#2240 - Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino

so you're saying that someone was telling you how to kill someone with coffee okay so i got to know all these uh you were talking about uh some his name's john mcphee some operators and uh I got to know through a friend, through a billionaire friend who loaned his plane to Clinton to fly those people out of, I think, North Korea. And so from that point on, he was surrounded by these guys.
And one of them, this guy Mikey, which isn't his real name. I think he's actually named, they name them all after the archangels.
So he was like Michael. Oh, Jesus.
Gabriel. They take on these.
There's nothing creeper than an assassin with a biblical name. They named after an archangel.
Yeah. And well, you know.
And so he, you know, we got to know each other because of our mutual friend. And I think what happened was he and a couple of the other guys, you know, they were placed on me as like for surveillance purposes, like, you know, find out what this Avery guy's about maybe or just keep an eye on him or whatever.
And they told me right up front, like, be nice to your surveillance. You know, like, don't try to lose us or anything like that.

Because, you know like don't try to lose us or anything like that because and i heard stories about how you know they're surveilling somebody in wherever bolivia and suddenly some gang attacks their surveillance and they step in kick the shit out of the gang and so um so i got to know these guys and naturally, I'm a writer and a filmmaker. And so I, of course, want to talk to them about stuff.
And they immediately started volunteering. Oh, yeah, we've learned all these different ways when I became an operator, blah, blah, blah.
I learned how to kill people without. And I was just making a list now of the 10 ways to kill someone without leaving a trace.
And I was like, well, just like when I told Quentin about this, he's like, well, what are those? I'd like to hear those. Everybody wants to hear those.
And so one of the ones that I think is the best one is you inject someone with coffee, caffeine, like just inject coffee into their bloodstream, gives them a heart attack, and it's untraceable. Later on, they do an autopsy and they just discover caffeine in your system.
That's it? That's it. Just right into the blood? Coffee can kill you? Sometimes the simple ways are the best.
Just right into the juggler with a syringe? Yes. Jesus.
After extracting whatever information you need to get out of him. How much coffee will kill you like that? A syringe worth? I don't know.
Is it the Turkish kind or is it Folgers?

Cuban espresso. Yeah.
But he was he was a medic, you know, during during the war, the war.

And he was a medic. And so he, you know, was kind of identified as somebody who knew how to kill somebody very easily because, you know, what will work.

Yeah. Because you're a medic.
And so, you know, I would hear every now and then, I would say, I'd kill some guy and some diplomat or something in the Philippines and hit him with my car. And I'd look in my rearview mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, you know, is the guy still alive or I better finish him off and put him in reverse and drive him over again a couple

of times and then take off and he's doing that all the time all the time they're doing it well

jamie and i were just talking they think they have a photo of the guy who whacked that insurance ceo

oh yeah yeah yeah they think they have a photo of his face now oh they do huh well i would think

with the amount of time or they picked it up later i think you know there's cameras everywhere yeah

and that's part of the problem with someone and i don't think this guy was a professional

I think there's cameras everywhere. And that's part of the problem with someone.
I don't think this guy was a professional. I think this guy, if I had to guess, some guy got fucked over.
Apparently that company is really bad on denying claims. 34% denial rate.
Something like that. Almost like 16.
Yeah. Yeah.
So those guys. I don't think anybody's going to be crying too hard over that guy.
Maybe his family, but that's about it. It's a dirty, dirty business.
The business of insurance is fucking gross. It's gross.
And especially healthcare insurance, just fucking gross. Well, actually, all insurance.
I live in California, and all of a sudden, because I live adjacent to any kind of open space, like nobody will insure my house because of fire. And so suddenly it's like I have a house that's uninsurable and it's not just me, it's everybody.
And so it's chaos. Yeah.
Yeah. I have a friend who's trying to sell a house in California and it turned out it was $125,000 a year just to get fire insurance.
Yeah. Like what? Yeah.
It's insane. It's fucking nuts.
It's insane. Yeah, but, you know, I was evacuated three times when I lived there.
I used to live in Bell Canyon, and, you know, it was fucking, it was rough. Look, I've been really lucky.
I live in, I'm almost afraid to say it, all right, because I've been living in the Hollywood Hills, and I've never, any of the fire stuff happens never happened around me. It is just luck.
I mean, the benefit of your place is you're at least in a helicopter accessible. They're just going to dump all that fire retardant right on top of you.
I literally am kind of at the top of the hill on a bunch of rock. So if the whole fucking place turns into an inferno, I'm still fucked.
And I think that place has probably been there a while.

It's probably withstood all sorts of calamity.

Yeah. When I was filming Fear Factor, I talked to this guy who was a fire guy for the fire

department.

He said, it's just going to be a matter of time.

There's going to be one day where a fire hits LA and the wind is the right way and we're

not going to be able to stop it.

It's just going to burn right through to the ocean.

He goes, it's just a matter of time.

We all know it. I was like, what the fuck, dude? I go, the whole city? He goes, the whole city.
He goes, when those big fires get going, there's not a damn thing. Like what happened in Malibu a few years back? Like those are, I always thought Malibu, those rich people, they're going to protect that.
Maui. That was like around 93.
That actually happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction. Really? Yeah.
Well, there was a big Malibu fire. The big Malibu fire happened while we were shooting Pulp Fiction.
So we actually set up a TV on the set because Bruce Willis was going to maybe lose his house. And so he was like actually – so we have this little TV area so we can like – so in between takes we can watch what's going on with the fire.
And they're like, and there was all these reports that, no, Bruce Willis and his family are on top of the house with their water hose. I go, no, he's not.
He's right here. Well, the thing is, fires were normal.
Like it used to be when I was young, you know, I grew up in California. And so when I was young, fires would burn through Malibu constantly.
But now they put all those houses in there where there never were houses because the fire is a natural process. It kind of clears the land, cleans the land.
And it's normal, actually. But, you know, when you put all that kindling in there, suddenly we end up with these like super storms of fire just where it's just going crazy.

Yeah.

It's I think it's overdevelopment, which is the cause of these insane kind of.

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That's 10% off at T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com slash Rogan. Fires that we're getting.
Yeah, but it's a cool place to live. You're not going to stop people from developing in Malibu.
It's just too nice. No, you're not going to stop.
You just take your chances, roll your dice. Yeah.
But you roll your dice. Take your chances and you roll your dice no matter where you live.
Yeah, it's just fucked up when when it happens like oh my god yeah i drove home once we were filming fear factory to stop the set early because the fire was so bad this was like 2003 or something like four and driving home it took me 55 minutes on the five to get home and the entire time the right side of the highway was on fire for 55 minutes everything like lord of the ring style so three different times you got evacuated from your house? Yeah, three different times. So what is, like, okay, so you decide what you're going to take with you kind of thing? Yeah, last time, the last time was the last time.
It was, like, the last big fire in L.A. And I came home from the comedy store at, like, 1 o'clock in the morning, and my wife and I are looking out the window, and the fire's, like, maybe 500 or 600 yards away, and it's coming over the hill and we were looking at each other i said let's just get the fuck out of here yeah right on let's just get out of here now just so we grabbed the kids got a laptop took some clothes i didn't even have underwear i just i said we could just buy stuff who gives a fuck you know who cares if you have your life yeah i'm always the i don't want to say stupid guy, but I'm the guy who for some reason always decides I'm going to stay.

Oh, you're that old guy.

I live near a fire department.

There's a fire hydrant across from my driveway.

You're the guy on the roof where the flood is happening.

You're going to have my property.

Yeah, that's me.

My family went away and I was like, well, they're going to close it out so we can't get back in. I'm just going to hang out here until I know that it's.
And, you know, at a certain point there was fire like cresting the ridge and I'm kind of watching it. I ran down to the fire department to see, you know, like, hey, guys, it's coming.
I can see it from my house. And they're all there like hanging out and eating sandwiches and like not even worried about it.
They kind of looked over at it. It's OK.
It'll be fine. It'll just burn a little yeah they get a little too blase blase about fire by the way my spec ops friend uh he's like fuck those firemen man fuck them they get so much like credit for like nothing they have barely do anything they're on these incredible pension plans like he like hates firemen that's ridiculous.
It is a great job, but you can't get mad at someone for having a great job. For having a great job.
There's a buddy of mine that I used to play pool with. He has to actually hump it into another country and kill somebody.
He's got a real tough job. He's not getting enough credit.
That's what it is. That's really what it comes from.
That's the better way to say it. That's the reality of our world today.
Those people don't get enough credit. But firemen, you know, it is a great fucking job.
But I like the way he brings it out. Fuck those guys.
Fuck those pussies. These huge pensions and everybody thinks they're heroes.
They're not heroes. Well, it's funny.
They're just doing their job. The firemen are very comfortable with fire.
These people are very comfortable with people dying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dying because of them. Exactly.
They just get real – they get blase blase about murder. It's not murder if it's sanctioned by your own country.
Isn't that wonderful? Yeah. What a cool loophole.
Yeah, isn't it? I had an interesting thing. It's like when you live in the Hollywood Hills, you're paying actually pretty decent property taxes.
So you get... There's a little vig that comes with it.
There's a reason why. You don't have to wait two hours during election.
You just go to the local elementary school. You're in and out in five minutes when it comes to election day.
But also, it's one of those stupid things that you do that like, what was the fucking idiot? You turn on the burner and then you leave the room for a while. And then you come back and all of a sudden your kitchen is flaming.
And so... Has that happened to you? That happened to me once.

And so the alarm goes off and I hit the button, let the fire department know.

And then I put it out.

I put it out like pretty much immediately.

And then maybe five minutes later, it could have been three, five minutes later, the fire truck is at my door. So I didn't even have time to say, hey, it's okay now.
It's okay. And so there's an entire fire truck at my door and I left them in.
I go, guys, I'm really sorry. I was really stupid.
I left the room with the pot on the stove

and whatever in any way.

So I'm really sorry I wasted your time.

I'm really, really sorry I wasted your time.

Having said that,

it's nice to see that you guys are here this quick.

Yeah.

And I'm sure they were like, oh, we'll just get a selfie.

And they were like, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Yeah, exactly. Private Jackson's paid for something.
Are you sure you want us to come in and just make sure? Yeah, go ahead if you want. The problem is sometimes they have to chop through the walls to make sure that there's not fire and embers inside.
Spray it all down. It's a hard fucking job when it's a hard job, though.
The thing is, most of the time, they're just chilling. They get to cook.
They eat. They work out.
Oh, I take ice cream down to our guys at the like, I'll go out and buy a bunch of ice cream or some pizzas and take it down just on random days just to. Well, actually, it was funny.
That's cool. I'm OK with the fire guys.
Well, it was actually funny because it was like one of the things that was a crack up. It was like the local fire department when we worked at Video Archives at our video store.
The local fire department was a customer. And so they'd rent different movies.
But like it was almost out of five movies that they would rent, four are pornos. Yeah.
No, they lived up to their career. Did you guys work together? Yeah.
No shit. That's how you guys met? Yeah.
That's how we met. Wow.
Video archives in Manhattan Beach, California. How fucking cool is that? From like 84, yeah.
Yeah. Wow.
84 for about five years. Yeah.
Maybe even a little bit before 84. Well, I started officially at 84 because I remember- But you were a customer before.
Well, I was a customer before. Yeah.
I was a customer before, yeah. I predated Quentin as one of the employees, so I was there.
Look at you guys. Yeah, actually, yeah, that's us.
That's crazy. Very unfortunate shirt on my part.
There was a lot of unfortunate shirts in the 80s. Everybody was confused.
They cut the drugs off in the 70s. No one knew what to do for 10 years.

That's exactly it. Yeah, it's crazy.
Like, you would have never thought back then that that industry would completely vanish. You thought blockbuster video is going to be around forever.
Well, you know, one of the things that... I didn't think film was going to vanish either.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I didn't think the theater experience was going to go away either.
But one of the things, though, that was the death keel to video stores that no one ever, like, when they were talking mom and pop, when they're talking old people, to like, hey, you know, you've retired from your business, you've got a nice little nest egg. If you want to invest in a nice little business where you get to work with your neighborhood and be in a nice little store with your family, video stores, that's a good business.
Well, I don't know anything about movies. Well, you have people who help you, you know, help you choose the titles and everything.
So there's a lot of people that, like, invested in this stuff. And it seemed like a good idea.
The reason that it seemed like a profitable idea was the idea like, well, you know, I sell you this video cassette and you pay for the video cassette. But the minute you rent it past the point that where you paid for, you paid for the video cassette yourself, then everything else is you.
All that other money that you make from here on end is just all profit once you pay for the actual cassette. Of course, you'll have some cassettes that don't rent as well.
But, you know, but that's the way it works out. But it should work out great.
Well, again, that sounds like a pretty good business model. Well, if I spend this money and then, you know, five years from now, boom, everything is is a profit.

Where it all fell apart is the idea that you always have to get new shit.

Because it's not a bookstore.

Well, bookstores need to get new stuff too, but it's not a library.

Life doesn't stand still.

Every month there's new titles coming out and you have to be competitive and you have to get the new titles. And so even if that were the issue, that wouldn't be that big of a deal.
But if you're a mom and pop star, you only have so much room. It's literally a shelf space issue.
Within three to four years years you're bursting out of the seams of videos you're just bursting out you've got no more room and so now all of a sudden rather than having your tapes facing out now everything is you know sideways spine facing've got to really – and it just never stops. It never stops.
Next month, you've got to get this. And next month, you've got to get that.
And next month, you've got to get that. You need a Costco-sized building.
Yeah. Well, again, if you have four different video stores or if you have a chain, you can move things around and it's easier.
But when you're a mom-and-pop, that's just it. You know, if a mom and pop store and you have a bike store, you don't have to keep getting new bikes every month.
If you have a pottery store, you don't have to keep getting new pots every single month. You constantly have to grow your inventory.
Every six months you get something cool. You don't need to get it every month.
And you're defined by you having the new shit. And then there was another problem when companies that were massively funded, like Blockbuster, came onto the scene.
They would go in and they would kind of do this sort of gray market purchasing where they would buy, you know, 50 diehards. And a mom and pop store can't afford to buy more than one or two diehards or three maybe to satisfy your clientele.

When it comes to a big title, yeah, the thing is you spend the money.

Like, okay, like, you know, one of our big titles in the early days of video was Top Gun.

Yeah, Top Gun.

Perfect example.

So you get like, you know, you'll get even the mom and pop store.

You'll get 12 or 15.

Because everyone wants to see it.

And at some point it's going to be out and it's going to be checked out.

And so you've wants to see it. And at some point, it's going to be out.
And it's going to be checked out. And so you've got to satisfy your...
Well, you're going to... Yeah, you'll rent all 15 of those for the next two weeks.
You know, it's going to be good. But then now you have to sell them off, you know, for $10 a piece, you know, once the desire has died down.

It largely fell on us because we were a smaller store and we had a Blockbuster just a block

away basically. Not even a block.

We're talking about in the same fucking...

Not a block away. It was

in the... On the block.

In the shopping center that we were

in.

You're missing the most interesting thing.

It's not about the bulk buy. That's what it what it is.
But that's every mom and pop store has to deal with that depending on dealing with a franchise. Well, it changes your strategy, though.
Yeah. But what Blockbuster would do, and they were famous for doing this.
They were famous for doing this. But particularly, they were strategic about it.

It's like,

okay,

we're going to go

into this town.

Okay,

we're going into

Manhattan Beach.

What's the biggest video store?

What's the most popular

local video store

in Manhattan Beach?

Well,

that would be Video Archives.

They're right on Sepulveda.

They're right across the street

from the warehouse,

which was one of the big

rental places. Before Blockbuster, it was warehouse, warehouse records and tapes.
And they still managed to survive across the street from warehouse. And then, what does Blockbuster do? They buy the Shakey's Pizza that is in our shopping center.
Our shopping center. And they moved into the Shakey's Pizza.
Because it's like, well, okay, with a warehouse and with these video archives guys, well, this is obviously the place to be. So they just bought out the Shakey's Pizza and opened up.
And they still couldn't shut us down. Yeah.
Wow. I'm sure they had the attitude of, well, just brush them aside.
Oh, of course. Of course that's how they felt.
And so consequently, because you can only get three or 12 Top Guns, whatever it is, it's not as many as Blockbuster is getting. You end up having to focus on, like, how am I going to convince my clientele to watch something other than Top Gun this weekend? And so it landed on us to basically say, oh, you can't get Top Gun.
Well, how about this movie that you haven't seen? But, you know, it's the difference between being a cool coffee place and being Starbucks.

Right.

Or, you know, a franchise bar and a cool little Joe's bar.

All right.

And the bartender knows you.

Right.

You know, so it's like, look, if you just absolutely positively need Top Gun that weekend,

then go across the streets of the warehouse and get it.

All right.

We have what we have.

But we had customers that came in every fucking day.

And part of their day, or every other day, when their camps were due.

And they were people of the neighborhood.

And they came in.

And not only did they rent stuff, they dropped stuff off, and then they rented new stuff out.

But they came in to talk to us for 20 minutes or 45 minutes like every other day. And there's no algorithm to tell them what to do.
We're the algorithm. You have to know, oh, this guy, oh, they're on a date night.
So they're going to want this kind of rom-com type movie or this guy. He really likes, you know, Vietnamese hooker porn tapes.
I got to make sure to find something like that for him. And those kids, they're going to want, you know, some skate stuff.
So I've got to learn all about the Bones Brigade videos and stuff like that. And so, you know, you just kind of figured out, like, how can I upsell the stuff that they haven't heard of? Because invariably, anybody who comes in.
But you're making it just sound a little bit more cynical than it was. You are making it sound more cynical than it was.
More like the challenge of it. You guys are like a married couple.
Yeah, but it's not that... Totally, we're like a married couple.
It wasn't that cynical. Without the benefits.
Tell them the whole story, honey. Just tell them the whole story.
We were just hanging out and they're coming and hanging out too. Yeah, and we would pop a movie on and like, you know, pop the movie on and be watching scenes from it and be talking about the scenes.
And a customer would come in or many customers would come in and they'd just become part of the conversation. And we would have like, you know, like a chat room in the.
No, there was like. No, there was there.
There was about, like, 15 customers that, like, you know, I talk to five hours a week every week for five years. Yeah.
Because they come in and I'm like, we'll spend at least 40 minutes every other day. And I expected to see them.
And, you know, I watched what I watched on TV. I saw what I saw at the movies.
And then they saw what they saw in the movies. They watched what they watched on TV.
We all talked about it. And they talked about the videos and what else we're going to get and da-da-da-da-da.
And if you like that, you're going to like this. About our lives and everything, yeah.
So at what point in time, while this is all going on, do you guys decide, we need to make our own fucking movies? It was always the case. Well, we were always thinking, well, Roger and

Roger had another friend that

he was a guy that connected me and Roger together

was a guy named Scott who took

his own life at a certain point. His father owned

another video story that I worked at as well

that Quentin used to come into. But the thing is, though,

that while I was just thinking

about making movies, Roger and Scott

were like making movies on Super 8.

Yeah. And they were making little horror

films and little zombie movies on

Super 8. Supernatural

I'm going thinking about this stuff and these guys are like Sam Raimi-ing it, you know, like Sam Raimi. They're making their shit in their backyard and working on it for like three months and stuff.
Yeah. And, you know, like I was friends with all the punk guys because it was like L.A.
punk. And so they were always in my movies.
All the punks were in my movies because they were media literate. They loved movies.
And so easy to pull in and uh and to be in the film so they were always playing like you know the gang of punks who beat somebody up or something so it must have been cool working at a video store though because it's essentially like you have it's like an education well when the time came where we actually wanted to be making movies where we were talking about making movies because i can remember when i think it was it was around the time of sex lies and video tape or maybe she's got to have it no no definitely sex lies and video but I remember uh you coming to me and saying the moment is happening yeah yeah it's happening like small a small movie is possible to get made like like it's happening for us for guys our age. Yeah, I mean, the one...

The Sex Eyes and Videotape was sort of like the Seattle band that broke.

But I was already looking at Blood Simple

was my in.

That's a great movie.

Was my in.

Where that was, okay, it's an artistic movie. It's arty.
It's funny. It can play the art houses.
It can play the art house circuit. But there's a genre base to it.
Yeah. There's a genre base.
It's like, you know, it's a thriller. It's a film noir-y kind of thriller done in a certain kind of way.
But it's a genre base. Yeah, I go, that's the way you do an art film.
You do it, you make it a genre base art film. If you keep one foot in...
Because it's entertaining. Yeah, if you keep one foot in exploitation in some way in genre, if you keep your foundation in genre, then you can do whatever you want.
Like, my favorite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick. I love Kubrick movies.
Okay, one can pretty much look at all of his films and say each and every one is a genre film. He's got his science fiction movie.
He's got a horror movie. Even Barry Lyndon as a costume drama at the time.
As a costume genre. As the genre.
That was a solid, bankable genre. The book is definitely a pulpy genre of its time.
Well, yeah. The book was serialized, wasn't it? It was like Thackeray wrote them in like an episode.

It was like a soap opera.

But that was a very popular book at that time.

Yeah, and so, yeah, it was all...

If you can...

And I knew this making my first film,

and I know, Quentin, you were talking about it.

This was the conversation we were actively having of

we have to make sure that we make a movie people want to see, a genre film like and i was calling them exploitation movies at the time like i want to keep one foot in exploitation and then but at the same time i'm like well i kind of also want to make like you know i want to elevate it as much as possible and so when the time came for me to make my first first film uh killing zo um you know it was like I knew it was going to be a bank robbery because I wrote it around a location. We found this while they were scouting for Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence Bender, or maybe you also had scouted that location, found this bank location.
And Lawrence called me up and he's like, hey, I'm calling all the writers I know. I found this bank location.
And if you can, if you have a script that takes place in a bank, we can kick together a couple hundred thousand dollars and make a movie there. It's like this complete, solid, amazing location.
And I said, oh, my God, Lawrence, this is your lucky day. I happen to have a script that takes place in a bank.
And then I just quickly wrote one based on the location. And as I was writing it, I was thinking, OK, you know, I know that it's going to be a bank robbery.
It's a bank. And so I know it's going to be a bank robbery.
And that's my solid bankable genre that I'm going to stick with. But I knew I wanted to do something more with it.
And I had just traveled through Europe and and I'd been telling Quentin the stories of traveling through Europe. He's like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes a Trip.
And... I still think it should have been called that.
I think it's a different movie. I don't think it's a...
No, you kind of made Roger Takes a Trip, just added bank robbers in it. But it's still Roger Takes a Trip.
I had been in Paris. I had bumped into a guy that I knew from Los Angeles who was a French guy and he was like, oh'll show you the real Paris and I went out with he and his friends Enrique Jean-Claude all the characters from the movie I went out with him and his friends and we uh you know he drove me through Paris and next thing I know he's doing heroin and I'm like and and it started with you no not with me I I now we do heroin yeah it was like now we heroin.
Hold my arm. I did hold his arm.
For real? Yeah, yeah. I had never seen anything like that.
Like he tied his arm off? He's like, hold my arm? No, no, no. Hold my arm.
He was the tying arm. Roger was the tying arm.
Roger, hold my arm while I shoot up. Jeez.
He doesn't quite know that this is all going to happen, that everything else has been a preamble to this. Yeah, suddenly that happens.
He just needed a heroin partner. Yeah.
And his friends were like, oh, doing it in the nose doesn't even affect me anymore. You know, things like that.
And I'm like writing these lines down like, this is great shit. And so I get back and I tell Quentin like about this whole story and about these guys and going, you know, driving around the Champs-Élysées and, ah, this is where the fags sell themselves.
Oh, now we go into the nightclub down below and we do more heroin. I'm like, what about the cops? Aren't the police going to say anything? It's safer here than, you know, like you can do heroin anywhere in Paris.
And it was like, no, I work at Le Monde. Like all of it was like basically everything in that movie.
I, you know, was stuff that I'd actually seen. And so when the time came to make it as a bank robbery film, I just, you know, I'm thinking about it.
I'm like, well, it's a bank robbery movie, but it's going to be about these guys. And it just became a movie about a guy going someplace and the, and everything that he thought he knew is wrong.

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OK, it's all about that that kind of friendship and misconception that he's downstairs at the bank. Jean-Yves Genglad, the bad guy, is upstairs.
The chaos is going upstairs. He has no idea what's going on upstairs.
And so this kind of just became what the movie was about. And so I just quickly wrote the script.
And then, you know, we ended up not even using that location to shoot the movie. And it came together later and I ended up shooting in downtown LA instead.
But but it was the seed was planted. The seed was planted.
So the idea was, OK, I'm going to make a French film out of it. Because I'm like in L.A., I'm making a film.
What can I do that would be different? Like that would make this more than just a bank robbery movie. And because of the experience I had just had, I was like, oh, I'm going to make a French film.
Okay. I had no business making a French movie.
I didn't even really speak French. I just thought it would be kind of cool.
I like, you know, a cool French girl and like greasy, dirty French guys, French criminals. And I always loved, you know, Alain Delon and Le Samurai.
You know, the way he wears a suit and the way he carries a gun and the way he walks around. I just like, I, you know, just adored all of that.
And so it was like, well, let's put all of that kind of space that's in my brain into the movie and then the movies tend to take on a life of their own they tend to be like children you know it starts off as a concept as a conception has a conception and then it has an infancy and then you're raising that child to become the movie and along the way you're really just kind of protecting it and trying to allow it to grow into what it's going to grow into without forcing it to become something that it's not. And it's a little bit of a balance.
You have to be a good parent, which means you have to give it a little bit of freedom to grow into something that you don't know what it's going to be. But at the same time, you have to be willing to be strong with it as well.
That's a very underappreciated movie. It's a fucking great movie.
I think I'm really good at making underappreciated movies. I think I've built a career on underappreciated movies.
Those are the classics that you would look for in a video store. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
You look for the movies that were really good that no one knew about. Dark Day Afternoon's not in, but we can get you killing Zoe.
My favorite moment in the movie. Well, I like it when the guy gets burned alive.
The hamburger scene. I remember they were trying to talk to you to cut out and they go, no, no, you can't cut that out.
I'm taking my name off. Yeah, yeah.
No, Quentin did that. Actually, Quentin was a great gorilla to have on my side at that time.
Why would they tell you to cut that out?

Everyone is afraid.

Everyone's afraid. Everyone operates out of fear.
If you take that out, I'm taking my name off. The only people

that don't operate out of fear, I think, is the

director and the actors. Those are the ones

who, if everything's working right,

you're fearless. It's always executives that

fuck everything up. But it's the scene.

My favorite scene is

the scene with Hugh Anglon when he walks into the close up. Oh, yeah.
And he's just like, wait a minute. He's like remembering what he heard and he's and he realizes.
OK, so that's a good example of because the movie was shot. Explain the scene better.
The scene was shot. Explain the scene.
I will. The movie was shot for for for very little money.
We had no money to make it. So I had to shoot the entire upstairs first and then the downstairs.
Because it's like doing a company move. But I had kept...
I knew that when writing... And this was sort of a rule that we had was...
One, make a genre movie. Two...
Explain the scene! I'm going to. I said explain the scene.
Don't tell me what you felt about at that moment. You missed the exit.
The scene was a replacement for another scene that was in the movie that was too expensive to shoot. That's the short of it.
What does that have to do with what I like? What I replaced it with was, and I had to fight for it, was a single shot because originally he he goes downstairs and he sees a bunch of guys coming in through the sewer. So he starts machine gunning people in the sewer.
Because there was like a little sewer manhole in the bottom of the bank. I was like, well, let's use that.
And so I had this whole thing. And the bond company showed up.
And you're behind schedule. And you've got to cut pages.
And I couldn't cut anything and I'm shooting upstairs, downstairs stuff.

And so it's like I had to have something because he leaves the scene and then comes back angry.

And so I knew I needed to have something.

And originally I had this whole scene where the cops are coming in and he reacts to that.

And so I said, well, okay, I just need one shot because it's all I had time to do because

the fucking bond company.

And so I set up, which were actually really cool to me.

They were actually, film finances was great.

I just set up a single camera.

I asked for kind of a Kubrickian lens, a nice wide, like maybe a 14 millimeter lens.

And I just had John Hughes walk up into a close-up.

And I just had him do, I said, just walk into a close-up

and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls.

And is that the shot you're talking about?

And he does like a little magic trick beforehand, like...

No.

That's not the one you're talking about?

No.

That's the great shot.

That's a great shot.

No, the scene I'm talking about is, but that's why I wanted you to explain it, because I hadn't seen it in a long time, but it was... Here it is.
See, is that the shot? Well, that's the shot. No, the scene I'm talking about is, but that's why I wanted you to explain it because I hadn't seen it in a long time.
But it was... Is that the shot? Well, that's the shot.
That's the shot I'm talking about. Look, he's looking into the walls.
He's looking around. But I thought the whole idea about it is the idea that...
I added those lines of dialogue in. No, but I thought the whole idea is he puts it all together.
He realizes that there's something going on, that the cops are doing this, or Eric Stoltz is dirty with him. And it all hits him.
He's ready to do something else, and he walks into a close-up, and it all hits him. But now we, the audience, know what's going on.
Yeah. And then he's just like, wait a minute.

Well, it just shows that sometimes if you can't do what you want to do, what you come up with is better.

And this was an example of it rained that day and I had to use the rain.

That's sort of the example.

The frustrating part for me about what you're talking is like, I don't care how the sausage was made.

I like the sausage.

I wanted you to talk about the sausage. Not the factory.
You don't want to know what's in that sausage. You have no interest in that.
I wanted to hear about the Italian sweetness. Well, it was very sweet, but it started off sour.
It started off sour because I couldn't do what I wanted to do. And so I just came up with something that was, well, he puts it together in his head.
But and I mean, I still think that sequence is exhilarating because it's all it all calls down to an actor's face. Well, I had Tom Savini on the set because and I couldn't afford Tom Savini, but I found his number.
And before I shot and I called him up and in Pittsburgh and I said, Tom Savini is a makeup effects artist who did Dawn of the Dead. He did all the effects for Dawn of the Dead.
And not to mention all the great Friday the 13th, all the slasher movies. He's the superstar of practical makeup effects of horror films of that era.
He was in Vietnam and saw some shit. And every time I'm talking to him about stuff like he's like, oh, yeah, well, you know, no, if you're bleeding from back here, there's only two small veins and blah, blah.
Because when your head gets knocked off, like he's seen all this stuff. And so this is his way of processing it.
But Tom came in and I couldn't afford him. I called him up on the phone.
I was like, hey, can you think I'm a young filmmaker? I'm, you know, I'm your biggest fan of like the makeup effects, blah, blah, blah. Okay, he flew himself out.
We had no money to pay him. I think we paid him like some tiny amount.
He flew himself to LA, put himself up, worked on the film, and he made that burn makeup on that burned guard in the vault out of Vaseline paint and tissue paper. And I watched him make, it was the most unbelievable thing, how he made blisters and burn effects.

And it was like watching one of the great artists work.

Tom is an incredible guy.

He's an incredible, incredible guy.

Where you were asking earlier on about, whoa, you're working at a video store.

Did you ever think, you know, when did you start thinking about making your own stuff?

Well, I was thinking about making my own stuff

for like a long, long, long time,

but these guys were actually doing it.

But there is a truth while I thought about it

like for a long, long time

and always figured I would do that eventually.

I did fall asleep for a few years, you know,

because working at that store, I just got caught up in the little life there.

And it's interesting because, you know, you spent your 20s going to comedy clubs and building a career.

So I'm spending my 20s there.

And well, it's one of those things where it's like, well, this isn't my dream. This isn't what I wanted to do working at a video store for years.
I wanted to actually make movies. It's not my dream what I'm doing.
But it's dream adjacent. It's close to my dream.
It's close to my dream. I get to my dream I get to watch movies all fucking day I get to talk about movies all fucking day I don't have to work at a pizza parlor I'm not delivering pizzas I'm not busting ass as a bartender I'm not busting ass doing menial jobs this is the kind of job that I'd – I'd go to the store if I wasn't paid to go to the store.
So it's like – but for a couple of years, it did put me to sleep. It did kind of put me to sleep.
It put my ambitions to sleep for a little bit because I was happy enough. Yeah.
I was happy enough. And just one of these these days I'll...
Right, but you didn't have

the fire. I didn't have the fire.

And when I got the fire,

when I eventually

got the fire back again,

and it was a life-changing

thing. It was a life-changing day.

It was...

We had a buddy of ours

named Steve-O. Yeah.

And he was one...

We had different living arrangements

and at one point in time me and Steve-O were

I'm going to go. And we had a buddy of ours named Steve-O.
Yeah. And he was one – we had different living arrangements.
And at one point in time, me and Steve-O were living in the same house together, renting towards the back of the store. The dude house.
Yeah. It was where everyone would hang out.
But now Steve-O was older than the rest of us. So he was about like almost five years older than us.
But he didn't seem like it. He was a young guy.
Like five years younger mentally or emotionally. But so he hits 30.
And he starts changing. He starts changing drastically.
I mean, he was one of the funniest guys I ever knew. And he was this really, really funny stoner dude and really cool.
And all of a sudden he's like angry about things. And now he's not quite as funny.
And now he's got this issue. And so we're roommates.
And there's this one night that he's kind of like all, he's kind of disgusted with his life.

And he starts ranting. We're roommates.
And there's this one night that he's kind of like all – he's kind of disgusted with his life.

And he starts ranting. And he's describing a situation that was very common if you were a kid growing up without a degree or anything in the 80s, especially in California, where it's like you can't get any really good jobs.

But like you can work at Licorice Pizza.

And if you're an okay employee,

you could like work at Licorice Pizza

for a couple of years.

And maybe you could even become assistant manager

or a manager.

And maybe they send you to another store.

And maybe you worked there for three years

and that's really great.

But then, you know, all of a sudden,

the district manager doesn't like

you, you run a file of somebody

higher up in corporate

and all of a sudden next thing you know you're fired and you're out in the street.

Again, it's management.

And so now you've just spent three years

at Licorice Pizza.

Now you could get a job at TRW

or some place that's like a real job job

or

well those are kind of hard to get but you can work at Warehouse Records and Tapes tomorrow because you just had three years at Licorice Pizza. Same thing with Wild West Closier, same thing with Miller's Outpost, same thing with any of these kind of stores.
Next thing you know, you're 28, and the only jobs you've ever had are minimum wage jobs behind a counter that were designed for kids to pay for their

gas.

Right. And you've spent your entire 20s doing that.
And then you start getting bitter. And you start getting bitter.
But he was not just bitter about the job aspect of it. But I knew, oh my God, he's telling me the truth.
I'm learning something here. because he goes,

you know,

you know,

Quentin,

you think that we're this really great team. We're this really great crew.
Well, we are. I mean, this is that time of your 20s.
We're like your group of friends or your family. And I'm like, well, we are.
Quentin, at 20, I worked at South Bay Cinemas.

And I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you.

And some girls there, too.

But it was a bunch of guys just like you.

And then I stopped working at South Bay Cinema.

Then I worked at Miller's Outpost.

I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you.

And we did everything just like we do.

We went to movies together. We went out and we dated amongst the girls there, everything.
Then I worked at Alicia Pizza for four years with a bunch of guys just like you. I've wasted my life hanging out with a bunch of guys just like you.
And they all go away at a certain point. And I realized this guy's kind of telling the truth.
He's showing me a truth about him. This is coming from somewhere.
And then all of a sudden, he still hung around us. He still liked us.
But then he started making it a point to touch base with some of his high school friends that were still around. So he's not just hanging out with guys four years younger or five years younger than him.
Anyway, I'm turning 25 around this time. So I'm having my own little, okay, well, what have I done with my life so far? So far, fucking nothing.
So I'm having my own little anxiety hitting 25, but I'm seeing what it's like five years from now when you turn 30. A window to the future.
When you're in this situation. And there was like one night that I had what I used to call – I would do it every once in a while.
I haven't done it in a long time, thankfully. I would have a Quentin Detest Fest where I'd stay up all night long and rather than give myself excuses, I would look at everything that I'm fucking up in my life or everything I'm not doing or whatever and just not give myself any fucking excuses out.
Just like nail it. And I would spend

like all night laying out

everything I'm doing that's wrong.

And then I would spend the last two hours figuring

out how I can change it.

And as opposed to just doing

it and then going to get some sleep

and then you forget about it

and fall back into your, you know, your

routine.

I decided to change

my life. I was like, look, the problem

is that I'm living in the South Bay. And even though I drive to Los Angeles, I want to not worry about this job anymore.
I got to just move to Hollywood. I got to get involved there.
I got to meet other people that are in the business. And if I have to work manpower jobs, you know, where you just work like four days at this place and four days at that place, well, then that's fine.
And by the way, I shouldn't be making money until I'm making money doing what I want to do. And that was ever a danger.
All right. But but then, you know, the next thing I knew, you know, I was I moved out of the South Bay and then I couldn't move into Hollywood.
I couldn't afford Hollywood, but I could afford Koreatown.

And I was close enough.

And literally the minute I kind of moved out there, I met a guy who wrote low-budget horror movies.

And then through him, I met other guys that wrote low-budget horror movies.

And this guy who directs a few low-budget horror movies.

And this guy who produces a couple.

and we'll but yeah

you meet one person

and that introduces you

to this

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's

and it's and it's and it's and it's and it's and it's that wrote low-budget horror movies and this guy who directs a few low-budget horror and this guy who produces a couple. And well, but yeah, you meet one person and that introduces you to three other people.
Now, all of a sudden, I actually knew people who were actually making movies. And the thing about it was it was like, also, well, if these guys can do what I can do.
Because they weren't too special. Right.
Yeah. You know.
That's the weird realization that you end up having. Yeah.
And then literally, it wasn't like everything changed, but like within a year and a half from moving out of the South Bay, moving into the Hollywood area, within a year and a half, I was finally able to make a living as a writer. You know, getting like $7,000 for this rewrite on this script over here, $4,000 for this polish over here, another $10,000 for this rewrite over here.
Well, shit. I mean, I made $10,000 a year through all my 20s before that point.
So if I can make $15,000 from writing, oh my God, that was the the greatest thing in the world. Wow.
It just takes being around people that are actually doing it so you realize it's possible. Well, it's the realizing it's possible, but it's also a situation where it's like as opposed to talking to your buddies about comedy in Minnesota, your buddies who like comedy.
No, you're at the comedy store and you're dealing with comedians every fucking night. And you're in the place where the shit happens and you're hearing how the laughs work.
But also, you know what's going on. Oh, Caroline's Comedy Hour is doing the tryouts for this.
And, you know, Chuckles is doing this thing or that thing. Oh, and there's a sitcom going on.
There's the funny neighbor guy. Yeah.
At any moment. You're plugged in.
Yeah. At any moment, there's a circle of people rising in any industry.
Yes. And it's just a matter of finding those people.
And those people will all gravitate towards the same things. Yeah.
And they have the thing where it's sort of's sort of like you know like hey benny we we have a spot for you that could be really you know i can't do it but my friend joe could do it can you yeah how about giving joe a chance yeah okay well you will you back joe up yeah i'll back joe up okay yeah well let's call your friend joe can he be down here at nine yeah he can be down here at nine well's how you get a fucking gig. This is exactly what we tried to do when we built the mothership here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What we've done.
We decided when we left L.A., like, we need a place where comics have a hub. And when we were all in Austin, we all just moved to Austin because of the pandemic.
And all of a sudden, we were allowed to perform indoors. It was crazy.
In November of 2020, we were doing shows indoors. And, you know, you couldn't go on Twitter because they would call you a big super spreader Monster, but everybody started moving here by the you know by the time 2020 rolls around There's like 15 16 world-class comedians that didn't used to live in Austin that are here now And we're like let's let's build a club.
Yeah, so we bought the R Theater where, you know, some of your movies are played.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is fucking crazy.

And when we put it together,

the whole idea was like,

have a place

where people can come.

We have two nights

of open mic nights,

Sunday and Monday night.

So there's always

a chance to get on stage.

There's always a guy

that's a real talent.

Adam Egett

is a real talent coordinator.

He's really going to watch you. He's really going to give you advice.
And you're around the best comics in the world all the time. And everybody knows it's possible.
And everybody treats you the way you would want to be treated if you were starting. So you're just one of us.
You just started. But we're not better than you.
There's nothing special about us. We're just telling you.
We started walking, and now we're 15 miles in. You're 15 feet in.
Just keep walking. Okay, but let me ask you a question.
Because, you know, when I watch some of the things on the comedy store, because you know I really love going to the comedy store. Yeah.
And they treat me really great there. It's really cool.
All right. But, you know, the mythology of the place is you go down there and open mic night.

And if you have something to offer, you know, then you work your way up and then you're the doorman and then, you know, you work your way up.

But it seems like that was then.

That was a long time ago.

Now it seems like people are almost spending 10 years, right, or eight years before they actually are getting up and getting paid not necessarily um like Tony Hinchcliffe started at the comedy store he started as a doorman you know and he worked his way up to selling out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row I mean it is possible to still be a doorman I met Tony when he was just starting. I'm figuring that that's a spot, but it seems like if you have to wait five years.
Well, you don't get good for 10 years. Yeah, yeah, okay.
It takes forever. Comedy is like making a mountain out of layers of paint.
It takes forever. You have to fail.
Yeah. You have to have the opportunities to fail.
Well, there's also no one who can tell you how to do it. Yeah.
Like writing a film, know you have a protagonist you have the antagonist you have a plot you have a you have a bunch of stuff that you can kind of create and formulate would you really but would you really say that it takes ten years to be a solid comedian it takes ten years to be a real headliner like a guy headliner that's a little different that's a little different that's when you're a real comic yeah you can do an hour yeah you can do an hour And then you could write another hour... Well, a headline, that's a little different.
That's a little different. Well, that's when you're a real comic.
Yeah, okay. When you can do an hour.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do an hour, and then you can write another hour.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you kind of know who you are.
Because it takes years to build that. Well, also, to be a headline, you have to be enough of a name of a...
To actually draw an audience. Yes, yes.
And, you know, you have to... Usually, you go on the road with a headliner, and then the people get to see you.
Oh, I remember he was here when Tom Segura was in town. That guy's really good.
We saw him then and he did 15 minutes. Now he's going to do an hour.
This should be great. And it's sort of that kind of a deal.
But it's the same sort of situation where most people don't – like if you're in Pittsburgh, you don't know what to do. You go up.
There's a couple open mic nights. Everybody sucks.
And there's no inspiration. It's not set up for comedy and it's in a fucking pizza plow.
Exactly. And it's good on the weekends.
And it doesn't work, and you go, well, I guess this is not for me. Right.
It's good on the weekends, because they'll fly in, you know, Greg Fitzsimmons, some headliner, and you get to see a real comic for a weekend, so you get a little bit of an education from that, and maybe if you're lucky, the club owner will let you open for them or do ten minutes on that show, and you kind of get a feel what it's like to perform in front of a real audience that's there to see a real comic but you

got to be around like comedy doesn't exist in a vacuum there's no great comedian that lives in

some small town by himself like you could find some great blues artist or a great novelist yeah

novelist is probably the best one because you kind of live in your own head yeah but you you

have to be around the other people that are doing it which is exactly why quentin moved to

I'll see you next time. artist or great novelist is probably the best one because you have to live in your own head yeah but you you have to be around the other people that are doing it which is exactly why quentin moved to hollywood yeah exactly got away from these losers you had to do it but you you really do have to do it wait i recall i recall living in hollywood as well yeah you did i freaking franklin yes you're from plumber park your bitter friend gave you a valuable little piece information.
Yeah, he did. No, very much so.
You need those. You need those moments.
Oh, I knew I was hearing the truth. And I knew I was hearing a coming attraction.
Yes. Because I was already feeling it at 25.
Right, right, right. Am I throwing my topsoil years away? Right, right.
The topsoil. Exactly.
It doesn't come back. It doesn't come back.
You never get to be 21 again. Let's hit reset.
Yeah. Yeah.
You get one weird march through this life. And if you don't, if you have it, you can throw it away until 23, but from 24 on, you need to be thinking about what you're doing for the rest of your life.
Yeah. Get it going.
Yeah. Get it going.
Yeah. I think these conversations are so important for young people to hear because there's a lot of people out there that do have ideas and sometimes they have a little bit of a fire and then maybe they have a job that's kind of cool like yours was and they they get sedated almost the worst thing that can happen is getting comfortable which i think is what you were talking about yeah yeah but you know i mean you know it all worked out okay it all worked out really really good and the thing about it was you know uh i did get comfortable but i got comfortable in a cool place and ultimately i did have the energy and the the wherewithal to ultimately get dissatisfied with it and and and want more you know the alternative would have been me working at at uh a department store for those four years yes right right right where, like, really been miserable.
Right, right, right. Here I'm able to, I mean, you know, in this instance, I'm still involved with film.
I mean, the part, the sedative part was the idea that it was close enough to what I wanted to do. Right, right, right, right.
It was close enough. I could get comfortable.
I could get comfortable. Well, there's guys like that at the comedy store.
There's a friend of mine at the comedy store that was, he was in the back bar and he wanted to be a comic. But he was there.
It was like five years after I met him. I'm like, hey man, you got to quit this fucking job.
Because you're here with all the greatest comics in the world but you're not going on stage. And you're making good money.
And that's the velvet curtain that's pulled over your eyes. Like I, I worked on Lords of Dogtown,

the,

the movie about,

uh,

Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing.

And I'm not like,

like a surfer or anything,

but my entry point into that movie was Zephyr surfboards was exactly like video

archives.

And I imagine that this is like this in a lot of places where, you know, you have a shop, they make, they do skateboards and they've got a shaper guy there, you know, Skip Englum, who's a surfboard shaper. And he was sort of like Lance, the guy who owned video archives.
And he started a shop and he's selling to all the kids locally and all the kids who like love surfing, you know, like peralta or tony alva or guys like that they would just go hang out there just like we would go hang out at the video store and so i looked at that and i was like okay i don't really know anything about these guys other than growing up in the beach community but my real entry point was i understand gravitating towards what you love and wanting to be close to it and that if a video store is the closest thing to Hollywood in your town, that's where you go, or if it's not a movie theater. Well, you know, it was funny because when I first started, when I started at the video store, I was like, it was great because, you know, like I said, I got to hang out in this place that I enjoyed and I'm surrounded by movies and talking about movies all the time.
Access to all those titles. But then also there was also the situation of, you know, I became like a little film critic in that town.
You know, it was like I was like the story was my little village voice and I was the Andrew Saras there. I was the critic.
And people would come in. And at a certain point, they're like, oh, Quentin, what should I get? And the thing is, I'm not just like holding court on my own personal taste.
Pretty soon they got a really good idea about my taste. But the thing is, I'm usually gearing it towards the people.
You know, I'm not going to, you know, get some housewife to watch some gonzo movie that I. Yeah.
Gonzo violent movie that I really like. I'm gaming.
I get to know her. You have to tailor it to her.
And so I'm putting something in her hand that I think she's going to appreciate. And I kind of know what kind of comedy she likes.
I know who she likes. Stuff like that.
And so I'm like, you know, really kind of, you know, gearing it in a certain way and that felt really good. It felt like I said.
I felt like a film critic. Yeah.
But one of the things that I forgot I was going to go somewhere with that and I lost my train of thought. But one of the things that ended up happening I hope I didn't say it the last time I was here, that ended up happening is we became really famous in the neighborhood.
We were the video guys. And, you know, our store was a little different than most of the businesses that were in Manhattan Beach.
And so everyone kind of knew us. We were the video guys.
So in a strange way, it was a precursor to what it would be like to be famous with the whole world kinda knows about you like that. In Manhattan Beach, I'm like walking down the street and people are like, hey, Quentin! Hey, Quentin, hey, how you doing, how you doing? You know, I'm like, I'm at the working at the store.
I'm walking to the Jack in the Box to get a Coke and come back. And then, you know, but we'd walk into the man's movie theater.
All right. That was by the theater, you know, and me and two of the guys would walk in to go see a movie.
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Terms and conditions may apply. We walk down the aisle and we hear, Hey, those are the VDR guys, guys.
Those are the VDR guys, guys. I was in San Francisco once and the guys from Red Cross, the punk band, they were customers of ours.

I was like, oh, they're doing a signing at this local record shop.

I'll just go show up.

I'll just show up there on Haight-Ashbury.

And I walk in and immediately the McDonald Brother guys were like, hey, it's the video store guy.

Hey, man, come back.

Come back behind with us. I don't think they talk like that.
They kind of talk like that. It's good to get that slow drip, get a little bit of a taste of it before you actually get famous.
Just get a feel of what it's like. It still doesn't give you the full, it's like, you know, oh, I'm just going to smoke a little weed compared to i'm gonna mainline uh you know oddly enough the thing that it did was it made me feel part of a community which i had never felt with before i actually felt part of the manhattan beach yeah i felt part of the manhattan beach i was part of the manhattan beach community you know the people knew me there and you know and i was i i was an upstanding member inside of that community yeah yeah yeah the the fame thing is no one can teach you how to do that there's someone needs to be like a group of people to get together with people that are about to get famous and say hey listen we're famous already let me tell you how fucking weird this is i don't know if you're prepared for this.
When we were first trying to make True Romance, Quentin had this amazing screenplay, and it was like we were going to try to do it Coen Brothers style. We had just seen Blood Simple, and we were like, okay, I'm going to produce.
Quentin's going to direct. We're going to go out and make this.
Our first thought was, okay, we've got this database of doctors and lawyers and housewives in Manhattan Beach. We're going to go to the video store.
You know, we ended up not doing that. You were going to ask them for money.
We never had the balls to actually ask anybody for money. Thinking about getting money and actually getting money are two different things.
We strategized about it a lot, but we never actually. I drew up full partnership papers before that whole dream failed of doing it that way.
Yeah, nobody knows what it's like to actually be successful until you are. But in the beginning, did you guys feel like pretenders? Did you feel fake? Did you have imposter syndrome? I didn't have imposter syndrome because I did a movie and I was really happy with the film.
But the thing is, what I felt like, I'll tell you exactly how I felt. I didn't feel imposter syndrome.
Well, I guess a little bit. There is all that, like, waiting for somebody to tap you on the show.
What the fuck are you doing? Get out of here. Who would let that guy in? Right.
The fuck out. What I had was I felt like I was a reporter deep undercover.
Alright? On the opposite side of the line. Right.
This isn't really me. I'm like those people over there.
Right, right, right. But I'm deep undercover.
Right. And I can give you reports from the front of what it's like here on the battle line.
Right. Well, maybe that was a good thing, though.
It was a really cool thing. Because I think that's one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was

very risky.

Like, we're talking about executives and all these different management people that are

going to come in and fuck with your thing and don't do that and cut that out.

But you had a sensibility, not of a person in management, but of a person that I know

what I'd like.

I know what I like. And I think I can think differently than these people do.
Oh, no, no. One of the things we talked about, we had a little theory about it, was that gave us a bit of a superpower when we were first brought into...
Once we established ourselves, the people knew that you read our scripts or you knew we were we had something to offer.

We would walk into rooms and we realized that

and look

I'm not here to make fun of Hollywood executives

some of those guys

you don't know how bad some of these

movies, these scripts are. They actually

oftentimes they actually make them better.

They're really really terrible.

All right.

When they go through the sausage factory, oftentimes they get better, believe it or not. But the thing is, though, you'd walk in there and you don't become this super successful executive by being doubling down on your own opinions.
You kind of want to get the temperature and get a consensus going on. You're not the maverick.
That's not how people establish themselves as executives. The D girl doesn't become the head of the development process by being the punk rock person who's shooting for the plimsolls.
They're looking for a rolling stone. film people, film geeks and film you know, film buffs the one thing they have is their opinion and they have spent years defining their opinion and they almost have nothing to show for their dedication to cinema other than their highly evolved opinion so you put them in a room and say well well, what would you do? Well, it's about time you asked me.
And then all of a sudden you take the strong point of view. And the term in Hollywood is, he who has the strongest point of view in the room wins.
And executives don't have the strongest point of view. You know, but the maverick artist who only can hear the sound of his own voice, he definitely has the strongest point of view.
Right. But it's refreshing to them.
Yes. You know, invariably they hire you because you scare them a little.
You're a little scary. Well, you're different than them.
They want to be like a little thrilled by that. Right.
But then, you know, like a girlfriend or something, they want to change you. They think they're going to make you normal.
Exactly. Right.
And then it falls on you to just stay true to that initial guy who was in the room. I had a really interesting situation where I had a guy who was an executive who actually directed a movie.
And he was talking about like, oh, I've seen these jokers out there. And, you know, what they do isn't so special.
I think I could do it. And so he finds a book and then they adapt it and now he's doing the movie.
And, you know, he's getting through it. Everything's working fine.
He's getting through it. And then he realizes the difference between himself and a director because there's dealing with another director about something.
Because he's an executive. So he's dealing with another director about another movie.
And he asks him a very important question about his movie. And the way he answers it, he realized the difference between him and that director.
And he goes,

I realized,

oh.

See, he's

a real director

because he sees the movie.

He sees the movie in

his head. The question I

asked, he went into his head

and he saw it. He saw

it. And he could actually answer it answer it oh the flower pot is green because he sees the entire picture yeah I don't see it I'm just doing my best I see it written but I don't see the movie in my head I'm just doing my best with the written material he's the comedy central executive that thinks they could can be a comedian.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right on.
And then they get on stage and they eat shit. What you were saying is exactly what happened to Chappelle.
The Chappelle show. They loved him.
He's this wild dude and then all of a sudden this is too wild. This is becoming really successful.
We can change him. We can change you.
They wanted him to stop saying the N-word. They wanted him to stop a bunch of different things on the show.
And we'll give you all this money if you roll over. They gave him literally the devil's deal.
We're going to give you $50 million, and this is what you're going to get. And he's like, no, I quit.
I quit everything. And I'm going to go to Africa.
I'm going to hang out in Africa for a while. And I'm going to quit stand-up for 10 years and come back and still be the best.
That is so the right move. Oh my God.
Well, look, he's a legend now, but that's really him. If you're around him, he's an artist in the truest sense of the word.
Yeah, absolutely he is. When I was young, one of my first jobs was actually given to me by one of our customers, this guy John Langley, who did that show, Cops.
And so he was getting his power turned off and stuff constantly. And he was struggling to get by.
And he would do these little things with Geraldo Rivera that Quentin and I would work on as PAs every now and then. The Dolph Lundgren exercise video.
We worked on the Dolph Lundgren exercise video together. We did.
We were PAs on the Dolph Lundgren exercise video. We were picking up dog shit in Venice Beach with our hands so that Dolph could do aerobics on that little grassy knoll.
Hilarious. And so, you know, I'm like the first I'm a PA working for him, a driver.
I'm running around town. My car is like the transmission is going out.
I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do? This is not what I want to do. I don't want to work on cops, but like I need the job.
And so I'm,

I go in and I meet with,

with John and he's been a customer of ours and he's fatherly like to me.

Yeah.

And,

um,

I go into his office and I sit down and cops has just started.

And it,

it started because of a writer's guild strike and,

you know,

there was a writer's guild strike.

And so Fox was like,

well,

that show has no writers.

And so they ordered his thing and he went from nothing to like i'm buying yachts yeah yeah i'm collecting vineyards not only that though i remember when he first came up with the idea with his partner malcolm barber yeah all right so he comes in and he's like hey we've got a really good idea for a show so he's he's he's he's describing cops before cops has ever been made. And his

first idea was, it wasn't called

cops, it was called the

real Miami Vice.

The problem was it doesn't scale out to the whole

country, the cops do.

Well, they defined it.

They refined it. I asked him, I said,

John, you've worked on you know in

this business a long time he was an ad for a long time what kind of advice can you give to a guy like me who's trying to you know work my way up he's like well what do you want to do ultimately i said i want direct films well then be a director don't work your way up the ladder don't try to be a grip and work your way in. Just be a director.
And I heard that. And he's like, start at the top.
It's the best way to go. Just start at the top.
And, you know, just tell people you're a director. Put yourself in that.
Otherwise, people will just pigeonhole you. They'll just say that's who he is.
He's a grip or he's a PA or he's you'll you'll have to work your way up.

Just tell people who you are.

So I thought about it.

I was like, OK.

I quit.

He's like, what?

I said, I quit.

I'm a director.

And I left.

I walked out.

I mean, I gave him notice and and I walked out and he sat there and he later told me, years later, told me, man, I thought that was the most audacious, ballsy thing. I gave you advice and you took it right away.
And OK, never mind the fact that it took me years of love just telling people I'm a director. I directed Super 8 movies like I was not a director.
I was was a poser i was faking it until i made it but i told people what i was and what i was doing and eventually it stuck eventually enough people hear it and all those people who you end up going into a room and pitching your idea and they say no eventually they see you at can running around you know trying to do foreign sales. They're like, maybe that kid is a director.
It was just believing in yourself when no one else believes what you believe. The guy who's talking about, John Langley, who created Cops, he was a really good customer and his wife Maggie was really lovely.
Morgan, all of his kids. I heard the story came back to me later that, you know, when I got the deal to make Reservoir Dogs, you know, just little by little through the Manhattan Beach community, they started, you know, hearing, oh, hey, Quentin's making his movie.
Yeah. Quentin got his movie off the ground.
He's actually making his movie. He's not at the video store anymore.
He's actually making a movie. Good for him.
And who knows what's going to happen to it, but it's happening. And I think they were having a little dinner party at their house.
And then Maggie mentions to John about what happened. Really? That's actually happening? It's actually happening? Yeah.
No, they've got production offices and everything. They're making the movie.
Everybody, raise your glass. Yeah.
To Quentin. He did it.
Good for Quentin. That's awesome.
Raise your glass. I'm getting Terry.
I just even thinking about it. You know, I just have to say, John Langley, you know, because I had some shit happen to me in my life.
I spent some time in jail. I kind of screwed up my life.
But when everything went down, when everyone in Hollywood dropped me like a hot rock, John Langley was there. Our customer, John Langley, because we lost everything.
He loaned me some money. He gave me my first job when I got out of jail writing something for very little money.
But he wanted me back in the saddle. I love the things you wrote from jail.
Oh, thanks. Thank you.
They were really good. It was really interesting.
It was like this super intelligent writer who's in jail. It's a different sort of perspective.
Roger's working on a book about his jail experiences that is fantastic so far. I kept a really detailed, super detailed journal about everything that's going on around me and it became a really, I mean that was a very intense experience being placed into a room, having the doors closed and you're just left with yourself.
And everything, all your things which define you get stripped away. Everything gets kind of dropped and you lose who you are.
And you're just left with your remorse and regret for why you're there. And you have a lot of time to think about things.
But having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on. I had golf pencils.
I could buy sheets of paper. And I've never in my life been more productive.
I've never wanted to write more than when everything was taken away. And I've never felt more about the world.
And I've never, yeah, I've, it was a very monastic, I was telling Quentin at one point, it was kind of monastic-like, you know, you're in a secular kind of, you're in a cell. You're in a cell and you're with a bunch of God of god dudes and you're writing you know it's like you're i i became a scribe i started i mean i was a scribe beforehand but i really really it became my escape being able to write being able to fall into things and to be able to travel into another world and then also people find out you're a writer and they're like hey man would you write my, essay, would you write my girlfriend? I want to write her a love letter.
I need your help. So I wrote like a ton of love letters.
That's actually good practice for dialogue. Oh, yeah.
No, totally. Totally.
No, actually, I heard some amazing dialogue. You're writing your Robin Hood script, all right? So that's your way to get out of the cell is to write his Robin Hood script.
You know, I – well, there's a book cart. And so I'm – you know, every now and then you go through the book cart and mostly it's like Tom Clancy novels.
They love Tom Clancy and stuff like that. And Clive Barker novels and things like that.
But lo and behold, I found this old Penguin paperback of, you know, an old, old version of Robin Hood written by E. Charles Vivian.
And I'm like, oh, man, this is going to be great. And I start reading it.
And it's like they get into Evil Hold, which is like this castle where, you know, Marion's father is being kept. And nobody knows it.
And he's there. And he's not away at Crusades.
He's in this prison this prison and Robin Hood goes into the prison and in the moment when he's in the prison how he sees the other prison the wretches that he has to leave behind because they're too wretched to even come out like how bad the prison is and what he's seeing inside and his observations I was shaking after reading reading it. I'm shaking thinking about, I mean, the entire experience now, but, you know, it was such a vivid depiction.
I'm like, well, I'm adapting this because I'm feeling it right now. I'm feeling like what it's like.
I'm feeling what it's like to have authority, to have the boot on your neck. I mean, rightfully so.
But I nevertheless. And and so I started writing, you know, my version of Robin Hood and with on, you know, pencil and paper.
And as I'm writing it, like I was crying as I wrote it. I was looking at the pages the other day and there's like teardrops like.
Wow. All over it, like on every page.
That's like's like holy crap it's like when you're writing like that and you're feeling that much it's not a bad thing to cry when you're writing yeah it's like thank god i'm i'm feeling like i'm feeling something and it's traveling into the page and also because i had been a working writer in hollywood for a long time just by, I had fallen into the very bad habit of composing at my computer, at my laptop, like one of those assholes who goes to Starbucks. And I was that guy.
And I had kind of become used to that. Well, writing by hand while incarcerated, it reconnected me like pen to paper or pencil to paper and i i reminded me that not only like when you write something down you have a different relationship with the word i consider the pen is the antenna to god it is the antenna to god and also when you type it into the computer that's a process of re Yeah.
And so you're losing an entire section. And so it reconnected me with that.
I couldn't agree with you more. Tell me, explain this more to me.
This is fascinating to me. Because I've heard many people say this about comedy, that they have to write on paper.
I don't. I write on a laptop.
I've always written on a laptop. For me, it's what I like about writing, writing even writing on paper is that it takes more time to write the word appreciate than it does to think about what it means to appreciate something like the word appreciate you know what it is instantly oh he appreciates this but to write appreciate it takes longer so there's more thinking and more thinking i feel like when you have more thinking there's more little different ways you might alternately branch off with your ideas.
I don't think I – That is not false. Not that I've ever written an hour-long stand-up comedy show.
All right. But I would think that your writing is different than my kind of writing.
Sure. I would think as far as writing stuff down, it's like notes and ideas and funny word phrases or this and that and the other.

But then you're working it out.

You're saying it.

You're saying it.

You're saying it.

You're saying it.

And then you get your story.

Right.

And maybe you say it into a recorder.

Maybe you do this or you do that.

But it probably doesn't even look right when you type it up on a thing.

It doesn't look right.

No.

It's the way you tell the story.

What I was going to get to is that when I type, I can type quicker than I can write by hand. And the problem with comedy is it comes quick and slippery.
And also you can edit. That makes a tremendous amount of sense.
I mean, we're writing stuff that has to hold up on the page. Right.
That has to hold up as writing. I'll write a 1500 word essay and I'll use one line.
There's one thing in there that might be a bit. But I'll write all this other shit on transportation.
It's like strip mining. You just pull all that dirt out and just process it.
That's exactly what it's like. I've tried to write.
So you open up your mind about, okay, just let loose on public transportation. Yes, yes.
And I'm not even trying to be funny. I'm just trying to write, and then I'll find something funny in it.
And then that's the starting point. Now I take that, cut it, copy it into a completely fresh document.
Now what is this? And how do I get to this?

Ultimately, it's whatever works.

Let me ask you a question.

It's the best.

Is it you on either typing or whatever,

is it you doing that eight-page thing on transportation?

Or is it more likely that you're just pacing around,

doing a running monologue on public transportation well i'm sitting still right that's what you mean the thing about typing is i type good so not great but i i don't have to look at the keys and i can type pretty quickly and if i have a good laptop like a think pad that has a lot of finger travel then you really feel it and i get into like a zone and then it's just about like no you I get into like a zone. And then it's just about like.
Yeah, so no, you actually do write your notes. Yeah.
And then it's just about. But they don't always come out the same way.
Because sometimes when you bring them out on stage, the moment lets you know this is not the way to go. It's this way.
And then all of a sudden you're like, God, how did I not see that in front of the computer? Because you weren't in that vibe of the crowd. Like it's like you don't do it on your own.
You have to do it with them. It's like the one art form that literally cannot be practiced in solitary.
Yeah. You have to do it.
So when I write, I write like that. But I also write things down on pieces of paper.
I also write like whenever I if I have an idea, I got to catch it. Well, they're not going to give you that computer in jail.
That's true. You're going to be forced to write it on pencil and that's going to be an okay experience for you.
But what is it that makes it to you like the hand to God? Like what is it about writing on paper? Well, my little analogy of it is you can't write poetry on a computer. Why not? Well, because I'm going for a rhythm.

Right. I'm going for a rhythm.

And there's a connection between my chicken scratch and this paper and this pen as opposed to this other thing.

And the more unintelligible and only I can read it, the more legit it kind of is. And the thing is, and it's vomit.
It's absolutely vomit. Okay.
When you write by hand, you overwrite. You're way, way overwrite.
Because you're just, you're just getting it out there. You're getting it out there.
Then after all the vomit happens, then you sit down with a typewriter or then you sit down with a thing. And now you take the vomit and you tame it.
And now you make the sentences work. And now there's more creative.
This is a blah. Okay.
Now you make it work like a writer. Now you make the page work.
Now you make the sentences work. Can we stop for a second while we're in the restroom? Yeah, let's go.
Hey, you have cigars, don't you? Yeah, you want a cigar? Yeah, let's have some cigars. He doesn't do anything fun.
I'll have a cigar. On Joe Rogan's show, I will have a cigar.
He doesn't do anything fun. That is the truth.
You don't do anything fun? Really?

Nothing?

Well, maybe I should talk about this.

You should talk about it.

Maybe I should talk about it.

Are we on?

Yeah.

Can I go?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't do anything fun.

Don't do anything fun.

No, you know.

Making movies is fun.

Well, that's the fun.

Where's the cutter?

I thought that was a cutter.

That looked cool. Is that a cutter or.
Where's the cutter? I thought that was a cutter. That looked cool.

Is that a cutter or is that brass knuckles?

What are you saying about fun? I don't do anything fun. Well, after what happened to me, I mean, I should probably tell the whole story, and maybe I eventually will here.
But, um, you know, I, uh, I went to jail, um, for a DUI related incident, uh, that caused manslaughter and one of my passengers, uh, um, died. And, um, uh, you know, after that and going to jail and whatnot.

He's not the funnest guy to get drunk with.

Yeah, I don't.

It's kind of what it is.

You know, if I go to a party or something like that, I don't want to be seen holding a drink with, you know, even with water in it. I'm teasing him, but I get it.

Of course. Who wouldn't fucking get it? But then you add the fact that he's a vegetarian.
All the fun shit. You're a vegetarian? Yeah.
Why did he do that? Because his wife made him. That happens.
That happened to a friend of mine. He sneaks out burgers every now and then.
I also have a kind of, it's kind of like an animal thing. I had a pig as a pet.
And man, when you look at those eyes, those are human eyes. And I looked into it and it looked into my, I just, I had chickens before that and you know what it's like chickens are like cats you know they want back scratches and stuff and i just couldn't like after a while i just couldn't do it yeah there's people that are feral you ever met a feral person you don't want to let them sleep in your house yeah you met a wild crazy person you're in jail so push that thing up you had it right you had it right did i yeah this right here yeah push that up pull it down yeah sorry pull it down sorry hey i'm digging this you've yeah they're great foundation cigar shout out um you've you've been around feral people right you don't want feral people living in your house you don't you don't want to take some murderer and you know give them your car and let them you know come and sleep in your and sleep in your room.
It's different. I should take you around some wild pigs.
Wild pigs are like little demons. They make like orc sounds.
Wild pigs are wild pigs. I get it.
You hear them fight with each other. There are people who are like that also.
Exactly. That's my point.
Myesticated people are awesome. Yeah.
Domesticated people like yourself and myself, we're fun to be around. We're nice people.
We know we're not going to rob you. No one's going to kill you.
There's a difference. What the wild is.
I like the way you describe that. It's different.
So I understand that you wouldn't want to eat animals, but they eat each other. And it's just this bizarre cycle of life.
I think it's where you're getting your animals from. Are you getting your animals from like these mass factory farming? That's the other part of it.
That's the other part of it is I think there's a line in Highlander 2 where Sean Connery says, I don't eat anything that I cannot identify. And I kind of feel like that as well.
Like I don't have a lot of trust for large industrial systems of food. You shouldn't.
But you can get meat from like a farm. You can get it from a ranch.
You could go to one of those you know have those, what are those, farmer's market type deals?

You can go meet a rancher and you can buy beef right from them.

I am not like one of these people who are like, oh, never, never.

Like, you know, if I am in the right place and the right environment and the right food is there, like if there's a, like if I'm on an island in Greece and the guy comes up from the boat with a basket of fish and which one would you like? I'll take that one. You know, sure.
Right. Do you at least eat eggs? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I eat eggs. Okay, so you eat eggs.
Of course I eat eggs like they're going out of style. Yeah, that's good.
Also, you're probably getting what you need. Cool.
As long as you eat eggs, I tell people like eggs are free. No one's getting hurt.
Especially if you have your own chickens. That's the greatest thing in the world.
We have 15 chickens. There's nothing like eggs straight from a chicken.
Oh, it's great. But it's also, it's karma free.
Like, the chickens are having a good time. No one's getting hurt.
Like, they're all, they're all, like, treated like pets. Like, hey girls.
I love chickens. No, I actually really have, I've always actually thought that an exotic pet would be to have a chicken.
It's like one chicken. And just treat it like a dog.
Hey, that's my chicken. He hangs around.
You've got to get a couple of them. They need to have a pecking order.
They like to hang out with each other. I think Goebbels figured that one out.
He was a chicken farmer. Was he really? Oh, yeah.
Oh, no shit. Chicken farmer.
That's how he worked out all of his policies in the camps. We shouldn't talk about that.
Don't want to connect that to chicken farming. It's just, you know, it's like the name Adolf, right? You can't use it anymore.
You can't have that little mustache anymore. You can't have a chaplain.
You can't have that cool mustache remember when michael jordan tried for a little while yeah mike that's how competitive that guy is like fuck that i can i can wear that mustache he had a hitler for a while i think i can't make it happen i'll make it happen he just decided he was gonna force it through you know as far as writing in jail i'm just thinking about it right now um one of the other things I had to contend with was... This episode is brought to you by TikTok.

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That's Oracle dot com slash Rogan. They would confiscate anything that I wrote.
Oh, so, you know, like once a week or once every two weeks or so. Why would they do that? Was it illegal to write? I was considered a security threat by what I was writing.
And oh, because you were telling the truth about what was going on that.

And then when they sent me in, like I was placed in this like solitary confinement thing, like in the hole. And, uh, you know, you're in there and like, I had never been in anything like that before in my life.
I was thinking this is like fucking Guantanamo, except it made me think about it. I've got due process at least.
And so I'm in this like crazy Kafkaesque mechanized totalitarian environment. You're in a room where you have no window and the lights are on 24 seven.
And, you know, I don't care what anybody says. You go into a room three days deprived of sound and the understanding of time.
You go crazy after two days. You're insane.
They broke me after two days. I was like, oh, I'll do some yoga.
I'll meditate. No problem.
No, after a while, if the lights are on 24-7 and you can't hear it, it's like being inside of a seashell. You go slowly nuts.
Is that by design? Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure sure it's by design it's like you're placed into a and and um so about once a week like in when i was in population um about once a week the you know middle of the night or you know the lights are down and suddenly the lights come on bright lights are always but lights come on bright.
And suddenly a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors. They just storm into the tank, into the section.
And they pull everybody out of their cells and they strip everybody naked and they put you up against a wall. So you're up there with Sancho and L Sancho and, you know, Leroy and like everybody's suddenly you're all, you know, one moment you're being kept separate and next thing you know, you're all naked together, standing up against the wall and they're going through everybody's cell and they're just ripping your cell apart, looking for anything.
And usually they're looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind, or cell phones, anything.

Like, they're looking for anything that's considered contraband.

Okay, for me, they were looking at my writing, because when I was in solitary at that time,

like, literally on kites, a kite is like a requisition form that you send out to the guards.

You're not allowed to talk to the guards.

They don't want to talk to you.

You tell them what you want on a kite, and then you give them the kite, and then they take it off and maybe it gets answered. I'd never had one answered in my life.
And so they come in, they strip everybody naked, they take all your clothes and they're under the guise of where, you know, we're doing a laundry exchange. And so everybody gets new clothes and you end up with like these big baggy pants or something too small for you.
And they would look for contraband for everybody. Well, with me, they would look for whatever I was writing.
Because when I was in solitary, I was writing, you know, like maps. I would map the place like a fucking idiot.
Like I still was, you know, I'm writing about, oh, Eisenhard, the guard. I saw him watching, you know, literally saw him watching on a little TV, Nazi propaganda, like triumph of the will is playing on his TV and he's watching it.
I'm going to write that down. So they didn't want me writing all my stuff.
They were like, that guy is a fucking threat. You get whatever he's written.
And so I noticed that whenever I was taken out of my cell to shower, to go to yard, to do whatever, that they would come in and just take whatever I had written. So I learned that they couldn't take or open letters to my attorney because it's privileged.
And so what I would do is I would just write. And then whenever I had to leave my cell, like to go to yard, or if they were rating the cells and taking everybody out and looking for contraband, I would just quickly seal the envelope.
My writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working in the letter to my attorney. And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out.
And then he would send that letter to my daughter who would then type up the pages that I was writing. And so that's how I wrote several scripts was like that.
Wow. And yeah, because little.
What did you what did you you said you read some of Roger's writing when he was in prison? What did you read? You where did you publish it? I don't remember where I was reading it. Well, was it on Twitter? I had several things.
Okay, so first of all, I was placed, I was sentenced to go to a low security, like a country club facility. I went to a low security facility.
And I went in there and, you know, you have access to stuff. It's it's you know it's more like a like a camp almost and you're there and you're incarcerated but it's it's a light incarceration almost and i had access to a cell phone and so i started tweeting and these were the early days of twitter right and so i started tweeting started tweeting, oh, they found tar heroin and so in, you know, pudgy cell and they dragged him off.
And, oh, they, you know, this happened over here. Oh, the so-and-so shakes.
So they've rolled up so-and-so and taken away. I was like tweeting this stuff.
And this is the early days of Twitter. And Roger Ebert, who was like at that time, the biggest on Twitter, was following me.
And he put me on blast. Like he he suddenly decided that he would tell every and like all of a sudden one day overnight, like the story kind of went everywhere in the world.
He put you on blast in a positive way. Well, he just told everybody this is happening somebody is roger avery academy award-winning writer is tweeting from jail and tweeting from behind bars did he but did he have at the time now it's like nothing people do it all the time people like uh um i've got a night's doing podcasts i've got a friend who's one of those january six guys and he's uh he's sends me like tweets all the time like he's got a friend who's a january 6 though yeah yeah you got a friend who's a january 6 guy well he's still there he's like hundreds of days in uh jail without uh without any kind of uh without trial yeah i i i mean tell me if i'm wrong but like that's not how it's supposed to be it's not how how it's supposed to be.
You're supposed to have a due process of some kind. Well, especially when you watch the actual footage of how it went down.
Oh, I watched it live. And there was that guy, that Antifa guy, waving people in, moving them in.
They were moving the blockade things. They were moving them out, and cops were waving people in.

They were opening the doors for people.

I want you to think about it this way.

In the most heavily armed nation the world has ever known, why would you have an insurrection with no guns?

You've got to have guns.

Machine guns.

Those guys weren't planning on an insurrection.

No.

And then you have the factor that there was agents in the crowd, and we don't know how many. There's government agents in the crowd that were inciting people to go in.
That's what they do. And I want to know who that cop was who shot that woman.
Yeah. What about that? Yeah, the whole thing's crazy.
The whole thing's crazy. And there's this thing that cops died.
No cops died that day. That's not true.
The cop who died, he died of a stroke and I. And I believe it was a stroke, a stroke or a heart attack.
But like everything, there's a lot of misinformation being given to us by the mainstream media. But it gets attributed to it, you know, sort of like when, you know, anything happens to anyone four years after the vaccine, they attribute it to the vaccine.
Oh, it was probably the vaccine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Could have been the guy just had a fucking heart attack. But this guy who was a cop, he did not die.
He was not killed by the protesters. And you watch the video of the shaman dude with the fucking buffalo hat.
They're walking him around. The cops are guiding him.
They're guiding him. How would you ever think that that is going to let you wind up in jail? How would you ever think that if you're an unsophisticated guy who was wearing fucking face paint and you're kind of a kook and you think you part of you think you're part of a movement which is really scary you know people get a part of a movement and they fucking yeah we're all doing it and then you've got literal government agents encouraging you to do it moving barriers letting you in they were playing chess and these idiots were playing checkers and they all got locked up yeah because nobody was doing an insurrection it wasn't an insurrection you don't do an insurrection without weapons it's the whole idea is crazy so there was no presumption that there was going to be any kind of like that you were going to get thrown in jail for a thousand days and so my pal jake lang is uh he's been there forever and every now and then i get a like a picture of him like he's been in like look i deserve to go to jail that guy doesn't right and most of those guys don't yeah i think it was a bad decision certainly to go into the capitol it was a bad decision to smash windows but i want to know who people have been smashing things like for a whole year before that right that's a good point.
It's like we were a culture of smashing things at that point.

It's also as soon as you find out that there were government agents that may or may not

have incited people to go in, the whole thing fucking changes.

Like, what are you trying to do?

Are you there to serve and protect?

Or is there some other weird shit going on?

Because it seems like there is and no one wants to talk about it because you don't want

to be that guy.

But at a certain point in time, you should be that guy. You should go, what's going on, man? There comes a point where men of good conscience must stand up and speak out against things that are obviously wrong.
And that is one of them, I think. Yeah, that is one of them.
It's a big one. It's a weird one.
And, you know, there's all this pushback about Trump getting into office. He said one of the first things he said was he was going to release all the January 6th prisoners.
Like, how long do you think they should be in there for? Who's opposing this? They should at least be going to trial. Yes.
You should at least be going to trial. It is unconscionable to hold somebody for over a year, two years.
Well, the thing, the government has always had a situation where we talked about when we did our episode on the Andersonville trial. Yeah.
The one charge that the government can put against you where they don't need direct evidence is conspiracy. If they arrest you for conspiracy, that means they don't have direct evidence, but they don't need direct evidence for conspiracy.
By the way, when I was in... Just one thing.
That's how they got Manson. Right.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Right. All right.
Well, they knew what Manson had done because they were helping him. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Well, I believe that, too.
Did you ever read Chaos? Oh, the book's one of the best. One of the best books ever.
Believe me, I read every Manson book that there possibly could read. And then I read that one.
I throw the rest of them away in the fucking trash. Chaos is insane.
Chaos is just fantastic. And he helped me too because my first AD is a friend of his, Bill Clark.
Oh, wow. And when I was writing the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood book, I go deeper into the Manson stuff.
And so I had a couple of little questions in my head that I always kind of wanted to know the answer to. So I got Tom's number and I called him up and I was able to ask him something really super like direct questions that can really help my book.
It's a crazy fucking story. Oh, it's.
You know, when I was in jail, I found out they record everything. They're just constantly recording.
And so somebody's in there and they're like, man, I'd like to kill that DA. Well, that's conspiracy.
And so they'll wait and like, oh, you're about to get out. And they'll literally start walking by and they're like, ah, stop.
Oh, God. Remember that thing you said about conspiracy? Let's play that back for you.
Oh, God. Or what you said about killing the DA.
Well, you're going away again. You're going back to trial.
That happened a lot. But it's also...
Don't ever talk. They put guys in your cell to get you talking about shit.
Oh, yeah, that happened right away. That happened right away.
They're trying to get you to incriminate yourself deeper constantly. It it's like a fun game what a fun game what a fun game to serve and protect and incriminate you deeper well i look i had a my as quentin will confirm i have my authority issues i always i always have i always have i'm suspicious of anyone in power and um you should be yeah's intoxicating.
Maybe we'll like this. Okay, part of the thing on our show—I'm getting back to what Roger's saying.
I'm not changing the subject. When we do our show, the thing is when we do our show, we talk about three movies.
So I pick three video cassettes.

The show we're talking about is the Video Archives podcast, which is – It was our second season. Patreon.com slash Video Archives.
But the thing is, all right, so it's like there's like the main movie. Then there's that second movie that's like kind of like the main movie but probably you don't know that much about.
And some wild exploitation thing that I – what the fuck is this? Let's watch it and find out. and one of the things that's about our show is

I don't say, hey Roger, so find these movies

and use them thing that I, you know, what the fuck is this? Let's watch it and find out. And one of the things that's about our show is I don't say, hey, Roger, so find these movies and you watch them and I'll watch them and we'll get together and we'll do it on the phone too.
Well, no, no, no, we don't do that shit. All right.
You know, we get together to watch the movies together. Part of it is the experience of being together and watching the movie together, watching it through his eyes.
The reason we came up with the idea of the show is like when we reconnected, we started doing what we used to do. During the pandemic.
Yeah, and then we were sort of like, well, hey, let's come up with a way we can get paid to do this, all right? So me and Roger will get together and we'll watch three movies, and sometimes even four, and then we'll get together, then we have a day off and then we get together on another day, and then we record and we're always in the room when we do it but the thing is when roger comes over to watch the films i've kind of learned that it's like roger i'm starting it's three movies we're gonna watch i am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here because roger will just get off on some archaic piece of thing. The earth is flat! The earth is flat! And the next thing you know, alright, it's been an hour and 15 minutes later and you're getting further and further and further away from the alchemy we're trying to create with the first movie.
So now it's a little in 20 minutes. I'm hitting play.
That's it. So wrap it up.
That's a problem with podcasts. When people come over, sometimes we have some of the best conversations before the podcast.
So now I have to be rude. I'll be like, stop, stop, stop.
Let's not talk. No, you're all good.
Come on in. Let's come on in.
Let's catch that magic. Yeah, because you got to catch it because it is weird.
It's a weird thing. It's a beautiful thing, though's a beautiful thing though because it's so open you know there's no one telling like there's no studio people yeah no i mean even the idea i mean one the fact the idea uh uh the idea that this has replaced the talk show the talk shows that we grew up watching and and like those guys were the kings.
The fact that podcasting, and you're the king of it, but the fact that podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that anybody that has got something intelligent, has got a cool little setup, has got an interesting personality and it can sell an interesting conversation. Theoretically, it can start a podcast.
100%. Yeah.
Yeah. The barrier to entry is so low.
Think about the barrier to entry when you wanted to be a director. Oh, God.
Jesus. It's fucking crazy.
Not only that, like the old days of television, like Desilu, we own our content. Like you like you own your content yeah and never mind that it's a podcast i'm okay with that i like the the fact that this is something where for the first time in my life at least i'm involved with something where there is nobody else it's me and quentin who decide everything yeah and you know if if quentin wants to do it, we go there.
If I want to do it,

we go there.

Talk to Quentin.

If Quentin allows it,

we go there.

I mean, basically,

what we're doing is the same thing

we used to do.

That's true.

At the video store.

We do what we used to do

at the video store.

We're talking about movies.

It's completely terrible.

I have the kill switch.

But other than that...

No, no, no.

I didn't mean it like that. I never use the kill switch.
But other than that. No, no, no.
I didn't mean it like that. I never use the kill switch.
The kill switch is always there. No, not really.
Not really. Well, I guess.
Theoretically. But you know what? But you want a theoretical sort of Damocles.
Most times when you've used the kill switch, you've used it on your own. I use it on myself.
You used it on yourself. You actually haven't used it on any of my things that I've wanted to do, which is really cool.
But basically, we're doing the same thing we used to do. We used to sit around and talk about movies.
And so during the pandemic, you know, Quentin called me up and we hadn't talked for, I mean, we had bumped into each other, but we hadn't really, we had had a little bit of a, we had a falling out.

And I call it a sort of a business related falling out. And maybe if I had been a little more mature, I was young as a filmmaker and probably unprepared to deal with the complexities of agents and attorneys and Hollywood and money and fame and the press and the press's agenda and all of that.
I was just approaching it like I'm a SoCal Gen X punk filmmaker. That was how I approached it.
I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do. I'm going to make the movie that I want to make.
And I with that attitude of, you I know what I want and I know what's right and nobody can tell me I'm wrong. Because you have to be a little bit of a megalomaniac to be a director.
You have to be willing to say, no, I'm right, even when everyone is telling you you're wrong. Is that how Joker 2 got made? I like Joker 2.
I like Joker 2. I know you did.
I like Joker 2. I haven't seen it.
I it. I'm just fucking around.
I will defend Joker 2. Yeah, I'll defend the movie as well.
I can't wait to watch it. Not that I need more fucking press on that.
I can't wait to watch it and then talk to you about it afterwards. Tim Dillon said it's the worst fucking movie that's ever been made, and he's in it.
You know, I can't. Well, that may have colored his perception, though.
Oh, but Tim thinks everything sucks. It's the beauty of Tim.
No matter what everybody's saying is amazing. Tim loves to talk shit about Austin.
I've got to tell you, the funniest thing that I've heard for a while on YouTube, when I was listening to you guys talk, he's a guy I never really listened to his show or anything like that. He's fucking brilliant.
But when he was on your thing talking about the election, and when he described Tim Waltz as like, well, that guy's a goofball who just should be at a county fair eating hot dogs. I laughed for 15 minutes and played it back about three different times because I thought that was such a funny comment.
He's always funny. He said it sounds like Kamala Harris is doing voodoo curses.
She's doing gypsy curses, he said. She speaks in gypsy curses.
And he always does this show with these fucking crazy glasses on. Like, that's his new thing.
If you ever watch his show, it's the best because it's literally just him ranting and a producer and the rant the ability to rant as a singleton Operator is a fucking lone person out there without anybody to bounce ideas off of is a rare town Yeah, and he's the best at it I've ever seen bill Burr is really good at as well Yeah, but Tim Dillon is the best at it. I've ever seen he's so fucking good at it and he's just basically performing to one person who's his producer yeah and he's just ranting and so because of that he's got this crazy muscle that he's developed from years of doing that where he just rants about all these different things but it's fucking brilliant i like ranting oh yeah clearly as you know well that's the great thing about you guys doing a podcast together well I was gonna get to it's like in the beginning you're you talking about replacing the talk show well fucking you guys replace Siskel and Ebert right because this is what we want to do thank you thank you that was actually the agenda that Quentin proposed to me both those guys are gone you know what I love watching is videos of like outtakes of those guys bitching at each other.
Oh, bitching at each other. They fucking hated each other.
They were so shitty to each other. And then they had to be smiley.
What a bullshit way to live. Do you remember when Vincent Gallo wished testicular cancer on Roger Ebert and then he got it? Oh, wow.
Do you remember that? Okay, I do. Well, he had a cancer of the mouth.
Now that you bring it up, yeah.

Right?

Like, he lost his jaw.

He did a remove his jawbone.

That was Vincent Gallo cursing it onto him.

Oh, voodoo's real.

He apologized after he, oh, my God, I didn't, I think he got it.

Well, I think it was after Roger Ebert said that Brown Bunny was the worst film to ever

play in the history of con film.

That's exactly what happened.

And then he went and he cursed him, and then the curse came true, and then he regretted it. I talked to him.
He was like, I wish I had never done that. It's crazy if it really worked.
That movie, Brown Bunny, I want to talk about that. I've always thought it's so strange that we can show violence, but we can't show sex.
And I know they tried to do that. You ever see the lines outside the movie theater when Deep Throat came out? Oh, yeah.
Carson was in line. Johnny Carson went to see Deep Throat in a public theater.
I heard stories about Bing Crosby arrived at midnight. Because people didn't know what they were seeing yet.
It hadn't been defined as a genre. There was nudie movies that people watched as stag parties.
There's that little moment in 73

where there was porno chic.

Yeah. Well, Stallone did

Italian Stallion. Yeah, but that wasn't

a popular thing. This was.

Everyone had to kind of see it.

And like,

oh, hey, maybe this will be a thing.

Maybe this will be a thing now

that one

or three or four porno movies will come out every year that will be considered like real movies that couples will go see.

And that was a whole thing was promoting the idea of couples going to see –

A porn film.

Either porno films or just heavenly erotic movies.

Right.

Like for sexy nights. Yeah.
Not like Travis Bick Yeah, not like how Travis Bickle does it. No, no, no, no.
It's a sexy night. Now we're going to go.
We're going to have a sexy night. We're going to go out and see and then we'll go home and we'll take care of business.
Right. Yeah.
And it didn't really happen. But there was this hope in the early 70s that that could happen.
But it's fascinating that it didn't happen because what I was gonna get to is like violence we don't have any problem with but we all agree that consensual sex is way better than someone getting shot in the face but people get shot in the face in movies constantly you see heads explode and arms getting lopped off and Game of Thrones and butter it's constant I think it's actually gone far, I think. I mean, this could be for me.
Well, it's not that violence has gone too far. It's the meaningless violence has gone.
Violence without purpose, almost. And I started to recognize this during Walking Dead.
But really, Game of Thrones, though. You mentioned Game of Thrones.
Like, I loved Game of Thrones at first. And then I started realizing, wait a minute.

Like, they're getting off on me falling in love with characters.

And then the moment I've fallen in love with a character, suddenly they're vivisecting their genitals.

You know, it's like, and then the cycle begins again.

You fall in love with a different character.

And then they're killing them.

And they're just doing it, like, sadistically because there there's like, there's nowhere to go other than that. They're just pushing the ceiling higher and higher.
Sort of. But also, if you were living in that world, that would be reality.
Nobody lived forever and became the hero of the fucking movie. There's no heroes back then.
Everybody's getting gutted. They're getting usurped.
They're like- Turned into a dungeon. Yeah.
You're getting eaten by dogs. This is real.
And now you have to fight for the next five years against the rats that are in the fucking dungeon with you. But television, at least the television I grew up with, was all about the familiarity of returning to the characters you love.
Yeah, but there was plenty of characters. And you did get to return to the ones that stuck around and didn't get their heads locked up.
I just wish they killed other characters. No, no, no.
I love that. Let me give you another example.
Everyone talks about how great television is now. It's pretty good, I've got to say.
It's pretty good. But it's still television to me.
And what's the difference between television and a good movie? Because a lot of the TV now has the patina of a movie. They're using cinematic language to get you caught up in it.
And obviously I'm talking about good shows. We're talking about shows that you're...
Ozark. Shows that you're compelled to watch.
Right, right, right. All right.
And so, okay, so I'll use an example of a show. I'll use Yellowstone.
I didn't really get around to watching Yellowstone the first three years or so. And then I watched like the first season.
I go, wow, this is fucking great.

I've always been a big Kevin Costner fan.

He's fucking wonderful in this.

All right?

And I got really caught up in the show and everything.

And all of a sudden, I'm having a good time.

And, you know, I've got a couple seasons I haven't seen.

So I'm watching it.

And in the first season, I'm kind of talking about, oh, this is like a movie.

This is like a big movie.

It's like a big movie.

And the guy who writes that is a good writer. There's good, like, punchy monologues and stuff.
So then I end up watching, like, three seasons of it. And then I even watched that, like, 1883, where, oh, this is a good Western show.
I like Westerns. But then after I've watched, like like two or three seasons

or one season of 1883

look while I'm watching it

I am compelled

I'm caught up in it

but at the end of the day

it's all just a soap opera

they've introduced you to a bunch of characters

you actually kind of know all their backstories

you know everybody's connection with everybody else

and you know they spend some time selling that out

and then everything else

then everything is just the compellingness

And then, let's the compellingness of the soap opera. What's happening to this character? And what's different between that and a film? Well, I'll tell you.
Because the thing is if you watch Edge of Night Monday through Friday, you get caught up in the dramas of the family and everything. Right.
But you don't remember it five years from now, you're caught up into the minutia of it at the moment so the difference between is I'll see a good western movie and I'll remember it for the rest of my life I'll remember the story, I'll remember this scene or that scene it built to built it built to an emotional climax of some degree. And, you know, one, the story is good.
It's not just about the interpersonal relationships. The story is good itself.
But but but there's a payoff to it. But there's not a payoff on this stuff.
It's just more inter interconnectional drama. And while I'm watching it, that's good enough.
But when it's over, I couldn't tell you. I can remember who the bad guy was in the first season of Yellowstone because it was Danny Houston.
I remember him in it. But I don't remember any of the details of it and I don't remember any of the bad guys for season two or season three.
It's out of my head. It's just completely out of it.
And same thing with 1883. When I watched the whole thing, and that was like a – that seemed like a movie, except I don't remember.
Sam Elliott is about the only thing I really remember of it when it was finished. But now Red River I remember for the rest of my life.
Isn't that, though, because it's a different thing, right? Because when you go to a film, film is designed for one sitting. You sit down in the theater.
You're going to get the entire encapsulation of what happens to these characters in three hours. Okay, I'll give you an example of one that is more than a soap opera.
And here's the difference. Here's the difference.
Okay. Yeah, you could say that.
Look, they're in the soap opera business. But I'll tell you one that's not, okay? If you watch that first season of – now, here's one that really works like a movie if you watch the first season of homeland oh yeah that first season of homeland first season is incredible okay yeah very good when it gets to that final episode of the first season and he's got the suicide vest on.
And he's in the room.

He can kill the guys that he's been waiting for to do it for the whole movie.

And you don't want him to die,

but you're kind of into him

and you kind of want him to pull it off.

And then his daughter calls him on the phone

before he does it.

She doesn't know what he's going to do,

but she gets that little sense from him

that something's weird. Dad, you need to tell me that you're going to come home right now.
You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight. And the entire series has been built to this scene.
And it's one of the most emotional scenes I've ever seen in a movie, in a TV show I've ever seen Dramatized. The first season was great.
I've ever seen Dramatized. Now, that was a movie.
That was not a soap opera. That built to this moment of him being in that fucking room with the suicide vest on.
And there was complexity. She doesn't know what she's asking.
But we do. She's stopping this major thing, and she'll never know that.
But we do. Right, right, right.
And he's still committed. But he's more committed to her.
And we know that. That's just great shit.
That's a movie. Right.
And you can't – can you do that every week? No, I didn't say you can do it every week. But I'm saying when the season's over, I need to walk away with more than just the soap opera.
An impactful moment. Exactly.
I don't expect you to do that every week, but at the end of the arc, if you're telling a continuing story, at the end of that fucking season, you need to, bam, drop the mic. Yeah.
You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot dot dot dot i see what you're saying and look while i'm watching it i'm not asking for that but the fact that it all just goes away right once it's over and it's just stand on the beach right it's a different thing though right i mean this is what the weirdness this is the weirdness of home. Here's where it's not a different thing.
Part of the thing that makes it different is the fact that everyone's watching these continuing stories, continuing stories, continuing stories. Okay.
If it were Bonanza, where it's just a set-up story, Charles Bronson shows up. He's a half-breed Indian, and he's working at the Ponderosa for a while.
And he gets involved in an adventure. And then at the end, it's done.
Well, on that show, you have the episodes that are maybe not so good or episodes that are whatever. That's not one continual story.
But then you'll have this great episode with Charles Bronson. Or do they have a great episode with James Kober.
They're almost standalones. That could have been a movie.
They could have expanded that to a movie. Right.
They're standalones instead of just a long, ongoing story. Well, the difference is that that's episodic.
It's a long, ongoing story that leads to the soap opera aspect. Well, it's episodic.
And television now has become completely serialized. Yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, somebody's going in and they're pitching their show, even a really, really good show like Deadwood. Okay, Deadwood, I know what they, they probably went in, they pitched, and what they knew that they were going to make was the, was it Wild Bill? Yeah.
The Wild Bill story. And they've got Carradine and like, and they know that story.
And that show is fantastic as long as they're telling that story which is like six to eight episodes once he's gone i don't think they had a plan they that was what they pitched and it was like they pitched a movie spread out over a number of episodes but it wasn't even the full season yeah but by that point in time they have have all the town characters. Well, they've got everybody, but I would maintain that for the rest of Deadwood, after Carradine's gone, it's just things are happening.
Stuff is happening. But I don't remember anything about that show other than the town and, you know, the various actors that I liked on the show.
But really, all they had was those first six to eight episodes. I can't remember exactly what it was.
And the thing about it is, I'm not... I don't say all this, and the sum up of it all is it's useless.
It is very compelling while I'm watching it. But it just doesn't compare to a movie real story that stays with me for the rest of my life, in some cases..
I know what you're saying. And like we'll watch a lot of – I try to watch at least one movie every episode that I haven't seen.
And sometimes it's like, well, I haven't seen it since I was 12. You know, or I haven't seen it since – Those are actually the scariest ones to watch because if you loved something when you were young,

it's almost like.

Well, and I'm expecting not to,

I'm tougher on stuff now than I used to be.

All right.

I was a big champion about stuff.

Now I'm not such a champion.

Now I see all the problems with it.

All right.

But I will watch something I haven't seen since I was 22

and I saw it like the day it opened.

And I, you know, and I, I watch, you know,

I watch it again. I think I just left my train of thought.
Well, actually, I can jump in really quick if you want. I'm talking like I'm stoned and I'm not.
Strong cigars. Yeah, strong cigars.
One of the movies we saw that we had seen a million times and we didn't even think that it was going to be anything was Dressed to Kill. Yeah.
Okay, let me set this up a little bit. Yeah.
Set it up. And then you can take it.
Yeah. Yeah.
It was one of those things where we were doing a thing, a special episode with Eli Roth. We were taking, you know, the Italian Jallo thrillers and thinking, okay, what are the American versions of Jallo thrillers? And we figured out there was like four of them.
And one of them was Dressed to Kill. Michael Caine.
Yeah. And so we get together with Eli and we're going to watch these four movies.
And then it comes down to Dressed to Kill. And it's like, I can't even think about how many times I've seen Dressed to Kill.
Hundreds. I can't even think how many times he's seen it and how many times that Eli's seen it.
I mean, we're just huge Brian De Palma fans and Nancy Allen fans and everything. So like, how many fucking times? And so I almost, almost brought up, I mean, do we even need to watch Dressed to Kill? I mean, we've got- We had a little Congress about it.
We've got three movies. No, okay, well, let's just watch it.
We'll just watch it. That ended up being one of the greatest screenings of Dressed to Kill I've ever seen.
All right? In our living room, in my living room, watching it with Roger- On VHS. On VHS.
Pan and scan. All right.
The old Warner Brothers video. Because we watch them on the actual video cassettes of video archives.
All right. Literally, the tape that we used to rent and handle and shuffle and put back and forth into the drawers and then rent to customers.
And that has been sitting on the shelves with the number on it and everything for the computer. We've seen the movie a bunch of times, but something about watching it with the three of us and then just sitting there and it's so good.
But, but, but, but it was Roger who was adding to it. It was Eli that was adding to it and I was adding to them, you know, and like, we just had this like appreciation for the movie, watching it with the three of us in this situation.
The fact that we even considered not even watching it was just like sacrilege. And we saw things in it that we had never seen before.
That was the other thing. It's like, I saw things in during that screening because of, because of feeling watching the movie with you guys that I had never thought about before.
And so it opened up all sorts of avenues. And, you know, most frequently you watch a movie and it doesn't live up.
I'm afraid to watch movies again a lot of the time. That was just one of those happy incidences where the movie really lived up.
It stayed strong. Even when we'd seen it hundreds of times.
I mean, you could not, it'd be hard to pick a movie that I've seen as much as Jessica. See, this is the better version of Siskel and Ebert.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The completely unproduced, uninfluenced version.
Well, I told Roger when we finished the first season, I go, you know, Roger, if we do this the right way, in three or four years' time, we could be considered like Cisco and Eva. A hundred percent.
Yeah. It's just a matter of getting it out there.
Yeah, yeah. I think there's just a bunch of people that aren't aware of it yet.
They will come. Yeah.
Build it, build it, build it, and they will come. But what I love about the way we're doing it now, because our first season, we just, you know, we just put it out.

And we had a partner with sirius xm back then and this season you know they kind of went out of business in their own for their podcasting thing a little bit oh did they i think they pandora now right yeah yeah they kind of turned into a different thing they just changed their whole podcast deal with the caller daddy chick yeah yeah i think they did. So I guess they're trying to get back into it.
I think some other people as well. They paid us a lot of money to do it.
And we actually did pretty good for our little archaic little movie show that goes on about two hours. It's a real niche type.
Yeah. And we...
Can you guys do Jaws? No, we don't want to do Jaws. But that's the best part of it.
Do whatever the fuck you want to do. That's exactly it.
But the thing is, they were like, so we actually had about like two million listeners, which was like, hey, that was pretty good for us, for us doing our little stupid movie show about VHS. And it's all about VHS.
It's about the VHS. We're talking about the box art of VHS tapes.
We talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie. We talk about the transfer.
By the way, the movie VHS is one of my guilty pleasures. That's a good movie.
The one with the devil lady? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She turns into a devil? Four different stories? Three different stories? Yeah.
But that one is worth it. Just sit through the other three for that one.
The Devil Lady was fucking amazing. But I think they were expecting us to do like...
John, Citizen Kane. They were going to do like Dax Shepard kind of numbers.
Right, right, right. But we're never going to do that with what we're doing.
Right, right, right. Yeah.
And so we're talking... But you could, though.
People want to see it. They want to listen to it.
It's just a matter of just itbitting. They'll realize they wanted it once they hear it.
That's what it is. It's like, oh, we want them to only talk about Citizen Kane.
No, no, no. It's got to be whatever the fuck they actually want to talk about.
And then you'll learn about that movie that you never heard about. Maybe you go see it, and then you'll have a deeper appreciation of why these guys love movies.
But one of the things that was interesting when we did it, when we – OK. So when we made our deal, we're thinking, OK, well, maybe we'll do it here for two years.
And we own the show and then we want to take it to Patreon so we don't have to do commercials. Right.
OK. And when I did commercials, I did it with a 70s DJ announcer voice.
All right? Because I felt like such a sellout that I'm not going to do it in my voice. Right.
The Datsun 750 is coming and it's coming soon. You know, and I did it like the real Don Steele.
That was my whole thing. I did it like the real Don Steele.
I just did those readings like myself and people started commenting on Twitter. They were like, man, Roger Avery.
ZipRecruiter can fill your placement in a quick week. Some people even get, in the first week, they get qualified candidates only on ZipRecruiter.com.
Look, I like solo stoves. They're great.
But I found myself doing stainless steel ads, basically, and talking about solo stoves. And suddenly people on Twitter were saying, Roger Avery will sell you sour milk from a sick cow.
I was like, well, I don't know if I want to be shilling stuff like that anymore. Well, you just have to only approve the ads that you want to do.
I approve ads. I don't just let them give me every ad.
I'm like, I can't do this one. I say it all the time.
We're not even under that kind of pressure now. The thing about it, I thought that would be kind of cool, is if we go to Patreon, we'll lose a whole bunch of listeners.
But we'll put a 40-minute version of the show out there for free. But if you want to get the whole show, then you've got to subscribe.
And if you just subscribe, you get the show. If you pay $5, you get our show.
Boom. Boom.
And if you pay $8, then you get an extra special show that we do. There's still a truncated version of it available for everybody to listen to.
You like the first part of it? Come for the rest. But the thing is, though, is what I like, and some people are sort of like, hey, fuck those guys.
Well, okay, fine. And look, I get it.
I'm the guy in my 20s would go to happy hour at the bar, all right, and nurse a beer while I ate all the pizza and the chicken wings and everything and that was my dinner. Yeah, right.
So I get that. You know, and by the way, you know, if you want to like wait till the end of our season and then join for a month and listen to all of our shows that way, you can.
That's an easy way to do it. You can get everything for free for a month.
You can get everything you want in a month. But that's not who we're doing it for.
We're doing it for the people who care about the show and are subscribing to it. And those people, those are our audience.
Right. And then they write on the message board and we write them back.
So we're doing it for those people. And as long as we can make enough to just do the show, we're cool.
And the general feeling is, wow, this is like like a five dollar film school because you've got a couple of guys talking about movies and talking about how to watch movies how to appreciate films how to read a film and then and hopefully just and hopefully just genuinely compelling discussions and and using our experience as filmmakers to discuss even you know deeper into the movies and to better understand them. And, you know, it's largely something has happened in culture where people, they don't know how to argue anymore politely.
They don't know how to, like, enjoy an argument with each other before. And so Quentin and I, we don't have to like the same movie, just like Siskel and Ebert didn't have to like it.
But we can argue about something. And then afterwards, it's like, OK, let's go do karaoke now.
It's not a recommend show. We want to pick three movies and we want to discuss them.
You don't have to like it to discuss it. Even if we don't like the movie, if there's an interesting point of discussion about it, well, that's good.
That's all we need. We just need an interesting conversation.
Yeah. It's not about we recommend you watch this movie.
Right. Personally, I don't care if anybody watches any of the movies that we talk about.
I want them to listen to the show and enjoy our back and forth and get to understand how you appreciate movies yeah if you want to go out and check the movies out afterwards fine go ahead but i don't care if you do or not and we have a really like dedicated group of people who have come and they've signed up and they like like i really what's funny is i really care about these people now it's like they're there and they're like in the club. It's like a clubhouse.
And the people who want to be there want to be there. And they're talking and they're talking.
They're on a message board with Quentin. And, you know, Eli is Eli Roth is there and Edgar Wright.
And like everybody is like. And so it's a we wanted to create a something that was like video archives and that people could come in and talk.

And I want at least one of the three movies, not every week, but at least – they're not easy to find. I want to come up with like, well, that's not streaming anywhere.
How am I supposed to get this? Well, it's on VHS. Get a VHS recorder and buy it on eBay.
And now all of a sudden that little group is like, well, maybe we can buy it. Hey, maybe if we buy VHS and then we can we'll burn it and we can trade it with everybody else.
And now they're all doing the work to do that. Well, good.
My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show. And and she's on the show with us.
And one of her things is like we get together and we watch movies at Video Archives. And then we know the films.
And then she has to—she doesn't have that access. She doesn't have access to the—she's not there with us.
She's like—she represents one of our—one of the people out there. She's got to find it.
So if Quentin finds something that's, you know, pretty difficult to find, she's got to track it down down and she usually has a little timetable to do it on.

And she kind of is doing her proof of concept on,

you can get these, you can find these.

She'll find it on VHS.

She explains how she tracked it down.

And so you can follow her guide.

If it's on YouTube, she'll tell you it's on YouTube.

However, when she goes,

Quentin, I just couldn't track this one down.

I'm like, yes!

Yeah.

I think that's the real reason he likes to do the show is everything on YouTube now a lot of things a lot of things a lot of things yeah there's some certain things you can't on YouTube still. And if it's up there and it's not there, it'll be up again somewhere.
It's like Whack-A-Mole. Right, right, right.
It's like Whack-A-Mole. There was the Gore Vidal film, the transsexual movie with Raquel Welch.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, we watched that.
We didn't do an episode on it, but I had the video of it. We watched it.
Myra Breckovich. I like that movie.
It's a crazy movie. Well, the idea that When she fucks the guy in the ass, that's the best fucking scene.
When she fucks the guy in the ass, that is the best fucking scene. It's pretty wild.
I like that movie so much, I read the book afterwards, because I thought it was so cool. Okay.
I never liked Rex Reed, and I am not gay, but I was actually like, wow, Rex Reed's kind of hot in this. Well, that's what he was trying to do.
That was the whole movie. You did it.
Gore Vidal was trying to turn you gay. Can you give me that lighter? Yeah, you should.
That's one of those weird ones that's difficult to find. I had to buy a DVD to get it.
Oh, I like that light she has that keeps building up to it. She goes, what, are you actually going to finally show her pussy? She goes, well, it looks like the moment of truth has finally arrived.
I think Raquel was just fantastic in that movie. Did you ever see those debates that Gore Vidal did with William F.
Buck? Oh, yeah. Those are legendary.
Legendary. Yeah.
Yeah. Incredible.

Yeah.

But this is, you know, you used to be-

Gore Vidal always won, though.

Oh, yeah.

Well, he was just-

Well, he was right and he was better.

Yeah, he was right and he was better.

Yeah, he was right.

But then you have Gore Vidal fighting with fucking Norman Mailer.

Yeah.

What were they fighting about?

Oh, no, just they'd get on-

They'd get him on like the Dick Cavett show together.

Yeah, Dick Cavett.

You know, he would talk to him like a Ponzi bastard, and the other one talk to him like a neanthrof. I'm sure they had dinner afterwards.
Well, you used to be able to have those kind of conversations on television, which is really fascinating. Yeah.
It's like now they exist in podcasts. And like the Siskel and Ebert thing, which I was talking about, I was like you can't manufacture a friendship.
Yeah, yeah. And you can't manufacture a real interest.
You can't be a guy who was a local news reporter who auditioned for the role of the guy who reviews movies. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
It's like this thing that you guys have is what – this is the whole new media movement is based on authenticity, right? And this is like the whole thing. You want people to not be able to find these movies.
You want to just review movies that you want to review. And that's the beautiful thing about it.
It's like the perfect show in that regard. Like for a film review show or a film discussion show, it's the perfect show.
And also when a customer used to come into the store, they had basically three requirements. I want something that's new.

That was always the first one. That's good that I haven't seen yet.
And I was like, well, if you haven't seen it yet, it's new to you. So that takes care of two of those.
And no, we don't have that new one, but let's show you something interesting. And so it was always a matter of, you know.
Well, the thing is, one of the things that like and there's a lot of movie.

There's a lot of movie shows out there on podcasts and they talk about stuff.

And the idea isn't for me to just say, oh, we're better than all those guys. We're not coming from that place.
But I'll tell you what bugs me about a lot of the other shows is the fact that the people are sincere.

They're completely sincere.

But their film knowledge is fucking abysmal. They really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Especially when they're trying to talk about movies from the 70s or something. They were usually born in the 80s.
So they don't know what something was like when it opened up and they don't really have any context they don't they definitely don't have context that's what they don't have they don't have context they just know whatever they've learned along the way and so they just yank stuff out of their ass and just and and say stuff that's just wrong a lot they're just misinformation a lot we actually fact check our shit all right you know uh we we re-record. All right.
To make sure that we just don't yank shit out of it. And we, there is a little bit of yanking stuff out of your ass.
But when I'm not sure about it, we look it up. And then if I'm wrong, then we change it.
Well, then also there's the fact that. You can count on what we're saying that we're telling you the true fucking shit.
We're giving you... I consider it as a film expert that

I would be...

My show

wouldn't be worth listening to if I don't

tell you the truth. If I don't give you factual

information that you can count on.

Also, because you were there during the opening of the film

and we're going... I can describe

the context. Yeah.
We have

the context to talk about. A lot of these people,

they maybe didn't see these

movies in theaters.

And the thing is, it's like

Thank you. We have the context.
Yeah. We have the context to talk about.
A lot of these people, they maybe didn't see these movies in theaters. And the thing is, you know, it's like, you know, my writing guru as far as like film writing, but I think writing in general was the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.
And she had one rule. One rule for film criticism.
And I think this could apply to all writing. You have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing.
It's that fucking simple. There has to be a compelling reason for you to engage in reading analysis.

And the same thing about talking about cinema.

You have to give a compelling reason.

Now, yeah, I like the guys.

That's a good start.

I like their personality.

I think they're kind of funny.

That's a good start.

But there has to be something more than that.

Well, that's what's more than that, what you just did.

This passion for it, right? That's what's more than that what you just did this passion for it right that's what's more than that it's just this like severe commitment to it that's that's what's exciting and then when we talk about the movies and we talk about everything that's good about them we talk about the things that that aren't good right honest yeah very honest yeah and and and and i can be wrong i i don't have to be right about it you might might be wrong about the Joker. I'm not sure.
It's audacious. It's audacious.
Because you haven't even seen it. You're just jumping on a fucking bandwagon.
I'm just talking shit. Talking shit.
I'm just trying to wind you up. Talking shit.
I'm just trying to wind you up. Sorry.
What's like an example of a film that you love that other people hate other than the joker uh i don't know if i loved it but okay i liked it a lot all right uh um well there's i have a ton of those as a matter of fact no there's i have i have so i have so many but but when i was younger particularly i was the champion of like the movie that movie that all the critics put down and said was the fiasco. And I wanted to defend it.
Is it because you're a contrarian? Can I guess? Yeah. Is it Ishtar? Well, I defended Ishtar.
What? I defended 1941. He was like one of the champions of Ishtar.
Ishtar championed 1941. Pushing that tape on so many customers.
How many of them came back angry? No, Ishtar's a funny movie. It's a funny movie.
Is it really? Well, the problem with Ishtar, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, the problem with Ishtar is that it suddenly became not about the movie, but about the production. Yeah, yeah.
And so people had formed an opinion about whether they liked it or not. Because it was so expensive.
Because it was expensive. It's like...
It doesn't change your ticket price. No, but that is the kiss of death.
If you feel like a film is over-budgeted. Well, especially comedies.
Yeah. It's like critics have a thing about spending a lot of money on comedies.
It seems obscene to them. What happened with this film? Where'd the budget go south? Where the budget kind of went south for the most part was the fact that Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman kind of had their full freight on the movie.
So Dustin Hoffman got his high big salary. Warren Beatty got his high big salary.
And all the accoutrements that go with it. And everything that goes with it.
I need a plane to fly me back from Morocco to New York every weekend. Oh, really? I'm sure.
No, no, he's just making that up. I'm making that up, but that's not unrealistic.
That's not unrealistic. It would be like if when they did, during the time when they did Ishar, Tom Hanks was famous, but he wasn't the superstar that he is now.
So if that had starred Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, like the two guys from Bosom Buddies, well then that movie would have cost a lot less and would have been just as funny. Those guys were terrific together.
And they would have been really good in that role and the film would have been seen for what it is. When a film does get labeled as a bloated film, though, that is the kiss of death.
It kind of is, yeah. Because the general public will turn on it then.
They want it to fail. But you know what? Generally, you give those movies a couple of years, and suddenly they're like these amazing movies.
Waterworld? They're like, oh my, well, Waterworld's a pretty fun film. Shut the fuck up.
I kind of have a great time watching. Waterworld was the first Laserdisc I ever bought.
That and Days of Thunder. Here's the one I bet you can't defend.
Kevin Costner's The Postman. I never saw The Postman.
I like the idea of The Postman. I remember the screenplay for The Postman was great.
I never saw The Postman, but I actually like Kevin Costner. I love Kevin Costner.
I think Dance of the Woods is one of the best movies. Kevin Costner is fucking awesome.
I love that dude. But you're you're right about the book it's hard to defend i'm not saying he's right about it because i've never seen it but now that says something that i've never seen it but yeah but i wouldn't mind seeing it i'll bet y'all like it but then there's films that are so bad they're great like showgirls i love showgirls showgirls is fucking great oh showgirls there's nothing wrong with showgirls i can absolutely defend i can defend it as an entertainment uh piece i i i am look i am not a so bad as good guy okay i'm not a so bad you are a so bad as good guy i'm not a so bad the sex scene in the pool okay that's a little ridiculous but yes the sex scene in the pool is a little ridiculous but actually the fact that it's going for a hollywood movie that's it's it, it's going there was actually interesting to me.
But what I really liked, I really liked her in it, when she beats the shit out of that guy, that's so fucking cool. When she beats the shit out of the guy at the end, the guy who fucked over her girlfriend and beat up his girlfriend, and then she does these spinning roundhouse kicks and beats the fucking shit out of the guy.
I was like, yeah, Elizabeth Berkley, go. What I love about Showgirls is normally a movie like Showgirls would be made for under a million, go straight to video, star Robert Davi, and just be this little exploitation movie.
And here was an example of that being made for $60 million with Paul Verhoeven directing doing whatever the fuck he wants, doing whatever he wants, making it as big as possible. Releasing it, NC-17.
Fuck you all. It's basically the same as one of those sub-million dollar exploitation films.
It still has Robert Davi in it. He's still playing the same part he would normally play.
And so it's this opportunity to see one of those weird little exploitation movies made in this grand fashion, in this huge fashion. It's exciting.
Showgirls doesn't sit on a special shelf in my heart. But I really liked it when I saw it.
I saw it at the theaters. I enjoyed it.
I love it when Elizabeth Berkley pushes Gina Gerson down the stairs. Is it Gina Gerson? She pushes down the stairs.
Like everything about that movie is awesome. I think it's great.
I love the film. I love the film.
I brought it up to all the – I had a dinner once with Verhoeven and a bunch of the producers that filmed it. I started going off on it.
They all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film. And then at the end of it, one of the producers said, well, yeah, that's all nice to hear, but really that movie was just about us doing a lot of cocaine.
That's exactly what I was just going to say. I'm so glad you just said that because I always describe that movie as a cocaine movie and I was just casting aspersions with no evidence.
But it like a cocaine movie because it seems like they thought it was great while they were doing it but it's like what are you doing? You know it's one of those things where you think it's great because you're on coke. I have a place in my heart for those big movies like that.
I mean Like I said that's not the one that I would that's not the one I would make my case on but I still don't like it. That's not my case that's not my that That's not my chest case.
Isn't that sort of an example of what happened when the 80s were cocaine culture? The world kind of shifted from a psychedelic thing from the 60s and 70s to a cocaine thing in the 80s, and you get movies like that. Yeah, you get a little bit more edgy, a little less trippy.
Well, also a little more ridiculous. But see.
But see, look at how great. See, the beginning, it's pretty good.
That's what I call an actress dedicated to her role. No, this is where you're losing me.
This is where you're losing me. Because how are you keeping a heart on? Yeah, and then it's Kyle MacLachlan of all people.
The whole thing is. Okay, but just watching Elizabeth Berkley's tits, all right, in a big studio movie like this, flopping up and down, like, I'm getting my money's worth.
Well, that was huge because it was from Saved by the Bell. Yeah, but, you know, okay, I'm not, actually, that's, I'm not thinking about it from his point of view.
I'm thinking about it from the water hitting her face. I'm thinking from her point of view, that's the, that's the, that's the unrealistic part.
That true. True.
Cocaine movies are fun, though. There's, there's quite a few of those that were just like, what is this?

Yeah.

Like, how much Coke was going around in the 80s?

A lot.

A lot.

It was actually Coke, too. It was actually real cocaine.

It was like proper cocaine.

Proper.

It's actually really interesting because it's like one of those things where-

Remember that customer who used to come in and he would bring in like a rock of cocaine?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you. There was this, I mean, it's actually really interesting because it's like one of those things where.
Remember that customer who used to come in and he would bring in like a rock of cocaine?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Drop it on the counter.

Like a rock of cocaine.

Tuttle. Boys, here.

The guy with the name was Tuttle.

The size of, yeah, Tuttle.

Tuttle, Tuttle.

The size of a coffee mug.

And he would bring us these things.

He was a cocaine dealer.

And the thing is he would rent, you know, we'd let him take the movies out and come back whenever he wanted. Whenever you want.
Yeah. And he would come in and he'd get his films.
And then he would either open up a little skull can. Yeah.
All right. It was a bunch of cocaine.
I remember that skull can. Boom.
All right. There you go, boys.
On the counter. There you go, boys.
Have fun. Have fun.
Jesus Christ. Or you take out a Coke rock and just like, bam! Like, throw it on the counter and it'll bounce off of you.
There you go, boys. See you later.
See you in two weeks. Like a baseball.
Like a baseball. And you take a colander and just grind it up.
Okay, who wants some? Pure Coke. And for the first time, because we're minimum wage kids, for the first time, we actually had, fuck you, Coke.
We actually had access to Coke in a way that we could never afford. For about a few months, because those relationships don't last that long.
No, no, no. Cocaine relationships never last.
But for a few months, we were like, holy shit, we're in the fucking, you know, we're in the powder. Well, he, there was a party once that he came to and he brought, again, a rock of cocaine and a live hand grenade.
And he put them both down. They usually go together.
Yeah, and it was like, okay, that's a dangerous combination. The type of person who does a lot of coke usually would buy hand grenades.
That was a fun party. And his name was Tuttle.
We always described excess as Tuttle.

Okay, we're going to get into a Tuttle situation.

Dude, I'm so tuttled.

Oh, that's hilarious.

It became like your figazi.

Yeah.

Oh, that's so funny.

When I worked in Boston at Nick's Comedy Stop, they would offer to pay you in cocaine or cash.

There was guys who just took the cocaine.

There were certain comics. They just wanted to get paid in coke.
Wild times. That's the 80s.
It was the 80s. That was actually even kind of an interesting situation because it was also one of those things where I was actually really kind of proud of us because we all kind of like, woo, we all kind of went nutty for like a little bit with this kind of like more access to Coke than we normally would have.
More access to Coke than we ever had. Ever had.
Yeah. You know, because we can't afford that shit.
All right. And so we all kind of went nuts for like a little bit about it.
And then we all kind of like, OK, let's. Yeah, enough of that.
Let's bring it together. Well, that's great.
Let's bring it together. And we also saw some other people who were like, who let it get the best of them.
Yes. And they got really kind of.
Like your friend with the story about being bitter. It's the same sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The same sort of thing.
You go, oh, I know where this is going. And so we all like, okay, let's pull back.
Let's get control of this. And we all did.
It was all collectively, we all kind of just got our shit together and put it in the rearview mirror. Right, right.
Didn't mean we didn't do it, but we just, it was we controlled it. Contrary to your goals.
We'll stay with pot. We'll stay with pot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well –

Yeah.

When I was growing up, a bunch of people that I knew got hooked on coke, and that's what kept me from ever doing coke.

I would stop – I mean, I had children, and suddenly it was like, oh, my God.

Like, I have to be on call 24-7.

Right.

You can't be out, coked up.

Yeah.

Like, that's not going to last anymore.

That's cool. and suddenly it was like, oh my God, I have to be on call 24-7.
Right, you can't be out, coked up. Yeah, that's not going to last anymore.
That gets in the way of mushroom trips. And pretty soon my Saturday mornings became more important than my Friday nights.
It's pretty simple. My thing about coked was I wanted to have excess, oh, I wasn't that interested in it.
Yeah, you want to take it to 12. No, I wanted to have a big pile of it, and we're doing it all fucking night.
Until this is gone. Until the straw is bloody.
Yeah. Okay, now I'm stopping now, because the straw got bloody.
I think it's like some people don't have the ability to only do that once. Like, for whatever reason, some people, they have that thing, and they do coke a little bit little bit then they just want to keep doing coke yeah that's scary when that is Gary that's scary when they have because you're captured by a demon yeah you know and it's literally and I think it's literally a demon yeah no I think in the classic gin sense sure word where it's whispering into your ear well in the sense it does all the things a demon would do you You know, you could say the demons aren't real.
Okay, but if the actual... They might be real.
I think there's pretty good evidence. I think there's pretty good evidence.
There's a lot of legitimate evil in the world. And where is that coming from? What's that energy? Like, what begets that? What is the reason why people are willing to, you know, mass murder? Like, what is it? What is it? People are willing to launch missiles into cities.
What is that? Where's that coming from? That would be evil if you defined it in the classic sense of the word. When an invading army comes into a village and hacks people, that's not demonic.
That's not evil. You're lighting children on fire and throwing them on thatched roofs.
That's not demonic. It seems pretty demonic.
Yeah. Like a demon would do that.
Whether the physical demon exists is almost like not even important. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like demonic behavior is 100% documented. What would Jesus do? Yeah.
Right, right. Just ask yourself that.
But it's the thing. It's unlikely he's going to raise a fist.
It's unlikely he wants to be smart and you want to be secular and you never want to say that you believe in something that's superstitious or ridiculous. So you don't believe in religion, you're either agnostic or you're atheist, that's how you get respect.
And it's like this weird thing where you're not willing to consider like, okay, but what are the actions? What are the actions of good and the actions of evil? The actions are real, right? And we all know in our heart and our soul when you do a good thing, how you feel versus when you do a bad thing, how you feel.

So what are those forces? There's a speech in Apocalypse Now when Brandos Kurtz tells the story of going into the village and inoculating all the children in the village, shooting their arms with, you know, flu shots or something like that, inoculating them. And then the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kids' arms.
And then there's like a little pile of arms. and Kurt says, you know, so we did all that, and then we came back into the village the next day, and we saw the little pile of all the little arms in there where they hacked them off.
And I cried like a baby. Then I started thinking, the genius of that, the genius of that, because these are not monsters.
They're not demons. These are men doing a job.
And they had the force of will to take the job and take it to its logical conclusion of what they had to do. All right.
You know, I'm not condoning. I'm not condoning what Kurtz is saying.

Kurtz is a fucking crazy person.

All right.

You know, but I'm interested in his perspective.

But of course, of course, that would be Kurtz's perspective.

He's speaking about true power.

Where he's a god.

He's a god worshipped by the natives.

Yeah.

Clearly lost his fucking mind in the fog of war. he's completely lost his mind in the fog of war but he's talking like Genghis Khan yeah exactly like they all talk yeah but this is the thing where you're suspicious of power right like why are you suspicious well you should be because you see where it ultimately leads it ultimately leads to a Kurtz or it ultimately leads to the way to really be in control of people.
Like you have to use violence. You can only use words for so long.
Strong men hold civilizations together. That's just a fact of things.
Both of us have become friends over the years with John Milius. Yeah, yeah.
Who wrote Apocalypse Now. Who wrote Apocalypse Now.
And, you know, John is the kind of guy who's like, you know, conquerors, conquerors, you know, and he wrote a script about Genghis Khan. That you worked on.
Yeah, that I worked on with him to help turn it into a series. My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke.
And, you know, you look at his Genghis Khan script and he's, you know, he's realistically talking about these horrific atrocities that just, you know, sewing people up and felt and lighting it on fire and throwing them in river.

Just however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better.

And but at the same time, you know, he invented paper money and he invented the Silk Road and he pulled pulled, you know, that whole region of the world together under one empire. And, you know, over the course of it, you know, you start out as, you know, almost like the like Conan, Conan, the warrior, Conan Conan the conqueror, Conan the king.

Eventually, you're a king by your own hand. And eventually you start realizing.
And John Millais also wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian. And so he, you know, he rightly recognizes that it's strong men who conquer, but also who hold together and maintain order.
And there's a balance to be had between force and strength and, you know, and compassion as well. Too much compassion, you know, countries fall apart.
Too much introspection, countries fall apart. Right.
And when things are too good. When things are too good.
Things are too easy and you think they're supposed to be easy. You don't understand how they became easy and what keeps them easy.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that's kind of where we are right now. It's weird times right now.
That's where we are. We're in a Conan movie.
Well, it does feel a little like we're in kind of neo-feudalistic times where there's highwaymen and that you have to contend with when you go out and everything's a little more fragile.

Well, there's also this new thing, which is the internet and social media.

And there's this new thing that has overcome our minds.

And it's affecting everyone in this very bizarre way.

And it's making people more tribal and more inclined towards echo chambers,

more antagonistic against opposing beliefs and views.

So you were saying about like being able to sit and have a conversation with someone and completely disagree, but not take it personally, just disagree about the points. We've lost that in our society.
It's really important to be able to engage with other people, to disagree with them. Yes.
And then to know that that's just that. We can still have dinner together.
We can still be friends. I can.
OK, so I go on a show and I said that I like Joker, too. Well, I say I like Joker, too.
And now now now there's 150 articles that come out on all these cannibalized articles. One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it.
And then there's 150 ripoff articles on that. And then you read read the comments.
Man, Quinn's a fucking asshole. That movie's fucking sucked.
Man, he's a fucking asshole for saying that shit. Why am I a fucking asshole? I like the fucking movie.
That makes me a fucking asshole. It's crazy.
You either like the movie or you don't. I'm not plugging the movie.
I'm not doing anything. I'm just saying I like it.
Who gives a fuck what I like? Right. What do you care what the fuck I like? Right.
And also... But then I'll say, I didn't see something.
Well, he's a fucking asshole, all right? I didn't see it. What do you care what the fuck I see and what I don't see? What the fuck do you fucking care? But there's no one in front of him to say that.
He's an idiot alone with his phone. If he just said it out loud amongst reasonable people, they would turn to him and go, what the fuck are you talking about? But he doesn't get that check, which is also part of the problem with social media.
Someone will say something like, well, I think he's fucking missing out. Well, I'm sure there's a lot of shit I can say that you're missing out on, and I don't care if you miss out.
Also, you have to be missing out. Otherwise, you don't have a life.
How much information do you think you can absorb in a day? How much things do you watch and listen to? Four movies a day, apparently. That's a lot of time, man.
You have to miss out. There's going to be shit you miss out on.
Well, the other thing is, if you're a film fan today, you're not just dealing with today's films you're dealing with this insane archive that cattle it goes back to rocky yeah you know goes back to you know on the waterfront goes back to the 20s good lord yeah there's so many films to watch like you know a film that I saw that was like very meaningful to me this year is I really liked the story of Bo Jessesse the you know the the french foreign legion story i like french foreign legion movies any old way but that's a really cool story and i really like the whole story of the three brothers in there and uh you know i'm i was familiar with the gary cooper version the 1939 version put it on a stamp but i'd never seen the silent version and it starred ronald cole And I watched the silent version recently. And I was blown away by it.
The storytelling was so epic and was so visually just beautiful. And we have a little micro cinema in the theater I have, one of the theaters I have in Los Angeles, the Vista.
And it's like a little 20-seat cinema that we just show VHS and 16mm. It's our video archives.
Yeah, it's like the Video Archives Cinema Club. And it's like literally, it's like the brick-and-mortar version of Video Archives, but like a little Paris, back avenue cinema.
It's like a little clubhouse. I mean, it's open to everybody, but for our core fans.
And the thing is, and we showed, last week,

we showed the silent version of Bo Jest in it.

And I wasn't there

at that screening,

but I asked the guy

who was our manager,

they're mad.

I said,

how did it go?

He goes,

Quinn,

you would have really loved

to have been there

for that screening.

And I go,

well,

what?

And he goes,

it was so moving.

The end of it,

and it is really moving.

And it's just like, nobody was talking. It was it was just it was emotional you could hear a pin drop and then was over and and everyone was still kind of in this collective emotional state and they just all kind of left the theater and they they just seen something emotional and they all kind of just moved out into the lobby and and in this emotional.
And it was like, that sounds fucking fantastic.

That's amazing.

I mean, I think one of the most magical things about movies is that it can speak to you at

different times of your life, you know, at the different windows of opportunity in your

life.

So you might see a movie and not like it.

And then, you know, people might see Joker 2 today and not really care for it.

And then five years from now, revisit it and watch it again. And you're in watch it again and you're in a different place culture is in a different place everything's in a different place and you have a different perspective on the movie and maybe you like the movie i hated blade runner when it first came out did not like the film i thought it was awful really awful like boring uh like muddled like everything that was wrong Suddenly I'm seeing Kubrick shots in the end from The Shining.
Roger would say, Blade Runner should be called Blade Crawler. No, I was really hard.
I was really hard on movies. I was a really angry young guy.
He was such a prick about shit. He's a completely different guy.
Now he's like beds over backwards to be nice about. So I go, who the fuck is this guy? Humble by life.
Well, I now look at having been a filmmaker and knowing the struggle that goes in to getting something on screen. Look, I know how hard it is sometimes to get what you have up here on the screen and doesn't always work.
And sometimes you're faking it by the time it gets to the cut. But, you know, it's not an easy thing.
So when I watch a movie now, I'm applying my life experience to it. And I'm like, okay,

this movie may not be the greatest movie,

but this is somebody's,

you know,

vision.

Yeah.

And I'm going to give that,

you know,

I'm going to value that and give myself to it and try to find in it what I

like about it.

And so I always give every movie a shake,

you know,

a good shake.

What's happened with our show that I think is really cool.

Again, for the fans that follow it and everything, is in our first season, we ended up, like, covering about 70 movies, you know, all together. And we mentioned a zillion movies in the course of a show.
But, like, you know, we covered about 70 movies all together between the three movies that we did over the course of like 26 episodes. And we kind of created new classics, at least amongst the people who followed the show.
Because they followed it and they liked it and they watched some old Mexican horror movie like Demonoid. Hey, that was pretty cool.
Demonoid is amazing. And everybody would put it down.
If you tried to look at anything about it, it would all be shitty reviews about it and everything. But then we talked about it with passion and then we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie.
It's a killer hand movie. And we gave the right context in which to appreciate the movie.
And then the people appreciated it under that right context. Like, because a movie is old and because maybe they didn't have the money to do it like super clean or perfect you know actually that actually has the most best hand effects well yeah that movie in particular is actually a tough one to because it's is this demon yeah so it's a killer hand that fucks everybody up is this the best like hand on the loose movie it's a mexploitation movie okay with a a Mexican exploitation movie.
But one that's great about it, she's fantastic in it, Samantha Eggers. Samantha Eggers.
She's become one of our heroes from the show. Love Samantha Eggers.
This movie looks hilarious. But what's really cool about the Mexican horror genre is they take their tacky horror very seriously.
It's tacky horror, but they take it really seriously. And you appreciate the seriousness that they're delivering their payload with.
And I know how hard it is to do some of the things that they're doing. This is like it's pre-computer graphics.
They have a limited budget. But their vision is so big.
And you're watching it and you're like, oh, my God. This is – if you just – like if you try not to judge it on what a movie looks like today.
No, but not only just that. What's interesting is when you see some of the effects, there's a couple of the effects.
Well, how did they do that? Yeah. Because it's all done practical.
And then some of it, it's like, oh, well, I can see how they did that. Oh, my God, that's so fucking clever.
They figured out how to do it in such a clever way. I can see how they did it, but that's so neat.
Because they just figured out how to do it on camera in a way that sells it. Yeah.
And it's a crazy movie also. That is crazy.
It's like you're inside of some sort of crazy Mexican's head making a horror movie. It's fantastic.
Well, the horror genre is hard to do to not make ridiculous. Yeah.
Although the best thing about the horror genre and science fiction is that they're the best vehicles to kind of study culture and sociological issues because you have that abstraction layer that makes people think, oh, I'm just watching a science fiction film or I'm just watching a horror movie. Right.
Like you watch Dawn of the Dead and, yeah, you're watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall. Or are you watching a movie about the vanishing middle class being drawn to the consumer temple because it's what they remembered from their lives that was an important place to them.

Oh. You're literally quoting the movie.

I'm actually quoting my liner notes that I wrote for the DVD way back when. Let me stop and go to the bathroom one more time.
Okay. The coffee is making me take a piss.
No worries. Go for it.
We can keep going. Okay.
so when you first got into this, like, did you have like a film that you aspired to create something like? Like when you first did, did you say, you know, like comedians would be like, I want to be the next Eddie Murphy. Yeah, it was a composite.
It was a composite. I have like a kind of a top three filmmaker.
You know, when you're a young filmmaker and when you're a young child, you look to your parents to learn how to behave. You know, you're a child and you look, you look to them and you're like, they teach you how to be.
And so at the beginning of your life, you're copying your parents. And cause that's, that's who you love.
And that's what you're copying. When you're a a young filmmaker very frequently you kind of copy your parents your cinematic parents and you know so um in my case uh you know i mean you know in in many filmmakers like for instance stanley kubrick who's one of my favorite filmmakers who i'm always thinking about his zero point perspective his reverse tracking shots i i just just love the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies.
I like everything about his work. I do too.
Kubrick, if you love Fritz Lang, you can see that, oh, Kubrick was, that's how he felt about Fritz Lang. Like when I watch M, I can see the Kubrick shots.
Is Fritz Lang Metropolis? Yeah, he did Metropolis. He did, I mean, like some of the greatest.
Metropolis is wild. Metropolis is a super, super powerful and kind of important movie that's exactly talking about everything that's going on today that people should see.
The movie I was thinking about was M, which is his movie with Peter Lorre about the pedophile who's and the movie is made in just just before the Nazis took power. And so he's making a movie that's really about like kind of the rise of the rise of Hitlerian fascism in Europe.
But he's it through this movie about a pedophile and it's it's Peter and Peter Lorre is fantastic and it's actually his first sound movie like Fritz Lang hadn't made a sound movie and so every single shot in the film is based on sound so he'll have shadows talking and the backs of people's heads talking or even the device of the movie is Peter Lorre whistling Peter Giant. That becomes like the device by which they find the killer.
So the whole movie is about sound. So as a young filmmaker, if you want to learn how to use sound in a movie, that's the movie to see.
Because every single shot,

like it used to be,

you would show an empty frame

and it would just be a shot of nothing.

But now Fritz Lang is able to juxtapose

like a woman has lost her daughter.

She's calling for her daughter.

And so she's looking for her daughter

and she's looking for her and,

Elsa!

Elsa! And they cut to an empty shot of a stairwell and you hear her Elsa and they cut to like you know an empty playground Elsa and then you see the balloon that she was carrying trapped in something like whipping in the wind Elsa and it's super, super intense.

But all he's doing is he's using sound juxtaposed with images,

which he couldn't do before.

Crazy that he just called it M.

Yeah, M for murderer.

And this is an amazing, amazing movie.

So Kubrick,

see that's a Kubrickian shot.

This is where he's,

Elsa or Elsie? Elsie! I seem to remember more Elsies. I think I got the wrong part.
It's okay. But anyhow...
So this is... But...
So Kubrick had his forefathers, who he used to watch, and that he used to look to. And so those would be like my grandparents, in a way.
And so there's this lineage of cinematic grammar and vernacular that gets carried on from filmmaker to filmmaker. And eventually, after you've made enough films, you start walking on your own.
You start coming up with new ideas. But for me, it was Stanley Kubrick, John Borman.
He's the guy who directed Excalibur and Hope and Glory and Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific. I mean, a number of movies.
I don't think Quentin's such a big fan of John Borman. Some of his films.
I think you're a fan of his writing more than you are his films. I have nothing but respect for John.
Yeah. And John Borman and then Roman Plansky.
I think those three guys for me and their work, not the guys, but mostly their work. Like, I am a composite.
If you watch my movies, I'm a composite of those guys and other people as well. And those were the filmmakers who were important to me.
Those were my parents, so to speak. Kubrick was such an odd one.
Like, his films are so different. And he was a weird guy, too.
He did, like, complex mathematics in his spare time. I do complex mathematics in his spare time.
Nothing wrong with that. No.
Yeah, he's a weird guy, but he was also, I think, thinking three steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment. I mean, to be honest, I was just thinking, I just pulled my script from Eyes Wide Shut.
I had a script that was from set, and I was reading it over the weekend. And I saw that it has this, I mean, I've known this for a long time, but I started really thinking about it over the weekend.
It's missing a narration. It's missing a third- person narration that was originally in the movie.

That's because the movie was

recut and

changed after his death.

And they will

deny it, but

as a student of Kubrick, I'm watching the movie

and I'm like, well, Kubrick wouldn't do that.

Kubrick wouldn't do that either.

Kubrick would have trimmed this scene.

I didn't know they recut it after his death.

Okay, so apparently... I think they finished it.

Well, that's the Thank you. Kubrick wouldn't do that either.
Kubrick would have trimmed this scene. I didn't know they recut it after his death.

Okay, so apparently...

I think they finished it.

Well, that's the party line.

That's a version, yeah.

That's the party line,

but I think that they changed the notes,

the close-ups, the inserts of the notes.

I think those are changed.

It's missing a narration.

It's definitely missing a narration.

You know, a third-person narration.

Like that scene where he sees the prostitute who's died, he's at the morgue and he's looking at her and he's like leaning over her. It's a bed for narration.
There's this whole thing. What they do instead, because they couldn't say that Kubrick finished the movie because they hadn't done the recording of the narrator yet.
And so maybe they just kind of clutched it together, except there's an entire thread that's kind of been... Squashed? Squashed in that film, and that's the two men that are throughout the movie that are constantly in the background of the film who eventually, in the final shots of the film, you see, like, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in that final scene in the toy store when she's looking at the Rosemary's baby bassinet, which is totally Kubrick saying something.
And they never take their eyes off their daughter until the moment they take their eyes off. And the final line of the movie is coming up.
You see those two guys walking off with the daughter. They're taking her away.
They've given their daughter to the pedo cult. That's what's happened at the end of of the movie and there's an incident where when they first screened the movie in england uh people who were outside apparent this is all secondhand by the way there were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater cubrick yelling at all the executives and saying it's my movie you can't cut it i, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Big argument going on. Then he dies like four days later.
Oh, Jesus. So somebody went in and finished the movie, but I think when they finished the movie, they hid the film.
The movie got changed into something else. And I would love to finish that film.
I like, I'm like... Have you ever made an attempt? I've thought about it.
And reading the script over the weekend, I started seriously thinking about it. Well, somebody should recut this or somebody should.
So it just be a matter of recutting it with narration. Well, yes.
And there's obviously missing. There would be missing footage now.
There. Things have been removed.
And is that accessible? No. Not unless you crack it open and there's no way anybody would.
Well, here's the thing. They would never.
But hold on. Here's the thing.
Now we have AI. Well, I know.
You're one step ahead of me. I'm one step ahead of me.
I've actually been experimenting a lot with AI. The newer versions are pretty stunning.
I've been working on runway lately, which is... The curve is insane.
Like the exponential curve of improvement. I'm literally, as I'm working on things, I'll be talking to the guys and, you know, I'll be saying, well, it'd be nice to be able to move the camera.
Okay, we got that tool on Tuesday. We're going to give that to you.
And so it's like literally whatever you think you can't do, ask us because we probably will be able to do it in a couple of days.

And so it's advancing so fast and so rapidly that I, without telling you, Quentin, I made a little claymation version of you.

And I have them talking and kind of funny looking.

I'm sure a claymation version of me would be funny. But it's a claymation version of both you and me.
How bizarre that something that would have cost like hundreds of millions of dollars. Like if you wanted to do a film, like a pixel type, you know, one of those crazy movies where you have all this like insane animation.
That shit took forever. The best work that I've seen of it lately.
it was the first time i've been kind of ignoring ai and like well i know what it is it's like form completion with visuals and i get it i understand what it is and we'll see we'll see but i like tactile i like tactile and i do but i worked on beowulf i made beowulf with robert zemeckis okay and like that was a big you puppet tune-type CGI thing. That was a fun movie.
Motion capture. Yeah, my original plan for that movie, because I was going to direct it myself, was to make it in Iceland, under $10 million, just really dirty.
I wanted it to be like an early Terry Gilliam film, like Jabberwocky. Like Jabberwocky.
That was actually the one Neil and I were thinking about when Neil Gaiman, my co-writer on that film. And the movie ended up getting made much bigger.
Suddenly it was like whatever budget I had was probably our craft service budget. Nothing like making a hundred million dollar movie.
It's like sushi every day, you know, champagne, fly the plane to England, you know, whatever you want. It's like, uh, it's crazy, but that was definitely not the movie I had planned on making.
However, um, when we made it like, and it turned into this big performance capture thing, it was fun like working with zemeckis and and he's such a like an excitable like creative genius like he's and even before you were able to do stuff like what he was doing in that film he was like constantly taking you know like when he made contact oh we'll take that off of Jodie Foster. And I like that eyebrow thing she does.
And so put that on this take. And so he was like messing with her face and doing all sorts of performance stuff.
And even when you go back to his earliest film, I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand is almost a visual trick.
You know, having the Beatles there but not be there. And even though he's not using computer graphics, I think he's just a really super inventive guy.
And it was so much fun making the movie with him because we were in what year was that? Inventing technologies. That was 2010.
But I think the movie came out. Beowulf.
Let's watch them in that. I want to remember what it looks like.
It looks probably like a video game pre-cut scene at this point. That's what's crazy, right? I've thought about taking Beowulf, importing it into my system, and then just painting over it.
Let's fucking go, Roger. Let's fucking go.
Which, by the way, you can do easily. Yeah.
Easily. I thought about fixing.
So let me see what this looks like with the Beowulf. Oh, geez.
Yeah. I mean, it looks like a video game cut scene at this point.
Yeah, but it was kind of cool because everybody looked like that, not just the monster. That was kind of cool about it.
I mean, the difference is that this was actual performances. And so we could take Ray Winstone and have him...
Ray Winstone doesn't look like that. He looks a little heftier.
Cuts his own fucking arm off. Cuts my arm off.
Cut my own arm off. It's funny because our original script was much more modest than this, but then Zemeckis was like, okay, boys, it costs a million dollars a minute.
Do whatever you want. He stabs a dragon in the heart.
Oh, no. This movie is kind of a, I mean, it's a little, it's an interesting experience what happened to me on this film, if you don't mind.
Yeah, go ahead. So I was going to make this movie myself.
I had set it up initially at Image Movers with Zemeckis Producing, and then it fell out, and the rights kind of reverted back to me. I had to cover the turnaround on it, but the rights reverted back to me, and I was going to go make the movie myself for nothing.
And I was trying to set it up.

And it was really I was broke at the time and I was not going to make money. And I had to cover the turnaround expenses myself on the on the film, which were considerable.
But I wanted to make the movie really bad. And I was working on Silent Hill, this other movie I wrote.
And I suddenly started getting calls. And it was like the producer of Polar Express, this guy Steve Bing, wanted to buy the script.
He's like, I want to buy it for Zemeckis. And I said, ah, too little, too late.
I'm making it now. And I kept saying no.
And I was working on this film in Canada, and I'm just trying to finish it. And every hour I'm getting a call from agents at CA and they're like,

Jack Rapke,

right?

Yeah,

it was Jack.

Actually.

Yeah,

it was Jack.

How did you know it was Jack?

Did I tell you that?

Well,

no,

because he,

well,

he was,

he was Zemeckis's agent and became Zemeckis's producing partner.

And,

um,

and so I was getting a call.

And he's the guy who gets shit done.

Yeah,

he is the guy who gets shit done.

Well,

I was like,

you know,

no,

no,

no.

And,

you know,

no, I won't. I'm doing it myself.
No, no. done.
Well, I was like, you know, no, no, no. And, you know, no, I won't.

I'm doing it myself.

No, no.

And Steve Bing, and I said, if another agent calls me, I'm firing the agency.

And they're like, will you at least meet with the producer?

And so I went ahead and I meet with them.

And he says, listen, if I don't make this film with Zemeckis, with Bob, I'm going to miss the moment.

I'm going to lose the movie.

It's going to be over.

Just what's your price?

Just tell me what's your price.

And I said, I don't have a price.

I'll see have a price. I don't work like that.
He said, listen, everybody's got a price. I said, well, I may have one, but I'm not going to tell you.
And he said, look, why don't you just tell me? Just discourage me. So I said, OK, you want me to discourage you? And so I started like making shit up.
I need this. I want this I want that I want this I want this I tried to come up with how much money had anybody ever made on a script and let's add some money to that I went over the top he's well Roger that is and I had grown a beard to make the movie and like grew my hair long like a Viking to learn about you know why Vikings had beards etc all that kind of stuff i'm making the movie i'm a viking he said well roger that is uh really discouraging but we have a deal and i was like and i was like uh well okay and i i started driving home and i started like i'd never done anything i'd never done something for money before i'd always done it because i for passion and then the money came and this is the first time in my life that I'd never done anything.
I'd never done something for money before. I'd always done it because I, for passion.
And then the money came. And this was the first time in my life that I'd ever made a choice based on money.
This titanic amount of money. And I was, understand, broke.
And I went home and I cried. And then the check came and nothing dries tears like money.
And then Zemeckis invited me into the process, which was really great of him. He really wanted me and Neil to be at his side and collaborate with him.
And it was a fabulous experience. But to be honest, I was like, who am I now? What does it all mean? I just gave away something I'd wanted to do my entire life.
I've always been chasing this John Borman film, Excalibur. I think it's one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the Arthurian legends.
And if you watch Beowulf and Excalibur, they're very similar, actually, thematically. And so I was like, who am I now? What does it all mean? You know, I don't even care.
I don't even know if I want to make a movie anymore. You know, like, what do I have to tell now, now now that i've just completely sold out and then i was at a dinner and uh um a big dinner and i was driving home that night and i was giving uh somebody who was at the dinner a lift my wife was in the back seat of of the car and we were I told my daughter I was going to be home by midnight.
We lived in Ojai and it was dark. And I.
So I was speeding. I have a lead foot and I was speeding to get there without getting into the details of what happened.
There was I lost control of the car. There was another vehicle, but they fled the scene.
I lost control of the vehicle. I think my tire blew, but I was going into a ditch and I knew I was going into it into this deep ditch because it was right near my house, full of rocks and stuff.

And I knew if I go in there, we'll die.

And so I turned into the thing and then I turned away from it to try to – the car spun out.

And I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was like a cow pasture.

And I was like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen there?

Well, it was pretty bad.

There was a telephone pole.

And I hit the telephone pole.

My passenger took the impact and my wife was thrown from the car.

When I came to, all I could hear was the horn. My hearing is going to have glass in my mouth and I'm injured as well.
I climb out of the car and it's dark. It's really dark.

But somebody's already arrived, the XDA from Ventura County, who did all the drunk driving laws and put those on the books. And he was the first person on the scene.
I was right near the fire department. They showed up shortly afterwards.
But when I jumped out of the car, I came running around to see what happened. I saw my wife on the on the asphalt.
She'd been thrown from the vehicle. And I threw myself onto my knees on the pavement, and I found myself in that moment asking for the one thing that mattered, which was just life.
She looked dead. And I just, in that moment, I dug down, I begged her to come back to life.
And I just, I said, I will give anything for life, just in any form, I'll take it. And in that moment, she came back to life.
It it was like the life came back into her okay it was a completely fucked up scene my other my other passenger is dying in the car um or dead am i uh the the police are suddenly there and next thing i know i'm in jail and um and suddenly you know like suddenly I found myself in jail. And and suddenly, you know, like.

Suddenly I found myself in jail. I found myself guilty of manslaughter and and something that is absolutely irreversible happening, which is, you know, someone lost their life at my hand.
And so after that, I, you know, I ended up, I found myself in jail and doing time. And suddenly everything that had come was gone.
Like everything that I had made, gone. It all went, you know, out.
All that money you made, gone. All that, to the settlement.
I didn't have time to spend it.

I didn't have time to register that it was there

and it was gone.

Because it was like it was not real.

And then you find yourself in jail

and suddenly everything is gone.

Career is gone. Everybody stops calling.
It's over. Two hit films, doesn't matter.
It's all over. In fact, it was right in the middle of the publicity on Beowulf.
It was just toward the end of it. And it was the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me.
And I and I found myself then alone in jail, incarcerated, alone with my remorse and regret and and really getting existential about things. Really like coming to appreciate, you know, simple existence is the best thing there is.
People don't appreciate what we have. You don't appreciate it until it's gone.
And it can go like, first of all, we live in bodies of glass. My wife was horribly injured.
And it has been a decade to not just rebuild our lives, but for her to come back to health even. what it did though you know, for her to come back to health even.
What it did though, you know, as, as, because I would do anything to, to reverse that, to reverse what happened. I would give anything to do it.
And I don't say this lightly, but having said that, I'm kind of grateful as well. Because I was like asleep walking through life.
And it wasn't until that happened that I completely, like, it changed how I see everything. It was like my third eye opened up.
I don't view anything the same way. I, you know, once you've been incarcerated and you've been deprived of, of everything and you have a lot of time to think and be existential, you come out of that, at least I came out of that experience.
And, you know, I looked at a tree and I was like, OK, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. I hope I never not feel this way, this appreciation for a cloud.
You know, to be able, like when you're imprisoned, to be able to pet a cat, for example. It's so simple.
It's such a nothing thing, you think. Okay, to be able to pet an animal is like a gift.
The simplest things are gifts. When I was in jail, it was also a little bit like a comedy.
You know, you have people walking in circles and, you know, everybody's trying to control the outside and so you start really seeing human behavior up front i mean when i was in jail uh you know i'm there literally during the academy awards it's on the tv in the tank and i'm watching him win like for django i'mango so while Quentin is like at the height

of things I'm pretty much

at the bottom

watching through bars

and not only that but

Greg Shapiro who produced the rules of attraction

for me my producer

who came and visited me with Robin Wright

in the days that followed he won for Zero Dark Thirty

and so I'm like there

like

to be taken

and I'm going to right in the days that followed he won for zero dark 30 yeah and so i'm like they're like like to be taken from one point where you feel like you're at the top and you're like oh you think you're uh you think you understand things no i'm gonna take you and put you at the bottom but let me tell you something in that moment i was sitting on the asphalt my wife came back to life i immediately knew what i had to say as a filmmaker after that it was like whatever had whatever cynicism i had had you know uh about the movie and not making it

it just went away yeah it evaporated it evaporated um

Thank you. It just went away.
Evaporated, yeah. It evaporated.
It evaporated. And the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic that I had in jail, were like, I mean, you see things kind of for real.
When you see somebody, you know, get hanged by their celly in a cell. Or when you see, when you know that, you know, oh, that El Salvadorian MS-13 hitman guy, he's going to kill that gay dude.
He's going to kill him in the yard. I'll go lock myself in my cell.

Literally, I'll go lock myself in. You shut the door because you know shit is going to go down.
Jesus. And so, like, that was, like, every day.
And so, suddenly, it was, like, you know. And also, you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens.
And, and like John Langley,

uh, our customer from video archives ended up being like,

like when I,

like I said,

when I was in jail,

he loaned me money and he,

uh,

gave me my first job when I got out.

That was our customer who did that.

And so,

um,

like I value our customers. Like, and and and especially john and his family and maggie who i like it really is like i talk about john a lot but really maggie she was really my big champion i think and so um anyhow i uh um you know what it taught me actually, because I was a filmmaker and I was up my own ass most of the time.
But what it kind of taught me was, you know, be compassionate to other people because you might not know it, but they might be going through shit in their lives, you know, and God forbid it be something health related, which is almost out of your control. But, you know, people are suffering and people are struggling.
And I used to be a lot more cavalier about people and kind of fuck with people and and be forceful people and not really care as much. Now I'm acutely aware of of people and, you know, what they may be going through.
I think this is the best way to wrap this up. Perfect.
Gentlemen, thank you very much. This is an awesome conversation.
Really, really appreciate it. Thank you for letting us come back.
Three and a half hours just flew by. Thank you so much.
Oh, my God, I actually thought, Oh, I guess he's wrapping it up quick.

No,

I think it's three hours.

I thought it was like 90 minutes.

Three hours and 15 minutes at least.

I thought it was like 90 minutes.

No,

no,

there it is.

The Video Archives Podcast

on,

on Patreon.

Patreon.com.

Patreon.com slash video.

If you just look up

videoarchivespodcast.com,

it'll leave you there.

Beautiful. Thank you guys.
Appreciate you there. Beautiful.
Thank you, guys.

Appreciate it. Thank you.