Titanic, Tattoos & Trade Wars

This episode is brought to you by Sky, which as great TV lovers, we are delighted about.

It's fantastic news.

I'll be honest though, I'm also a fan of Netflix, of Disney Plus, of iPlayer, and this is supposed to be an advert for Sky.

Well, the good thing about Sky is that it's not just good for Sky shows, it's basically an all-you-can-eat buffet for TV lovers.

Mmm, buffet.

If you've got something specific in mind.

What about that thing you were talking about the other day?

Memento Mori.

It's a one-off drama.

It's on BBC iPlayer if you like that sort of thing, based on the novel by Muriel Spark.

That's niche.

So it's got everything, the niche stuff, the mainstream stuff.

It's got all the apps you like.

If you want to go straight to watching the best that TV has to offer without the fuss of searching, Sky is a game changer.

Just go to sky.com to find out more.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Rest.

Packages by Expedia.

You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

We were made to easily bundle your trip.

Expedia.

Made to travel.

Flight inclusive packages are at all protected.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, convenient installation options, and the best selection of Bridgestone tires.

Go to TireRack.com to see their Bridgestone test results, tire ratings, and reviews.

And be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireAct.com, the way tire buying should be.

We're not going to make a penny from it.

No.

Actually, why would you make money from it?

Hold on a minute.

You're trying to muscle in on this?

You bounced the idea off me.

That's the thing.

Yeah, I bounced off.

That's the thing.

I like what you build your idea.

And And you said that's a terrible idea.

Well, that isn't, yeah, and you push back.

Anyway, people are also people telling us all sorts of things that they go to the cinema for.

Boring partner is.

It's a thing.

In boxing and in business development, I understand.

If Rory

had an idea...

I don't always start it like that.

Do you think for one second that Alistair Campbell will get 8% of anything Rory ever thought of?

I've thought of a number of answers to this question and I can't say any of them out loud.

Shall I just go with I don't know, Richard?

Yeah, good one.

The Odeon on Lothian Road in Edinburgh, they use it for jury selection.

Do they actually?

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Isn't that came from one of our listeners?

Wow.

Diversifying cinemas, how interesting.

It's just a room for the seats.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Is it?

Or is it all those wonderful people out there in the dark, Richard?

It's a theatre of dreams, but also really good for jury selection.

Now, last week, we also, we were talking about dust jackets.

Yes.

And you said, oh, by the way, I wish someone would ask why are books rectangular?

Because I have an answer to it.

Yeah.

So we said if anyone wants their name read out on this podcast, just write in why the hell are books rectangular.

We asked you to write.

We tried to make it sound like an action movie.

It is fair to say an awful lot of people wrote that exactly that question.

So we had to go with the first person who sent that in.

So Johnty Smith has a question for you, Marina.

Regarding.

And John T.

Smith's question is, would you mind explaining to me why the hell books are rectangles?

Johnny, thank you so much.

Now, they are rectangles.

And

we'll talk about the ratio of the rectangles.

Can I say, by the way, my answer to that would be, well, because of course they are.

So I assume there's something more than that.

Okay, yeah.

But the ratio is interesting.

All this.

Anyway, actually, papyrus was square, right?

Was it papyrus?

Yes, papyrus was square.

Greek scrolls, there were scrolls, so that's a very, I mean, it is a rectangle.

It's a long rectangle.

It's a very long rectangle, and it's a different proportion.

It's not the 5-8 proportion or the 2-3 proportions that you might see.

Well, what's a papyrus?

The scrolls are made of papyrus, weren't they?

What?

Scrolls were made of papyrus.

Yes, scrolls were made of papyrus.

When it was in sheets, it was in squares, but when Greek scrolls, it depends on which culture or which civilization you're talking about.

Egyptian scrolls, they read left to right, and

it was in columns down the scroll.

So by the time you get to parchment, where they, which is actually

pays off.

What's parchment?

Parchment's got

animal skin in it, and therefore the stretching, the particular means they used to stretch it, made it more oblong, okay?

If you're making this up, it's very impressive.

It sounds like I'm winning.

But reading is that rectangles are the best way to organise both reading and writing.

And the golden, do you know about the golden ratio as a thing?

That's a facial thing.

It's called phi or sometimes phi in mathematics, P-H-I.

That's the Greek letter that's used to symbolize it.

And it's roughly speaking, it's two to three.

Okay, that's roughly speaking is a golden ratio.

And it's sort of obsessed mathematical thinkers.

It's all connected with Fibonacci numbers.

You see it in lots of things.

Architecture, Le Cobusier was very, like, was fascinated by the golden ratio.

Salvador Dali's Last Supper

all conforms in these kind of obscure ways to the golden ratio.

Also, though, music and things like posters, widescreen TVs.

Anyway, there's...

The other way around.

But the other way around, but there's a reason it sort of works.

Anyway, but there are obviously practical reasons.

If it's wider than it is tall.

This is amazing.

John T, thank you so much for asking this question.

But if it's wider than it is tall, then there's too much pressure on the spine.

Yeah, I've lost a lot of copies of Good Night Moon to this exact problem.

And I taped a lot of them up, and this is what happens.

Good night, Good Night Moon.

Mainly, it's like ergonomic.

Who is reading them?

We need our hands like this.

Blah, blah.

And then...

And our hands are rectangles, really.

In some cases.

In terms of the pressure that can be put on them.

Quite right.

That's a rectangular depression.

But it's the movement of the eyes.

Now, I am conscious of...

talking to you about this because you'll say to me well my eyes don't move in this way but in general people's eyes it's called circading.

After a certain length.

It's like a TED talk.

It's silly.

It's like a disorganised TED talk.

Quite right.

Okay.

After a certain length of line, your eye gets lost and it finds it hard to reconnect with the start of the new line, but also too short and your eye is distracted by the different line lengths.

And you sometimes get that thing.

Do you ever get that thing where someone's, for some reason you reply to certain emails and for whatever reason, the system that you've replied to means that there's a really, really long email and you have to kind of scroll along the bottom.

It's like, what the hell is happening here?

There is a certain length that is, and I'm saying this for

people without your condition, but the eye can hook around the most easily and not flick around.

There's a certain form of mathematical, not just satisfaction, but rationality, which is the golden ratio, which books are generally in the golden ratio.

All of that has to work, and that's why we have our golden ratio books.

Are you happy with that, John T?

Glad you asked?

So, books are in the golden ratio.

Okay, I love it.

Look, and lots of things are, and actually, the golden ratio is such an interesting thing to read about.

It's this kind of harmonious proportions, and it's very, very interesting to delve into.

I'm sure the golden ratio is also I can order from it on my delivery.

Yeah, I think so.

It really does sound like that, doesn't it?

Question for you, Richard, from Scott about the trade war.

Rumours are floating about that China could ban American movies.

What would the impact be to Hollywood?

It would be substantial.

The impact on Hollywood is the truth.

Certainly, it's not an impact if you're in an industry that's not in the best shape anyway, not an impact that you would welcome.

In China, they go and see a lot of movies.

It's still a huge deal in China to see movies.

Most of it is domestic, but it's 17 billion is the cumulative box office in China any given year.

It was a point where they were building 600 movie theatres a week.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Now, almost all of them being used to show episodes of television programmes.

17 billion.

So we will make this happen, won't you?

Yeah, we'll do it.

We will make it happen.

Even if I have to relocate to China.

To put that into perspective, 17 billion.

The American box office is about 9 billion, something like that.

So it's almost double the size of US box office.

So an awful lot of people in China watch movies.

As I say, most of it is domestic, but allowed films that go over there.

They had a quota.

They have a quota system.

But the quota is not functioning the same way it used to.

In the older days, it mattered so much that you got your movie into China so much.

And now, less so.

I mean, I'm just...

So the Minecraft movie, I don't know what the Minecraft movie probably took, which was one of the movies they've allowed in because they don't allow lots and lots of movies in.

That I think took 20 million.

Of course, it's not nothing.

It's about a fifth of what the US box office was this particular week.

Yeah, and it's one of those things.

It would cost, if you want to put an exact figure on it, it would cost about half a billion dollars.

to the US movie industry.

It's not an enormous amount, but it's also not nothing when you think about the state the industry is in at the moment.

So if China were to ban movies now, what China have actually said was we will limit them appropriately is the language they use.

We will limit them appropriately.

And appropriately is a word often used in Chinese diplomacy which sort of means anything.

It sort of means we can completely roll back from this and not ban anything at all or we could put a complete blanket ban.

I parent like this in time.

This is exactly how I parent.

It could mean anything.

Yeah, I'm going to limit your putting appropriately.

This is a ridiculous holding position that

allows me to do anything in the future.

They have definitely said, they've definitely spoken about limiting American movies.

It might not happen at all.

It might also cost them half a billion dollars, but it's certainly money that Hollywood wouldn't want to lose.

But at the moment, listen, we'll see where that trade will go.

It would be fairly easy for the Chinese to target American movies.

Hollywood was so happy about Trump, weren't they?

Lots of those executives thought, oh, we'll get to do all the M ⁇ A stuff that we think is really essential for us to be able to survive.

Whereas, like, now, like, Disney are like, sorry, we need a lot of steel for our parks and cruises.

A lot.

Yeah.

We're all in the entertainment business.

We are all in the ad business.

And therefore, you've just messed up the ad.

But anyone who's in the entertainment business, basically, at those studios, are in the ad business.

And he's just made it incredibly difficult for them.

So, yeah, if you imagine you're one of those execs as well, you've got these two things which you think, well, look, if Trump gets in, it's good for us because this is going to be great at a corporate level.

You know, there is going to be more money.

And so Trump gets in.

And so now they're thinking, oh, it's actually really bad for us economically.

And they think about they've still got the thing of every single person who works for them pretty much 95% of people who work for them are absolutely furious about Trump getting in as well so they're like oh god now I'm getting it from both sides like everybody hates me no one's helping me out here we weep for them do we not we yeah we also cry for them yeah it's quite a soft target but the Chinese do like having Western boobies coming into the country it gives them sort of you know an illusion that there is some freedom of choice and that's quite quite a powerful thing but yeah um appropriately if you ever you hear that uh in a chinese context that that as you say

yeah that's essentially let's talk about it when your mum gets home in terms of theme parks which we talked about on uh on tuesday's show you know there's there's the big disney theme parks in in shanghai and uh and and in hong kong and obviously if you were to lose disney ip that would be a huge deal that i don't think is at risk if that's at risk then the trade war has got uh we've got bigger problems it feels like there are there are accommodations to be made there a question for you Marina, from Stephen Coyne, which I don't think is crypto, but you never know.

I investigate.

This is Stephen Coyne.

Stephen Coyne, yeah.

That's, oh my god, my Stephen Coin has gone crazy.

We're riding this to the moon.

That is quite something.

Stephen says, how much work goes into a future series of a show during the first series production?

For example, did the writing team of the franchise think about what would happen after the cliffhanger of season one?

Anything I've ever been involved with, yes, your thinking ahead.

By the way, you could throw that all in the air and I'll come to that in a minute.

Jesse Armstrong doing succession.

He knew roughly where it was was going.

And I mean, you know, it's kind of up there in the title, but he knew roughly where it was going.

Obviously, every season you think, how are we turning this wheel this time?

And anything can get thrown out.

Because it's tricky on the series one thing, because every time you launch a series one, you're like, I hope this runs forever and ever and ever.

And that thing of when you go, well, let's work out what would happen in series two.

But in some ways, it feels like bad luck.

It absolutely feels like sort of bad juju.

And you're like, oh my God, I just, I don't want to say anything.

And you have have to constantly catch yourself the way you're talking about it.

I mean, I've had ideas for like pilots that I was already thinking what could happen that would completely upend everything in season two.

In the franchise, yeah, we definitely had a full idea of not a full idea, but roughly where it was going.

Then again, you know, I was remembering right in the middle of the night when I was thinking about this particular question, right back at the start of development, I remember Sam Mandis and Amanda Unichi, one of the things we were saying is, oh, maybe it could be on a different type of movie.

Maybe then be doing a children's franchise or a kind of like muscle car franchise or whatever it is.

You know,

there were all sorts of different ways you could do it.

I would say that in general,

every time, and I know people who are working on some of the big, big, successful US dramas at the moment, you get to the end of a season, nothing is set in stone.

You don't then say, if sometimes, okay, if there's source material like there was in sort of Game of Thrones or whatever, then you sort of know what's going to happen.

Equally, everything, in my experience, and in most people, it can be back on the table.

And if you suddenly, if things haven't worked, one of the things they often say to you is, what about a time time jump?

Because let's leave this mess of your first season behind and kind of try and put it on a different footing for whatever reason.

There's lots of different things you can do.

And nothing, I think, most writers would say to you, nothing can be off the table.

And, you know, the way it goes, the way it's received,

if you have any off, if you're lucky enough to have any sort of off season, you might think, oh, hang on, I just maybe the world, the currents of the age are going a different way.

And you suddenly think, oh, this would be a fun way to take it.

And what's best is when you can always say, oh, I

let's do this totally different thing.

Having said that, I do think you're always thinking to some extent in a path, even if you're not voicing it out loud because you don't want to jinx it.

Yeah, you're setting things up.

You're thinking characters who are slightly underused in a season, you know, and when you're filming, everyone goes, oh my God, we absolutely love this character.

And all the writers are like, oh, we want to write more for that character.

That character needs a bigger arc in season two.

And then you start maybe in the last episode, you introduce them a little bit more.

Or people talk about configurations.

Oh, we haven't seen, especially when you get into long running, well you haven't seen much of those two together because what you're trying to say is you know these two random two who we don't really often you know what would happen if we throw them together and we give them a story that has to play out you know it gives you different dynamics it's always the most fun thing in books is when you've got two characters who've never had a scene together you just think oh my god this would be fun um i remember on the first thursday murder club i obviously wanted to write a series but it's not in your gift as you know uh and so i left enough open-ended but i didn't do anything that you know you know sometimes when you watch something you'll read something and and at the end you go oh it's there's a sequel is there because there's something unanswered or undone.

And I made sure I didn't do any of that just in case I was caught by my own humorist.

So you have to sort of hide the fact that you want a sequel as well.

When I did Boys Unlimited, the sitcom, and the first series came out in

1998, and that

was a shoe-in for a second series.

It didn't happen, spoiler alert.

But we'd started some of the pre-preparation for the next series.

series, which was going to be a girl band competing with the boy band of Boys Unlimited.

There's so many things you want to see.

But also because it was coming out in 1999, they were going to do a boy band version of 1999 by Prince with a double A-side with a boy band version of Old Lang Syne,

which was the thing I was most looking forward to putting together.

That's so funny.

I love that.

Obviously, I love all these lost things that never happen.

Yeah, exactly.

But there are, it's interesting, things that had first series.

There are so many lost storylines and lost characters

who are never coming back.

Perhaps there's a show in that.

And the franchise from being the unloved thing, they became the sort of tentpole and that was going to be much more about,

you know, you get everything you wish for and you get all the money and all the technocranes and all the things that the family is.

Oh, is that going to be season two of the franchise?

It's suddenly it's the biggest thing.

Suddenly

you are the tentpole, you're the sort of whatever.

So we thought that would give us something different.

But equally, you never know.

You know, if you had got a second thing, you might have gone back and said, oh, let's change this totally.

It's always good to be able to have the scope to totally just rethink it.

Although, you know, people, you know, you could could see in the first season of Lost, and there are other examples of it, where they throw everything.

They just say, you know what, we're just going to throw everything at this.

And you think we can work out the problems in season two, and sometimes it takes a while.

So, yeah, sometimes you set things up, which are never, ever going to be seen ever again.

And sometimes you just go, please, God, give us a second series.

And I'm aware there's an absolutely gaping logic flaw here somewhere that people need us to fix.

But that's a problem for next year's me.

Yeah.

Shall we go to a break and hope we've got a part two of this episode?

Let's hope we have a sequel to this.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the narrative arc in the second half.

This episode is brought to you by Sky, where you can watch the highly anticipated second season of the award-winning The Last of Us.

Richards, I am very excited that The Last of Us is back on our screens.

I watched the entire first series and it was emotional.

It was bleak.

It was brilliant TV.

It follows Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, who is tasked with escorting Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, who's a teenage girl.

She's immune to a deadly infection, and he has to transport her across a post-apocalyptic America in which they face these infected clickers and much more.

And season two, I think, picks up.

Five years later, they're living in a community of survivors.

Time jump.

Oh, time jump.

It's probably five years since they filmed the first one.

So it's fair enough, isn't it?

From what I hear, my nerves, my nerves, the second season sounds like it's going to be even more intense.

There's conflict brewing everywhere, not just on the outside with the infected and all the different factions among them, them, but inside between Joel and Ellie too.

Yes, if you're into emotional gut punches, high-stakes world building and brilliant performances, this show is for you.

Watch the brand new series of the award-winning The Last of Us available on Sky now.

Welcome back, everybody.

Welcome back.

After a time jump, it's now five years later.

Yes, can I ask a question?

Why are books all now square?

That's something that's happened, isn't it?

Like in the last 18 months or so, after the end of the trade war.

Well, as the CEO of TED Talks, which is, as you know, enjoyed a huge revival under my leadership.

And by the way, lovely to have you in so many of my cinemas.

Can I ask you something about actors with tattoos?

Because Paul would like to know.

Tattoos.

People have been very, very lax with surnames.

It's almost like they don't want you to do a four-minute riff and say, right, I'm putting you in my book as a sort of, you know, homicidal snooker player in the next.

Yeah.

Hold on a minute.

Actually, hang on a second.

That's a great idea.

A Homicidal snooker player.

Why have you got a snooker cue?

Because I play snooker.

It's nothing more sinister than that.

Yeah, why have you got a long case carrying something?

But listen, I always find Stephen Coyne.

He gave his surname.

He got away scot-free.

All right.

Well, Paul hasn't.

Let's imagine he's got a surname.

Okay.

Yeah.

Paul Scottfrey is a double barrel.

Paul Scottfrey.

Paul Scottfrey.

Baul Scottfrey says, tattoos are now incredibly common, particularly with younger adults.

Aren't they?

Would an actor with prominent tattoos be automatically excluded from some roles?

If they were otherwise perfect for the role, but they had a huge clateau across their chest, which might require shirtless scenes, would casting directors still consider the actor or decide that the makeup editing is not worth it?

Yeah, it's an interesting question because all young people have tattoos.

You can't watch a football match now, the sleeves on people.

It's unbelievable.

Actors are told not to have tattoos.

Agents will say if you can avoid you know, huge body art, then it's probably best because you can put makeup over them.

But obviously the more tattoos you have, have if you're going to be in Bridgerton and you've got you know sleeves and back just covered in tattoos then

your costume sort of could cover it up but what if you've got tattoos on your hands there's all sorts of roles where it would Chris Evans has absolutely loads but you know you're Chris Evans and you're in a Marvel movie but what you're buying yourself is an extra hour in the chair every single day exactly that so you will find that actors have fewer tattoos than say footballers or normal members of the human race civilians let's call them civilians let's call them.

Angelina Jolie has got a lot.

Sometimes her character, Fox, which is in the Wanted movie, her tattoos become part of her character and part of her plot, not the Billy Bob Thornton tattoo.

But the interesting thing with tattoos is that the other difficult issue is they are actually copyrighted.

Anytime you see a tattoo, it belongs to the artist who tattooed that on you.

So actually showing.

Is that true?

I did not know that.

It is.

Well, the Hangover got in trouble.

Ed Helms wakes up with that Mike Tyson face tattoo, and the hangover producers were sued there's a guy called victor whitmill who created that tattoo and the hangover producers had to settle out of court with victories

yeah exactly so yeah it's one of those things where you will find that actors have fewer tattoos than other people it is an enormous pain i guess you could take them out with cgi but if you're an actor you are discouraged from having um too many tattoos which you know in the music business and the football business you are not discouraged you want to be the u.s secretary of defense though just you know know keep getting I can't yeah the sleeves the crusades tattoos yeah I mean I think if you were a time traveler from the 1970s you crest landed in 2025 of all the things that would surprise you and there would be an awful lot I bet the main thing would be watching the football and seeing that literally every single person has arms full of tattoos you'd be like whoa I'm not sure I genuinely think it would be that the US Defense Secretary's got a neck tattoo or something I mean no I'm sorry I just I think if you're from that like sort of post-war like Eisenhower generation, you're like, sorry, now what?

You've got a what now?

You've got a what now?

By the way, I was say in future, if you do send in just your first name, I will provide a surname for you.

I just, you get more of an idea of someone if you get the surname as well, don't you?

Richard will fit you with a surname, whether you wish to be or not.

I will retrofit it.

It'll be a cut and shut.

It might be deeply, it might be completely inappropriate, but listen, that's the risk you take.

Osmond nomenclature chop shop.

If you don't want to be grafted onto the body of something completely different did you say that the old osmond nomentlichlature did you say the old osman nomentlklature

it's not the repair shop is it it's not as catchy wow nomenclature is a hard thing to say the the nomentclich the nomenclature chop ah try saying everyone at home try saying nomenclature chop shop you did amazingly

That's a skill you didn't know you had.

Let's move on.

Yeah.

Okay, we move on to someone who has provided us with a surname and what a surname as well.

Richard Herring, the wonderful podcaster and comedian.

He asks this.

Hi guys, longtime listener, first time caller, Richard Herring here.

On Instagram, I keep on seeing clips of films and sitcoms where they allege that a bit was improvised during filming, but they always seem to be well captured by the film crew.

Are any of them actual examples of total spontaneity in the moment?

I accept some that may have been improvised in rehearsals, but given the little I know about filming stuff, none of the ones I've seen seem to be real.

Did Anniston really not know a dummy was about to be thrown downstairs?

I mean, that's about the best one I can think of.

Did Johnny Depp improvise Falling Down Some Steps, even though it's filmed from about 16 angles?

They are relentless and I think quite offensive to the actors and writers

who are often accused of corpsing when they're just laughing in character.

Or whatever.

Anyway, love the show, Steve.

Keep up the good work.

This is me, Richard Herring.

Goodbye.

Okay, well, I do think that some of the those drive me mad, by the way.

Instagram's full of people are saying they didn't even know the cameras were on, or these two actors went completely off script.

Yes, you can always tell.

If there's something like a single-camera sitcom, I don't know, something like The Office, then you can see how they get it.

If there's lots of cameras, then of course not.

It's much harder.

It reminds me of that bit in broadcast news.

Do you remember where he interviews a rape victim and then he's shown crying on the footage?

And then she works out that actually they only had one camera, so he's faked his tears because they only had, and that's a sort of plot point there.

But there is a really big tradition, as we've talked about before, in American comedy, of improv.

And certain people are just, they'll do all the proper takes and they'll do the

coverage and everything.

And then for their own coverage, they'll say, can we do a loose one?

Can we do a loose take?

And someone like Kieran Kulkin's succession was absolutely brilliant at improvising.

They ended up losing lots of his things.

There's a bit in community, you know, Arbis trying to work out whether Nicholas Cage is a good or a bad actor.

And it's, and they knew that he was going to do this big sort of monologue at the end.

It was set up, but they didn't know what he was going to say.

It's absolutely, go and watch that clip.

It's absolutely brilliant.

They didn't know, and he didn't know.

He was so in-depth into like the Nicolas Cage thing at that time.

There's a scene in season three, I think, of the US Office where Michael's accidentally outed Oscar within the office as being gay.

There's a sort of, you know, Denimon of it all.

And then he actually ends up kissing Oscar, which it wasn't at all scripted.

It's completely improvised.

If you look, because remember it's single camera, so you're able to see some of the cast break character completely because it's just so ridiculous it's a sort of a brilliant sort of iconic scene a really famous one it ended up being part of a cold open in friends billy crystal and robin williams they had a movie called like father's day which was for some engagement to do with it or whatever they were on the lot and the producers the writers saw them and they went onto the friend set and they said will you do a bit and they're on the sofa and they're these two friends and they completely i mean they are obviously yeah genuine comic geniuses and they improvise this extraordinary thing about this guy who's telling.

And Monica's trying to tell an anecdote, I think.

I think this is the sorry, if memory says, if Monica's trying to tell some anecdote about something that happened to her, they get so sucked into these two guys having the conversation where the guy he's saying, my wife's sleeping with someone else, and I think it's a, you know, the gynecologist.

And then it becomes clear that actually the person you're sleeping with is the other one.

And it becomes this thing, and then they break up their friendship and then they leave.

And then Monica's like, I can't remember what I was going to say.

But that's a simple shot.

Again, what you're saying, Richard, you know, there's bits right, yes, if if there's a camera at the top of the stairs, maybe they did it in rehearsals, but then you knew it was going to happen.

But that is a sort of fairly simple frame shot of the sofa of these two people interacting.

So it is possible.

So yes, lots of times they kind of come at the end in a sort of loose take, often those kind of great improvised moments.

When you know you've got the shot, so you've got it, you know, so you've got the storyline, you know, you've got the script as was written, and then you try extra things.

But often on Instagram, there are those things where people say, oh, the two actors just completely changed what was happening.

And then, you know, they'll go somewhere and there'll be a fire outside you think well they obviously that's not improvised every mark

there are three cameras on this and also every writer who's ever lived when they're going yeah you know that's that was the script we wrote pretty much you know not everybody is steve core yeah and like you were talking about jason mamoa doing improv in the minecraft movie not all actors can do it well i mean you know audiences aren't hating it well they're suddenly turning out for it who knows who knows how much of that script he improvised but one of my favorite things in the world is just to watch you know and the american office bloopers i mean you can just use spend forever.

They're all absolutely brilliant, and they love to do it like that.

And, you know, actually, American actors in UK sitcoms will often ask for takes like that at the end when they know they've got everything because it's so in their blood and their bones and their sort of training that they just want to do improv takes at the end.

Yeah, and also to try and make each other laugh.

There's lots in, you know, the Anchorman outtakes where you've got to do a list or you've got to give an example of something.

And every single take, Will Ferrer will give a different example of the thing just to try and break everybody else.

And I'll watch those all day you want a name because here's a name oh great and by the way i'm going to mispronounce it i'm so sorry talon aslanian or aslanian either way i love it that's a good name yeah that's also a question i'd be i'd be happy if i came up with that i'd really love to know how cinemas actually play the physical films are they downloaded onto a system has someone plugged in a memory stick how do cinemas stop employees sending themselves a copy to watch at home it used to be of course that cinemas, you know, took reels of film and which were incredibly long and incredibly heavy.

Each reel would be about 2,000 feet worth of film.

So the average film would weigh about 30 kilograms.

Titanic, which is three hours and 15 minutes long, that was 17 reels.

So it means the theatrical release was over three miles of film.

So every single cinema showing that has got three miles of film that they have to spool up and re-spool and that doesn't happen anymore.

Everything is now digital.

What you actually get is a thing called a DCP, which is a digital cinema package the distributors and the studios put together.

That contains all the video, audio, all the subtitles, any metadata you need.

So that gets sent to individual cinemas, this DCP, and Tannin's question of can you steal it?

Firstly, every single one is unique to the cinema itself.

So they know exactly what copy has gone to exactly what cinema.

The password is unique to that cinema as well.

So if anything ever turns up elsewhere, they'll know.

It is also time-locked.

So if a distributor is giving a film to a cinema for three weeks, at the end of three weeks, it disappears.

It no longer exists.

You can't just keep it on your system or anything like that.

So they're very, very good at understanding what pirates would like to do.

Very easy to get a job in a cinema and steal a movie.

And so they make it impossible to do.

So yeah, it is all digital.

It gets downloaded.

You've got a password, but it is unique.

Your copy of it is completely marked.

Everyone knows exactly where it came from.

Everyone knows exactly who's had access to it.

And yeah, it disappears in a puff of smoke after it.

Because people used to steal reels of movies all the time.

Wow.

It's self-destruct after watching or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

The Return of the Jedi, that was stolen at Gunpoint during transit.

Yeah, Return of the Jedi.

Stolen at gunpoint.

Yeah, and someone tried to sell that.

I mean, that's a weird thing to sell.

I mean, Pasolini is the 120 Days of Sodom.

That was stolen.

He was murdered, of course, Pasolini, around the time that that was stolen as well.

And he was investigating it.

There's lots of other theories as to why he was murdered, but that's certainly one of them.

That took a dark turn, didn't it?

Yes, it did.

Italian.

Yeah, well, you were just asking about digital password protection, and suddenly we're on brutal murders of Italian film directors.

That's the magic of theatres.

That's what happens if you give us a surname.

Right, I think that is about us for today, but we will be back with a bonus episode about the island of Dr.

Moreau.

It's going to be a two-parter because it's that troubled.

It's one of the craziest stories in the history of cinema.

It's crazy.

It's absolutely mad.

Other than that, if you're not signed up to our club, therestisentertainment.com, we will see you as usual next Tuesday.

See you next Tuesday.

Well, that wraps up another episode of The Wrestlers Entertainment, brought to you by our friends at Sky.

Now, what have you got on your must-watch list at the moment, Ray?

At the moment, White Lotus enjoying the latest season on the table.

Oh, let's watch a treat.

Oh my god, it's incredible.

It's so good.

A dark treat.

A dark treat.

The visuals are really great, and with your Skyglass TV, you'll be able to enjoy it all in its 4K glory.

And also, the built-in sound bar means you can also listen to it in its full, whatever the sound version of 4K glory is.

But it sounds immense, I'll say that.

It is indeed.

It brings everything to life and it really gives that cinema experience at home.

It feels like Jason Isaacs is in your house.

Like sometimes I go downstairs, I'm like, Jason Isaacs, come on, man.

Cup of tea, please.

But he's not there.

No.

But for our listeners who want to experience this with Skyglass 2, visit sky.com to find out more.

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them.

With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into

sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/slash special offer.