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You know, of all the people that I've profiled for the magazine, Julio's one of those people where I just don't think his mind works quite like anyone else's.

His comedy is not a straightforward set up, joke, set up, joke.

It's more like he's a guest lecturer at an art school or something, and he's laying out his very particular way of seeing the world.

He's very design and visual oriented.

He's very in tune with the inner life of objects.

His new HBO special, which comes out this month, is called Color Theories, and the way he sees colors is quite different from the way that you and I see colors.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... and you're a filmmaker who shoots the natural world beautifully.

Anyone who's seen, uh, your first, uh, three features were all in or in part set in the American West, in South Dakota specifically.

Hamnet is set in, uh, Elizabethan England, and you-

Leesa.com, promo code New Yorker.

This is Ira Glass of This American Life.

Do you know our show? Okay.

Well, either way, I'm gonna tell you about it.

Michael, same question to you.

First of all, I need to acknowledge the circumstances under which I saw this movie.

I ended up going to a screening in Saugerties, New York, at the beautiful 118-year-old Orpheum Theater run by Upstate Films.

Shout out Upstate Films.

This was a screening on a Friday night that was opened with a set by a live Elvis impersonator.

Oh, my God.

So everyone walked in.

And I'm just curious what you made of it in the context of, you know, is there something like deeply authentic and necessary happening here? Or is there something kind of queasy making and potentially exploitative? I'm not sure I was able to make up my mind, so I'm very curious to talk to you in June about it.

campaign didn't

go well, right? That's the example that immediately came to mind because, you know, this was Bradley Cooper's movie that he directed and starred in.

So he cast himself as, you know, the maestro, Leonard Bernstein, and then started appearing everywhere.

talking about how he had been obsessed with conducting as a child.

And he spent months and months and months watching the Philharmonic and learning how to conduct.

And he had the prosthetic nose.

And it started getting on people's nerves that he seemed to be too thirsty, like too try hard, this stuff.

It's this weird kind of split personality thing I feel like I'm expecting of actors now when they get out there in front of a film.

campaign didn't

go well, right? That's the example that immediately came to mind because, you know, this was Bradley Cooper's movie that he directed and starred in.

So he cast himself as, you know, the maestro, Leonard Bernstein, and then started appearing everywhere.

talking about how he had been obsessed with conducting as a child.

And he spent months and months and months watching the Philharmonic and learning how to conduct.

And he had the prosthetic nose.

And it started getting on people's nerves that he seemed to be too thirsty, like too try hard, this stuff.

It's this weird kind of split personality thing I feel like I'm expecting of actors now when they get out there in front of a film.

(laughs) Is there something lost when this is the new play?

You know, I have one or two thoughts about this, as someone who writes long magazine profiles of (laughs) you know, actors and directors at The New Yorker.

Like, listen, they still want it.

They still want publicity in magazines.

It's just that they have to do a, uh, it, it's...

There used to be a limited number of things you could do.

Like, you could be on the cover of Vanity Fair.

Um, this marketing campaign didn't go well, right? (laughs)

Can you kind of talk about how that has played out?

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess it's just that the dwarfism is not a monolith.

Obviously, Peter Dietrich has been saying that some actresses dwarfism and then seem to find this really retrograde.

All this stuff can find... that dwarves might be on top of them, and that would be great, but the CGI, wow.

I feel like they said yes to all their ideas in brainstorming maybe.

[laughs] And then there are ladies who come out who have, like, piña colada headdresses and little, like, half coconuts.

There's the, the r- there's a row of cocktail tables at the back with sort of, like, classic, uh, you know, Hollywood stars, and they, they...

Merv starts introducing them, and they do little things.

Like Cyd Charisse, the classic dancer, does a tango, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are in fringed co- uh, cowboy costumes, and, like, Vincent Price is there, and Dorothy Lamour.

And then, uh, they kind of each have a moment, and then Merv tells Snow White, "Meet your blind date, Rob Lowe."

Yeah.

And then his friends, you know, I'll just, I wanna just end with this quote from his friend Nicky Haskell.Who, uh, you know, after he died, everyone kind of realized that, like, there was this metaphorical death in 1990, in, in, in 1989, and then he sort of lived another 10 years, but before he had died of cancer, he kind of ...