Schindler's List with David Ehrlich

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Blank Jack 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 with Black Jack

All around its bits lie the golf wait is Nasferatu in the room?

How do you do Ben I the podcast is live?

Do the podcast.

I can't stop doing Nasferatu.

It is a problem.

Yeah.

No, I think that was a very good Ben Kingsley in Schindler's time.

Oh, that was supposed to be Ben Kingsley.

Well, who else was it supposed to be?

I was like debating whether to put the word bits in the quote because I was like,

well, no, because I was like, look, this might be a more serious episode.

No bits.

And then within 15 seconds, we're doing Nasferatu.

Yeah, we're going to keep the Becker talk limited to like a tight 20 for this episode.

I am also a fan of Becker.

If we're doing Decade of Dreams, Becker talk is in the top 10 most hated sections of any episode ever that people will not stop bringing up.

But then there's the 10 percenters who are like, wish they'd do more Becker talk.

Yeah.

I like the Becker run.

Come to my castle and watch Becker with me for an entire time.

I think they should have talked about the movie less.

We could get into all the ways that Count Orlock is coded as Jewish and the legacy of those characters throughout the history of the vocifiers

Count Orlock isn't coded

in anything like the original Nasferatu.

It's pretty plainly painted out.

I'd say in the middle of the day.

I'm checking.

What right are you?

Germany?

Wait, what's this country?

Which decade, though?

Don't worry.

It must have been after the World War II stuff, right?

Oh, no, way before.

Cool.

Would you mind turning on the light switch for me?

It is the Sabbath.

Cut all of this out.

This is a terrible way to introduce.

what if spielberg listened to this episode oh he's definitely bailed by now he's he's already

worried about it didn't even get to hear me meta acknowledge him listening we've done two series on his career not to mention all the new release episodes and he was like i just want to see how they handle schindler yeah he's i've heard a lot about this guys they take a lot of swings yeah and i haven't bothered to listen until now Is this the first time that somebody has been on two episodes about the same filmmaker?

Good point.

Oh, no, no.

Let's go through let's go through but this is a good this is a good list this is a good list sorry i'll stop lawson was on both lawson did saving private ryan and always

right that guy well always is not air dead i'm at the time of recording i think you guys have only gone up through et correct erlich has done uh

now will have done kingdom of the crystal skull and an inferior film in shrinkler's list yeah well we'll determine its inferiority at the end of this episode here's my question though has anyone are those are you two the only two to have been on both parts?

And if so, if not, has anyone done two masterpieces?

Because I think both of you guys have gotten one uncontested masterpiece and one kind of left-handed oddball movie.

Is that fair to say?

Oh, you mean within this Spielberg?

Within the two parts of Spielberg.

I believe those are the only two, Griffin.

Wow.

I think left-handed oddball is

too generous to always and rudes in the end of Jones Kingdom.

Okay, well, that's what I thought you were going to say.

Hello.

Our energy today is normal.

I don't look.

I'm excited to talk about this wonderful film with you, my friend.

I just had a big bowl of noodle soup and a couple peanut butter cups, which is not two foods that matched up, but that's how it went today for me.

And here we are.

Introduce the show, please.

Look, this is Blank Strike with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

And I am David.

Great.

We're not, we're certainly not nervous about how to talk about this.

I've been like sweating bullis for eight months since Sims texted me when I was on the treadmill.

You were like put this like a cross to bear on my shoulders.

Question you were doing.

I and I have had to be speaking to the legacy of all the children.

Because Sims, I was like, How are we going to handle Schindler?

Do we just do that without a guess?

And he was like, No, Ehrlich really wants to do it.

Ehrlich's got a lot to say.

Ehrlich and I have had,

please finish that.

I'm David.

Podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce.

Baby.

Baby.

It's a pretty wild, clear.

This is.

Yes, but obviously one of his more passionate projects.

Yeah, but a passiony project that makes $96 million domestic, wins many Academy Awards, including finally his only best picture win, his first best director win.

It is the movie that in terms of this half arc we have done.

Potter Asset Cast, the early films of Steven Spielberg.

This is, we zoom out.

The narrative has been a man trying to figure out how to grow up, right?

Of course.

And I think that you guys chose a pretty natural point to split the filmography, but I also don't think it's possible that in the history of Hollywood filmmaking, there has never been a more distinct inflection point in the filmmaker's career.

Your lovely wife's birthday was last weekend.

And I was talking, we were talking.

This is who he is.

David Erlick.

Thank you.

Decade of Davids.

MD Wire.

Fighting in the War Room.

Decade of Davids.

David.

and we were talking about this exact idea and just saying like man i know why we justified starting where we did seven years ago but man has that paid off beautifully paid off beautifully because imagine if we were had one more episode to go and it was the lost world like that doesn't make sense as an end point and he has the four-year break and he has the tree works like but the influence

in those four years jacked it he's set up like a fucking LLC like he was just starting to finally set up that LLC called his account he's like I think I should set up an an LCC time.

But I also want to clarify that we were not talking about Schindler's List just because we were about to record this episode, but that's just always what I'm talking about.

I have had a lot of drunken conversations about Schindler's List over the years, and that is why I immediately thought of you for this episode.

Yeah, also, you've been on the show before.

It's my go-to subject whenever there's a lull in any conversation, really.

Exactly.

It is kind of the Schindler's list of movies, I would say.

It's one of them.

Look up.

I was thinking this while watching it.

It is one of those films where it's like used as shorthand almost in a like monolithic way to represent like a larger idea of a type of movie.

Not just the film itself, but like the cultural reputation of the movie.

Like a prestige, uh, sort of gotta see it.

The way historical people will say, like, look, it's no citizens can't.

Citizens can't.

Citizen Kane.

Why am I fucking Schindler's listing him?

The way people will say it's no Citizen Kane or going, like, look, they're not trying to make Citizen Kane here.

I feel like Schindler's list has a similar kind of shorthand for like serious, well-made movie.

But I think

serious.

It has as much to do with the film's quality as it does with the fact that it's become synonymous with the historical event that it depicts,

you know, in a way that it won't get into it, but it's sort of like inextricable now from our visual idea of a portion of World War II, specifically the Holocaust.

Throwing out like come and see is like, no, that's a deeper cut, letterbox, nerd joke for a movie that is like purposefully kind of challenging to watch versus Schindler maybe being the most successful movie that is this difficult ever, like the most mainstream movie that is this challenging and upsetting.

I can't begin to reckon with what that list is.

Sorry.

I mean, I guess I sort of know what you mean.

I'm trying to think of like, what are, yeah, what are other mega upsetting films that became somewhat appointment Bohemian Rhapsody.

Yeah, so true.

Wicked.

Now, wait a second.

I know I can't back up that statement, but you get what I'm saying.

Yeah.

You get what you're saying?

Where it's like you can make the reference of like, look, it's like Schindler's List or whatever, and everyone knows what you're saying, which I do think perhaps in the last 15 years has started to become an albatross around this movie's neck.

I would actually, I mean, again, we'll get deep into it, but I think we're on an interesting part in the arc of Schindler's List's reputation and esteemed place in the culture right now, because I think it was freighted with a lot more baggage immediately after its release and now is reclaimed is way too strong a word for a movie that already occupies the place that it does in the public imagination.

But I think it is easier with distance to appreciate

people watch it and they're like, oh, this is fucking good.

I feel like it had 15 years of basically being like homework.

Well, but also just like undeniable, kind of like largely uncontested.

This this is one of the great movies spielberg like proved himself shut down all the haters i think about it is one of the great shut down all the haters movies it is sure shut down i mean he created a lot of new haters in the process sure among like the jewish intelligentsia in particular yeah but he shut down a lot of them yes uh i i think about

the

the original afi top 100 list which i want to say came out in like 98 or 97

and schindler made the top 10 and going over that list with my parents and being like, whoa, they put a movie that recent in the top 10.

And my parents, who are noted Spielberg skeptics, were like, yeah, but it's Schindler's list.

There was this feeling of this.

It's just very interesting to see Griffin's relationship with this movie so far.

But that stuck in my ear.

It's basically like, you know, it's the word you use for a series movie.

And it really crushed at the AFI top 100.

I'm talking about this immediate canonization, which I then think turned into it being like homework, which then turned into a notion of like, well, like Spielberg doing the Holocaust.

Is that thing like...

I like how in Griffin's head,

Spielberg's relationship to Schindler's list, how it's somehow separate from him is kind of similar to Griffin's relationship to his own lateness.

Oh, and that, like, it's like going right to Holocaust.

Going right to the day before you came here.

You guys talk.

You guys say stuff.

I will say the first Oscars I really remember watching is the 94 Oscars for the 93 films of 93.

And I remember, you know, you're like seven?

Yeah, I would have been almost eight.

And

like a lot of those 90s Oscars are defined by movies that sort of sweep.

So Schindler, English Patient, right, Titanic, where you're watching a three-plus-hour ceremony where it's like, okay, time for another ward, Chandler's listing.

And obviously, let's keep it going, you know.

And

I do remember being like, what, you know, because it's like, I'm watching the Oscars.

People are laughing and dancing and, you know, and then occasionally they'll play like very somber black and white footage.

and someone will come up and be like this is a very important thing and i'll say to my parents like so what's this movie and they're like yeah we'll get to it later

like so hard they're not mad about it but they're just like we can't start to explain that let's add another wrinkle to that too which is like by 1994 if you're a child right and you're interested in movies in any way not only are you like oh right steven spielberg jurassic park guy et guy i guess i sort of knew i was pretty young i'm yeah i might might have known who spielberg was but there are also like four cartoon shows that all have Steven Spielberg presents on them that are like dominating 90s pop culture.

This is the Animanexaniacs guy?

This is, but no, but I don't think that was true for me yet.

I don't think I knew about Spielberg, the

whatever, like what you're talking about.

Shows the pop culture creature.

I had him baked into the top.

I know, I just wasn't watching them yet, right?

Like, when is Animaniacs?

I think it's like, I think it's 94.

I think it's actually Adamana.

Tiny tune.

But there's a bit in the book that I have in front of me because I always like to bring a prop.

I'm also clutching the

symbol of horror and despair.

The giant, yeah, pink puppy.

It's my comfort animal during this record.

But there's a bit in this book by Franciszek Polowski, The Making of Schindler's List, which was written before the movie came out, before the author had seen it, where he talks about how some of the young extras couldn't will themselves to be afraid in some of the background scenes because they couldn't imagine.

a Steven Spielberg movie, those who are familiar with him, like the guy who made AT.

Like how scary them.

Right, exactly.

I mean, sure.

And I was like, oh, clearly you never saw 1941.

But in terms of the, geez,

in terms of the sweetiness of it all, though, I mean, it's so hard to parse Clint Eastwood's delivery when he's giving Spielberg the best director trophy because he says, he's like trying to make a joke of it.

At first, he tries to give it to a chair.

And everyone's like, Clint, Clint, Clint.

But he's like, oh, big surprise.

And he looks at it, but his delivery is so stilted that it sounds out of context like it was a huge surprise because Spielberg had never actually won the award before.

This fuck.

I mean, mean, surely Clint Eastwood was happy for.

I've never really thought about like what is Clint Eastwood's relationship with Steven Eastberg.

Have they ever interacted?

When Spielberg,

when they wins

Best Picture, about five minutes later, he's standing backstage waiting in the wings and he hands his best direct Oscar to Clint Eastwood to hold.

And Clint Eastwood just fucking throws it at his head.

No, he's fine.

He's happy.

Animaniac premiered September 1993.

So it

was in between

Hot and Schindler.

It was the new hotness.

And Tiny Toons had actually finished its main role.

It's story drone.

It's story drone.

I'm looking at the Oscars of this year, trying to think if there was like any movie I had seen that was nominated.

Because I remember those early Oscar years when like the mask had like a makeup nom.

I would be like, the mask better fucking win.

And then they'd be like, English patient.

I'd be like, what is this crap?

Children across the world these days are like this year are going to be thinking the same thing about a better man

raging at their televisions i don't think i'd see you know i i don't think i'd made it to the cinema to see the remains of the day or the fugitive have you seen jurassic in theaters so that's in the tack categories i don't think i saw jurassic wow and did i i don't i can't remember also fucked up that they had harrison ford star of best picture nominated the fugitive handing out the best picture award that year they do that all the time they do that all the time

the movie that's why who is it there's one year that it kind of does it's a shakespeare in love year because they have harrison ford do it again thinking that Slaving Prevent Ryan's about to win Best Picture.

And he goes, Shakespeare in love.

And everyone's like, huh?

Like, you know, like, and that was them assuming Spielberg was about to get his, you know, second crown.

He takes three red Hulk pills to crown himself from Hulkingham.

He's like grabbing one of the big Oscars, like, and then he crushes the big Oscar statue with a big red hand.

I was late, quote unquote, to seeing Brave New World to enter.

Well, you really wanted it to, you know, to matriculate, to stew in our culture for a week or two.

I really wanted it to wire.

Exactly.

You wanted those tannins to mellow.

I was astounded that that movie is explicitly about a prescription pill refill.

That is what that movie is about.

You need my pills, leader.

It's like, I wouldn't be getting those.

In the bad legacy of the born legacy.

Right.

There truly is a monologue

where it's like, Harrison Ford, how did you allow this bad guy to rise to power?

And he's like, I needed the pills.

You were so good.

He red hulked me by mistake.

I guess no one was under the impression that the fugitive was going to win best picture.

It seemed like a safe bet.

It wasn't like caught up of the piano lost the big level

second.

How many times has Harrison Ford handed out or that that was best director, right?

No, no, no.

He handed out best picture.

He does picture.

Clinton.

I'm saying the pianist year.

He does.

The pianist year?

He is the one who announces Roman Polanski.

Oh, is he?

Oh,

okay.

You're switching to the picture.

I was switching that.

Okay.

I was trying to.

All All right.

Well, I can tell you, Harrison Ford has announced Best Picture

three times to Schindler's List, Shakespeare and Love, and of course, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

More words.

That he said in a row in several on-screen performances.

And also coming to you, Everything Everywhere All at Once, me on streaming television.

I'm in everything, everywhere.

All at once.

All at once.

Carry my pills.

Who's done it the most, you ask?

Nicholson, eight times.

Do you think they might get him back this year?

Post-50th SNL appearance?

Look, I'm really happy.

It was lovely to see Jack for a moment.

Didn't strike me as a guy who's ready to say more than a couple of words.

What if he

came out and announced that Best Picture was going to Adam Sandler?

That they were like, oh, there's only

Sanderson.

He can't say it this way.

I hate to, you know, I hope he's doing well.

Nicholson announced Best Picture 2.

The French Connection.

Rocky.

Wow.

Starting that early.

Early.

Yeah.

I mean, that's how fucking major he was.

I guess already.

And also, he was just always there.

They were like, come up.

Hey,

you're in the front row.

Rocky, Annie Hall.

Driving Miss Daisy, which he did with Warren Beatty.

Beatty was probably trying to say it was do the right thing or something, like reading from the back of the envelope.

No, I'm sorry.

It was Faye Dunaway, who fucked up that thing.

Okay.

Unforgiven.

Then a long, long rest.

Then he comes back to say crash.

Crash.

And he holds up the two fingers.

And then the next year, he did announce the departed with Diane Keaton.

Conflict of interest.

How dare he?

We're back in this zone.

But he doesn't remember being in the departed, if you've seen that performance.

Then I have no memory of this.

He gave it to Argo with Michelle Obama.

Oh, was Michelle Obama like teleconferencing in or something?

Yes.

He comes out on stage and presents Michelle Obama live surrounded by...

military vets.

I want to active military.

Okay, sure.

Yeah.

No memory of that.

The thing about best picture is you're really tired by that point and the show is kind of rushing it at that point and usually best picture is actually kind of a forgotten award because it's some producer who comes up and is like oh i'm so proud of all the money i spent on the you know like it's not always the director look we're obviously not avoiding talking about shinless list but you pointing out that nicholson had presented best picture twice already by the 70s pretty crazy what is the last time someone under the age of 50 presented best picture uh rita moreno's under 50 right i just feel like that award is exclusively

safe for Living Legend.

Lady Gaga, who is only 38 years old, Lady Gaga, who's almost exactly my age,

presented Best Picture to Coda with Liza Minelli.

Okay.

If you remember, she was kind of helping Liza.

Yep, they balanced out to be about 73 on it.

But if you want to go solo, let's go solo.

Because Liza fits into the Living Legend category.

Julia Roberts presented Best Picture to Green Book, which we all remember so well.

She would have been about 50.

Okay.

Like 50-50.

Yeah.

So kind of on the cusp there.

Sean Penn, we all remember, gave it to Birdman and was like making jokes about him being an immigrant or whatever.

And everyone was like, it's his ribbled sense of humor.

Right.

He said, like, check his green card.

Okay.

People were like, don't, please.

He would have been like, he didn't mean it rudely.

They're friends.

They love joking like they did on the set of 21 Grams.

Tom Cruise presented to the artist.

I remember none of these.

Yeah.

And he was about 50.

So it's like, I feel like it's when you hit 50.

I think think so, too.

You're sort of like, it's kind of like, all right, you know, welcome.

It's like you're 50 and you've been a movie star for three decades.

Congratulations.

You're officially part of the topic.

Denzel gave it to No Country for Old Men right around the age of 50.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Kirk Douglas, when he gave it to Chicago, I remember he was like 22 or 23 years old, right?

He's the one who goes, and the Oscar, like, and the winner is.

Like, he, he.

He says the old way of saying

rather than the Oscar group.

Right.

And then he said, Merry Christmas.

Right.

Famous Jew.

I don't know what that joke is.

Yeah.

Ehrlich, I feel like you have things to say.

I mean, I was just hoping that we'd still have some time for some Becker talk because I have some thoughts.

I've really done a deep dive since the episode.

And here's a promise.

At the end of this episode, we're ranking every single Steven Spielberg.

And we're ranking every season of Becker.

I was basically just lost in thought, imagining if on the set of 21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzales and Yoritu needed a phone call from Adam Sandler or Robin Williams every night just to cheer him up.

Similar to Spielberg on Streamliness List.

He He introduced like a soul vampire, though.

He probably was making 21 grams of being like, this is making me stronger.

More misery.

Just put the camera, point it at Claire Duvall for a minute.

She's going to cry.

I don't know.

I'll fit it into the movie somewhere.

It is funny that that is quietly maybe like one of the biggest parts of Schindler's list.

Schindler's list's lasting legacy.

The lore around it of like, he was editing Jurassic Park.

He needed phone calls from Robin Williams to cheer him up.

Robin Williams would just do a jazz set over the phone for an hour every night to

keep him above water.

I mean, that's that's some serious, heavily, heavy Jew work, like having to get on the phone every night and talk to Steven Spielberg and like do a tight five just to keep him off the brink, you know?

But it's also the Spielberg thing where he's like, Yeah, I called my friend to kind of cheer myself up.

My friend, Robin Williams, circa 1993.

Like, he's like,

I'm friends with the most funny person of the moment.

Okay, can I throw out a big take?

And this ties into this, that I had watching it again last night.

This feels to me like the kind of movie that fundamentally cannot be made in a world with cell phones anymore.

Wait, wait, explain.

Even that anecdote is pointing to something, which is like the level of like immersive concentration around this movie, right?

Like not that they were like method living the Holocaust, right?

But the way he talks about it of like we were really trying to like evoke something and there is like a disciplined, sober focus to the idea of like bringing this thing like back in front of lenses

that I feel like the second anyone is able to like after cut check their cell phone.

Yeah.

I mean there is a mood and a tone that is sustained in every film.

Yes.

That I think speaks to him being like, I need to call Robin Williams at midnight because I've been living in this for 12 hours without break.

Versus being like, look, I'm not accusing Spilberg of being performative at all.

I also just think that there is a whole like, how do you do press for a Holocaust movie?

Yes.

You have to kind of acknowledge whatever, like, oh, it's so hard and serious.

And like, you don't want to be like, oh, we were fucking cutting it up on set.

And I don't want to be disingenuous or, you know, or unkind towards Spielberg, but I do think he's also happily performing the act of making

the great film that is coming.

But he's really

selling everything.

But I think he really sold how serious and how grown up he was making this movie, which I think he was.

I agree.

But I also want to say, like, to Griffin's point, I think it's more, it feels more pressing to me that there would be less of a need to make this movie in the age of cell phones because so much of what is galvanizing this production is the act of sort of concentrating collecting memory and serving as much of an arc in its production.

You had an incredible movie about the Holocaust that kind of felt like it was made without cell phones.

The boy in the striped pajamas.

No, but I.

It's a zone of interest.

It will get there.

I'm not saying you can't make a movie about the Holocaust in a world with cell phones.

I'm saying that i feel like there is a type of like and it's less about how much spielberg was suffering and living in this world which i do agree he like not overstates but that is part of the narrative behind this film which he's very good at selling his own like mythology and the management films this book makes the set sound positively buoyant so i i think a lot of this

one for all all for one vibe on this set too right of like

you know this isn't an ego thing right like there's not really any stars in this movie leeson is you know a little famous.

Ray Fienes is not at all, right?

Like, Ben Kingsley is the biggest thing.

Which is crazy that he's in the movie in a way, although he had quickly become a character-supporting guy.

But what you pick up when you're reading about, you know, day-to-day life on the set of this movie is that every day there would be another one of the Schindler-Juden who would come to set.

And they would be, these are people, these will be people who

may have been thought dead or have been off the radar and who were summoned like Moss to the Flame to the production of this movie that sort of reconstituted the collective identity of this people and this group and of what Shinland was able to do.

JoJo Rabbit?

There's a movie that feels like there's no sort of cell phone influence on set.

Here is what I'm trying to say.

I think more than anything is the level of like sustained concentration this movie has.

That more than anything is like holding on to a feeling without overstating it that feels like it very much makes sense with what you're just saying of like daily reminders of this is what we're doing that is less about Spielberg because that's his job to stay in it, and more about like, you feel like the entire crew was on the same wavelength, you know, that like the hundreds and thousands of background actors were on the same wavelength in a way that I just like, as someone who now works on shitty modern productions and you just feel that sense of like they call cut and everyone goes off and they're like, I got to check other shit.

You know?

Yeah, there was definitely a sense of purpose that was very cohesive on it.

It really just feels like a movie where people are checking their cell phones.

And I don't say that out of disrespect.

All the the movies feel like that.

Once again, Chris.

I just wish the sets I was on these days were run with professionalism.

Yes.

No, I'm not even complaining about it.

I'm just like, this is what it is.

This is how we all live our fucking lives now.

When did you get it?

Instead of just like shipping out me.

We're all just going to fucking focus on making Schindler's list for seven years.

I'm so happy that there wasn't like a Universal Studios marketing intern who had to come up with TikToks from the same Schindler's List.

They don't torpedo their own life.

Due to respect to Rhys Feldman, the king of TikTok, he was not sent to Schindler's List.

I'm closing the book up against content.

When did I first see it?

Yeah, when did you first see Schindler's list?

I think I first saw it when I was like 14.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

And it was in a you haven't seen Schindler's List.

Aren't you supposed to be the movie guy?

Yeah, I think probably it was similar for me.

My friend Don.

Don Hood.

It's like the Jewish equivalent of Hot Fuzz, but you ain't seen Schindler's List.

Basically.

Yes.

The five nominees for best art.

I'm watching this now, the

Oscar clip, are Jim Sheridan, Jane Campion, who I think was only the second woman ever nominated.

Correct.

After

James Ivory,

Robert Altman, who did not bother to show up.

Robert Altman.

For shortcuts?

Yeah, for shortcuts, who never bothered to show up.

And Steve.

Short up for the Gosford year.

Yes, he did, and he looked great.

And he hugged Lynchy.

I mean, it's,

we definitely were feeling that we were doing everything in our power to delay actually confronting this movie and what it is.

But I also wanted to preface this episode, at least personally, if only by way of like as a disclaimer for any sort of future glibness that I hope to avoid, of talking a little bit about like how I've lived with this film.

And maybe that's true of how other people on this record have internalized this movie over the years.

But like I am the grandson of a Holocaust survivor.

My grandfather was two of nine siblings who survived.

He left Poland in 1939 as a member of the Polish cavalry on what he described as sort of the last boat out of Poland.

It was going to the World's Fair, which was his only ticket out of there.

And the rest of his family, like so many in the characters in Schindler's list, did not believe the severity of the crisis that was coming towards them.

And so they elected to stay.

And my grandfather, who ended up owning movie theaters, and unfortunately, I don't have any memory of talking about Schindler's list itself with him, which I'm sure he played.

He died in, I don't know, early 2000s.

After he lived just long enough to tell me that he was thinking about voting for George W.

Bush, which was really difficult.

But

anyway, he was so fucking complicated.

I mean, it was all about Israel.

And again, we'll get to it.

But

he was always the funniest person that I knew.

And he would always talk about his memories of growing up in Poland and like of the early years of the Holocaust with, not with like...

you know, not as if it were a comic event, but with like a certain levity that he always made it very clear to me that it was important to confront these things honestly and with a hint of, you know, humor, albeit gallows humor, in order to be able to reckon with them and not make it so sacrosanct that became impenetrable and therefore something that would be allowed to repeat itself.

And I don't know.

I think that sort of seeped into my relationship with the movie Shinless List, which I've always talked about,

despite what the first 30 minutes of this episode may have sounded with a certain like casualness, just because

it didn't feel right to hold it in this

sacrosanct verified space.

It does no favors to the the movie itself.

I think that's the case with basically all movies, you know, and there are other like serious, important movies that have kind of like things like The Godfather are always framed around

it's so watchable.

Yeah.

The Godfather is undeniable, despite it being like this like totemic best picture winner and blockbuster.

And that's uniquely problematic for Schindler's List in a way.

It isn't for The Godfather.

Right.

Right.

But Schindler's List did play in a similar way.

And part of the accomplishment of this movie is without belittling its

subject matter or the import of the messages trying to communicate, the Spielberg X Factor is it is so fucking watchable.

It is watchable in a way that somehow skirts around being like exploitative, in my opinion.

Some certain old European filmmakers disagree, but like you watch Color Purple, and that's the first strike of him trying to do something like this.

And it's like, he can't stop making it like it's a popcorn movie.

Right.

But I also think he's not doing that.

And yet, it's got the Spielberg kind of magic of just like, you're so locked into every scene.

I think its power, its lasting power, and its value to me and to the culture at large and to the memory of the Holocaust lies in how it straddles the difference between those two parts of himself as an artist and also the parts of his career.

But

I also had like very humble beginnings at the start of this movie and that I watched it on a built-in, a 13-inch TV with a built-in VCR in the break room uh at the school where i taught wood shop one summer uh and there has never been a human being less qualified to do that and so like while timmy was sitting behind me like sanding his arm off uh i was like locked into schindler's list uh on tv and just like watching it over the course of the day and that was just uh i don't know and when that movie ended i popped it out and put in like rambo too right just like it's a very well-made movie yeah but i've seen it i've seen it uh i think an unconscionable amount of times since then i've seen it so many times it's weirdly a movie that would be on TV.

And

there's a sort of aspect that we're like, this almost shouldn't be just on TV in between Rambos one and two or whatever.

But I would watch like chunks of it all the time.

I've seen it so, but the first time I saw it, I had the opportunity.

I was like, I need to know a lot more about that.

I was, I guess I knew plenty about the Holocaust in a sort of vague history sense.

But when you're watching that, you're just like, I don't understand.

Where, where's this?

Where's everyone else?

Why don't people know?

Or why do people, you know, like, I immediately sought much more context.

I'm a context-seeking.

You're saying the context of the actual historical events?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's, that was a big, you know, on Holocaust.

It was a big part of the motivation for making it was just the idea that the Holocaust, it was sort of this, you know, twinfold thing that was happening where I think among Jews, the Holocaust was starting to assume a more central role in the

collective identity of the diaspora

because for decades there had been, and again, I'm talking in sweeping generalizations, a feeling of trying to sort of minimize and move beyond it amongst

people.

Like the Holocaust survivors in my family, it was like never spoken.

And I do feel like that's a bit of a stereotype.

Yeah, I mean, it was part of the, you know, idea of founding the nation of Israel.

And it was just sort of like, you know, this idea of trying to move beyond that.

And I think its power to be,

you know, galvanizing for the diaspora was coming into focus at the same time as a decreasing awareness of the Holocaust on the whole among the Goy population of the world and a rise in people not believing that it happened.

I mean, there's a poll, that's something or statistic that I read that said in the early 90s, something like 22% of people had expressed sentiments doubting that the Holocaust ever happened.

It's crazy to me when you get to the end of this film.

and you have the real survivors appear on camera, right, in this very profound, affecting way.

And my immediate thought is, God, I can't believe how young they all are, right?

Sure, right.

Whereas now it's like there are very few living.

How many are still alive?

I mean, this is the same thing.

I don't think how many World War II veterans are still alive.

It's a number that dwindled.

I remember when, like, the last World War I veteran died when I was a teenager or whatever.

It was like some ancient man.

I remember being in like eighth grade in the early 2000s.

About 245,000 or something.

Close to a decade after this movie comes out.

And at my school, they were like, a Holocaust survivor is coming to speak.

And like, everyone from every grade above, above, you know, third, this is like required mandatory, whatever.

And it was at that time an old woman who talked about having been a child.

That's the thing.

The one Holocaust survivor I know very well is a child.

Was a child.

She's not currently a child.

She's currently a very old woman.

But it's like the fact that Spielberg options this, right, gets universal to option it, spends a decade being too afraid to touch it, says that kind of the inciting thing in the early 90s was like, I am seeing this level of like denialism starting to grow along with a kind of like edge lord neo-Nazi kind of normalization.

Had no idea how bad things were going to use those exact words, decades.

Yes.

Weirdly.

That it was like, I have a cultural responsibility from my vantage point, my power to get stuff made and communicated.

My, my like megaphone, basically, to make something to make this feel vivid and present and understandable to people.

And then to see the survivors at the end of the movie and you're like, these people still like have colored hair.

You know, like a lot of of them haven't gone gray yet.

This is like such.

These people are kind of hot.

You don't have anything yet.

You watch this and you're like, it's crazy how much more recent this history was to feel that disconnect from it versus now.

He should have shot the scenes at the end there in Israel like Coralie Farget shot the substance, you know, just like really slow motion.

I think it is very interesting to watch this movie now.

As there are like four or five huge tracks of what is happening in the world around us that echo this movie and the events that this film is representing in different ways that are terrifying that feel like going back to this question we have of like, how does this happen?

What do you mean?

How does this just happen overnight?

And this movie is really trying to break down like the steps of understanding psychologically like through a certain prism.

I think that's what's smart about it.

Yeah, this

history of no, I don't think it's its main goal.

And I think through picking one specific story, it does find a way to dramatize in certain ways the gradual shifts of how these things happen.

But now what's scary is you're just sort of like, this feels far enough away from our present that people are losing their connection with it in the classic, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it kind of way.

And the fact that it felt so urgent to make Schindler in the 90s is wild to me when it's like, this is still kind of fairly new.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Spielberg's own trepidation in approaching the subject matter, again, very metately reflected in our own approach to the start of this episode.

Very great job, boy.

I think so.

Right.

Can we just make Jurassic Park quickly before we have to go off and do this?

And also, I think, you know, the distance between the 90s and the Holocaust has been compounded in interesting ways between the distance between the release of Schindler's List and today, in a way that we'll talk about, especially in relation when you look at some of the reaction to Schindler's List at the time.

And I think also all those things you're saying about it being the right time to make it, it does.

And again, I don't mean to be a cynic about it, but I do think he was sort of at a point of his career after Hook, after always, you know, these movies that weren't really connecting.

I mean, Hook is the ultimate.

It's time to fucking grow up movie.

And, you know, whatever its charms.

And

while I haven't listened to that episode yet, I have to say, this series, this miniseries has been revelatory in so many ways.

Like Dan Candyman is from Montreal.

That's big.

I never, I never would have known that.

I told him people were going to like the lord drops and he was pushing back.

He said, cut it down.

And I said, they need to know he's canadian and part of a polycule one thing dan candyman is always saying is oh cut that down you should cut that down

uh that really that really blew my whole deck pfefferberg i'm cutting off and we're going to the dossier can i say something off of what ehrlich just said then you can crack open the dossier talking about this inflection point

a a anecdote i found very interesting is that Sid Sheinberg, when he was negotiating to do Schindler and Jurassic, was like, you have to do Jurassic first.

I feel like that is also a huge part of Spielberg selling this movie is that that's something I've known my whole life.

Like this lore of like, he had to do Jurassic first because he never could have done it after making Shindler's list.

He had to call Robin Williams.

He was editing Jurassic Park on like...

like a video

conferencing than that.

I think he was mostly just doing the mixing.

Yeah, he was doing the final stuff.

George Lucas was quieting a lot of the special effects.

He was overseeing some of the mixing.

Right, right.

All this stuff where you're just like, right, this is all.

Janusz Kaminski, you know, in my head became, it's like, yeah, there was like a newsboy on the streets of Krakow and Spielberg sort of discovered him, you know, like all this stuff.

It'd be funny if George Lucas was like, can I just pitch in on Schindler's, on the crowd control there and someone else can do Jurassic work?

I think the subtext of what Scheinberg was saying was not just like, look, after Schindler, it's going to be hard for you to mood pivot back to Jurassic.

I think there was this notion of if you pulled this off, it's going to fundamentally change you as a filmmaker in a way where it's going to be harder for you to ever go back to that.

Which I think is the next movie he made was a Jurassic Work.

But I think it was the rationale there.

It's not the same.

As artistically motivated as much as it was, do the thing that's going to make us a billion dollars first.

I need to get that done.

And then you can go do your fancy black and white Lil Art project.

Do the thing that comes out in the summer before the thing that comes out in the summer.

I think part one is if you pull off Schindler, it's going to change you forever.

Two is, please just give us the safety movie before you cash in the blank check, right?

And the third part of it is, if you fuck up Schindler, it's really gonna stick to you i think if you if you this there was no way he was gonna i agree with this movie but there was a possibility i think spielberg thought that it would be a less seen movie that it was empire of the sun yeah that it would be you know it's a three-hour drama with a lot of polar movies i do think there are way i mean i do think there i think there's

well obviously he could have fucked it up like in my opinion but i don't think people would have been like f what a stinker i think if he fucked it up though it would have been like conclusively he is not a grown-up film right his ego

I mean, I admire him for having the chutzpah to make this movie, to take on so transparently the weight of what this project entailed.

But the ego required to be like, I can do this.

I'm going to do this.

It's extraordinary.

And I think that if the movie had disappointed the people that it was meant to represent, you know, en masse, it would have been a really difficult blowframe.

He had already made Empire of the Sun.

Which people didn't like.

I don't know.

Empire of the Sun got good reviews, made okay money, got some Oscar Note.

Like, Empire of the Sun did okay.

If Schindler had gone over the way Empire of the Sun did, I think it would be.

It would have been a big deal.

If Empire of the Sun had been a disaster, he could have gone home for the holidays without having to hide in the closet.

I think that

we're getting into a very similar argument here.

I'm just trying to say, like, he had made grown-up movies.

They had gone over okay.

Like, it's not like he'd never made a grown-up movie before.

I'm just worried we're narrativizing this a little too much.

I'm going to stand by this.

I think if Schindler had gone over the exact same way as Empire of the Sun, the response would have been, okay, for every five blockbusters you deliver us, you can make one of these versus this being the time where

anything Spielberg makes becomes this important, whether it's a dinosaur movie or a Holocaust drama.

Sure.

I mean, there's nothing like what happens after you make Jurassic Park and Schindler's list in the same year.

No one will ever do anything like that again, probably.

I mean, have you guys, have you guys gone deep on his predilection for making two movies a year?

He talks about it so much, but mostly on the other mini-series because that's why he's doing it more and more.

It feels like this rhythm that must work for him.

I mean, for whatever reason, he's done it like four times.

Obviously, it's over now.

Now he's slowed down.

But yeah, I think it's a tonal balance thing.

And it worked.

So why not try it again?

Right?

Like it worked here.

So like, why not do...

Well, Amistad and Lost World, that didn't work out perfect.

But then Catch Me If You Can't Minority Port, that works out pretty good.

I mean, the ending of the Making making of Schindler's List book is just like, and it's just been announced, he's about to make Amistad, and it's going to be Schindler's List all over again.

And they were just like waiting for the next great American epic.

Munich and uh, War of the World,

you know, sort of like a

on-base single version of it working out, and then Tintin and Warhorse, uh, which

is sort of like a okay,

he just did it five times.

I think part of it is in the same way that the making of this movie is Spielberg being like, I need to tie my arms arms behind my back a little bit to like limit myself and challenge myself and like put some restrictions on my filmmaking language and all of that.

The way Soderberg talks about like the

compression of time, of crew, of course.

All Soderbergh wants is right, like faster, faster, faster.

Part of that is he's like, in order to stay sharp, I have to make this challenging for myself.

I have to put restrictions on it because both Spielberg and Soderberg, I think, are so fast in their kind of brain processing of these things that I think for Spielberg, it helps him to be like, I need the challenge of the other movie to feed in.

Yeah, sure.

I'm so happy Soderberg didn't make Schindler's list.

Would have like edited it on the train ride home and it would have just been like musty colored frames of it all actually just takes place in like an office, like one office.

But I do think it is a, it is a self-challenge, right?

It's like sort of like this feeds

to say one movie ends up informing the other movie in a way I'm surprised by.

Yeah, I mean, he was working in a radically different way than he'd ever worked before.

I mean, he was working with, first of all, with the predominantly Polish crew.

I mean, it's the first movie.

Storyboarding, storyboarding, handheld camera, which he's often carrying himself.

And he's like, literally.

He's the biggest dick star ever.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Evian body.

He's having to deal with that.

The kind of dogmatic, like, I'm not allowed to use steady cam.

I'm not storyboarding.

Like, all these things where he's just like, I'm banning pieces of equipment.

I'm banning the approach of how I conceive of scenes.

Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag.

It's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes when sponsors buy ad space on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love it to get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

What?

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Avenger.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of...

Reimagining.

Reimagining, whatever.

A reboot of the Toxic Avenger.

Now, David and I have not gotten to see it yet, but they sent you a screener link.

Yeah, I'm going to see it.

We're

excited to see it.

But, Ben, you texted us last night.

This fucking rules.

It fucks.

It honks.

Yeah.

It's so great.

Let me read you the cast list here in billing orders they asked, which I really appreciate.

Peter Dinkledge, Jacob Tremblay, Tremblay, Taylor Page, with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

His stepson.

Okay.

Wade Goose.

Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard of them yet.

Okay.

You got fucking Dinkledge is fantastic.

He's talking.

He plays it with so much heart.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like

David sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high high school.

Yes, yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches.

Yes.

With my sleazy and sticky friends.

It informed so much of my sensibility.

Your friends like Junkyard Dog and Headbanger.

Yeah, exactly.

Making Toxic Crusader drills.

And so when I heard that they were doing this new installment, I was really emotionally invested.

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Ciniverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect but also a little weary they're playing with fire here yeah it's just it's something that means a lot to me and they knocked it out of the park okay it somehow really captured that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original toxy movies.

And they have like updated it in this way that it was just, I was so pleased with it.

It's gooey

gooey.

Tons of blood, tons of goo,

uh, great action.

It's really fucking funny.

It just, it, it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version.

Cineverse last year released Terrifier 3 Unrated.

Yeah.

Big risk for them there.

I feel like it's a very, very intense movie.

And one of the huge hits.

More interesting, yeah, theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years.

Want to make that happen again here

tickets are on sale right now advanced sales really matter for movies like this so if y'all were planning on seeing toxic advenger go ahead and buy those tickets please go to toxicaver.com slash blank check to get your tickets blank check one word in theaters august 29th yup and ben it just says here in the copy wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says summon the nuts.

Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

And they are the most dang-ass freaks of dang-ass freaks.

I'm excited to see it.

And your endorsement, I think, carries more weight than anyone else's in the world on this list.

Seriously, get your tickets now.

Go to toxicadvengure.com slash blank check.

Do it, do it.

Hey, Griffin, David.

Oh, wait.

They're both asleep.

And the new beds we just added to the studio, so I'll just have to be extra quiet.

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Aw,

you're dreaming.

Pol Deck Pfefferberg, Polish-born Jewish man who survived the Holocaust, thanks to the efforts of Oscar Schindler.

Met, well, this is where his story begins.

He immigrates to the United States in 1948, becomes, temporarily changes his name to Leopold Page,

starts a leather goods store in Beverly Hills, continues to know Oscar Schindler.

As people who know about this probably know, like, Oscar Schindler sort of survived on the goodwill of the Schindler Juden like later in life when he was a broke they were vengeing him every month.

Truly, it was like the little Caesar CEO paying for Rosa Parks's apartment.

Yes, exactly.

That's real.

It sounds like me just making a dumb movie.

I was like, Did Griffin just tell a joke?

But then I was like, No, that can't be.

Uh, starting in the 50s, he's like, Someone should make a movie of this.

Like, this is a good idea for a movie.

What happened to me?

Like, what Oscar Schindler did?

I think also was like, How do I repay this man?

Yeah, sure.

Perhaps he needs to find like a vehicle to

forever pin him in the annals of history.

A deal is reached to make a film called To the Last Hour, possibly starring Sean Connery as Oscar Schindler

at MGM, written by Howard Koch, the writer of Casablanca, one of the writers.

And it almost happened since even like Schindler got a check for 37 grand, like, you know, to sort of get the rights or something.

dies, you know, doesn't make it.

At one point,

Pfefferberg approaches fritz lang who must have been quite old at that point to try and get something off the ground he goes over to like

you know mca of germany he's like maybe i can make it in europe like doesn't uh happen he dies at the age of 1974 he dies at the age of sorry 1900 at the age of 66 in in 1974 makes slightly more sense but a few years later

Thomas Kennelly, Kenali, I think Australian journalist Keneally,

walks into his leather goods store after he's died.

And

after Schindler has died, and Pfefferberg is telling everyone who comes in.

David's looking at the dossier.

Oh, like

I misread this.

Schindler's dead.

Pfefferberg's alive.

Schindler is the one who died in 1960.

Correct.

Pfefferberg's still alive.

I was like, what?

Why did he say?

Sorry, I misread this.

He's the disembodied spirit running away.

In 1980, Thomas Keneally...

walks into this leather goods store and Pfefferberg tells him the story.

Like, I was saved by this Nazi called Oscar Schindler.

I mean, you get the sense that anytime anyone came into the store and it was even like tangentially related to Honorable, he was like, Sit the fuck down.

Yeah, I'm about to tell you my life story for an hour where I signed up.

I knew at this point how to put some, you know, spit on the ball, right?

Where he's like, you don't get it.

It's not just that this guy was a Nazi.

It's not just that he was this kind of like good-looking, charming guy.

He was like fucking his way through Germany.

He was carousing and drinking.

He's like,

he's this interesting guy.

Right.

He starts out with this kind of amoral sort of like, hey, sure.

Like, you know, you know.

Not to be crass.

It is like a perfect

Hollywood hook to making a Holocaust.

Of course it is.

Which is just like Guy slowly gains a conscience in the Holocaust and does a great mitzvah.

And Keneally initially is like, look, I'm a Catholic.

I'm no expert on the Holocaust.

Like, I don't know if I should write this book, but he can't drop.

the idea.

So he writes Schindler's Ark, which have you read it?

I have not.

I've never had any desire to, weirdly.

It's good.

It's a novel.

It's like a sort of like fiction, you know, a historical novel, right?

So it's sort of written in this way that has, you know, he's using documents, but he's also sort of filling in gaps with kind of, and it's good.

And it's about,

you know,

the paradox of this man, right?

Like, you know, it's about this person more than anything.

It wins the Booker Prize.

Spielberg sees the book.

Had never heard the story before.

And is very interesting.

And so

very interested.

So, Universal buys the rights in 1982.

And his first response is, is this real?

Like,

it sounds fake.

It sounds Hollywood.

It sounds like Hollywood bullshit.

If this is real, it's incredible.

Yeah.

So, Spielberg, of course, as we all know from watching that movie, grew up Jewish.

The movie you're talking about is Jurassic Park.

Pave women's.

Okay.

And new Holocaust survivors.

When he was three years old,

he has a story about

someone coming to the, you know, to family dinner and telling stories,

his grandmother, and, you know, whatever.

Like he has a vivid memory of someone like rolling up their sleeve to show the tattoo to him with the numbers.

And, but nonetheless,

kind of like you were saying, or like, generally, it's sort of like, that's not dinner table conversation.

Like, we don't talk about Nazis in this house, right?

We don't

like dwell on it too much.

We're.

We're happy.

Michelle Williams is playing the piano and buying monkeys.

Dano's getting cocked all over town.

I mean, like three-fourths.

You just got to move states to avoid getting cocked.

Three-fourths of my family are Eastern European Jews who immigrated to New York State before the Holocaust.

Yeah, and like the 1800s, probably.

Right.

That's when my family mostly immigrated.

Right.

All of my grandparents were first generation, but were born here.

Right.

And it did,

I feel like.

Whenever any of them would invoke this era, it was like, obviously a great tragedy thing, but it did feel like there was this feeling of, we don't even want to touch that.

Like, this is too profound and serious.

And we're lucky that none of us had to live through that.

And there was the kind of like general Holocaust Museum, like, nod seriously, of course, a great tragedy kind of thing.

Must also start to seem unreal at a certain point.

I think.

I mean, you're like living in America.

Maybe we are in America.

Things are okay.

It's like this dream that happened to someone else.

It is very bizarre for me to think about like my grandparents being like children and teenagers and whatever and just hearing that this was happening.

And I think, right, you like needed to apply a certain degree of cognitive dissonance to not go insane, especially when you're like a powerless American tribe.

Still one thing I wanted to understand when I, when I start learning more, like where I was just like, when did people know in America say, right?

You know, like.

They didn't know during the war.

They knew the war was happening, right?

But like, they didn't really know the extent of this until after the war.

And then how quickly, obviously obviously the nuremberg trials start to have you know like how quickly does this start to come out like is this information widespread you know i was just fascinated by the development of all that i mean you can see that chronology take place uh on screen over the decades

yeah it's what's one of the things that's so interesting about holocaust cinema i mean it starts i mean it starts i'm not saying this is the first holocaust movie but like i think in terms of just the the weight and the gravity of what's happened and sharing that raw imagery i mean i think of alain renee's night and fog um and that's that's right in the middle

yeah exactly it's pretty soon after World War II.

Obviously, you know, in historical terms, we think of soon.

It'd be like instant information.

It's a decade

later.

What's hard to think about now that you had to wait years to really start to get the gravity?

But we started getting Holocaust movies in a relatively modern sense not long thereafter and great ones.

But we'll talk about in terms of Schindler's list.

Like none of the ones, none of them had really penetrated.

uh mass culture in a way that any of spielberg's which was movies ever had i mean like you know i could wax poetic all day long about Lena Wurtmuller's Seven Duties or about The Boxer in Death or about Capo, you know, and these are great films that have had a lasting impression on me, but only because I sought them out.

Yeah, The Boxer in Death is a Slovak film.

I don't think that one was burning.

It was

screened to me in the Holocaust cinema I took with Annette Innsdorf in college

and not something that someone was just going to catch casually on TNT.

No, and then there's movie, but there's movies like The Pawnbroker or whatever, where it's like, this is about a Holocaust survivor.

It's about the legacy of this, but it's not about like the history of what happened.

Great movie.

Right.

There are a lot of movies about the kind of the ripple effects and the aftermath.

And yeah, right.

Sort of psychological studies.

Universal buys Schindler's arc, but literally, Spielberg says to Pfeffenberg, apparently, it's going to take me about 10 years to make this.

Like, he basically knows even then.

And he tried to shop it the whole while.

That's because

he's a lot of people.

As he says,

for some years, he was.

We're going to talk about that because he says I needed more films to make more films.

I wasn't about to go from Temple of Doom to Schindler's List.

It would have been impossible.

Right.

In my burning desire to entertain, I kept pushing it back.

He hadn't had children yet.

Talks a lot about how having children kind of changed everything for him.

It is hard to imagine.

He was like, make those guns flashlights.

It is hard to imagine someone making this movie before.

They have children.

In a way, I mean, it's an unfair.

I think I paraphrained them to say it, but you think you could just, you're like Ben getting the simple plan money.

You're like, I can make schindler's list point the camera over there i could roll out of bed kid list and make this movie i haven't seen a simple plan in a while does one of the characters decide to spend all their money on making a holocaust movie i no i i agree with you that this feels like a fundamental you are not the most important person in the world kind of movie in a way that spielberg wasn't always making autobiographical films but they always felt very tied to his

kind of experience and world outlook, if that makes sense.

I mean, I think, and what you're seeing in this movie is him,

I don't know if the right moment to go like too big picture, but you're seeing the

defining interest of his films philosophically go from being about the family, being, you know, stemming from divorce and things of that nature, to in the process of this movie, and literally you can see it in the span of a single scene, becoming about the value of a single human life, which becomes the

defining theme of his career.

You see it obviously front and center in Saving Private Ryan, and again, in AI, and of course, in the BFG.

So I think that

these are things that you're value of a single jar of far.

Vampers.

But yeah, I mean,

this is him entering a new phase of his existence as a person, really, beyond that's just sort of reflected through the art.

Spielberg, presumably talking about Hook LOL, says J.J.

Bursch, our researcher.

I was seduced by my own success.

I'd always played to the adult audience who were able to remember their childhood and enjoy the movies along with their own children.

But when I began playing to kids directly, I found I stumbled on my own shoelaces.

I realized when you're making movies, you can't do shame things consciously.

It's interesting to hear him say that because Hook is indeed him being like, I'm making like essentially a film for seven-year-olds.

And like, sure, he's made E.T.

or whatever, but ET is sort of indefinable magic.

But it's like, yeah, he mostly made movies for like

everybody,

teenagers.

Hook for the seven-year-old and all of us.

Yeah, sure.

Seven-year-olds and all of us are always like, I got to put my cell phone down and stop stop working so much i think it's almost always a problem when filmmakers this talented try to put those kinds of limitations on themselves like not filmmaking challenge limitations but are like this is just a movie for kids and i'm like well now you're not playing

exactly like i mean that's what george lucas where he's just like i don't know it's for kids and i'm like this is about senates and like take yourself seriously it used to be about everything right and it used to work for kids as well which is your magic the second you're like well if if adults don't like this, they're not taking it.

They're up their own ass.

But then again, if I made some fucking movie that made a billion dollars and children around the world enjoyed, and adults were like, you're more criminal for making it.

I'm talking about like the Phantom S, I would be like, well, the warmth of children's love sustains me.

I don't need you, grown-ups.

We were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, but there is, you know, I, I literally just last night sat down with my son and watched the first 30 minutes of Star Wars and New Hope, which is the fourth film.

And I don't, I don't know if you guys know.

I think we never got to that one.

We never got to.

He, uh, he's Sabulba back yet.

Um, every, whenever Sebulba's not on screen, Ace saying, Sebulba and us for a two.

Those voices aren't that far away.

Sibula did this bit of the record.

Waters the one who simply record during Sundance, when I checked my phone between movies and saw that Wato had died, you did.

I immediately texted Griffin with horror in my heart and got nothing back.

And then I even got 400 texts.

We were in the middle of recording.

You will not believe how many texts I got.

It was more than my birthday but also i i didn't i went texting you today do you want coffee for the episode record only then realize i hadn't responded to you i mean i was i not that you expect something back when you send someone a condolence call really but like i just needed information i was like what's happening you know okay that makes um

but i i no what were we gonna say i was gonna say i saw

uh i showed you to the first uh 30 stars we had i've never in my life fielded more questions about jawa uh i don't think anybody ever has We're really just the same question over and over and over again, which is, are they bad guys?

Which is literally the case.

But I think what Jawa is is, they're in the right in the gray area, which, and hey, that's one of the first things you meet in Star Wars.

Kind of the example of what a question is.

But Star Wars is ultimately, you know, one of the reasons that it appeals to children so much is it's this Manichean, Manichian, however you want to pronounce it, story of good versus evil.

Of course.

I mean, obviously there's a black-clad sadist who appears before the JavaScript.

I thought Darsader made some good points, but

what's not mine.

But I think that, like, you know, you

have that good versus evil thing that kids whose only question at this age is, are they a bad guy, can understand?

And that, you know, I'm not saying that I'm showing my five-year-old Schindler's list anytime soon, but I'm saying that, you know, it's an interesting parallel when you're looking at, you know, Spielberg maturing and making a movie for adults.

Here he is making the most black and white, you know, morally black and white movie he's ever made is the closest thing to the spirit of Lucas in some ways that, you know, aside from maybe Indana Jones, the D.

Yes,

But also building it around like a weirdly gray character in a lot of ways.

The quick sidebar, because you guys were starting to get into this before the recording.

I was like, we got to fucking get this out on Mike.

At your wife's birthday last weekend, both of you, we were talking and the question came up, what is the first Spielberg movie we will show our son?

Right.

You were like, when will he be?

Because it was like, is he ready for E.T.?

Will E.T.

be the first one we show him?

What is the right age for E.T.?

In theory, E.T.

should be the first one, but then you kind of get into like, do I want to traumatize my child?

Your wife was like, I'm imagining his response.

We maybe have to wait until he's stronger.

And I was like, I think part of the right of passage of E.T.

is seeing it a little bit before.

It's sort of true.

You have to time it out.

I'm saying, David, he's also just better than any other movie that you could show your kid that age.

So it has someone dying or getting sick where it's like they might be upset by that too.

But E.T.

really, you know, avoiding the risk for trauma is sort of a futile endeavor because we're talking about a kid who is currently so scared of everything we were watching wreck-it-relf and when uh someone just perked up a great movie which my daughter calls angry man um what's the name of that actress from uh jane lynch jane lynch's character shows up sergeant kelvin yeah asa decided that she was absolutely terrifying wait wait he didn't even see her shooting bugs he was he was out on just the jane lynch daddy you have to pause the movie now um and uh shrieking at me and so you continue to tell me that your son more than anything reacts negatively to uh authority figures in film threatening to discipline characters.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, well, that would paint a picture for your listenership that I

would say that that's a very absent from me.

That's what's funny is you're like, if a character comes on screen and feels like they might get angry at the kid, your son freaks out.

And then really when I try to tell my son to do anything, he laughs at me.

Yeah, maybe the problem is that like I've done such a bad job of disciplining my kid that the idea of having any sort of discipline has become this very alien traumatizing.

Jason was at my daughter's birthday.

Yes, he was.

And he was very well-behaved.

He was throwing himself from the tops of the video.

I will send you a video where he is having like a demonic possession over in the side of one of the booths and talking about Venom.

And I thought he was talking about Venom, the cartoon.

And I was like, how did you hear about Venom?

And then it came out to me that he was just talking about like being venomized ASA, which is like ASA but poisonous, which is, I guess, poison spider.

I was like, okay.

Or poison spider.

Venomized.

Venomized is a big initiative in the Marvel universe.

But Venomized?

All the characters are getting venomized.

Listen, who knows what the Eric Adams administration is teaching these kids in school these days.

But

I do think that,

you know, fucking him up with E.T.

is fine.

What was I going to say?

Yeah, Griffin threw a great pick into the mix, which was the adventure that was a good thing.

I was like, Tintin's a fucking...

Tintin's good.

Even though it has guns or whatever, Tintin's pretty, like, the stakes are silly.

I also said, in the, is that a bad guy kind of fear that

Ace is living with.

But also with Tintin, you're like, you can tell who the bad guys are because of the way their faces look.

Like, everybody.

Everyone.

Aason Tintin looks normal.

So caricatured.

What about, I mean, I get BFG is also obviously pretty.

Yeah, I mean, it's just

a movie for dorks and losers.

It's a movie for people who want to go.

But Aason and sleepy bedtime.

When he was like two and three, we would do, I don't think this is going to translate at all.

And I don't know why I'm just going to keep going with it because there's no mechanism in my mind that can stop these things.

But we would do this game when he was young where I'd say like, E.T.

and I'd stick up my.

finger and he would stick at his finger touch and I'd go hook and I'd hook his little arm with my finger and I go Jurassic Park.

And he'd laugh and I'd claw at his stomach.

And then I would always like throw in a curveball just to make myself laugh.

Or I'd be like, always.

And I'd try to like do something like sugar.

I'd like to express dust and sugar on that bad boy.

Yeah, I'd be like, Warhorse.

Don't show him Warhorse.

Not that bad.

He'll fall too dusty.

He'd want to fuck that horse too bad.

He's too sexy too.

But recommended it to all the parents.

Thomas, I already for Kenelle, Keneally?

Keneally.

I'm guessing.

Writes the first script.

They didn't like it.

It was too sprawling.

He couldn't figure out how to, you know, whatever.

He's a novelist.

He's not, you know.

So then Kurt,

I'm not sure how you say his last name, but Ludetka,

who wrote the screenplay for Out of Africa.

So obviously a recent Oscar winner.

He is a journalist.

Like he makes a lot of sense in a way, even though Out of Africa is boring.

But says that.

Interestingly, he couldn't find his way into believing what he was writing.

He was like, as a journalist, like this almost feels surreal that someone would behave this way.

So that's when Spielberg turns to, well, maybe does Sidney Pollack want to do it?

Does Brian De Palma want to do it?

No, Steve, I love him, but no.

Take it back.

Take it back.

I mean, there are sequences.

Go back to Brian's house and take it.

You could easily

split screen.

Does Roman Polanski want to do it?

Roman Polanski, a literal Holocaust survivor who survived the Krakow ghetto.

Krakow.

And Polanski, I think, did take the offer somewhat seriously, but.

Here's the guy I want to open this box.

Yes.

And it makes the pianist years later.

Right.

If you are a writer being hired by Steven Spielberg to adapt this book and this story, and in your mind's eye, you're like, and then this will go through Steven Spielberg's camera.

I think it is tough to figure out how to write it because even looking at things like Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, and the story feeling so kind of like unbelievable on its face, you're like, how do you you prevent this from feeling like a magical fairy tale?

Yeah, you can't

be in the mindset of the Steven Spielberg movie.

Right.

How could this fit into his world?

Yeah.

Now, Scorsese

is the person who really did almost make Schindler's list.

Marty Scorsese.

You've heard of this guy.

Spielberg thought like he's not going to back down from like the truth, the violence, you know, the sort of horror.

Playing the sympathy for the devil over at a scene where Namakarta shows up.

Here's a more serious, bracing, bold filmmaker.

and like it's a part you know i'm gonna guess that this was in sort of like the late 80s right when when marty's taking it on so it's like right around when he's doing like last temptation of christ right he's making you know strides to whatever like serious also he i don't know he got a lot of blowback on king of comedy he got a lot of blowback on last temptation of christ Spielberg coming to him and being like, here's a project that everything that's challenging about it is like challenged because of history in a certain way.

You could sort of see him like going, Look, it's something being delivered to me, handed on a plate, okay, supported by the best people.

Here, I have Scorsese for you for you.

Okay, and be Marty.

Yeah, he's racist.

But he's listed.

I hired Steve Zaley.

So, he's a nightmare in the room.

He hires Zalian, which I didn't know.

Steve Zali, who wrote the script.

He says this is around 1990.

So it's right after he did Last Dentation of Christ.

And I guess it's probably after he has filmed Goodfellas, which comes out in 1990, which is a good movie, but a better pizza brand.

And as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Nazi.

The whole point of the movie to me

was to start a dialogue about something which is still important to me, which is the nature, the true nature of love,

which could be

Jesus.

I'm not being culturally ambivalent here.

It's what's in us.

He says it could be the force.

No, he doesn't say that.

Is God in us?

I really am that way.

I can't help it.

I like to explore that.

I want a dialogue on that.

So I did last temptation.

I did it a certain way.

And, you know, I did the best I could.

I went around the world.

Any arguments, I took him on.

But like in the case of Schindler's List, the trauma I had just gone through was such that I felt like I had to take, tackle this subject matter like so seriously.

And he's worried that he's, he's a Gentile and he's not like going to be

up for it.

Like he mentions that Jewish people have been upset that the writer of the Diary Van Frank movie, I guess, was a Gentile.

I I don't know.

Like, it's, you know, funny, like, controversy's long past at this point, but it is one of those.

Infamous historic sliding doors that Spielberg is seriously considering remaking Cape Fear, which is a real, like, Steve, come on, you're avoiding.

I mean, that is, it's so funny, right?

Like, you're totally avoiding this at this point.

Where Spielberg's like, should I just like remake some of my favorite movies?

Like, because that's what always is as well.

Like, it's just like, I'm just going to remake these movies.

I mean, there was, there were rumors that Spielberg has

said are not true, that he and Scorsese effectively traded projects.

I mean, the part of it that's simplified in a way that is kind of incorrect is people missing the context that Spielberg was the one who hired Scorsese to do Schindler in the first place.

I feel like the story kind of gets repeated as if like they were just doing separate things in separate silos.

And then he called one day and was like, what if we Yankee swap?

Well, supposedly, according to JJ, they did swap.

No, of course they swapped.

I'm just saying that it was Spielberg being like, I know I offered you this, but I'm kind of thinking I should make it.

And of course, Cape Fear.

And as repayment, do you want to do Cape Fear?

Which becomes Scorsese producers?

Ambla produces, becomes Scorsese's first kind of like mainstream hit.

Yep.

Makes money, obviously.

He talks about it being a huge transition in his career to like figuring out how to work within the studio system and all of that.

It's a big, big movie for him.

Everyone kind of wins in this scenario.

Yes.

But I think that the legacy of English language films about the Holocaust, especially American films about the Holocaust, was really working against Spielberg in that it was all the more reason to make the movie, but it was also, you know, part of what made it so daunting.

I mean, you have like Theodore Adorno's declaration that poetry is impossible after Auschwitz resonating in your head.

And then you're seeing the Diary of Anne Frank movie and some other things that are really sort of trivializing or

making into kitsch the Holocaust in some ways that are played with commercial interruptions from Hallmark or whatever.

Anne Frank feels like the main vehicle for telling stories about the Holocaust in a very long time.

For sure, for a long, long time.

And then you have like Hitler comedies.

Like you have like to be or not to be and a great dictator and these movies that are made like in progress that are sort of like poking fun at the idea of this guy without really understanding what's going on.

There's an animated movie about Anne Frank where it was like Anne Frank but modern in a way.

It was like set in the Anne Frank house and she escapes into modern, into the modern world that played at Cannes a few years ago and I saw and reviewed and has never seen the light of day.

What's it called?

Something, something Anne Frank.

Okay.

But then the other huge monolith that you have, I think, in recent cultural memory around this time is Shoah, Claude Lansman's film, which is in a way, you know.

It definitely wasn't a sort of last word in testament, you know, about the, about the Holocaust or Shoah, but it was a definitive in a way and also an opportunity for someone like Schindler or for Spielberg rather, because it doesn't contain a single frame of archival footage.

It's all interview testimony.

It is a, like the filmmaking in that is fascinating and alive.

And like it is another movie that despite its epic length does not at all feel like homework.

And I highly recommend everyone who has been afraid of it sit down and watch it because it is a really fascinating and

incredible document.

But

yeah, I mean, so that's the other sort of thing where it's just like, it's been kitschy.

It's also the most totemic and serious version of this has been done.

How do I thread the needle between these two things?

Right, right.

Which is like, there's something tonally he's getting from Shoah that is, you don't have to make the stately Hollywood kind of like, um, and Frank is like a very traditional movie.

It is like the conventional mechanism for how for decades Hollywood would turn important stories into accessible drama.

The 59 film was

yes, you know, and like Shoah is sort of like obviously this eight-hour kind of like monolithic

art house sensation, kind of like historically important text, but you can see him going like, is there a way to kind of like bridge the gap between these two, have the unbracing like specificity and feeling of Shoah and put it in a vehicle that audiences can like go and see?

Yeah, and I think that's exactly what Spielberg recognized to his great credit in my eye, is that part of the value of him making Schimler's list is that people would see it more than exactly.

I think the things that certain people like to ding this movie for are all part of the strategy of what the intended impact of this movie was, which you can't really argue with because it fucking worked.

And yeah, I mean, it's hard to think of any other movie, aside from maybe Saving Private Ryan, that so definitively created a visual language for a historical event that

is almost dangerous because it becomes so ubiquitous

and limiting in that way because people think of the Holocaust as being sort of visually synonymous as one thing.

Just like now, you can't think about D-Day or just like the nature of these ground battles in World War II without thinking of how Spielberg transformed them in our visual memory with saving Private Ryan.

And so, like, you can't think about that.

It's a lot of people who are not,

but also that danger.

And of course, thank you.

Sorry.

Talked over that important point.

No, I talked over your important point.

Of course, Daisy gives up the project.

He says, I guarantee you, it would have been good, but it wouldn't have been the hit it became.

Had some ideas.

Most of it's there.

It had a very different ending.

I admire the the film greatly.

You know, I would, I, it's fascinating to consider.

It'd be one thing if it was like, oh, yeah, he took the movie back from Turtletop.

It's like, Marcus Morsaci almost made this.

What does that look like?

Yeah.

We've had so many chances to see the Turtletop Schindler's list.

People from the last few years, but it's just like so many.

He came out Turtletop.

I'm going to remake it now.

He's like, even though it, anyway, no, he's Stephen Zalien, Spielberg, likes the script.

because he doesn't tell the story from the survivor's point of view, but from Schindler's.

And as Dalien puts it, I wanted it clear.

He didn't do what he did out of friendship.

He didn't feel sorry for them.

He eventually does it because it's the right thing to do.

But Spielberg's like, we do need to longer.

We need to broaden out.

We, you know, like, yes, it should be from his perspective, but we can,

you know, leave his perspective to take in what's happening in Krakow and like happening in the Holocaust around him.

He had like a sub.

two-hour script where he was like, I mean, this is another Spielberg thing of him being like, I can get away with this movie being over three hours long.

Don't feel the need to rush this and get processed.

I don't need to play a Sunday in 2025.

It doesn't have to be a tight 82 minutes.

Right.

At first, he resists.

They went to Poland together.

They meet with survivors, I think.

You know,

they talk about like, what do we put in there?

Zalian initially had this sort of hard rule of like, no, Schindler has to have been in the room essentially to have a scene, you know, take place in this movie.

And Spielberg's like, no.

I think an incredibly smart decision.

But Shoa comes out of the same soup, which is just like this feeling, getting back to what we were saying earlier, of these people are still alive.

There are people who live through this, who are still like young enough and cogent enough that we need to get all of these stories on record and do something with them and preserve them and archive them because they're going to start disappearing.

Which is part of the reason why making something like Schindler's List is so dangerous.

And I think was greeted by a lot of skepticism among certain critics because it has the potential to malform the collective memory of the Holocaust

in a way that, as we've seen based on the movie's influence, is a real power that it had to shape our understanding of it.

So the biggest

thing that they have to figure out, and now Spielberg talks a lot about going to Poland,

transforming his relationship with his religion,

understanding the Holocaust completely differently if you go there.

But what they also don't really know is like, what is the motivation behind Schindler's sort of transformation?

Because I feel like the survivors are basically just like, well, he did this thing for us.

But it's like, but they don't know, like, you know, why?

Why did this seemingly fairly amoral businessman suddenly, not suddenly maybe, but like, you know,

fairly quickly start to behave a different way?

Gradually in steps.

And it always, I think the.

The thing that makes him so interesting as a character is it feels like for the first two-thirds, if not three-fourths of the movie, he is fighting against the idea of any responsibility, where every time he does something that helps someone, he's like, it's good business.

Well, and then also it's just like, never fucking make me do that again.

Oh, yeah.

That's an aberration.

I think one of the reasons that this movie is a masterpiece is because it does this very controlled sense of winnowing over the course of the movie in a number of different regards where, you know, this habitable space that the Jews of Krakow have comes smaller and smaller and smaller in very understandable ways.

You feel Schindler's sort of moral compass.

This is a mixed metaphor, but like getting smaller as well as the movie goes on.

And there is a geometry to how he is reaching the sort of moral epiphany

that is reflected in the scope of the movie.

And every time I watch the movie, I'm surprised all over again by how narrow its confines are.

Yeah, I also think all those, the huge shifts and the revelations, and part of it is, and it seems like this is just the way

the accounts

supported.

I'm backing myself into a sentence I can't construct properly here.

It feels like part of what was fascinating about Schindler was there was a certain degree of inscrutability into like what caused these shifts and when and how and what was going on in his mind and these sort of blurry lines of like, as you're saying, the moments where he's like, it's good for business and denying that there's any altruistic motives versus the moments where he does an altruistic thing and then feels angry about it, that the moments of big psychological shifts and catharsis are like in between the scenes of this movie.

And even the thing that is closest to a moment in the film of him until the end, which we'll talk about, the closest to a moment of him being like, oh my God, my understanding has changed is obviously the little girl in the red coat.

But yet, in that moment, the person who's having the bigger emotional reaction is the mistress on the horse next to him.

Like she's his wife.

But there's

like that moment, not the mistress.

Yeah, there is nothing that would have cheapened, I think, this story more than acting as though Schindler's moral awakening was schematic enough to be done like a save the cat like

him.

I'm shocked to learn that.

Because the red coat happened so much earlier than I remembered.

And then even then, he's like going back and forth and fighting it.

And when you get to like the last chunk of the film where he's

where Ben Kingsley has to pull out of him that he's purposefully making bad shell casings.

But mine worked.

And you're like, oh, a huge shift has happened here where not only has he saved people, but now he's like trying to undermine the war and everything.

And those scenes happen in between the margins.

Right.

I mean, it's because, again, with the girl in the red coat, you are seeing someone sort of awaken to this idea of the value of a single human life.

He's witnessing a crime that would have gone, would have been obliviated into history if not for him having eyes on it, because no one else is watching this girl.

I mean,

and

right, but it's, you know, I think also what is so powerful about the movie, again, going back to the good and evil of it all, is that I don't think Schindler's moral awakening happens if not for his relationship with Amon Goethe, who is an evil that is so profound that he has to distance himself from it.

That it's like only by virtue of being exposed to that degree of sociopathic cruelty is he able to sort of recognize his own morality and step back and find his own humanity.

Most of the other Nazis you're seeing up until that point in the film, even the ones who seem to get some degree of perverse pleasure from it, are primarily the like just following orders guys, which I don't think Spielberg views as any less evil.

But the level of sadism and perversion in the Ray Fienes character is, you're right.

It's the thing of just like, I am fundamentally a different person than this guy.

Yeah, I mean, and there's, I mean, I think the interplay between the two characters is so brilliant.

You know, there's that great scene.

I mean, there are several great scenes between them, but especially when he is, you know, talking to him, he's about to bargain for Helen Hirsch's life at the end.

He's talking, but like Goethe, even after everything that's happened and their various negotiations, cannot fathom why

Schindler would want these Jews to work for him.

He assumes it has to be some sort of financial trick.

that he's missing.

And I think in Schindler's awareness of that sort of moral bankruptcy,

it unlocks something in him that dealing with a slightly less, you know, profoundly evil, but still obviously evil Nazi commandant would not have maybe precipitated the same reaction.

Well, right.

The difference is the guys he has to fight with to get Kingsley off the train.

I mean, okay.

So that is, that is the scene of, I think this is the most important scene of the movie in a way, because this is the scene where you're seeing one Spielberg collide with another and sort of knot themselves together in a way that i think makes this movie what it is and makes him eventually the artist he would become which is that you know it's a very suspenseful scene of him trying to rescue uh it's it'shak stern from being sent away to one of the camps um and he tells the guys in this like very fun um movie that has owes as much it's very fun moment that owes as much to something like casablanca and like classic um you know 50s film 40s and 50s films um as it does to holocaust narratives you know he's telling them he's going to send them to the eastern russia by the end of the month And then the cut is to

Liam Neeson walking along the train saying, Stern, Stern.

And then who enters the frame are the two Germans who you see have now bowed to his will and are and are working on his bidding.

And it's a completely slick cut that is

foregrounding the entertainment.

in what is ostensibly the most consequential dramatic moment of the movie so far.

And it's a perfect marriage between the entertainment value and like a choice that almost no other filmmaker would make to

like really squeeze the fun out of that moment.

It's almost a joke.

And then

it's kind of a comedy editor.

It's a very funny, it's a very funny edit.

And then it pivots again in the span of a single shot to what is the most horrifying moment of the movie so far, which is when they exit frame after Liam Neeson says, you know, if I had been here five minutes later, then where would I be?

It's scolding him.

Exactly.

And saying, like, where would I be?

I don't give a shit about you.

Like, where would my business be?

And the camera lingers on the luggage that's being taken from the Jews who were promised that it would go with them to the camps.

And we follow that into a back room where it's unpacked and sorted and obviously, you know, organized so that it can be sold and they're never going to see their own belongings again.

And all of this is happening with a fluidity that no other filmmaker would think to approach it.

And it's really, it's, it's just so.

fluidly blending the Hollywood of it all with the sobriety of what the story is and the gravity of it.

And I think from that moment on,

you know, he's just so in the pocket as Griffin Newton.

That's also when the movie has a mission, when it doesn't really, before then, you know, like it's sort of, it takes half the movie, everything for the sort of plot to come to coalesce.

Like his plot.

I don't mean the well, you guys have seen this movie far more than I have.

So correct me if I'm wrong here.

I feel like up until that moment, anything that he ostensibly does to help another person is profit motive.

No, I was going to say, is

facilitated by Kingsley.

It's like Kingsley going like this guy, and then Neeson is stamping it.

Kingsley is essentially using him as a vehicle for stuff.

That's true, right?

Which Kingsley's incredible.

But Kingsley's also playing to his desire to make money, you know.

Right.

I mean, it's part of the magic of the performance.

And then that Kingsley is quietly the one who's, he's so fucking good.

Is like

running the mirror.

Did you listen to Kingsley on Marin?

Oh, my god

it is

ben kingsley is

one of the hardest listens i've ever endured i don't like i love ben kingsley he's given like many performances that i've listened to this episode i might i mean but like he has such a rep now for being

you know pretty pretty tough so i'm not surprised to hear that he and marin didn't exactly vibe here's what's incredible about it He is really tough in the exact way you expect him to be.

And he just like immediately clams up at Marin being way too casual and conversational about stuff.

And him reading Marin as kind of glib.

And then also clearly, like, oh, this is one of those things where this guy wants me to like break down and like get emotional or start sharing intimate details.

And that's not what Kingsley wants to do.

I think Kingsley wants to be treated with like a lot of

reverence.

Correct.

Right.

He wants every interview to be like a career retrospective, like award, lifetime achievement award.

You're here to tell us about, you know, whatever.

He talks about like

the Ryan Reynolds.

What was that like awful movie?

he made so many awful movies in the last 10 years but there's one thing he makes with like ryan reynolds and like technology i don't i mean i saw i know the one you're talking about was ryan reynolds in it i don't even know it's not called limitless but it's got a title like it's like limitlish it's like along those lines right

what movie is this it's a movie where like he ryan reynolds consciousness is in his body or vice versa yes it's a weird fucking thing the worst part of ryan reynolds to have in your body one would argue but i think that like the uh the thing about kingsley he talks about that in the same sort of terms that he would talk about Gandhi or Schindler's List.

And anyway, that thing I was going to say about that interview is as much as he is like putting up walls and being like, I'm not going to play your fucking game.

And if this is what your show is like, then I'm going to give you like monosyllabic answers.

By the end of the episode, even though he's doing it like with a very tight grip, he basically admits that his entire life is driven by the fact that his father never gave him an ounce of approval.

and then gets him to admit that he's too critical of his sons who have also followed him into acting and he disapproves Marin refuses to end any interview until someone makes the same confession.

That's kind of incredible.

The movie is selfless.

Thank you.

I knew it.

It's a Tarsim movie.

Right.

But like his most anonymous.

You know that if you go up to Tarsim and tell him that you saw the fallen theaters, he will give you a like huge hug, physical hug.

That's great.

On the spot, anyone.

Two to three people can guarantee life.

I saw it in theaters.

Good for you.

Here's, let me finish my point I want to make here, right?

So like this is the first moment in which Neeson does something not aided by Kingsley.

It is provoked by Kingsley.

He is saving Kingsley, but he's not just like signing off on something that guy put into motion.

And Kingsley, the whole first hour of the movie is walking on eggshells.

It is this incredible unspoken performance of him just being like, how much can I get away with before?

I get a little too loud and a little too sloppy and this guy like clamps down on me.

It's sort of like a reverse assimilation that he's performing.

That's just like obviously deeply embedded in the Jewish experience that would follow the Holocaust in particular.

But like, there's that amazing scene right after the one-armed worker has come to him and just to thank Schindler for employing him, which obviously never let that happen ever.

Right.

And, but the way that Kingsley handles that scene, where the driver comes out, and Kingsley's like, fuck off, like, fuck off, go away, get in the car.

Like, we need to heed this off.

This has to have never happened.

It's, it's a brilliant negotiation in real time.

The effort he puts into saving Kingsley, which part of the magic is he doesn't do it with a sense of stakes or immediacy.

in a way.

He's doing his like

Schindler bullshitter.

I need that guy.

Right.

Freaking out the two officers kind of thing.

And then you think that it's like he's not going to say anything and he's not going to show emotion, but this is an acknowledgement that he's started to care about Kingsley a little too much, or at the very least, has started to see him as a person a little too much to let him get away, that there's some emotional calculation.

Kingsley gets off the train

in one-broke, one unbroken, long Spielberg wonner, right?

He gets off the train.

It's like door open, train stopped abruptly.

Kingsley gets off.

He is playing the emotion of a guy who was 30 seconds ago convinced he was about to die.

This was it.

Even though Schindler's running after the chain, it's like, well, he's missed it by five seconds.

It's compounded by the understanding that Stern has a greater awareness of the consequences of the train than anyone else.

This guy has just to some degree accepted his fate, right?

Is now like being saved by a hare, steps off the train.

They close the door so quickly behind him.

The train starts moving.

He glances back for half a second at like, holy shit, all of those people are about to die.

Just gets behind Schindler and walking, starts apologizing profusely.

He's apologizing while he's still in the car.

He's like, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I fucked up.

I fucked up.

And you're expecting that Schindler's going to be stoic.

And Schindler's like, no, you're right.

You did fuck up.

Fuck you.

Never let that happen ever again.

It's also one of so many different moments in this movie that hinge on a kind of divine providence, which, you know, there were some criticisms when the movie came out about how the Jews were seen as having, you know, just being this, this faceless mob in the background and not having a massive mass.

But they're passive.

Well, guess who took away all of their age?

Yeah, but it's not Germany.

It's also saying that, like, you know, the flip side of that argument, which is there was this famous village voice symposium that came out right around the time of the movie where someone was arguing that, you know, the Jews don't, it's, it makes it seem as if they didn't do anything to save their own skin.

And I think that is countered just by like,

you know, and it's like only the people who survive deserve to survive.

And I think it's countered by like just the role that we see luck play in this movie time and time and time again.

One person, you know, he lines up 50 people, shoots 25 by going to every other one.

You know, one person hides here, one person hides there.

It's all complete.

happenstance.

I think this movie does an incredibly good job.

I want to say better than maybe any other Holocaust film I have seen of really dramatizing the drawn-out psychological warfare aspect of the dehumanization, where I feel like people who

struggle to wrestle with the enormity of the Holocaust are like, I don't get it.

How did they just show up one day, tell the Jews to get in cages, and no one fought back, right?

Like, how did they just accept this sort of victimization?

and not fight back against it.

And the movie is showing that it's like their strategy was so complicated, so drawn drawn out, so gradual that there are these constant steps of just like, we just have to like accept this thing and then find our moment to fight back against it or to slip away or to get our exit.

And people did get away and people did survive, right?

But it all felt so kind of random and chaotic that there was this gaming of even the women on the train being like, I've heard this rumor about the showers.

And they're like, the fuck are you talking about?

That's just crazy.

What you're describing is crazy.

That couldn't be real.

Yeah.

I mean, you feel, it's, again, going back to the idea of how Spielberg, you know, the gradients by which he introduces different elements, you feel the noose tightening as the circle where the Jews are allowed to live grows smaller.

And you feel Schindler expanding in that space.

And there's that great scene that could potentially have been too on the nose.

I mean, this is not an overwhelmingly subtle movie, but I think, you know, it is very effective in doing this where we see the Jews being kicked out of their apartment.

in Krakow.

And then who takes up the apartment is Schindler.

And he says it couldn't be any better, which is kind of a ham-fisted and clunky line, but only exists so that it can be mirrored by the Jewish woman then saying, oh, it can't get any worse.

Like, you know, it's,

and you have that scene where they're talking in the ghetto about like the get, they said, one guy says the ghetto is liberty.

They're talking, no one stole my business today.

Nobody threw me on a truck.

The constant rationalizations of like, at least I have this, at least I have that.

And, you know, like frogs in boiling water.

You know, it's, they had never, they had never been witness to a Holocaust before.

No, and also like you get to a point where people have just so fully lost their sense of selves.

You're attacking them from so many strange, unprecedented angles and moving the goalposts so constantly while also constantly maintaining this looming threat of severe violence, tragedy, nightmarish experience that people just like don't even know what to fucking do anymore.

People also just didn't understand how you could kill people en masse because that's not something that, you know, they industrialize it.

People struggle to wrap their heads around today.

Exactly.

Yes.

One of the things that makes it very tough to watch.

We would also have to delve into like pre-war European, like Poland, these countries are nascent.

You know, like they've been sort of like overrun by empires many times over the last hundred, 200 years.

Like, you know, this isn't a country with a sort of like completely fixed, you know, structured government.

You know, like, I mean, obviously it's been, you know, invaded at this point by both countries, by both Russia and Germany.

We can't, I need to go back to the compelling fact that, of course, Mel Gibson was one of the people considered to play Oscar Schindler.

What a world.

Along with Harrison Ford, who certainly makes sense both for Spielberg and for age, and like

time.

And the name you want me to name, which is Kevin Costner.

We talked about it recently.

Probably

lobbying for it.

Yes.

And as Beatty was, Foreign Beatty famously was as well.

The period where Costner, where Spielberg was reluctant to direct it, Costner also took a stab at like, I think I could direct this.

Schindler's List Part 1.

I mean, look, obviously, Costner is, what, two, two, three years removed from Dances of the Wolves.

The man is...

He's feeling confident.

What if he ran out of funding halfway through Schindler's List?

Had to go to Santa Barbara.

Two to four or more en route.

Spielberg instead goes for Liam Neeson.

One, wants someone who looks like the guy in his head, at least.

Two, not an unknown actor at this point, but not a star, won't bring baggage for the character, won't overwhelm the film.

Obviously, if Warren Beatty was playing Oscar Schindler, it probably would.

Like, would he rock it?

Possibly.

Would he do great in all the scenes where he's fucking his way around town?

Yeah.

Can we be good at that?

Can we talk about Neeson for a bit?

It's an incredible performance.

It's an incredible performance.

And

I love when this kind of thing comes up on our show.

An incredible performance, one of his most important performances.

And yet when you step back, you're like, don't spend the most important performances in his career.

Complete outlier.

Well, this is like, first off, the movie starts, he starts speaking.

Not immediately, right?

But when his first dialogue kicks in.

The movie starts, they light the candles and he's like, I'm here too, by the way.

It's not 100% unrecognizable.

He's doing an accent.

It is the only time I think he has successfully changed his voice to any degree.

But he still has a hint of the progue, and it works.

He does.

This is some of the best accent work of any movie I've ever seen.

And that of all these movies that immediately caused me to roll my eyes at English and various other, you know, actors of other necessities, like this.

I didn't want to do subtitles.

Subtitles, you're reading the movie, not watching it.

You're not looking at what's happening.

There's something about just maybe they're just getting the tones right.

Not that I am all that well versed in what the right accent should sound like beyond my own family.

There are a lot of accents in this film.

You know, it all feels right.

I don't know.

I don't question the reality.

I feel like every other time Neeson tries to do an accent, he is putting a little something on top of his Irish brogue, and you just kind of accept he sounds like Liam Neeson.

He's making some effort to get away from pure Irish, but he's got his own voice and no one else sounds like

when he played Qui-Gon.

Hey, Sebolpa, give me that kid.

This is what I'm saying.

He never fully sounds American.

He never fully sounds British.

This is the best I think he's done at finding a voice that is different from him while also retaining some of the core like movie star qualities.

It is also

Ponyo's dad.

Did he bust out his Schindler's voice for that?

He's incredible.

I mean, I think it helps that part so much about the character that he's playing here is a performance in and of itself.

It allows for a theatricality that he can play up and sort of disappear into.

And there's that incredible, you know, first sequence where he's, you know, trivia, the, the matrix at the nightclub where you see it is Branko Lustig, who is the, not only the producer of the film, but a survivor of Auschwitz.

And

yeah, and he goes in there and he's putting on a show, like one by one in this nightclub and bending everyone to his will.

And the charisma is just

off the screen.

It looks like he just walked out of Casablanca.

He's like, you know, got the cigarette smoke hanging over him.

Like, it's the, this is the best black and white photography.

This makes, this movie is like taking a shit on the idea that, like, just putting a movie in black and white makes it look good.

It's like, no, no, no, no.

You can fuck it up or you can do what Yanush did here.

This movie looks good.

This movie has the eyeshadows in that first scene alone.

And also, he's got an incredible face for black and white.

Yeah, of course, because it's got a brow and crag so the shadows can fall on his face.

And the movie also feels like it starts the day after Oscar Schindler has realized that his businesses fail because he doesn't take advantage of the fact that he's hot as shit.

Like he has finally figured out that the fact that I am like the most charismatic and beautiful man alive is going to be my greatest asset as a businessman because I am not a great businessman.

David, two anecdotes.

David, David.

Not an ad read.

I apologize for everyone who got triggered by that.

Sims,

if you can find either of these in the dossier, there's a there's the like entertainment executive who Spielberg recommended Neeson study, where he was like, this is the kind of charisma I want you to have.

He was the CEO of Time Warner.

In a way where Neeson's obviously a very charismatic guy, right?

And can get away with the sort of like Qui-Gon as Lonnie, just like, this is the most important man in the world speaking like the word of God.

Loved Steve Ross.

Steve Ross was the head of Time Warner.

I am not aware of Steve Ross actually being the greatest human alive.

Spielberg seemed to think he was.

I guess he was like a philanthropist and he maybe he was like by CEO.

This reminds me of Frederickler could be a loaded compliment.

I don't know.

Well, but no, but he's saying like, no, no, no.

Study Steve Ross.

Like we're saying, like, study how he walks.

Study, like, I.

Spielberg seems like very entranced by Steve Ross as a kind of like good business.

But I also think he's like acknowledging that this guy needs to have a certain kind of businessman charisma and not a movie star charisma.

That makes sense.

Right.

Like, if it's, if it's Gibson, if it's Costner, if it's Beatty, you're too far on the other line of that.

Neeson obviously has movie star charisma, but there's also the deep well of Irish sadness in him that is always his superpower.

And also knowing that he's like not a guy who's going to be protective of his leading man image, that he's a guy who's going to view this as an acting assignment.

And he's like, watch the way that people who are good at fucking winning negotiations behind closed doors have charisma, not the people who are good at like getting on camera and charming up.

But it's like, what if Charles Foster Kane enjoyed being Charles Foster Kane?

Right.

Like that's sort of the vibe.

But that's these guys who like fucking love making deals, you know?

The other anecdote I wanted to say, I can't remember if it's Kingsley who's the one who gave him this advice, but that he like a week or two into filming was like, I don't know if I have any handle on this thing.

Spielberg is like not giving me direction.

He's not explaining it to me.

I feel like I'm floundering.

And I think it was Kingsley who was like, you need to just trust him.

Sure.

I can find that probably.

Right.

Like you, you are a color on his palette.

He hired you because he knows you can do what you want to do.

He's going to make you look good.

He's adjusting around your performance.

Don't get freaked out by the lack of hand holding.

But I think there is a little bit of panic.

in the movie.

I'd be pretty fucking panicked if I was Liam Nisa making this movie.

I'm saying there's a little bit of panic that I think helps the performance.

Maybe, yeah, of course, because Schindler is kind of skating the whole time.

Yeah, he's got enough money to fall back on.

I mean, that's the first thing he says to Stern.

He's like, I don't have the money for the kind of business that I like.

I need you to trade enamelware with

other Jews.

Part of this is Spielberg being like, I want to approach this like a documentary.

I want to just let the actors do their thing and then figure out how to shoot it rather than doing like perfect dollhouse arrangements.

Which to Neeson, he's like, why is no one giving me direction?

I've never really been the lead of a big Hollywood movie like this before.

Darkman Dead in a Ditch.

I'm sorry.

I forgot.

That is wild.

Yeah.

Dark Man Thursday.

Dark Man is so shortly before.

It would be funny if Spielberg was like, I just loved the way he did Darkman.

I love I love Darkman died.

Well, also, let's call out.

This is only the second movie for M.

Beth Davids.

Her first film is Army of Darkness, Sam Raymean Universal.

Is Spielberg quietly plucking the Raimi casts?

Maybe he is, but you know who it's also only the second movie for?

Rafe finds Voldemort himself, which, you know, it's one of those...

like Spielberg things where, or like casting things where Spielberg's like, look, the man screamed evil to me.

What can I tell you?

And Spielberg lays on so much praise of like, I really think this guy could be like Al Guinness or Lawrence Olivier.

Like, you know, like he's the, he's the talent.

He's the Pope.

Which he kind of is.

Yes.

Right.

I, I, I can.

Excuse me.

He doesn't want to be the Pope.

Stop voting for him.

I close the loop on my Nissan thought to then bridge to the Fiennes thoughts.

Yes.

It's just the way you say these things sometimes.

It's like, you know, you're building another skyscraper.

I'm like, we barely talked about the movie.

Karen, yes.

I think the lack of guidance he's giving him is because he doesn't want to feel like he's controlling the performances and he's trying to let this movie develop more organically, which is freaking out Neeson a little bit because this is a little out of his wheelhouse.

And working on Dark Man, Raimi is notoriously like, here's the shot and I'm going to do this.

And at two seconds, tilt your head this degree.

Like so hands-on.

Yes.

Right.

Which to me,

I think does subconsciously, and I don't think this was Spielberg's intent.

create a certain energy of, am I getting away with this?

That helps the performance.

It's part of the negotiation that we see in the movie because the first sequence of this movie, the first real sequence of schindler at the nightclub is shot like the shadow i mean like it's uh it is hyper precise and that gives way almost immediately when we cut to uh you know the footage of you know foot soldiers running down the street to the docudrama like handheld but he is almost sort of like finding his way into doing that around what the actors are doing rather than collaborating them to get to that point, which I think is mostly what he had done with his movies up until this film.

Whereas Ray Fynes feels like he just is like incredibly studious and self-sufficient and just showed up and was like i figured it out here's this guy and spoken's like great you're ready to go like fuck it i don't know how you found this he talks about it like he had like a voodoo doll where ray fines was like i just like lived with this horrible creation that i like understood and poked and prodded right i mean finds talks about you know he like people who play villains all the time like understood some sympathy for this like broken evil man or whatever.

But I love that he shows up in the ghetto with the cold from Bridge of spies uh i mean some of the like the two great cold acting i think films you watch this movie now and you're like there's ray fines and i i joke load lord voldemort that's literally you know like that's why him being cast as voldemort would to me at the time i was like can we try again like that's too obvious except guess what he rocked the house as lord he's great that performance is unbelievable i have no to be clear uh he's he's very good in the role he's one of my favorite screen actors of all time next year we got to mad mickelstones as a villain or something crazy like imagine oh that'd be crazy i i joked the the other day on text it's gonna be Danny Houston.

I swear to the Lithgow thing.

I'm like, I'm in this state where I'm like, well, I shouldn't even care about this stupid Harry Potter TV show.

We need less replications of these books over and over again.

Like, there's plenty done already, and we don't need to be feeding that beast.

I feel a relief, and then they're like, John Lithgow is Dumbledore.

And I'm like, fuck that.

God damn it.

But also, I feel the relief that it's like, thank God we're not tying down Mark Rylance for a decade, which was the rumor.

Yeah.

David, what?

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Booking.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what I was about to say.

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Ben, who's like, what's an example of someone I know who maybe has a very particular set of demands?

Bringing me in, and there's only one other person in the room.

There's one other person in the room.

My goodness.

This is so rude.

I sleep easy.

I'm definitely not someone who insists on 800 thread count sheets.

No.

That's an example of a fussy person.

Look, people have different demands.

And you know what?

If you're traveling, that's your time to start making demands.

You know, you've got

a partner who's sleep light, rise early, or maybe, you know, like you just want someone who wants a pool or wants a view, or I don't know.

Maybe any kind of demand.

Lynn, and I need a room with some good soundproofing because I'm going to be doing some remote pod records.

Sure.

Maybe you're in Europe and you want to make sure that's very demanding to be in Europe.

You got air conditioning.

Well, I think of one person in particular, although it's really both of you.

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Look, if I can find my perfect stay on booking.com, anyone can.

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Look, they're again,

they're specifying like, oh, maybe you want a sauna or a hot tub.

And I'm like, sounds good to me.

Yeah.

Please.

Can I check that button?

You want one of those in the recording studio?

That'd be great.

You want to start, You want to be.

I'll be in the sauna when we record.

I was going to say, you want to be the Dalton Trumbo podcast.

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You would look good if I had a sauna and a cold plunge.

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Ray Fines.

Ray Feines, imagine seeing this film in 1993.

99.9% of people do not know who Ray Finn.

No, 100%.

Nobody knows who fucking Ray Finn.

100%.

Unless you've been going to the national theater in Britain or whatever, you know, like, and like this guy shows up.

And I do feel like people were just like, they got a Nazi from like the 40s.

Right.

They just found one like in a time tunnel.

Like that's what it feels like when you're watching him, those first scenes.

I find talking to people,

very often people just assume he won for this.

I will hear people constantly refer to Academy Award winner Ray Fienes and be like, he won for Schindler, right?

And then he has that immediate, like, it's very similar to the Edward Norton arc, which is like out of nowhere, who the fuck is this supporting performance?

Then like immediate elevation of leading man.

I don't know if he should have won.

I still, I wrestle with it to this day.

I wrestle with it.

It doesn't matter who else is in that category.

He should have won, but I also completely

Tom Eli Jones for the Future, which is basically the greatest supporting performance.

It's a great performance, but there is no performance in this movie that should not have won an Oscar.

Well, wait a second.

Bing Kingsley's losing Ray Feines.

You've defeated yourself.

They should have both won, split the trophy, or he could have pulled a Ving Reims.

One of them could have won and given it to the other.

I watched that again the other day.

It's a really good moment.

But I, you know.

That's like your favorite moment.

Because that was bad for you as a kid because you were like, This is allowed?

When Michael Cain won the Oscar for Ciderhouse rules, I was like, said this on our show, right?

Sit back, he's gonna do it, he's gonna do the right,

he's gonna give it to him.

The torso, I was so sure he was gonna do it.

I was like, It's not over yet.

I'm always like, oh, it's crazy finds it went right, Tommy Lee Jones.

Nobody has delivered a line better in a movie ever than Tommy Lee Jones in the fugitive.

I'm not joking, I'm deadly serious.

I don't care.

I don't care is the greatest line reading in the history of movies.

Prove me wrong.

David L.

Sims on Twitter, which I don't use that much.

You will never be reading.

You can just send replies into the void.

I do think.

And lucky with Tommy Lee Jones, it was like, hey, man, you've been in this industry for 20 years.

You're a legend.

Like, it's time for you to win your Oscar.

Ray finds, I think it's partly like, well, he's young.

He'll be back.

Maybe in a conclave.

Two, it's like, maybe he's just a fucking crazy person they found for this role who's so incredible.

And maybe it's like some magic trick.

No, he had to do the English patience to be like, I actually am that hot and not a nuts.

This is what's nuts to me is like within three years, it's like, oh, now you were like matinee idol in a huge sweeping epic that like ran the fucking gauntlet on at the Oscars and was a hit.

Yeah, but he had to lose to shiny McShine.

And then they don't nominate him again for 30 fucking years.

Obviously, I think they should have nominated him for a grand budapest.

Correct.

You should have won.

What?

He should have won.

But there was at the time category confusion, in my opinion, stupidly.

Are there other Ray Feines movies, though, that he should have gotten an Oscar nomination?

No, I love A Bigger Splash, and he's on my ballot that year, but obviously that wasn't a big splash.

I feel like there was the Duchess Reader in Bruges year where people were like, he's so good at it.

He kind of should get a supporting, but no one could figure out which movie to put him in for.

The answer is in Bruges, but that movie kind of broke late and obviously is the silliest.

And David Cronenberg's spider?

He's amazing.

What about?

That is an incredible performance.

It sure is.

I would have given him mostly momentum.

What about I mean I give him a supporting actor nom for fucking goblet of fire a movie that I think is otherwise trash.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Goblet of Fire?

Because that's the first one that he's introducing, right?

He's in it for like five minutes.

That's the one?

It's the whole final set piece.

You know what I mean?

It's only fair that it's the whole final set.

I'm just saying.

That's a movie that I think has its fair share of flaws as the Constant Gardner.

He's very good in that movie.

Which Rachel Weiss wins on?

Right, the Oscars just seemed to make one rule where they were like, it gets one one win and nothing else.

I think that's enough for the conversation.

It's crazy how quickly he becomes a take-from grant.

He's not constant enough.

He becomes a take-it-for-granted.

No, no, no.

No, Griff.

I disagree with you.

That's not true.

Okay.

You're wrong.

Make your power argument.

The whole thing with him is he makes Schindler's list.

Yeah.

This is a star-making moment.

Who the fuck is that?

Of course you've played a villain, a Nazi, the most scary Nazi.

I will say, I do think it is also a case of he doesn't win because the character is almost too evil.

I think that's part of it.

It is so upsetting that people are like, we have to nominate it, but it feels gross to give him a signal.

Unless you're going full clown mode, Christoph Waltz, they do not want to reward.

It's why Fastbunder didn't win.

They don't want to reward people for financial aid.

It's why Tatario didn't get nominated for Django.

Well, that's a bit of an over-the-top performance, too, in my opinion.

I don't know if you guys noticed this, but he's kind of like dialing it up slightly in that movie.

So next year, he makes Quiz Show, which is wonderful.

Oh, my God.

Fuck getting Quiz Show.

But that's a movie where clearly the Oscars liked that movie, got best picture nomination, did not know what to do because that movie's filled with good performances.

Taturo, weirdly, doesn't get a nomination.

Right, gets the precursor nominations, and then Armin Mueller Stahl gets the surprise.

I'm sorry.

I always make this fucking mistake between Shine and Quiz Show.

And Paul Schofield is awesome in Quiz Show, but it's kind of like, right, old legend giving a couple great scenes.

So he misses out in Quiz Show.

Also, in Quiz Show, he's kind of playing a dweeb.

Like, you know, guess what?

He fucking

roles in Quiz Show.

Okay, the next year,

this is his career so far.

He's made, these are the only two movies he's made so far since, you know, Strange Days.

Amazing performance.

Quite a curveball from him.

People are like, who is this?

Hey, man, I need my mini discs.

You know, like, we're like, this is Ray Fines?

Okay.

The next year after that, English patient.

Holy shit.

Here he is as a romantic lead.

He's taking a bath with KST.

Is that movie good?

Should I move it?

I think it's good.

I think it's good.

It's very sweeping.

It's why they invented the word sweeping.

It's sweeping as hell.

But here's like romantic Ray Fines.

He's hot in it.

He's such a handsome.

And he's really good.

He loses to Shiny McShine.

If he hadn't lost to him, he possibly would have lost to Tom Cruise and Jerry McGuire, greatest performance ever.

But he's really good in it.

Okay.

So the next year he does Oscar and Lucinda.

Not a bad movie.

Young Cape Blanchett, but that doesn't really

fail Oscar bait stuff.

Sunshine is.

This is what I'm trying to tell you.

He kind of goes down a bit of a tricky road.

Sunshine kind of fucks, though.

Well, the next year he does The Avengers.

Oh, The Avengers.

That movie made a billion dollars.

No, no, no.

No, the other one.

Right.

Right.

Hold on.

There's a sort of like, okay, this guy doesn't cross over.

He's, he's a person.

The Avengers, where it's like 89 minutes, but like the closing credits are like 20 minutes.

That one only made $500 million.

Yeah.

Of course, The Voice of Ramesses and Prince of Egypt does a great job.

1999, right.

You have the sort of sunshine.

uh uh on jin you know the the russian uh novel adaptation end of the affair where you're like has he become history's greatest homework actor right where it's like the man does movies based on books you read in school.

Here's another thing that's starting to davies to cast him in something like that.

I think he's great in the end of the affair, which is kind of a forgotten thing.

I was going to say it's the kind of thing where it's similar to Rachel Weiss.

It's like, oh, and look, the actress gets the nomination.

Like, you're taking Feins for granted, being like, oh, this is that thing he does.

Okay, so he takes a, he literally takes three years off, doesn't make a movie.

This is, I'm having fun with Feins's career now because it's really interesting.

We're having a Fein's time.

In 2002, Spider, an amazing movie, but small.

Sure.

Obviously.

Charms.

The Good Thief Uncredited.

Okay, that doesn't count.

That's a Neil Jordan movie.

That's a remake.

No.

It's a remake of Bob Flambeau.

Bob Flamborer.

It's a fun movie.

It's Nulty, very, very normal voice in it and everything.

I am a Flambourg.

Truly, that's the movie.

I saw it in theaters.

Let me flum.

Red Dragon, lazy casting in a way, but he's not bad

as Dollar Hide.

Do you see?

Do you see?

And

his most unnerving and strange performance, maybe in his entire career, made in Manhattan, where you're like, why is Jennifer

Le Pes in love with this vampire?

This Republican vampire.

Like, that movie is unhinged simply because of him.

Everything else in that movie, like, I get it.

She's a maid in Manhattan.

She takes the train.

She's got a kid.

She's falling in love with a rich guy.

Oh, no, it's spelled maiden.

No, it's spelled.

But like, that's where it's like, well, hey, could Ray Feines do this?

And everyone's like, not really.

It was a hit.

Yeah, it made money.

But like, again, does it ever walk away from that being like, you know who I loved in that?

Yes.

And then yeah, another three years off.

In 2005, he's in Azillion Things.

He's in Harry Potter.

He's in the White Countess, which is a late merchandary movie that doesn't really play.

He's in Constant Gardner, which is good.

He's in the Chum Scrubber.

Remember that?

Go fish.

And then he's kind of, because of Voldemort, become...

supporting villain guy in Bruges.

The reader is a supporting role, you know, very heavily.

You know, Hurtlocker rocks in it, you know, swings in like a rap.

He's playing the reader.

He's not another Nazi.

He plays old, old

young man.

Nazis' theaters.

He plays once enough.

He's the older version.

He's the grown-up version of.

Have you seen the reader more than once?

No.

In your life?

Has anyone?

No.

Not even that.

It's hard to imagine re-watching the reader.

I don't think Daldry watched it more than once beginning to end.

He is the grown-up version of the kid who has to testify that she read the book to him or he read the book to her.

Whatever.

It's just interesting.

It's all building, obviously, to the apex of his career.

Grand Buddha Fest.

Oh, I was going to say the reteam of him and Neeson in the Titans films.

Ah, of course he played Hades.

Hades and Zeus.

Well, never, one of the greatest taglines of our time for Clash of the Titans.

Titans will clash.

He never got bad, but like at all.

No, no, you're right.

It is a hard career.

When Skyfall comes around, they're like, yeah, you can play M, James Bond's boss.

And it's like, he's like not that much older than Daniel Craig, you know, and it's like, no, no, no, Rafe.

Hey, hey, you're M now.

You don't get to run around.

There is perhaps a weird lack of strategy to his career that I respect now, stepping back and looking and knowing that he's got a lot left to do.

In the 90s, the strategy kind of seems to be like, you know, prestige movies.

Right.

And then it's, yes, it starts to get more diffuse.

Obviously, he does.

Strange Days is a weird swing.

Avengers is a weird swing.

Made Manhattan's a weird swing.

Anytime he went studio, it was an odd choice.

You guys are forgetting his most unnerving performance, though, which was, of course, the videotaped introduction he sent in to the Toronto premiere of his recent film, version of the Odyssey.

Another TV that in my as I went straight to homework, which unfortunately must not exist on, I mean, Christopher Nolan kind of

announced, I think he waited like right until after the movie at theaters, but he like did a video from a hotel room somewhere in Europe where his eyeball was like against the camera.

He was probably in the most example where he currently is.

I love him so much.

I love him too.

I love him.

Yeah.

And no, no, you're, this is, I'm glad we took the time to outline this because it does make more sense.

It's a weird career.

It is a weird career.

The Grand Buddha Pest Snub is outrageous.

That movie is the best movie ever made.

I recently watched it and I was just like, I should watch this once a week.

I think he and Neeson are the same and that the career is so diffuse and so spread out and has so many weird eras to it that sometimes you're like, who is this guy again?

If you were to sort of like hall of fame project, just be like, pick the 10 most representative projects and try to hit the different phases or modes of their career.

If you reduce either of those guys to just 10 movies, you're like, that's insane, right?

And they still got gas in the tank and are going to keep making stuff, but they're both sort of Fiennes has a lot more range than

he has.

Although 100%.

And Hollywood really sees Neeson as like one of two things, right?

Like either the sort of starter.

Especially now.

But Neeson is, to his credit, a much bigger New York Rangers fan than Ray Fiennes is.

How do you know?

Because you asked.

I haven't asked Ray Fiennes.

Do you see?

I have also Ray Fians according to the Stanley Cup.

Oh, God.

It's so far in the distance now.

But I have not seen Ray Fiennes at every hockey game I have ever gone to, unlike Liam Nisa.

God bless you.

And I'm just like looking over there as I watch the Rangers, like Panerans get the puck up the ice.

And there's Oscar Schindler on the sidelines being like, yeah.

Carousing with ladies.

They have a bunch of ladies with him.

He's there with Margot Robby, another classic Rangers then.

Good for that all.

Yanisz Kaminsky, of course, famously Spielberg calls up, you know, Zygmunt, Kundi, Alan Davio, Douglas Solcom, and is like, no, thank you.

No, thank you.

No, no.

He watches a film on TV called Wildflower, a TV movie, thinks it's beautifully photographed, and is like, who shot this?

And Yanush says, like, Stephen watches a lot of television.

Wildflower was directed by Diane Keaton on Lifetime.

Crazy to imagine Spielberg being like flipping over to Lifetime, but maybe, or maybe he was like, hey, Diane made a TV TV movie.

I'll watch it.

And he got offered an emblem-produced TV movie called Class of 61.

And I guess, you know, Spielberg at this point learns that he's Polish and is kind of like,

well, I'm making this movie in Poland, like, and starts to look at him more seriously.

It's still crazy, though, because I do feel like Spielberg mostly worked with really established names.

This is DPS.

Yes, and had Janush is basically a nobody.

He had his regular guys, but also like, until this point, isn't like married to one DP.

And, and, but the other thing is with this movie, he's basically like, do what you want.

Like, he's not like, hey, this is exactly what I need to do.

And, like, I have storyboarded this.

He's kind of like, uh, you should take whatever approach you need.

We're not going to do Dollies.

We're not going to do steady cam.

It's also part of him being like, I need to throw myself out of my comfort zone a little bit.

It's also part of like him being inspired by Andrei Wadzza, whose name I just captured, even for my Polish background, who he was looking at as like the guy in his mind's eye who he needed to be to make this movie and was never going to be and thinking about the cinematography in those films and looking for someone who had an understanding of how you know a polish crew would work and what shooting in poland would look like and and could approximate those uh that aesthetic and that's exactly what he looked like

all of that does make sense it is fascinating though that it's just like it's this late at the like inflection point of his career that he finds the second most important collaborator of his entire life absolutely yeah noush is the king uh to be clear.

He's a god.

He's the first E.T.?

Yeah, E.T., that mother crazy motherfucker, who is a runner on this one.

He was the best play.

It's a slow runner.

Let's go get someone else.

I love this from Yanoush.

I know why JJ put this in because he knew I would like it.

The problem with doing black and white is there's silver, obviously, in the emulsion, as we all know, because we've all seen it in Glorious Bastards.

And that creates a negative discharge of electricity.

So it makes these little like spots on the film.

So you have to avoid static being in the room.

And so you like have to, you would like spray the room before you shoot because like there's all this static electricity and like weather is a problem.

Like weird production is a problem for all of this.

So that was the biggest challenge for shooting in black and white.

And this movie almost fell apart because of Spielberg's insistence to shooting it in black and white because he wanted to, and his quote is that the Holocaust was light, was life without light.

And he wanted to reflect that in the shooting without color, which he saw as sort of a symbolic of light.

But like the movie almost didn't go because Universal was so stubborn about the idea that black and white movies don't make money.

There's also a thing, and this is an axiom that is like still held to this day, that black and white films do even worse overseas, even worse on like home video and television.

And so almost all cases where Hollywood Studio has made a black and white film the last 35, 40 years, they insist that they shoot it in color and convert it later later so that there is a color version of the film that they can at least like play on foreign television.

Where like I know Nebraska did that, where they were like on the Epics channel playing the color version of Nebraska.

And every American was glued to their television for the premiere of the color version on Epics.

I remember that well.

Right.

There's like shit like that.

And Spielberg was just like, I refuse.

I am shooting this in black and white.

But it's also a case of perpetuating the cinematic memory of an event because

another one of the reasons why he wanted to shoot in black and white is because every Holocaust film he had seen was shot in black and white and the footage from the Holocaust the archival footage was shot in black and white and he was you know continuing that idea which is a fraught concept in and of itself but he was trying to make sort of the ultimate version of the Holocaust films that he had seen interesting uh Schindler's list what do we want it's funny it's funny i was just looking at my little notes on my phone and i was just the

it's like the thing i see is it's funny it's like again, we talk so much about him trying to find the right tone, negotiating these different energies.

And you see that come to a head with the scene where they're hiring secretaries, which is a great comic little sequence.

It's like the classic, like Steve, you can't make this not fun.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

He has to do it.

And it's, it's an inherently funny idea that Schindler was only interested in having a hot secretary.

And then this woman comes in who is not a young hottie and she can type three times as fast as anyone.

He's like, motherfucker, like, I'm going to have to hire her.

Well, like, what is one of the moments that changes Schindler the most as a character?

It is the reaction he gets to kissing the Jewish woman delivering the cake with the daughter.

Right.

Which is to Schindler, just like, what?

I'm a horny devil who kisses everything he sees.

Right.

It almost is the thing that makes him understand the severity of the situation in a personal way for the first time.

Is I love kissing women.

You're telling me that some women are unkissable?

By law.

Well, yeah.

But it also shows that he fundamentally doesn't think of them with the same level of disdain that like the pure Nazis do, right?

No, not at all.

As much as he's like, I refuse to care.

He doesn't think about them as a businessman.

Exactly.

You know, more of a Don Draper thing.

But

and like Don Draper, I guess, was also, I guess, admitting in that statement that he's obsessed with them.

Another, by the way, another Spielberg comedy edit moment is if I'm going to stay here, you have to promise me that no one will ever mistake me for anyone but Mrs.

Schindler.

And then hard cut cut to her when we're buying the plane on the train.

It's a really funny cut.

I mean, I'd say the other moment that is a real awakening for him, in addition to the one we talked to, is when somebody calls him a good man.

I really feel like nobody, you know, you have the one-armed worker come in and you have,

you know, much later in the film, you have the daughter of the

married couple who he reluctantly pulls out of the camp.

But you get the sense that nobody has ever called him a good man before.

And that was something he wasn't necessarily looking for.

And he tries it out like he, it's a weird fit for him.

Um, but it almost feels like he's projecting the idea of the responsibility where it's like, if I crack the door open to people thinking I can help them or save them, then suddenly the obligation is going to become so great on me, a thing I cannot handle, which is what makes the end sort of like uh implosion so emotionally devastating of him doing the math of like, I didn't save enough.

And here's a guy who spent the entire movie being like, Don't make me do anything.

Yeah, because he talks so often about about how the Holocaust and World War II and the whole is just bigger than he is.

He just like, he's like, okay, so they're going to kill everyone.

They're going to kill everyone.

Like, what?

What does that have to do with me?

What can I do about that?

Which is part of how the Holocaust happily abstains from

obligations.

It's so extreme that it is abstract.

It is hard for people to get their heads around, regardless of what side they're on.

Isn't it also his self-preservation?

Because he doesn't really know exactly the terms or the rules of how this is all working.

Like he doesn't want to be perceived by the Nazis Nazis to be supportive.

To be clear, he is a Nazi.

Oscar Schindler was a Nazi party member, and he is very much in like the German, you know, whatever, high class, you know, that had years prior been like, we're signing up.

Like, even if I'm not a true believer or whatever, like, I will happily join the party now that they run the country, right?

Like, there are some people who didn't join the party, right?

And like, Fritz Long.

There you go.

Like, and like, you know, still existed in Jubilee, like where I'm not joining.

He joined the party.

Like, he was a probably not a, you know, deeply idealistic person, clearly, but uh, he was a Nazi.

Yeah, it's crazy.

He joined the party out of convenience because he was exactly if you weren't a major.

This is what all these fucking Germans did.

Yeah, I mean, and I don't like him.

And, you know, there's that, there's no historical parallel for that, or else you know, we might have something on our hands here.

But that's the thing that keeps happening in the movie: I feel like Ray Flines has the line later where he's like, we're going to be making so much money, we won't care, right?

That, like, much like certain present-day situations, there are people who are just like, if you're saying it's going to help the economy this much, that I will personally benefit this much, then maybe I like sort of blindly sign off on whatever this other stuff you're doing on the side is.

Whereas other people were signing up

explicitly in support of that stuff on the side.

But I think to Ben's point, it's true that he did not, and so many people would.

you know, claim not to, to know where this was going.

I mean, I think that was the Nazi.

I'm turning such a blind eye to like what's happening over there.

Part of what's going on with Schindler is he's actually in Poland.

He's German, but because of his industry and all that, he's coming to Krakow.

He's seeing what's going on where it's like a little harder to ignore.

Whereas in Germany, a lot of Jews had already left.

All the Jews had already left.

And there was also, you know, he's like Hamilton talking about like how he has been waiting for a war his whole life to rise up.

I mean, like, I know you guys, there was a play called Hamilton.

I'm scratching my chin at this one.

No, because I mean, there's literally a line in the movie where he talks about how the one thing that he's always been missing, in addition to realizing that he's hot as hell and needs to work that angle, is a war to

cause economic instability that he can use to his.

Oh, he wants to.

And, you know, I'm not liking Oscar Schindler to Hamilton in any other respect, but there is that idea of these circumstances being uniquely profitable for him and taking advantage of that.

And I think the speed at which Poland falls to the Germans, it happens in a span of two weeks, is hugely to Schindler's advantage because everything is so up in the air, he can capitalize.

This is a guy who loves to find an angle he can work.

The scene where he meets Kingsley and is Kingsley's like, so wait, what do you do?

And he's like, I'm not good at working.

I'm not good at running things.

I'm good at just being like, all of you should do this and then give me all the money.

Right.

And it's maybe he, that's capitalism.

It's part of what he's voted for.

Again, really funny that.

Spielberg was like, my idol, the guy who runs Time Warner.

Really?

You're right.

It is very funny because like the moral arc of this movie is completely contrary.

Merger and acquisition.

Capitalism.

It's all about capitalism.

Because what he did that was so good is gave up on capitalism and was like i will just spend two zeros that's the thing it's like it's not like he's the world's smartest businessman it's just that he recognizes oh there is a uniquely bad set of circumstances here that i could maybe benefit from and part of it is that he's like other people don't want to touch the jews i view them as a cheap labor force I can take advantage of that.

Yes, it's right.

They're products to him and they're a balance book, you know, equation to him.

And as you said, he's annoyed by any reminder of their humanity

because it's morally inconvenient to him.

He's like, I don't want to think about this.

Also, not obviously.

Viewing them as vermin.

Right.

In the same way.

Bigoted in the way

that many Nazis are.

And like then when Amon arrives, you're like, right, this is a psychopath who's been enabled by this.

But don't you think that's a good idea?

Whereas, of course, like there are other Nazis, you know, high, high-ranking Nazis who after the war were put on trial and they were like, I don't know, I did what I was told.

I mean, I'm the millionth person to point this out.

But I don't think that's part of it.

How this character, in how Schindler is characterized in the movie is that he's just the kind of like, look,

I don't let any attachment or relationship get in the way of smart business decisions, right?

Like him not viewing the Jewish people with disdain.

I don't invest in any enamel factory that I can't drop in 30 seconds or less.

He keeps his hot ass wife at arm's length.

Like he keeps everyone at arm's length.

He's just like, these are just numbers.

Should we shout out Caroline Goodall?

Fourth build in this movie?

And obviously she's in Hook.

She's an English rose.

Very beautiful.

I think it is the best thing about Hook as a movie is that it at least led to her getting cast in this film.

Sure.

Okay.

I mean, she's good.

I mean, I would say.

It's a point about how little I like about Hook.

Right.

I was right.

I was going to say.

That's what I was getting.

But she's good in this, but it's not a huge role.

Just interesting that the way that works, right?

Where it's like, what's that actress famous for?

Well, Spielberg really liked her for a minute there.

But what's amazing about this movie is that, you know, it is one of the great ensembles, truly, like one of the true ensembles ever put together in that there are so many fucking faces in this movie.

And every one of those faces has its own story to tell that becomes absolutely, you know, critical to the mega narrative that's happening around them.

And you track these characters without even knowing it the first or second time you watch.

And the movie, I think, does such an incredible job not

making it, like, not holding your hand about that.

Like, maybe you don't clock, like, oh, this is the person I saw 50 minutes, you know, like, maybe it doesn't matter.

You're always involved.

And then as you re-watch the movie, you realize, like, oh, I see, you know, you like very ambiently recognize that, okay, this guy is here.

And now I see him in this one-shot walking out of the ghetto.

And then it turns out to be the guy who,

you know, Goethe's gun misfires on when he shoots him outside of the hinge factory.

She's the biggest example of it, but it is so skillful skillful the way he uses the M.

Beth Devitz character, where especially in the latter half where she's on the train,

you know, the wrong train or the train going the wrong way and whatever.

And now, like, you could see most filmmakers saying to themselves, the reason I've set up this character is now I have a POV character who the audience is invested in, who we can show these terrors through.

And she remains in the frame for most of those 15 minutes or so, and yet she is not the focus, where she is constantly sort of around.

Sometimes she's going out of focus, sometimes she's moving out of the frame in moments like the fear of the shower and things like that, where what he's trying to do is remind you, like, yes, this is a character you have pinned in your mind who, of course, you're going to keep track of, but also she's not more important than any of them.

Part of the mass, like, um, uh, sort of terror of what's going on here is that everyone in this space is her.

The characters that shoulder the greatest burden in that sense are the children.

It's the two kids, the boy and the girl with the glasses, who we see in so many different stages, in so many different places.

And, you know, have such, I mean, the moment where the little kid is blowing his whistle to alert the Nazis during the

liquidation of the ghetto to her mother, and then he stops himself when he recognizes, you know, he recognizes her and she him and he hides her.

And you can't tell if he's like being extra sinister in that moment or good.

And then we see him.

I mean, I mean, like, these things all track so viscerally because they're children and because they're so instantly recognizable.

And also, a factoid that I only learned yesterday that will be mind-blowing for exactly three people out there is that one of the most memorable scenes in this movie for me is the one where Eamon kills the Jewish engineer after she's building his house.

We can't be arguing with these people.

She is like her performance 15 seconds in this movie.

People, his accent is so it's amazing.

She is played by

Elena Lowenshoe, who plays the clairvoyant in The The Beast.

That came out last year.

Yeah,

an actress with a bajillion credits.

Yeah.

These people are so tied to this movie in my mind that the idea that they exist in other realities is very

a little bit to paraphrase an earlier tweet.

That's the race finds, I think, is undone by that a little bit.

To paraphrase an early tweet that I think about a lot.

In the year of Spotlight,

you had a tweet to the effect of there are like 10 actors with five minutes of screen time in spotlight who give the best supporting performance I've ever seen in a movie.

You were sort of like, you could like beyond the argument of like, oh, who do you put supporting actor of the spotlight cast?

You were like, basically every like survivor they interview for five minutes

is giving the most indelible, where the fuck did they find this guy performance.

And some of them are actors who were just unknown and then have gotten bigger, like Michael Cyril Creighton.

Some of them are like.

kind of like the guy who's like the former boxer, you know, like some of them are like non-professional actors.

And this is another movie like that where anyone who shows up for like 15 seconds i mean i've remembered these people my entire adult life and series because they were on screen for 45 seconds in this movie what is the energy being captured here yeah it's it's a remarkable testament to casting directors and also

like

six credited casting

the polish casting as well and right and all that um i want to shout out the blood um

Because I feel like Spielberg had done lots of violence in movies before, but it's always more cartoon-ish.

Or in like the case of the color purple or whatever, it's realistic-ish, but you know.

But also a little bit avoided.

Yes, exactly.

I feel like he takes, he does such a good job to make, like, when people get shot, like blood spurts out of their head and it's gross and it's like disturbing.

But also is now this jet black.

Yes.

Like goo.

It looks like very, like, right, visceral and real in a way that like kind of gets me every time.

There's something kind of

you're not dealing with Rambo squibs.

You know, there's something about watching in the deep background of a shot, a person just get like

gunned in the head.

And then you see the splurt and they fall to the ground.

The blood continues to trickle.

And it's like, oh, the, the, the commonality of this violence.

There's a banality.

I mean, the banality of the violence.

Banality is the word actually,

but it is a

banality to just the executions.

And the movie is always, it always has less executions and murders than I remember.

I think often I conflate it.

All of those things are so, yeah.

But I think, like, the pianist, I feel like in my mind, in the first hour, it's like every time you turn the camera, you're seeing someone.

The pianist is the same if you re-watch it.

Is it?

Uh, where, right, you're like, no, I've actually just kind of been thinking of like three or four moments that are so shocking and, you know, distressing.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it, it does, you know, obviously the horror is meant to be sort of muffled and muted in the background and sort of inter

interpolated into daily life, but they do a good job of not,

I don't know, not making it you numb to it.

The pianist, which I think is a very good film, is also about, from the perspective of someone who this is happening to.

Which a lot of the Holocaust movies are.

You're watching the Warsaw Ghetto shrink around him and then he gets shipped to Trivlinka.

Especially the Postchanner movies are primarily the stories of the people trying to survive.

What are you thinking of?

Of course, Life is Beautiful.

Life is Beautiful.

Of course, Jacob the Liar.

I was going to say bullshit like Jacob the Liar.

But wait, what are other.

I'm trying to think of like other canonical sort of Holocaust films.

Like concentration camp movies.

Did they?

I mean, maybe you guys weren't old enough to see me, but they took me at school.

They like got us all on buses and took us to see Life is Beautiful.

That makes sense to me that like this

sort of like, is this important?

Right.

Yeah.

They weirdly didn't do that, but did take us to Shakespeare and Love, I want to say.

Well, hey, man, they wanted you to have a great time.

I just remember being like, I think we don't get to see boobs during a school day.

Hell yeah.

Well, that's that's St.

Anne's for you.

Um, well, hey, I was not there yet.

Okay, fair enough.

That's uh, wherever you were, for you.

Um, this is Joseph finds he'll be our nation's most important actor.

It's

in the 2000s.

Yes, there are plenty of films that you know, uh,

involve either directly or glancingly the Holocaust.

There's movies like the Grey Zone, Tim Blake Nelson's movie, which never went anywhere, which is pretty horrifying.

Yes, other films like you know, Acosta Gavrus's Amen,

But, like, none of these movies really

hit.

And was there so much of that?

There's not a lot of money in the Holocaust, despite Schimer's list.

May have been a lot of people.

Like, the closest you have is The Pianist, which is, you know, a genuinely big movie, but is made European and all that.

And the Reader, which, you know, nobody actually like...

I guess it made like 100 million worldwide, which is insane to consider.

But there was.

There is a wild proliferation of Holocaust movies.

There's a lot of Holocaust movies, but they're not whatever resonating in the culture

becomes like

homework right yeah and also kind of like failed oscar bait like movie that yeah and right is it some easy path to an oscar it becomes cynical even just things like defiance right which i know is not quite the same thing but you where you just be like oh here's a serious director announces a movie with three serious actors that's about the Holocaust in some way.

Defiance is kind of a movie people were asking for.

With like, well, show me a movie about Jews resistant.

And this was directed by Edwards.

They're Nazis.

And it's like, well, that's a story of that.

And everyone was like, well, it's okay.

You know, like,

but there wasn't a lot of, there was a lot of concern at the time of

Schindler's List's release that because of the shadow that Spielberg cast, it would be treated as the last word on the Holocaust.

And I think you see that in a lot of the hesitation around academics around the time it came out.

And I think the opposite.

Well, maybe not.

Again, it's complicated because the movie is so seared into our visual memory, but

it opened the floodgates.

You know, you had to get to the zookeeper's wife, where it's suddenly like, okay, but tell me about the zoos at the time.

I mean, Boy with the Stripe of Dramas, which Erlick's already referenced is a movie that I find basically abhorrent.

It's quite abhorrent.

I mean, I would say the sort of major Holocaust films post-Schindler's list that had a big impact on the culture are Life's Beautiful to some extent.

Although somewhat of a forgotten movie now, you know, weird guy.

But at the time, was very big.

At the time, very big.

The pianist for sure.

The reader, sort of.

Son of Saul for sure.

And obviously, Son of Saul is trying to take a different approach into telling that story.

And it's a very polarizing movie, I feel like.

Some people were so moved by it.

Others were right.

We were kind of not into it at all.

Zookeeper's wife, absolutely.

Jojo Rabbit, that doesn't count.

It's not even really a holiday.

Our buddy Chris Weitz, who made Operation Finale.

And Zone of Interest.

Operation Finale, I think, is a really good movie.

That's not really directly a holiday.

This is what I'm saying.

When we had him on the podcast,

talking about Allied.

Yes.

Zecha's the Secret, my house of priest.

Zebec is the secret, pretty good.

This is secret three out of five, yeah.

But he was saying, like, I feel like I didn't get the memo that no one liked World War II movies anymore.

That he felt like this is one of those sturdy, like Hollywood genres from the 90s on, where this is like a proven area where you can make a serious grown-up movie with movie stars and legitimate production values.

And then the movie kind of got like monuments, man, right?

But I, what happened to those monuments?

I would put forward, does something kind of shift in Inglorious Bastards?

A little bit, but right with like the

having such a wildly different, like, genre-based tone and the revisionist history and everything, where from like that moment on, people don't want to watch Hollywood make a serious version of it.

But then they did, the zone of interest did break through.

I feel like it's like Stone of Saul's zone of interest.

Like, if you are going to mess with I'm saying Hollywood, yeah, that's my point.

Both of those movies are doing unconventional things with the form.

They're happening in foreign countries with like smaller budgets.

I think you can't do the big shiny studio version of it anymore.

No, but you also can't get to the zone of interest without Schindler's List.

I think, like, you know,

Schindler's List is a film that, you know, its detractors may disagree, but it's just put the stuff to all bare.

It's crazy to look.

I'm looking at you making these points while you have it.

No, I think you're watching it to my chest.

We do totally connect, but I would put a hidden life in a similar vein to.

Yeah.

But I think that, like, you know, obviously, this is the ultimate question at the root of any conversation about Holocaust cinema is how to depict an atrocity, to what extent you are minimizing it by through recreation, by visualizing it.

Schindler's list takes it to one sort of maximalist extreme, but it's in very, in to my mind, one of the reasons I have such reverence for this movie is that it's in a very real and nuanced conversation with the right to do that.

And the zone of interest is, I think, similarly nuanced, but obviously on the opposite end of the spectrum where it is, you know, taking away any sort of visual evidence and operating solely through absence.

And I think it's not one or the other.

I mean, these things have to be in conversation with each other.

And I think they're both valuable in their own terms.

But I also think, you know, for me, one of the reasons why Schindler's list is bigger than, you know,

the sum of its parts or its role as a movie is because, you know, there is a danger, as I've said, about one thing becoming the focal point for our memory of the Holocaust.

But I think the work that it did to enshrine the memory of the Holocaust in the abstract, even only one version of it, one telling telling of it in the collective unconscious is inestimably important and it's seeded the path for all these other conversations and you see now how uh

even now you know the holocaust is in jeopardy of being it's questioned all the time we see nazism on the rise and what and whatnot um you know i think it's my mind's eye all the stories my grandfather would tell did not coalesce into something i could picture until i saw this movie i have seen other holocaust movies and i do think nine and fog what you mentioned before that's something where it's like, watch that.

Right.

You'll see.

Right.

But like that.

But again, that's through absence.

I mean, you're seeing just the hair piles and the shoes.

And that is more in conversation with the zone of interest.

But I think that like I needed like a, and I think a lot of people who are thinking about the Holocaust less than the Descendants of Survivors needed a baseline understanding of what this is.

They needed to see it through the...

lens of Hollywood spectacle in order to wrap their minds around it, to let their imagination sort of touch the horror that was sort of always a little bit beyond the pale.

As you're saying, the undeniable effect of the conversation that Schindler's List was able to force like everyone to have being such a culturally important movie and a movie that even like, you know, when they air it on broadcast television for the first time, four or five years after, they're like, it will air in its entirety without commercial breaks and no edits.

And the ratings are even higher than the color premiere of Nebraska.

It was at the time, like I think 20 million people watched Schindler's List play as a Sunday night network TV movie.

It was the highest ratings any TV broadcast of a theatrical film had gotten since Jurassic Park.

And they played it without cuts, without commercial interruption, with nudity, with no censoring.

And there was the sense of just like, this is so important.

Tom Coburn, who was a senator, I think he was a congressman at the time, who back then was one of the most psychotic Republicans around now would probably be like a pillar of decency in that party.

But was like, what if a child changes the transition

nipple?

No, it was beyond that.

He was like, this is an all-time low, like nudity, violence, profanity.

I do love the idea that he's like, this Schindler's got a body now.

And he had worse

for it that he had to publicly apologize.

Of course, now he would become Secretary of Commerce for behaving that way, probably.

But that speaks to how active the conversation was around this movie for years, beyond it just being a film that basically immediately went into like school rotation, a thing that is shown, a thing that does start to transform it into homework.

Then you have all these shitty prestige, you know, World War II movies.

And then you have the good films that come out of it are like art house intellectual exercises that are critically very respected, but are not engaging in a mainstream conversation.

As a teenager, though, this movie, look, Saving Private Orion was the serious Spielberg movie that all teen boys were like, oh shit, like, have you seen that?

Like, you know,

Aaron Pepper shot that guy through the

talking about it like they watched a fucking awesome action movie, which it is, but it's also very serious.

But people would talk like about the most visceral scenes in this movie, kind of like you had seen a horror movie.

Like, I remember that kind of like, you know, teen boy just.

Impact of having spiel boys.

Like, and like the scene of

Feins trying to shoot the guy in the gun won't work.

You know, these scenes that are like drawn out torture.

Right.

I mean, there is a lot of consternation about the suspense of, you know, showing the Jewish women going into the showers.

That's the scene that Hanukkah always focuses on right and uh and you know one that actually happened uh and two i mean i think that suspense is one of the film's tools to engaging viewers in participating and acknowledging history i you know i think Again, in this Village Voice Symposium that came out, you have someone like Art Spiegelman, who other than Brian Michael Bendis, who, by the way, sounds fucking exactly like Paul Sherman.

Mauser is

the only other graphic novelist whose name I recognize.

So you guys got to get Spiegelman on the show.

Mouse, a classic.

But even.

Spiegelman hated this movie.

Yeah.

And I think...

A lot of people who are very involved in telling stories about the Holocaust hated movies.

Claude Lansman didn't like this movie.

I'm aware.

And he thought that it was...

Claude Landsman, a bit of a grump, I will say.

Sure, but I think, look, this is such a sensitive, complicated subject matter that I think anyone who has spent...

so much time digging in and trying to figure out the responsible way to depict it is going to then butt against what other people landed on.

But I also, I think that what, and this isn't to take anything away from March Biegelman, who again, mouse is a formative text for me, and he was the son directly of a Holocaust survivor.

I didn't know that.

And also, but he did have a huge beef with Spielberg going into this movie because of American Tale, which he thought was a ripoff.

But he just felt like it was...

I mean, points were made.

I mean,

he's not.

Listen, but we all also in this house respect Fival Muskwitz.

There's room in my heart for both.

But yeah, he was just like, it's just too.

I just think that they were.

This isn't at any point against two.

It's a little turf.

I just looked him up.

I'm sorry.

He's going to be cast in the new Harry Potter, though.

That's a good friend.

I'm playing on Bill Potter.

He said some shit I don't like.

He's selling weird brain pills.

Is he still out west?

Did he ever come east?

Fival, he went west.

He never came back.

He bought a compound in Austin, Texas.

He's yoked now.

So there turns out there were cats in America.

You know, streets are just saved with cheese.

But I think that they didn't recognize the extent to which our conception, our generation's conception of history would be formed by popular culture, by movies, the role, like they, what they looked as a negative in Spielberg's and his power over the public consciousness, and could have been a negative.

I think they underestimated, one, the conversation this movie would create, and two, just

the good that it would do to have it on those terms.

I agree.

Now, this is what I think I'm trying to get at here, which is like the weird, I don't want to say double-edged sword, but like that this film inspires a bunch of movies that are not as good, that do not hold up as well, ones that were dead on arrival and ones that were lauded at the time and now feel kind of embarrassing, right?

And then the conversation, how we talk about the Holocaust and art, becomes a much headier, more intellectual thing rather than like a mainstream conversation.

We're getting far enough away from it.

The survivors are dying.

It is becoming abstracted.

As you said, a lot of the like collective memory or notion of this is kind of in a language, a tone, a look that this film kind of codifies for better or worse.

Obviously, you make a film about any large historical event.

It should exist in a dialectic with all other works in that.

space, right?

Like I always find it frustrating when people critique a movie for being like, but it didn't touch on this, if it is not the first movie to ever cover that area, because the responsibility isn't to do all of it in one film.

But this film film has lasted in a way that others haven't, while also sort of getting flattened a little bit into like a notion of it being a homework movie, which I don't think it is in practice if you're watching it, which then allows for in like decades since there has been any work that has touched on this in a way that actually reached this widely.

we start to now be far enough away that we're losing sight of what is going on, which leads to a present moment where you have like three or four different terrifying misinterpretations of what should we take away from the Holocaust that are happening on a colossal scale on our planet.

But I do think like that, yeah, that plays into the entertainment value of it, which I think the movie needs to be as compelling as it is for new generations to be able to see it and come in and recognize the urgency of what the movie is saying.

Whereas if it were totally

in this rarefied space where we can't really talk about it,

we have to talk in hushed tones about the Holocaust.

It becomes that much easier to allow something that is, you know, perpetuating the same crimes, but in a different guise to happen again.

And, you know, I, I, I have to say, uh,

you know,

we can get to the, I don't know if we were jumping at the end of the movie, but it is now the end of this movie crushes me.

It always has.

You know, we can talk, well, we will talk, I'm sure.

Sort of the epilogue?

Yeah, I'm talking about the epilogue.

You know, I was emotionally overcome the other night, as I always am, uh, by all of these people, by the collapse of history of the actors and the people that are flying.

It's such an incredible touch.

You know, putting the rose on Schindler's grave and whatnot and the stones.

But

I think it has an extra dimension, a regrettably extra dimension of tragedy to me now in that Israel, you know, representing what Israel has become, which is like, you know, it's this point you see in the movie, we can't go east, they hate you there, you can't go west, you have to find a homeland of your own.

And, you know,

it...

I think it's a dark irony in much the same way as like Jonathan Glaser's Academy Awards speech called Attention 2 about

the subject matter of interest which people are very normal about.

Which does kind of prove the point I feel like we're dancing around here, where it's like for that movie to be so lauded by the Academy while being a very small movie in the grand scheme of things, and yet have that percentage of the people in the audience who had voted for the film get angry at the speech where he is just stating what the movie is about.

Yeah, but like the never again of it all just doesn't hold water when you see that at the end of Schindler's list and they're now in a country that is perpetuating similar crimes on another.

And it's just, it, you know, it's the unbearable,

it's the idea that this is going to happen and happen and happen throughout history.

And why I think in this moment in particular, I find it more resonant rather than less that we're focusing on someone who is in power in the movie, you know, a character with agency who found some sort of moral center and awakening, who used his capital for good, because these are the people that we are most reliant upon right now.

And these situations

feel powerless.

We're like reliant on or

like being crushed by, like, you know, sort of.

I mean, the never again of it all is the thing I have been stewing on so much for the last, whatever, 18 months of our hellscape, right?

In a larger 10-year hellscape, in a larger centuries-long hellscape.

But

there is this

sense of muddling of what this movie is.

Not just this movie's about, but the sentiment that this movie is born out of that I feel like is very similar, not to take too big of a swing here, but the kind of like perversion of the abstract idea of the teachings of Christ to then like alienate persecuted groups, right?

You're saying that Christianity has participated in the oppression.

This is the first time hearing about this, but I'm going to hear about it.

I'm saying that like all of this shit keeps happening where we're like, great, I got it.

You're giving me the one sentence.

That's the thing I never forget.

Right, never again.

And then people lose sight of when they're like doing the thing again, when they are actually acting the exact opposite of the mantra that they have now abstracted into a way where it can be twisted to their own means or just fucking lose sight of it.

And while, you know, the ending of Schindler's List is obviously laudatory towards the existence of Israel in that sense, it is that, you know, threading the needle, collapsing the space, whatever you want to call it, between the past and the present.

is something that's so instrumental to what this movie is doing.

I think you need, that's why those bookends work so well, why we start in sort of this like, you know, liminal present state, um, and then fade into the past, right?

Um, you know, I think it's saying that this is a part of our world, this cannot be separated or compartmentalized.

And when we do that, we invite it to happen again.

And I, you know, I and the perversion of the never again doesn't mean we can't let this happen to the Jews ever again.

It is a larger responsibility to make sure this doesn't happen in our world again.

And that twisting has led to like such horrors.

And I was afraid that I hadn't really dug too much into it because I'm very clear on where I stand.

And

I don't know.

I don't need to parse what certain celebrities have to say.

But with Spielberg, it's different because in my mind, and maybe you can understand this, like Spielberg is sort of like the great Jew of my life.

He has become like a weird kind of cultural ambassador.

And I don't mean that morally.

I just sort of mean that in his statue.

Like a very famous Jewish person who like, right, speaks on and travels, you know, and I think already was, but then this movie makes it like, okay, great.

So he's like,

he's a prominent jew in american pop culture right and that pop culture was sort of my lingua franca you know my whole life this is how i this is where i want to interact with jewishness you know it was always more interesting to me that superman was jewish than i'm reading the fucking tall you know you don't read the tall but you know what i mean um but uh the and so his comments in the wake of october 7th i was always very afraid of of what they might say and i was reading them over last night and I just couldn't imagine that someone who made Schindler's list would look at this and be like, would see it, you know, in the worst possible light.

It's like totally disconnected from what had happened and i you know maybe he said some things that i didn't see when when searching the internet but at best i could tell he really only made public comments about yeah he was saying you know as someone who then founded the showah uh institute and is going to be asked to for comment on something like this he made mention of the palestinian people and was talking about you know their suffering in the same breath as lamenting the deaths of of the uh i would say israelis on october 7th and it seemed like you know he's not going to be the guy who is uh coming out with Free Palestine, you know, hashtag.

Maybe he could, though.

I would love that for him.

I mean, that would really surpass my experience.

So incredibly impactful.

I don't know.

I mean, he's obviously, you know, he's a fairly, I think, long been like a fairly sort of straightforwardly supportive of the state of Israel person.

Yeah.

But yes, he was not, he's not.

I'm just, you know, like there's a certain sort of streak of celebrity who became,

you know, very, very polemical in a way that was kind of disturbing.

He's certainly.

Yeah, no, he's not, he's not

released kind of measured statements on the facts of like, you know, but I, I would have, rather than saying that, like, I, I, you know, I didn't have any realistic hope for him to be like a leading voice in this issue, but I would have been heartbroken had he come out and said something unequivocally in support of Israel.

The IDF rocks, right?

Like, and no, and he talked about killing women like children in Gaza.

Right.

Well, you know, Jerry Steinfeld's like a really normal dude.

Yeah.

Normal behavior.

But I, I mean, this is part of you.

Great director, though, on Frosted.

Oh, yeah,

laughed for days.

I laughed a couple times.

That movie is well shot.

Cleans, baby.

I know.

Um, I didn't mind unfrosted.

I didn't hate it.

I mean, one of the great trials of my life was uh watching and writing about that movie, but teach their own.

What I would tough is 93 minutes.

Yeah, okay.

Go ahead.

No, I think watching this movie in like uh 2003, right?

When

there were not as clear, like

sort of screamed, underlined parallels in the current situation in the world.

You're thinking about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' recent triumph at the Super Bowl.

That was top of my mind 24-7 in 2003.

You're excited for the release of the Return of the Cave.

I'm trying to think of 2003 stuff.

Yep.

Radioheads on tour.

You got to pop them in MSG.

I saw Radiohead.

That's the Hail of the Thief.

It sure was.

It was radicalized me.

They opened with the gloaming.

Glooming live.

Fucking rocks.

Anyway, real loud.

I'm trying to remember what my point was it's 2003 you're watching schindler's list right you know this feeling that i think it sounds like all three of us had watching the film as young men being like how the does this happen like looking to this movie for answers of of how how could such a thing happen because i feel like if you are a a

Jewish child a certain a couple generations away like we were you learn about this in a very large 100% sort of like.

It's not like I was like, wait, what's this now?

Right.

I certainly had been educated.

And you just start pulling at strings and going like, wait, what do you mean?

How is that possible?

Like, how much of the terror am I allowed to dig into at this point?

Right.

How do I understand the steps of something escalating to this kind of point?

And you watch a movie like this and you're just like, how were there not like thousands of Oscar Schindlers?

How were there not more people standing up and like objecting and all this sort of shit?

And I think an amazing and sort of forgotten scene in the movie is where he's talking to the other businessman, trying to get him on board.

And the guy's like, I already did a lot.

And you're kind of like, you haven't fucking done anything.

Like, but to him, even the slightest, right?

You know, if we're like policing, like, why hasn't Spielberg like taken more of a stance, right?

Why hasn't he used his power more?

Like, deliberating all this stuff.

This is my point.

A lot of what I've struggled to deal with in the last year is like, I don't know if any of this fucking works anymore.

Like, I don't know if any of this has any fucking impact anymore.

It is like really kind of overwhelming to be like there has been such a loud conversation going on for so long in what feels like kind of an immovable issue.

I do unfortunately think that it does, or maybe not unfortunately.

I don't know.

I mean, the fallout of Jonathan Glazer Doster's speech was really

blew my mind.

It was so sobering.

And in a horrible way.

I felt for Glazer because I feel like he was incredibly nervous.

Yeah.

And but it's also like, this is what the movie.

This is what the movie's about.

You don't have to fucking tell me.

Sorry, Steve.

I know, but like, I felt like he,

it's not like he bobbled the speech at all, but like you could felt he was so nervous.

And the speech has kind of like a rhetorical, in my memory, kind of like,

you know, device to it, right?

Where he's like, and like, people misinterpreted the language right away in battlefield.

Exactly.

But I felt so frustrated because I was like, I know what he was trying to say.

And I think you do too.

And you're like, you know, putting a comma somewhere essentially to kind of make it work for you.

And it was really

infuriating.

Let me throw this out.

Unlike like Michael Moore getting up there and yelling, where I'm like, well, some people are just not going to enjoy Michael Moore yelling at them.

And then diagram makes them feel like it's a lot of fun.

People applaud.

The cognitive dissonance to do this.

It was a pretty good job.

The cognitive dissonance to do this blows my mind.

You're right.

But some people did watch Zone Interest

and did not pick up on any of that.

They were just like, oh, wow, this is really about the Holocaust.

And they should have known.

Right.

This is why we have to make sure that Jewish people are never persecuted against again.

That was their entire writing.

And I guess that's right.

I mean, maybe we should cut it.

It's a symbolic thing that kicks out.

We have to do it.

We can't go see bad faith interpreted by it.

Or triple it because, I mean, we're, I really don't think we should triple it because that would really take it.

Just put like a deep reverb on it that makes it sound like everything we said is heard three times.

But I think that, like, what we went through for the past, and I say this as someone who's writing about movies, writing about Zone of interest, writing about other, you know, Holocaust and Israel-adjacent movies.

Um, and you have not avoided talking about I have, I have been very clear-throated.

I mean, I feel like I have mortally fortified as I've been on any subject I've ever spoken about, about the enormity of the wrong that Israel is persecuting and people perpetrated.

I was wrong, people over here said I was wrong to book Dave Zero.

You were wrong, I said that you were framing it as he's desperate to come on, he was framing it as I'm being hounded by Simon.

Well, he's always framing it that way.

Continue your point, Mr.

Erland.

No, it's just that like there was a time and only and this feels only slightly diminished recently where to even name the crime that Israel has been perpetuating was verboten to really mix my uh German and uh uh modern politics.

But like it it, you know, I would have to go through rounds of legalese to use the word genocide and make sure that I, you know, there were governing bodies in the world that I could link to to back up my decision to use such a word.

Um, and I would be accused.

I'm not going to name names or go into specifics, but like there were there were heated incidents, some of which I definitely went out of my way to invite upon myself that, you know, whatever, but yeah, I know, but and some of which took me by surprise, where the language I was using was

policed and seen as being aggressive.

And it did not feel safe for a person employed by anyone other than themselves or by a large company to even a Jew, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, to say that what was going on.

And I was like, I can speak to this issue more in a more full-throated way than I can to almost any other of the world's great atrocities of my lifetime.

And even so, I was still getting blowback for it.

And

from mostly from other members, ostensibly of my community.

And

that, you know, it's, it's, it really has,

it's really soured me on a lot of different things over the last 18 months or so.

It's been really capable of it.

Look, I think it is

an incredible microcosm through which to underline all of the kind of

social evils of social media, of like the actual damage it is wrecking upon like our brains and our society and all of that sort of shit.

When I say like, I don't know if any of this matters anymore, I'm working hard to not fall into a level of despondency that is, so why even bother doing any of it?

But I think what I spin on is like, let's say Glazer had somehow done the impossible and like perfectly worded the speech in a way that he's given some speech that everyone was like, wow, he's really thrown things into context.

Within 30 seconds, people are doing jerk-off motions going, oh, liberal Hollywood elites in their bubble, because even the idea of that happening at the Oscars doesn't mean the same thing it used to mean anymore.

You know, like everything is so blown up and so like endlessly expansive in a way and is so loud and just this constant pit of screaming.

And of course, I think to someone like Laser, and I sympathize with this greatly, it shouldn't be that controversial to say, hey, remember that, you know, people defining thing that they did to us less than 100 years ago, maybe we shouldn't do something similar to that to someone else.

Maybe we should actually learn from that and behave differently.

I mean, it would seem to be a benign statement.

It is part of the, in certain ways, it is a danger of the death of the monoculture, right?

Of just people being like, well, I'm going to my own sources.

I'm existing in my own bubble.

I'm looking at what my social media feed is and what I watch and which outlets I pay attention to and whatever.

And in other ways, the scary part is like the control of those outlets in certain ways, you know, and the bents that things are taking.

It's a fucking nightmare situation.

Stephen, Stephen, he and I are very close.

He, Stevie, he says that, you know, he wants to accept this on behalf of the 1 billion people.

watching on behalf of the six million who perished, six million Jews in Poland.

But like a billion people, I I mean, really, you have the feeling watching that ceremony that really this was the center of the universe.

And I will say that, though, the Oscars always used to say that they were like, a billion people watch the Oscars, and you're like, no, they don't.

What are you talking about?

But the Jonathan Glazer speech was one of the few moments where it did suddenly feel like the Oscars were back at the center of the universe to some limited extent for a half second.

Well, it was also just one of those things where it was like, I wonder if he'll like,

you know, make a speech versus like going up there and being like, well, thank you.

This film was hard to make and I'm glad to.

It's going to be very interesting in like four days from when we're recording this to see if and hopefully when no other land wins best documentary.

That will be interesting.

I imagine it's going to win.

It seems like which is so, I mean, it's so wild that Glazer speech would trigger that reaction a year ago among so many people in Hollywood.

Obviously, maybe not a majority, but enough.

And then you would have that same body award such an outspoken film.

The narrative of like who made it.

And look, we're getting very deep in the weeds have you guys i've shouted this movie out before i'm moving us to a slightly different tack here by the way you're never getting your wallet back no it's fine now it's fine he threw a wallet at a jewish it felt like an anti-semitic attack

so much

have you ever seen i've shouted out before the hbo tv movie directed by frank pearson conspiracy

no it was acclaimed at the time one emmy's like you know it was not like a forgotten movie or anybody it's a tv movie i've seen it kind of a disturbing amount of times, considering it's a movie about Nazis planning the final solution.

It is incredible, and I feel like it gets no

recognition.

2001.

It's called Conspiracy.

It's called Conspiracy.

It stars Kenneth Branagh.

Oh,

I remember Colin Ferris.

Isn't there a scene in K Street where somebody goes to see Schindler's list?

I don't know.

I can't answer that question for you.

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K-Street is an HBO show.

Okay, yes, okay.

What's the Soderbergh?

Yeah, it's about lobbyists.

Weirdly, people were not that interested.

I don't know why.

Even though it's sort of America's favorite TV star, James Carville.

The whole thing, it was like classic Soderbergh where he's like, well, what if I just like point cameras at lobbyists?

HBO will be interested, right?

Like, nobody fucking...

Anyway, I highly recommend it as a sort of flip side because it's an incredibly simple film.

It's basically set at a big table.

There's basically nothing to it.

It's about the real Vanasi, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, conference in 1942, where Heydrich,

who was a high-ranking Nazi at the time, basically like gathered a bunch of people.

He got the corner, not K-Street, the corner.

What was the corner?

Now we got it.

The corner is David Simon's miniseries that basically was.

So you did James Carville.

It's like, there's no fucking way.

I wish so badly that I had the wallet back.

Well, now you deserve it to do it.

And you can't.

You only get one wallet.

That's the problem.

You know, he gathers the high-ranking Nazis and is like, Hitler has ordered us to exterminate the Jews in like an, you know, beyond what we've been doing in a, in a uniform way.

And we're going to, and we're here to figure out exactly how to do it.

And it's amazingly acted because it's so procedural.

And

like

there's nothing more chilling than watching people discuss this stuff as sort of a matter of fact.

Like, you know, just, and there are moments, obviously, where like things get more, you know, bigoted and intense or whatever.

And there's also moments where it's just like fucking German army,

you know, big shots arguing, like having little turf wars with each other.

It, it fucking rocks.

I have a question about it.

I'm interested.

Does America get a shout out?

In conspiracy?

Wait.

Because of course it's been found.

Oh, that America like kind of knew what was going on.

But okay, we're not talking.

It was found in, and I'm pretty sure it was during the specific meetings that you're shouting out that they were looking to america in the way that we suppressed african-americans yes i do that

that they could then incorporate into what they were doing to the jews uh i think they they do briefly mention something like that i can't remember but i think i know what you're talking about species we have here yeah yeah monthly series of governmental just a nice reminder yeah

sorry to no

but it's that's what's so interesting is that you watch an interesting whatever fascinating disturbing, distressing.

Like you watch Chandler's list and you're 15 years old.

You're David, me or Ehrlich.

And you're like, I have so many questions

or Ben.

I would choose Sims.

Oh, get out of here.

Come on.

You must have been cool.

Your entire audience just giving the biggest laugh this whole episode.

You're a cutie pie.

Elisa recently sent me a picture of you in college, and we were both like, what a cutie pie he was.

You're watching it and you're like, but how could this not just like happen?

It's just like, you're telling me there was like

sort of, you know, what I'm talking about.

Like, like people writing things down and making plans and being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, use that railroad.

That one's good.

Like going through Rauschitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz is really good because it's kind of in the middle of nowhere.

So no one will see what's going on.

So they know they don't want anyone to see what's going.

You know what I mean?

Like all of those thoughts.

It's just like every time you think about like the thought process or the conversations people had, you're like, how did this, you know, continue?

Like, how did like it not stop there or there?

Something that I think allows Schindler's list to not spin into the Maudlin or really get overly or any sentimental toward until the very end is it's focused on bureaucracy from the start.

I mean, this is a story about paperwork.

The first line in the movie, other than the prayer and the prologue, is someone being like, name.

And then you see them just taking down names throughout the paper, throughout the movie.

It's all just a drama of, you know, trying not to create more paperwork or less paperwork.

And everyone just, you know, and then, of course, the miracle of it all is solved by paperwork, effectively, at the end.

It is interesting that like that the most thrilling thing they do is kingsley fucking burning up that typewriter like at the end it is interesting that amistad is so transparently him trying to make his schindler's list for slavery and the actual successful version is lincoln which once again takes the approach of bureaucracy where it's like the way this gets settled is through like an absolute like king shit working of our fuck system.

But like, I think Amistad, he thought he had it too, where it's like, well, oh, what's interesting is they put on trial the notion of like, you know, were they allowed to do this?

Like, were they allowed to overthrow their masters on this boat?

I think this speaks to

like he just thought, like, that's another way to get at that question, right?

In like a non-and, like, it's not like Amistad's a bad movie.

I mean, we, we've put out like 53 great minutes on it.

You can go listen to anytime.

And then a four-hour episode.

Maybe we should read Amistad.

Our ad reads are 53 minutes long, though.

I will say this.

I mean, working on my like

Ultimate Spielberg ranking that we'll do at the end of this episode, I was just like, man, like 10 of these I need to rewatch.

But I do think that and Amistad is one of them where I'm like, I would like to watch it again.

But I think Amistad does then rely on like magic movie stars giving the great monologues to sell it versus like.

the biggest Lincoln monologues in Lincoln happen behind closed doors for two people.

And then the real action is him sending out like fucking, you know,

to like work it and massage it and all this sort of stuff in the same way as Schindler, where it's like, you have to kind of just like wheel and deal to trick people into doing the right thing.

And it speaks to another one of the prevailing interests of Spook's career, which is his fascination with how history is told, how it's written.

And you see it even in a film like The Post, which I think is underrated from the one time that I saw it.

Which he also knows that he is one of the people who now is writing history, that anything.

But there is that part of that double, that twinned awareness, which I think, you know, he was aware to some degree in Schindler's List and then his fame grew, I think became even more pronounced.

But like, you know, he is aware that he is Hollywoodizing everything he touches and perverting the historical record to some.

He's trying to do it responsibly rather than denying it.

And I think, yeah, his films have a very sort of textual emphasis on what the different, what it means to create history, to write these stories,

what the decisions are that go into that, and really the documents and the paperwork that form the lives of the people that they touch.

And you see it across history.

In Lincoln, what we're watching is the Civil War is about to end.

You know, they've essentially quote unquote won.

And Lincoln is like, well, we still need to put, we need to write this shit down.

Like we need to put it in the Constitution before the southern states rejoin, before like, you know, there's no chance of it ever happening.

And everyone around him is like, do we have to?

You know, like,

we won.

Like, it's fine.

Take the W.

Right.

Walk away.

You know, like, that's a lot of work.

It's hard.

You have to use all your political capital on this.

Like, yada, yada, yada.

Right.

And he's like, no, no no no i understand that this is going to be pivotal and the movie has hindsight so it knows it's pivotal but nonetheless like he also is like i have theater tickets like six months from now so we could get it done within that window i want to be able to see a play and not have this on my mind that's six months a little bit more paperwork would have saved them um in schindler's list what's so crazy is that

there's an an awful thing happens in front of oscar schindler every five minutes and he's laughing it off now he's trying to survive, like Ben's saying, like, and just sort of scape by or, you know, like, right?

Just like, hey, when, like, this is, this is the way it is.

But, like, he's in the middle of insanity.

Like, whereas he, on Amistad and Lincoln, it's kind of like, well, we know about the insanity, but we're over here in Washington and we're kind of like trying to untangle it.

Like, later.

This guy has been, right?

Unlike Lincoln, Schindler.

Let's also call out.

Neeson could have

for like 10 years.

I know.

We talk about it on the bottom.

I just want to say it in this episode.

For like 10 years, Lincoln was Spielberg's Schindler Part II, where he was like, I'm not yet ready, but I know I want to make it.

Ben was a tall drink of water.

That whole decade, it was Neeson supposed to do it.

And then when he finally got the script and was like, Liam, I'm ready to go.

Liam's like, I'm not the right guy.

And it was.

It's not the right guy.

It was a correct decision.

Was anyone going to take Lincoln's daughter?

I have to shoot a whole movie in a parked car.

I was so excited about the idea of Neeson playing.

There was some Photoshop that went around.

You probably remember it like in those early days at the internet where like someone had photoshopped the beard on him yeah it was like this is gonna rock it's gonna rock right

but it beyond the fact that it's just like you're never gonna get a better performance than you got from from danny day playing lincoln i also

i gotta say i think wait your buddy dan yeah big d yeah a nissen lincoln coming out one year after taken

it would have been a swing would have been

it's fun to have a swimming.

I understand the timing.

It would have flipped people's brains.

I am going all in on the hope that the Naked Gun remake the summer brings Neeson all the way around.

We all have our eggs in that basket.

I would say.

If you looked at the eggs in that basket, they have the blank check logo on them all.

It's crazy.

There's so many things at stake on that movie, which I'm just asking to do with theatrical comedy.

Silly and consistently funny.

Neeson not just making movies set in parked cars.

I'm like, this, it potentially opens up the final, last golden phase of nissen's career because like the other movie he's making is called cold storage and i don't know what it's about but here's my guess he's like shooting a movie with cold in the title in the last four months i do just want to you know talking about neeson in like a funny vein

He's got Cold Pursuit and like cold trucks.

Yeah, it's weird.

He's the ice road, but yeah.

I mean, the ice road fucking blows.

Cold Pursuit is a really solid movie that had the misfortune of being the movie that he was on the press store.

He was a master press store.

And one more thing will happen.

And she's like, not one more thing.

Turn his mic off there.

If I can add further context.

But there is, I mean, Liam Misson's not in this sequence, although he precipitates it.

But like, I do, every time I watch this movie, I am blown away by what has to be the most darkly comic sequence in maybe all of the last 30 some odd years of American film.

Until

2025 comic sequence.

Of course, which is the I pardon you sequence in Schindler's list where Schindler prevails on Goethe to show Mercy says power is not control.

Power is that we have the

ability to kill these people and we don't.

And then in what is

uncomfortably a comic sequence,

Amon pardons, it follows the rule of three.

He's like an SNL skit.

I mean, like he pardons one person and then another, and he's like working against his demons and looking at himself

in the window, in the mirror, rather.

And then it's

a thing where he like moves his hair across his face.

Yeah.

And he's sort of studying himself.

And then in typically Spokarian and fashion the way the information comes out i mean he cannot commit to uh having any sort of redeeming qualities and he ends up murdering liesk uh but it it is a i mean again when i think of the sequences that sort of define schindler's list and are able to thread the needle between these very contrasting energies uh having that sort of like gallows humor is an understatement like the incredibly morbid humor here

and making it like you don't laugh when you're watching that but it is inherently comic It's not the day the clown cried, but like it's it's funny in its way.

Can we watch that yet?

Or do you have to like go to West Virginia?

You have to like go to Fort Knox.

Yeah.

Here's like a thing in this movie that is so risky that I think pays off so beautifully, which is

Schindler basically has no ideology, right?

He is so defined.

We can tell.

Apart from money talks.

Right, but that's really sort of Chris Tucker's idea.

He is defined by this sort of sense of like, I haven't quite been able to make a business work, right?

Right.

Like, I never will, really.

I'm sort of a disappointment.

My father thinks I'm kind of like a fuck-up.

He's sort of the ultimate large adult son.

Very large.

I mean, he's good at fucking.

He's good at fucking.

He's like good at charming people, but you're like, this guy is sort of like kind of just a dilettante to a certain extent.

100%.

He's like the kind of like grindset, mindset, quote-unquote, entrepreneur who you're like, who does this guy like?

Pardon me.

Okay, carry on.

No, but I'm like, he is the

Schindler's tweets about this were fired.

He is the version.

He is like the LinkedIn lunatic all this time in a certain way.

He's all in on crypto.

We're about to hit the three-hour mark, and I can tell.

It's getting good.

The guy

talks about the dynamics.

You know, you can tell because I'm getting warm.

We haven't even talked about the liquidation of the ghetto sequence, really, which is like maybe the marquee sequence in Spielberg.

It's really hard to talk about.

To me, the most important scene in this film, or the scene I'm kind of most impressed by, the dramatic execution of, because it's not a complicated sequence in terms of the moving pieces as a filmmaker, is the negotiation for Hirsch, right?

With the notion of the game of 21.

And that

you're kind of surprised that Schindler is willing to put his neck out to try to overplay his hand to get this, right?

He's had this moment of relation to her in the basement.

When he's talking to her, a move that astounds me is that you can see, and a lot of this is Yanish and a lot of this is, is Devit's

visible goosebumps on her skin as he's sort of circling her and trying to get his head around her.

And then has that moment of the like, can I kiss you, but not in that way, where you're starting to see these gears turning in this dude.

And it's also coming after like the negative response he got to the kiss upstairs and all that sort of shit.

Then he goes to King's.

The kiss, the kiss where he kisses later,

he kisses the Jewish woman at the party, like

a sustained kiss on the lips is such an interesting moment because there's no clear indication as to why he is doing it and that you have to sort of once again to his lack of ideology which is just like you know what i like doing kissing women yeah but why would i judge any set of lips as not worth kissing my interpretation for that moment where he's surrounded by nazis who are looking at each other being like what the knowing that he's breaking the law is at that point it is sort of a fuck you i think he's saying like like interesting i i think it's a fuck you i think it's he doesn't need to kiss that woman.

I think it's early in the film.

I don't know.

No, that is.

When he gets arrested, that's towards the end.

My, my read on the movie is like, he's sort of taken aback by their response, where he's sort of like, you actually are this disgusted by these people.

Like, he's sort of like, I thought this was sort of like, let's keep the trains running.

Let's all like prosper in wealth kind of thing.

That's really what he shows his cards when he's pouring water on the train car.

And he's like, it's completely like that point, it's unambiguous that he is trying to respect their humanity.

And the Nazis are just laughing at him.

You get there, right?

Him saying to Kinglessly, like, leave one extra slot blank.

You don't quite understand why he's doing it.

Then it gets the negotiation where he knows Fiennes is going to pick up on that and makes the play to try to win her, get Hirsch on the list.

And Feins starts short-circuiting, right?

Like this guy is so unequivocally evil, but in a way where he hates himself for being attracted to her and keeps kind of like tying himself into knots where he's just like, if I want to fuck her, then I must be vermin too.

And he's trying to square this circle.

And Neeson knows that that's what he can do to make him shut down, where it's like, challenge him on all of this.

He can't push his, her, like, the value that she has to him because he will.

Overriding, like, biological sort of like drive towards this woman is being defeated by his notion of like country and what he represents, which is the exact thing that Schindler lacks that allows him to gradually go, like, wait, this is just a fucking person.

Right.

Why am I treating this as any sort of ideology would be too confining for him to navigate the Holocaust the way that he does.

And the more these people make money for him, the more he's like, well, I'm kind of endeared to these people.

They've helped make me a millionaire.

Why would I view them as less than?

That's so like small-minded to just like categorically group a whole like section of people as less.

And you just watch like Fienz is doing these insane quick turns as he's like pacing back and forth as Neeson is putting him through the paces being like, yeah, but you're not going to take her to Vienna.

Let's be honest here.

That's not possible.

You know, there's another moment in the movie.

I'm trying to remember where it is, but it's earlier.

Oh, it's in the conversation, the first conversation in the wine cellar with Helen, where Spielberg deliberately has a cut.

that fucks continuity, where he goes from one angle to a slightly different angle on a two-shot of both of them.

And in the first one, finds his hands are on his hips and he cuts continuous dialogue and Fiennes' arms are straight down by his side.

And it is such a perfect, like,

for a movie that is so tight and is so controlled and so disciplined, most people would go, like, fuck, you can't do that.

That fucks with the austerity of the film.

And Spielberg clearly was just like, this is the best combination performances.

I don't fucking care.

If that throws people off of the movie, then we have bigger problems, you know?

But it's a similar thing of like this scene where Feins is just like wanting to punch himself in the face for wanting to kiss her.

That I think is such an interesting counterpoint to like, here's this guy who is so dogmatic in what he thinks he needs to do and has certain psychological and biological drives that he cannot override that are tearing him up inside versus Oscar Schindler being like

Well, it's one character who's at war with his humanity, what little of it is left, and another who is coming to embrace his humanity as the film goes on.

Because as he's starting out, he's just sort of like, I go wherever the money is.

I care about anything the advantage that schindler has over goethe is that he knows who amon goethe is and the reverse is not true uh and that's

um amon

um

is not very capable of judging other people's emotions because he has clearly like a mental disorder which he was diagnosed with by the nazi party when they finally kicked him out he was so bad at his job he was actually fired which is so crazy to think about that they were like,

you know, you're not producing enough work, I guess, you know, like, or he was stealing, you know, quote unquote, stealing money.

You're taking enough work.

You feel of the naked woman lying in bed alone.

And then you're like, what's she doing?

And then cut to him on the balcony with the sniper rifle.

And you're like, this guy doesn't want to fuck.

Well, that scene is, yeah, obviously very chilling.

And also, it's right.

How she's like, come on, you know, while he's doing this like unbearable psychotic thing.

And he's like barely taking the time to put his suspenders back on.

He's half naked.

Right.

Like the drive in this guy is so frightening.

The kiss, just one weird factoid about the kiss scene earlier was when he kisses the little girl before he kisses the older one on the lips.

The woman who that character really is was on set that day.

And Neeson.

Is it the end of the movie?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Nissen goes up to her

and kisses her, dressed as Schindler in the same way as the real Schindler kissed her on the cheeks at that party.

And it's just like, that for me sort of epitomizes how the production of this movie was sort of as much as there had been cell phone on set, and people could be playing Angry Birds in between.

I know.

It's so crazy to imagine how many cell phones.

I would have played so many games of Marvel.

What if it turns out that Spielberg had like a big brick cell phone that he did play like snake on?

He was snake it all the time.

And he's actually like completely zoning out the entire movie.

I just need this for my standard.

There's two ways I'm getting through this.

Nighttime riffs from Robin and Snake during the day.

But the ghetto sequence is,

you know, I think problematic for some because it's so electrifying.

And I think, you know, watching it in a vacuum, if I was an alien coming to Earth.

Putting the fucking, burying the jewelry and the bread.

I mean, it's as electric as anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It also just starts to happen.

I mean, it's, yeah.

Well,

you get a speech about how today is history and how he's going to make the history of Jews in Poland a rule.

But again, it starts, you're like, holy shit, the movie's up to that point.

That's the thing.

And it's happening this abruptly.

The time of this movie is kind of elastic.

You don't, again, have the political background.

You have the title, you know, you have some titles that come up occasionally to be like, okay, now this is what's going on.

But you're not understanding the progression of the war.

And you're not understanding later, I mean, like that much until you sort of realize, like, oh, the war's kind of over.

Like, or is whatever.

Germany is now on its back foot versus its front foot.

It's a much later film, but I was reminded in re-watching this of Tar, which I think similarly you're watching and you're like, I know where this movie is going.

When's it going to happen?

And it does the trick of being like, this has gotten further along in the background of the story that you're focused on than you realized.

Tar is so good at that, where you're like, oh, are we about to methodically watch her get canceled?

And then we've actually cut two.

Like, now it's actually

like she doesn't

get over.

Right.

But what do you guys think of the, like, the, she's the way that it's shot.

Tarle sounds amazing.

The lady.

I'm saying lady.

Yeah, of course.

Her behavior.

yeah yeah i don't know the liquidation of the ghetto sequence i think is as i think sort of the the fulcrum of where people who think the movie is problematic meet where people think the movie is more successful i don't know it's just like it's such an electrifyingly staged sequence but it's also

so horrifying in what it's depicting and there's like the the rush and suspense of people fleeing for their lives at the same time they're hurted are they going to escape can they hide who is making the right choices here i mean i don't know i don't really i don't know i'm throwing it open to the table I don't really know how to.

I don't have a problem with this.

I understand the academic, you know,

I don't have a problem with an objection of like, right, can you dramatize any of this?

Can you put any mustard on it, as I would say?

It's just

the slightest

gap.

The thinnest spread of mustard.

Yes, you absolutely can.

The scene where the women, the scene that upsets me the most, realize their kids are on the trucks.

and start running.

It's an incredibly devastating scene.

It's also, once again, incredibly well staged by Spielberg.

Like the shot of them all suddenly moving.

And like,

you know,

that means it means you have an indelible memory of something that's like, you know, like you need to know and remember.

For reminding me of a point I wanted to make.

It's one of the most effective parts of this film to me.

There are no cell phones.

There were no cell phones on set during the making of this film.

Or at least, let me say smartphones.

No, a thought I had while watching this is as much as he is sort of like, I'm approaching this like a documentary.

Let the actors figure it out.

I'll sort of like adjust around them.

I'm not going to like push them into place.

There are obviously larger blocking maneuvers

that need to be worked out.

And this is

Guelberg.

Yeah.

He's not just like, hey, everyone, run around.

I'll figure it out.

Yeah.

This is such an incredible, like, hundreds, thousands of extras movie in a way that is like textually important.

And you'll have these Spielberg wonners that like start with, you know,

two characters talking in a train in the background and then it follows them off somewhere else but you can tell that in the background now out of frame there are still those hundreds of extras who are existing just outside the perimeters because there wasn't a cut the camera just moved they're not just running back off to their trailers or whatever you know the crafty table and uh it is like a constant reminder of the the sheer numbers of people who were involved in this on both sides.

And when you see those masses of just like, right, as you're saying, the women running towards the train and they don't stop coming.

And you're like, there's more of them.

There's more of them.

He hasn't run out.

The resources to be able to like put that many people on set and to let them exist is the kind of like, every one of these people is equally important.

Even if the scene is now focused on Liam Neeson's face, you're never forgetting that those people are right there.

Yeah.

I mean, there's the feeling that every character you see, both the Jews and the Nazis, are sort of in their own movie over the course of this.

And you feel that in the liquidation sequence, where I think things that might feel glib, like the Nazi playing Bach on the piano after somebody steps on and alerts them to their presence,

I think that symphonic feeling of it, the triumph sort of over being played over

the sorrow and the horror of what's happening, like people being executed summarily at point blank range,

you know, in front of of people who are sort of like giddily doing their job.

I mean, I think it's, it's,

it speaks to how well the movie and the energy the movie gets from the confluence of all these different energies that are happening at once, where it was, it's never just

the

unimaginable horror of what's happening.

Or it is, but the horror is compounded by the fact that so many other human emotions and experiences are happening at the same time.

It's like the shit that Spielberg has always been great at is like having exposition that sets Brody into action in Jaws happening in the background of a one or while in the foreground there's like a small like domestic comedy scene playing out with his wife and child you know this sort of like his capturing of energy of never letting a scene be only one thing uh

it is just like yeah the amount of um

sort of like parallel action he is able to stage in a way that isn't canceling itself out is astonishing because it is part of what needs to be reckoned with of just like how much was going on at every single moment.

Which is also what pressurizes the ending so much when all of this expansive, you know, fuck far-reaching energy collapses on this one

moment of,

you know, moral recognition.

And with this ring, I could have done more.

You know, I could have saved more lives.

I think it's a real shift in the density of what we're seeing.

There's that moment where they send the boy out and they're pointing the guns at him and you're like, fuck, I'm about to watch this kid get shot in the back of the head at point blank.

And then it cuts to Kingsley walking, sort of just like trying not to rock the boat.

And you're like, oh, I guess the kid survived.

And then as the camera is following Kingsley, you see the dead kid lying.

Right.

And it's just this sort of like, oh, at the exact moment that someone's surviving, someone else has been like executed in a meaningless way.

And the scene with the rabbi where they test him on the hinges, which let's just say another great thing about this movie, Anytime they show you the way the operations work, the way the pot gets made, that shit is so good that them like stop watching the hinge.

He feels like he's passed the test and then finds his like, well, but if you can make them that fast, then why are there only this many in the bucket?

He's taken out.

You're like, I'm about to watch another fucking horrible scene for a guy I've now fallen in love with in 30 seconds.

And then the guns won't work.

They're jamming up.

They're going through multiple guns.

It's sustained.

In the background, people are escaping.

People are getting shot.

you're focused in on this one thing.

And then only after there have been like three false starts with the gun does he say, like, I hesitate to even bring this up, but the reason I didn't have to hinge is they had to reset the machinery or whatever, where you're understanding the psychology of this guy in this moment who's like processing, I could die at any second.

Second way, he flinches every time.

Totally.

But also that he's thinking, like, should I even say this?

If I start to speak to explain myself, do they shoot me even faster?

Like, what is the thing that helps me survive this when the chaos of what's going on is so extreme and so all over the place and feels kind of randomized?

I mean, the randomness, I mean, we talked about it earlier, that like so many accounts of people who survive the Holocaust come down to weird flukes of luck.

Or just literally, I stepped out of line and was like, if I step out of line, will anyone catch me?

And they don't.

Eamon Wood.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say the women when they're pricking their fingers and trying to rouse their cheeks to get themselves like to look more alive, good at working, essentially.

Stronger, more healthy.

That's one of those details.

I mean,

a kid jumping in the toilet, and you're like, I can't believe anyone had to do this.

And then there are four other kids already in there.

A lot of these details came from accounts that Spielberg learned on set.

Yes, I mean, it's like the idea of them eating the putting the diamonds and bread and then swallowing them.

That was something that someone mentioned to him on set, and he was like, We have to work this into the movie.

It's also so fascinating as Schindler starts to buy off German officers, things like the lighter and the bag of diamonds later, you know, and him having the breakdown of not selling the car or the pen or whatever.

It's like he's selling them on the notion of like, we all know this is going to crash and burn at some point, which makes it all the more terrifying that people are just like, well, I'll just continue carrying out orders until the last possible moment.

And then he knows the morality test of that final moment, inviting them into the warehouse and being like, if you really care about this shit, fucking execute them right right now.

And everyone backs off.

I mean, which is a big swing.

It's a huge swing.

But part of it is...

Really gambling with a lot of lives there.

What is this guy's like superpower at the end of the day?

He actually really knows how to read people.

And he's brash.

And so much of this, right, is like, put your money where your mouth is.

And some people like Eamon Koch are happy to be psychos all day.

And others are just like, I'm just doing my job, you know, which their job is, you know, the world's most unimaginable evil.

But I can understand why some people would be allergic to the end where he's saying, you know, he's breaking down and saying this ring.

I could have done it.

Well, because it's the most Hollywood moment.

Right.

But at the same time, I don't know what other catharsis you could have at the end of this.

And this person also withheld emotions all

the entire film.

But it's also the first question I would have of him where I'm like, yeah, why didn't, you know, like, why did it end up being this many?

And why did it take you this long to figure it out?

Good for you figuring it out.

Weird that more didn't, but

it's not the enormity of what Ben Kingsley says to him, which is that like generation.

There'll be generations because of what you did.

And you just think about my own life.

But like, it feels like something a movie shouldn't do,

which is have a character kind of be like, what you did is a big deal and will be a big deal.

And Neeson being like, are you sure?

And he's like, yes.

You know, like, it's like movies should, like, historical movies about true stories.

I think that is part of what helps that movie exist in a dialectic with other stories is that he doesn't present it as like, and this is how the Holocaust was won.

This is how we solve the problem.

Sure.

Like the movie then acknowledges like this is kind of a drop in the bucket isn't a deeply impactful drop.

Well, but it's like then, right, that's why Shoah exists.

Right.

I mean, the statistics are mind-blowing.

I mean, you see in the movie that there are more people alive because of Oscar Schindler than there are Jews in Poland.

Yeah.

It's right.

If you were Jewish, would you live in Poland?

I've never, I've never done my real pain trip.

I've been, you know, I've been back and forth on the idea for so long, and that movie did not really move the needle for me one way or the other, but especially if Kieran Kulkin's going to come with me.

I liked that movie.

But, you know, like, like.

Yeah, but I'm just saying it didn't make me want to go like buy my plane tickets to Poland and go on the history tour.

I went once and did not do any of the historical things and felt a kind of profound connection to like, this is where my people are from without needing to really dig into all of that.

Maybe I was also like the fucking 20 and afraid of like doing emotional things.

What I like about that movie is it's him sort of narrativizing his own conversation, negotiation with the pain that he's inherited, with other people's pain.

To what degree is it healthy to take this on?

To what degree do I need to create some space from it?

And I know that if I were to go on that tour, maybe one day I will, I, like Jesse Eisenberg in real life and, you know, like his character in the movie, would be so in my own head about how I should be feeling in this moment and like the solemnity I should be expressing and internalizing and how wrong am I to have my thoughts wander about whatever while I'm here, that it would be sort of self-defeating.

And hopefully I can reach a point where I could go more fear.

But anyway.

Hey, congratulation, guys.

We just passed the runtime of Schindler's list.

And we didn't even talk about John Williams.

You know what?

What I think is the single most iconic film score ever written.

I think we did a lot.

And especially because we need to.

Just do the rankings.

Yeah.

I think we should.

Yeah.

I'm going to challenge you on that, though.

I know.

I mean, just the theme.

Just do the challenge.

I meant to say theme.

It's a great theme.

It is not.

I mean, it's been stuck in my head on a non-stop loop for 30 years.

Make the artist.

There are other more iconic scores.

No, there are more iconic films.

John Williams' Chinlis score.

John Williams wrote more iconic film scores.

Exactly.

I'm just saying.

Five more iconic scores.

I meant to say most iconic film theme.

Just that one piece of music that doesn't come up in full until two hours and 51 minutes of the movie has literally been in my head on a loop for over 30 years.

That's weird.

It is weird.

I have seen several.

None of them can figure it out, but it is

powerful.

The part in the documentary, though, where they're all like the most beautiful thing he'd ever done.

And we cried when we heard it.

And it's like, Parliament, you know,

and you're just kind of like, it would be funnier if they were saying that about his terminal score.

Well, if you're not sure.

They were like, you know, the movie's silly, but like his terminal score, I just started hugging him and was moved to tears.

All right.

I got therapy in 25 minutes.

Let's go.

We've been talking for so long.

Did this movie win any Oscars?

This film won seven Academy Awards.

I'm shocked it didn't win more, in a way.

I could have won more.

No,

I like that.

I'm going to be honest with you.

That was good.

Who wins best actor this year instead?

Tom Hanks wins for Philadelphia,

which I, you know, is a performance I like, but I would certainly give it to, of the five nominees, I would give it to Liam Neeson.

I personally, who, and I think Neeson's just amazing this year.

It's his second best performance.

I personally, behind Ted 2?

Yep.

I am allowed to buy this serial.

Silly rabbit.

I personally give it to David Thulis for Naked, which is like kind of like one of the most insane performance

ever put on screen.

Yeah, but you can give it the Oscars used to have some real uh heavyweights.

Well, he well, Thulis wasn't nominated, um, but also that year, Anthony Hopkins is nominated for Remains of the Day, which is an amazing performance.

Larry Fishburne for What's Love Got to Do Do With It?

Like, they're amazing nominations, anyway.

Uh, you know, the weirder thing is that it loses supporting actor, sure, like we said, but like I'm kind of surprised that it lost, you know, like makeup or whatever.

What one makeup?

Hello!

Well, I guess you can't argue with Madhem Delphire.

I think that my assessment of the movie being quotable is right.

Hello.

I think they're both quotable in their own ways.

Both.

Yeah, for sure.

I think you have helped make hello a quote in a way that solidifies your argument.

So wait, it wins picture, director, correct, screenplay, score, screenplay.

Yes.

Cinematography?

Yes.

Editing?

Yes.

So that's six.

What's the one I'm forgetting?

Does it win production design?

Let's see.

No, it lost costumes to, I think, Remains of the Day, which, you know, great costumes, beautiful costumes.

No, sorry, it lost costumes to the Age of Innocence, but it did win, indeed, Art Direction.

Okay.

Production design.

Yeah.

And of course, Jurassic Park that year also wins three Oscars or whatever.

It's a, you know, it's a hot year for old Steve.

It wins sound and visual effects.

Yeah, it wins both sounds and visual effects.

Jurassic Park, in my opinion, also a good movie.

The film opens,

well, it's not an opening, it's opening number 14 because it opened in limited release, but it did make close to $100 million, as you said, Griff, 96.

More importantly,

322 worldwide.

It was kind of a global hit, I think, in a way that Spielberg might not have predicted.

Banned in about 10 countries?

Most titties.

No, I don't know why it was banned.

I assume for incredibly anti-Semitic reasons.

Yeah, but they would, in some countries,

I believe it was the Philippines, they overruled

Indonesia.

Indonesia, they overruled the ban.

Oh, sure.

And in some countries, they didn't.

Yeah.

Oh, it was banned in Indonesia because it's sympathetic to the Jewish cause.

Hmm.

It doesn't seem like a great reason to me also.

Look, we live in a very complicated world.

So

it won Spielberg his Oscar, his long-desired Oscar, of course.

He looks great at the ceremony.

Hair is kind of long, gives lovely speeches, but...

speeches that are very much like, I'm indebted to, you know, it's like, he can't just get up there and be like, take that fuckers, Spielberg's on top, you know, which would be interesting if he had done that.

Which it's interesting to think that this is also the Philadelphia year where Hanks gives the famous like president of Hollywood speech.

It's definitely a bit of a self-important.

This is a reel beyond and out telling you.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, it is.

This is like peak, serious speeches of like, it's not about me.

It's about the story.

Yeah.

And to think that it's like Spielberg wins all these Oscars, presumably like

goes out, parties, wakes up the next morning, and then has to review story reels for Freakazoid.

It is funny.

You think they made him do that at 8 a.m.

Monday morning?

I think he did it.

I don't want to disrespect Freakazoid and his struggle.

It opens number 14.

It is funny what?

Oh, just to imagine him.

Just how many plates he had spinning at this time.

Even if he doesn't make a difference, it's the Warner brothers, but the Warner sister dot is there as well.

He's like, uh-huh.

Will there be a pigeon sort of Goodfellas thing happening in this?

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah.

God,

everything I learned about the Godfather initially came through Goodfeathers.

December 17th, 1993, Griffin.

So it's opening illuminative release.

Number one at the box office.

It's a fun movie.

It's based on a bestseller, a legal bestseller.

Is it the Pelican Brief?

It's Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts in the Pelican Brief.

The Pelican Brief.

One of those movies that

has sort of gotten reclaimed because I think it kind of slipped through the cracks.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Well, it was a hit.

It wasn't taken.

And then people kind of forgot about it.

Right.

Who usually was a little more serious-minded.

It's him and his dotage a little bit.

Famously, Roberts and Denzel Don't Kiss.

Sure.

Right.

Like there's a little bit of Hollywood cowardice there.

Yes.

Anyway.

Pelican brief opening to a solid $16 million on its way to a very solid 100.

I don't know.

It's a fun movie.

It comes a little long.

I like it a lot.

Yeah, it's fun.

It's Pelican long.

It's not that brief.

Yeah, Pelican kind of long.

Yeah.

I just canceled my therapy sessions.

Did you really?

Yeah, I mean, this is more more important.

You can get out of it.

No, no, no.

Well, here it is.

The people need to know where on my Spielberg list Kingdom of the Crystal Skull falls.

Three days ago, Ehrlich was like, no matter what, you have to promise me I make it out of here for the therapy session.

But you know what?

Griffin wasn't even that late.

You were like five minutes late.

Thank you.

That's really not making or breaking.

This really

15 minutes late.

I was not.

Mrs.

Doubtfire.

I think I was 10.

I was the exact midpoint between the two numbers you guys guessed.

I just said what number two was.

Hello.

Hello.

Mrs.

Doubtfire.

Crushing it.

Number three, it's a comedy sequel.

It's a comedy sequel.

David's eating a fucking ring pot gummy worm.

What the fuck?

It's like licorice.

It's great.

It's great for

the in my opinion.

Good guess, but no.

And not a good movie.

In fact, here's what's crazy.

The next three movies are all comedy sequels.

Wow.

Possibly a bad idea to have these movies.

Is it Wayne's World 2?

This one is Wayne's World 2.

Yeah, they rushed it.

A bad movie.

I was going to say that would have to be 94, but I guess.

Yeah, but you know, they finally have explained what happened with that movie.

That Mike Myers wrote an entire sequel.

He was like, to i i have i want to take inspiration from passport to plymco pimlico yes

and was like funny uh brothers movie and it's a movie about wayne starting his own country and paramount was like great we love it and he wrote the script and they put it into like active pre-production and then like two weeks before filming they were like we fucked up we didn't get the rights for that movie and i forgot about this but i've read this article that you're like they made him rewrite the movie from scratch beyond that they had to like dynamite the the sets yes no what's weird about wayne's world too is that right the rewrite is should we just kind of like parody the doors like and you're like uh should we but that feels like a we have two weeks to go concept and the one thing they knew was that they had to build to the concert because they had built the stage for the performance seeing that movie in theaters as a nine-year-old who had never even heard of the doors was the confusing there's funny stuff in it but one is a stone cold masterpiece you know there's funny stuff in it but what one is one is so good one is perfect

on this show can i make a pitch because i know we thought about spherus but we took a really long, complicated.

You know how we folded

Love Guru into Austin Powers?

Yeah.

I think we fold Axe Murderer into Wayne's World, do those three.

So do another Myers trilogy.

Yeah, I'm not saying we do it immediately, but I'm saying I want to pin it on the board as an idea.

Yeah.

Because then we basically covered all the Myers au-tour films.

You guys have to do Axe Murderer one way or another.

Yeah.

It's too important.

I think

Katin has its own fucking thing.

Kevin the Battle.

It Shrek's its own thing.

The ones that he is the driving force is the three powers, the two wanes, worlds, and axe marker.

That's it.

It's six.

So I'm like, we could

have important work here.

We do important work here.

It's three hours, 30 minutes.

No, there's actually a clock above my head.

I'm just noticing that.

Yeah, it's just sort of like the anyway.

Number four, it's another sequel.

It's new this week.

Family movie about a pet.

Oh, it's Beethoven's Second?

That's right.

Is that the funniest title of all time?

I mean, it's a good title.

It's up there.

In my memory,

they left work for the day after coming up with the title.

I mean,

Sister Act II, Back in the Habit is very good.

Up there as well.

Well, you've just guessed number five, my friend.

I figured that was in the neighborhood.

That and Wayne's World are both like, we got a sequel out in under a year.

But it feels like a mistake.

Like, don't rush it.

And then don't have them all up against each other.

Sister Act II is the one of those three movies where I'm like, that movie's not bad.

That movie has juice.

The Great Bill Duke.

The Great Bill Duke, the Great Lauren Hill.

Like, you know, there's stuff going on in Sister Act II.

Beethoven's second, I'm pretty sure they they were just like, I don't know, there'll be a girl Beethoven 2.

Great, can we go?

Can I make the case for Beethoven's 2nd as a perfect title?

No, we already agreed with you.

This isn't something you need to argue about.

I don't think they greenlit Beethoven 1 being like, and obviously it's a franchise, and then later we can play on the great works of Beethoven.

I remember my dad trying to

explain it to me.

I have the same memory.

I remember your dad trying to

seriously.

Where I was like, why isn't it called Beethoven 2?

And he's like,

well, so Symphony writing, you know, like it was was a pain in the ass for him to explain it to you.

Just imagine the moment where they were like, wow, I'm checking the books here.

Pretty good return on investment in Beethoven.

Should we maybe do a Beethoven sequel?

And then some guy stands up from behind his desk at Universal.

I was like, sorry, I know it's only my second day at the job.

And this is a role that you would have played.

I'd remiss if I didn't point out there's an incredible opportunity here.

People in Hollywood do not

understand or care about how much of a pain in the ass it is for parents to explain things to their kids.

Like when fucking six minutes into the Incredibles, you have to explain to your kid how insurance companies work, Brad Bird is not spending a thought about this.

My whole problem with the current Sansweet didn't ask to be saved.

Mr.

Sandsweet didn't want to be saved.

I mean, I put cars, I finally gave into cars in

a mistake in thinking that this one would at least explain itself.

No, Cars is the most careful.

We have to explain endorsements.

Or, like, you thought cars is the one that would explain

cars.

The world's greatest minds.

Like, fucking Žižek is still watching Cars being like, I don't know.

Where's the brain?

I didn't think that.

Dude, the dogs work originally.

Wait, so they fly on other vehicles who are also.

Yeah, they go inside Siddley the Spyjet's butt, and they have a conversation with him inside of him.

Also, in the top 10, you've got a vehicle, location, and a character.

You've got Toronto Motor and American Legend, Walter Hill Film.

You've got A Perfect World, great film.

You've got The Three Musketeers, lots of fun saw it in theaters.

You have Adam's Family Values, Ditto.

And you've got a all-lol masterpiece called The piano a piano now steven spielberg griffin has made uh by my count 34 films if you uh

jewel yep uh so yeah give me your top 34 for steven spielberg i'm just gonna doing it all the yes here he goes talks about here he goes i prepared and every i have a list yep okay i'm just gonna try to do this fast And some of it, my bump on when I say it, but I'm just locking in the order I have right here.

Okay.

And I'm shooting from the hip.

34, hook.

33 1941.

32 terminal.

31 the BFG.

30 ready player one.

29 Warhorse.

28 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

27.

I don't like that movie.

27 Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Come at me, bro.

26, the Lost World Jurassic Park.

25, always that high basically on the strength of Holly Hunter alone.

24, the color purple.

23, the post.

22, Amistad.

We're now in a territory where every movie is basically incredibly good at best, at worst, right?

21 War of the Worlds, 20, Munich, 19, Westside Story, 18 Minority Airport, 17 Sugarland Express, 16 Duel, 15 Tintin, 14 Lincoln, 13 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 12 Jurassic Park, 11 Jaws, 10 Fablemans, 9 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 8 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 7 Saving Private Ryan, six Bridge of Spies, Face the Bridge, five.

The biggest jump up for me in doing this series, Empire of the Sun.

Number four, Catch Me If You Can.

Number three, Schindler's List.

Number two, AI, Artificial Intelligence.

Number one, E.T.

the Extraterrestrial.

I'm surprised you have Ryan so high.

I wouldn't have thought that.

Look, it's a film I find very difficult to watch.

I think it is just kind of undeniable

in terms of craft.

I mean, that's one where maybe I'm like, do I, do I flip close encounters?

You do what you want.

You did what you did.

That's what I listed.

Ehrlich, you did this?

I did this on the fly.

Okay.

I already have great issue with my picks, but I did 34 BFG, 33 Always, 32 Warhorse, 31, Ready Player 1, should have been lawyer.

30, 1941, 29.

Movie I skipped school to go see at 11 in the morning.

The day came out.

Has not aged well or was good at the time.

The Lost world.

Number 28, the terminal.

Number 27, Amistad.

Number 26, Triggerland Express.

25, Dual.

24, Hook.

23.

High for Hook.

2, Lincoln.

22, The Color Purple.

21.

23, Lincoln.

I said what I said.

24.

You can't have a pet.

24, hook.

21.

I need to see Lincoln again, but it is not, I don't know, never really did much for me.

21, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

20, Westside Story, 19, The Post, 18, Empire of the Sun, 17, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I mean the most Ehrlich movie of all time.

Number 16 Minority Report.

Number 15 Tom Hanks has a cold in the Bridge of Spies.

Number 14 Ace's next favorite movie The Adventures of Tintin should still be a sequel holding out hope.

Number 13 Indiana Jones I think just Indiana Jones.

We call it the Raiders of the Lost Arc.

No, we don't.

We call this Raiders of the Last Arc.

Nope, we don't.

We call this The Last Crusade.

Number 12, War of the Worlds.

Number 11, Sammy Fableman and the Fabelmans.

Number 10, Saving Private Arai.

Number 90T.

Number 8, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Number 7, another movie that would have

complicated my relationship is Steelburgers Munich.

You know what I'm talking about that in context too.

Number six, Raiders of the Lost Arc.

Number five, Jaws, number four, Masterpiece called Catch Me If You Can.

Number three, Jurassic Park, number two, Schindler's List, and number one, AI Artificial Intelligence.

Okay, guys ready for a third one of those?

Nah, number 30.

Now, like, do I put Shin, do I put Sam Private Ryan?

Do I flip Sam Private Ryan and Jaws?

I don't know.

Go on.

Number 34, 1941.

Number 33, The Terminal.

Number 32, Always.

Number 31, Hook.

Number 30, The BFG.

We're exiting bad movies.

Two.

Okay, movies.

Yeah, that's like his only bad tier to me.

Right.

Number 29, Lost World.

Number 28, War Horse.

Number 77, Crystal Skull.

Number Bad Adjacent.

Right.

Number 26, Amistad.

Number 25, Temple of Doom.

Number 24, Color Purple.

Okay, now we're getting into good movies.

Number 23, Sugarland Express.

Number 22, Duel.

Number 21, Empire of the Sun.

I might put that up higher on rewatch, but whatever.

Number 20, not that high.

Number 20, the post.

Number 19, Tintin.

Number 18, Last Crusade.

Number 17, Ready, Player One.

Number 16, Munich.

Number 15, War of the Worlds.

Now we're in.

I fucking love this movie territory.

Number 14, Catch Me If You Can.

Number 13, Bridge of Spies.

Number 12, Westside Stories.

Number 11, Cuck Brigade.

Number 10.

Cooligant.

Rogan's Cuck Brigade.

Number 10, Lincoln.

Number 9, Close Encounters.

Number 8, Saving Private Ryan.

Number 6, 7, Jurassic Park.

Number 6, Raiders.

Number 5, Jaws.

4.

Schindlers.

3.

Colin Ferrell Kiss Me.

Number 2, E.T..

Number 1, AI Artificial Intelligence.

Colin Ferrell Kiss You is number 3?

Yeah, Minority Park.

That's one of the best movies I ever made.

I'm officially flipping Saban Private Ryan and Jaws in the Order.

Take note, people who listen to that dribble.

Otherwise, staying the same.

But yes, I think it's interesting that we all have AI right near the top.

I think it's interesting that you fools don't understand Ready Player One is good.

I don't think it's that interesting.

Look, I bought the 3D Blu-ray and someday I will fire it up and give it another.

I have a steal.

Well, they didn't put the 3D out on steel, so I bought the 4K steel and then I bought the 3D Blu-ray and I put that in 3D.

And people who do that are on a government watch.

I've created my own combo pack.

Is catch me if you can generally accept it as being one of the top tier films.

I think it has of late become generally accepted.

But I think all three of us put it a touch higher than most would.

Well, I have it lower than you guys, but I also, like, once we're in that top 15, We're in five-star territory.

I'm like, I mean, everything I feel like in my top 20 is four stars and above.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yes, yes, yes.

If not even more than that.

Stevie, you've made me some nice movies.

This is the thing.

For that, I say, thank you.

Any of our rankings that seem rude, it's like the guy made too many fucking great movies.

And even the ones I don't like all have some of the best things I've ever seen in a movie.

Ehrlich, is the last episode you were on Eyeswise Shut?

No, you did Vengeance after that.

Because Eyeswide Shot went this long.

Not quite this long.

It should have gone longer.

sure this one went really long i need to pee very badly erlik thank you so much for being here oh my pleasure

you know i may your memory be a blessing i

uh i feel safe in saying that i have now done the single least funny episode of blank jack a badge that i wear with honor that's not true we had a lot of fun yeah we had we had a good time i think they're less funny episodes

once again amistad 53 minutes soaking wet i was just being like oh what do we say we could do a better job

yeah let's go go back and do the second half of Spielberg again.

Let's run it back.

You could do like a how to train your dragon where just like one element remains CG and

throw it everywhere.

It's fucking psychotic that they are just at this point now just keeping the same CGI elements of the original movie and are just putting human beings around them.

It's like the other dragons at least are a little more redesigned, but Toothless looks fucking 98% exactly the same with the same director, Engerard Butler.

I saw an interview with Dean Dubois yesterday, got fed to me on YouTube of him in 2020 saying how morally bankrupt he thinks it is that the animation studios are remaking their own movies and live actions.

Well, you know what helps you be less physically bankrupt is making movies like that.

And like pigs to the slop, I will be

taking my kid opening wiggle.

Of course,

anything you want to plug?

No.

Great.

Fighting in the War Room, your podcast.

Terrible podcast.

Don't listen to it.

It's a good podcast for smart people.

It's even more of me if you can stand it.

And you probably can't.

I don't know.

I write on IndieWire.

I write about movies.

I think a lot of the people listening to the show are aware of that and wish they weren't.

No one has ever had a weird opinion about your movie writing.

Never.

They never will.

What do I want to plug?

My deck on Marvel Snap is fucking crushing it right now.

You just inherited a new wallet full of different.

I have new credit cards.

What can I spend before Sims cancels the if the first name's the same?

It's all gone.

After battle.

Who's going to check?

I have two kids.

Your kids roll.

You can follow their progress on Instagram.

Two of the best kids in the gazebo.

Yeah, I don't know.

You should shout out that best of the year.

A while.

I mean,

I did have a fundraiser that is related to this episode in support of for the second year in a row with people of Gaza.

This year is for the Palestine Recrescent Society.

The amount of shit that GoFundMe has given every step of the way in vetting this account to make sure that I'm not abetting their definition of terrorism or whatever has been insane.

I've even able to get all the money out and to Palestine, but they have currently shut down the page for it anyway.

It's

a fucking nightmare, but I've been very proud and happy to have been able to raise money for the people of Palestine.

And that has brought me joy.

Related to it is a video I put together, but is seemingly inconsequential in comparison.

But yes, I do that.

And this episode is not well timed for me to promote that, but maybe I can come on in the fall.

Ehrlich, do you know which filmmaker we're doing next?

Somewhere in my brain, I know, but

how do you announce it?

What am I looking at?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Great.

How about this?

How about a killer three DVD box up?

That's a cool episode.

Well, we're announcing right now, of course, that next we are doing Amy Heckerling.

Nobody has guessed this or seen it coming as usual.

The films of Amy Heckerling, guys.

Next week, we're straight into Fast Times at Richmond High?

I believe so.

With returning guests, Lola Kirk.

That's right.

Yes.

Now, some of these movies, are they going to be kind of hard for people to get access to, or is it all more or less screamable?

Johnny Dangerously, I think, is the only one where it's like quite a pickle, right?

Yes.

Some of them are maybe not as like rentable on iTunes.

I don't know.

Look, I'll say this is a great time to fire up a VPN if you have one and start scanning the internet.

Right.

Johnny Dangerously is the one that's like pretty out of circulation, but maybe that magically changes soon.

Like, I'm, you know, like loser, that's rentable.

I could never be your woman.

Either way, I just wanted to give a hint.

Rentable as hell.

Oh my God.

You guys are going to finally canonically discuss rentable.

Had the fact that Josh, that she's butt crazy in love with Josh.

That's a movie where we're going to need to go four hours.

It seems it's going to go hog wild.

For the clueless episode, could we have multiple changes?

Looks.

Yeah, I think we have to.

I don't know that we have to because

we don't maybe.

You're only the producer of the show, so you might have forgotten that this is an audio show.

It's important to the authenticity of the sound.

The sounds of Polaroid snapping between

Ben's point.

I agree.

You'll feel that we're wearing a sportier look.

I'm so tired that I just said Ben's agree.

Can you see

Radioheads just in the background?

Or is it fake?

What are they?

No, it's not.

It's way too hard.

They'd be fake plastic trees, though, right?

The coolest sounds.

List over and over again over the background of that episode.

Yeah, no, we'll license that.

No problem.

Anyway, normal swing.

From Schindler's List to Fast Times at Ridgeman High.

Check back in for that next week.

And on our Patreon, we're doing the Superman films.

No, we haven't actually kicked that off.

Really?

No.

My source timing is weird.

This episode, of course, is dropping April 20th, 420.

So

Hitler's birthday.

It's also Hitler's birthday.

Good job, guys.

But we are about to drop a Galaxy Quest episode.

Okay, well, we'll tell you what's happening next after Galaxy Quest.

Superman.

Superman is following that, beginning with the Richard Donner film.

I'm seeing here that its title is Superman.

That's not what it's called.

It's called Superman Colon the Motion Picture.

That is the official title.

That is why the James Gunn movie is called simply Superman because no film has ever had that title before.

Well, you're, I think, wrong.

I think I'm wrong.

It was marketed as Superman colon the movie.

Do you have any strong thoughts about the aesthetic of the trailer for Superman?

I'm not sure why he's chosen that particular color creation, and I hope he like, you know, tweaks it a little bit.

Otherwise, I'm looking excited for it.

I want to push the stop button.

Why is that?

I don't know, because this has been going on for a while.

Are you excited for me to talk so much about Superman, though?

A guy I really like and a guy you probably think is a bit of a square.

I can't believe that movie is called Superman the Motion Picture.

Are we going off of what it says in the opening of the film?

No.

The film is called Superman.

Oh, right.

Well, first of all, it's Superman the movie.

As I told you two minutes ago, you weren't listening.

It was going to be thrilling conversations.

It was only marked that way.

Leading up to the release of the new James Gunn.

Ben, when we're done here, I'm going to be my therapist for the afternoon.

The new James Gun film is not called like Superman.

It's going to lie that you don't legacy.

That's what Almost is called.

I know, know, but like, I was trying to think of a funnier version.

Like, Superman checks things out, you know, just this whole thing where they're like, oh, Superman toddles forward.

Superman begins something.

Well, first steps is one of the worst subtitles.

So bad.

I think that trailer rules, and I'm very cautiously optimistic for that movie.

But here's my pitch: no subtitle necessary.

Fantastic Force First Steps.

What happens in the movie?

Galactus tries to eat Earth.

Oh, is that what happens when you take your first step?

What are you talking about?

What are you fucking talking about?

MCU's bulletproof right now.

Can't go wrong.

Yeah.

Let's Let's all just quickly take our rolk pills.

We've gotten tense.

Let no.

I must negotiate a treaty.

Do the pills stop him from being roll or they make him roll?

They stop him from being roll.

Yeah.

And keep him as the great politician he is.

Freedom!

You've elected an 80-billion-year-old man.

The episode's over.

Basta.

Basta.

Basta.

Thank you all for listening.

And as always,

the podcast is live.

Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims.

Our executive producer is me, Ben Hostley.

Our creative producer is Marie Bardy Salinas, and our associate producer is A.J.

McKeon.

This show is mixed and edited by A.J.

McKeon and Alan Smithy.

Research by J.J.

Birch.

Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American Novel, with additional music by Alex Mitchell.

Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds.

Our production assistant is Minnick.

Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help.

Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit.

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