And, and it's just the story of these guys that he's sent off, including Ethan Hawke and a couple of others, um, walking this stuff out of there and trying not to die at every turn.

[laughs] It's such a, it's a great premise.

And I, I love, like, logistics problems of, like, "Okay, cool.

You got the gold.

Now how do you get this shit over the mountain?" [laughs]

Yeah.

[laughs] You know? And he's this just super, you know, not even a criminal genius.

He's just this really smart dude surrounded by a bunch of ignorant peckerwoods.

Yeah.

It's just me and those tables and chairs.

It's taken me a lifetime to get right here.

And it might be a lifetime till I come home, my dear.

I've come home empty-handed to this empty, lonesome place.

Life gets long without you, and I know I've been replaced.

I still change my clothes, and I wash my hair.

[upbeat country music]

oh that's fine

yeah okay I have to tell people when we're playing live, stop.

I have to tell them, okay, it's over now.

We're not coming back.

It's over.

But yeah, no, I mean, I spent, as you know, you listen to Boots and Saddle.

I've gone on this journey over the last couple of years.

Northern report, I think,

So I know it's kind of a broad, vague question, but as someone who has seen just about everything, in a way I'm not, where do you land on sort of where we're at this summer at the movies, from both a commercial and an artistic perspective? there's a

lot of good movies out.

Right.

Which is nice.

I mean, every week there's something to see.

And some weeks you can kind of just, you have a pick of two or three really terrific movies.

And the nice thing is the sure things are bombing, like you're talking about.

Before we move out of the current movies and go back to something from the 70s, is there anything that you have seen this summer that you were especially taken by that you feel like... hasn't caught hold, people aren't talking about, people should seek out?

I

mean, it's that, that great.

And that, Like, Harry Dean is so cool in it.

He's just this old man.

Like, this is when he became a movie star.

He's, like, 58 years old in a suit surrounded by punks with piercings.

It's strange, too, how, like, cool Emilio Estevez is.

Ooh, okay.

Oh, my God.

No, there's just so much joy, and, and, you know, 'cause it's ultimately, I mean, it's a movie about a community, and it's how everyone pulls together to sort of help each other.

And they're all outcasts and everyone's kinda fucked up, and they've got all these tragic histories of their own.

And then when the, the shit comes down in this movie, they're there for each other, and I find that one of the most moving things you can watch, when people, people rising to the occasion, you know?

[laughs]

[laughs] And it really is something out of this old folktale.

Like, I re- I, I assumed it was based on a book, and it was not.

I thought it would be, you know, this hundred-year-old story.

It's like-

So it's just exhausting, and I, and I sense...

Whenever the comic book guys, too, get involved, I feel like...

Remember when James Cameron got criticized for being all gruff when the, the Tita- the Titanic submersible guys all...

The thing imploded and James Cameron went on TV, he's like, "Oh yeah, they're all dead at the bottom of the ocean." And he's-

So it's-

Like, I had this very dedicated hater who used to just hound me all the time, and I would always like respond and like quote tweet him and dunk on him and stuff.

And then my old editor, my first editor, she just messaged me.

It's so fun

... 'cause it's so, it has this childishly [laughs] mean sense of humor that it's like, [laughs] it's the best of that old Spielberg and, like, the Poltergeist/Temple of Doom era, where he just, you know, used to love destroying things.

And there, there's a, there's a giddiness with this, just [laughs] the way people get gobbled up.

[laughs] There's great wit to the staging, I think.

I mean, Mitchell made It Follows, you know, and he really knows how to use backgrounds.

Um-

It is interesting too, 'cause usually in these kinda movies, like when you have like a dad who like lost his job and stuff like he has, and he drinks, like this is the point where Dad's gonna reassert his place in the patriarch.

Like they even have Anne Hathaway say at one point, like, "Listen to your father," and stuff.

I am not lying to you.

Why would I wanna hurt you? Why? Why? Why? [laughs]

You're like, "I don't understand."

From his first appearance at that dinner there, like, I don't understand.

I, I mean, I don't get the innocence project in the beginning, like, okay, well, our, our big person here accidentally put this innocent guy away, so [laughs] let's have him be our spokesperson from now on.

[laughs]

That was when I started to really love the movies.

Like, I li- I really admired Dunkirk, but, like, Tenet was the first one that I was like, "Oh, I'm in the groove on this." And then Oppenheimer blew me away and, um, and so did this.

But he, he's really raised the bar for thoughtfulness in these kind of films.

Oh, yeah

... 'cause he'd never seen it, and was like, "This is what we're going for." [laughs] And it's true, 'cause there's, there's that very, it's scaled back.

There's no pageantry, and it's a very tactile real world where you have these incredibly eerie and frightening indications of the divine.

And, you know, the gods are terrifying in both films.

Had you ever done anything like this before?

I hadn't, but I was angered by it.

There are 400,000 American veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

We thought this was disrespectful, particularly coming from a man who'd called Americans who had volunteered and served, wore the uniform in various wars, suckers and losers.

So we took this step.

His commission signed off on the arch in May, and another key approval could come as early as September for what some opponents, like Sean Burns, have dubbed the Arc de Trump.

We have several other iconic monuments to presidents, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson.

They were not built at the orders or direction of any of those three men.

Oh.

No, I thought it was...

I feel like he like synthesized a Sundance movie.

The, I, I, I can tell why he gets ahead in these things, because it's always like in I, Tonya, like here's my favorite scenes from Martin Scorsese movies, and like, you know, [laughs] all of his movies are, are collections of scenes from other movies.

And like with Dumb Money, it's like, "I'm gonna make like The Social Network, and if it sucked, and..."

[laughs]

While we like wait for them to wake up so the end of the movie can happen.

[laughs] Like just...

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, um...

And then, like, he disappeared for a long time.

I thought he'd, like, quit acting or something had happened.

And it's always the same with these guys.

I look them up, and they've been on TV shows for, like, nine years that I never watched.

Like when Patrick Wilson played too many creeps in a row, and Aaron Eckhart, and all of a sudden they were like, you know what? We gotta change it up a little.