Tasha Robinson | The Verge

For better and worse, Terminator: Dark Fate is a throwback for the franchise

2019-11-01T11:42:06-04:00

The Terminator franchise has always had a fundamental problem: past the hit film that kicked off the story, nothing that happened in the series really mattered. The timeline got complicated, screenwriters monkeyed with the story mechanics, directors brought new special effects into the battle to keep the action fresh. And yet every Terminator story basically assumed the same thing: that a sentient, murderous AI called Skynet would rise, design a series of powerful kill-bots called Terminators, largely wipe out the human race, then send Terminators back in time to kill off anyone who might have a prominent part in resisting the genocide.

Every movie or TV episode in the series was a desperate battle for survival, but because of the perceived demand for sequels, that survival never seemed to change anything for anyone — not for the human race, which was still doomed, and not for Skynet, which never learned to mix up its strategies a little in the interest of maybe winning a fight for once.

Arguably, Skynet’s relentless dedication to trying the same plan over and over, no matter how often it failed, was a feature rather than a bug. From the beginning, with 1984’s The Terminator, the series was primarily about one thing: the merciless, pyrrhic single-mindedness a machine soldier could bring to its missions. Terminators chasing humans throughout the franchise lost limbs, had their skin torn or burned off, and eventually got cantaloupe-sized holes blown in their heads every few scenes, but they still kept implacably coming.

The franchise has followed the same principle: no matter what the protagonists do to fight the future, Skynet keeps rising, and Terminators keep traveling back in time on murder missions. The first movie made it seem like it was possible to win against a Terminator and against fate. But the relentless pileup of sequels made it clear that the fight was never anything more than an exhausting delaying action, and the best humanity could hope for was to keep a few key personnel alive long enough to ensure humanity would only mostly die off.

At first blush, the new Terminator: Dark Fate seems like an actual step forward for the human race. This film is a direct sequel to 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it dismisses 2003’s Terminator 3, 2009’s Terminator Salvation, 2015’s Terminator Genisys, and the 2008 television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles as alternate-timeline stories, all successfully prevented by freedom fighters Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton in Terminator and T2) and her son John. At the end of T2, Sarah and John seemed to have changed the timeline in a way that would prevent the rise of Skynet and avert global Armageddon. The sequels suggested otherwise, but now, Deadpool director Tim Miller and a team of six writers (including Cameron with a story credit) are rebooting to suggest that the Connors did at least have some worthwhile effect on the future.

The problem is that this new future leads to the exact same place as the old one. Skynet doesn’t emerge, but in its place is a different AI named Legion, which still develops Terminators and still sends them back in time to take out key resistance leaders. This time, the main target is Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), a perfectly ordinary Mexican factory worker who’s understandably baffled when a shape-changing killer robot (played by Gabriel Luna) attacks her and her brother at work and a grim white woman named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) charges in to rescue them. Before long, Sarah Connor (Hamilton, emerging from semi-retirement at age 62) joins the fight, and they all wind up on the run together.

Dark Fate’s creative team certainly hit on the most crowd-pleasing, nostalgia-courting gambit with this installment in the franchise. By bringing back Hamilton, clumsily reintegrating original Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger, and peppering the script with “I’ll be back” jokes and other references, they’re courting original viewers and encouraging them to bring their kids into the franchise fold. They also mostly focus on action rather than exposition, which keeps the story moving briskly. But in the process, they lose a lot of opportunity to consider what the Terminator franchise means or to give this installment any sort of unique flavor.

Most notably, they take the time to clarify that Armageddon has been delayed and that Legion, which came later, isn’t Skynet. But they don’t bother to make one distant human-hating AI distinctive from the other. There’s no sense of motive or meaning for Legion or even a hint of who created it, beyond “the military.” Both it and the latest pursing Terminator are entirely generic enemies, vaguely ginned-up tech threats meant to enable a long string of car chases, gunfights, and explosions.

What flavor Dark Fate has mostly come from its casting and setting. Certainly, it’s a new twist to have Latinx characters take such a prominent role in the film and to focus on a mostly female central cast. Grace, Sarah, and Dani each represent different brands of feminine toughness: Grace is a military vet with a tough, self-sacrificing mindset, while Sarah is a world-weary, seen-it-all smartass who’s turned trauma into an aggressive cynicism she wears like ablative armor. Dani, initially the kind of naïve ingenue who has to be physically hauled out of every new battle because she’s frozen with grief or terror, rapidly grows a spine and a war-specific morality as she decides she isn’t willing to leave any more people behind to die, no matter the cost.

The other fresh aspect of Dark Fate is the latest Terminator model, which comes with some new tech options designed to make fights more unpredictable. Given the choice between Terminator’s rigid, weighty antagonist and T2’s sleek, fluid one, Dark Fate’s team says “Why not both?” Luna makes a surprisingly personable Terminator, not quite as soulful as Garret Dillahunt in Sarah Connor Chronicles, but certainly more charismatic and human than most of the people who’ve played the series’s killer robots. He’s also blandly terrifying in kill mode.

But by closely emulating past Terminator models, Miller and company run into the same major problem those films had: they can be extremely repetitive, with a glowering kill-machine charging across the screen as the protagonists blast it with everything they have, or flee through a series of increasingly improbable and dangerous scenarios. Dark Fate’s combat sequences vary. Some, like the factory fight and a nerve-wracking sequence in a Mexican-American border facility, are staged clearly and cleanly, with an emphasis on hand-to-hand action and the price of physical contact with a Terminator.

Others are packed with CGI blurs and muddy action and are hard to follow in even the most basic “who’s where, and are they dead?” kind of way. And when Dark Fate does deign to explain what’s going on, it delivers its exposition in a self-important, hushed, clumsy way, as if audiences should be astonished by the most basic plot revelations. In particular, Dark Fate handles the question of why Dani is important to the future as if it’s a brilliant, ground-breaking twist, instead of the most obvious thing possible. The script’s self-important, back-patting, “Women can be warriors too!” attitude around that plot point matches very oddly with its frankness everywhere else about how Hamilton and Davis handle their fights.

But at least the human factor in Dark Fate is strong, probably the strongest this series has been since Sarah Connor Chronicles. Hamilton overplays the scenes where she drops her guard to talk about John’s fate and her response, but as a takes-no-guff heroine who treats everyone like a nuisance, she’s a pitch-perfect veteran action hero. And Davis aces the combination of human vulnerability and machine implacability that other, very conceptually different protector-types have brought to this series. Even Schwarzenegger, deliberately reverting to his ’80s lack of expressiveness, brings a kind of appealing dignity to his role.

And that dignity is important in a series that can feel like it’s endlessly, despairingly spinning its wheels, forcing its characters to fight the same wearying battle a thousand times over without making any progress. Dark Fate certainly makes it clear that the best they can currently hope for is to keep Dani alive a little longer while writing off the rest of humanity. Past Terminator movies — the ones now brutally retconned out of existence — varied the formula by moving into the future. Dark Fate, for better and worse, jumps back to the franchise’s heyday and tries to recapture the glory days. For the most part, it succeeds, but only for people who really enjoy seeing this same battle for stasis play out over and over again.

‘It was a learning curve for everyone’: Robert Eggers on The Lighthouse’s tech experiments

2019-10-18T13:01:13-04:00

Robert Eggers’ new black-and-white arthouse drama The Lighthouse is the kind of film that’s just about impossible for a studio to market. It’s nominally a horror film, set in the brutal isolation of a remote, storm-wracked coastal lighthouse in the 1890s. But it’s hard to say what kind of horror film — Eggers and his brother and co-writer Max Eggers deliberately keep the details ambiguous. It centers on an older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) who takes on a young, initially reticent apprentice (Robert Pattinson) who eventually turns belligerent. As tensions rise between them, they deal with events that might be hallucinations, or an assault by the supernatural. It’s the kind of film that deeply frustrates conventional horror fans who just want a clear and present monster to show up and say boo.

But the easiest way to market it is to say “It’s the second film from Robert Eggers.” Eggers’ debut movie, The Witch, raised similar frustrations with some genre fans because of its slow-burn tension and lack of conventional scares. But for a certain breed of cinema fans, it was a stunning project — a beautifully realized period piece, impeccably written and acted, with highly controlled design that spoke to a filmmaker obsessed with getting the details right. That same care went into The Lighthouse: Eggers’ team built the lighthouse and other buildings in the film for maximum control over their setting, and obsessed over the details of cameras and lenses to give the film its unusual square silent-film aspect ratio (1.19:1) and vivid black-and-white cinematography. At Austin’s Fantastic Fest, where The Lighthouse previewed at a secret screening, I sat down with Eggers to talk about working with ancient lenses, vicious weather, actors with widely varying sensibilities, and deliberate ambiguity.

At the Fantastic Fest screening Q&A, you said you developed an entire camera language for this film. What went into it? What did you want to get out of it?

Jarin [Blaschke, the cinematographer] and I worked very closely together on developing this. It was our intention to tell the story through Rob’s eyes in the beginning, and the end shots are our objective director point of view. From the shot where Rob watches the lighthouse-tender disappear into the mist, up until the third-to-last shot of the movie, it’s from his perspective.

Now, you may not experience that as an audience the whole time. I hope you do. But when Jarin and I were deciding where to place the camera, we were thinking about how Rob was experiencing this moment. There are a couple scenes from Willem’s point of view, but only rarely. And then — it’s not like the least amount of cuts is somehow better, but we’re trying to get to something very essential, so we’d start out with a scene we were shooting from four angles, and get it down to two or three. Sometimes shot / reverse-shot is the best way to do things, but I’ve never shot a scene with traditional coverage, and probably won’t.

You can build a sense of momentum in the scene when you do a long oner. It captures a kind of energy if it’s done right. And certainly there are things about the cinematic language of this movie that are referencing old cinema. Not necessarily with any specific films in mind, but the handmade feeling, the way the camera operating is sometimes a bit off. We talked about how big the gear-head in Fritz Lang’s camera was — it wasn’t in good shape, and it shows in his films.

There’s a shot fairly early in the film where Pattison is moving toward the camera in the water, and it looks like a very early silent picture, particularly with the square aspect ratio. What did you want out of the silent-era feel?

I’m not trying to trick anybody into thinking this is an old movie. Our lighting is just not how anyone would have made a film back then. But by evoking the feeling of an early sound film, it more easily places the audience in the past. In the late ’20s and early ’30s in Europe, there was a little bit of a lighthouse genre, with a couple of French directors filming things in Brittany about the maritime community there. And in the early ’20s, there were some silent films, with Rin Tin Tin and a lighthouse [1924’s The Lighthouse by the Sea], and a silent film with a girl and an old man in a lighthouse [1924’s Captain January]. Shirley Temple made the color and sound version later. Somehow setting lighthouse stories in this era just feels right.

You’re using one camera lens from 1912, and others from the 1930s. How did you acquire those? What did you get out of them?

We got them from Panavision. Jarin has a good relationship with Panavision, and they know he’s into all this weird stuff. So when they’re in their dusty closets and they find something strange, they tend to let Jarin know about it. We had a zoom lens that we use for one shot that nobody knows what the hell it is. I think it — not unconsciously, but subtly evokes certain responses the audience wouldn’t be aware of. There are certain ways in which the whites bloom, and that makes it feel like an older movie. Creating an atmosphere is just the sum of all these tiny, tiny details, like making sure the buttons on the uniforms are accurate to the period, and the cutlery and the dirt under their fingernails is right. The little aberrations on these old lenses, the sound design, it all just builds to creating an atmosphere that you can buy into, and hopefully be immersed in.

Part of the atmosphere is the sense of impending madness, because of the threat of isolation and superstition. But because you’re dealing with madness explicitly from the start, the film feels ambiguous. We don’t know whether this is a fantasy or a psychological thriller.

Good!

So that ambiguity was key to the story?

Yeah! My brother and I worked really hard in the writing to answer all the questions for ourselves, but then to create all these misdirects for the audience. There are a few heavy-handed signposts — it’s bad luck to kill a sea bird — and we couldn’t be more obvious with the juvenile boom up the lighthouse to the Mary Poppins weathervane. But at other times, there are very important lines of dialogue that pass fleetingly, and if you aren’t there to grab it, you’re thrown off-kilter. That’s intentional! I don’t know if it’s successful, but we worked on it.

Was there any complication with retrofitting those old lenses for modern cameras?

Yeah, Panavision rehoused all the lenses for us, and that took a bit of work. The gear remotes for focus pulling, there were a lot of issues. We broke a lot of rain-deflectors in the weather. Eddy McInnis, our awesome focus-puller, was like — the rain’s coming, and he’s got a flashlight in his mouth, and he’s like, [Yells] “I’m trying to jam together three fucking eras of fucking camera equipment, all this bullshit! Raaarrr!” [Laughs] Good times.

When you talked at the Q&A about the terrible weather throughout the film mostly being real, my first thought was, how did you keep your lenses dry and clear?

Yeah as I said, we broke a lot of rain deflectors, and there were a lot of takes we couldn’t use because the lens was fogged. Take after take after take… Rob had to walk into the Atlantic Ocean like 25 times, because the lens kept fogging on that shot. Yup!

You’re drawing dialogue from contemporary sources, like you did with The Witch. What was the process like, stitching those old journals together into the story?

With The Witch, I started with other people’s words a lot, to build scenes. That was not the case here. Mostly, I was trying to translate what I was after. Defoe has a couple of sentences here and there that are completely intact from Sarah Orne Jewett’s sailors and sea captains. But generally, my brother and I developed a sort of thesaurus for ourselves. There are nautical dictionaries that were useful, and we’d come across things where we’d say “That’s a great phrase, we’ve gotta use that.” Like when Willem’s log becomes important to the story, that was from my research. I found a lighthouse keeper saying nasty things about his assistant, and used some of that. Once we got into the swing of it, Willem was so fun to write — I had to sit down with him to cut a lot of his dialogue out of the script before we went to camera, because I just couldn’t stop writing dialogue for that character. It was fun, but I’d gone far too far.

You said in the Q&A that Dafoe and Pattison have radically different rehearsal and acting styles. How did they approach the material?

Everyone needs something different. I’m speaking to you probably slightly differently than I spoke to the last people who were in this room. You’re always calibrating yourself for what other people need. Honestly, neither of them needs a whole lot. They’re very talented actors, and I cast them because I knew they could do this. But I need certain things. Both of them choose to take risks in the films they make, and the directors they work with, and they knew they’d have to relinquish some of themselves to my approach for the film to possibly succeed. It could still fail, but if they didn’t work on the terms I needed to work, there was no chance of succeeding.

There are certain things I do that Willem likes, and things I did that he doesn’t like, and same with Rob. Jarin and I needed the actors to rehearse, to know their blocking ahead of time, so the camera movement wouldn’t feel artificial. Willem comes from theater, and he’s used to rehearsal, and he was happy to engage with that. Whereas Rob really hates rehearsal, and he didn’t really feel comfortable. It wasn’t as if I exploited that in a Kubrickian evil way, but… you know, Rob’s character is uncomfortable and out of place too, so that only helped us in the end.

One of the film’s most striking shots has Willem Dafoe delivering a speech while lying in water with dirt in his mouth. What was it like shooting that scene? How did you manage?

Willem was not a happy camper. He was really in a terrible mood and we couldn’t do too many takes of that one. That water under him, if you notice it, it looks like just a nice texture. But he was lying in ice-cold water on top of everything else he has to endure in that scene. And we shot it on day two. But Willem Dafoe is Willem Dafoe, so he did it, and I’m just a lucky man.

We’ve talked before about how The Witch evokes a modern, relevant fear of female power. Do you see a similar contemporary resonance in The Lighthouse?

If if there wasn’t, I don’t think anyone would like the movie. You know, if it’s so obscure that only someone in the 1890s is gonna get and like and understand and enjoy what I’m doing, I’ve got a fucking problem! But I didn’t set out to make a feminist film when I made The Witch, that’s just sort of what happened. And similarly, with this film, I see it through a similar lens — people like to talk about tough, toxic masculinity in this film. As I said last night, and again in the fucking press notes, “Nothing good happens when two men are alone in a giant phallus.” Really, what else is supposed to happen in there, except what happens here?

You built the lighthouse and outbuildings for the film because you couldn’t find anything that met your needs. How did you find that control helpful?

The sets were designed to work with the aspect ratio. The furniture had to be built to accommodate the aspect ratio — the kitchen table needed to be a certain size where we could get a two-shot on a 50mm lens without blowing the walls out. And the interior of the lighthouse tower — I’m going to give away my secrets here, but we had to be able to move walls, because that is an eight-foot diameter space, and you can’t fit an actor and a camera in eight-foot space and do anything with them.

This was at least a little bit inspired by a real historical case of two men with the same name tending a lighthouse. How much did you draw from that history?

Just that. And the younger man had a sordid past, and was known for being violent, and the men got into a lot of rows in the lighthouse. So I used that as well. But the ending of that true story — I just don’t know how true it is, because the end of it is like a folk tale, or something out of Edgar Allan Poe. The old guy dies of a heart attack, and the young guy’s afraid he’s going to be accused of murdering him. So he ties the body to the side of the lighthouse to somehow tell people that there’s a problem. I know, “What?!” And then the corpse of the old man keeps tapping on the window.

You spoke at the Q&A about using orthochromatic film, which I had to look up. Why was that important to you?

They don’t they don’t make orthochromatic motion picture film anymore. So we used Double-X, which is basically the only 35mm black-and-white negative that you can easily get. But we tested some other film stocks. Kodak was entertaining the idea of making some stocks they make on 16, making them on 35 for us. We couldn’t afford to do it. But this is the stock we preferred, because it is has a more aggressive grain structure. And we used a filter to create more of an orthochromatic look. If we went with true orthochromatic, we would have used a deep blue filter. But we already needed so much more light to get exposure with the the Double-X that that we used a cyan filter. So it wasn’t as aggressively orthochromatic as the film stock of early cinema. But no one is used to working with a format that requires that much light these days. So it was a learning curve for everyone.

The Lighthouse opens in theaters in limited release on October 18th, 2019, with a wide release beginning October 25th.

In the Tall Grass director Vincenzo Natali doesn’t know if Stephen King read his script

2019-10-09T16:30:39-04:00

Vincenzo Natali is the kind of director who makes the cult movie-steeped audiences at Austin’s annual Fantastic Fest swoon. He isn’t a household name, but his distinctive, creative low-budget genre movies have earned him a strong reputation among the kind of people who can list off a dozen Dario Argento movies without checking the internet. Natali’s 1997 indie movie Cube is a particular case in point: a low-budget Canadian science fiction film about a group of strangers who wake up trapped in a prison shaped like a seemingly endless maze of cube-shaped rooms. His 2013 movie Haunter takes a similarly claustrophobic approach to a very different story, as a dead girl (Abigail Breslin) haunting a house she can’t escape begins dealing with the weird supernatural phenomena around her. Natali got to work on a larger canvas in 2009 with Splice, a flawed but ambitious “dangers of science” movie starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as researchers who unwisely create a sentient animal-human hybrid, which naturally rebels against them.

Most recently, Natali has been working in television, directing episodes of Orphan Black, Hannibal, American Gods, and Westworld, among other shows. But he’s returned to filmmaking with the Netflix project In the Tall Grass, an adaptation of a novella co-written by Stephen King and King’s son, horror writer Joe Hill. The film expands significantly on the novella, which features a brother and sister venturing into a country field to try to save a child, then discovering the supernatural powers and malign intentions of the area that’s trapped him. When Natali came to 2019’s Fantastic Fest to premiere In the Tall Grass, I sat down with him to talk about directing his first Netflix film, why he keeps making movies about enclosed spaces and trapped people, why horror fans love practical effects, how technology is changing low-budget horror, and how he went about making grass scary.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

How did this project start? Did Netflix court you, or did you go to them?

My producing partner Steve Hoban and myself came to Netflix. I’ve had the script for quite a while, and there had been some discussion with them a few years prior, and it didn’t really take off. And then there was this moment where Stephen King suddenly entered the larger consciousness again, with the It film, and we felt like we should try again. At the same time, Netflix had just released two original Stephen King movies, which are both quite good: 1922 and Gerald’s Game. They were interested in doing another one, so they got this crazy script from us, and for some reason, they said yes.

Had you already negotiated the rights with King?

He has a pro forma deal that, as I understand it, everybody gets. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are within the industry. First, he has to approve you. Then you option his work for $1. So it’s very cheap, but you have to meet certain benchmarks in terms of writing the script, getting into the marketplace, and so on. And he has a lot of approval over the material and the casting, etc. But he and Joe Hill, his son who co-wrote this novella, are very deferential to the filmmakers. Never, not once, did they exercise that control. I was encouraged to just make my own movie. I think he understands that adaptation shouldn’t be literal. And it certainly couldn’t be in this case. So it was a real pleasure. They’re very collaborative and easy.

This is an extensive expansion from the original novella. Did you consult with them on it at all?

I just wrote the scripts and gave it to them, and they approved them. To be honest, I don’t even know if they read them or not. I grew up reading Stephen King, so it was actually terrifying for me to write the script and submit it knowing he might actually read it. But for whatever reason, they kept saying yes, and we kept going. I actually wanted to be very faithful to the story. But I knew I would have to expand upon the story. There’s dialogue from the story in the movie, it’s quite faithful, but where the story ends, the movie just keeps going. I was constantly dipping back into the story for details and elements, and I didn’t really invent characters or locations. It’s all there; it’s all latent in the original material.

It reminded me a fair bit of your films Cube and Haunter in that you’re extensively exploring a single nearly homogenous environment in expansive ways, finding all the possibilities. Horror requires isolation, but is there something specific that interests you in the theme of infinite variations on a specific isolated place?

I think it’s twofold. The highfalutin answer to that question is, I grew up in an apartment complex in Toronto, a city where it’s very cold, and you spend a lot of time indoors. The idea of isolation and containment — this is me psychoanalyzing myself — may be part of my psychological makeup. The less highfalutin answer is, I don’t have a lot of money to make my movies, so I have no choice but to tell stories that involve only a few characters and locations because that’s all I can afford.

But often, limitations are inspiring. I’m cognizant of that when I’m taking on these projects. I do think, as a filmmaker, there’s something exciting about it because it’s sort of like a symphony where you have a central theme, but you do variations. There’s a certain excitement in watching those kinds of films to see how the filmmaker can keep spinning those plates, and doing new variations on the same idea. It does give you license as a filmmaker to be more eccentric and explore unusual possibilities because you’ve already grounded the audience in a location. In the case of Tall Grass, I was very clear from the outset that we would present a real, believable, “normal” world. And then, gradually, as our characters enter this environment, we’d break it down, until, by the end of the movie, things are pretty surrealistic. There’s a visual progression and a filmic progression that follows it.

People keep describing the film as Lovecraftian, but that’s becoming an increasingly common label for any kind of uncanny horror. Is H.P. Lovecraft a specific inspiration for you? How do you feel about the urge to label so much horror as Lovecraftian?

I actually do see him as an influence, and I bet Stephen King and Joe Hill do, too. I certainly know Lovecraft had a big influence on Stephen King. In this case, we have a kind of Lovecraftian god that is, for lack of a better word, our central evil. And “Lovecraftian” makes sense because it’s ancient, and its existence likely predates mankind, which is a common tenet in Lovecraft’s work.

So I don’t resist the label in this case. What I think is really powerful about Lovecraft, and what makes him a difficult writer to adapt, is that he rarely has the reader confront precisely what is frightening in the story, and he rarely explains or describes it. He’ll only allude to it. It’s an enigmatic kind of horror. I find that really alluring, fascinating, and frightening. Partly, it’s because when you can’t see something, your imagination tends to fill in the blanks. But also, that’s our situation as human beings. We’re just dots, microbes living on this little rock. We have a tendency to think we’re the center of the universe, but we’re truly not. So the whole Lovecraftian notion that if we truly understood what was out there, we would go insane, I think that’s actually correct!

Stephen King specializes in making mundane things terrifying, but that’s harder to do in a visual medium. How did you approach making grass frightening and coming up with ways to escalate that fear?

To be honest, what you see of the field on-screen is what it’s like. If you were to walk in that field, it’s an unnerving experience, a little like swimming in the ocean. On a very primal level, you feel vulnerable. You can’t see two feet in front of you. If there was a predator in there, you wouldn’t know until it was too late. And the grass itself, I actually wish I’d made more of this in the movie. It’s serrated. It will cut you. It’s not a friendly organism to humans. There’s a little of that in the movie, but you hardly notice it. I wish there was more of it.

But I think really what it boils down to is presenting the grass as a character. It has agency and consciousness. And we anthropomorphize it, as opposed to it just being some inert, unaware thing. So you’re like Jonah in the whale, in a way. You’re stepping into an environment that’s also a living thing.

How did you work with the actors, especially about suspending their disbelief around scary grass?

As somebody who’s worked in this space before, I can tell you, it’s really important that the actors express their fear. Some actors are afraid to do that. Some really good actors, for whatever reason, do not have it within themselves to show fear. And if you don’t do that, the audience won’t be afraid, either. It just doesn’t work. So I made a point when we were casting the movie that the actors needed to do that, and they were also going to go through an emotionally and physically strenuous production, so they should be prepared.

Which they were! Laysla [De Oliveira], in particular, because of what her character has to go through, really gave a raw, unfiltered performance, and it has a huge impact on the film. She just let it all hang out. That’s not an easy thing to do, and I don’t think many people are necessarily capable of it. I would coach them, but there was a lot for them to work with. They were never standing in front of a green screen in a studio. They were always in an environment they could react to. I mean, Laysla got hypothermia while we were shooting, from the rain. It was physically taxing! But as painful as it was for her and the other actors, they were committed enough to use that pain to enhance their performances and make them feel real.

The overhead shots of the field, especially that opening shot, are one of the most impressive things in the film. Are those drone shots? Are they CGI enhanced?

I don’t want to say too much about how we made the film because I don’t want to take away from the experience of it. But I will say this that opening shot, the high angle over grass, was shot from a drone and augmented because the grass wasn’t that perfect. The grass naturally grows with paths and little clearings. You see a lot of that in the movie, but in that shot, we filled them all in, so it’s just this wall of green. But it’s all real grass. We didn’t have to do that much work on it.

With things like CGI and drones getting so much cheaper, is technology radically changing how you personally address low-budget horror?

Yes, absolutely. But there’s a push and pull with it. As great as CGI is — and it really, truly is — there’s a backlash because it has to be done the right way. If it’s not, it has a very cartoony, unreal quality. Horror really relies on things feeling like they’re real and physical if they’re going to be frightening. I’ll give you a perfect example: unanimously, I believe people think John Carpenter’s The Thing is much more frightening than the 2011 prequel, which incorporated a lot of CGI. Even outside the story and issues like that, people just found the creature more frightening in 1982 when it was a physical object photographed on film. There’s a desire in the horror community, an appreciation of real physical makeup effects and physical props. Having said that, I think CGI is amazing, and I did incorporate it in this film. But I tried to do it in a way where you would never know that it’s there.

There’s one tremendous shot in Tall Grass with a reflection in a moving dewdrop, with the camera inverting. Was there a practical element to that shot?

I don’t want to say! [Laughs] I am sorry. Let me put it this way: you could never do that shot without CGI!

This film got me thinking about the difference between relatable horror where viewers feel like they could be in the protagonists’ position, like what they’re seeing could happen to them. And then there’s uncanny horror, which is much less real. Do you see a division there? Do you see one as more interesting than the other?

Let me put it this way: as an audience member and somebody who’s grown up enjoying horror films, I like it when the genre’s mutated, when it’s pushed somewhere new. And I’m as interested in re-creations of things that I’ve seen before. For me, David Cronenberg is a very important figure because what he did was so personal, so groundbreaking, and so impossible to imitate. Or Guillermo del Toro, with his particular kind of Latin magic realism. That’s what I aspire to, regardless of what kind of horror it is.

Anybody could look at your body of work and see that impulse to break new ground, but you’ve done a lot of interviews about how difficult it is to find backers for your films because people don’t want to take risks on films that don’t fit into familiar categories. Is the streaming age, and the splintering of movie audiences, helping you? Is it getting easier?

Yes! Oh, it really has. This film would not exist if Netflix hadn’t chosen to make it. Or if it did, it wouldn’t be as well-made. Because Netflix has both the willingness to let me make my own movie without interference and the resources to let me do things like that shot of the dewdrop. If I had made the film as a little independent movie, I couldn’t have afforded to make this version. Making a horror film independently, there’s a literal threshold for the financing. You’re never going to get more than $5 million to make a movie. It’s impossible, unless you have really big actors with tremendous international value.

So yes, this new landscape is exciting for somebody like me. I don’t want to make big, big movies, but I don’t really want to make micro-budget films, either. I’ve always existed in the space between. That space disappeared after DVD disappeared, and the international marketplace wouldn’t support it. And then studios started focusing on tentpole franchise movies. So that void is being filled by Netflix and Amazon and some of the other companies coming up. It’s incredible. I don’t think there’s ever been a moment like this in the history of filmmaking, and because there’s so much money being infused into it.

And a lot of that money isn’t being spent with a particular concern about instant return. It’s more about staking a claim, wanting to make content that really draws people’s attention, that is special. In the studio world, it’s all about the bottom line. So much money is at risk, and people’s jobs are at risk, so they just can’t afford to take chances. So this is a transformative moment. Over the last five years, I’ve done quite a bit of TV, and a lot of it was really interesting stuff that I was lucky to work on. But the line between TV and movies is blurring. It’s all narrative content, which is great.

The other aspect is our movie will become available to 190 countries at the exact same moment, which is wonderful for the movie because it means more people will watch it, I hope. But also, we’re in a historical moment where the world really needs to unite, to figure out some of the pressing issues we have. I don’t want to sound utopian about this, but I do believe it’s helpful that there’s no classification to who gets to see this first. It’s not going to open in America first, then filter through the rest of the world like they were second-class citizens.

Films are being democratized. So everyone gets the same content at the same time and shares the same experience at the same moment, which I have to believe is going to be unifying. If somebody makes something that influences how we perceive climate change, maybe that’ll have a real impact. And it does seem like Netflix is working on that. I certainly don’t think my film’s going to do that. [Laughs] It’s such a scary moment in the world right now, but there are a lot of things to be hopeful about and excited about.

In the Tall Grass debuted on Netflix on October 4th, 2019.

Question Club: the best and worst Joker debate topics

2019-10-09T11:17:52-04:00

Todd Phillips’ Joker has been one of the most discussed films of the year, in part because it was controversial before it was even made. When the film was first announced, not long after the disastrous DC movie Suicide Squad revealed its own cinematic take on the Joker character, a vocal subsegment of the film world rebelled at the idea of rebooting the villain yet again, and protested DC’s interest in focusing on him at the expense of so many other characters.

But once Phillips’ film started screening for critics, new conversation topics emerged: whether Joker as Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver conceived it is dangerous; whether it’s a call to violent action or a celebration of anarchy; whether it has a coherent message or is just a mashup of films like Fight Club and The King of Comedy; whether it’s actually a comic book film (which Phillips denies) or more of a melodrama; and so forth. The Verge’s staff sat down together to weigh in on some of the debate around Joker.

What did you think of the film?

Tasha Robinson, film/TV editor: I’ve consistently been on the more positive end of the Joker spectrum compared to a lot of other film critics, but I still think it’s a badly flawed movie: a self-pitying fantasy about a truly awful world that picks on one poor victim until he rightly snaps. The open, extensive theft from Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver bothers me — there are points where Joker seems like a cover version of those movies, and not a particularly nuanced or thoughtful one. But toward the end, when put-upon protagonist Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) starts celebrating his own break with sanity by dancing like no one’s watching and reigning over public mayhem, the film has a real emotional power. Superhero comics and comic movies are so often about escapism, and this film feels like it embraces a radical, dark, ugly kind of escapism from sanity that’s pretty seductive, no matter how irresponsible or antisocial it is.

Russell Brandom, policy editor: The best part was Phoenix’s performance — particularly the laughing fits, which seemed genuinely afflicting. The idea of watching his sad-sack clown descend into violent madness is really promising. But by the end, too much about the movie didn’t work for me: the Fleck / Thomas Wayne backstory, the love interest, the entire approach toward comedy and fame. I also hated the talk-show scene, which saw Arthur turning self-pity into violence and being immediately, inexplicably rewarded with the love and support he’d been missing through the whole film.

Love it or hate it, the Joker movie presents a tempting fantasy

Adi Robertson, senior reporter: Right. It lost direction in the last act, in part because it was so beholden to Scorsese and the original Joker character — it kept drifting toward those poles in ways that felt generic or disjointed, instead of playing to the strengths it had established.

Julia Alexander, reporter: If I don’t think about it too much, I think I actually like Joker. Phoenix’s performance is undeniably masterful, and for the first half of the movie, it’s a poignant look at loneliness. I wish Phillips spent more time on that story. The second half of the movie, particularly the final 20 minutes, washes away those striking moments. Joker feels like it loses its identity. The more I think about it, the more frustrated I become — it ends up dissolving into a movie that wants to think it’s smarter than it actually is.

Was it too tied to the Batman mythos? Not closely tied enough?

AR: I’m glad that beyond recasting Thomas Wayne (very effectively!) as an elitist jerk, Joker didn’t make me work out any DC pantheon logistics — like, is Arkham Asylum still full of other supervillains? Thank god I don’t know! I do think that giving Arthur the “failing standup comedian” backstory from The Killing Joke was a mistake, but primarily because it set the character up as a clone of Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy, which was one of the less interesting bits of his characterization.

JA: I’m more protective over Bruce Wayne and Batman (my third favorite superhero, after Iron Man and Hulk), and them being such a minor part of the story helped me accept certain moments in Joker. That said, I do wish they leaned into the Batman mythos a little more. I appreciated the new take on Thomas Wayne, and Bruce’s childhood introduction to Joker, but it felt empty. I saw one essay that suggested this Joker was actually just the inspiration for the actual Joker that Bruce Wayne eventually fights as Batman and… I’m just tired of the need to over-explain things that aren’t defined in this movie? I’m tired. There’s a way to do a Joker story with Batman mythology tied in, but this isn’t it.

RB: I would have liked to see a little more classic Joker in the late-movie version of Fleck, who never really came together for me. He had the sadism of the Joker we know, but there was none of the gleeful absurdity, which would have been welcome after 90 minutes of miserabilism. Imagine if he’d killed Robert De Niro by crushing his head with an enormous mallet. That would have been so much more satisfying than the weird 4chan-isms we got.

TR: I would have been entirely fine with leaving Bruce Wayne and Batman out of this movie altogether. Bruce’s presence raises too many questions (so Joker in this world is twenty-something years older than Batman, minimum? Does Batman remember the guy who came to his house and was weird at him when he was a kid?), but mostly it means we have to sit through the cinematic death of Thomas and Martha Wayne for seemingly the billionth time, flying pearls and all, in a way that adds nothing new to the Joker story but cheap “I made you / You made me” irony. Cramming child Bruce in there feels a lot like the way he was crammed into the TV show Gotham and became this weird little gatekeeper prince figure in the first season, bestowing his blessing on Jim Gordon. Why not just focus on the character Phillips is radically re-envisioning, instead of the one where he’s religiously sticking to established canon?

Is this a socialist movie? An anarchist movie? An anti-antifa movie? Are its politics clear?

RB: I have seen a couple of Socialist Twitter people online arguing that Joker is a left-wing movie. That seems like such a bizarre read to me. It’s true that a lot of the rich people in the movie are bad, and that robust, publicly funded mental health care does come off looking pretty good. (Is Arkham single-payer?) But the clown-branded political movement that closes the film is cartoonishly extreme, to the point where Joker almost echoes the anti-Occupy anxieties of Dark Knight Rises. In this Gotham, there is no discernible political split between raising Thomas Wayne’s taxes and murdering bankers in the subway. As the Gotham Journal puts it: KILL THE RICH — A NEW MOVEMENT? Surely this isn’t the headline the Bernie Sanders campaign was hoping for.

AR: Joker’s politics basically seem built around its aesthetic and narrative requirements. The best-developed theme is certainly that rich people have exploited and abandoned the rest of society, yet profess to be shocked when this drives people to violence. But it’s more of a storytelling device than a primary concern. The most obviously contemporary political elements don’t even make much sense — I get why audiences would nod along at the complaint that “nobody’s civil anymore,” for example, but it seems like a non sequitur alongside Arthur’s other complaints.

JA: When The Dark Knight Rises came out in 2011, there were questions about how much the Occupy Wall Street movement inspired Nolan’s final installment in his Dark Knight trilogy. Nolan called the overlap of themes incidental at the time, but the film’s political messages seemed to mesh well with Bane, a menacing force with specific political ideologies. Joker uses political ideologies because it feels like it has to, very much to Adi’s point. It doesn’t make much sense. Everything feels rushed, and that makes finding any ideological coherency difficult to really capture. Plus, the Joker isn’t a political figure. He’s anarchy at its purest, madness at its most psychotic. There is no rhyme or reason for his actions. He is chaos in motion. Trying to assign a political ideology that reflects or supports his actions is a fool’s errand.

TR: I read Joker as much more anti-political than political, much more based in an adolescent, rebellious “Screw the system, the system just wants to screw you” chaos than in any coherent political slant. It’s about breaking all the rules (which makes that “no one is civil anymore” complaint even more ironic) and becoming an iconoclastic hero. I think Phillips wants to see Arthur’s above politics, that he’s sidestepping the system entirely. There’s certainly borrowed protest iconography in there, but I don’t see the messaging here going deep enough to reflect any real-world political or parapolitical movements.

What’s the most interesting talking point about this movie?

TR: I’m not engaging in any discussions about whether Joker is “dangerous.” It certainly holds up some dangerous ideas, mostly that people like Arthur deserve better than what life has given them, and are justified in murdering people who hold them back, or in any way represent the parts of society that have left them feeling under-seen and lost. But I don’t think it represents such a convincing argument that it requires hand-wringing and overused symbolic pearl-clutching.

I’m actually more interested in the ongoing conversation about whether it’s “a comic book movie,” because Todd Phillips seems so determined to say it isn’t, and it so obviously is. That conversation is helping us expand the definition of comics and “comic book movies,” which is really overdue in America.

AR: It is absolutely a comic book movie — and moreover, an adaptation of the kinds of comic books that got me into comics! My real introduction to the medium was ’80s and ’90s Vertigo-style titles, which were all about gritty “adult” deconstructions and inversions of superhero stories. We’ve critically reevaluated these in recent years, and ironically, the actual comics world has stepped away from equating “more depressing” with “more mature.” But it’s still a genre I love, and Joker is a pitch-perfect translation of it to the screen.

JA: It’s definitely a comic book movie, it’s just not a Marvel movie or even a Zack Snyder movie. The comic book movie as we know it has changed substantially over the last 11 years. We expect comic book movies to look, sound, and feel a certain way. Todd Phillips may have convinced De Niro and Phoenix to make a serious film under the guise of making a comic book movie, but he actually made a pretty standard comic book movie in the process.

AR: And by that token, I actively resent that the “serious film” discourse has somehow thrown us back to square one in sophisticated pop culture debates that are older than I am. Forget whether the movie is dangerous — do we really have to go back and relitigate the divisions between high and low culture every time somebody disses the Avengers?

**Is Joker more interesting if the end of the film — or even most of the film — is just Arthur’s delusion?**

TR: I know this is an odd question, but the fact that Arthur’s entire relationship with Sophie (played by Zazie Beetz) is imaginary, a product of his unmedicated mental illness, has some people questioning whether anything in Joker after a certain point is meant to be real. Is Arthur really assaulted on the train by finance bros with a mysteriously complete knowledge of Stephen Sondheim lyrics, or does he imagine that and murder them for no reason? Is he really invited on his hero’s talk show where he commits murder, or is that a fantasy, too? If those things happened as seen, is he really rescued by his followers in the end, or is that all his own glorious monomaniacal fantasy?

Personally, I love ambiguity in a film when it feels daring and deliberate. But here, not being able to trust anything we see on-screen would just make it even harder to parse what’s going on in this film, how much damage Arthur is doing, and how we should take it. The story of him imagining a bunch of wild things isn’t particularly interesting on its own. I respect the urge people are feeling to write off any aspect of the movie that seems unlikely or annoying to them, but I don’t think it improves the story to decide, without clear indications one way or another, that most of the film is unreal.

RB: Yeah, I find that whole question exhausting. In the most generous possible reading, I guess it conveys how isolated and detached Fleck is? But Mr. Robot has a lot to answer for.

AR: The obvious comparison point might be a film like American Psycho, which teases the idea that we can’t tell whether its protagonist Patrick Bateman is a sociopathic fantasist yuppie or a mass murderer. But that works because either of those interpretations are fairly compelling, which I don’t think is true for Joker.

JA: At this point, I’m not sure whether the entire Joker experience is a dream we’re all experiencing at once. No, I don’t think it’s all a delusion. It’s too Newhart for Phillips to concoct this entire thing, only for Arthur to realize it’s all a dream.

**Are people discussing Joker more than it warrants? Is this a socialist movie? An anarchist movie? An anti-antifa movie? Are its politics clear?**

TR: Obviously there’s an irony in asking if we’re talking about this film too much, at the end of a feature where we all talk about the film. But it’s a legitimate question: a lot of the conversation around Joker has been about how to interpret it, and a lot of that conversation seems to go well beyond what Phillips actually intended for the movie. Divorced of all the concerns about possible theater violence, or an anarchic incel uprising, this film feels a lot more like empty, nihilistic provocation.

Are we talking so much about it because we’re afraid of certain loud, dissatisfied, vocal elements in society — like the online crowd who openly says they want to enslave women into “servicing” them because they feel entitled to sex and companionship — and what they might do if they felt empowered? Are we really that worried about a handful of malcontents, or are we vaguely looking forward to violent upheaval in the same way people fantasize about the zombie apocalypse?

RB: I think part of the urge to talk is the result of a clever idea with mediocre execution. It’s genuinely interesting to think about what a social-realist character study looks like in a comic book universe. In the end, I didn’t think Phillips executed the idea very well, but it’s a new thing to try, and opens up more possibilities than better-made movies like The Last Jedi or Avengers: Endgame. And the sheer shock value of the movie leaves a lot unresolved.

AR: I will consume almost any story whose premise is “What if a pulpy genre plot were subject to the dour constraints of reality?” and I will talk your damn ear off about it. It’s been odd to see Joker treated as viscerally dangerous, but I think there’s just a cultural shift toward the idea that information and media are harmful, whether the fear is internet propaganda swinging an election or movies inspiring violence. Absent of that cultural context, it seems almost mundane compared to films like Fight Club or Taxi Driver — which literally inspired someone to almost kill the president!

JA: As someone who talks far too much about movies that no one cares about, I don’t think we — as a society — are talking about it too much. I think we’re giving it a certain weight that it doesn’t warrant. Trying to paint this movie as a thoughtful critique on a type of person who we’ve come to fear around the world in 2019 is outrageous and dumb. Joker isn’t even in the same boat as Fight Club, a movie released 20 years ago this month that did manage to swirl a number of poignant issues into a dark, satirical, brilliant two-hour film.

Any movie that incorporates Joker, the best-known comic book villain (arguably the most popular villain, period), is going to be talked about. We should absolutely talk about the movie, and we should absolutely never stop talking about real-world subject matter that people may see mirrored in the film. What we shouldn’t do is conflate the idea that one can’t exist without the other. Joker is a mostly entertaining movie — one that features a superb performance from a master actor. It isn’t anything more than that, and shouldn’t be treated as such.

Love it or hate it, the Joker movie presents a tempting fantasy

2019-10-04T18:43:56-04:00

Todd Phillips’ standalone supervillain origin story Joker is arriving in theaters amid so much controversy and concern about the potential for copycat violence that the debate has largely overwhelmed the film itself. It’s been fascinating to watch the discussion around the movie shift from “Do we really need another Joker story so soon after Suicide Squad?” to “Is Joker full of dangerous ideas that will spur its worst fans to murder?” The initial worries around Joker assumed the movie would be unnecessary, its impact negligible. The current questions ascribe it with too much importance, as if it might incite full-blown anarchy just by existing.

As usual in a case where people leap to extremes, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Joker may make some people who feel marginalized feel more seen and more powerful, and they may act out in response. There are some ugly, self-serving messages in the movie, which is incongruously bent on creating sympathy for Batman’s worst enemy and one of DC Comics’ most notoriously callous mass murderers and atrocity architects. But love it or hate it, the film does spin up a tempting fantasy of persecution and relief, of embracing nihilism as a means of complete escape from a terrible world.

It’s a self-pitying fantasy, certainly. Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver follow in the footsteps of Joel Schumacher’s 1993 drama Falling Down in portraying the world as a cartoonishly dark and uncaring place, an almost comically vile carnival where the protagonist can’t find a hint of comfort or relief. In a thoroughly immersed performance that’s being seen as a guaranteed awards-season attention magnet, Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a part-time rent-a-clown working for a seedy talent agency full of exaggerated grotesques. Arthur is mentally ill and coping via meds and court-ordered therapy, which don’t offer comfort or represent caring. He’s devoted to his sick mother Penny (Frances Conroy), who’s encouraged him to see himself as a joyous light in the world, bringing laughter to the people.

The problem is that he isn’t particularly funny. He’s painfully awkward, the kind of twitchy, social incompetence people shy away from in public because his erratic behavior feels like it could turn dangerous — or at least uncomfortable for them. It’s easy for viewers to empathize with his desire to be loved, without necessarily loving him. When he says he feels invisible, it’s clear why: he’s the kind of person people look away from on the street, out of apathy or active discomfort.

That tension between sympathy and revulsion is one of the most honest things about Joker, which mostly goes out of its way to make the world awful. While working as a sign-twirler, Arthur is randomly beaten by a handful of kids, who steal his sign and then break it over his head. His boss not only doesn’t believe his story, he demands Arthur pay for the missing sign. The dramatic ironies and injustices compound throughout the film, until it’s clear that Arthur isn’t paranoid, the world really is out to get him. And then he takes violent, irrevocable action.

For much of its runtime, Joker is a consciously ugly film, visually and emotionally. Arthur starts with close to nothing, and loses it all incrementally, in ways designed to hurt empathetic viewers. Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher (who also DP’d for all three of Phillips’ Hangover movies) give the film a sickeningly grungy, underlit, David Fincher-esque look, especially in Arthur’s squalid home. Everything about the storytelling — the ominous, booming score; the gritty darkness; the invasive sound design — is designed to be oppressive, and to push the audience toward Arthur’s point of view as the primary victim of all the oppression. It’s hypnotic just how horrifying Arthur’s existence is, just as Phoenix’s performance is hypnotic as he spirals from fragile hope into increasingly outsized and confident acts of destruction.

And then he escapes it all, by learning not to care — not about how or whether other people see him, not about whether he hurts or frightens or kills them, not about whether his final-act manifesto makes any sort of coherent sense. The important part of Arthur’s story — and the cause for so much of the concern around Joker — is that when he embraces his most nihilistic and destructive impulses, he suddenly earns the praise and attention he’s been lacking. That may not fully motivate him, but it’s meant as a message for the segment of the audience that feels closest to Arthur, those who feel most unseen and unloved: plenty of people agree with you that the world is unfair and ugly, and if you did something about it, they’d back your play.

Like Falling Down — and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which Phillips openly emulates and references — Joker suggests that when the leading man loses his mind, it’s an understandable, even natural reaction to an equally mad world. Viewers who aren’t already inclined to see humanity as a seething cesspit may not resonate with that level of cynicism. But to viewers who feel as abused and overlooked as Arthur Fleck, or even who harbor smaller, more rational resentments about society, Joker is a deliberate and fine-tuned provocation and promise: you aren’t alone, the people you hate really are awful, and it would be okay to act against them in any way you want.

Phillips has made it clear that he doesn’t believe Joker is anything as small and dismissible as a mere comic-book movie. But while his film is grimmer and more harrowing than anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s offering up a fantasy just as clearly as any superhero wish-fulfillment power trip: the fantasy of being a hero to some, of going from powerlessness to power, of being feared and beloved at the same time. Phillips delivers that message in a self-congratulatory way, largely by setting the film in a world where Arthur has no choice but violence, and no escape but madness. He’s portrayed as a kind of dark truth-teller because he’s learned that the world is a joke and nothing matters.

That’s a fairly adolescent outlook, which Phillips embraces in the same persecution-complex spirit that recently led him to complain that he had to make Joker because the world is now too sensitive and woke for his previous brand of destructive-bro comedy. But Joker would probably be raising much less social concern if it wasn’t such a technically compelling movie, if its final moments weren’t so outsized and joyous and purposefully insane.

Because Joker does play — not just to its most put-upon, angry, repressed viewers — but to the entire audience’s darkest hearts. It shows someone suffering when he lets society have its way with him, and freed when he has his way with society. It shows him weeping alone when he plays by the rules, and dancing wildly in public when he decides to break those rules. The story hurts and harms him, but Phillips suggests in the end that everything he went through was necessary to bring him the power and recognition he deserves. It’s a tempting fantasy, crafted with utter conviction.

Many critics and early viewers have responded to Joker with loathing, because that fantasy is so selfish and solipsistic. By dismissing the world as imbalanced at best, outright malicious at worst, Phillips is enabling his viewers’ worst and most destructive impulses. “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore,” Arthur says plaintively at one point. He’s a relatable kind of villain, harmless and sad — not an Everyman, but an audience avatar for the downtrodden. And then he models a way to not be harmless anymore. That doesn’t necessarily make Joker a call to action, or an invitation to real-life violence. But it does represent a horrifying form of invitation — not just a call to sympathize with the devil, but a full-blown justification for the hell he creates.

Why Justin Timberlake didn’t star in The Death of Dick Long

2019-10-02T11:23:12-04:00

The Death of Dick Long isn’t exactly what viewers might expect, judging from the mild innuendo of the title and the trailer portraying it as a comedically dark disaster about a boys’ night out that goes wrong. It’s also not necessarily what viewers might expect based on its creators, director Daniel Scheinert and his longtime friend and collaborator, screenwriter Billy Chew. As half of the writing-directing team Daniels, Scheinert has been involved in a lot of giddy mayhem, from colorful music videos (most notably for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”) to bizarre, exciting short films. They’ve created complicated experiments in interactive cinema, and they made their feature-film debut with Swiss Army Man, a strangely tender movie about a shipwrecked man who survives with the help of Daniel Radcliffe’s aggressively farting corpse.

So it’s surprising how empathetic and personal The Death of Dick Long is, for a noir crime comedy about a man who dies with mysterious anal injuries, leaving his friends to frantically cover up the circumstances. Set in Scheinert’s native South, it’s sympathetic toward the hapless bros who witness the death of Dick Long (played by Scheinert, though he tried to get Channing Tatum for the role) and turn it into an even bigger, more darkly comedic disaster than it already is. I sat down with Scheinert at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, where the movie premiered, to discuss the film’s thoughts on fragile masculinity, the bro code, dodging Southern stereotypes, trying to stunt-cast a dead guy, creating empathy for Nickelback, and butts. Especially butts.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Why are the Daniels so into stories centering around butts? I’m thinking about Interesting Ball and Swiss Army Man, and it’s relevant again here in The Death of Dick Long.

[Laughs] I don’t know! Something about lowbrow and highbrow at the same time is my favorite comedy, and anything about bodily functions is universal. Everyone across the globe is born with a butt. Fifty percent of them have vaginas, and that’s funny, and 50 percent of them have weiners, and that’s funny. Dan and I joke about which bodily functions we haven’t made movies about. Like, we’ve made a movie about barfing, but not burping, and pooping and peeing.

Are you working from a checklist? Do you need to get to belching soon?

I guess so! Another real answer is that for Dan and I discovered that for music videos, if you want to tell a visual story, you go for physical comedy. Bodily functions resonate with people, and with us, and make us laugh. They help us explore the human experience. Bodies are weird.

At the same time, Dick Long doesn’t track primarily as a comedy. There’s a lot of emotional drama, and a lot of time spent in the heads of people in very sad, uncomfortable places. Is it harder to mesh that kind of lowbrow bodily humor with serious drama?

No, that’s my favorite, dramas that make me laugh, or comedies that make me sad. Billy wrote a script that gave me permission to have fun and make jokes, as long as it wasn’t at the expense of the characters. Dick dies under a farcical set of circumstances, so there’s a lot of opportunity to have fun. But you’re right, it was also an opportunity to do some three-dimensional scene work with actors. Huge chunks of the film just focus on the reality of these bizarre circumstances.

So you’re from Alabama, and Billy isn’t, but he spent some time there, and you’ve said he was sending you messages like, “Your home state is fascinating.” How did he end up there?

After college, he moved there. His ex-girlfriend lived there, and he went and lived with her and her parents for a while. They discussed it, and they didn’t want to go straight from college to the big city. It didn’t feel particularly right or fun to them. He got really excited about going somewhere specific and weird and interesting, and learning about the world. So their plan was, “Let’s go to Alabama for a few years and figure out exactly where we want to go next, and what we want to do next.” And they lived there for three or four years.

What kind of perspective did he give you about Alabama?

I respect him a lot. He’s a smart, interesting guy. So I thought he’d be bored. But then he would tell me the stories he’d read in the local paper, or heard around town, or who worked at Panera with him. They would remind me of people I grew up around, but it blew my mind that he thought it was so interesting. A lot of people grow up in the South and claim to have Southern pride, but actually have Southern shame. Like, “Where I’m from is boring. Nobody cares about little me living here in this silly state.” He was finding out things I loved and knew, but thought wouldn’t interest other people. And now I realize that’s not true. And it’s something I have to offer. I come from somewhere specific, and not many filmmakers are from there. So I can use that until the rest of the world catches on and starts hiring people from Birmingham, until there are like 20 of us.

You’ve talked about making this as a response to movies like The Hangover, bro comedies about male bonding over terrible behavior. Why was that important to you?

I love those movies, but I’m ashamed of loving those movies because the things the characters do have no consequences. Some of the people enabled by those stories are my least favorite people in the world. I love Jackass and The Hangover, but I thought this was an opportunity to explore man-children and add in some real repercussions. What’s it like keeping secrets? What toll does it take psychologically? They brush over that in The Hangover, the secret they all keep. “Bro, we’re not gonna tell anyone what happened last night” is a terrible way to start a marriage. It’s a tragic movie! In the end, he marries her, and his friends are all, like, “We’re never telling anyone!” I was like, “Fuck, that’s a sad, sad metaphor for nuclear families across America.” [Laughs]

This movie is so much about that kind of masculinity, about the macho code of “We will never speak of our emotions, and we’ll police each other constantly for any sign of weakness.” How did you want to approach that idea?

I approached it just as a fan of the script. I tried to find the most interesting actors, and talk with them about what felt truthful. I didn’t want to do a reductive satire. I wanted to make something that would resonate with these kinds of guys, something they would enjoy. So we approached it honestly, and found all of us have a lot in common with these characters. Not extremely specifically, but we’ve all bottled shit up or had a week where we don’t want to admit to a significant other or parents or ourselves what we’re going through because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

There are big comedic elements to the movie, especially in some of the dumber decisions the characters make. But you don’t want them to come across as stupid or laughable. How did you approach that with the actors?

We would look for variations in each scene, in how to play it, but we were always looking to find humor in the situations, as long as we were grounded in reality. I wanted the movie to never not be funny for longer than a couple minutes, so people wouldn’t forget the film had been silly for the first half. But I also think that’s accurate to real life. When people are sad, and their marriages are falling apart, they’re a mess. They fall down the stairs, they misspeak, they stutter. But in movies, people are so articulate, and they hit their mark. I find it unrelatable when people are going through tragedy and they look great, and they’re standing in perfect light and giving speeches. When I’ve gone through hard periods of my life, I’m ridiculous. So it felt like, in a way, the comedy was another way of chasing authenticity. Because real life’s funny.

There’s so much sensitivity right now about anything that seems to examine what it means to be a straight white dude, especially if there’s any hint of criticism or critique. Even acknowledging that there’s a culture there makes some people uncomfortable and angry. Did you have to contend with that, or have you been seeing that kind of reaction?

A little. And then my brain just went in the opposite direction. There’s a culture of people just wanting to really dunk on straight white man culture in a way that feels unhelpful. For alt-right bros to refuse to self-examine, or admit that maybe something’s wrong with their outlook, is dangerous and bad and terrible. Gamergate and that kind of culture is about building up walls, creating a siloed-off culture. But there’s also the opposite siloed-off culture of people who want to break down the patriarchy and can’t admit that the guys are just their neighbors. One of the things I love about Billy is that when he writes, he has all this stuff in the back of his mind, but he tries to go into the gray of the world and have a ton of fun there, and have things to say without creating a preachy, preachy sermon. People these days often really want to stick to extremes, but I don’t. I think movies are more fun when they’re an exercise in empathy.

You’ve talked about the challenge of creating empathy for weird things, like getting people to connect emotionally to a farting corpse. Or in this case, to—

To Nickelback!

Why is that an urge for you?

My favorite films do that to me, so I aspire to do that to another audience member somewhere. I want to make people have an emotional reaction they didn’t expect, or didn’t think they could have. It doesn’t blow my mind if a movie makes me sad when the dog dies. But it blew my mind how the end of Midsommar gave me an emotional, spiritual experience. And it shouldn’t have. It’s supposed to be fucked-up. I love that, getting persuaded to empathize with culty murderers. And it’s a fun process as a filmmaker to remind myself that empathy is the end goal because then every choice you make is just you understanding some humans. What are they like? What are they up to? As opposed to moving them around as pawns.

Is it true that you pursued a lot of stunt casting for Dick Long himself?

Yeah, we actually reached out to Channing Tatum and Justin Timberlake’s PR teams. And I feel bad in retrospect. I’m so lucky to be in a position where I can reach out to people like that, but this was a pretty mean role to offer someone. [Laughs] Especially now that I’ve played the role. It would have been miserable. I mean, it was fun. Dick gets to shoot fireworks and guns, but then he gets dragged around and dropped on concrete and covered in fake blood for a long time. They wouldn’t have had much fun. But I think Justin Timberlake’s team — we got in touch with his agents, and they were like, “We’re not even showing this to him.” Which has never happened to me, where an agent was like, “No. Hard pass. We’re not even telling Justin.” Maybe they were afraid he’d say yes, and they censored him!

What would you do if Channing Tatum or Justin Timberlake approached you at a film festival and said “I can’t believe they didn’t tell me about this role. I wish I’d been Dick Long!”

I’d be like, “Let’s do another one! Next time! I’ll find a role for you!” But I’m glad it didn’t work out. I love that nobody in this film is a celebrity, like a big, super-distracting, famous face. Because there’s a whole genre of indie film that makes me feel like I just went into a small-town world, and I hope this movie’s like that, like a window into a community. Like Beasts of the Southern Wild, or Moonlight. Sundance has like 10 indies every year that are like, “Here are 10 super-celebrities playing a small-town Arkansas family.” Like Kings of Summer. It’s a good movie, but everybody’s parents are so famous in that movie, it kind of distracted me. And this isn’t that.

Why was Dick Long a solo project rather than a Daniels film? Are you guys planning on doing a series of separate projects?

Dan and I are constantly figuring out our process, and trying to make our working relationship healthy. So it just felt right at the time. We have tons more work that we want to make together. This one — Kwan and I had been outlining our new movie together, and then he sat and wrote a draft while I made this movie. That was an experiment in our writing process because I could be a pretty impatient writer. This time I said, “Okay, you’re going to have three or four months, and I’ll be around to talk, and then I’ll come back and we’ll make the movie this winter.” That was two years ago. [Laughs] Like, six drafts later…

It’s been good for us. I don’t think we’re going to solo direct a lot, but we have been learning that giving each other some space is really fun. With a music video, doing everything together makes sense. But with features, some space is nice because we can surprise each other. “Okay, you did a draft, made some discoveries, and now it’s my turn.” We’re excited to do some solo writing and editing, but we also have dual directing plans.

How’s that film that’s been in scripting for two years?

It’s coming along! I’m so proud of it. We’re inches from being able to shoot it this winter. So awesome.

The Death of Dick Long opened in theatrical release on September 27th, 2019.

Netflix’s In the Shadow of the Moon plays smart tricks with time

2019-09-30T12:24:29-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.

One of the chief joys of the time travel subgenre is strictly mechanical: it’s all about the ways nonlinear characters let creators deconstruct a standard narrative, bringing different segments of the story together in unexpected ways. Construction-oriented movies like Timecrimes or Predestination scramble the order of the pieces on-screen, bait viewers to guess why certain things happen, and then slowly fit those pieces together into a startling whole.

But the same thing can be done in movies without time travel, like Memento, where the audience just receives the story out of order. A more specific and unique joy of time travel stories is the way they can address one of humanity’s chief bugaboos: the way choices, once made, can’t be unmade. Part of the reason science fiction writers have been obsessed with time travel for so long is because it lets people live out a fantasy of being able to fix the past with perfect hindsight, taking back choices and making new ones — hopefully better ones, but often entertainingly worse ones. There are variations on the genre, but more often than not, time travel stories embrace the fantasy of the do-over, the undo-key on life.

Netflix’s new thriller In the Shadow of the Moon hits both these buttons: it’s constructed as a puzzle for viewers to unlock (though, like a lot of mysteries, it cheats by leaving some key clues offscreen), and it plays with the fantasy of being able to fix the past and avert the present. It does both of these things a little clumsily, but for fans who already enjoy how the genre works, and feel more challenged than frustrated by the prospect of waiting for a story to fall into place, it does offer a sense of scope that most time travel stories don’t.

WHAT’S THE GENRE?

Science fiction. The technology that enables the film’s opening crimes isn’t immediately evident, but it’s almost instantly clear that it’s impossible by present-day standards. It’s the kind of film where the audience will be way ahead of the protagonists, simply because they recognize the trope and aren’t invested in denying time travel as an option. It’s like a zombie movie where the main characters keep saying “But zombies aren’t real!” no matter how many walking, moaning, rotting carcasses they face.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

In 1988, Philadelphia beat cop Tommy Lockhart (Boyd Holbrook) is at a transition point in life: his wife is heavily pregnant, and he’s fairly sure he’s on the cusp of being promoted to detective. His daughter’s imminent arrival has him anxious, though, because as long as he’s stuck on overnight shifts, he’s out of sync with his wife Jeanie (Rachel Keller). So when people start dropping dead under strange conditions, he pushes himself further into the investigation than his rank warrants, hoping to prove his detective skills. That pushiness annoys his more laid-back partner, Winston Maddox (Bokeem Woodbine), and his boss and brother-in-law, Detective Holt (Michael C. Hall).

But Tommy’s aggressive lunge for involvement sets him up for a close encounter with the killer, who reveals things she shouldn’t know about him. It also sets him up to investigate when people start dying under identical circumstances exactly nine years later. By that time, he’s a detective, Holt is a police lieutenant, and life is different for everyone. It’s even more radically different nine years after that, by which point, Tommy has deduced the pattern behind the killings, even though no one believes his rants about time travel.

WHAT’S IT REALLY ABOUT?

It’s more or less about the “Would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” ethical conundrum. If this was a less pulpy movie that was more devoted to exploring the ideas it presents, it might set off a significant conversation about the balance of one human life against thousands and the ethics of taking lives to save them. But In the Shadow of the Moon treats that question as easily answered and not worth exploring. Off with baby Hitler’s head!

IS IT GOOD?

It has its significant strengths. The greatest one is the way its construction lets audiences see the shape of what’s coming but not the details. The movie’s opening shot of a devastated office building, unchecked fires, widespread damage, and a seemingly deserted downtown in 2024 Philadelphia gives the whole film a palpable pressure. Tommy has a deadline and a limited number of nine-year jumps before disaster strikes, but he isn’t aware that he’s barreling toward a grim future. It’s a neat narrative trick that’s meant to put the audience on edge as they count down the years toward disaster.

But the other deadline is even more compelling: as the film moves forward, Tommy is visibly aging and disintegrating under the pressure of a threat other people keep dismissing. Each nine-year gap gives Philadelphia’s police force a chance to forget the previous wave of deaths and move on, and Tommy looks like a psychopath for clinging to his conspiracy theories for so long.

It’s clear early on that the story will check in on Tommy every nine years until he finally solves the mystery or dies trying. And then the filmmakers take every advantage of that setup. Tommy’s life doesn’t go the way he planned, and one of the film’s better conceits is the way director Jim Mickle (We Are What We Are) and writers Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock let the audience fill in the gaps between segments for themselves, drawing their own conclusions about the tragedies of Tommy’s life.

In that sense, Shadow of the Moon ends up playing into some of the natural human tragedy of generational projects like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a coming-of-age story filmed over the course of 12 years, or Michael Apted’s 7 Up documentary series, which checks in on the same group of Britons every seven years to see how their lives are coming along. (The latest installment, 63 Up, debuted on British TV earlier in 2019.) As Shadow of the Moon tracks Tommy’s losses, it starts to feel like a look at how people age, how quickly time gets away from us, and how we sacrifice possible parts of our lives with every priority we set.

But other aspects of the film aren’t as strong or well-considered. There’s a side plot involving a scientist who shows up in Tommy’s precinct with a handful of notes and some babble about the Moon, which explains both the film’s title and the nine-year gaps. But the character never feels particularly integrated with the story, and both his information and his later decisions feel like the worst kind of science fiction pulp plot spackle. The nature of the deaths raises a lot of questions that largely have to be answered with either “Because it’s convenient for the plot” or “Because it makes for cool visuals.” The concluding reveal is over the top both in its ridiculous patness and in its late-breaking attempt to spark big, soft emotions in a movie that never set its audience up to feel them.

The film concludes with a voice-over that seems aimed at belatedly turning the whole project into a much more thoughtful movie about consequences and connection than it actually is. As long as Shadow of the Moon sticks to action sequences and the pains of its isolated protagonist, it’s a tightly wound thriller with a surprising speculative element. But every attempt to reach outside that box feels half-hearted and frustratingly unfounded. It’s like a small film that’s trying to be bigger, without enough heart or structure to back up the larger ambitions.

WHAT SHOULD IT BE RATED?

There’s a fair bit of blood and a little gore, but nothing exceptionally stomach-wrenching. PG-13 at most.

HOW CAN I ACTUALLY WATCH IT?

In the Shadow of the Moon launched on Netflix on September 27th, 2019.

Takashi Miike’s crime thriller First Love is a wild ride

2019-09-27T12:22:26-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.

“This is fucking wild!” a wounded yakuza member bellows to no one in particular, deep into the heart of Takashi Miike’s latest action-thriller, First Love. And he certainly isn’t wrong. The line may read like a self-congratulatory bit of meta-commentary, like Miike and screenwriter Masaru Nakamura praising themselves for the sheer extremity of the situation they’ve gotten their characters into. By the time he delivers the line, Miike and Nakamura have already crammed the film with warring Japanese gangs, a modern-day samurai, a ruthless assassin, an escaped sex slave, a one-armed triad boss, a huge bag of drugs, and a lot more excuses for bloody confrontations.

But given that the character delivers the line from the back seat of a wildly spinning vehicle that’s being chased by both the yakuza and a triad, and that he’s bleeding out while covered from head to toe in meth, it’s also a pretty relatable moment. The film is fucking wild, in the most joyously excessive and ridiculous kind of way, and the audience is likely to feel the exact same emotions he’s expressing.

WHAT’S THE GENRE?

Crime thriller. Miike has worked in a wide variety of genres, from the gruesome body horror (and social commentary) of Audition to the farcical musical comedy of The Happiness of the Katakuris to the traditional children’s fantasy of The Great Yokai War. But he often returns to the underworld of his native Japan, where clashes between yakuza factions, between law enforcement agents and criminals, or between foreigners and home-grown gangsters all provide rich opportunities for the extreme violence that made him famous. In spite of the tender title, First Love isn’t primarily focused on romance. It’s more about corruption, betrayal, and clashing agendas between amoral characters who are all doggedly chasing the same payout.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

It takes a while for First Love to come into focus, because there are so many characters to introduce, and it’s initially unclear which ones matter, and which ones are bullet fodder. But a few eventually emerge as key to the story: Monica (Sakurako Konishi) is an addict paying off her father’s debts with sex work, while accumulating her own debts to her abusive pimps, Yasu (Takahiro Miura) and his Western girlfriend Julie (credited only as “Becky”). Yasu and Julie are in the middle of a big drug deal for a yakuza group, but one of the yakuza, Kase (Shôta Sometani) has drawn corrupt cop Otomo (Nao Ohmori) into an plan to steal and resell the drugs, and frame Monica. Meanwhile, a young up-and-coming boxer, Leo (Masataka Kubota) is informed that he has a brain tumor, his boxing career is over, and he doesn’t have long to live.

First Love’s title comes from the relationship between Monica and Leo, who meet under stressful circumstances and form a bond that initially means everything to her, and not much to him. She initially looks like a fairly standard crime-picture damsel in distress, too meek and damaged to be a femme fatale, but just as capable of drawing a hero into a deadly conflict. But the meat of the film isn’t really in their relationship — it’s in Kase’s ambition, Julie’s outsized rage once the plot kicks into gear, Otomo’s weaselly behavior, and the way the stakes ramp up when the Chinese triad boss also takes an interest in Yasu’s stash.

WHAT’S IT REALLY ABOUT?

First Love is more about outsized characters and big action than subtle themes, but on some level, it’s certainly about how connection defines people, and how new connections can help people escape old nightmares. Without entirely realizing what he’s doing, Leo helps Monica find a way through her history of abuse. In less positive developments, Kase and Otomo pull each other away from their respective organizations, and toward betrayals that set everyone on a much more dangerous path. Nearly everyone in the movie is trying for a come-up, but only the people who show some loyalty and selflessness have a chance of actually surviving where their new connections put them.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s a blast. Some of Miike’s crime dramas can be humorless, dour, or overwhelmingly gory — he’s an extremely prolific director, sometimes averaging four films per year, and he’s worked in a lot of different modes. But he has a notable streak of dark humor as well, and it frequently emerges in First Love. Many of the characters are oversized stereotypes, like the honor-bound yakuza member who carries a katana and once cut the arm off a member of the triad that’s gunning for his crew. It says something that their mortal enmity — with the triad member emerging from prison with bloody vengeance on his mind — barely rates as a minor sub-subplot in this crowded narrative.

But part of First Love’s humor is in the use of familiar types doing familiar things in particularly grandiose ways. Their face-off, teased throughout the film, reads a bit like a gag because it feels like something more suited to a samurai epic than a gangland picture. But when it finally comes, it’s thrilling.

Leo and Monica’s budding romance is treated more seriously, but not in a particularly sentimental way. She’s damaged and needy; he’s a bit of a gentle dope, spending most of the movie fairly removed from the action because he’s still processing his diagnosis. It takes a fairly extreme crisis to wake him up to what’s going on around him. Their relationship isn’t entirely satisfying — her weakness and his blankness are both detriments to the story — but it does lead to one of the film’s most striking visual and emotional moments, as Leo inadvertently gives her a new way to look at the specter of her sexually abusive father.

Mostly, though, First Love is the kind of film that’s designed for seen-it-all genre fans who know these tropes (the scheming criminal, the dewy ingenues, the cold-hearted lady assassin, and so on) and appreciate seeing them tweaked in new directions, and treated with an air of fond familiarity rather than dour airlessness. First Love isn’t a comedy, but it piles up the abrupt surprises and “I can’t believe that just happened” laughs. Miike doesn’t treat any of the storylines here particularly seriously, but he does create a significant tension around how it’ll all come out in the end. The film is troubled in some ways — it’s so overcrowded that it’s initially hard to tell the characters apart or sort out their agendas, and the buildup is much messier than the payoff. But it’s all worth it for that end result, which is, inevitably, fucking wild.

WHAT SHOULD IT BE RATED?

Hard R. While not as graphically violent as some of Miike’s more exceptional work, it’s set in a world where criminals go after each other with guns, knives, and sometimes swords, and the results are messy.

HOW CAN I ACTUALLY WATCH IT?

First Love opens in limited theatrical release in New York City and Los Angeles on September 27th, and will enter wide release on October 4th. Check the film’s website for available theaters and dates.

Everything coming to Netflix in October 2019

2019-09-24T11:57:46-04:00

As the streaming wars ramp up, the way new shows and films are made is changing rapidly. Suddenly, anything with a dedicated fandom and a familiar title is uniquely valuable, and the refrain “Six seasons and a movie!,” once used to rally Community fans into stumping for more of their favorite show, seems to apply to more and more properties. Veronica Mars got its own (partly fan-funded) movie, HBO finally made the Deadwood wrap-up movie, and this month, Netflix is continuing the Breaking Bad story where the AMC TV series left off, with Aaron Paul returning as meth dealer Jesse Pinkman in the original movie El Camino.

For Breaking Bad fans, at least, that’s likely to be the highlight of Netflix’s October offerings. For non-fans (from the “I have to have someone to sympathize with in a show, and all these people are terrible” brigade to the “I hear it’s great, I just haven’t gotten around to it” crowd), there are plenty of other options this month. Superhero fans will be interested in Raising Dion, a science fiction series about a single mom whose young son is developing mysterious powers. Apocalyptic-comedy fans have Daybreak, an upbeat teen series about navigating the end of the world. The raunchy animated series Big Mouth returns with another season about sex and puberty, this time with Westworld’s Thandie Newton. Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, and Tip T.I. Harris launch the reality competition Rhythm + Flow. And Paul Rudd confronts a better version of himself in the science fiction comedy drama Living With Yourself.

On the film side, Steven Soderbergh’s new movie The Laundromat follows his previous Netflix movie, High Flying Bird, in circling around imbalanced and unfair financial systems, this time looking at a form of insurance fraud that benefits the wealthy and bankrupts policyholders who thought they were covered. In the Tall Grass adapts a novella written by Stephen King and his son, horror writer Joe Hill, about a seemingly ordinary field where terrible things happen to seemingly ordinary people. Dolemite is My Name stars Eddie Murphy in a lively biopic about self-made groundbreaking comedian and movie star Rudy Ray Moore.

And finally, as more American media companies prep their own streaming services, and competition for licensed content revs up, Netflix is investing heavily in licensing or developing content around the world. This month’s streaming offerings are an embarrassment of riches for fans of international culture. The spread includes the Chinese science fiction series Nowhere Man, season 2 of the Italian teen drama Baby, the French rom-com series The Hook Up Plan, the Brazilian crime drama Brotherhood, the Indian work comedy Upstarts, and more. It’s never been easier to see what entertainment looks like around the world.

Coming to Netflix

October TBA

My Next Guest with David Letterman and Shah Rukh Khan (talk show)

Netflix description: The late-night king interviews the king of Bollywood, celebrated Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan.

October 1st

Carmen Sandiego: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: The stakes are higher than ever for Carmen, Ivy and Zack as V.I.L.E. unleashes a host of dastardly new villains while A.C.M.E. closes in.

Nikki Glaser: Bangin’ (comedy special)

Netflix description: Following her popular set on Season 1 of Netflix’s The Standups, Nikki Glaser is back with her first hour long Netflix original comedy special, Bangin’. Launching globally on October 1, Nikki keeps the audience at the edge of their seat as she delves into taboo topics like sex and… sex. The gloves are off as she pushes back at the unreal sexual expectations women face with her hilarious, no-holds-barred style.

93 Days
A.M.I.
Along Came a Spider
Bad Boys
Bad Boys II
Blow
Bring It On, Ghost: season 1
Charlie’s Angels
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
Cheese in the Trap: season 1
Chicago Typewriter: season 1
Crash
Exit Wounds
Good Burger
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Honey 2
House of the Witch
Lagos Real Fake Life
Men in Black II
Moms at War
One Direction: This Is Us
Payday
Rugrats in Paris: The Movie
Scream 2
Senna
Signal: season 1
Sin City
Sinister Circle
Supergirl
Superman Returns
Surf’s Up
The Bucket List
The Flintstones
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
The Island
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Rugrats Movie
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Tomorrow with You: season 1
Trainspotting
Troy
Tunnel: season 1
Unaccompanied Minors
Walking Out

October 2nd

Living Undocumented (series)

Netflix description: From executive producer Selena Gomez, Living Undocumented follows eight undocumented immigrant families who volunteered to tell their stories at great personal risk, revealing the high cost many must pay to try and live the American dream.

Ready to Mingle (Solteras) (film)

Netflix description: After the man she thought she’d marry breaks up with her, Ana joins a class for single women who are in search of a husband.

Rotten: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: Explore the secrets behind sugar and chocolate, the true cost of avocados and bottled water, and the changing world of wine and marijuana edibles.

October 3rd

Seis Manos (anime series)

Netflix description: Set in Mexico in the 1970s, Seis Manos centers on three orphaned martial arts warriors who join forces with a DEA agent and a Mexican Federal to battle for justice after their beloved mentor is murdered on the streets of their tiny border town.

October 4th

Big Mouth: season 3 (animated series)

Netflix description: In Season 3, Big Mouth focuses on what it’s like to be going through puberty now. The show continues exploring human sexuality and everything around it, tackling issues such as cell phone addiction, female anger, the vast spectrum of sexuality, Adderall abuse, dick pics, toxic masculinity, and of course “how to have an orgasm.” As the end of seventh grade rapidly approaches, Thandie Newton shakes things up as Missy’s new Hormone Monstress, and Ali Wong joins the cast as a new student who makes everyone at Bridgeton Middle question their sexuality. The season culminates with a superhero showdown that brings long-simmering tensions to a head and tests even the strongest friendships.

Creeped Out: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: Creepy apps, wishes gone wrong and portals to another dimension: Brace yourself for 10 new spine-tingling tales.

Peaky Blinders: season 5 (series)

Netflix description: As the Shelbys grapple with the 1929 stock market crash, Tommy confronts new threats to his power from younger family members and fascist rivals.

Raising Dion (series)

Netflix description: Raising Dion follows the story of a woman named Nicole (Alisha Wainwright), who raises her son Dion (newcomer Ja’Siah Young) after the death of her husband, Mark (Michael B. Jordan). The normal dramas of raising a son as a single mom are amplified when Dion starts to manifest several mysterious, superhero-like abilities. Nicole must now keep her son’s gifts secret with the help of Mark’s best friend Pat (Jason Ritter), and protect Dion from antagonists out to exploit him while figuring out the origin of his abilities.

Super Monsters: season 3 (series)

Netflix description: The fun-loving Super Monsters learn new lessons and make new friends while exploring the world around them in Pitchfork Pines.

Super Monsters: Vida’s First Halloween (series)

Netflix description: The Super Monsters share their Halloween traditions with Vida, then get invited to a Día de los Muertos party in the Howlers’ backyard.

In the Tall Grass (film)

Netflix description: When siblings Becky and Cal hear the cries of a young boy lost within a field of tall grass, they venture in to rescue him, only to become ensnared themselves by a sinister force that quickly disorients and separates them. Cut off from the world and unable to escape the field’s tightening grip, they soon discover that the only thing worse than getting lost is being found. Based on the novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill.

October 5th

Legend Quest: Masters of Myth (series)

Netflix description: When mythical creatures come to life, it’s up to Leo, Teodora, Don Andrés and Alebrije — super-secret monster hunters — to save the day.

October 7th

Match! Tennis Juniors (live-action series based on manga)

Netflix description: A tennis prodigy battles the odds to excel on the court while balancing schoolwork and inspiring fellow players on his team.

October 8th

Deon Cole: Cole Hearted (comedy special)

Netflix description: Chicago’s own Deon Cole is relentlessly hilarious in his first hour-long Netflix original comedy special, Deon Cole: Cole Hearted. Doubling down on his unrestrained and engaging set from the Netflix stand-up comedy series The Standups, Cole beta-tests bottomless jokes about offering mints to strangers, dining while Black, post-sex salutations and the preservation of comedy as the last raw form of expression.

The Spooky Tale of Captain Underpants Hack-a-ween (film)

Netflix description: When Halloween is declared illegal, best friends Harold and George search for a clever way to fight back against the outrageous new law.

October 9th

Rhythm + Flow (reality series)

Netflix description: Judges Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and Tip T.I. Harris search for the next breakout hip-hop star in this music competition series. Starting October 9, new episodes of Rhythm + Flow will roll out each Wednesday, with different phases of the competition featured across 10 episodes.

October 10th

Schitt’s Creek: season 5 (series)
Ultramarine Magmell (anime)

Netflix description: Decades after the sudden birth of a new continent, a young rescuer-for-hire provides aid to adventurers exploring this dangerous, uncharted world.

October 11th

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (film)

Netflix description: Written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, the Netflix Television Event El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie follows fugitive Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) as he runs from his captors, the law and his past.

The Forest of Love (film)

Netflix description: Auteur Sion Sono helms the fictionalized retelling of how one charismatic leader led his followers down a bizarre, gruesome, deadly and depraved path.

Fractured (film)

Netflix description: Driving home after a tense holiday weekend with his in-laws, Ray Monroe (Sam Worthington), a well-meaning but overwhelmed family man, pulls into a rest area with his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) and daughter Peri (Lucy Capri). The trip takes a turn for the worse when Peri is hurt in an accident and the family rushes to a nearby emergency room run by a staff with dubious intentions. After being sent away for further testing Peri and Joanne vanish and all records of their visit disappear. Ray’s concern turns into a desperate race to find his family and discover the truth of what happened to them.

Haunted: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: In an all-new season of true-life terror, real people recount unsettling run-ins with demons, ghosts and more, as told via dramatic reenactments.

Insatiable: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: In season two of Insatiable we find Patty dealing with, well, a lot. Her past is haunting her, and her struggle to be “good” is becoming harder and harder each day as she battles her inner demons. And Bob — well — he’s helping her cover up Christian’s murder, but just how far will his loyalties go? Will he continue to allow his romantic relationships, his career ambitions, and his integrity to take a beating, just to help Patty pursue her pageant dreams? And when beauty queens start going missing, who’s to blame? Patty’s rage? Or is there more at play?

La Influencia (film)

Netflix description: Back in her childhood home to care for her comatose mother, Alicia is forced to face a past she thought she’d buried and a body that refuses to die.

The Hook Up Plan (Plan Coeur): season 2 (series)

Netflix description: Four months after bidding farewell to her BFFs, Elsa stages her return to Paris. But guilty secrets take a toll on her love life and her friendships.

The Awakenings of Motti Wolkenbruch (film)

Netflix description: Pressured to marry a nice Orthodox Jewish woman, Motti is thrown for a loop when he falls for classmate Laura, who his mother will never approve of.

YooHoo to the Rescue: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: In a series of magical missions, quick-witted YooHoo and his can-do crew travel the globe to help animals in need.

October 12th

Banlieusards (film)

Netflix description: Noumouké, 15, must decide which of his brothers’ footsteps he’ll follow: law student Soulaymaan or mobster Demba. Directed by Kery James and Leïla Sy.

October 15th

Dark Crimes (film)

Netflix description: In this engrossing drama based on a 2008 New Yorker article, the cold case of a slain Polish businessman begins to heat up again after a famous writer publishes a novel about a strangely similar crime.

October 16th

Ghosts of Sugar Land (film)

Netflix description: A group of suburban Muslim friends trace the disappearance of their friend Mark, who is suspected of joining ISIS.

Sinister 2 (film)

Netflix description: In this terror-drenched sequel, a single mother and her 9-year-old twins move into a new home, unaware of its dark legacy until they’re introduced to Mr. Boogie — a hideous demonic spirit who preys on children’s souls.

October 17th

The Unlisted (series)

Netflix description: Identical twin brothers Dru and Kal uncover a secret government plot to control and track Australia’s students.

The Karate Kid (film)

October 18th

The Yard (Avlu) (series)

Netflix description: After a fateful domestic clash, a devoted mother finds herself in prison and fighting to survive in hopes of reuniting with her daughter.

Baby: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: Chiara and Ludovica find their lives spinning out of control as they navigate relationships, high school dramas and new corners of Rome’s underworld.

Eli (film)

Netflix description: Eli is the story of a young boy (Charlie Shotwell) plagued with an unknown, debilitating illness that requires him to live completely sealed off from the outside world. After exhausting every option, his parents (Kelly Reilly and Max Martini) put their trust — and his life — in the hands of a doctor (Lili Taylor) whose experimental, cutting-edge treatments at her clean-house facility may hold Eli’s last hope. As Eli undergoes the tremendously intense process that could potentially cure him, he begins to be haunted by experiences that make him question who he can trust and what is lurking inside the house. Co-starring Sadie Sink.

Interior Design Masters (reality series)

Netflix description: Aspiring interior designers transform a variety of spaces from dowdy to delightful as they vie for a life-changing contract with a top London hotel.

The House of Flowers: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: The de la Mora family grieves a loss while trying to recover sold businesses, plotting revenge and entangling themselves in romantic disasters.

The Laundromat (film)

Netflix description: A widow (Meryl Streep) investigates an insurance fraud, chasing leads to a pair of Panama City law partners (Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas) exploiting the world’s financial system. Steven Soderbergh directs.

Living with Yourself (series)

Netflix description: The Netflix original series Living With Yourself is an inventive existential comedy that asks: do we really want to be better? Miles (Paul Rudd) is a man struggling in life. When he undergoes a novel spa treatment that promises to make him a better person, he finds he’s been replaced by a new and improved version of himself. As he deals with the unintended consequences of his actions, Miles finds he must fight for his wife (Aisling Bea), his career, and his very identity. Told from multiple perspectives, the eight-episode series was created and written by Emmy® Award winner Timothy Greenberg (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (The Battle of the Sexes, Little Miss Sunshine) and stars Paul Rudd and… Paul Rudd. Greenberg executive produces with Anthony Bregman and Jeff Stern for Likely Story, Tony Hernandez for Jax Media, Dayton, Faris, Rudd, and Jeff Blitz.

MeatEater: season 8 (series)

Netflix description: Steve’s journeys in search of such delicious game meat as venison and mutton take him as far afield as Mexico and Alaska.

Mighty Little Bheem: Diwali (series)

Netflix description: From decorating his home to devouring sweets, join Bheem as he makes merry — and a bit of mischief — while the festival of lights is in full swing.

Seventeen (film)

Netflix description: To find his therapy dog, a 17-year-old escapes from juvie and embarks on a journey of reconnection with his brother and grandmother through Cantabria.

Spirit Riding Free: Pony Tales Collection 2 (series)

Netflix description: The fun continues for Lucky and her friends with more adventure than ever before. Wherever they go, it’s quite a ride — and you get to come along!

Tell Me Who I Am (documentary)

Netflix description: After losing his memory at age 18, Alex Lewis relies on his twin brother Marcus to teach him who he is. But the idyllic childhood Alex paints is hiding a traumatic family secret that the twins must finally face together decades later.

Toon: seasons 1–2 (series)

Netflix description: Reclusive, socially awkward jingle composer Toon must navigate the nightmarish world of show biz after a viral video skyrockets him to fame.

Unnatural Selection (series)

Netflix description: Pioneers in gene-editing techniques and artificial intelligence confront ethical and technological challenges unlike any humanity has faced before.

Upstarts (film)

Netflix description: Upstarts is a bromance about three college graduates from small-town India, captivated by the startup mania sweeping the country. As they enter the rollercoaster startup ecosystem of big dreams, big money and bigger sharks, they are faced with a big choice — their dreams, or their friendship. Directed by Udai Singh Pawar, Upstarts is produced by Raja Menon, Janani Ravichandran and Jawahar Sharma of Bandra West Productions. This film is supported by real-life heroes from the startup world in Bengaluru.

October 19th

Men in Black (film)

October 21st

Echo in the Canyon (documentary)

Netflix description: 1965-67 was a moment when bands came to LA to emulate The Beatles, and Laurel Canyon emerged as a hotbed of creativity and collaboration for a new generation of musicians who would soon put an indelible stamp on the history of American popular music. Featuring Jacob Dylan, the film explores the Laurel Canyon scene via never-before-heard personal details behind the bands and their songs, and how that music continues to inspire today.

Free Fire (film)

Netflix description: In a deserted Boston warehouse, two criminal gangs meet to complete an arms transaction, but the deal ends up going horribly awry, pitting the two sides against each other in a high-voltage shootout.

October 22nd

Jenny Slate: Stage Fright (comedy special)

Netflix description: Comedian and actress Jenny Slate’s first Netflix original comedy special Stage Fright gives the audience an inside look at the comedian’s world. Interspersed within her hilarious stand-up set, Jenny shares personal clips of her childhood and interviews with her family in an intimate look at her life. Launching globally on October 22, Jenny overcomes her stage fright while telling stories about her visit to a midnight Catholic Mass and the ghosts that haunted her childhood home.

October 23rd

Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner (reality show)

Netflix description: Each episode of Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner will feature David Chang accompanied by a different celebrity guest exploring a single city, its culture and its cuisine. As the pair travels through each city, they will also uncover new and surprising things about themselves. Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner is produced by Tremolo Productions in association with Majordomo Media. Morgan Neville, Dara Horenblas, David Chang, Christopher Chen, Caryn Capotsto, and Blake Davis serve as Executive Producers.

Dancing with the Birds (documentary)

Netflix description: Some of the world’s most majestic birds display delightfully captivating mating rituals, from flashy dancing to flaunting their colorful feathers.

Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy (film)

Netflix description: After his defeat by Ip Man, martial-arts expert Cheung Tin-chi gives up the Wing Chun discipline and vows to live quietly in Hong Kong with his son. But he soon runs afoul of a triad and is pulled back into a life of violence.

October 24th

Daybreak (series)

Netflix description: High school isn’t the end of the world… until it is. In this post-apocalyptic, genre-bending series, the city of Glendale, California is populated by marauding gangs of jocks, gamers, the 4-H Club, and other fearsome tribes who are kicking ass as they fight to survive in the wake of a nuclear blast (on the night of Homecoming… ugh). Following an eclectic group of survivors as they navigate this strange and treacherous world, Daybreak is part samurai saga, part endearing coming-of-age story, and part Battle Royale. This Generation A series (A for Apocalypse! Get it?) is rated TV MA.

Revenge of the Pontianak (film)

October 25th

A Tale of Love and Darkness (film)

Netflix description: Bringing to life the memoir of celebrated Israeli author Amos Oz, this affecting drama depicts his early years, when his family was swept up in the turbulence and violence of Israel’s founding as a nation.

Assimilate (film)

Netflix description: While hard at work on a web series about their community, friends Zach Henderson, Randy Foster and Kayla Shepard make a frightening discovery: Their neighbors are being killed and their bodies taken over by doppelgängers.

Brigada Costa del Sol (series)

Netflix description: This series explores the history of drug traffic in Spain and focuses on the first law enforcement organization created to fight it in the mid 1970s.

Brotherhood (series)

Netflix description: An honest lawyer (Naruna Costa) reaches a moral crossroads after learning her brother (Seu Jorge) is the leader of a rising criminal faction in Brazil.

Dolemite Is My Name (film)

Netflix description: Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner Eddie Murphy portrays real-life legend Rudy Ray Moore, a comedy and rap pioneer who proved naysayers wrong when his hilarious, obscene, kung-fu fighting alter ego, Dolemite, became a 1970s Blaxploitation phenomenon.

Greenhouse Academy: season 3 (series)

Netflix description: The teen drama set in an elite boarding school in Southern California returns for Season 3, with the two rival student houses joining forces to uncover an evil plot.

The Kominsky Method: season 2 (series)

Netflix description: The sun isn’t setting yet on aging actor slash acting coach, Sandy Kominsky and his longtime agent Norman Newlander in the award-winning Netflix comedy series The Kominsky Method. Academy Award® Winners Michael Douglas (Kominsky) and Alan Arkin (Newlander) continue their journey as two friends tackling life’s inevitable curveballs as they navigate their later years in Los Angeles, a city that, above all else, values youth. This season, Sandy meets and bonds with his daughter’s new boyfriend (guest star Paul Reiser) who is uncomfortably close to Sandy’s age. Meanwhile, Norman reconnects with an old flame from his youth (guest star Jane Seymour) and after fifty years, they decide to start again. Nancy Travis and Sarah Baker co-star. Both comedic and emotional, The Kominsky Method is a half-hour single-camera comedy created by 8-time Emmy Award Nominee Chuck Lorre. Lorre, Al Higgins and Michael Douglas executive produce the series which is produced by Chuck Lorre Productions, Inc. in association with Warner Bros. Television. The second season consists of eight episodes.

Monzon (series)

Netflix description: This series explores the criminal investigations of Argentine boxing champion Carlos Monzón, who in 1989 was found guilty of the violent murder of his wife Alicia Muñiz.

Nailed It! France (C’est du Gâteau!) (reality series)

Netflix description: Nailed it! hits France with a splat as home bakers talented in catastrophe compete to make almost-edible wonders. French pastry may never be the same.

Nailed It! Spain (Niquelao!) (reality series)

Netflix description: Nailed It! cruises to Spain, where novices try to avoid a fiasco while baking stunners. La Terremoto de Alcorcón hosts alongside chef Christian Escribá.

Prank Encounters (reality series)

Netflix description: Hosted by Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things), each episode of this terrifying and hilarious prank show takes two complete strangers on the surprise ride of a lifetime. It’s business as usual until their paths collide and their one-day assignments turn into supernatural surprises. Where fear meets funny, Prank Encounters is the most elaborate hidden camera prank show ever devised.

Rattlesnake (film)

Netflix description: Katrina (Carmen Ejogo) is a single mother driving cross-country to start a new life with her young daughter Clara (Apollina Pratt) when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. As Katrina changes the tire, Clara wanders off the desert road and is bitten by a venomous rattlesnake. Desperate to save her daughter’s life, Katrina accepts the help of a mysterious woman, but after she miraculously heals Clara, Katrina is asked to repay the good deed by killing a stranger in exchange for the life saved. Without time to lose, she must wrestle with the morality of who deserves to live and who should die, before her daughter’s life is once again put in peril at sundown. Rattlesnake is a pulse-pounding, psychological horror film directed by Zak Hilditch (1922, These Final Hours), also starring Theo Rossi (Sons of Anarchy, Marvel’s Luke Cage) and Emma Greenwell (Shameless, Love & Friendship, The Rock) and produced by Ross Dinerstein (1922, The Package, 6 Balloons).

It Takes a Lunatic (documentary film)

Netflix description: An intimate portrait of Wynn Handman, a teacher who impacted generations of actors and directors — including Denzel Washington, Christopher Walken, Connie Britton, John Leguizamo, Aasif Mandvi, Alec Baldwin, Burt Reynolds, Joanne Woodward and many more.

October 28th

A 3 Minute Hug (documentary film)

Netflix description: This documentary captures the joy and heartbreak of families separated by the U.S.-Mexico border sharing a short but bittersweet reunion in 2018.

Little Miss Sumo (documentary film)

Netflix description: Banned from competing professionally, sumo wrestling champion Hiyori confronts obstacles inside and outside the ring in an attempt to change the rules of Japan’s national sport — and fight gender inequality.

Shine On with Reese: season 1 (series)

October 29th

Arsenio Hall: Smart & Classy (comedy special)

Netflix description: Actor, talk show host, producer, and comedy legend Arsenio Hall makes his Netflix comedy special debut with Smart & Classy. Over the course of his illustrious career entertaining audiences around the world, Arsenio reflects on stand-up in today’s political climate, Coming to America, winning Celebrity Apprentice, his favorite drug, and more!

October 30th

Flavorful Origins: Yunnan Cuisine (documentary series)

Netflix description: Explore the diverse flavors of China’s Yunnan province and get to know the cooks and ingredients that shape its rich culinary tradition.

October 31st

Kengan Ashura: Part ll (anime)

Netflix description: The Annihilation Tournament rages on: corporate leaders jockey for the Kengan chairmanship while their gladiators beat each other bloody in the ring.

Nowhere Man (series)

Netflix description: Two nefarious schemes taking place 10 years apart entangle a dauntless triad member who must break out of prison to rescue a loved one.

Raging Bull (film)

Leaving October 1st

A.I. Artificial Intelligence
All the President’s Men
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Bring It On: In It to Win It
Cabaret (1972)
Casper
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
Cloverfield
Deliverance
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Empire Records
Evolution
Forks Over Knives
Frances Ha
Free State of Jones
Get Carter
Gremlins
Hoosiers
Impractical Jokers: season 1
In Bruges
Julie & Julia
Lakeview Terrace
Midsomer Murders: Series 1-19
Obsessed
Pineapple Express
Platoon
Quiz Show
She’s Out of My League
The Dukes of Hazzard
The Nightmare
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Leaving October 5th

Despicable Me 3

Leaving October 7th

David Blaine: What Is Magic?
Scream 4

Leaving October 9th

Little Witch Academia
Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade
Sword Art Online II: season 1

Leaving October 15th

El Internado: seasons 1–7

Leaving October 20th

Bridget Jones’s Baby

Leaving October 25th

The Carrie Diaries: seasons 1–2

Leaving October 29th

The Fall: Series 1
The Imitation Game

Yes, Toy Story 4’s director knows how weird Forky made the Toy Story world

2019-09-23T12:17:35-04:00

Toy Story 4 debuted in a world that’s changed profoundly since the original Toy Story hit theaters nearly 25 years ago. Toy Story was the first-ever entirely computer-animated film; now CGI animation is common, and the hand-drawn cel animation it replaced is a shrinking rarity. Toy Story was considered a huge success because it made more than $300 million at the box office; the newest sequel was considered a mild disappointment because it didn’t meet the outstanding projections for its performance, meaning it only brought in $1 billion.

But more significantly, Toy Story dropped into a world where Pixar Animation Studios was still an unknown, rather than an industry-shaping inspiration. Expectations for the first Toy Story were modest. Expectations for Toy Story 4 were outsized in part because Pixar has been such a powerful industry force over the last 25 years, and the Toy Story series in particular has been such a critical, aesthetic, narrative, and financial success. It was a major legacy to live up to with a third sequel. First-time feature director Josh Cooley is a Pixar vet who’s worked as a storyboard artist, writer, and shorts director on projects from Ratatouille and the Cars movies, to Up and Inside Out. With Toy Story 4 releasing digitally on October 1st, and coming to 4K UHD and Blu-ray October 8th, Cooley talked to The Verge about the biggest challenges on the film, from specific story beats to character design and making the perfect virtual spider.

What was your biggest challenge on Toy Story 4 from a technological perspective?

Josh Cooley: It would definitely be the antique store. We have about 10,000 items in that store, and each one had to be shaded and built and rendered, so there’s a lot of information for the computer to wrap its head around. And we knew we were going to be in that antique store for a big chunk of the film. There’s also dust, and spiderwebs, and all this detail. So at first, we weren’t even sure we would be able to fill a store that big with that much stuff. The tone I really wanted was like a jungle, like a crammed city jungle, just a lot of stuff, how the stores are. We did a test a couple summers earlier, and we were able to make it work, so it seemed like would be possible.

You’ve said you put a lot of visual Easter eggs in the antique store because you got “lazy,” so you put in renders of things like Bing Bong’s rocket from Inside Out. What else should viewers watch out for on home video?

[Laughs] I should verify that it wasn’t out of laziness. That was just a joke. We do actually have to re-render everything, it’s not as easy as just clicking and dragging something from an old film. We have to start over again every time. But my favorite thing is, in one shot, there’s a casting of a hand in the background. And that is Ed Catmull’s hand. Ed’s the [former] president of the studio, and it was the very first computer model that was ever created. He did it as like, a project in school. I think they even used it in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan or something. [Catmull worked on the film’s computer-generated Genesis simulation.] So we made it into a plaster statue that you can purchase at an antique store.

It’s so random.

Toy Story 4 lowers the stakes and ramps up the whimsy

Talking to Pixar over the years about its evolving technology, we’ve heard a lot about your light renderers and how they change the textures of your world. How does your lighting interact with something as visually complex as spiderwebs?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m not exactly sure even how that works. I do know they had to build, basically, a virtual spider to design the webs realistically. They’d say, “Where exactly would you like to have spiderwebs?” And I’d point on the screen where I’d like them, and then they would send the spider into action that would create natural-looking spiderwebs. It was insane, it was amazing. To be able to direct that side of the film, the technological side, all I had to do was talk about the emotion I wanted, and the animators would go do their magic and come back and show me incredible stuff. It was like a magic trick. It was insane.

What was the hardest sequence to plan and design?

The big action scene in the store, when they’re rescuing Forky out of the cabinet. That was a tough one. There were a lot of moving parts, a lot of characters. The staging had to be very clear as to where the characters were. We use the lighting to help sell that. The light coming in from the front of the store is casting into the store, so in the beginning, Woody and the toys are in shadow, and then when they get into the cabinet, the light’s streaming in. So we really made a difference between the two parts of the set they were on. But there’s a lot of action, a lot of story beats within that action scene that had to be very clear. So that was a tough one.

What about from an emotional perspective? What was hardest to convey when you were trying to break down the narrative and get the script set?

Probably the Bo and Woody relationship. Overall, we kept a real close eye on it. It was so important. Because this is a movie about their relationship, we looked at a lot of movies about relationships. Often there’s not a lot of dialog to establish a relationship. It’s mostly the looks between actors and the chemistry you can feel when you’re seeing how someone will look at someone else for just an extra little beat. Really subtle little things. And so, whenever we had moments like that, we made sure when we were animating it to bring everybody into the room at the same time and look at all the shots back to back. We wouldn’t just look at a single shot, like we tend to do. We’d look at the whole scene in whatever state of animation it was, just to make sure that every beat was being timed correctly and was being acted in the correct way.

The boldness of the ending was a big surprise to a lot of fans of the franchise, but Pixar just released an alternate ending that went in the exact opposite direction, and it apparently got as far as the animatic stage. What kind of conversations did you have about how you wanted to end the film?

Well, the very first version — this was always just in animatics — all the toys, including Bo, came back to Bonnie’s house at the end, and it was kind of like, “Bonnie has a new lamp now, and everything’s reset the way it was, but now with Bo in the picture.” And it just wasn’t emotionally satisfying. We didn’t really learn anything in that version.

So we thought, “Let’s see what happens with a Casablanca-type ending,” where they love each other, but they know they have different duties they have to perform now. So that’s what you saw in the deleted scenes. And that wasn’t satisfying, either. And then we went on to the next step, which was, “Let’s see what it looks like if they both don’t return.” I had this thought — I remember walking through this pitch with the producers. Just talking about him staying with the love of his life and saying goodbye to his friends, and saying “To infinity and beyond!” with Buzz, my voice cracked with the emotion of that moment. I could feel that. So I was convinced that if I could put that emotion on the screen, it could mean something.

What were the biggest challenges in the design stage, particularly in designing Ducky and Bunny?

Well, the great thing is — my production designer, Bob Pauley, was a designer on the first Toy Story. He actually designed Buzz Lightyear. So he came in with the design aesthetic, knowing the world. Toy Story is all about exaggerated shapes seen from low perspectives, because that’s where the characters are going to be most of the time. He knows theatrical lighting and realistic textures are the things that defined Toy Story. With Ducky and Bunny, I said, “These are carnival toys. Most carnival toys are crappy.” They don’t look like you can really hug them, because they’re made of this awful material that’s really cheap. These guys are designed to be as cute as possible, which will contrast perfectly with their actual personalities. So the designers showed me tons of different designs of cute animals, and we narrowed it down to two, who are attached and have these off colors, you know, with a bright blue Bunny and such.

Forky is a new visual element for this world, and he has to look like trash but still be a personable, relatable character. What were the discussions around his design?

There weren’t that many! [Laughs] He’s very simple, which is what I love about him. When we first started speaking about an art craft becoming a toy, the very first drawing, I think, was of a spork. And when we all saw that, we all just kept drawing sporks with different types of arms and legs. It was just that sporks are funny. In a weird way — we didn’t even plan this, but the idea of a spork being a fork and a spoon also complements the idea that he’s trash and a toy at the same time. Even in his creation, he’s not even sure what he is. So there was just something really funny and entertaining about that.

People take Pixar movies so seriously, debating your timeline and your philosophy and so forth. And Forky freaked people out because they’re saying, “So can anything be a toy? Can anything in this world come to life, and then it’s alive forever?” Do you guys have these kinds of philosophical discussions? Did you talk about what Forky was doing to your world?

Oh yeah! That’s how he was born. We were in a room talking about our own kids, and how the rules of Toy Story are that toys come to life. We said, “Well, our own kids in real life, they will pick up a rock and play with it. If Bonnie does that, does that mean the rock’s alive?” So we started pulling the threads on the universe. But then we were like, “Well, wait, let’s embrace that! Let’s say what would happen!” And the fact is, that thing that was not a toy would come to life. It has never seen Toy Story 1, 2, or 3, so it doesn’t understand any of the rules of the world. And we were just busting ourselves up with how ridiculous that was.

But also just the fact that the audience is coming in with all this knowledge of Toy Story. So to have a character show up that doesn’t understand it gives you so much leverage, comedy-wise. But also, it allows you to have an innocent character that can force Woody to explain what it means to be a toy. And then we could say, “Oh, now he’s supporting Woody’s story. Now there’s a real reason to have him in the movie.”