Mm-hmm.

They know what to expect formally, which is that he kind of pushes against his own boundaries or inverts them or weaponizes them.

I mean, he's not just attentive to form, he kinda makes you, uh, aware of form.

But the tension here is that I think for the first time, give or take, he's making a movie about someone who is more famous than he is-

That's right.

And that Nathan is on the other side of it, and he is embedded with this family in a way where the family dynamics, they're not getting in the way, they're what he's living with.

And you sort of go, is this really about, you know, Theranos when this woman's about to go to jail and be away from her kids, and this father is gonna be looking after them.

To some extent, the celebrity and the notoriety falls away as much as it can.

I love The Dropout.

Alyssa, you just, you spoke, what you just said was so eloquent and so smart about the dynamic with Elizabeth and the new husband.

I mean, the new husband, Billy Evans, this is like the most, one of the most fascinating parts of the doc, like both complimentary-

Okay, play another documentary

And not just, not just what do you think, but like, "I'm making this doc, and oh, I wish I could just talk to her," or, "I wish I could go back to these moments," or, "I wish there was another angle I could take on what happens." And in a very kinda like Hardy Boys, you know, like, "Let's do a, let's do a-

What about the movies? What did you really respond to?

Well, I think I've said it on this pod before, and it's no less true for saying it over and over, which is you can have a very good time at TIFF if you pick and guess right.

And if you don't, or if you're running a particular beat, or if you're a glutton for punishment, you'll see bad movies.

It's just a law of averages.

There's like 280 of them, you know? So I, by and large, saw stuff that I thought was pretty good, but that's because I was trying to.

for work purposes and for personal purposes.

I wasn't, you know, wandering into...

Okay.

Hmm

... is it took this really lean, kinda mean-spirited story of revenge, and I don't know how much of it's the writer or the director, but, like, The, The Revenant is very, like, sentimental and politically correct for a movie set and about what it is, where it's like, well, he has a good reason to kill this guy.

I mean, the reason that the DiCaprio character has to go after Tom Hardy in the movie is very different than in the original story, and we constantly see these scenes that show what a good guy he is along the way.

I feel like that violence and that depravity sit very much at odds with how sentimental this guy's writing is.

Not the novel, the-

[laughs]

Like, that's the, that's the, the test for, for, for, for, for sociopathy is do you like the Road Runner? So the great compliment I can give to this movie is it actually redeems the Road Runner just slightly in a way that breaks those Looney Tunes rules.

You know, there's a lot of debate over whether the creators of the Road Runner and Coyote actually wrote rules about the cartoons.

I'm curious what your relationship is like with the Coen Brothers filmography before you wrote it and after, after spending, I mean, how long did you work on the book?

I think that book took about a year or a year now.

It was the first of these director monographs I did for a publisher called Abrams.

And we were kind of finding the form.

I mean, not that the ones on Anderson, on Paul Thomas Anderson, they're not like the Coen books book, but once we figured that one out, we kind of had like a pipeline of how to, do them and i have to say not to play favorites or anything i mean each of those books is a labor of love and the filmmakers are really fascinating but i mean in terms of pure affection and you know childhood influence i mean the coens are are first among equals with those filmmakers and they're very important to me too just in in in general i think that you know like you i would have been a teenager when you know things like the huck sucker proxy came out and You know, very susceptible to the rhetoric around a movie like Fargo.

Not that it's not a great movie, but just the rhetoric around it's like, here's an independent film or this is what, you know, kind of like secret Americana looks like.

It's really, you know, seductive stuff when you're a teenager.

I read the description of it.

[laughs] You know what I mean? I don't know if I could chart that in quite such clear terms, but it does feel like that's what's happening with Jane.

Well, there's these blocks.

There's creative block, there's a social anxiety, there's romantic block, there's this kind of, you know, sexual frustration that, you know, has to be kind of, you know, surmounted.

I mean, there's a degree to which this movie is playing a game of wish fulfillment.

That plays out in a lot of the set pieces, you know? Like commandeering the movies that you used to watch, and now you get to make them, and they can be how you want and about what you want, or you project yourself inside of them, or you can kind of pilot this fictional serial killer as a way to get rid of all the people who are frustrating you in your, in your life.

Or, you know, the movie star that you've been crushing on your whole life, you know, is like inviting you in to, to hang out.

But, you know, and we'll get there, but what's interesting is when you say you identified with the films and so did I, it's tricky because on the one hand, there is no shortage of movies that are made for the kind of cinephile demographic and which flatter them and cater to them.

Ev- we all know what you are.

Yeah.

We put money in these movies.

This is the only way we will show them, is we are literally trying to get our own money back from it.

I mean, some movies do really well.

I mean, Nirvana and, and Blue Heron, like, they've played consistently in actual movie theaters.

You can split those definitions very finely about, like, what an actual movie theater is and, like, what's mainstream and, and what's art house, but it's hard to get that kinda sustained traction.

And I always think about this idea of movies breaking containment, which is like, what might a normal person go see on a Tuesday? And I know normal is a tough word.

Mm.

It's good.

But it's a, but it's a movie that spiritually resides kind of in, like, the after school specials, or not even after school specials, the, like, Lifetime movies or TV movies of the '80s.

There's a very particular film, which I still haven't seen, called Kate's Secret, which is a kind of, you know, diary of a bulimic housewife or an anorexic housewife film.

And the real balancing act to this movie, which while it's funny I find quite serious, Maddie's Secret, is how do you conjure up that kind of movie, that kind of, like, social problem movie or that sort of, you know, psychological problem movie, talk about how it tends to sensationalize and flatten these issues, show that you kinda love that sort of movie, and that for John Early at least it's quite formative, and sort of just make it? Like, make it pretty straight ahead while kinda making fun of it at the same time.

That's very tricky.

And on top of that, John plays the lead part in a drag performance which he says is inspired by actors like Divine, who, you know, acted for John Waters.

I think that, you know, John Waters is part of this movie's DNA, certainly because John Early has said it so many times, a movie like Showgirls is part of this movie's DNA.

And he, he pulls it off.

Does that make sense, Adam?

Yeah, and I can't remember the last time Mel Brooks played in repertory in Toronto, whereas they play 2001, you know, uh, they play 2001 all the time.

I'm thinking of including Blazing Saddles, and of course I'm doing this fall on satire.

I really am, like not just saying it 'cause we're on the pod, because the intersection in that movie of, you know, like Jewish humor and Black characters and re-evaluating the Western, I mean, at the time that was such a conversation piece.

piece.And I don't know how you would talk about it now, the question of, like, are those his jokes to make? Are those his words to use? Good questions, by the way, and fair questions.

And it's not like people are only asking them for the first time now, but they asked them differently when that movie came up.

If you read the reviews of Blazing Saddles then, it was very...

[laughs]

[laughs]

... that's putting the money on screen while still hiding it a little bit.

But I mean, in Operation Avalanche, the thing I think of as a Canadian viewer, you know, I've, I've, I've written about this, uh, before when that movie came out, he doesn't just break into NASA.

I mean, he films himself, Matt, at one point as Matt Johnson shaking hands with Stanley Kubrick, which is not just a good joke about Johns- about Kubrick faking the moon landing, that's a really forward thing for a Canadian filmmaker to do.

We have this kind of cinematic inferiority complex here where it's like we either sneak into the American pipeline or we assume that Americans don't care.

A couple years ago, uh, you know, they did a list of the best Canadian films of all time, and 'cause they were worried people wouldn't read it, they put, like, Titanic on it.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's good and it's funny, but it's not nice, you know? And, uh, it's very interesting to c- consider with each iteration of Nirvana the Band The Show, uh, as they're getting more self-reflexive is they're also kind of gentrifying themselves, too, because they're recreating their early 20s and this cheap Jack way of doing it with more and more resource.