:54] What message are you trying to send? Yeah, I guess. What's the subtext? Is the pot making you aggressive? Yeah. Yeah, it's and Tom Cruise's hair is doing such incredible acting in this in the scene. It is just. The way that it dangles. Insane.

[01:40:12] You can feel like the unraveling tension, but also so tight. Look, we've covered so many Tom Cruise movies on this podcast because he is a director who works with so many. He's what? He's the best one. It's his best hair. I'm just I'm just dropping that bomb.

[01:40:27] Can you pull up that blank check meta? Twitter account that I love that every day posts a different actor and how many times they've been covered on the show. Yeah, it's a great account. What is the account called? Let me find it.

[01:40:38] I'm just curious what the current Cruise count is, especially with the Mission Impossible on Patreon. But I don't know if there's an actor whose hair. Hanks is another one, obviously. Hanks, obviously way up there. But I think Cruise might be number one now.

[01:40:51] Well, yeah, he's got two tweets. Carrie Fisher also was way up there. Well, the Star Wars one's been on. But then like when Harry met Sally. I know, but it's just I know, I know, I know, I know.

[01:41:00] Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky, Jack Reacher, Jack Reacher, Never Go Back. That's sort of one. Yeah. Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Ghost Protocol, Collateral. That's seven plus this would be eight main feed movies. And then you have six Mission Impossible movies and the Mummy on the special feature.

[01:41:20] I just don't know if any other actor's hair is this versatile. So versatile. When it is genuinely. The Daniel Day-Lewis's hair. When it's genuinely their hair and it's not like he's doing some crazy like in this one, I got a perm. No, it's and his hair is perfect.

[01:41:34] It's exactly what it should be. It's always perfect. Yes, yes. It's I actually never made a mistake. There's no Da Vinci Code weird hair, I would argue. I don't love the longer hair. Like Mission Impossible 2, but I will say. I think it fits the time. I do.

[01:41:47] I think it's almost always the right hair for that moment, that movie. Sure. I mean, it is iconic in its way. But as someone who doesn't really think about actors hair, I was nervous about watching the trailer for the new Mission Impossible. Oh, sure.

[01:41:59] I was like, what's the hair going to be? What's the hair? If I don't like the hair, it's very similar. It's very similar to his recent. Yeah. Because for a while Mission Impossible would fluctuate every other film. But now he's just kind of. Yeah.

[01:42:10] Because he has long hair in two and four. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. I think the missions tend to be a little more impossible when they're shorter. Not like the buzz cut, but I like when they're shorter. I think that goes to what's the next one called? Fucking rogue.

[01:42:24] Dead Reckoning. Whatever is. I can't wait, but it's he. I think that's the ideal length. I think. I hope it's a good movie. They should call it the Mission Impossible buzz cut. It stinks. I would hate that so much. It would really suck. I cannot tell you.

[01:42:37] You know what? I watched the Way of Water trailer, the Wakanda Forever trailer and the Dead Reckoning trailer. Like a lot. At least once a week for each and just go like, I need one of these. I think all three of those are going to work.

[01:42:47] I hope so. Yeah. So, but Bill goes out into the night. He's like, yeah, he gets the phone call that a patient died. Right. And he goes to that house. And that's where Mary and the daughter tries to seduce him.

[01:42:58] It's funny how little in this weird way where she's like, I love you. Let's run away together. And he's like, you've literally never talked to me outside of the context of your father's illness. Right. But I'm with her. I love him too.

[01:43:10] And then a guy, her partner comes in. Who's like, Greg, Greg. It's Greg. Greg from Donovan. Greg. Oh, that means nothing. I know. I was fired from Kerrall Mines for kicking somebody. Famously kind of an asshole. Yeah. Oh, really?

[01:43:24] I just get big like Rodrigo Centoro in Love Actually vibes like the prototype of that. No, it's insane that Rodrigo Centoro is in Love Actually. Anyway, sorry, carry on. No, the fact that he's Greg, that it's like, it's Greg. I guess he hires him before. She was Dharma.

[01:43:41] She was like, I just love you. And I also love Eastern medicine or whatever, whatever Dharma did. He must get cast in this movie before Dharma and Greg premieres. But by the time this movie comes out, Dharma and Greg is already.

[01:43:52] He was cast in this movie before like Must See TV exists. But Jenna Elfman was a movie before Lucy. She was a prominent Scientologist, right? Maybe he carried the message to her. Maybe he possibly or maybe he recommended Elfman to Greg. I don't know.

[01:44:06] The point is at this point, he's shorthand for like uptight normal sitcom. What's going on? Yeah, me and my wacky wife. There's something just so funny of the reveal of like, oh no, my husband's coming and it's fucking Greg walking down a hallway being oblivious.

[01:44:22] But yes, it is. You have a scene where this woman sort of acknowledges the weird movie star pull of Cruise. Yes, right. When the last... I'm obsessed with you. When the last 30, 40 minutes of this movie have largely been cucking him. Yeah, well. And deflating him.

[01:44:39] But now he's even questioning his... I think he's not. I think he's not even... He does feel unstable at the idea that his wife could cheat on him. But I think he's also having the feeling of like, should I have been cheating on my wife? Yeah, yeah.

[01:44:51] Like, am I actually an asshole? Should this be me policking my way around town? What happens in every subsequent scene for the next hour of this movie is someone tries to have sex with him. Yeah. And it goes so wrong. And they cut the scene where I try.

[01:45:02] They sure did. It was weird that they shot that. But you were in England at the time. So it all checks out. And everyone, there's lots of kissing, which you also like. I do love kissing. And I love Vanessa Shaw. There's even kissing with the mask.

[01:45:14] I mean, we'll get to Vanessa Shaw in that dress. But... There's even 69ing with the mask, which feels a little counterproductive. Yeah, it feels right up to... There's no mouthless there. You're just rubbing plaster lips. But what's interesting about what Griffin said in the scene is that like,

[01:45:28] yes, that is the charm that he's radiating. It's the first time we feel it. But he's also again in a subservient position. He's a hired hand of this ultra rich family. He's making house calls, which is not something that normal people,

[01:45:40] myself, when this was happening in my family, we don't afford. Also making a house call to confirm that a guy has died. Right. And he just feels his head. Walking into a dead body in a room.

[01:45:50] It says so much though about the fact that he's making house calls still at all. Yes. But it just makes complete sense that it would be like super rich people can basically get whatever they want. Yeah. But it's also like, I think he wants to get out there.

[01:46:06] Like he likes to leave the house and just go like have that feeling of people who need him or in his thrall. Yeah. It's like his kink. Okay. Yeah. I can see that too. It's definitely a great excuse to get out of having that conversation. Sure.

[01:46:20] So I got to go dead body to check out. He's just praying someone dies. Someone dies. That's when he meets Domino right after the... Yeah. The dead guy. Right after he meets Greg. Domino played by Vanessa Shaw, aka, you know, my wife. She's the best.

[01:46:39] When is she bad? Never. You know what? She's incredible in... Two Lovers. That's right. Yep. Oh man. James Gracey's and Approaches. The... Yeah. I mean, what's... That scene is so fascinating because she is the platonic ideal of like a normal man's perfect... Yeah. You know, like sex worker.

[01:46:58] Yeah. Like that. Like she is a very nice grad student who doesn't seem like she does this a lot. Charmingly messy apartment. She's very pretty, charmingly messy. It's just right here. It's very warm. We're gonna have a nice time. I'm gonna speak of you fondly afterwards.

[01:47:12] It is like cartoonish to the degree that it is a fantasy for someone who wants to like do a little dalliance and paying for sex. Yeah. She was a child actor. She's of course in Hocus Pocus and was in some other stuff and then takes...

[01:47:26] She wasn't in Hocus Pocus. She fucking owns Hocus Pocus. Yes, she owned my heart. But is she in the sequel? Good question. Premieres tonight. Greg, does it premiere tonight? It doesn't look like she's in the sequel. Why is there a September release? It's... I mean, it's premiering tonight.

[01:47:40] I don't know. But wait for October 1st. Literally wait like three days. Could you wait three days? Come on. We've waited for 25 years. It's fucking Tuesday. We have to be premiering Hocus Pocus on a random Tuesday in September.

[01:47:54] I'm just like October 1st, I would remember that's when it's coming out. Anyway, all Disney Plus original movies are great. You'd be able to tell your grandkids they're exactly the day Hocus Pocus 2 premiered. Yeah. When was it?

[01:48:04] It should have been October 1st, but I think it was end of September. I mean, the domino thing is like... What if you were approached by a sex worker who was Vanessa Shaw in the most stunning dress? Yes. And she was just like, I'll take care of everything.

[01:48:18] Just come back to my apartment. I'm making out with you on the street. Like this absolute dream world vibes. Child of actors, works as a child actor, takes several years off, goes to college, isn't sure she wants to act again, gets called in by Kubrick.

[01:48:33] And there's a very charming story. I think it's in the dossier that Kubrick put his hand on her shoulder after a take and was like glowing. And he was like, I'm so excited for you to have the career that I know you can have. Hell yeah.

[01:48:46] Which is sort of like... She should have had a better one. She should have. God bless. She's had a great career. And she still works. Yeah. She's one of those people who always feels like is undervalued. While being totally consistent pro.

[01:48:57] But that she was like, I was at a point where I was like acting was a thing I did when I was a kid. I don't know if I really want to do this ever again.

[01:49:02] He was the guy who made her feel that not only could she have a career doing it, but that she enjoyed doing it and felt a sense of autonomy over doing it.

[01:49:10] And she said she felt really empowered by how much he was telling her like, you're going to do incredible stuff. Yeah. Well, she does rule. But their encounter, of course, is set every time he's tempted. He gets the kiss.

[01:49:22] He makes out with her and they go to her apartment. And then he's like... Nice luck if you can get it. Yeah, seriously. You get paid to kiss Tom Cruise? Continuing my... Oh, I was doing Vanessa Tropic.

[01:49:32] And he does the sort of like, I think I should go. David's doing a very good physical cruise. He's got the fucking jacket, you know, and it feels like there's this force field on him. It's also Christmas. It is Christmas. That's like another... We are fifth Christmas.

[01:49:50] It's another thing that is very off-putting about like the fact that he's cheating on his wife, the mother of his children, but it's the holidays. Well, one very precocious child. Sure. But it's sad that it's like for her too, thinking about her character that like...

[01:50:07] She's working on Christmas, picking up, you know, waspy doctors walking the streets. I mean, that's the thing. If I'm a very high powered sex worker, I might at Christmas be like, there's going to be some rich guy having an existential crisis.

[01:50:20] If I just walk up and down Fifth Avenue. But she's also, he's like red meat for her. She sees him and she's like, oh my God, this is perfect. And so there's this really sweet feeling of them both sort of looking for each other

[01:50:31] and being drawn to each other. It is sort of, you know, Ben's talking about Christmas, like the gift of the magi, this between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Like they're both going out into the world in their ways and like looking for the thing that their partner needs

[01:50:41] in the most fucked up ways. Everyone calls this a classic. Now the take is, it's boring to say Eyes Wide Shut is a classic Christmas movie now. It's like 10 years ago saying Die Hard is a classic Christmas movie. Now it's just like, we all accept...

[01:50:54] Do you think Die Hard's a Christmas? We should litigate this for a little bit. What's going on? When's it set? I think the fun take that we can start right here is that we're reclaiming it as the Jews Christmas movie. It's like Chinese food on Christmas.

[01:51:03] It's like, I mean, I watch it often at Christmas. Is Eyes Wide Shut secretly a great Hanukkah movie? Wow, is it the only Hanukkah movie? He has one crazy night. He has one crazy night and there is a miracle. And there's potential for... He doesn't get killed.

[01:51:17] His light should have been extinguished at the end of this night and somehow it kept burning. When the girl woke up with Sidney Pollack, Sidney Pollack went, it's a Hanukkah miracle! No more speed balls. Ted to the girl for a second.

[01:51:29] I got to light another candle for the third night. You got to spin a dreidel over here. Or a gimble. I think I wanted to say, much has been talked about Kubrick's weird artificial New York in this movie. Yes. Which people at the time... Theater of the mind.

[01:51:44] Right, but people went like, it looks nothing like New York. He's failed. Where's Red Street? This is the downside to his hermetic whatever. It's mostly this one major street set they built. It's like two streets that are intersecting.

[01:51:54] There are only a couple things that are actually shot in the streets of London, but they built like this big sort of intersection. And then they would flip it sometimes in the shot so that they could change the orientation of it.

[01:52:05] And every time they shot a new scene there, they'd redress all the businesses to make it look different. But you're basically reusing this same intersection over and over again. And the thing that's talked about a lot with this movie is like, there are very few extras.

[01:52:17] There's pretty much no one on a street... It is Christmas time. ...unless they exist to actually interact with this character. They're going to call him a homophobic slur. They're going to hit on him. Right, they're going to offer him a cloak. It's a snow globe.

[01:52:28] I mean, the movie doesn't have to feel like that. He's in his fucking brain. Right, and I think people viewed this as a failing of like, well, New York City's not like this. It's a city that never sleeps. They're constantly... No one's selling hot dogs out of water.

[01:52:39] But it is the thing that is very spooky if you ever find yourself in a part of New York that is just quiet. If suddenly you walk down a street where no one is... Especially at a time like some holiday weekend or whatever.

[01:52:50] Whether because you're lost in a long part of town or just, for whatever reason, there's no one here. You have an accidental midnight vanilla sky moment. I think one of the big secrets they do to make it feel like it's, still hermetic, but not just literally two streets,

[01:53:06] is that they have him take a cab from one part of the village to another part of the village, which is just like... Sure. It's like it would have been half as fast to walk it or twice as fast. I totally believe it with this guy. Yeah?

[01:53:18] Yeah, he doesn't... Right. Well, I mean, he did not have the best walk over to that part of town. What if there was a really wise hot dog vendor who said like, you know what's most important? It's family. He's like putting the hot dog.

[01:53:30] But this movie, there's, you know... I think, interesting to look at this movie against After Hours in certain ways. Another movie that Stanley Kubrick adored. Yes. And one of my favorite movies of all time. About a wild crazy night in New York City. The Great American Griffin movie.

[01:53:47] In many senses. But that's a movie that is very obsessed with the actual realities of 80s New York City and is the same one crazy night... But it's shot in locations and it's very much... Absolutely. Right. Feels like you're in New York.

[01:54:02] But it's also a movie where all this guy wants is for this night to end. Right. And Eyes Wide Shut has the vibe of this guy being like, what if I just push this a little bit further?

[01:54:11] He's like, if I go to sleep, then it's back to normal. Yeah. That feeling of... Look, on the lowest scale level, that feeling of a bar is closing, you leave a bar, you're walking to the subway and possibly go like, what if I go into a different bar?

[01:54:23] What if I just don't go home? It sounds like a Griffin thing. He doesn't leave the house until like 11. Right. No, I know. But he's doing the thing like in Minecraft when you're just like, one more tunneling session and I'm not going to die.

[01:54:35] What if I just do another thing? What if I just keep drinking? So he goes and meets Nick Nightingale, the legend, and they're chatting. Right. And Nick Nightingale gets a phone call. Three performances in one night. Yeah. The man is working.

[01:54:52] Playing the saddest looking jazz club of all time. The party they go to at the beginning of the movie. Was the night before. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Still, he feels like the Ray Romano of jazz pianos. I've got to do three sets.

[01:55:05] I've got to do three sets and then an orgy. I've got to do a stand. They blindfold me. I tell jokes about Debra. Debra! But there is that feeling that you were talking about earlier, Sims, of like he's itching. Like he knows that this is dangerous.

[01:55:18] Yeah, he's like, you know who? It's a Beethoven opera. Don't you want to ask? It does feel like— Not my last show tonight. If he had lived another 10 years, Kubrick might have gone like, maybe Ray to play.

[01:55:28] You could have seen in the line of all his comedic leading man. The Aryan Papers starring Ray Romano. This movie. So, Nick Nightingale, the G tells him he's gonna need a black cloak, a mask, and a third item. What's the third item? Well, it's— He sees the password.

[01:55:47] No, he sees the password. Tells him about the orgy. We gotta keep— We gotta move. But what's the third item? It's a black cloak. They say it so many fucking times. Maybe it's not even— He needs a hood. He needs a mask. Tuxedo? Yeah, tux.

[01:55:59] That's what it is. Tux, cloak, mask. I love that he goes like, they'll kick you out dressed like this. And you're just like, this is the most upstanding gentleman. He's got a fucking waistcoat. You get a great reaction shot of Crews being like,

[01:56:10] what the fuck are you talking about? Like, do you know how could I look? But it's that thing. It's that level of like, you don't understand the stratas of wealth, of power, of access. This is— This is the layer beyond you that you think exists.

[01:56:23] You know, say this movie is just happening in his brain. It's what he thinks he can peek beyond. I also think there's this interesting thing this movie raises. The dumb thing of people thinking like, you know, much like the notion that the Shining is him

[01:56:38] confessing that he faked the moon landing. That a movie like this is Kubrick being like, I have the files on all these perverts and I'm leaving you the clues to solve the mystery after my death. In 20 short years, you'll figure it out.

[01:56:50] That this is his book of Henry. He's leaving instructions for how to fucking fake Epstein's suicide. I mean, we are going to get a Room 237 about Eyes Wide Shut. I'm probably, you know, hopefully be in it. But yeah. But whenever these stories come out about these guys,

[01:57:04] I do feel like there's the question that everyone sort of stews on where it's like, is it that people this deviant need to achieve the highest levels of success so that they have the security and the sort of insulation to be able to like, follow their whims willy-nilly?

[01:57:22] Or is it that reaching this level of success, having this much money, this much access completely perverts and breaks your brain? I think it's chasing the dragon. I think it's... I think it's like at some point you're like, I have to hunt people now. Right, it's true.

[01:57:36] Because I've shot all the endangered animals. You've conquered everything in the world. The only thing to do is to break laws with impunity. Right. But I think that's right because it's like, the thing about the orgy, which is again, not supposed to be like

[01:57:46] the hottest thing of all time. It's not supposed to be like, could you imagine something this hardcore? This is a very chased film by most standards, at least as far as the subject matter is concerned. But it's about these people who like,

[01:57:57] don't know how to have sex anymore because their minds have been so riddled by riches. This is the only way these people can come. They're like, we can only fuck if we make it a fucking ritualistic medieval orgy.

[01:58:05] And not to jump ahead to the end of the movie, but when Pollock does his final explanation, I find it in certain ways equally believable that they need to kill people to cover their tracks and that they need to pretend that they kill people

[01:58:19] for the theater of their own excitement. There's a note that Kubrick had in a much earlier draft of the script where he was thinking about like, they have this whole plan. They don't know when they're going to need to use it. Right.

[01:58:29] But they have it ready to go for when an interloper comes into the orgy. Right. So it's like, did they execute ghost protocol? Yeah, exactly. Or is it like, no, our thing is this theater pretending like we kill people. It's basically sleep no more, but like, you know,

[01:58:42] people are starting to- But that is a way you can- By this is just sleep no more. Right. When he says, do you think, so you guys think that like, that's a possibility that this is some big staged whatever. I think it's a possibility. Like improv event.

[01:58:55] The most important thing is that there is not, like, you know, we don't put the, miss the forest for the trees and think it matters. No, no, I know that. But the first time I watched, I like that it's unknowable. The first time I watched it,

[01:59:09] I leaned more on the side of sleep no more with a mild side of deviancy. I admit. And rewatching it this time, I felt like, I think Sidney Pollack's covering their tracks. Kubrick delights in swapping out the dead actress. Yes.

[01:59:21] You know, like the person you see in the morgues lab is not the same actress. And it's actually, I mean, I wish I had this handy. I have this whole fucking book sitting on my lap. But there is- Erlich has a book with like a 40 different little colored-

[01:59:32] This is the most amazing- Which book is this? It's just the, it's the same book that I think JJ was reading. Oh, The Eyes of Israel. But the woman who plays the girl who redeems Tom Cruise has the most incredible quote that I just found.

[01:59:45] Because it was originally supposed to be Mandy, who redeems him. The woman from Ziegler's House at the beginning. Yeah. And then this actress, Abigail Goode, who ends up playing her says, Davis, who plays Mandy, was a difficult girl to work with and she was always late.

[01:59:59] She added that Kubrick liked my long legs. He preferred the way I walk. Or it might've been simply that I had a better body than she did. It's like, Jesus. It's like you already got the part, man. She's already dead.

[02:00:11] It is wild when you get to the party, how it feels like the women pretty much all have identical bodies. Yes. And it's so- They look- It's un-erotic. The G-strings, which he was very particular about, apparently he was sent basically every cut of women's underwear that existed. Yeah.

[02:00:28] Like as he was picking because he was like, no, not quite right, are so unsexy. Is that crazy for me to say? No, no, no. It is. Because they feel like action figures almost. Like the way they're just kind of walking around like robots. In our showgirls episode,

[02:00:39] you talked about Paul Verhoeven's attack on the breast. Right. How that movie makes boobs feel upsetting. And this is just a movie where like, you're watching incredibly attractive, like, you know, these hourglass model women like fuck on screen. And it just feels like you're watching nature photography. Yeah.

[02:01:00] Like it's weirdly un-erotic. But Kubrick talked all the time about it. This was his most personal movie. And that's such an enigmatic thing for an enigmatic figure to say. Well, you know, this is a documentary shot in real time. It's based on a true friendship.

[02:01:11] He did meet his wife, Christiane, at an enormous masked ball where he was performing and or she was performing rather. And he was the only one who wasn't in a costume. And he felt like everyone was looking at him. Wow.

[02:01:23] So that like, what I like to think about is like, okay, so I'm a rich evil guy, right? Congrats. Can I only come if I'm fucking, you know, anonymous strangers in a room where lots of other people are having sex in a castle or in a state? Sure.

[02:01:38] Or can I only come if I'm doing that and I know there's one new guy here? Right. Like, you know, where I'm like, so the new guy's coming, right? You think there's always a sacrificial lamb? That's what I'm saying. Like, can they only do this and be like,

[02:01:49] and we're going to leave some bait for like some random wasp to show up and think he knows what he's doing, right? It does feel like that's part of what turns them on. Right, right. The whole thing's about power, obviously. And desire.

[02:02:00] And like being able to covet the things they already have. And they love being able to sniff him out. They love being able to kick him out. They're not angry that he snuck in. But like, that's, they're like, okay, yeah, sure. Three hours of mindless masked fucking. Right.

[02:02:12] When are we having a weird trial of Tom Cruise? Well, the thing is the biggest boner that anyone gets that night is definitely the moment when Cruise walks into the room and finds them all waiting for him. Like, that's the moment. But then they don't.

[02:02:26] And it's funny that Kubrick put in the boing sound effect. But then they don't strip him naked, which is like a weird. It's such a good threat. It's much better than like, we're going to hurt you. It's like, we're going to humiliate you in front of these people.

[02:02:39] Because the next day is the greater satisfaction. It's not like we could take you naked tonight or we could drive you insane for another 24 hours. No, for sure. Another thing where like this movie has gone through tiers of hype where people are like,

[02:02:51] you're going to see Tom Cruise's dick on screen. You're an hour and a half into this film. Most people haven't seen all the right moves. But you're like an hour and a half into this movie that the audience is probably losing patience for.

[02:03:01] And you get to the scene where they're like undressed and people are like, here we go. Salacious, indecent. But like, isn't there something interesting about how it's a movie? Not all, but most of these robed people have been naked and having sex for hours.

[02:03:15] And then the idea of him taking his clothes off, you're like, God, that would be so awful. So weird. For him to like suddenly be like, uh, okay. Just standing there uncomfortably. Like, the weird emasculation of it. It's so effective. We should jump back to rates or basic.

[02:03:32] Yeah, we got to talk about it. A little bit of him. We get a little bit of rates. Jesus Christ, what a performance. He really does absolutely put some sauce on it. And Lili Sobieski is a very different vibe from her, but she's doing a great job.

[02:03:41] What's the thermostat thing we say? Oh, the thermostat performance where someone is able to enter into a movie and completely change the temperature. I feel like, would you argue that he's doing that in this film? Yeah, it's also this movie has not had a lot of levity.

[02:03:54] It's been going at a very patient clip. And now we have a guy in here who's like talking like a person. Okay, okay, you're in a hurry. He's like, he's like Wado. He's the Wado. He's almost too much of a sort of like, goofy merchant. Right.

[02:04:11] He's like, what was it you said? Black. And it's like, what did you think? He said green. He said black. Your mind tricks don't work on me. 100 I can't do. And he's like 200. The guy's like, 200. I do have two Japanese guys and my daughter up here.

[02:04:27] But yeah, sure. 200 bucks. I'm unlocking the door. Red, I give you the outfit. Blue, he's mother. The weirdest thing is he's just like, this is really annoying. And it's like, he literally needs you to go and get something off of a rack.

[02:04:41] And he's going to pay you like double. You live above. It seems like you were already awake considering how quickly responded to the thing. Like he doesn't have groggy energy. This is a guy who feels like he's awake. It's not like, I don't think this guy sleeps ever.

[02:04:54] Maybe he just kind of like sits in a chair and is quiet for a little bit. But also, so when you see doctor, I did my hair and you're like, is he saying this as a joke or is this a genuine?

[02:05:08] And obviously his reaction to the sight of his daughter with two older men wearing wigs and powder. But another one of these things that what I'm talking about where you just see something that is inexplicable, raises so many questions. You can't ask any questions.

[02:05:20] Your perception of reality is immediately changed and every bit of it makes less sense to you. He knows these men. Why are they dressed like this? It's his daughter. You know, everything about it is strange. He gets right back to the transaction too.

[02:05:37] He's like, all right, anyway, where were we? But he's very, you know, Claude Rains in class of blank about this, right? Where he's like, I can't believe you're doing this. What a shocking thing for me to see.

[02:05:50] The best is when he locks them in the room and he turns, he's like, I'm with a customer. This is so embarrassing for me that you would be doing this. I didn't know about it at all. And it's so distressing. All the implications of it are so distressing.

[02:06:04] Lili Sobieski, who's amazing. It's a tiny role, obviously. She was such a striking actor at that point. I mean, she went from like, deep impact and like, you know, uh, never cries. But she probably went from this to deep. But yes, it's the early sign.

[02:06:22] It should be the early sign for Cruz of like, you don't want to enter into this world. The things you're going to see are going to raise questions that you don't want answers to. Right, right, right. It's it's the underlying sort of stories.

[02:06:36] Is monogamy, you know, is the not knowing of monogamy. Right. Is that maybe preferable to the I'm going to blow my life up and go and chase all these stuff, dragon dragons. Can't unknow about like the depths of human depravity and shit like that. But yes, yes.

[02:06:51] Where the rainbow ends. Bizarre and strange. He gets his outfit. He gets his outfit and it is. And then he arrives and it is weird when he arrives at the orgy and he's like, hey, guys. And they're like, what's up? And he's like, Fidelio.

[02:07:04] And they're like, we'll take you up. And they should be like, who are you? Why are you showing up so late in a in a cab? OK, also fucking cab where you're like, oh, ripping me a hundred dollar bill. An insane. What if he did this? So crazy.

[02:07:17] What if he did this thing that happens in this entire. And it makes me so what if he did this rips the hundred dollar bill in half hands him one hundred dollar half a hundred dollar bill and a roll of scotch tape?

[02:07:28] Because then it's like you're not going to have to do any work putting this back. I remember the first time as a kid, I accidentally ripped a 20 that I was saving to buy a Pokemon starter deck or whatever.

[02:07:37] My dad was like, if you tape it is legal tender. They have to accept it. Even still, it's a little time I tried to cash a taped up dollar bill. I felt like a Jamoche. OK, but it's rude to do it to the guy's face. I agree.

[02:07:50] I agree. It's a dick move. He's got another hundred hundred in there like you can spare. But it's also a thing of like he he's still Mr. Power in the cab. This is the last time he's about to stop being his power has been tested the whole night.

[02:08:04] Right. And he wants to serve it. Riddle me this. Where are all the other drivers? Are they all just like in a room together smoking, being like, yeah, another orgy? That would be funny. It's like Andrew Dice Clay and company.

[02:08:14] And they're like, oh, yeah, I'm really fucking until five a.m. again. Jesus, I'd last ten minutes up there. And then we're in the orgy. One of the great sequences in all American film. If you can call this American film, Jocelyn Pook just wild and out.

[02:08:29] Yeah, apparently Stanley Kubrick told her, let's do some sex music. And she's like, I don't. OK, Barry White. What do you mean? What are you fucked? It would be funny if Barry White was at the orgy. Justin Timberlake in the background doing like a sexy back.

[02:08:46] Waiting for someone to do a cut of that and we oppose on Twitter. It's so scary. I find it all so unsettling. And I do think the first time I watched it was like two in the morning in my fucking home in Newcastle where I went to college,

[02:08:58] like on this little TV. And it really did. And it really did. The music and everything. You're just like, this was happening. I'm not turned on. And I'm so distressed. Look, not to be gross about it, but like when you're a 13 or 14 year old boy

[02:09:15] watching a movie late at night on a TV in your bedroom, and it has this many boobs, and it's this impossible to jerk off to. It's almost an accomplishment on a scale that's hard to compare, right? Yeah, I don't know. What do we think of the orgy?

[02:09:31] I mean, it's an incredible, incredible sequence. I think it has that magical power that Kubrick was always looking for. The sort of magnetic pull of his scenes that he couldn't describe in words. That's why he made movies.

[02:09:43] And he was able to sort of achieve it and sustain it here. I mean, the Jocelyn Pook music is, even though he literally did say, I want sex music. That's what she came back with. It's incredible. There's the later music that's more sexy sounding.

[02:09:57] Well, I mean, there is. I mean, anything that's more sexy sounding. Which is like backwards Hungarian monks or whatever, right? That's what that is. Later in the sequence we have what for my money is one of the great needle drops in all the film,

[02:10:10] which is the introduction of the Leggetti score, or the music for the first time. I mean, that moment is just like, fuck. Oh my God. You cut to that wide shot and all that. I mean, and then suddenly... All their faces, the weird...

[02:10:22] And you can see in the pan across all the faces that or not even the pan, just like the various three shots that he has of them. Like that's the image that had haunted him for so many decades. He was like, that's a movie.

[02:10:33] Like that's something I need to explore. Who do you think the guy who nods at him is? Do you think it's Pollock or do you think it's someone else? I don't. I mean, it's Leon Vitali. Yeah, whatever you and Leon Vitali. You see Leon Vitali around every corner.

[02:10:45] I just want to put a button on this by saying that I truly believe that... That performance that he gives as the orgy master, which was sort of incidental. They had another actor, you know, he just does it. It's so perfect. It's one of those things

[02:10:59] that holds an entire universe together. The way, the theatricality of it, the menace. It's such a nice camper for a guy who abandoned his acting career to serve at the feet of this dude that gets to sort of be this pivotal... Imperious king of the evil guys.

[02:11:15] What's the password for the... I mean, it's like every line is just burrowed into my soul. But another part of Owen Gleiberman's pan that actually feels like a great encapsulation of what is powerful about this movie is when he says, like, Kubrick turned sex into a ritual.

[02:11:31] And it was like, this movie was supposed to titillate us. He's failed. And it's like, no, it's that thing of you walk into a room where the most beautiful women are doing everything you ever have imagined your most horny state of mind. Yeah, yeah.

[02:11:44] And it instead just reveals like, wow, sex is weird. This is like weird that we do this. This looks odd. And the campiness... Ben doesn't like that and I'm with him. Sex is great. High five to say. I like having sex. I want to be very clear.

[02:11:57] And I also think... But when you look at it from an angle like this and you especially look at people watching it happen. It's an orgy, right? But like also no kink shame against orgies. No, sure. How they do this orgy. That makes it so scary.

[02:12:10] It feels joyless. It doesn't feel like anyone's enjoying it. No, not at all. What's amazing is that it feels joyless, but also super campy by design. But it's campy and scary. And the fact that it's able to be scary while it's campy only makes it scarier.

[02:12:23] Performative, but in a way that's very different than the kind of performative sex we see in porn or in movies. Right. But it's no consent. And even because there's money involved, but like they're being drugged. Like it's really fucking crazy. If you turn up the volume,

[02:12:40] if you put closed captioning on, you keep on seeing subtitle woman number six. You have my enthusiasm. This is good. Yeah, please let's keep doing this. Come on. It's like the Pinocchio root beer moment. There's like woman 12. You have my enthusiasm.

[02:12:53] You and the plague doctor mask, you know, get over here. God, every time I've been watching WALL-E with the subtitles on, Disney Plus is always like WALL-E moans. Yeah, they'll keep doing the atmospheric subtitles. WALL-E in particular, it should all be fanatic.

[02:13:07] They should never describe a WALL-E sound. They should go like, eh, wah, wah. I've, you know, I've long sort of, I like to entertain the idea. Again, this is not some movie where it needs to be understood, but you know that this is just a ref,

[02:13:20] he's just having the same experience he had at the Pollock party as a nightmare, right? So he's watching a woman die. Yeah. He's in this weird, like, you know, place of rich people and power. Sure. And instead of like the refined thing he saw there

[02:13:35] with this sort of nasty incident in the bathroom, he's seeing this like weird nightmare version of it, right? And the same energy you get with like the bears, and like the bear guy giving the blowjob in The Shining, all of the goons.

[02:13:48] This movie has some of the best goons that have ever been. I mean, that guy with the grease back hair coming out of the back of his mask who goes up to him and he's like, your taxi is waiting. But you asking the question about like,

[02:14:01] is the guy who gives him the nod Pollock? It's once again, the point is he will never know. No, he'll never know. He finds out that Pollock was in that room, but he can't know for a fact that Pollock was the guy who nodded to him.

[02:14:12] And it's as disorienting. Maybe it was Kidman. When you're walking down the street, when you're in a public space and someone gives you like a nod or a wave and you're like, I have no idea who that is. I don't know if that was someone I don't remember.

[02:14:22] If it's someone who thought I was someone else, I will never get an answer to this, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that scene is just, it's just has such an incredible sort of super textual power to it. It's just like you, it has a hold on you,

[02:14:35] even if you don't always know why. And it seems silly in retrospect, as it would be like for any of the people at the orgy to talk about in clear terms later on, they sound ridiculous. I just also love that it's like his gait is wrong.

[02:14:47] This woman immediately like, She's like, you're in great danger, dude. Gotta get out of here. You fucking... And his mask is good. Credit to his mask. I think it's a great mask. The outfit's good. He's got the drip going. It's on point. Yeah. But uh... God.

[02:15:00] God, some of those other masks are so scary. You'd be pissed if you showed up to the orgy and like the plague doctor mask, and you had like a three foot, you know, protuberation, whatever, like sticking out of your face. Yeah.

[02:15:12] And you're like, oh, I'm now we're gonna go have sex with this girl. And you're like, I can't, you know, it's just sticking out of your face. Why didn't I just go with the black? Yeah, right. Yeah. So there's this thing that does feel staged in a way

[02:15:24] where the woman sacrifices herself, where it's almost like she's like, I invoke orgy law. Like I will give myself... I volunteer tribute. Yes. And then it's like, well, she invoked it, of course, because she is allowed, as we all know, the bylaws of the orgy.

[02:15:38] If only the stenic could work that clearly, right? Jesus. You are free to go, but don't come back. And it does... I do like the idea that when he leaves, they're all like, oh, that was great. That was great.

[02:15:50] And then we get like one of many great hard cuts. And then there's an hour of the movie to go. Well, yeah, because like, and you would think at the pace at which this movie's gone that we might get some business of him leaving and traveling home.

[02:16:00] But the second half of the movie is defined by these really hard, in some cases, like shot cuts to like time passing. He's in the... Whereas up until this point, there's been a lot of crossfade. A lot of walking. A lot of walking, but a lot of crossfades.

[02:16:11] He's been fucking Edward Burns again. I saw Edward Burns on the sidewalks of New York the other day. I texted you guys immediately. He looked... Like a snack. Yeah, he's a handsome guy. It was pretty absurd. He's a handsome guy and he's from Brooklyn.

[02:16:28] I saw a movie once called 27 Dresses and the moral of that movie is that Edward Burns is very handsome. That's true. Don't trust him though. It's the moral of the holiday in every other movie he was in. You were talking about how it's like this absurdly handsome guy

[02:16:40] and his career became like, I'm a schmo in his own movies. And then other people's movies, it's like, don't fall in love with this. I'm a real jerk. But no, no, it was the rewatchables did Saving Private Ryan and they were just like,

[02:16:51] it's so weird that he was like, I'm the next Woody Allen. And then every movie he writes and directs, he's like, I just can't get laid in this city. God, I'm so angsty. To Christie Turlington, you're doing great. He went from Heather Graham to Christie Turlington.

[02:17:09] They've been married for like 20 years. He looked incredible. So the entire time I said Fidelio, he was like, but so he gets home and it turns out that, you know, Nicole Kidman's been having a night of her own and she's been having this crazy dream. Which is right.

[02:17:30] Yeah, there were intercutting with these fantasy sequences. He's dreaming about her getting rogered. Right. I mean, it's him imagining what she described imagining, right? Like cabin. So we're like old British joke. We're like, we're like two degrees away from reality, right? It's his conception of her conception

[02:17:49] of what this hypothetical affair would have been like. And Kubrick didn't let Cruise on set when they were filming the show. Famously, this is the biggest part of this sort of like psychological torture, quote unquote concept. So Cruise was really caught up in the,

[02:18:03] I don't know what happened on that set, especially because Kubrick was like, we're going to film you in every position. Like you are going to be involved in the process. You have final approval for what happens. But I want to get a lot of footage

[02:18:15] of a lot of different sexual acts. And Cruise just has no ability to watch this. No oversight of this. When you think about every movie after this, he is the main producer, save for Magnolia. He is a guy who is involved in every single aspect of production.

[02:18:30] And it's like his first movie as a producer is Mission Impossible right before this. And then he makes two movies where he doesn't have control. And then he goes back to, I never don't have control again. Yeah. Must've driven him crazy. Yeah, it probably was pretty intense.

[02:18:48] Making this movie seemed pretty intense. And she was similarly in the dark with what he was filming. And as Kubrick notoriously does, a lot of the scenes would get rewritten on the day. They'd improvise. They'd rewrite based on the improvs. They'd refine the scene.

[02:19:02] I mean, the process of this movie was they built these sets and he would like get there in the morning and spend hours figuring out the lighting scheme with like a Polaroid camera doing tests. And then Todd Field said they filmed only at nights.

[02:19:14] So they would show up and the set was like perfectly lit to his specifications. And then they'd get there with the script pages and they go like, so let's figure out what we're shooting. And then it was a couple hours of like litigating,

[02:19:24] like let's get rid of this. What feels more natural, this and that. And then once the scene has taken shape, it's like everything's set to go. Now we're just going to do it a million times until I feel happy. But they didn't have to be there for lighting,

[02:19:35] for blocking. You know, it was like... But there's this feeling of like this psychic connection between Alice and Bill and what's going on there. Like he's enacting it in the physical world, so to speak. And she is dreaming, although it could be said that he's in a dream

[02:19:46] and she is, you know, somewhere else. But that they had both been having this twinned experience in a way. Right, she had this sort of dream of an orgy as well, like essentially. But he was witnessing it and she was laughing at it. Right.

[02:19:58] And she's very upset about it. This is, I think, her best scene in the book. It is. It's an incredible scene. And it's kind of her last big scene in a way until she says fuck, right? And I would flip her a supporting actress.

[02:20:10] But she also, like she does more in like cuts and like one shots where she doesn't say anything. Like when they... After he tells her the whole night later on in the movie where she's just bleary-eyed, that it's just devastating. Yes.

[02:20:22] There's also that one time they cut to early and she's like watching TV and smoking. Yeah. That was just one glimpse of her. Yeah. What a movie. So now we're in the cold light of day. Yes, it's truly the cold light of day.

[02:20:33] You go to the hotel to find Nick. Nick was checked out by some very big man. And so it tells us... I love that he's like kind of... I just love when someone's like, I'm a detective, right? There's a mystery and I need to solve it.

[02:20:46] But they're not drawn to it because they're being paid as a private investigator and they're a cop. It's just like... They gotta know. He has to know. He's so driven. Yeah. But I think Alan Cumming kills this. This is the guy who's like, I'm a bit naughty.

[02:20:59] I want to tell you something. There were very big men that took him out. You know, like that's sort of like, you know... And just love for like, is he titillated by this? Is he testing Cruz's sexuality? There's a... I mean, so we now have, you know,

[02:21:13] this first random encounter with another character after that long night. And we're having the same sort of flicker of desire that someone's pulled to him. Yeah. But I mean, I think it's possible to see sort of like a homophobic reading of this because the reality of it now

[02:21:26] that it's sort of in the cold light of day and it's less pleasant is that it's a gay man who's coming on to him rather than a woman. I don't know if I necessarily believe that, but I do think that there's an element of like,

[02:21:38] the sexual interest in Bill now is starkly unwanted. Yeah, right. Bill's like, I already... Yeah. Yeah. That's more my read of it. He goes... It's a thing he's not tempted by. He goes to get the cloak back. And at that point, Millich is just sort of like,

[02:21:55] yeah, I don't care what my daughter's doing. The two businessmen come out and the daughter comes out after him. And he's like, last night you were saying those guys would get arrested. You couldn't call the fucking cops on me. He's like, we figure things out.

[02:22:04] And now he's confronted by the horror of this guy prostituting his 15-year-old daughter. Then offers him up to Cruz. And before you have that moment when he traps the two businessmen in the glass cage, she hides behind Cruz. Yeah, and he can kind of convince himself like,

[02:22:18] okay, maybe this was... He can explain it away to himself. Not in logical terms, but in just of like, the feeling of the moment. But also there's almost a like, maybe I saved her. The fact that I woke the dad up, that he had to come downstairs,

[02:22:31] that he caught her, she's hiding behind me. Right, right. Right in fact. I'm the noble man. And now it's like, she's being served up to you on a platter. But one detail I really, really love is when he goes to the diner in a string of great diners

[02:22:43] in this movie to inquire about Nick Nightingale. And the woman who works at the diner next to Club Sonata where he plays knows where he's staying. Yeah. Which is like, what's been going on here? This weird New York is a small town. Well, it's also, you know,

[02:22:58] maybe his pants are a small town. Hey, wait, hey. It is so funny for how much this movie gets clocked with this, like the artificial New York thing. The few establishing shots that do exist as a kid who grew up in like Park Avenue. Manhattan, right?

[02:23:15] But there's like, they go to 11th and University at one point, which is very close to where I grew up and stuff. Oh, right. Thank you. It has like real time capsules. Right, he goes to Great Dog and he gets number seven.

[02:23:25] It was like my dad trying to get the recession special. Where does he get the pound cake from? I don't know. Dean DeLuca maybe? Yeah, sure. But I just, I was... Dreaming DeLuca. Every time... It's funny to show up to pound cake where a sex worker works.

[02:23:40] Well, it's very... He should have brought the pound cake to the orgy. Yeah. Heard there's some pounding going on. I mean, do you think they would have treated him differently if he brought snacks? That actually, if he was like, what's the second best one?

[02:23:49] I don't know, but I have this pound cake. Oh, good! You should say so. Go to that room. There's some really good stuff going on in there. 4am, I'm high as hell. Can you pass it over? Not like that idiot who brought the chassis.

[02:24:02] You know how much fucking incense I've been breathing? I appreciate it, Griffin. Thank you. No, I was just gonna say the like six establishing shots of real New York that do exist in this movie felt like, like really... They're jarring.

[02:24:14] No, but for me, it's like time capsule shit where I'm like, oh, you actually, in a very clean wide shot held for a few seconds, have a perfect snapshot of what this block looked like exactly 23 years ago. Yeah. He goes... The most real New York.

[02:24:30] He does what I would not do, I gotta be honest, which is he drives back to the orgy house. I'm looking at Ben's notes. Oh, Ben's notes are very... Usually Ben writes his notes on a yellow legal pad. Today, it looks like the scribblings of a serial killer.

[02:24:44] It looks like Mr. Detective... He just wrote, forget your inquiries, which are completely useless. And give up your inquiries. I mean, I just love... He's underlying Fidelio and circled it 40 times. Alan Cum is doing something here. Okay. I like calling him Alan Cum. The fear... Like the...

[02:25:07] I just think it's so impressive and scary. Your poor name, Alan Cum. Yes. To hand a typed Richard Seaman... Be quiet. You shut up. I should hand him a note. Just a typed Times New Roman note. They had it waiting with his name on it.

[02:25:26] He's gonna fucking show up. Get those notes. Yeah, right. So scary. Then he goes to see Domino. I guess sort of doing the thing of like, maybe I should have just had sex with the beautiful woman who offered herself to me. Right.

[02:25:46] Guinness Book of World Record Breaking Time is in a sexual entanglement with her from the moment he opens the door. I mean, he is like across the precipice. And I'd say like three split seconds later is face to face.

[02:25:57] It's the moment where it feels like he's finally getting into this idea where it's like, does everyone want to fuck me? Am I a guy who can walk into any room and just immediately enact upon people their greatest desires? Right.

[02:26:08] And she's like, I look, I'm attracted to you, but you don't understand. I'm about to give you terrible news. Right. Because timing could not be worse. Right. So Domino had just learned that she's HIV positive. She's not there. Sally, her roommate is there, played by Faye Masterson. Yeah.

[02:26:27] And then... Cruz is like, he's still in the fun flirtation mode with her when she's like, I gotta tell you something. I mean, he's trying to like get that innocence that sort of like, she wants to be back.

[02:26:36] And they hold on this like sort of high angle over the shoulder shot of him getting the news and he's grinning like a fucking doofus because he thinks she's going to tell him something salacious. And him just being stuck there with this dumb smirk on his face,

[02:26:52] like a fucking goober while she drops the HIV bomb. And it's like, he knows he didn't sleep with her. Right. He knows he isn't contagious, but it's this immediate like sliding door. But it's also this immediate of like, like, fuck,

[02:27:05] like I really need to think about what I have going with my life. Right, right. Like what I need to get, like we need to go have a conversation. Just this like very sobering splash of reality of, you know, the idea of mysterious sex partners.

[02:27:18] It's like, no, they have lives and problems and struggles. And some of those struggles are created by sex. You can't just go around and fuck people, Tom Cruz. Yeah, I mean, it's not it's not anti like a sex negative movie,

[02:27:30] but it is saying that like you fuck around, you find out like movie, like things, choices that you make in life have consequences. Which was the one title for this movie? It was, it was. That was the title of like 30 years.

[02:27:39] Then we just changed to the last minute. But like the things, the choices you make have these, these like far reaching complications and consequences that you will never really be able to know. And that there are those that come from,

[02:27:50] you know, binding yourself to another person in a relationship. And there are those that come from doing the opposite. These people exist beyond just being objects of your desire. These signposts of temptation, whether you give into them or not.

[02:28:03] Yes. And then, of course, the last thing before he goes to see Ziegler is that he finds Mandy's body. Mandy, the person from the bathroom at the start of the movie. And so then he goes to see Ziegler and it's, this is really my favorite scene.

[02:28:18] What about the walking in the piano? When he's getting followed. It's pretty good. Dude, dude, if I was walking by myself. And you heard that piano? I heard that piano. I would shit my fucking pants. Georgie Ligeti is standing behind you on a little piano.

[02:28:32] They're only playing Brownie. Truly. Yeah. And there's, what was I gonna say? Right. And there's that moment where he like leans in to kiss her maybe. Yeah. Like and he stops himself. But it's this like really in dialogue with the reality or lack thereof in the situation.

[02:28:49] He's trying to force himself into feeling a realness that didn't come through to him when he saw that she had died in the paper. And like there's, it's really... On the doubleheader with hearing the domino thing, where it's like he doesn't even hear that from her,

[02:29:02] she immediately becomes an abstraction to him. He knows he's probably never gonna see her again. Now this other woman is dead. He can never speak to her again. You know? And I just like, I love the cutaway.

[02:29:10] It's the morgue worker who's just like looking down at the floor being just like... Right. But like he needs Ziegler to tell him not to worry about it. Right? Like that's what I love about this scene so much. He needs to be relieved of this.

[02:29:23] And he wants answers and he's fucked up. But he also, he kind of wants Ziegler to be like, look, that line where he's like, her door was locked from the inside, cops said suicide. You're like, oh wow, you really know the specifics of this case. Yeah.

[02:29:37] Like she died like eight minutes ago. Yeah, what the fuck? She's a junkie, you know. You saw me injecting shit in her and then fucking her brains out. Podcasting her brains. It's so... Sorry, snowball. He's so scary and effective in this scene.

[02:29:52] Him like, you know, playing with a pool table. Sidney Pollack just explains to you how it is. Yes. It's just one of the greatest special effects in the last 40 years of cinema. One of the creepiest things is like he's playing pool by himself

[02:30:06] and he's just like, Tom Cruise is like, I'll just watch. And it's like these two adult men of like vast power. One in particular, just like watch me play this. It's also like, do you play? And he's like, no, not really.

[02:30:16] This rich person thing of like, I guess I just need to have a billiards table. Right, I guess I've got so many damn rooms. Why would there be a billiards room? Just like Mr. Body from Clue. I gotta be better than Mr. Body.

[02:30:27] They should call Sidney Pollack Mr. Body. They should have called him. Well, he's got one. I do just watch this and I'm like, can I just like jump forward 20 years? You're really desperate to get that Pollack barrel. It's not a guarantee though.

[02:30:38] As an actor, I don't want to be fucking 33. I'm not taking for granted that I'm just going to age magically into that. That bearish body that he's got. I'm gonna have to work for it. You're gonna have to work for it. That's the thing.

[02:30:49] And it's like, it's a hard work I don't want to go through. He played a lot of golf, right? You know, I feel like he was one of those guys who did kind of like rich guy. Yeah, maybe he had really strong forearms. Yeah, right, right.

[02:30:58] This scene, the energy of this scene, the rhythms of the scene. It's like there is that sort of magic to it where it feels like a piece of music. And it's just, it all flows so beautifully.

[02:31:08] And you remember like you would a great song, like every line from it. It sort of bonds to your memory in a way that. He's just, he's incredible. It's so inscrutable because it does feel like he's shifting between like, you need to believe me.

[02:31:20] I'm actually giving you the truth now. And sometimes emphatically explain something to him that he knows is what Cruz wants to hear so that he doesn't have to worry about this anymore. Exactly. Just to get it out of his head.

[02:31:30] Sometimes it absolutely feels like Pollack knows this is bullshit and knows that he knows it's bullshit. But now I've given you the ability to deny it. Because he's saying like it was a charade. And also she just went and died of an overdose minutes later.

[02:31:45] But sometimes, at moments. And he's just sort of like, am I supposed to buy that? I believe him. And that's the thing, he's such an effective actor. Right, well because he wants to do the same thing that Bill was doing in his own way,

[02:31:54] in less violent terms earlier in the movie, which is be the hero. Be like the person who's pulling him up saying like, it's OK, I'm saving you. And also, you know, exert power over him and say,

[02:32:03] you know, I'm scaring the shit out of you at the same time. And Nick is fine. But that's the thing, he's also like, he's like, Nick is fine, that prick. Yeah, but then he's also like, you don't understand how scary these people are. Right.

[02:32:13] And so I get, what am I supposed to walk out of there thinking? Like, oh yeah, like they're the scariest people on earth. But if you betray them, like no big deal. They'll rough you up a little bit maybe.

[02:32:24] And so when he gets home and he sees the mask on the pillow and he starts crying for his fucking, you know. Right, because Richard Bayes charged him extra for the misadventure. Because $5 is pretty good price. I think that's every time that mask fucking look great.

[02:32:38] No, that's an ornate mask. Yeah, but you know, it probably falls back of a truck, a Venetian mask truck. Knowing that guy, why is the mask there? Like, it doesn't matter. Like, it's just this sort of like perfect, you know,

[02:32:53] like you don't, you don't really think about it. Like, shaming around the apartment and like looking for what's, you know, like looking for stuff for Christmas. It doesn't matter. But him crying is just so cathartic. And like, what could she, what would you infer if you came home

[02:33:06] and saw a mask, you know, on your partner's or you like, you know, you found that mask in your partner's space in your apartment? Like, what would you... I would have some very excited questions. I'd be like, tell me all about it. Tell me what you do.

[02:33:18] You'd be like, who is this? His parents came home from a movie when he was a kid. Like, tell me all about it. Tell me everything. It truly, I would remember if they'd go out for a movie night

[02:33:26] and it was like, I'm supposed to be in bed at this point. The movie's long. I would stay awake just so I could get the 15 minute rundown of what's your feeling on Titanic? Right. Yeah. Right. But that's not Nicole Kidman's vibe in this scene, I would say.

[02:33:39] She was, she has questions, she has concerns. But there is, I love that cut so much when she goes, just tell me everything. And then it's like a hard cut to her face, like completely bloodshot having been up all night

[02:33:54] waiting for their daughter to wake up and be like, what is happening? It isn't funny. Her daughter, by the way, their daughter, blissfully oblivious. I was going to say, it's funny how much of a non-present she is in this movie, but you also have to imagine logistically,

[02:34:05] much like the AI thing. They had to do it early. Right. We have to do it early and we got just get a couple things with the daughter. Because this daughter can't be 13 years old. All of a sudden.

[02:34:13] She graduated from college by the time they were finished filming. Um, they go to FAO Schwartz. Right. Which is what's the name of this Hemings? It's a, no, Henley's. Henley's, sorry. Yeah. Isn't it Henley's? I think it's Henley's. Yeah. But doubling for FAO Schwartz.

[02:34:29] I love that there were Spice Girls dolls in the back. Hamley's. Sorry, I did go. Hamley's is the British FAO Schwartz. I'm sure it's awful now, but like when I was a kid, I remember my dad being like, let's go to the most famous toy store in Britain.

[02:34:40] Yeah. Right. And obviously FAO Schwartz doesn't exist in the form it did back then, but it's a place that is very distinctive. Iconographic has been used in movies like big, you know that this doesn't look anything. No, it looks like I've been. Yeah, you're right.

[02:34:52] There are the Spice Girls dolls in the background, which I love because it's one of the only things that stamps this movie to specific period in time culturally. When they're having the pot fight and she gets up and starts like yelling at him on the bookcase behind her,

[02:35:07] there's like her stereo system. Novelization. But they're also like six VHS tapes, and I was scrubbing through it trying to make out. But you couldn't? I couldn't. And I was like, I can tell it's a fucking Paramount. I can see the typeface.

[02:35:19] I almost thought one of them was Rain Man. And I was like, is he putting a cruise movie in there by accident? On purpose. But I couldn't make out what they were. 2001 soundtrack in Clark Garten. Yeah, I just love the Spice Girls thing is the one concrete thing

[02:35:33] where you're like, this is where they stand in relation. You knew they were going to last forever. He did. He was like, these guys are never breaking up. Just like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Yeah, and all the orgy rooms were actually named.

[02:35:43] It was there's the ginger room, the baby. Well, no, the baby room. That's distressing. David. Well, it's weird that there's baby Spice. Okay, let's be honest. That was weird. And everyone seemed to sort of just doesn't fucking not think about like a baby.

[02:35:56] Well, that's why it was weird. Yeah, it was like, what am I supposed to take away from this? Anyway, he apologizes. He's told her everything at this point. We're assuming. I mean, he says he's going to tell her everything, right?

[02:36:08] It would be great if there was actually a scene where he was like, then there was this Slovenian guy. She smokes another choice. She's like, dude, this is crazy. This movie. You did this all night. Bolero form is the what form of you ripped $100 bill, you asshole.

[02:36:27] And that's the one part she was really disgusting. I thought we just give him the did you give him tape? So he had to then go home by tape retape it himself. I didn't have any tape on me. I only had hundreds.

[02:36:39] That's what the sequel should pick up on the catalog with that guy. No, the sequel should end the last shot of the credit post credit should be like airplane where he's like, I'm going to give this guy 10 more minutes. All right, that'll be funny.

[02:36:52] There should be a post credit. Yeah, like he goes back to the cabbie after he leaves the orgy. And the guy was like, so how was it? There's something you need to do as soon as possible. What's that? Fuck.

[02:37:05] One of the end of cut to play, which is shot, which I detail I love so much is that it's one of the only scenes in the movie and one of the rare scenes in Kubrick's filmography that he shoots just very standard over the shoulder coverage.

[02:37:16] And it's sort of this return to normalcy in a way of like a back to, you know, happy upper class marriage, you know, without any funny business going on. I also feel like this movie has more organic compositions than Kubrick had been trending, right?

[02:37:31] You look at like, I mean, formal jacket right before this. And it's like everything is so perfectly composed and symmetrical and tight and sharp and clean. And it's like this movie is fuzzier. It's looser. You know, he briefly considered using the Barry Lyndon lenses for this

[02:37:47] because he knew he wanted to have a similar lighting scheme. The warm glow. And it was partially that like film speeds had increased so much that the lenses weren't appropriate anymore. But the other thing was he was like, I want to have camera movements.

[02:37:56] I want to be looser in this. I don't want to have to be like constrained by these technical limitations. I remember a film teacher saying to me at a time where I still thought, oh, the line on this movie is that it sucks.

[02:38:08] And anyone who thinks it's good is an idiot because I was an idiot. But her saying like, I don't really like Kubrick because I find his stuff too hermetic and controlled. You know, the obvious Kubrick complaint that people throw out.

[02:38:19] And she's like, the one I like is Eyes Wide Shut because it's the only one of his movies that doesn't just feel like a series of photographs to me. And I've always thought about that where it does feel like his most sort of organic movie since The Killing.

[02:38:34] Yeah, I can see that. I also just want to say that my read on the end of the movie is not that it's a return to normal necessarily. I mean, there's like a feeling of destruction, a feeling of renewal.

[02:38:42] It reminds me a lot like the more recent analog I think of is the ending of Before Midnight of like we are coming to grips about what it means to be together as a couple. Right. And the ins and outs that the fact that desire exists in marriage

[02:38:55] and outside of marriage and this idea that like, you know, we are still being people, but we are going to sort of choose to forge ahead knowing the perils involved. I mean, like any successful marriage is essentially like six or seven different marriages.

[02:39:10] When people stay married for decades, Yeah, it involves. They talk about that. They're like every seven years, the whole structure of the relationship changes. And, you know, if you're lucky, when you both change, you find a new way to be simpatical in your current form.

[02:39:23] But it's also a film sort of about how the mist, when you are just with one person for the rest of your adult life, every small corner of darkness, every shadow is magnified so large. Every mysterious element that you discover and would have assumed didn't exist

[02:39:36] because you knew your partner inside and out is suddenly like a cataclysmic urgency. Yeah. And, you know, that is sort of the void that you get trapped. Wait, you think people can pick up on that stuff? Over time, like, You're safe. That stuff kind of comes out.

[02:39:54] That Bones hat is pulling all the attention. Eyes Wide Shut, five out of five, a plus. Six out of five. My final take. I don't know if it's my favorite or Barry Lyndon is my favorite. I'm giving this the edge. It's got seniority for you as well.

[02:40:13] It does. You're newer to Barry. Barry Lyndon will unfold for me in further viewings in a different way. But it's what you said earlier, like, it's that thing that is so rare where you find a movie that it feels like every time you come to it,

[02:40:26] you find new things in it, both because you've changed and there are so many different prisms at which to view the thing. It's kind of that's that tier of like, the greatest films are the ones in which it will mean something different to you

[02:40:39] any time you watch it based on what mood you're in, where you are in your life, all that sort of stuff. Like it explains to you back to you sort of where you are in your life and become.

[02:40:49] And that is, I think, an added value, like a utilitarian value. Yes, it's just like it remembers for you who you are and who you were and who you've been. It's fascinating for that. It's an incredible film, a stat I will remember forever is that 1999,

[02:41:03] obviously this historic year for American film, right? This sort of not last gasp. It's a big old tour year where movies were at the center of the cultural discourse and everything. But 99, a particularly big blockbuster summer, right? It was a summer with like just beloved populist favorites

[02:41:25] and even things like Phantom Menace that were, you know, complicated. Massive, massive success, obviously. The stat I remember was that summer was so successful. Eyes Wide Shut was only one of two movies to open between May and August that opened at number one and didn't hit $100 million.

[02:41:43] Like Final Curse, right? Yeah, yeah. Every other film that opened to number one was like soaring to success. It sank quite quickly. Can you name the other one? What's the other one? The Haunting. The two Todd Field movies. But it spoke in both cases.

[02:41:58] There was like hype, great trailer. People saw it, disappointed. Don't go see it. And similar quality movies with similar care behind the camera. And movies had longer legs back then. No, they did. But also a lot of the movies we're talking about are-

[02:42:10] Blair Witch, Runaway Bride, Sixth Sense, Phantom Menace. Okay, okay, let's play the box office game. July 16th, 1999. Yeah. Eyes Wide Shut number one, $21 million. I mean, not nothing. No, and once again, sold on nothing other than what the fuck is this movie? But it is cursed.

[02:42:25] The two biggest movie stars, this elusive master filmmaker who's dead. Yeah. And what did he leave behind? There's a lot of hype. Very elusive. The ultimate elusiveness. Just true mystery box movie. Yeah, opening at 21 million. Very healthy.

[02:42:37] Insane to imagine a movie like this having this level of success. A 21 million dollar opening today. I mean, Don't Worry Darling is kind of- It is the closest comparison. It is where you're just like, everyone's just so obsessed by the idea of what happened with this fucking movie.

[02:42:50] What is this fucking thing? And I imagine that movie will also drop off in a similar way. There was initially at the eight news cycles of Don't Worry Darling nonsense ago, there was a lot of talk about the sex in that movie.

[02:43:01] Yeah, it is kind of the only analog, just not an analog in terms of quality. Number two, speaking of sex, is a sexy comedy. Do you think Stanley was jealous of Will Smith having Big Willy Weekend and was like, I'm going to have Big Stanley Weekend?

[02:43:14] July 16th is Big Stanley Weekend. Yes, absolutely. I will hold claim on this. I will release one new film every 17 years. Right. He did famously refer to himself as Big Stanley. What? Number two, it's a sexy comedy. American Pie? Directed by a friend of ours.

[02:43:28] It's American Pie in its second week. Jim Statham wiggling those eyebrows. Absolutely. It's only dropped- See this Eyes Wide Shut picture? Jim Statham, is that the orgy? You could see his eyebrows over the mask. Oh boy, back in my day. Dropping only 28% in its second week.

[02:43:47] It's a huge hit. This is what I'm saying. These movies in 99, they played. They stayed in theaters. They were word of mouth hits. Number three is less of a word of mouth hit, but it was a modest hit of the time. It's new this week.

[02:44:01] It's a horror comedy. Idle Hands? No, that was a bomb. No, no, no. 1999, it's a horror comedy. Huh. What kind of- You know what? I'm going to- I don't think I've done this before. I'm going to ask for the box office game.

[02:44:18] Hint, the thing I find most useful doing- Go ahead. The box office game online. What studio released it? The studio is 20th Century Box. It's not Ravenous. No. No, Ravenous made like negative $4. These are the great horror comedies of 1999.

[02:44:36] That thing was released in like a sewer on Venus. It's new this weekend, July, horror comedy, 1999. I can give you a further elaboration on its genre. Is it like a Kevin Williamson adjacent post-scream thing? No. Give me a further elaboration. Creature film. Is it Lake Placid? Lake Placid.

[02:44:54] There we go. Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, aka The Big Three. Yes. David E. Kelly's script. It's a big crock. Forget that it's as much of a comedy as it is. It is. It is a comedy though. I mean, it's a- No, it is. It is.

[02:45:08] And it was sort of like a mild hit. Yeah. Is Deep Blue Sea the same summer? Yeah. That's August. Yeah. And that movie was congressionally mandated to be released in August. No movie has ever been more released in August than Deep Blue Sea.

[02:45:22] They made the shark's brains bigger and they got smarter. They were like, we need every high school lifeguard who's fully cooked his brain on pot for two months before he sees Deep Blue Sea. Deep Blue Sea is one of those movies where you're like,

[02:45:33] how much are they in on the joke or not? And Lake Placid, you're like, I'm surprised there are this many jokes. Yes, this is heavy on jokes. Ellen Skarsgard's death scene in Deep Blue Sea is just- There's a lot of good death scenes in Deep Blue Sea.

[02:45:44] LL Cool J put a song out. Yeah. Deep is bluest. My head is like a shark's head. My head is like a shark's fin. I've forgotten a lot of stuff in my life. Talk about cooking your brain with weed. But I- He just pointed to Simms.

[02:45:57] Remember, my head is like a shark's fin. I think about it once a year. It's the most insane lyric that's ever been written down and then turned into a song. Talk about things you probably forgot in your life, Ben. Yeah.

[02:46:12] Someone dug up, this will happen where people will listen to old episodes of the show and then post on social media like, I listened to this episode from five years ago. The boys predicted this thing. In our Mrs. Peregrine episode,

[02:46:24] you were talking about how much you liked the character that was the girl with the secret mouth in the back of her head. And you were like, they should have done more with her. It should have its own personality and should be nasty like a venom.

[02:46:35] You essentially pitched malignant five years ago. You malignant. Malignanted. I mean, should I try and get paid for that? Yeah, definitely hit up James Wan. Yeah. All right. Number four, the box office. Spoilers for malignant. HBO Max famously happy to just spread money. They love paying out.

[02:46:50] Yeah, they love it. Name number four of the box office is a straight up comedy with a movie star. Movie star comedy. It's a movie star. It's not. Been out for a month. No. Oh, okay. So it's a June. It's a June comedy with a major movie star.

[02:47:02] No, no, that's August. It's made $134 million. Is it Notting Hill? No. Notting Hill has made 107 and it's been out for two months. Okay. It's not a Curie. It's not a Williams. No.

[02:47:13] Uh, it's a, it's a, is you said it's a major star, but it's a major comedy star. Yes. Is it Eddie? No. It's not Eddie. It's not a Robin. It's like a shark. It's not a Curie. Ella Coojay is not in this film. Then major star.

[02:47:27] Oh, oh, oh. Is it Austin Powers' Spider-Shag Me? No. That's number 11. A movie that at the time had the second highest grossing opening weekend of all time. Yes. That's number seven. Okay. Number two. Number 11. Number. This movie is number one at the box office. Four.

[02:47:42] It's been out for a month. Yes. It's up to 130. Yep. Its total gross is 163. Oh, it's Big Daddy. Big Daddy. Big Daddy. Uh, with Adam Sandler. Remember we got the Jon Stewart bump. Yes. Good. Much like The Faculty.

[02:47:57] Uh, yeah, kind of a, I just remember being so fucking treacly at the end. Yeah. But that's sort of the Sandler thing. Works for me. I think it's a good balance of it. I haven't seen it in a long time.

[02:48:07] You've also talked about, I mean, since becoming a father, not having rewatched it, but how much... I'm becoming a Big Daddy. Since becoming, you are a Big Daddy. Yeah. One must admit. I won't lie. I look at the size of this lad.

[02:48:19] No, I feel like you've talked about since becoming a parent without having rewatched the movie, how much the McDonald's scene brings into it. The McDonald's scene, it's immediately what I thought of again. This is horseshit! Right.

[02:48:29] And then he starts crying because it's like, yeah, I think about that a lot. But now, of course, you can get breakfast all day at McDonald's. So the scene is irrelevant. The set up to that scene is like they miss it.

[02:48:37] They miss it by like 10 minutes or something. Less, and it's like he stops to tie his shoes a couple of times. He has to pee and then he wants to give money to Buscemi's crazy eyes. So it's like there are all these windows where he almost makes it

[02:48:48] and he just cannot fucking deal with letting this get down. Yeah. Good movie. Sure. Number five of the box office is kind of a famous flop, but it still has made 94 on its way to 113. It's an action film. Wild Wild West. It's Wild Wild West. Big Willy Weekend.

[02:49:03] Because the Big Willy Weekend had recently happened. A movie I was so excited for. I saw it. I was like, hmm, I guess I don't like everything. Truly from scene one, you're like vibes are off. It starts about as bad as it ever gets.

[02:49:18] But Kenneth Branagh gives a really reserved and nuanced performance. Great performance rooted in the history and culture of the American South. It was confusing because I remember being in the theater and going like, did they accidentally switch to a reel of a documentary?

[02:49:31] Are we watching a Wiseman film suddenly? Yeah, it's Ken Burns. I've got the editing room and put a spin on it. His name's Dr. Loveless because he has no penis. He's got no finger. And everything he builds overcompensates. He drives a giant mechanical spider.

[02:49:44] He's got the giant pneumatic pumping thing. Yes, he does. Number six, just to give you some other ones, new this week is Rick Familiar's The Wood. Oh, good. Which is a pretty good movie. Maybe you make another movie challenge. I know. I know.

[02:49:58] Remember he was going to do The Flash for a second? He was going to do Flash. It felt like right now he's in the fucking Star Wars TV rotation. Which he does actually a pretty good job on those episodes. I want him to make a movie.

[02:50:07] Number seven, Tarzan. Yeah, fine, Phil. I think that movie's winner. You'll be in my heart. I haven't seen it since theater. You're in my family. Number eight is… I didn't see Tarzan because I was just like, I'm seeing Eyes Wide Shut now. Like the Tarzan days are over.

[02:50:24] I went and saw Tarzan and was like, I feel like I'm ready to watch that. Me too. Even as a baby. I was just a baby who likes dumb baby shit. I was like… Number eight is a little film called Star Wars Episode One, The Phantom Menace.

[02:50:36] It's weird that they never made a sequel to that considering how big of a hit it was. Number nine is a genre of movie from the 90s, you know, like Eyes Wide Shut, the nasty sort of crime thriller. The General's Daughter is the movie.

[02:50:51] One of those movies where it's like, this is just kind of 20% nastier than it could be 10 years ago. Also, that movie is nastier than it needs to be. I mean, it's like a really violent, ugly movie about raiding. But $100 million. Made $100 million. 99 was just like everything.

[02:51:06] And this is the thing, it's number nine and it's made 87. It's going to get to 102. Yeah. It's just going to fucking churn away. These movies like legged it out for four months and you're seeing so many… Like none of these films are cannibalizing each other.

[02:51:19] Number 10, new this week, Muppets from Space. Horrible opening. Yeah. It's opening below the fifth weekend of The General's Daughter. People get mad at me for saying this. A bad film. I think a bad film. It's the only movie I don't like.

[02:51:32] The only other interesting thing about this box office is that new this week on 27 screens, making $1.5 million. The Blair Witch Project. Holy shit. Holy shit. Wow. I was about to get real obsessed with that movie. That movie fucking rules.

[02:51:45] Sort of the opposite of a Blank Check movie, but… And we would never do those careers. But maybe we could do… But we should just do it. We could do the Blair Witch Trilogy on Patreon. That would be fun to do. Yes.

[02:51:53] As a Patreon, you guys could recreate the Blair Witch Project. I wonder what it would be like. Oh, the bits. The Blank Check Project. If we… I actually might… I might be too scared of that. I'm just facing a corner.

[02:52:03] Like if we went in the woods and Ben was like, whatever, making weird noises outside the tent. You know how the whole thing with that movie was like, they made this for only $40,000. What if we gave ourselves the opposite challenge?

[02:52:12] We have to figure out a way to make our episode expensive enough that it costs $40,000. The only thing left to do is rank Stanley Kubrick, and then I really have to go. And we also have to figure out… I finally followed the…

[02:52:23] Oh, yeah, we gotta make Avatar plans. We're gonna be talking TAR soon. You guys are going back to Pandora? Well, I guess at this point, we'll have already come out. It'll have already happened. We're gonna be on the big picture to talk Avatar.

[02:52:32] So we want to go see it before we do that. We gotta go back to Pandora. I'm trying to convince David to go see it in 4DX. We can… I think we can do that. It's just… We have to do it in the daytime, that's all.

[02:52:42] Okay, we'll do it. We'll make the plans right after this. We're gonna do it right after this. I have 4DX passes burning a hole in my wallet. I don't even know what that means, but okay. Just a minute. When I saw Hobbs and Shaw, the spritzer wasn't working.

[02:52:52] Okay, I'm gonna give you my Kubrick. I finally did the thing I should have been doing this entire time where I've been keeping… You did the letterbox. The fucking letterbox list and updating after every episode.

[02:53:01] So I have a proper list that I'm not making up on the fly. Okay. Do yours first. You want me to do it first? Yeah, why not? Number 13, Fear and Desire. Although I do agree with the sort of context,

[02:53:13] I think we did not give it in the episode that Alex Ross Perry put in our head where it's like… It is important for that film to exist to humanize him, to make his other accomplishments more impressive because it's not like this guy was just

[02:53:26] touched with genius and knew how to make movies better than everyone else. Did we get to three hours? We're over three hours for fuck's sake. Number 12, Lolita. Yes. Number 11, Killer's Kiss. Yeah. Number 10, Spartacus. We have the same bottom four. Okay, now here's where we're gonna deep dip. Okay.

[02:53:41] Number 9, Dr. Strange Lover, How I Learned to Stop Worrying. Wow, you have it at nine. I just don't love that movie. It's not one of my things. Okay. Number 8, The Killing. Me too. Number 7, Full Metal Jacket. Okay. Number 6, Clockwork Orange. Number 5, Paths of Glory. Number 4, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

[02:53:59] Number 3, The Shining. Number 2, Barry Lyndon. Number 1, Darkman. Sorry, Eyes Wide Shut. We have very similar lists. Yeah, I imagine just a... I'll do mine top to bottom just to... Jacket. It's a little... But really, one Barry Lyndon. Yeah. Two, Eyes Wide Shut. Three, 2001. Four, The Shining.

[02:54:18] So we have the same top four in there. Right. I agree. Yeah. Five, Dr. Strange Love. Yeah. Six, Paths of Glory. Seven, Clockwork Orange. Eight, The Killing. Nine, Full Metal Jacket. Ten, Spartacus. Eleven, Koskis. Twelve, Lelita. Thirteen, Killing Disrespect. Pretty good to put it below Clockwork Orange.

[02:54:36] What are you talking about? It's a great movie. I think it rules. Killing rules. Yeah. Dare I? Yeah, it's great. I'm not beefing with The Killing. It's a Stanley Kubrick list. I'm not putting it below fucking Dennis Dugan's movies. I like that Barry's at your top. Yeah.

[02:54:54] For me, this miniseries, I got to discover that fucking movie. Discovered. It's like famed Irish liar. Movies of all time. I'm going to dress up like fucking Barry for Halloween. You should. Every year. Hell yeah, Ben. Thank you. I'm sure we talked about extensively in that episode,

[02:55:14] which is the one we haven't recorded yet. But the experience of getting to watch Ben watch Barry Lyndon was my movie going experience of the decade. That rules. I wish it had been there. I don't even think I care about my Stanley Kubrick list.

[02:55:25] So I'll just say Eyes Wide Shut is number one. The end. Great. Well, what do you got? I mean, the rest is all nonsense. Doesn't matter. I have like Eyes, 2001, Shining, Barry Lyndon, The Killing, Strange Love, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket,

[02:55:38] Clark Garren, Lolita, Killer's Kiss, Sporadicus, Fear and Desire. Wow. Sporadicus below Killer's Kiss? Nah. Olivier's in that thing. When I was young, he was trying. Sure. Sporadicus doesn't do much from back then. I mean, it's really arbitrary to me after. Yeah.

[02:55:53] All right, we're done, but we should announce our next. And we're done with Stan the Man Kubrick, although we're not quite done because we do have to do Barry Lyndon. So it doesn't feel totally over. That's your time, you listening to this.

[02:56:05] For us, we are done on this slightly exhausting, but in sort of increasingly rewarding journey, I would say. Yeah. Look, I certainly feel like I came to a very different place in my relationship to Stanley and his movies than I did going into this.

[02:56:21] Or I wasn't dreading doing this, but I was very open about the fact that he's like not one of my guys. And I think we've talked about this, but episodes recorded wildly out of order. If it feels like the arc of my relationship to him

[02:56:32] is changing in a backwards and forwards way, it's for that reason. But I feel like I have a much greater appreciation of him, especially with a lot of help to JJ, truly helping to demystify a lot of the sort of mythology around him

[02:56:45] that I always found very exhausting. True. Shout out JJ. Yeah. And now you guys are finally entering the Hong Sang Soon-iverse? No. Thank God. Imagine if we did. Soon, we will. I really love that one slow zoom, to be clear. I love Hong Sang Soon.

[02:56:57] No, actually next week we are talking Fablemans. Yes. That's going to be our palate cleanser in between miniseries. It's arriving right at the right time. We have two palate cleansers? Just the one because Avatar is- Oh sure. On the other side of it. Right. But then after Fablemans,

[02:57:10] we're going to talk about the career of a great animator who has a new movie coming out and we've long wanted to do him and now it's time to do him, right? Kind of the Stanley Kubrick of animation that it's been- It's taken him a long time.

[02:57:20] 13 years since his last film? Yes. His last film made an unqualified triumph. Yeah, you know. Coraline. We're doing Selick. The reason we didn't do Nightmare Before Christmas four years ago is because we were waiting for this. Yes! Henry Selick, five films. Five? Five. Yes.

[02:57:38] Yes. Nightmare, James, Monkeybone, Coraline Wendell. They won't let me- They don't like the idea of recording Nightmare in a hot topic. No, but I do want to record it in a giant peach. Inside a giant peach. Yes. And then of course, yeah, no, Wendell and Wilde,

[02:57:57] which is probably about to drop on Netflix right now-ish? No, it's kind of Halloween. I think it'll already be time. Okay, so it's already on Netflix. So in celebration of that, we're doing Selick. Yes. Yes. And then we're going to do something else. Finally a new film,

[02:58:10] giving you Nightmare Before Christmas in the quarter between Halloween and Christmas. It'll be fun. We're doing someone else, but yes, with a couple interruptions, Fablemans and Avatar. Fablemans before Avatar in the middle. Correct. And then, you know, next year we're going to have,

[02:58:22] you know, Knock at the Cabin. We're going to have a- You want to do Mission Impossible on the main feed, it looks like. Because we've covered all the McQueries. I think we have to. Yeah. Well, we don't have to, but I'm with it. I think we have to.

[02:58:33] We've got Oppenheimer. Yes. We've got Aquaman 2. We might hear from the Maestro. We might ride in the Ferrari. I think that might be 2024. It's filming right now. It is. It depends how long it takes to edit.

[02:58:45] It's messed up that you guys aren't going to be going on to the high seas with Napoleon, because you've never done Ridley Scott. That feels like something that would be so up your alley. But isn't that maybe now coming out this year? I think a lot of eyebrows.

[02:58:55] It's coming out next year. Okay. No, that is not going to happen. It could, because Ridley Scott does not waste any time. Right. Ridley Scott just filmed Napoleon 2 while we had this conversation. Ben, just quick question. Have you been monkey boned before? Yeah.

[02:59:10] I'm glad we're doing that right during this Fraser-sance too. I know. Is that going to be the first Harry Knowles cameo that you guys have discussed? Honestly, I actually don't think it is. I think we've done one other movie. We haven't, haven't we? I don't know. Yeah.

[02:59:23] He's in Killer's Kiss. I have an announcement. Okay. This is episode 401. Oh, that's true. We forgot to acknowledge this on the Full Metal Jacket episode because we didn't. No. But yeah, that was the 400th episode. This is 401. Eyes Wide Shut filming for 400 days. Yeah, exactly.

[02:59:41] And this podcast recording for 400 minutes. We were just talking before we started recording about how we used to record this podcast in a closet. We sure did. Yes. And now we're recording in our own office and I just wanted to say it's been fun. Yes.

[02:59:56] So two minutes in. It's been fun. On the ceiling. Getting along again is good. This office rules. No, we'll keep doing the show. We got the next, we got the first half of 2023 mapped out already. And I think it's a corker.

[03:00:10] We sure do for our sins and it is a corker. I'll say this. It's a thing we often do where, you know, post March Madness winner when we kickstart a new year, David and I often come to the table and go, you pick one, I pick one.

[03:00:23] We both knock a long dreamed upon movie miniseries off of our list, right? Yeah. So there's... You're wearing robes. There's a guy... There is. Pounding his staff on the ground. There's a David pick and a Griffin pick and they're two, I think, long promised filmmakers on this show.

[03:00:37] I don't think, I know. You know? And so we'll reveal that later. But that's it. Tune next week for The Fablemans. Fucking great movie. I can't wait to watch it. David doesn't quite like it as much as I do, but he likes it.

[03:00:49] I mean, I like it as much as you do. I don't know, but it's a keeper. It's the thing we didn't get to talk about that much in this episode of Jewish filmmakers who still don't really want to put their Jewishness on screen.

[03:01:00] The self-loathing is a whole podcast. He puts it on screen in The Fablemans, but it's interesting when he does not put it on screen. It's just interesting to have Armageddon Time and Fablemans and have both these guys being like, look, we're not going to cast two Jews.

[03:01:11] It's not like my parents were Jewish. Yeah, come on. All right, we're done. We want people to watch. We have to book Avatar. We're done. Okay, folks, thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe.

[03:01:21] Thanks to Marie Barty Party Barty for doing our social media and helping produce the show in a myriad of other ways. Thank you, Aunt Marie Poop Peepee. Forever. Back and forth. Oh, that's a new nickname. Poop Peepee? Yeah, for Marie. Yeah, I'm sure she'll love that.

[03:01:38] We'll hear from Marie six weeks from now when she's listening to this edit saying, cut it out. I don't want people tweeting Poop Peepee at me. Or double it. She loves it. Thank you to J.J. Burch who really built some massive tomes for this mini series.

[03:01:53] But it turns out there's a lot of writing about Stanley Kubrick. Thank you to Pat Rounds, Joe Bone for our artwork, AJ McKee and Alex Baron for editing, Lee Montgomery, the Great American for our theme song. Go to Blankcheckpod.com for some links to some real nerdy shit,

[03:02:07] including the Patreon Blankcheck special features. Tune in next week for The Fablemans, as we said, and then Henry Selick after that. And as always, I think David's ready to go back to Pandora and 4DX.