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Foreign.
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Hello. Welcome back to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson. That's Mali Rubin. And joining us today from Sycamore Studios, it's Van Lathan. Hey, Van. How you doing?
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What's up, guys? How are you guys doing? I'm here at Sycamore spelled S I
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C K. What do I. Slickamore. Slickamore is one of Sycamore.
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I like that. I like. I like both of them. These are fantastic names. We're hearing our new digs. Everybody's so excited.
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All right, here's the deal. Mallory and I are at home. Van's luxuriating on our beautiful couch there in the studio, and we are here to talk to you about Interstellar as part of our ongoing Christopher Nolan series. And we'll get into that right after this.
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This episode is brought to you by Walt Disney World Resort, the most magical place on Earth where you can go into hyperspace in the Millennium Falcon, ride past hitchhiking ghosts in the Haunted Mansion, and shrink to the size of Andy's toys in Toy Story Land. There are infinite worlds that you can experience, and it's all in one place. Walt Disney world Resort. Visit disneyworld.com to learn more and discover a world of magic this summer across all four theme parks.
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This episode is brought to you by Hotels.com Save youe Way is a new feature on Hotels.com and it's as simple as it sounds. When you book a trip as a Hotels.com member, you decide how to use your savings. Take the instant savings now or bank the savings as rewards for later. It's your call only@hotels.com Save your way is available to loyalty members in the US and UK and hotels with member prices. Other terms apply. See site for details.
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All right, so, Mallory, do you want to announce the theme that we've definitely planned long in advance? Sure. Like, we've been planning this for so long and definitely did not just come up with it. What House of R is doing for the month of March, I would say
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we had planned all of these podcasts and only just recently realized we had many space podcasts in a row because we are so excited for Project Hail Mary. It's a book we love. It's a movie. We're very much looking forward to it. So it's Space Month. It's Space Month here at the House of Our move. Oversee our month. You're on notice. It's Space Month in March and we will be doing. Obviously, we're doing Interstellar today as the part of the ongoing Christopher Nolan rewatch on the here at the house of our slow and steady march toward the Odyssey. It's the first one of Winter. We've been workshopping some titles for that. I think it'll ultimately fall on Carlos to name it when the podcast goes live. Is it chill? Nolan Winter, you've been workshopping some other ideas. Then we're going to be revisiting the Martian because that is another Andy Weir space adaptation, Drew Goddard's screenplay. So we need to revisit that film before Project Hail Mary. Then we're going to do a space movies draft. Can't fucking wait. That's going to be a blast. That is going to be so fun. And then we will be diving deep into Project Hail Mary. And guess what? We're talking to Andy Weir.
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We got Andy Weir in the pod. Very exciting. Thrilling. So, yeah, it's Space Month. We're really, really excited and I'm so excited to have Van here for our trip into Interstellar.
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We could not save the human race without Van. We needed a team up for Interstellar. It's an absolute must.
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How can folks keep track of everything we're doing in space and everything else that's happening on the feed?
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Here's what I would recommend. Follow. That's really all you need to do. Follow the pod on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. You can see full video episodes of House of R and the Midnight Boys. Pew, pew, pew, pew. On the Spotify app and the Ringerverse YouTube channel. You're gonna be able to see around the Oscars. You're gonna be able to see the annual team up the Versys. That's a thrill. We're all excited for that. We're gonna be gathering next week to do the Versys. That's always a treat, always fun. And while you're at it, follow the Ringiverse on the social media platform of your choosing. We're not gonna tell you what that should be. Wherever you wanna be, that's where we are.
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Live your life.
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Live your life. Find us. Find us on the Internet.
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Engage where you will.
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Yeah, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, et cetera. And then, you know, email us. The inbox is always open. We had a wonderful time with the seasonal mailbag just a few days ago. Keep the emails coming. Send us your Project Hail Mary emails, your Space Month emails. What do you think should be selected in the space draft? Even though you don't know who will be drafting or what the categories are going to be, let us know and send us your Project Hail Mary thoughts, your daredevil thoughts, Anything that's coming later in the season. We always love to hear from you. Hobbitsanddragonsmail.com this van.
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What are your thoughts on space and space movies in general?
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I was thinking about this. Cause I saw Project Hail Mary last night. And then I dusted off Interstellar this morning. Cause I wanted to have it fresh on my mind. And boy, do I feel small this morning. Feel small and dumb. And I'm ready. But you know what I think, though? And this is the real take. Watching these two movies back to back. And obviously we'll all, as a family, talk about Project Hail Mary a lot on the channel later on. Space and movies set in space give creators, filmmakers, a unique opportunity to litigate humanity. You can make movies in space that tell you more or demonstrate more about what it's like to be human, what it's like to be alive. Then you can. You can do that easier in space than you can with movies set like, right in the heart of Los Angeles around here. There's so many distractions wherever you live that take you away from your connection to people, from your feeling of a greater human experience. From sometimes how you are dedicated to humanity. But when you see people in space doing stuff and all they have are the sentences that they're saying to one another. The bravery, the mission, and it's for all of the marbles. Normally you get these really profound statements on life and love.
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I think. What do you think of the fact that there's like so many space horror movies. Like, in addition to these sort of adventure. Project Hail Mary, the Martian, Interstellar, et cetera, et cetera. You get a lot of space horror. What do you think about that? Any thoughts?
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Yeah, so I like space horror because you got all kinds of crazy things that can happen, right? You can pass or. What was that? What was that one where they went through the black hole and everything went crazy? What was the name of that one? What was it called? Event Horizon. Remember that one? That was wacky.
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Oh, yeah.
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Okay, so you get a crazy beast, a demon, a virus or something like that. It's always fun. And I like that because space itself is a prison. So even if you're on a ship, doesn't matter how big the ship is. You're trapped inside of the ship as you're doing all of this stuff. But the things that really move me about these space films, like I said, are the exploration of the science behind them. And this fundamental examination of the human experience. That can only happen when you're so far away. Space is the ultimate away game, okay? You're on somebody else's turf, you're around stars, time is different, all of that stuff. What do you have left? Love, commitment and experience.
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Mallory. I don't want to like blow up the spot of the person we were talking to, but we were talking to a mutual who said they like didn't like space movies because it like the concept frightened them. Sure. What, like, do you have any big, big picture space movies or space stories ideas that you want to share in this particular moment? I think I want to save it
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for the take for the space movie draft. So we're not stepping on that too much. But I do love a space movie. I think a lot of what Van is saying feels really right to me. That extends to television shows, novels as well. You know, something like Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorites to this day because it allows us to explore all of that, like what is worth preserving and fighting for and saving about humanity. But also there are episodes where the sheer terror that you're forced to confront when you know, one of the moments in this movie, in Interstellar, which we're about to talk about is like that I love. It's quiet, it's quick. But when Rom is like, there's just nothing between us and all of the things that could kill us other than this big piece of metal. So you have the capacity in a space story to explore all aspects of. Of what frightens human beings and what human beings are driven by, motivated by, trying to preserve. They also, it's just, this is like the most obvious thing to say, but it is just so cinematic. It is the capacity for grand spectacle in a space opera and a space film. And then this is one of the things that I think we're really excited for, to explore more in the space draft and any draft here at the Ringer. There's always bleed across categories, but you have an opportunity to try to like codify and define something. And as you both are saying, the sub genres inside of the genre of the space film, like, are kind of boundless. You have space horror, you have space friendships, you have space adventures, you have first contact, right? You have space stories that are ultimately more set on some sort of terrain and planet. Is that something from space reaching us on Earth? Have we or other beings gone elsewhere into the great abyss? Can we establish a sense of connection and home? Or will we always feel like we've lost that if we're not on this very planet? It's just it's great. So I love what it unlocks for people. And like, there's something about when I was. I was texting Joe this the other day, like when I was a kid, I had a telescope and I loved the idea of having a telescope. And I was weaned on sci fi stories. This is like, my dad loves sci fi and you know, his introduction to something like Asimov's Nightfall, for example, leaving that as one of the stories on the bookshelf in my room is like a big gateway for me and getting into all of this in the first place. So I like kept this telescope in my room and I just always wanted to look up at the stars and think about it. Never really learned how to use it. And it's a regret of mine to this day. And maybe this is the year that I pivot back to a telescope, but I can't really see stars in Los Angeles. That's the problem.
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I know.
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Too much light pollution.
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Honestly, it's quite tough.
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Yeah. What about you, Joe? Why do you gravitate toward space cinema?
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I think that idea of the size thing that Van was bringing up earlier, like how small we are when we leave a planet where we are considered the apex predator, the most important thing on the rock. And then we go out in the world and we see in the wider world, see how big it is. See that there's intelligent life out there, see that there's intelligent life that is far more advanced or far more intelligent than we are. And all of a sudden we're the apes, you know, we're the whatever. I think that's really interesting. I think there are so many shots in this movie specifically. And we will be spoiling Interstellar, by the way, in case you haven't seen Interstellar, we will be spoiling you interstellar. So what are you doing? Go see that movie and come back and listen to this. But there are so many shots in this movie where the ship is so small in relative to the size of everything around it. When you see Gargantua or Saturn or even on the ocean of Miller's planet, like there are all these moments when the. When the minute nature of humanity is taken in sharp relief. And then also, one of my favorite things across many space stories is the silence in space.
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Yeah, me too.
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Right? There's like the favorite alien. Like in space, no one can hear you scream. But like all the exterior shots you get of the endurance and like how all the sound cuts out, I think that's like one of the coolest things that happens. In a space movie.
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So great.
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I'll add. One thing that I always love about these movies as well is the math. And tell you what I mean is that, like, so there's so much chaos, right? There's so much chaos in space. There's stars that are dying, there are black holes in this movie. There's all kinds of different things that happen, but the math is the salvation. The universe does have an operating system. And that operating system we can decipher, we can understand it, we can math our way through the universe. There's this theoretical astrophysicist named Miguel Alcubierre, and he wrote a paper where he talked about the fact that warp speed, light travel. Actually, the math checks out. It's the engine. I was stuck on this for like a month, so I gotta put it in here. It's the engineering, really, that we don't have. We really don't have the engineering to build the craft that we would need.
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Need.
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But the math checks out. So when we see human beings who are at the mercy of all of these different forces in the universe, just have to use something that we've been able to observe and wield with our own minds, which is the math of the universe, that's our salvation. It's almost like a God in and of itself. It's almost like a spirituality in and of itself. The equation, if you can figure that out, you can save yourself.
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I really love that you brought this up at the top of the pod. I think this is a fascinating film through which to assess the question of, frankly, whether you need to be able to track the math and science and whether the math and science inside of the film is sensical at all. So I'm sure that will come up as we go through it today. But more broadly, what I love about it is, and what I love about the category of film is that you can calibrate your relationship to that question as a viewer. And I think what something that Interstellar. I have quite a few notes on the science of interstellar. Even though I am not a scientist, not a physicist, I think the way that Interstellar deploys some of that is a little bit befuddling to me still, all this time later. However, what I love is pairing the intention to pair the hard sci fi and the soft sci fi. So you have a lot of actual science, right? And the equation, the idea of the singularity, the black hole, the event horizon, plan A, plan B, gravity, three dimensions, five dimensions, et cetera. You also just have the very tidy concept of the Explorer. And that is the same thing inside of this film because the impulse to explore and we get the comp to the explorer and the boat right before we're on a water planet. Wonderful stuff, right? It's great. The idea of just the human impulse to always seek something else. And so maybe that is just something that you feel in your soul. Maybe it is something that you say, I actually need to be able to crack the code of this and the math and the science support that one day I and humanity will be able to do that. And whatever the character's relationship to that idea is or the viewer's relationship to that idea is, it propels you outward and forward.
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I think this idea to bounce off of what both of you said. First of all, I think this idea of faith inside of this movie is really, really interesting. The daddy issues and the God issues are all wrapped up in one the way that they always should be inside of a story that we love. But also this idea, and this is definitely present in Project Hail Mary, of course, is like our salvation being science, our salvation as a species being science. And the way in which the world we live in, the country we live in right now, is consistently devaluing science and devaluing the idea of, like, NASA as like a vital part of the human experience versus now it's shifting towards, like, this is what the uber rich do and will do. And so like that. So we're not like gathering around to watch our scientists. We're gathering around to watch, like, Katy Perry go to space. And it's just like the way in which NASA is so humbled inside of. Of this story and. And the way in which. But then the way in which largely these stories so value scientists and math and curiosity and exploration is important to me. Can I just, as a person who. Yeah.
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Can I note one scene and it stuck out. This stuck out to me as I watched the movie this time. All right? When good old Coop, the best looking pilot farmer in the world. There's never been a better looking pilot.
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His skincare routine.
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His skincare routine in the dust bowl. Amazing.
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Okay, so this is such a good old Coop. So when Coop and Murph follow the gravity puzzle and they get into the room, there is a thought that they are inside of an Illuminati meeting, right? There are people. Legitimately, the way that scene is set is there are a bunch of people sitting around a table doing some weird shit. They're asking questions. They're asking questions as if they have some sort of authority. They're Asking questions as if Coop is beneath them. At first it seems that way, but what they really are, are curious. They're curious about what's happening, right? And that's sort of the veil is ripped off that when we find out who they are, they go, this is NASA. So this is not some military installation. This is not all the world's billionaires. This is not like this end times sort of religious cult that is there to figure out. This is NASA. Our relationship to NASA, the fact that we looked at that time at least as the people that explore space, as these people to be there was an altruism there. We looked at NASA, we looked at space exploration as something that broadened our experience as a human culture. Something that was awesome for us, something that brought us all different types of investments into technology. Something that changed our lives and made us understand how we interact with our universe and our natural world. When they go, this is NASA, you feel safe. You feel like he's safe. That would not be like that right now if that was this is Space Force or this is Blue Origin or this is SpaceX. You'd be like, it's a Bond villain at the other end of this conversation. You know what I mean?
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That's what I'm saying.
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The billionaires have like, the billionaires and the ne' er do. Wells have taken this thing that was like so patriotic and American and unifying and all this other stuff and. Okay, anyway, time dilation means that I have done podcast in a weird order. We're going to go now to our opening snapshot, which we do. All right, so this, this film was directed by Christopher Nolan. Have you heard of him? Screenplay by Chris Nolan and my beloved Jonah Nolan. We'll talk about some differences between their versions of this story, but it's based on an idea from Kip Thorne, renowned scientist, Nobel prize winner, I believe Kip Thorne and Linda Opst, who is a producer who worked on Contact. So came from like scientific minds who had an idea for a very grounded. I mean, Mallory, not a scientist, but has some questions about the science of this movie. But the. The idea was let's make a space movie that has very grounded science in it. And that's what we want to do here. This came out November 26, 2014. Budget 165 million. So less than a Kristi Noma ad campaign. Box office space 773.8 million. Which is.
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That's wild, man.
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Insane. This is an original concept sci fi movie. Matthew McConaughey was like real hot at the Time. But, like, this is, like, yes. 2014 original concept movie, $773 million on $165 million budget. This is the fifth highest grossing film for Chris Rollin. After Inception, two Batman movies, and the phenomenon that was Barbenheimer, like, and then it's Interstellar. That's completely wild to me. Honestly. Incredible stuff for Van, like, because Mallory and I have been, you know, hopping and jumping around Christopher Nolan's filmography. People know how we feel about Christopher Nolan. What's your relationship to Nolan's filmography? What do you think of him as a filmmaker?
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So Nolan was one of the first directors of my. You know, I had the directors that I came up with. These were my guys, right? These were guys, and we all got older together. It was Spike Lee and Spielberg was the older guard. All of these guys that I came up with. Nolan is one of the first of the new guys, like, a friend that I met in college. You know how you have your friends that you grew up with and they're your friends, Then you get to college and you make a new friend and you go, is this friend gonna be as with me as the guys this guy might be with me? This is one of my guys. That is who Christopher Nolan was. For me, it actually started off with Batman Begins. I know he had done stuff before, and I went back and watched it, but I went to watch Batman Begins and I was like, yo, what the fuck? This was way better than it had any business being. This is a weird take on Batman. And subsequent movies just continued to push me to expand my palette as a film fan, to really work my brain out. He just doesn't make a simple movie. He goes into the world of magicians and does all of this crazy shit, goes into the world of sleep and does all this crazy shit, goes into the world of Batman and does all this crazy shit. You're relitigating. Is the Joker, right? I never thought about this before. All he wants to do is poison the water supply of Gotham. I never thought that he might have a point before. And so by the time we get to Interstellar, I'm like, all right, me and him are good now. I'm like, whatever he's gonna do, I'm pretty good with it. And I'm gonna be real with you. It had to have been that way, because that first watch was lift. That was lift. That was deadlift. That was bench press. There was a lot on the screen. I'm at the TCL Chinese Theater getting bombarded by sound. Getting bombarded by the depth of what's on the screen, and then by the time you're. It's dusty in the world. Is this Earth? Are we on Earth? Where's the dust? They're eating nothing but corn products. What's happening here? No explanation as to what's going on. You just have to infer that. And then they start with the science. And Inception had kind of primed me for this a little bit, because you get to a point at the end of Inception where I really cannot really explain. This is the fourth kick, third kick. We're down to the fifth level and all that stuff. I really don't know what's going on. So Interstellar. By the time I got to Interstellar with Nolan, I could surrender to his taste the way that he makes movies and what he demands of an audience. And I remember leaving the theater. The first thing I thought was, when can I see it again? That was the first thing I thought. It was like, when can I go back?
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B
Mal, where were you when you saw it? And did you love it right away?
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C
So this is 2014. I was in Los Angeles. I was working at Grantlin. I was just recounting this to Sean the other night. I have a pretty vivid memory of this being, like a. Of being a very active discussion in the Grantland offices about this movie, in part because one of Van's co hosts, Tate Fraser, was a Grantlin intern at the time. And Tate walked into the office and this is my memory, perhaps apocryphal, but I feel like this is true. And basically declared that this was the best film that had ever been made. And I think that is how people of a certain generation feel about this movie.
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B
It is. How old is Tate? Tate,
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yeah. So is that. What is he? Gen Z?
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B
A young millennial? What's a young millennial?
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C
I don't even know. I just know I'm old now. Is Tate 32? That makes me feel so old. I hired Tate when he was an intern. Oh, my God. All right, I'm going to have to process that later.
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B
The grip this movie has on a generation. It's is so interesting to see. Like, this is. This is one of the first movies that I remember, like, feeling. I. I love this movie. And, and. And sorry, I was swing back to you to second, Mallory, but, like, I love this movie. I didn't love it in the first watch. I do love this movie, but it's the first movie that I remember being, like, of the older generation, watching a younger generation, like, claim something in a very serious way that like, other generations don't adhere to it. And you're like, oh, wow, you have to be a little bit younger to feel it kind of precisely the way that maybe these kids who have grown up with the larger looming threat of climate change or whatever the case may be, whatever the reason that their fixation on this movie has come about.
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C
Okay, sorry about that. Yeah, like, I'm sure, certainly plenty of people who are older than this slice of people who saw this movie when, like, when this came out, they were in high school or they were in college and they're like, this is the film of my generation and one of my favorite films of all time. Plenty of people who are older than that or younger than that and have come to it later love it as well. But it is, I think, undeniable. Like one of those films for that age group, which is interesting. I mean, we've talked, you know, this is our fifth Nolan rewatch pod. We've done four to this point. So we've kind of established what our top three, you know, is. And one of the things I've said on every pod is I want to like, leave open the ability to reset my power ranking as we go, because revisiting movies over time, you know, they always shift up or down. In your estimation, Interstellar is a really interesting one for me, where it has remained, I feel very similarly about it now as I did when I first saw it, which is like, like it's a middle of the pack Nolan movie for me in a way that I think might surprise people who like, listen to our pod and like, know some of the tent poles of things that I'm drawn to in stories. There are parts of this movie and aspects of this movie that I, I think are masterful and I love. I think the middle of this movie, the second act of this movie, basically like Miller's water planet. All of the knockdown drag out arguments between Cooper and Amelia Brand coop watching the 23 years of videos from home into revealing who man is. And all of the man twists on the ice planet is like God tier. I have a little bit less of a deep and abiding connection to the first and third acts of, of the film. But I think the, the emotional highs and like emotional resonance inside of the film really work for me. I think there are certain riveting and rapturous aspects of scripting and dialogue. And then there are some lines in this movie where I'm like, I was struck by how often I wrote, do people talk this way in my notes.
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B
Oh, that's true of all Nolan movies.
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C
This one really has them in the first act in a way that is distracting.
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A
There's some ridiculous dialogue here, guys. I don't know. Nolan traps so much into a movie that every now and again you just have to deal with, hey, aren't you the guy who did the thing back in the day and they told you you'd never do it again and blah, blah, blah, blah.
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C
I thought you were going, exactly.
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A
And like, so totally. I actually. He does that every movie, by the way, so. But he's packing so much into the movie. That's just one of his things that you just gotta deal with, man.
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C
Yeah, no question. And a lot of like, one of the ways that we've ended every pod is to talk about like the most Nolan thing about the movie, which we will again today, and the thing about revisiting this film that kind of has its most prepped or hyped for the Odyssey. And I find that almost for every pot, like I'm trying to mix it up, but I end up gravitating towards some of the same beats. And that's actually part of what I love about his filmography. And Nolan is a filmmaker who, you know, he's one of my favorite filmmakers and I adore his movies. So saying Interstellar is like a middle of the Pac Nolan movie to me is no dig. You know, it's like still a movie that I really enjoy. I just think it is. It is more of a mixed experience for me than his top tier films are, you know, Inception, the prestige, dark knight, etc. I'm curious to see like, where it checks in when we. When we finish the watch. I think if you said to like House of Our listeners, space opera, family driven adventure story where love in a magical, also scientific bookcase saves the day. They would be like, that's probably Mallory's favorite movie that was ever made. So I'm like always a little surprised that I'm like, that is a movie that I find myself crying during many times and visually astonished by many times. And then also a few times every time I watch it, I'm like, I'm rubbing my chin a little bit. So I feel about it.
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B
I think for me, the. So I. In 2014, I can't remember if I had started. I might have just started at Vanity Fair or I might have still been at Pajiba, but it was at an era of my life when I was like, still very dedicated to snarky reactions to things and which has changed a Bit for me over the years. Not entirely, but somewhat. And. But I used to just like it was an era, my life, when I thought, like, being snarky about something and feeling like you're smarter than the thing made you smart, which I don't agree with anymore. But so I had like a real snarky reaction to this movie. Like, the library section at the end of this movie is like, you know, easy to make fun of if you want to. And my memory is that, like, this is a very divisive movie at the time that a lot of people were like, what the fuck is this? And then some people are like, I love this.
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C
And the.
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B
My experience with Interstellar is that every single time I watch it, I like it more. Yeah. And its highs are higher than most other Nolan movies. For me, like, you know, it just. The McConaughey weeping scene is like one of the best things I've ever seen. And I would also say, and I bring this up every time we talk about like a Jonathan Nolan, Chris Nolan collab. My journey through Westworld, which was such, like a deep, deep, deep scholarship of television that I did, made me go back and like, revisit Jonathan's other works. And so like to see the, the DNA of what he was interested in in this movie and play out in the better parts of Westworld. Emilia's speech, I think especially, like, really helped my appreciation for it. And so, like, you and I, Mallory, you and I both bumped a bit on the runtime. And I will say it's a long movie. It's a long, It's a long ass movie. Van, you watched it this morning. Do you ever get surprised by how long this movie is?
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A
Yeah, so I started last night before Project Hail Mary, right? It's going. I have some times, like I watch the movie, I like to watch the movie, have it fresh. And then I cut that. I was like, God damn. You know, I know, I'm up. I got.
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B
It's an hour in and we're still on Earth. And you're like, oh, shit, I'm up
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A
at 6am in the morning trying to finish this bitch. This bitch is long.
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B
Yeah.
- [30:58]
A
But, you know, I think what we're all saying is that, like, Nolan, it's interesting. Like at the end of the day, it's a guy screaming at his daughter, right? It's a guy, it's a father. Everything comes from the human thing. It's the human thing. It's the human thing. It's the father, it's the daughter. It's explaining what being a parent is in this movie, we get an explanation of what being a parent is. And then we also get an explanation of how love is stronger than gravity. Yo, if you are going to do that in a movie, you literally, it has to be three hours long. Because that's such a deep concept and it's a novel concept. It's something that I had never heard before. Love being the only force in the universe that orients the universe. Like gravity. You gotta give a little math, you gotta give a little connection. You gotta play with time. I gotta see this poor black guy who's on a goddamn Kraft for 23 years while they played it. Poor bastard. You know, he's up there 23 years, he comes back, tell you what, one thing they got right, he got a little salt and pepper in his beard, but he basically looked the same. You know, why don't crack? But all of those things. I guess that's what intrigued me about the movie. When I first walked out of the film, I don't know if I could say that I thought that it was one of the best Nolan movies or whatever. I had to kind of surrender to the movie. I was kind of on my back foot a little bit about what my expectations were. I had to sit with it at the crib. Cause like in the theater there's another thing, just from a technical aspect, like I was like legitimately overwhelmed. I almost thought the first time I saw it that I was gonna have a panic attack because that other movie had just come out with. No, maybe it came out after what was a movie with Sandra Bullock and she was stuck in space.
- [32:53]
B
Gravity. Gravity.
- [32:55]
C
That movie makes me anxious.
- [32:56]
A
Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't handle that movie. That one was too much, you know, so, but, and so with everything that Nolan does, the films are just so deeply human. They're so deeply human. But they're grandiose.
- [33:12]
B
I think they are. But something that, you know, I've been saying again and again as we talk about the Prestige, which is the Jonathan Nolan co pro. Like I think the Jonathan Nolan co written scripts are by far more emotional and warmer than you know, because Chris Nolan sometimes gets accused of being kind of cold and clitical. And I think sometimes. And he has talked about that and he has talked about a couple things about this movie. Like the, the code name for this movie when they were shooting is Flora's Letter, which is about his daughter Flora. And so like this is a letter to his daughter about being a father and having a daugh. There are so Many things from Jonathan Nolan's script that he changed dramatically when he came on the project. Right. This project is originally Kip Thorne and Linda Ops bring it to Steven Spielberg who hires Jonathan Nolan who works on it for years. And then Steven Spielberg leaves Paramount and all of a sudden like leaves the project. And then Jonathan Nolan's like, well, shit, I need a director. Oh wait, I'm related to one. And then Chris Nolan comes on and is like, hey, I'm going to rewrite your movie, okay? And he's like, okay. So you can read Jonathan Nolan like one of his, a version of his earlier script and, and the final script side by side, which I did. And it's like the first third, like where we're on a corn fed planet. Like that is so Stevie Spielberg, right? Steven Spielberg thinking about Close Encounters and, and Richard Dreyfus leaving his kids to go explore space. Like that is. That's the DNA of, of that version of the movie. And then I will say Jonathan Nolan's other version, way, way worse. Like, way way worse. I will not defend it against what Chris Nolan did here. But like the, the core pieces, the coop watches 23 Years of Life go by as he sobs. That's in Jonah's script. You know, and like all this stuff with the family. Mal, I was thinking about what we talk about all the time when we talk about like you have to show the Shire before you. You show what's worth saving. So I don't know that like the, the dust bowl, dying planet right there. Isn't that like, you know, nice tilled earth. But there's Murph and there's Coop and there's that relationship and that's what the first hour is like, really invested in. I mean, sorry, Tom, not you, but like, you know, that's what the movie's really invested in showing what a journey for Tom. That's the real Spielberg sort of aspect of it. That's the heart of Jonathan Nolan. And so I love that like Chris Nolan, I think this is by far his most emotional movie. And for that reason I think it's only grown in my appreciation, you know.
- [35:44]
C
Yeah, I think those aspects of it are the ones that just work their way into your heart and stick with you and you can think about even when you're not with the film. But then really just. It's a satisfying experience to be back with. The movie looks fucking great on 4K. Can't hear a goddamn thing. As is so often the case with Nolan movies of this era, the IMAX stretches.
- [36:07]
B
Look Amazing.
- [36:08]
C
And my ears can't process it. But to your point, Joe, I think as a matter of intention, as a matter of structure and then as a matter of shorthand, the way that the not even just like the vast and the massive, the single biggest thing Will the species survive? Will the human race survive? Is a story that we explore through the most personal and intimate relationships. A family, a lost love in Amelia and Edmonds case. Right. Or Dr. Brand as a father to Amelia. Dr. Brand. Right. We have that family relationship but mostly most of all, of course Coop and Murph. And then you have these things like two of the three members of this very podcast love Carhartt. We wear a lot of Carhartt.
- [36:53]
A
Right.
- [36:54]
C
This is one of the all time great Carhartt jacket runs in the history of story. And right now you can get a pretty similar set. That exact one is basically impossible to get. You can get a very similar one right now. Carhartt work in progress website sent you guys the link last night. When Murph is wearing that jacket despite everything that has happened as a way to carry her father with her. It's just that perfect little touch. Do I understand how exactly the quantum data glimpse from inside of the black hole is conveyed to Murph through the second hand of the clock? No. Do I need to know? What I need to understand is that A, he gave her that watch. We're going to compare. Right. B, she went back for it and see, he knew she would like. That's what we need to get. And we do. We understand that on a soul deep level. And that's why the movie sticks with you.
- [37:50]
A
Yeah.
- [37:52]
B
Van Gogh.
- [37:53]
A
I'm listening.
- [37:54]
C
Any thoughts on that Carhartt jacket?
- [37:55]
A
Well, no, I mean I think the Carhartt jacket is fire. You know what I like to. I just like to feel I'm a. I'm a working with. I put the Carhartt on. I come in here to. I'm a working man's podcast. I come on here to give the takes. You know, man.
- [38:09]
B
No free ads, Malik.
- [38:11]
A
You know, it's everything to me in all of these movies is just about how the filmmaker can make you desperate for the thing to happen. You remember at the end of youf've Got Mel and you know, he walks over and she goes, she really. I really hoped it was you.
- [38:28]
B
I wanted it to be you.
- [38:29]
A
I wanted to be you so bad. I'm like, we did too. Like, we did too. We knew that it was going to happen. We knew that it would. The movie is in Making us want them to get together. And so by the time. It's one thing to do that with two people getting together, it's another thing to do that with someone solving. Essentially shout out to Reed Richards the problem of everything, right, so he can get closer to his daughter. It's so many things in there, like how parents have to let their children go. There has to be a sort of distance that you put between you and your kids so that they can grow older and experience their own adventures in the world for themselves. But then in older age, you come back to those kids and they steward you off into the thing, just like you brought them into the world. That happens in this movie, twice in the reverse. Because then she goes off before he does and he is left to go out into the world. She births him again. The movie is like subverting and moving around and rejiggering all these things about family and using the math of the universe and the gravity of love to sort of do it. It's great. But it does take a commitment like
- [39:50]
C
it does, I think.
- [39:52]
B
Also all the things that we've watched and talked about in the 12ish years since this movie came out. And also Mallory specifically, I would say in our time. Podcasting together really helped inform my enjoyment of this watch. Thinking about Yoda saying we are what they grow beyond in the Last Jedi, when Coop is talking about becoming your children's ghosts and stuff like that, or the ghosts of your children's future. Or Carhartt. Let's talk about it. The Last of Us when inside of this. Inside of this movie, where they're constantly talking about the concept of saving the species versus saving your own kin. I mean, the irony of Professor Brand saving his daughter, putting his Nepo baby daughter on. On. On the ship and saving her future while lying to Coop about, like, whether or not he'd be able to save his daughter. Not irony, but just sort of like Bran the Monstrous Lie, you know, which real Knight of the Seven Kingdoms inside of us in this movie. But, like, that idea of, like, who is worth saving? Who is us inside of this and is us humanity as a species or is us my daughter, you know?
- [41:05]
C
And who gets to decide that?
- [41:06]
A
Yep.
- [41:06]
C
Right. Yeah.
- [41:07]
B
Yeah.
- [41:08]
C
Also that Joel's jacket is a Flint and Tinder, not a Carhartt. But I really appreciate it. Cardish nonetheless. Cardish.
- [41:15]
A
I didn't know that either.
- [41:18]
C
May or may not have a couple of those.
- [41:20]
B
She does.
- [41:20]
C
She's been on a real trucker jacket journey in recent years. Please carry on.
- [41:24]
B
Yeah.
- [41:25]
A
So the movie, for the most part, for most of the movie, the film, the villain is just shit. Right? It's just stuff. It's like climate change, dust, eating a lot of corn. Okay. Different corn situations. Corn sandwiches. All of that stuff's going on. I'm not sure.
- [41:42]
B
Fritters.
- [41:42]
A
Fritters. They're having fun time with eating corn. So corn's the only thing left.
- [41:46]
B
Yeah.
- [41:46]
A
Okay.
- [41:47]
B
So rip okra.
- [41:49]
A
Yeah. But after this, then space and time becomes the villain, and then the movie makes a very direct decision to insert a human adversary. And this is always the part of the film that I enjoy, but wonder why they did it.
- [42:15]
C
Oh, the man part.
- [42:16]
A
Yeah. So I get it. I understand it. Right? But wow. To insert an unhinged Matt Damon into the movie.
- [42:27]
B
Surprise. Deploy a surprise Matt Damon.
- [42:29]
C
Incredible. To this day, just incredible.
- [42:32]
A
It worked. It's fantastic and all of that, but I just wonder why, when the stakes are so high and we are already that invested into everything, I wonder what the thematic purpose of a human, somebody that, like, is just that fucking crazy. Like, what was the purpose of that?
- [42:55]
C
So this is my favorite part of the movie. This is fascinating. We can kind of tip a category pick because you just mentioned villains. So my pick for one of our recurring categories is who's the real villain of this movie? And this is where I thought we could talk about some of this, but let's just do it here. Like, my pick isn't Dr. Mann, isn't Daemon's character, man.
- [43:15]
B
It's, say his full name. It's Doct Hugh Man.
- [43:20]
C
His name is. It's always a shock to, like, learn what the character's first names are in
- [43:24]
A
this movie other than Donald, because that's so Hugh. Okay, we see Johnny. Okay, we see you guys. Okay.
- [43:36]
C
Oh, man. Remarkable. The best of us. Hugh, man. It's perfect. My pick for, like, the villain and I think the man. Some of what we learn about Dr. Brand, Michael Caine's character and the choices that he's made to keep what he's kept secret about Plan A. But mostly, man is like the, the way that the survival instinct, the idea of a survival instinct in the movie, that it is necessary for us, I think, imperative for us to understand how that could become warped. Like, if everybody in the movie is. Is doing something heroic in order to save everybody or make sacrifices, then it. I don't think it lands as fully for us when Coot makes the choices. That does at the end.
- [44:18]
B
Well, I, I, I, I, I really agree. And I. What I like about the. What happens after man's whole is like what Bran goes off to do and what Coop goes off to do is like follow their hearts, right? Like, you know, she's looking for good old Wolf Wolf Edmonds. Is he alive? I don't know. That's where she goes.
- [44:38]
C
We see his name Patch at the very end. So I think that he's dead.
- [44:41]
B
But like. No, what I meant, what I meant was in that moment allowing her to see alive, right? So like she goes off in pursuit of that he goes home in pursuit of like trying to make good with, with Murph or do something with Murth, blah, blah. But in doing those two selfish or, or emotionally motivated things, that's the future, right? Brandt establishes like, you know, a homestead, a place for them to, to land and, and Coop goes to the interdimensional space library and saves humanity. You know what I mean? But they do it because they're doing something not altruistic but ultimately emotionally selfish. Which I like that complexity inside of it.
- [45:22]
C
You know, I think the idea that the. We've all said like it's so human and human impulse many times and that's obviously just like kind of the core
- [45:29]
B
huge
- [45:32]
C
strand of DNA that makes this movie function and the story function. And I think the fact that like the survival instincts and the selfishness fuel both the heroic acts and the villainous acts and it's two sides of the same coin is to me the most interesting part of the story. And what's so crucial, especially because we have evolution inside of that. Coop is like, I'm going home. I'm gonna go home. Right? He makes that choice. To your point, Joe. But then still the great. I mean, God, the look on Amelia's face when she realizes like, oh, it's not just the robots who are dropping like you're going with them. When TARS is like, see you on the other side. You get a chance, chill. Because he's. He has this. The thing that has driven him the whole time is gonna do this thing to save my kids, gonna do this. I have a note on the time dilation and whether we should go down to Miller's Planet because of what the math would mean for my kid. Every, every time, every decision he makes along the way is about getting back to his family, including literally saying, I'm gonna go get back to my family. But at the end of the day, when it all comes down to it, he's willing to risk that outcome to allow everybody else to survive. Which is the exact opposite of what man. The guy we have Heard throughout the the Best of Us and remarkable and led all these people to go on the scariest and starkest journey in. In human history.
- [46:47]
B
It.
- [46:47]
C
Like, I love so much in the Man Coupe fight, when coup says, you coward. And it is such a withering indictment. And man just says, yes, yes, yes. And so I love that we get that, because that feels really true to me, that that would be something that pulled that. The. The fear of, like, wanting to push the button so someone came to rescue you. That people would do that. And maybe the people who were supposed to save us. I don't know that the movie works without that.
- [47:18]
A
It might not. It might not because it's still a movie, which is always the thing. I mean, it is. It's still a movie, right? It's still a movie. In the movie, the thing still has to happen where the guy goes, oh, I did this. It's so. So it's still a movie. And then there's actual utility for this character. But when I'm watching it, that's the part that feels most like a movie beyond Christopher Nolan. And, like, you know, the two or three lines of weird exposition. Oh, is that the magic shoe? The shoe that was rumored to be the thing. And he goes, yes, this is. That's it. And, like, he does it in every movie.
- [47:58]
B
I don't.
- [47:59]
A
I'd be honest with you. Like, I. So obviously, I talk about this all the time. The clean slate is the OG of this. That's the number one. Oh, you mean the clean slate. The device that lets you change everything. I'm like, what the fuck is that? Can we see somebody? You gonna do it just like that? Chris? He's like, fuck it, we gotta get to Bane. But that's the part of it that felt most like a movie. The rest of it feels. And this is how I fall into things, like, I am a film lover. Everyone knows it's very hard for Van to be critical of a movie. Van. It's very hard for me to be critical of a film. I go into the movie to like the movie, and you have to make me not like it, right? You have to make me not come out and say, this is the best thing that's ever been made. Like, you have to make that happen. You have to impose that upon me. So when I'm watching a movie, even now, I'm legitimately falling in and surrendering to everything about it. That is the part to where I'm like, oh, this is kind of like an episode of Star Trek, not in a bad way. But that's the part that I most see as being sort of ordinary.
- [49:12]
B
I wanna get to our categories, but I wanna. I think this is a really good way to talk about, just to note really quickly a couple influences on the film and then what the film has influenced. Because like 2001 and when Nolan talked about 2001 A Space Odyssey's influence on this movie, which when you go see Project Hail Mary, you'll see immediately that movie's influence on that movie, like that is the ur text of space cinema for so many modern filmmakers. Right. Like when he talks about it, he talks about it as like this experiential thing that just sort of washes over you. You have to surrender yourself completely to the experience of that movie. And so that there are things inside of this movie like, you know, the visual of Gargantua or Dust Space Library or whatever the case may be, or the ticking hand on the watch that you just have to sort of like that is, you know, similar to Inception. We're not dealing in. In a place of easily explainable reality. We're just sort of dealing in element. I mean, it's certainly a tenet which we will get to eventually. But like, you know, we're dealing in sort of how do the. Are the human emotions selling it? Which is something Mallory has already said. But to think about 2001, to think about the right stuff, which is an incredible film that I don't think enough people watch. But when you look at the opening of this film, especially his test flight, that is his nightmare that opens the film, that is very much the right stuff. That's the grounded sort of what can man on the ground achieve? Sort of aspect of this movie. That is the DNA of it. But I'm most interested. I don't want to burn whatever we're going to say about the Odyssey at the end, but I'm most interested in this movie thinking about what Chris said when he came on to talk about Dunkirk with us. And this idea that like so many of Chris Nolan's movies are about a guy, people trying to get home.
- [50:57]
C
Yes.
- [50:58]
B
And that it's all been leading to the Odyssey. And that's not true of every movie. But like, Chris made such a good point. And you know, like if you think about Cobb and Inception or whatever, and so you think about Coop on this journey and for the history of space sci fi, space exploration and like maritime exploration have been linked. That's what the, you know, the USS Enterprise is. You know, space, the final frontier. Like this is. This has been an ongoing. You get. You get lost in space, which is just, you know, Robson Crusoe in space, essentially, so his family, Robinson in space. So, like, the. The idea that this is like a. A proto odyssey for him. The way in which they, like, drop it on these planets that have frozen clouds, dilated oceans. Like, these are like dropping on the various magical islands on the way. And the reason why a man is a doctor Hugh man is so important is like, spoilers for the Odyssey. Broad stroke. Spoilers for the Odyssey.
- [52:01]
C
I think you're okay.
- [52:01]
B
Yeah. There's a reason Odysseus makes it home and none of the rest of his shipmates do, right? And there's a reason why there's, like, characters like Eurylochus, I think, like, you have to contrast what makes an Odysseus someone who can get home versus his shitty second in command who does X, Y and Z. And so I think you need that contrast of like, what is a. What is a Dr. Hugh man? Also, him saying. Him saying. No one has ever been tested the way that I tested when to Van's point, Romley was just kicking it on that spaceship for 23 years by himself with. I mean, you know, with a robot. But, like, you know, it's just like. That's not true, Dr. Q man, all.
- [52:46]
C
It's a delusion.
- [52:47]
A
He was up there by himself. He went to sleep a couple of times, but he had to have faith
- [52:54]
B
that they would come back.
- [52:54]
A
I love that performance in that scene because he's obviously slightly insane. When they get back, he's obviously holding it in. He's like seeing ghosts. He's in his pajamas now. No more spacesuits. Like, he's like, legitimately. He didn't answer the door in some massive shit. He's like.
- [53:13]
B
He's.
- [53:13]
A
Fuck it now. Like, he's got some coffee. I'm glad you guys are back. I didn't think I would ever see you guys again. So. No, I get what you guys are saying and you guys are absolutely right. But this also might be. For me. It might be indicative of the esteem that I hold the movie in now. The movie Almost and Project Hail Mary felt like this to me too. Like I was just a ball of emotions. The movie was so effective on me. I think I'm going through something, but
- [53:43]
C
it's a wonderful film.
- [53:44]
B
It's very good.
- [53:45]
A
But I fall into interstellar. Like, I believe it. It's a documentary to me. I don't know why I fall into interstellar. Everything that happens seems so genuine. Even with some of the stuff that we've talked about. But everything, all the points you guys are saying, they're all lame ending.
- [54:05]
B
Mal, anything you want to say about the, the Odyssey beat? Do you want to save that for the end or that's.
- [54:11]
C
I mean, you know, I know it's our, our closing category, but you, you, you covered it. I mean, the, the journey home, the quest home is certainly the thing that revisiting interstellar now, I think makes us feel like we are readying and preparing for the Odyssey and obviously also spending time with Matt Damon as Hugh. Man, great stuff.
- [54:29]
B
And, and Anne Hathaway.
- [54:31]
C
That's right. Yeah.
- [54:32]
B
The, the. I'm curious if. If Chris will talk about this in the many interviews he'll do around the Odyssey, but like, the details, like every minute on Miller's planet is seven years. Right? Isn't that, Isn't that the case?
- [54:49]
C
Every hour?
- [54:49]
B
Yeah, every. Every hour. Sorry. Yeah, that makes more sense. Every hour is seven years what it costs us Decades. Yes, but like, you know, Odysseus is detained for seven years on Calypso's Island. Or like, you've got Penelope's faith that he would return and Telemachus and like, anger at his father's absence. Or like, if you just watch the trailer, you have Anne Hathaway saying to Matt Damon, like, promise me you'll come back. And he says, what if I can't? Like, how is that not the beginning of this movie also? So I'm just, I'm so excited to see.
- [55:17]
C
And then he passes her a brown and tobacco custom Carhartt Detroit trucker jacket.
- [55:25]
B
Yeah. And she wears it.
- [55:26]
C
And you're like Greek mythology. It really is all just one story.
- [55:30]
B
Absolutely.
- [55:31]
C
Yeah. Yeah.
- [55:33]
B
I think I've already covered sort of like what was different about Jonathan Nolan's version and Chris Nolan's version. But I will just say I really love it when these brothers work together. I think they make great shit. Okay, anything else we want to talk about before we get into these sort of superlatives category, things that we do,
- [55:49]
C
I guess, just quickly, like where we are in the, the McConaissance at this point. You kind of answered this earlier, but that feels like kind of key context. Right. Because he's coming off. This is his first film after the Oscar winning Dallas Buyers. It's the same year as True Detective. So this is just like, this is the peak. This is the peak moment for him in terms of like a second peak, a new peak in terms of like him doing stuff that really recalibrated how people thought about him as a performer.
- [56:16]
A
I have a thought here, and I want us to take our content culture brains together. Has anyone reinvented like this? So think about it.
- [56:28]
C
Jeez.
- [56:29]
A
So think about it in this way. So Matthew McConaughey explodes onto the scene. A Time to Kill. All right, all right. Dazed and Confused, almost in a Brad Pittish sort of way. Not quite like Brad Pitt. He comes on, he's beautiful and all of that stuff. But then you have movies where Matthew McConaughey is a serious Hollywood leading man. Then something happens throughout the 2000s. Matthew McConaughey becomes sort of a joke. Like he becomes completely joke. He becomes sort of a joke. And other guys start to like ramp up this cool factor. The Ocean's Eleven's movies come out. Brad and George are Hollywood cool guys way up here. Other stars start to develop. Viggo Mortensen comes up and becomes this huge box office star, but also a guy that's just in like dead ass cool movies. Like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. All of this stuff starts to happen. And Matthew McConaughey starts to become a guy that no one fucking takes seriously anymore. Right? Then he just completely nukes that with four or five different choices. Mud into Dallas Buyers Club into Interstellar, into True Detective. And he Zeniths and Apexes. Oh, I'm sorry.
- [57:50]
B
Magic Mike, please.
- [57:51]
A
Magic Mike?
- [57:51]
C
Yeah, please include Magic Mike.
- [57:54]
A
He's Zenix. He doesn't like even come back. He creates a new Matthew McConaughey. And I'm trying to figure out if anybody has ever done that in that way. I'm trying to think of somebody who has done it that way.
- [58:12]
B
I don't think there's a direct comp. I think you have someone like Downey whose personal life started his career and he came back but didn't like. I mean, being Tony Stark is very different from being Chaplin. So he did come back to do something different. But like, I don't know that I would. I would call it the exact same thing. Colin Farrell is one of my favorite career trajector because Colin was like this like heartthrob leading man. And then he was like. And then he was also sort of considered. You know, he made Alexander like he was considered a joke for a while. He did like swat. You're just like, what is Colin Farrell doing? And then he becomes like an actor's actor, you know, when he comes back. So I'm a huge Colin Farrell.
- [58:53]
A
I'm thinking about horrible bosses. I don't know why Like. Cause when he. I didn't know he could be that funny. And then there's the whole Professor X joke.
- [59:03]
B
Joke
- [59:05]
A
I'm thinking about. Horrible.
- [59:06]
B
I just think that, like, what. What Makana he did is he just started, like, when he does Magic Mike, when he does Mud, which is so good. When he does, like, Bernie, you know, like, he does a bunch of things where he's just sort of like, I don't give a fuck at this point, and I'm just gonna do what's really interesting to me. And so there it becomes less of, like, a calculated career and more of a. Like, well, if you're gonna, like, not take me seriously anyway, I might as well just do what interests me. And then in doing so turns in this True Detective role, which I will always swear really won him the Oscar. Like, Dallas Buyers Club is incredible. But, like, I don't think he wins that Oscar if True Detective didn't come out right at the same time. And just sweep him up in this. In this moment. And then watching him in this. It's so wild because I would say Even now, like, McConaughey is still. You know, he did enough to reinvent his career. They still got back.
- [60:01]
A
Just say it. I know he. He's doing the. He's the Uber. I made a joke about it. He's. He now has reverted. Not reverted. I don't want to diss the. What I'm saying is he. The guy who he was at that time was probably closer to who he actually is, and so he doesn't really want to be taken super duper seriously. You can see him being an Uber Eats Detective, like, on commercials, like, that's a thing. And like. Like the Cadillac car guy, like, there's this.
- [60:31]
B
Yeah.
- [60:31]
A
There's, like, a link about Matthew and an everymanness that probably is. Is. Is more genuine to who he is.
- [60:42]
B
Well, this is why Nolan said he wanted to cast him in this film, because he wanted an Everyman. But I just don't think that, like, age. Age aside, I don't think Matthew McConaughey now is leading a Christopher Nolan. A big Christopher Nolan movie the way that, like, he was in that very moment. I don't think, like, let's pretend he's the same age now. I don't think Nolan's casting him in this role, you know?
- [61:03]
C
Yeah.
- [61:03]
B
So I say that with love and affection.
- [61:06]
A
I love him, too.
- [61:07]
B
I love him, and I think he's. I think he's great in this movie, honestly.
- [61:10]
A
I just remember a time when everybody Kept waiting for it to happen. And he tried the romantic comedy thing for some reason. People, some of them work. But then everybody just went, okay, well, Matthew McConaughey didn't really. You know, he'll be like a leading man, but not like anything big. And then it came back and it was like he goes, nah, I'm here. Like, I got this. Maybe there's a Nick Cage comparison in there some way, but not really, no. Cause Nick just doesn't give a fuck.
- [61:38]
B
Nick is.
- [61:39]
C
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B
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- [63:18]
B
All right, let's do our categories. As always, every category starts with the Christopher Nolan movie quote. Why so serious? Funniest line or moment from this movie? Van Lathan, what do you have to
- [63:32]
A
me the funniest line you know, have I have to say it? The funniest line is. I don't know why this makes me laugh so much, but John Lithgow just being pissed off that baseball is dead. When the whole world
- [63:49]
B
he's like, where's My hot dog.
- [63:51]
A
I come to a ball game, I want a hot dog. I'm eat popcorn at a ball game. First of all, we do number one. And then secondly, dude, there's no more food. Like we used to have real ballplayers in my day. They didn't go on strike. My man. The world is ending. Just. Can you enjoy that? I always laugh at that. Cause that's how my dad would have been pissed off at the end of the world.
- [64:15]
B
That was one of mine where you cut away and it says the New York Yankees. That's just very funny. In Jonathan Nolan's original script, what happened is there's a broken down van and there's a bunch of ball like what look like minor league ballplayers or whatever. And then Coop stops to fix their van and he gets it going for them. And then you see on the side of the van, like New York Yankees, like they're in like a. Just a shitty van. And that's how they get to their games. But like that was always the joke of just sort of like 10% of the population is left.
- [64:42]
C
And.
- [64:43]
B
And that's why this is where the New York Yankees are playing. Good stuff. Mallory, what's your.
- [64:47]
C
What do you have makes that makes me think about an end game when you know the, the, the therapy scene and it's like how much we miss the Mets. Let's get like a non New York baseball team in one of these apocalyptic scenarios. My pick is tars, who. I just think that we need the levity that TARS provides throughout the movie because it is a very, very intense movie in a number of different respects and moving in beautiful and profound ways in just like scary high tension ways. And so I love the throughline of how are his settings calibrated? Whereas his honesty setting, you know, 90 absolute honesty isn't always the most diplomatic versus humor setting during takeoff. Etc. And like I love the payoff that we build to. To at the very end in the like Homestead Museum on Tinkerbeast. Yeah. When Coop is restoring TARS and he's like, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna actually. We're gonna go 75. Okay. No, we gotta take this down to 60. Do you want to go to 55? It just makes me chuckle.
- [65:55]
B
It's great. I think these are great picks. I think also Coop saying you told them I liked farming to older. Murph is really, really good. But for me it's when Damon. Dr. Heumann, I mean Dr. Heumann is the funniest part of this whole movie, honestly. But, like, when Dr. Human is gearing up to give his big speech, there is a moment and then the whole thing just explodes on him.
- [66:20]
A
Iconic.
- [66:20]
C
That's genuinely iconic.
- [66:22]
B
I love that. That's a great thing.
- [66:23]
A
You know who's underappreciated? I'm sorry.
- [66:26]
C
No, go ahead.
- [66:27]
A
Bill Irwin.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah.
- [66:29]
C
Oh, my gosh.
- [66:30]
A
I don't know why he's. He's underappreciated. Remember my Blue Heaven?
- [66:33]
B
This is my.
- [66:33]
A
Remember, he's dancing around in my blue Heaven. And like, he's like. He's got rubbery bump. Like, I don't know. He's just underappreciated. Like, he's. He doesn't get his.
- [66:40]
B
But like, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel getting married also. He's, like, so good in that movie. He's gonna be in the Odyssey.
- [66:48]
C
That's right.
- [66:49]
B
And I don't think it's been announced who he's playing, but I think some people are suspecting he's playing in, like, Polyphemus or something like that. Oh, hell yeah. He's doing like. Like a mocap performance. But, yeah, Bill Irwin.
- [66:58]
C
That would be perfect.
- [66:59]
B
Mal. Sorry, you were saying runners.
- [67:02]
C
This is one of these. Like, it is. The line is delivered in a way that only Matthew McConaughey could deliver the line. And so I think it's. It's the way he's delivering it that makes me chuckle more than the. The language itself, though, it is also just the. The. The writing is amusing. And the parent teacher conference scene when he's like, you're telling me it takes two numbers to measure your own ass, but only one to measure my son's future. And the way he says it now, again, we say this with the self awareness of being. People who record routinely three hour podcasts want to own that. There's something about the way that Coop stretches out every word to, like, the amount of time it should take to say seven words where you're like. That's also why the movie is 2 hours and 49 minutes. But I find it hypnotic and very pleasant, honestly.
- [67:46]
B
Like,
- [67:48]
C
this is. This is like a.
- [67:51]
B
There are so many. So Damon. The way that Damon's deployed in this movie, the way that Ellen Burson is deployed in this movie. Like, they're just great uses of, like, powerhouse actors inside of this movie. And then you put David, a yellow O, in this, like, principal role. And I was like, what the are we doing here with David Yellow? Like, this is the biggest waste of absolute talent you have in this movie.
- [68:11]
A
But I Feel like early on, maybe this wasn't early on, but remember, David was also in. He was also in Planet of the Apes. Remember he was in Planet.
- [68:25]
B
I forgot that.
- [68:25]
A
Yeah, remember he was in Planet of the Apes. He's in. I feel like he was just trying to get his face out there. He was, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [68:32]
B
He wasn't. He hadn't done, like, Selma yet or anything like that. So, like, he wasn't like it. But, like, when you go, yeah, young Timothee Chalamet is there, and you're like, yeah, he was, baby. Like, whatever. He was getting started, but I was like, David, a yellow elf. You didn't know what you had here, man. Anyway, okay, next category is. You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. Sickest set piece. Van Lethal.
- [68:56]
A
Oh, man. So look, there are a lot of them that are sick, but okay, so what counts as a set piece here? All right? Cause so it.
- [69:05]
C
Whatever you want.
- [69:05]
A
Whatever I want.
- [69:06]
B
Go Lose.
- [69:07]
A
All right, now all you guys are gonna go. Some of you guys are gonna go wormhole, some you're gonna go black. Whatever, man. The fucking mavericks. Chasing mavericks. Wave. Water planet. Whole joint is my answer.
- [69:21]
B
Checking.
- [69:22]
A
Terrifying. Like, that entire joint is so. I feel so minuscule. I am so scared for them even when I watch it now. Like, just the wave. Those are mountains. Get back to the ship. Whoa. What the. That entire thing is just high octane, man. And that's the stuff that Nolan's really good at.
- [69:45]
B
And I think. I mean, this isn't my Zimmer answer, but I. I'm. I'm like. I don't mean to, like, blow the Zimmer category later, but, like, the tick tock on the score. I'm, like, sweating bullets that whole sequence. You can feel how heavy, like, the gravity is on the. Oh, it's just like. Oh, my God.
- [70:02]
C
It's. That's. This is my pick as well. I. I do think there are a lot of candidates for this category, but that this is like. Like, kind of clearly the winner. It's one of the most iconic and indelible visual sequences from the. The film. And I think it's also one where a lot of the core character impulses and beats and the science aspects are beautifully captured. Like, this is such a key stretch for the time dilation, which I think probably we'll all come back to in other categories. But you know, even something like thinking about, like, the descent down to the planet and this question of, like, you know, the. The idea of the break. The air brake Right. That Coop is going to try because, like, the fuel conservation is key and every second counts. And the question of, like, do you want me to turn off the feedback? Coop's like, no, I need to feel the air. And you're like, we're watching. We're getting to another category. Like, we're watching a great man at work. And then it's like, it doesn't matter.
- [70:51]
B
It's not enough.
- [70:51]
C
Because the scope of the thing they're facing is so gargantuan, so Titanic.
- [70:57]
B
I love that.
- [70:58]
C
To your point, Van, that recognition, that beat where he's like, we're in the middle of the swell. It gives you like something as kind of like grounded and documentarian as, like, you could feel that way watching 100 Foot Wave on HBO. Right. But then you take this to these genre places. I love the moment where Emilia realizes after they find the beacon, they find the wreckage. Oh, this just happened for Miller. Just happened. That is such a key aspect for. It helps us understand. It's crucial. It helps us. You can say one hour, seven years, we can get back to Rom on the ship and he's like, 23 years passed. Something like understanding that the reason they didn't know things had gone wrong is because it had just happened here, even though all this time had passed for them, is, I think, really crucial.
- [71:49]
B
When you rewatch and you can sort of. Sort of like see where her ship crashed. Like, you know, in. In the sort of that massive wide shot. Did you know, this is a fun fact I learned from this movie. Did you know the phrase fly by the seat of your pants comes from like. Like aviators using the vibration in the seat of their airplanes to guide them as they. As they go?
- [72:09]
C
No. Or if I did, I've forgotten. But I love knowing it. I feel. I feel richer.
- [72:13]
B
He wanted to fly by the seat of his pants.
- [72:15]
C
I think also the seeing the turn, looking and seeing just the wave of water, that's like one of the more Inception esque visuals to me in this movie where you're just like. You see something that allows you to understand the physical space and the reality of where you are and what the characters are facing instantly. And it's. It's just.
- [72:35]
B
It's the best.
- [72:35]
C
You won't forget. You won't forget it.
- [72:37]
B
I would say also inside of that, when you see this robot that you thought you understood how the robot moved.
- [72:44]
C
Yeah.
- [72:45]
B
And like, level up this, like. Yes. Incredible.
- [72:48]
A
Two things.
- [72:49]
C
I'll say that we all just did that.
- [72:50]
A
Yeah. Because in the movies, I was like, oh, all right. Two things I'll say. One is how when you get on that planet and that planet's water, once again, that feels kind of safe. The reason why it feels safe is because, like, when we see planets that are barren and don't have any life, when we think of planets that are barren, we don't think of planets covered in water. We think of the Earth as being a planet that can sustain us because it's covered in water. So that you land and the planet's water, oh, this is a Earth. Like, they're water. They might have fucking fish. Fucking. I don't know. Dolphins might have come around, say hello to you, whatever. But then the water on that planet being the predator, being the thing that makes the planet uninhabitable, just automatically you're scared. On the backside of that, there's a profound statement that the movie continues to make about how we experience things with each other. If you've ever talked to somebody that's been through something really traumatic, they always say, it feels like it was just your. Especially for, like, a time. They always go, I know that's been a lot of time for you, but it feels like it just happened to me. It feels I am still connected to this event, like, in a way that signals immediacy. And so when you have three different people, when they leave there, like, they almost could have saved her. Something just happened to her While it was 23 years for this other guy. Cause you also hear that as a human being, this one month where I was stuck in this trench or doing this thing, it felt like an entire eon. So all of that stuff, the same event, how they experience it differently, just kind of mirrors our experience here with different things that we go through.
- [74:42]
B
I love that. I mean, it reminds me of the way I've talked about time since COVID and the way Covid just completely destroyed my understanding of how time progresses. Like, every. Like, we're in 2006, and I'm just sort of like, yeah, but Covid was yesterday, right? Like, Covid was just last year. And that's. Yeah, trauma. Okay? You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Who is the real villain of this movie? Fan, you already talked about this a little bit, but do you want to.
- [75:14]
A
It's Young Coop. Not Young Coop. It's Young Murphy.
- [75:20]
B
Young Murph.
- [75:20]
A
Young Murph is the real villain of this movie. Young Murph. If it was up to Young Murph, we'd have been eating corn Fritters until the astrophage killed the sun. Okay. It's like if it.
- [75:33]
B
Oh, I'm sorry.
- [75:33]
A
Oh, spoilers. I'm sorry. No, no, spoilers. I take that out. My bad, my bad. That's too much. If it was young Murph.
- [75:39]
C
It's a premise. I think you're.
- [75:40]
B
It's a premise. I think you're fine.
- [75:41]
A
Young Murph and her pluckiness, that's the real villain arc of this movie, is her getting old pluck. Young Murph and her plucking. Hey, Murph, guess what? Daddy gotta go save the species, okay? He might not be around to help you braid your hair. Okay. Daddy gotta go save the species. Like, yeah, Daddy gotta go get on the craft and pile. I know it's hard for me. I'm getting older, okay? I never had any kids, so maybe this is something that, you know, happens with kids. But when I look at it now, if young Murph gets her way, we're fucked. None of this happens because he wouldn't have gone. So this is the true villain arc, is her stepping into her role as a genius and actually picking up the pencil and putting down the emotions and helping humanity figure out what we're gonna do next. She was bothering the shit out of me early in the movie. I'm sorry.
- [76:42]
B
I love younger. That's so funny.
- [76:46]
C
Incredible take.
- [76:47]
B
I think young Murph is so good. And you need. You need to really feel when that incredible shot when Coop is driving away from the house and the camera is placed on the side of the truck as if it's a rocket taking off. You know what I mean? And you have to feel how painful this decision is for him. And so you just need that. And he pulls back the blankets and she not there. Like she was hiding there before. I don't know. I get the bit, Van, and I support it, but it's not a bit. I can't support you even that, though.
- [77:25]
A
This also could be a black thing. You know what I told you? I told you to stay your ass in the house. I didn't tell you to get under the house.
- [77:32]
B
But he kind of likes that she comes.
- [77:34]
A
Yeah. Cause that's the difference.
- [77:35]
B
He likes that she's in.
- [77:37]
A
This is the thing that I actually wish. I wish that sometimes when I did my precocious shit, that somebody went, ah, maybe we should kind of goose his curiosity a little bit. That's not what happened. But no, the movie, to me, doesn't really have a true villain. Besides, time. Time is the actual Villain of the movie. So I would give it to young girls because I don't like the pluck I don't like.
- [78:01]
B
I'm gonna give it to climate change. Mallory Rubin, what's your great one?
- [78:06]
C
Yeah, I already said mine at the beginning. I think the way that, that the idea using that certain characters like human or in a way.
- [78:15]
B
Thank you for using this.
- [78:16]
C
Welcome. The elder Dr. Brand or even in some respects like Tom, older Tom, refusing to let his family go even though they're dying by staying there. The way that this like aspect of a survival instinct, your choice, the threat of time and loss can be warped and allow you to make the wrong decisions. Like when man, when human, says of Dr. Brand, when they're talking about that reveal, he knew how hard it would be to get people to save the species instead of themselves. I think that connects to what Van is saying and is obviously true. But then you build toward. I've always really loved the moment where on the heels of that monstrous lie quote from Amelia Mann says, like he acknowledges it, right? There's no contention there. He's like unforgivable. And he knew that he was prepared to destroy his own humanity in order to save the species. He made an incredible sacrifice. And this is the kind of warped thinking. There's a version of that that's true, but then there's a version of it that leads to the warped, delusional thinking that man will then turn into. I can make an incredible sacrifice. I can kill Coop. I can do whatever I deem necessary and say it is under the guise of ensuring that the species perseveres, but really it's because I don't want to die. So I just think the way that the film explores that is fascinating. And getting to see man as Cooper's choking and gasping for his last ammonia free breaths is like you're feeling it, aren't you? The survival instinct, that's what drove me. And trying to build a connection to this person he is seeking to kill,
- [79:44]
B
but also being like, so good. Also be like, I thought I could. I thought I could stick around and watch you do this, but I can't. You know what I mean?
- [79:51]
C
Cowardice of turning off his. His radio is what allows Coop to call for help and eventually be okay.
- [79:58]
B
Yeah.
- [79:58]
C
So that's great. What's your picture show? You said climate change. Is that your actual pick? It's a great one. I mean, it's a great one.
- [80:05]
B
Your man, your Dr. Hugh man quote about convincing humanity to protect the species. I also wrote Last of Us esque, like, selfishness, like, you know, or myopic. Myopy? Is that the word? I. I think that, like, I mean, it's. It's. It's the thing I love about the Last of Us and I love about the Dr. Heumann stuff and stuff like that is, like. It's very understandable.
- [80:32]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [80:33]
B
Yes. But it's also, like, it's not who you hope you'd be, you know, when faced with these decisions, but it's probably who you would be, so.
- [80:41]
C
That's exactly right. The perfect way to put it.
- [80:44]
B
All right, are you watching closely? Most exquisitely gorgeous shot.
- [80:49]
C
Crowded category for this movie.
- [80:51]
B
Van, what do you have?
- [80:54]
A
Yeah, it's very tough. You know, I personally love the first pass through the wormhole.
- [81:03]
C
That's my pick. My eyes.
- [81:06]
A
Oh, yeah. Oh, look at that. Look at that. That's my.
- [81:09]
C
It's gorgeous.
- [81:09]
A
That's my favorite shit. It just looks crazy. It looks crazy. It feels crazy. You feel the weight of what's happening on screen.
- [81:18]
B
In an interview that I watched with Jonathan Nolan, which I referenced a lot when we did our prestige episode, it's this great. It's on. Youtub was at Sundance, and it was like, it's like a career retrospective of his career and, like, where science and his career meet. And so they were talking a lot about the science of the wormholes in this and how, like, Kip Thorne, like, was very specific about how it should look. Like, very, very, very specific. And it was, like, incredibly time consuming and hard for them to render it the way that he said. But they. They did it. And then there were, like, studies done later that corroborated that this was actually quite an accurate depiction of what going through. I mean, I mean, how could people know? I don't know. But they were talking about this, about the visuals, and then the woman who was interviewing him was talking about the color in it, and she's like. She's talking about this color scheming before the wormhole and after. And he's like, here's the fun fact about. Both my brother and me were colorblind, which I don't know how broadly known that is. I didn't know it. Maybe it's widely known. I didn't know it. And he said, that's why you don't see a lot of red in Chris Nolan movies, which is not true of Tenet, but is maybe true across his filmography. I don't know. But anyway, he was like, we're red, green, colorblind. I was like, oh, that's fascinating to me. Interesting.
- [82:31]
C
This is my pick as well. And I think to that broader science point. Joe, you know the stuff on the. Again, let me be clear. Not a scientist, not an astronaut, not a physicist. I don't know fucking anything about any of this. Not a mathematician. What's added to the telescope.
- [82:44]
B
You owned a telescope.
- [82:44]
C
But I once had a telescope that
- [82:46]
B
I never once had to tell how to use.
- [82:47]
C
So this like everything with the wormhole here there's the great Rom gives us a. It makes me think a little bit of Mr. Clark in Stranger Things is like the acrobat.
- [82:57]
B
You know when you get.
- [82:58]
C
Let's break out a pencil and a piece of paper and explain something very hard to understand in a very simple way. I always love that.
- [83:03]
B
Is there another way to explain wormholes? Then the pencil through the paper plate, whatever it is.
- [83:12]
C
And you know that that part of this. On the science. The time dilation stuff, I mean this is a all. I think all time like Pantheon Bootstrap, Paradox movie. We love talking about stuff and that's like really wonderful if you're interested in thinking about that. The. So these are the science aspects of the story that I love. The parts where I'm like there's a line in the movie about recursive and nonsensical. And then I wonder if the movie sometimes falls into that trap. Is more about the like what is solvable or not solvable about the equation and the connection to gravity and what we can parse. Etc. But again I'm fine with it. But this. Did you guys go to the planetarium a lot when you were kids? Was this a thing that either of
- [83:54]
B
you love to do?
- [83:54]
A
I didn't know when I could. There wasn't much of one in Baton Rouge. Rude. But we tried.
- [83:59]
C
I loved. I'm like such a like English social studies student broadly. And I was pretty like bad at math and science. But I loved going to the science center and space was something I loved. And I loved going to. Going to the planetarium. This wormhole sequence where you're basically looking at like a. A like a gummy marble like as the sphere explanation unfolds and then you move on this like bright river. It basically is like planetarium kid grows up to hit a bong with an astrophysicist. And I think that's ideal.
- [84:33]
B
This is why you like Avatar. This is why you like Avatar as you know.
- [84:37]
C
The hallucinogenic drug sequences of the Avatar films are definitely my favorite parts of them. It's just fantastic.
- [84:44]
A
I Like the fact that they don't just go straight into the wormhole either. They like orbiting. You know the thing that they do where they shoot Coop flying the craft and he's always on the side of something and they shoot it over the top. It just makes it feel a lot more rich. He didn't just go into the middle of the. They didn't pull out wide and then show the small craft going into the middle. That's not what they did. They put you into the experience of going into the wormhole, which was very innovative to me, by the way. I just figured. Cause when you were talking about this telescope, I was thinking, I'm gonna go buy a telescope. This is the part of my. I'll go get. But I figured out why.
- [85:21]
B
Fantastic.
- [85:21]
A
Well, I have a negative opinion of telescopes. And I figured out why.
- [85:25]
B
Why?
- [85:25]
A
I used to know a guy when I first got out to la, and the whole thing with the telescope.
- [85:30]
C
I know what you're gonna say.
- [85:31]
A
He would use the telescope. He had a telescope on his balcony. And the whole purpose of the telescope was like, holland that hose. That was the whole purpose of the telescope.
- [85:40]
B
It was like, how's the Peeping Tom?
- [85:42]
A
Yeah. Like, he would have the telescope, the Telesco. And now I'm like, I don't want to. He would use the telescope to look at.
- [85:51]
B
You just gotta aim it up, aim it.
- [85:53]
C
It's just plenty of other ways to look at telehealth.
- [85:56]
A
I know.
- [85:57]
C
Look at the stars.
- [85:58]
A
This was one of the first true real creeps that I ever met. This is when my antenna started to go up in la. This guy had the nicest crib I had ever been to. And we go there and he goes, the telescope is for two reasons. One is wooing women. Because you get a girl out there and you so look through the telescope and then, you know you're doing something together.
- [86:16]
B
She's looking and then you, like, over her shoulder. You're adjusting.
- [86:18]
A
Yeah, he's doing the whole thing with the telescope. That's what he said. But he goes, also, you know these curtains around here? And I was like, dog, I'm driving home, I'm like, did you hear what he just said about the fucking telescope? I can't hang out with this guy anymore. Hung out with him again.
- [86:32]
B
If you go to someone's house and their telescope is pointed, level, or even worse, like, down, like, now if you
- [86:40]
A
have a telescope in your crib, I'm kind of looking at you a little funny. I'm kind of like, what you using the telescope for it's, you know, maybe
- [86:47]
C
I want to get one.
- [86:47]
B
Well, but now it's kind of quaint because I feel like now people do that with drones. Like, now people just fly drones around looking for women, undressing.
- [86:55]
C
You're right.
- [86:56]
B
Have you ever had a. Had a drone come, like, hang outside your window? I've had that happen in Oakland and I'm just sort of like, scary.
- [87:04]
C
Very disturbing.
- [87:05]
B
How is this legal? How are you allowed to just sort of like, drop a camera in front of my window? What the fuck?
- [87:10]
C
Horrifying. Some quick runners up here. You mentioned, Jo, the size perspective and how the movie reminds us of how small people are. I love how we get that in space. And also on the terrain. The kind of first zoomed out wide shot on the ice planet on human's planet of Cooper and Man. They're fighting and they're just specks when we pan wide during their fight scene. And they're tiny little specks in this icy abyss on this giant kind of glacial scape. I love that when after man, your comedy moment after man is like speechifying and then explodes the endurance because he didn't properly latch on and ignored all counsel. When it's. When in. In general, I think endurance, like spinning like a pinwheel across the screen, is just visually arresting and astonishing. But particularly the shot we get of Cooper and Amelia and Kayce and Tarzan and their ranger on the left of the screen and endurance is pinwheeling and the debris is flying everywhere and the ice planet is beneath them. That is like. It just looks so fucking cool. And when you got to see that back in the day at the theater or you get to watch it now in 4K, it's like, fuck, this is why we watch movies. It's just amazing.
- [88:26]
B
Wait, quickly, quickly. Mallory, did you have any Stranger Things PTSD when you realized that there are 12 spots on the clock. That is the end the of words.
- [88:36]
C
I'm always thinking of the ticking clock and why it had to be 12. Always. Always. And then I just love the. It's like a kind of like a twin to the wormhole shop. But, you know, in this case, the black hole Gargantua, when tiny broken Endurance is moving toward Gargantua. And that like, amazing shot of light matter bending and it almost looks like like rivers of lava, like, as they're. That looks so cool. It just looks so great.
- [89:10]
B
I mean, like, also part of this is. I mean, I don't know if this is borrowing from someone else's category, but like the brand Cooper Handshake on each side of that experience. The way that she reaches out for him on the way in and then he reaches out for her on the way back.
- [89:25]
C
Fantastic.
- [89:26]
B
Great. Shit.
- [89:27]
C
Okay.
- [89:29]
B
I can't remember to forget you. The scene you think about the most. I will say not. Not just because I'm saving it for later, but genuinely true. I think about that brand love monologue the most.
- [89:46]
C
It's really good.
- [89:47]
B
That's. That's the one I think about the most. Maybe it means something more, something we can't understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe as someone I haven't seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can't understand it. How hot do you think Wolf Edmonds was to inspire this?
- [90:13]
C
Had to be a 10 galaxy.
- [90:15]
B
Had to be in diamotion. Who would you cast? Great question.
- [90:21]
A
So he has a beard. So he has to. He has to be hot bearded scientists.
- [90:29]
C
I have no notes.
- [90:31]
B
That sounds great. Who would play in 2014? Who is a great hot bearded scientist?
- [90:36]
A
So I don't think he's as pretty as, like, a Clooney, because, you know, you had Clooney and gravity. I don't think he's that pretty. I think he is probably. Let me see somebody. Is he a bearded Walton Goggin? Maybe not.
- [90:53]
B
No,
- [90:57]
A
I'm trying to.
- [90:58]
B
I love Goggins, but. I love Goggins, but he's never gonna deliver like a scientist of the top tier caliber to be sent on this mission to save Earth. That's not his vibe ever.
- [91:08]
A
I'm trying to think of who it would be. Oh, what's my man from Train Dreams?
- [91:13]
B
Oh, Joel Edgerton.
- [91:15]
A
Is that him? I could see that being him for sure.
- [91:17]
B
Yeah.
- [91:18]
C
That's a good pick.
- [91:19]
B
Joel can. Can grow a great beard. Did you see Matt Damon complaining about the fact that Chris Nolan made him grow a real beard for the Odyssey? He's like, can we do a fake beard? And Nolan's like, who do you think you're talking to?
- [91:29]
A
Grow the beard.
- [91:30]
B
Who do you think you're talking to right now? Grow your beard.
- [91:33]
C
You're gonna be out in the ocean for weeks on end. No glue is strong enough.
- [91:37]
B
No, grow them against the salt water. Come on, Mallory.
- [91:41]
C
What's your.
- [91:42]
B
What's the scene you think about the most?
- [91:44]
C
I The first time I saw this, and every time I revisit it, I am just shaken to. To my core. We've talked about this a lot already, but like the. The dawning horror when you realize the. The time that was lost on the water planet, like it hits so hard. You have the pre trip down calculus. So you in some ways are prepared, but it's like you can never be prepared. You can be prepared intellectually, but not emotionally. And that is one of the core aspects of this film. And I think that's really centered effectively here. You know, you have this discussion like, plan A doesn't work if the people on Earth are dead by the time we get back, et cetera. So there's how are we, okay, let's do this instead of this. And how are we going to save as much time as we can? And then it doesn't matter. Everything happens with the tidal wave. They've got to let the engines dry. The time is lost. And the Cooper Brand argument after the wave crashes. And they are realizing in real time, confronting in real time what this means and what is happening. What's this going to cost us? Brand a lot. Decades. And that argument they have, like when he makes the, you know, you eggheads, you know, we're not prepared for this. And she's like, we got further than anyone in human history. And he says, not far enough. And now we're stuck here till there won't be anyone left on Earth to save. And she says, I'm counting every minute, same as you, Cooper. It's just like a perfect movie moment. It's a perfect scene. It's a very important moment for Amelia, I think, for her character. It's like everybody's carrying shit with them, not just Cooper. But we feel it so keenly because he's our protagonist and we do know what the math means and what is he's left behind and who he's trying to get back to. And that agonizing conversation they have about like, she basically has to explain, you know, time can stretch and it could squeeze, but you can't go back. And like you. It's just crushing down on you just like the water. Like, this is the realization and the crystallization of what we face. What the cost could be for the people on Earth, but also the stress of every decision that they make on the planet, in the ship, what every single move or mistake they make might cost them and cost everybody else is just like Titanic. So I think about that a lot also.
- [93:52]
A
Well said. There's also this. This Tension between, like, he's a smart pilot and she is. He's smart for a pilot, she's dumb for an astronaut. Like, he's a, he's, he's, he's mission. He's a mission guy. She is a science person. So there's a tension there in him just being completely. What are my parameters? What is this? What is this? And she's sitting down, trying to think of things in their totality. And she has to remind him at the end that there's also a cost for her emotionally because she's an answers person and he's a mission guy. So he's used to tapping her for data and then moving on with the data. This is a stupid answer that I'm about to. But the most absurdest scene that I always remember is just him going through like the black hole or whatever. Just, just, just how, just how. Like, I had no idea what was going to happen. I still kind of don't know what happened.
- [94:49]
B
The tesseract library.
- [94:51]
A
I still kind of don't understand it. And every time I watch the movie, I hope to understand it more. And it never happens. I don't know. He comes when I'm in the theater. This was the part that I was like, it's kind of like a, you know, like it was getting a head tilt. I was like that. Cause I'm like, okay, so he's out of his suit. Is this happening for real? Is this like something that's. Is this an allegory visually or like, what's going on here? And every time I watch the movie, I hope to get it a little bit more. And it's not what. I know that they came and got him, but like, it still doesn't make very much sense. Sense to me.
- [95:25]
C
He got himself, he brought himself beside. So that's the bootstrap, the bootstrap paradox aspect of this that I think is kind of satisfying on the mystery box puzzle front. I don't Will, like, does five dimensional space manifesting as three dimensional space so that it can be accessible. We had that primer earlier from Amelia of like, maybe time would render as a canyon or a mountain. So, like, what shape would it take for Coop to be able to understand?
- [95:50]
B
Space library.
- [95:51]
C
Yes, a space library. That. I mean, it's a one, it is a wonderful set of bookshelves in Mershroom back in the homestead. No question about it.
- [95:57]
B
Built in.
- [95:58]
C
Yeah, yeah, that's all great. But this idea of like, okay, we've been hearing throughout the entire film. They, they, they put the wormhole here. These anomalies and these gravity, these gravitational events and using gravity. So the idea that he is initially in this space and crying out to himself, to his kid. He's the one who delivered the message, stay. That young Murph, decoded in Morse code. Because even then in the climax of the film, his impulse is to say, don't do this thing. Don't wind up right here where you are. And then he has to recognize in real time, I am the one who sent those coordinates so that we could get to NASA, so that I could go. I. There's no they. I'm.
- [96:39]
B
They.
- [96:39]
C
Yeah, I called myself here.
- [96:41]
B
Can I.
- [96:41]
C
And this fulfilling circular aspect of that paradox. And then the. The other little detail is like. Because TARS is basically like Cooper's like people. You know, the conversation about cooperation we have. You can't build this. We can't build this in the future. It is built by a more advanced, evolved version of civilization that can. That only has a chance to evolve and advance because of the things that Cooper and Murph and understand.
- [97:05]
A
Stuff like that.
- [97:05]
B
I love. I. I mean, as you know, I love a bootstrap paradox. And I love that, like, it was always going to happen this way. Because it already did happen this way and all that.
- [97:13]
C
I love that part. I like pushing the person moving the watch. I'm less. Here's my note.
- [97:17]
B
Knock. Here's my knock. TARS has to be so stupid in that sequence.
- [97:22]
C
Oh, this is a great note.
- [97:23]
B
This is a great note to just be like, what do you mean, Coop? And Coop, who's like a flyboy, is like, well, don't you see? This is how this works. I was just like. I mean, it's great that that Bill Irwin's voice is there so that it's not just like Coop muttering the shit to himself. Like you needed someone there, but they had. I wish they had, like, explained that TARS was like, slightly damaged and malfunctioning or whatever to like. Like, help me understand why he was so stupid in that moment. But, you know, that's fine. All right? Swear to me, this movie is PG13, which means it could have exactly one F bomb. And actually it does. This hasn't been true for a lot of our other Nolan movies, but this one, as Mallory already mentioned, Cooper does say fucking coward when he's fighting Dr. Hugh Man. Yes, but where else would you drop an F bomb inside of this movie van? Do you have an answer for this?
- [98:11]
A
In the scene where. Where they tell the devil, yellow old tells him that his son is nothing more than a farmer. My kid's going to fucking college.
- [98:22]
B
Okay, that's a great one. You know what I mean?
- [98:24]
C
I love it.
- [98:25]
A
You don't tell me about my kid. Cause that's where it would have been dropped in my life, you know what I mean? My mom and my dad. My kid's going to fucking college. You know? So that when I thought about it, that's the scene where he has a lot of rage, especially for that lady, that lady who actually. Maybe not even to David, or yellow old, maybe to her, who doesn't believe that the moon landing is what she talks about.
- [98:50]
C
What about.
- [98:50]
B
Yeah, you don't fucking believe we went to the moon or you don't believe
- [98:54]
A
we went to the fucking moon or just. You gotta be. She says all that. You gotta be fucking kidding me. You know, or something like that. Cause her skepticism of all of that, I guess is supposed to. To represent the cynicism that humans have and scientific achievement at that point and all of that stuff like that. And how there are some people that wanna just die on this barren sort of pine box earth and not go out and seek more. And how that's actually been the thing that's always held us back and not necessarily, you know, whatever, but yeah, that's where a F bomb would've been perfect.
- [99:30]
B
Well, this idea that David Ayelowo says, we're a caretaking generation, right? It's our job to just sort of like. So yeah, it's our job to everyone. Just be a farmer for now. Get us through the other side. Don't dream of anything else. You got to keep your nose to the grindstone. But also, you know, I have a different answer for this. But we have a category later of like, what hits harder, like 12 years later. And I will say that like severely editing school books hits differently for me now than it did in 2014. So challenging things I thought we all agreed was
- [100:06]
A
such a funny world that we live in now. I watched Indiana Jones fight the Nazis my entire life. And I watched actually in Last Crusade them make an outright commentary on the burning of books. Maybe you should try reading books instead of burning them. And now all of this is mainstream. The Nazis are mainstream. The censorship of the books is mainstream. Indiana Jones lied to me.
- [100:34]
B
Mallory. Mallory, where's your fub?
- [100:36]
C
I'll stick with my girl Amelia Brand here for a moment and just kind of continue through that stretch of the story on the heels of the arguments and the stretch down on Miller's Planet where Cooper, who at least at this point in the story, as we've discussed, this is an evolution for him. But at this point in the story is very much focused on. On what he wants and what he cares about in his family. And then Amelia is in a similar position. We should choose Edmund's planet, not man's. And Cooper's, like, literally on the other side of the exact conversation he had with Donald on the porch about, like, you know, just because you want it doesn't mean it's wrong. Like, it might. Right? And then Amelia goes, so Cooper makes the call. We're going to. We're going to man's planet. And then Amelia has to just kind of pursue, proceed. And goes and checks on the colony. Is it okay? And Cooper goes up and apologizes, and she says, you might have to decide between seeing your children again in the future of the human Rose, human race. I trust you'll be as objective then. And I think she should have said, I trust you'll be as objective then, because it would have been very well earned, Very well earned at that point in our relationship.
- [101:45]
B
But in the story, I mean, her tone is giving. And I should say, say, I think the use of Anne Hathaway. Nolan's use of Anne Hathaway is so interesting because, like, putting her as Catwoman in the Dark Knight Rises, when she was at, like, a very low point in her career, there was that whole period of time right before she won the Oscar for Les Mis, which is like, it's Dark Knight Rises, Les Mis. And then this essentially, like, that. There was that whole, like, Anne Hathaway likability moment where it's like, Jennifer Lawrence, Prince is cool, and Anne Hathaway as a drama school, try hard. It was this, like, real. You talk about character reinvention, like, career reinvention. It was just like, a really weird, patchy time in Anne Hathaway's career. So Cassia's Catwoman was like, this huge, controversial thing. And then I think she actually completely killed. It was so good in that. Very memorable. And then, yeah, very good. And then she does. Les Mis wins an Oscar. And then she does, like, her being in this movie, I think, is like. Like such a fascinating. Like, Jessica Chastain, not just because she's been in the Martian, but, like, Jessica Chastain, like, makes so much sense in this movie. And Anne Hathaway doesn't make a ton. Like, I would not think of her for Amelia Brand right away, but I. But I love that she's here because that sentimentality that she brings to everything which is so key to, like, you believe in her intelligence. But also there's just like an inherent sentimentality to an Anne Hathaway performance that really works out.
- [103:09]
C
And just there's like a level of empathy from her, but also for her that we feel. Let me tell you who never had a. What's going on with Anne Hathaway Is Anne Hathaway. Me. Always loved Anne Hathaway. She's. She's great.
- [103:22]
B
I believe you were on the right side of history. I'm just saying, not all world.
- [103:25]
A
The Catwoman thing was super interesting because I never. I never recoiled from it. But I was like, huh? Because remember now, for me, at least, the Catwomen, you know, it was Michelle Pfeiffer. And I just remember I was, you know, was going crazy, man. It's like. You know what I'm saying? It's going crazy.
- [103:46]
C
It's one of the most important things
- [103:47]
B
that's ever happened in the world.
- [103:49]
A
It's going crazy, brother. You know? And then just the casting of Catwoman. I don't know if you guys. There's a. Well, I know you guys. Who am I talking to? But that casting then drove Sean Young crazy. Like, not to diss Sean Young, but Sean Young started going around the town,
- [104:04]
C
lost her marbles, like, showing up.
- [104:06]
A
So it was like this big huge deal. And it was a very understated casting. And then when you watch the movie, the first scene, you go, she's got it. Like, the first scene. The first scene, she's like, she's got it. She understands the role. She kicks the goddamn cane, takes the thing off. She's Catwoman. She's got it. But I did not think that she would nail it to that degree when
- [104:26]
B
she does that, like, scream on a dime. Yeah, yeah, she's great. Okay. My. So I. I was. I was poking around, sort of like a Murph thing. A Murph, like, angry at her dad thing to put my F bomb in. Hello, dad, you, son. But no, not young M, but older mirth. But like, hello, dad, you son of a. Is perfect. And I wouldn't touch it. So I think I'm have to go to. Those aren't mountain. They're waves. Those aren't mountains.
- [104:51]
A
They're waves. Talk that. That's good. That would be awesome.
- [104:54]
C
That's a great one.
- [104:55]
B
Great one.
- [104:56]
A
Yeah.
- [104:56]
B
That's no moon is what that feels like. Okay. No one cared who I was until I put on the mask. Best use of Nolan verse regular. And I should say we like the other Movies we've done, this has been a bit easier. Michael Kane is a. Is a constant. But in this it's like Michael Kane, Anne Hathaway, and I guess we're counting Matt Damon because he's. And Bill Irwin if you want, because he's also in the Odyssey. But basically, like, if they've. Before, it was sort of like they've been in multiple. Now like they've been in at least two. So what's your best use of a Nolan versus regular in this movie? Van Lee.
- [105:29]
A
I'm still going Michael Caine. I know I'm still going Michael Caine. Just because when you see Michael Caine in a Nolan movie, you know this shit is serious. Okay? He shows up and it's time to impart some real wisdom onto the audience. It's Michael fucking Cain. This is very important. The Michael Caine of my youth is very important to me. Dirty rotten scoundrels. Nobody talks about this movie. This movie is fucking hysterical. Go watch the film. Okay, but like, you move on. And then I trust Michael Caine so much that when Nolan is taking these big swings like Michael Caine as Alfred and all of these Academy Award winning people in a Batman movie, I'm like, oh, Michael Caine wouldn't do it unless it was really serious. So when I see him in this movie, I know that the. There's a deeper reason for him to exist in this room. And I'm like, oh, what's the mystery? And I think he did that for a lot of Nolan movies for me. So like A.D. hathaway, all of these people, his ability to ensemble. Like, we don't really. We haven't really talked about it that much, but like, you know, to get Casey Affleck to come in this movie, and it's basically third or fourth or fifth wheel this bitch towards the end when he's kind of doing his thing at that point. But yeah, so to me, Kane is the guy. Does a lot of other obvious answers, but Caine is the guy. To me.
- [106:49]
B
Yeah. Michael Caine reading Dylan Thomas, though I will say, like, does Dr. Brand know any other poem? It seems like he just knows that one.
- [106:57]
C
If you're gonna know one, it's a
- [106:58]
A
good one to know, especially at this point.
- [107:02]
B
But I will. I mean, I think it's the surprise use of Matt Damon here. That's my point too. I will just. I will just. I was just watching a Ben Affleck Matt Damon interview where Matt Damon was talking about. About the call he got to be in this movie and that Chris Nolan called him and was like, hey, Matt, you know that saying, like, there are no small parts, only small actors. This is a really small part,
- [107:28]
C
but
- [107:29]
B
I want you to do it anyway. And I was just thinking about the way that like, Matt Damon agrees to do this Dr. Human, not part of any of the promo. A significant but relatively small part inside of this movie, but then gets the payoff of getting to be Odysse. And I was thinking about Cillian Murphy showing up to be the Scarecrow for like two minutes in all of these Batman movies and then. And to be like 12th build in Inception and then getting to play Robert Oppenheimer.
- [107:58]
A
You know, has this ever been discussed on any, on any ringer pot? I've never had a chance to bring this up. The tilling of the soil for him. Like, he. I looked at him as a big deal, right? And then he shows up as the Scarecrow. I'm like, yo, is he settling into character actor territory here? And then he comes back in Inception, he's like, really doing the whole thing with Nolan. And then obviously Peaky Blinders is a big deal for him, but then he gets Oppenheimer and I'm like, it was all worth it. He did his deal in the Nolan uncertain.
- [108:33]
C
The long game.
- [108:34]
A
He played the long game. Like, I don't know if, if, if anyone's ever made that point before, but I thought that with Oppenheimer that, like, it really paid off for him being way down on the Nolan list, being a part of these big, these big productions.
- [108:49]
B
I promise you that I have examined every angle of Killian Murphy.
- [108:53]
C
Sure.
- [108:55]
B
And it's going to come up again. Mallory Rubin, what's your best use of. Well, you said Matt Damon.
- [109:00]
C
What do you mean? Yeah, my pick is Damon as well. And I just, I just think part of it is the thrill of the surprise. I think part of it is that it's hard to like, just exist inside of the vacuum of the film. So we have, you know, the context of him making the Martian the next year. And I love this idea of like, just right before he's Mark Watney. And the fact that he is in this harrowing circumstance of like, complete isolation and dire straits is part of why we root for that character. And here it's like the kind of noxious element of what we end up learning about Human. I love the way that he, the way that he, likes, latches onto Cooper when he wakes him from his sleep and like, presses his face into him. And that moment later, that's like, I hope you never know what it feels like to like, to go that long without seeing a person and need to see a person that badly. And you're so inclined initially to be drawn to him that it is just so effective and potent when he betrays the viewer and the other characters alike. It's so memorable to me.
- [110:04]
B
I was thinking about that. I was thinking, like, casting Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Matthew McConaughey, this real sort of 90s guy, sort of casting inside of this movie. Wes Bentley, et cetera. But, like, the. I was thinking that. I was like, oh, you cast Matt Damon so that we're inclined to trust him. And then the twist is so whatever. But then I'm like, but he had already played Tom Ripley.
- [110:26]
C
Yeah. Some of his best roles are as villains.
- [110:28]
B
Courage Under Fire. You know, like, there are things that
- [110:31]
C
he's like, yeah, school all the way back to that. I mean, Jesus Christ, don't bring that
- [110:35]
A
son of a picture.
- [110:35]
B
But I agree with you. But also, I was like, but why does that work on me when he's done that, son?
- [110:39]
C
I was thinking the same thing.
- [110:40]
A
It's amazing because he's like. He's still such a cool. We still think he's a cool guy. You know, he's just such a. We keep. Every time his villain turn always works so well because we trust his face.
- [110:52]
B
Amateur Seek the sun get eaten Powers Daze in the shadows Stealth. MVP of this movie that not enough people talk about. Molly Rubin.
- [111:00]
C
This is. I think I'm gonna go with something you said at the top, Joe, because, like, you know, we've talked on other pods about, like, the production design. Obviously, the planets look great, the ships look great, but that's not really like, an underrated or understated MVP in this movie.
- [111:13]
B
When I did Almost do location scout, but I did it. But I thought about it.
- [111:17]
C
It would be. I think. I mean, it's worth celebrating for sure. I'm going with the quiet. The use of quiet because the score is so propulsive and energetic. And in general, the sound design and the deliberate sound design, whether it's very, like, orchestral or whether it's very deliberate. Something like when Coop is on his floating journey and then all we hear is his rattling breath. But we're still hearing something. The moments when the sound is sucked out of the film entirely just allow you to feel first, second, delude yourself and trick yourself into thinking that you can feel for a second what it would be like to be out there. I think it's very effectively used and paired so memorably with the visuals. You have these, like, Close up shots of, you know, the attempt to latch on to the. The endurance and the way, like, the fingers are closing and we're seeing something that should be deafening and we can't hear a thing. Like, it's, it's, it's just great. You could say Dylan Thomas, you were just talking about maybe Dylan Thomas is the MVP in the movie.
- [112:24]
B
Dan, what's your answer?
- [112:25]
A
Baseball.
- [112:27]
C
I'll never argue. I'll never argue with the baseball player.
- [112:30]
B
Tell me why.
- [112:30]
A
So you got two different baseball scenes, right?
- [112:33]
C
That's right.
- [112:34]
A
That are two different. They expose two different things about humanity. The first baseball scene is people watching baseball and they can't even enjoy it anymore because they're comparing the baseball to old baseball. They are trying to be the way that they were, but they can't. They have to leave the planet. Our time here is over. They can't even enjoy the thing that they used to enjoy anymore because they realize that it's not the way it really used to be. The next time you see baseball, the ball is hit and it's on the planet. The ball does the whole thing. We are now different. And they use this game that's fundamental to Americana, like thematically to say, hey, we're not on this planet yet. We haven't figured it out. We're still trying to be as normal as possible. But look what happens to the ball as the ball is hit. Baseball. Tying those two scenes together to describe the journey of humanity from the cornfield to the centrifuge.
- [113:45]
C
This is a perfect, outstanding pick.
- [113:47]
B
Perfect answer. I love this answer. I also, I've referenced it before, but a friend of mine years and years ago wrote this incredible review of Field of Dreams where he talked about the way that time passes inside of a baseball game, which I'm sure he's not the first person to ever talk about it. But like, the way in which, like, well, it's different now because of the pitch clock, right? But like the way in which. Thank you so much.
- [114:12]
A
It's different. What are you talking about? It's different because of what? Wow, okay. Sports Joe. Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck is that? Mina.
- [114:25]
C
Well, I was swelling with pride.
- [114:28]
B
Mallory. Mallory took me to a baseball game a couple years ago, an Orioles and A's game, and she taught me about the pitch clock. But like, how time you. Like baseball used to be a game that, like, didn't have time limits, right? It's just sort of like the Indians can stretch or contract the way that they need to. And so like the Idea of, like, what? Especially inside of the context of the story of Field of Dreams, which is a lot about time and. And. And going back in time and all this other stuff like that. Okay, my answer was either gonna be cool corn, but we already covered that. Yeah, A very versatile crop. Or I'm gonna give it to Biller. When we already talked about it, the fact that it was, like, physically on set operating tars and Case, like, the fact that he was just, like, there moving this, like, incredibly heavy, you know, droid puppet thing that was like £200. And then it gets digitally erased out of the movie. So you never know. You think it's a special effect, but no, it's just Bill Irwin, like, classically trained clown, like, moving this thing around the set. I just think it's incredible. And, you know, people will learn more and more about this when they learn more and more about Project Hail Mary. But, like, you know, when it comes to, like, putting something real in the room and a performer in the room for an actor to respond to, I. You know, it's just an underrated part of all of these things. Okay. You're waiting on a train A train that will take you far away. This is my favorite recurring Christopher Nolan category. Best dead wife moment. There's an easy answer, but Mallory Rubin, what do you have here?
- [116:01]
C
I gotta say, I think it's probably just because we're midway through the series, but this is where it really just is, like, so funny. They're just always dead, huh? It's like, why?
- [116:13]
B
Why?
- [116:16]
C
There are a couple moments, obviously, where the dead wife and dead mom is invoked. They're all great. They're all valid picks. My pick is, once again, the parent teacher conference. And the way that just goes for the jugular.
- [116:36]
A
That's the one.
- [116:38]
C
You know, one of those useless machines they used to make was called an mri. And if we had any of those left, the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife's brain before she died instead of afterwards. And then she would have been the one sitting here listening to the this instead of me, which would have been a good thing because she was always the calmer1. Great McConaughey moment. Also just.
- [116:59]
B
I burst out laughing. Just know. Just knowing this category was coming. I just, like, laughed so hard.
- [117:05]
C
It is, like, very funny. And if you're thinking about this Nolan trope and tendency, it's comical in a different way. It's actually is kind of, like, effective also in the movie as a way to use, like, continue to use Personal pain to show us where society is and what that has caused cost. But yeah, that's my pick.
- [117:25]
B
Van, I just want to, like, share with you the way, like, we knew that this was like, a trope inside of Crystal Nolan movies, but actually tracking it across every single movie. The way that he added both of the dead wives to the prestige that it wasn't in the book. They just, like, added two dead wives. Or the way in which, like, you know, like in. In Batman Begins, like, of course there's like, Martha Wayne, but there's also, like, Descartes has a dead wife for like. No. Russell Ghoul has a dead wife for no. Like, it's just put in there. I don't know. He's just. Is his favorite thing to do anyway. Van, do you have an answer?
- [117:57]
A
No, it's the same one. And it's like using. Using the. Because, you know, obviously there's like, you know, Inception, which, like, you know, we get to see. She looks. She's lost it. Is she in reality? Or whatever. It's like, whatever. It's a whole nine. But in this one, the fact that we also learned the limits of technology through this. Like, we use it to craft the whole world. And to know that he is also out. There's also some gender roles there. Like, he. A main. He don't go to the parent teacher conferences. That's women's work. So he's like. So he's playing an away game already? Cause he wouldn't have been there. And he's only there. Cause there are no Mr. Mris. The only. No mris. Because we lost all of our technology and we need more farmers. It's like the whole thing that was. That's perfect. That's the only answer I have for that one.
- [118:49]
B
So good. All right. The. They won't fear it until they understand it. And they won't understand it until they've used it. Clearest Great man moment. This is something we've also been tracking across these Null movies. I'll just say that mine isn't under is. I'm just going to repeat that. That Dr. Hew, man. There is a moment, and that explosion that just feels like a real subversion of like, the classic great man speech that shows up in almost every Nolan movie. He's about to give it, and then it just blows up in his face. And I really, really love that. Van, what's your.
- [119:20]
A
I'm going unconventional here. The first time I realized Coop was a bad motherfucker is when he hacked the drone. Oh, yeah, when he hacks, he hacks the drone and then they flying a drone, and I'm like, you know, that's the first time in the movie that I realized, you know, Coop is something special. Hacks the drone, flies the drone around, sets the drone down, loots the drone to take it for parts. Like, he's like a little Indiana Jones himself. I knew you guys would pick other stuff, so I wanted to take that one because we weren't probably.
- [119:50]
C
That's the first time I realized that Tom wasn't gonna make very good decisions when he's like, I'm just gonna drive off this cliff unless you tell me not to. Dad.
- [119:56]
B
You told me to keep driving, dad. Right. Keep going, Tom calling Murph a dumbass with the audacity. All right, Mallory.
- [120:03]
C
Okay, so obviously, everything Cooper does, the drone, the escaping from the water planet, the besting man, ultimately rescuing Endurance, like docking to save Endurance, is a great one. The decisions he makes at the end, the ability to reach Murph across time, all of it, it's all great man stuff. The entire movie is a great man movie because of that. I think that even though it is not my favorite scene in the film, I think that the conversation between Donald and Coop on the porch is so necessary as a primer for why Coop, like, craves these things and has this level of yearning in him. So, you know, I can't believe how many times the parent teacher conferences come up. But after that, right? And they're kind of.
- [120:53]
B
Maybe that was a great use of David. A yellow O.
- [120:55]
A
Then it doesn't matter. He saw it.
- [120:58]
C
They're debriefing. And Coop's lamenting, right?
- [121:02]
B
He's like.
- [121:02]
C
It's like we've forgotten who we are, Donald. Explorer, pioneers, not caretakers. And then Donald saying, you know, the kid like, tom's gonna be fine. You're the one who doesn't belong. Born 40 years too late or 40 years too early. My daughter knew it. God bless her. And your kids know it, especially Murph. And then Coop says, we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our in the dirt. So all of that is just like. It kind of allows you to accept that this person would do these things and behave this way and feel like he needs to do these things, not only for his kids, for the future of humanity, because he once was a pilot and had this horrible crash, but because it is something inherent to who he is and how he thinks about what has been lost about the human experience and his ability to participate in it. So that's my pick. That porch scene. Swigging some beers and talking about the stars. Can you.
- [121:52]
B
You can. I believe you. Can you make beer out of corn? Because here's my question. Okra's gone. MRIs are gone. But we're. We still have beer where they get beer hops. Yeah.
- [122:03]
A
I don't know. Can you.
- [122:06]
C
I'm not a home brewer. To the list of things I'm not. We should ask Riley. Riley brews his own beer sometimes.
- [122:10]
B
So interesting. I mean wheat, but also rice, I think. And I think uses rice in this world.
- [122:17]
A
Are there animals? Animals? They're not. There are no more animals. Are the animals gone? See any dogs?
- [122:24]
C
I can't.
- [122:25]
A
I didn't see any cows. I mean, obviously they had cows. They would be having a fucking steak. Are the animals gone? And if there's corn, why are the animals gone? You can feed corn to the animals you shouldn't. But you can feed corn to chickens.
- [122:35]
B
I don't know.
- [122:35]
A
Why would the chickens have been gone if they have that corn? They should be eating some chicken.
- [122:39]
C
I guess they ate them all because
- [122:41]
A
they might have eat all the chickens. Yeah, pretty sad. It's fucked up. I didn't see any. Like, it's a. Fuck.
- [122:48]
C
It's a really funny
- [122:52]
B
Indiana Jones lied to you. And there's no more animals.
- [122:56]
A
And by the way, that means that they can't take any animals with them. Like in. There's like there's. There's. Is there a snake? Are the snakes fucked up? Like what? Like we didn't.
- [123:06]
C
This is really sad. We didn't explain how do you survive
- [123:09]
B
without animals in the chat. Like also you've got all these human embryos, but we couldn't do like a Jurassic park sort of like animal embryo. What's going on situation.
- [123:19]
A
Maybe they did though. Maybe when they went to the new place they still had maybe DNA. I don't know how it works. Maybe they arced it out in some sort of way. Who knows?
- [123:26]
B
But remember dino DNA.
- [123:28]
A
We got a new planet at the end. She took her helmet off and the whole nine. It looks like that place is gonna be, you know, fuck it that we don't get to go to Yellowstone anymore. I guess we'll make a new Yellowstone stone. So like, it's still fucking sad, but whatever.
- [123:46]
B
All right. He is the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Who was regrettably miscast and who would you place them with? Okay, I'm taking Wes Bentley out of this movie. With love and respect to Wes Bentley, I'm replacing him with Cillian Murphy.
- [123:59]
C
And here's what we're doing.
- [124:01]
B
We're making that character feel like he's a more important part of the movie so that when he dies unexpectedly on the water planet, you're like, ah, that's killing me. You know, because Wes Bentley makes no impact on this movie. He's just like kind of here kind of handsome, you know, kind of thinking about plastic bags floating around in the air, whatever the fuck he's doing, right? And then he just dies. And so, like in that moment when. When, like when they rescue Bran, but. And then he goes unexpectedly with the wave, like it would have had much more impact if that's a character we either, like, liked if he had a relationship with anyone, you know, like, doesn't have to be romantic, but like, he could have been like an old buddy of Coops or like something, you know, like some sort of connection so that when they're like, oh, no, he died in that sort of like Rachel McAdams game night sort of way, like he would have had some impact. So I say put Cillian Murphy in there. And then you have that nice subversion of like, Cillian Murphy's in all the promo. You think Cillian Murphy's a big part of this movie. Then he dies right away. And then all of a sudden you get a surprise Matt Damon instead, and it's just this nice. Again, a not replicable sort of idea. I'm sad that, like, when people watch Interstellar for the first time now, they already know that Matt Damon's in it, so. But anyway, Van, what would you say?
- [125:12]
A
What's the category again? Because you got me thinking about my whole trajectory with Wes Bentley. I'm still. I might be the world's last American beauty defender.
- [125:22]
B
No, you and I, we remember when
- [125:25]
C
you selected it in the mega movie draft.
- [125:27]
B
Yeah, we love to defend Kevin Spacey and we love to support.
- [125:32]
C
See, you see, he's.
- [125:33]
A
I mean, you just did that. I wasn't even thinking about that.
- [125:36]
B
I was kidding. I was kidding. That was a joke. I was making a joke. But I do think about West Bentley and that and that plastic bag all the time.
- [125:44]
C
My primary West Bentley association now, after years and years and years of time on the Dutton ranch, is Yellowstone.
- [125:51]
A
Yellowstone.
- [125:51]
B
Oh, is he a Yellowstone guy?
- [125:52]
A
He is.
- [125:53]
C
Oh, yeah, he's.
- [125:54]
A
He's. To me, I think a large part of the story orients around.
- [126:02]
C
Yeah, he's a Central figure in Yellowstone.
- [126:05]
A
That's very true.
- [126:06]
C
Fucked up character.
- [126:07]
B
West Bentley was another one where it's like American Beauty and you're like, he's just gonna go. And then it was like, four feathers. Down, down, down. Van Lathan, what was the catalog? Who was miscast? Who's miscast in this movie? And who would you replace him with?
- [126:21]
A
So I'm gonna say that Casey Affleck was, Was, Was miscast in the movie. Movie. I don't buy the anger and the whole nine of that stuff. I don't get it. I want one, like, a little swarmier bastard to be in there. As far as who I would recast him with, I'm trying to think.
- [126:45]
C
I don't think I ever answered the second part of it, the recasting part.
- [126:48]
B
That's hard.
- [126:50]
A
I'd have to think about that. But Casey Affleck, every time he pops up in this movie, it doesn't make very much sense. He's just. I know you want to do the Nolan movie, but to me, I put like a much more of a. I don't know, like, he kind of throws the movie off a little bit when he's in it.
- [127:09]
B
To me, you want someone who, like, you would more readily believe would keep his family on a farm even though they're coffin to death.
- [127:17]
A
Yeah, like, I'm trying to think of somebody who I.
- [127:23]
B
I do think Timothy Chalamet is good casting for a young.
- [127:25]
A
For the young one.
- [127:26]
C
He was perfect.
- [127:27]
A
Timothy was perfect for that. But, like. And I think they got the agent up good, too. Cause, like, you know, but I don't know Casey Affleck in this movie. I don't like him in very much stuff that he's in. I think that he's been good in a couple of things, but, like, yeah, I didn't dig him in this that much. I kind of think of who I'd replace him with, though.
- [127:48]
B
Molly Rubin. Who are you?
- [127:49]
C
I have two nominees. Kind of like one of them is a little bit of a similar. Yours was a much better version of this show, but kind of a similar, like, logic behind it. Topher Grace is Getty. I'm sure. Like, this has no. There's just no impact to this character. And it would actually be nice if. I mean, like, it builds for, like, the kind of eureka and the kiss and stuff. And I'm like, I guess there's a version of this where if Murph had a real, like, connection to somebody, that would be interesting. But even just the idea of, like, somebody in her work FIELD Other than Dr. Brand, who, you know, because the idea that she's, like, not going back home because it's too painful and stuff like that just felt like really a genuine nothing character. So it's more about the character than the performance, but maybe there's something there. And then I will say I don't totally get John Lith.
- [128:36]
B
Gallis.
- [128:36]
C
Donald. Like, I, I, I don't. I don't know. It's not, like, wrong or bad. It just doesn't seem like the character is, like, a total match for what he can bring to the role or to a role, like, with his energy. So I don't know. I don't know who I would suggest instead.
- [128:56]
B
Do you want someone who feels like, more naturally like a farmer or. Because my sense is, like, you know, I don't know that Donald always was a farmer. We don't know exactly, like, what his vibe was, if we. Or do you want someone who's like. Or you just don't think this role is enough for John Lithgow to say his teeth.
- [129:14]
C
He obviously has done so many very serious and somber things, but I think when I see him, I want to be able to tap into the humor and the spark of oddity a little bit more than we can hear.
- [129:28]
B
Third Rock from the Sun. There's, like, absolutely not as close as John Lithgow.
- [129:32]
C
John Lithgow, you know, so, yeah, I don't know.
- [129:35]
B
It's interesting.
- [129:36]
C
I will say that there are a number of. Number of contenders for this category, which is not always the case.
- [129:40]
A
Well, because I think they casted the movie really brilliantly with the. And then some of the other people, they just, you know, they wanted to have names. Look, there's. Have you ever seen Ricochet? If you want to see evil John Lithgow, go watch Ricochet. Oh, my God. Let me tell you. Just gotta give me 10 seconds on ricochet.
- [129:56]
B
That movie gave me, like, nightmares way too young. No, it's not a. It's not a horror.
- [130:01]
A
It's not a horror. It's a movie where it's basically Cape Fear with John Lithgow is this guy who has a grudge against this cop that Denzel Washington plays. He hires lady of the Night to come in and give Denzel Washington, like, chlamydia. It's, like, crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's evil John Lithgow at his best.
- [130:25]
B
If you're not watching Dexter, there's an integral latex glove. It was. It was a movie that, like, made me that Movie which I watched way too young, plus an episode of Captain Planet made me convinced that, like, people were out there trying to, like, get you hooked on drugs or give you diseases, but that you didn't have or whatever. And so we had. When. When Dare came to my school when I was a kid, I was, like, so scared about that that I wrote it down on, like, a question, on an anonymous question, on a note card of, like, to ask them, like, hey, is someone going to get me addicted to drugs by just, like, injecting me with heroin or something like that? And they just, like, very kindly did not answer that. That really dumb question for me. But, like, definitely Ricochet was. Was an inspiration for that.
- [131:10]
C
That movie fucked me up.
- [131:13]
A
Ed Harris is the dad.
- [131:15]
B
Is he the right age?
- [131:17]
A
Would he. Would he not be? Ed Harris is the dad. It. It like, Ed Harris, make the role a little.
- [131:23]
C
You would love that.
- [131:24]
A
Make the role a little serious. You know, he's not going to stand up and clap at the Oscars just because everybody else is standing up and clapping.
- [131:32]
B
That's my favorite thing.
- [131:35]
A
Make the role a little serious.
- [131:36]
C
I like this.
- [131:36]
A
You know, Ed Harris as Pops right there. I just saw.
- [131:40]
B
They're about the same age. They're about the same age.
- [131:42]
C
That's a great suggestion.
- [131:43]
A
I just saw him in that. He takes weird roles. I just saw him in. In that Glenn Powell movie. What the fuck, guys? The fuck is happening, man?
- [131:54]
B
Yo, I have a lot of questions. I have a lot of questions about it. Ed Harris mostly is just wander around being really proud of his wife, and I think that's really cool. Cool role for Ed Harris right now.
- [132:06]
C
Okay, Nola.
- [132:08]
B
Okay. It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me. Nolan is not known for sexual content, but let's go ahead and try to execute the hoardiest moment of this film. You guys already mentioned my answer, which is a sopping wet Matt Damon clinging to Matthew McConaughey upon arrival. Like, imagine you think you're never going to see a human face again. And what you see is the dewy, seasoned face of Matthew McConaughey just exuding an all right, all right, all right sort of energy, and you yourself are just sort of like wet and shivering in his arms. He's sort of like he threads his fingers through his hair. It's just a very tactile moment. I just wanted to support it, you know?
- [132:48]
C
Great book.
- [132:49]
B
Mallory, what's your answer? Oh, yeah, Van, what's your answer? No, Van, what's your answer?
- [132:52]
A
For me, it's the thought of Coop and Anne Hathaway's character turning that whole planet into their repopulated personal fuckfish. Pat.
- [133:08]
C
They got a whole time to get to work.
- [133:11]
A
Time to get to work. He takes the shuttle there. They've had the tension, they've gotten over their moonlighting phase. Now they can do the whole thing. Just that whole planet's their personal loved in, you know, so that. Yeah, that's why I think they gotta get busy right away.
- [133:28]
C
Do you think that's why?
- [133:30]
B
Yeah. When Murph said, Bran, she's out there setting up camp alone in a strange galaxy. Maybe right now. Now she's settling in for the long nap, if you know what I mean. By the light of our new sun in our new home. Go her. Do you really think that's.
- [133:43]
C
Yeah, let's add that to the. Where we could have inserted a. Quite literally.
- [133:47]
B
Go get some, dad.
- [133:49]
C
These are great. These are great. I have a third, I think, powerful suggestion to round out the field here. We've already all noted that our guy Ram is Left alone for 23. Three years. And when they return, he's just in a bathrobe hanging out. It's been a minute and I think there's a version of this movie that feels more authentic to what the human experience would be, where they return and he's sitting there just cranking it to some home videos because, as we know, transmissions are still coming through.
- [134:23]
B
They were receiving and not sending.
- [134:25]
C
How is he feeling this time? If not, you know, we. We'd get some actual canonical answers. But the head camera canon. Indeed. Just watching some porn, watching some home videos and jacking off for the better part of two and a half decades.
- [134:40]
B
Do you think K. Does Case have the capability to, like, help in any kind of way?
- [134:46]
C
Possibly.
- [134:47]
B
You know what I mean?
- [134:47]
C
I mean, it's, you know, not a
- [134:49]
B
lot of, like, orifices or like, you know, it's a very, like, bulky sort of. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.
- [134:56]
A
Hey, do they bring that, though? Think about it. Like, if I have a question about. Because even when I was watching, like, if you watch Project Hail Marian or you watch the Martian or you watch all of these shows, two of the people on the Martian, they had a baby at the end of the movie. Remember? They had. They were together. So there's some stuff going on. Maybe not, you know, I don't know what the regulations are or whatever that might actually be frowned upon. But like, if you're going on a thing like that, do you have time for the Self fulfillment or is this just all business? If you up there for nothing but time?
- [135:32]
B
I will say the. Okay, the thing is like Christopher Nolan's movies are not horny by nature. Usually we'll get to Oppenheimer eventually. But like, but in terms of like stripping down for the long nap in the space, this is like a highly, you know, we're just sort of body bag zipping ourselves into, into goo, water, whatever. We're not doing the alien strip down into your, into your undies and get into like a clear casket. So he really like skipped over a potential, you know, strip down to your skivvies and get in the pods, you know, sort of moment.
- [136:06]
C
Agree.
- [136:06]
A
What's the sexiest scene in Nolan history?
- [136:10]
C
Think of Cillian Murphy sitting naked, cross legged in a tornado plush armchair.
- [136:15]
A
But like with all of these directors that I'm thinking about, I'm trying to think of the sexiest. There's been some sexies. Nolan doesn't have a Carrie.
- [136:25]
B
Carrie Anne Moss spitting into the beer that she gives to Guy Pierce in Memento.
- [136:31]
C
That's a great pick.
- [136:32]
A
And that's early Nolan. That's a great one.
- [136:34]
C
Yeah, I mean Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is quite sexy.
- [136:39]
A
I think there's some sexiness.
- [136:41]
B
But like Nolan, but in general, Nolan's not a very sexy guy.
- [136:44]
A
Not very utilitarian. He doesn't care about it. Interesting.
- [136:51]
C
All right.
- [136:51]
B
An idea is like a virus. Resilient, highly contagious. The line that hits hardest 12ish years later. Mallory, what's your answer for this?
- [136:59]
C
This is similar to like what you were saying, Joe, about the book burning or the climate change. Kind of of a piece with that where I think often my pick here is just about the beauty of the prose, but this is really more like. It's just unpleasant to think about this idea when you watch this movie. Right now when Coop says this world's a treasure, Donald, but it's been telling us to leave for a while now. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here. Like the way that the planet is just melting around us and we're going to. Will we be around? I don't know. But not too many generations behind us will be here for the death of this planet.
- [137:40]
B
And as far as I know, or
- [137:42]
C
otherwise, I don't know.
- [137:43]
B
As far as I know, we have neither a plan A nor a plan B. I guess plan A is the billionaires get to leave and we will stay behind. Van Lathan, what's your answer here?
- [137:53]
A
They should be. We make Them leave and then we. Okay. Anyway, it's the love and gravity bit. It's like such a profound. You know, man, maybe you don't need two people fucking in the movie if every fucking movie has this profound prose in it. I remember when the Joker was explaining how things go to plan. It's like something that we know intuitively. But the way he put it, I was like, oh, he's fucking guys. He's smarter than Batman. What's happening? You know what I mean? And the love and gravity thing, just any human being trying to understand the crushing weight of love and connection, like, what the fuck is it? What is the deal? Remember when Vision was talking about, you know, the grief is love? Like, I was like, what the fuck is going on?
- [138:43]
B
Persevering.
- [138:44]
C
Perseverance.
- [138:44]
A
Yeah. So like that right there as love, the love being a cosmic force of the universe and not just something that we've invented to explain our chemical connection to one another is just insanely profound. It's outlasted the movie for me in its relevance by a long ways.
- [139:07]
C
Yeah, it's so good. I mean, this obviously is the actual pick. I think the fact that the movie builds through kind of the technical, tactical, rational, logical discussion and like, Coop has to kind of concede because Emelia is like, we love people who are dead. Right after he runs through all of the kind of like, social, utilitarian reasons to be drawn toward each other. It's just. It's really riveting.
- [139:31]
B
And he's like. He's like, you're right. I do have a dead wife and I do love her.
- [139:42]
C
Exactly.
- [139:43]
A
Yeah.
- [139:44]
C
It's just. It's great. Like, love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can't understand it yet, is frankly, both very effective lampshading of some of the aspects of the movie and, like, beautifully empowering, conceptually.
- [140:02]
A
It's great.
- [140:03]
B
I don't mean to bring the mood down, but my answer is Professor Brand talking to Amelia and one of the pre recorded things, and he says, then we. We must confront the realities of interstellar travel. We must venture far beyond the reach of our own lifespans. We must think not. We must think not as individuals, but as a species. And that idea, like, I think about that all the time when I think about, like, you know, let's say, like, like, let's talk about climate change. Why not? When I think about, like, the people who are smart enough to know that climate Change is real. And yet like not wanting to do anything about it, it is the most like, well, it won't impact me in my lifetime sort of attitude that like, yeah, makes me so pessimistic about humanity, right? And it's just sort of like, yeah, I don't think you have to have a kid to care about like the future of the human species. You know, a lot of people make that argument, but like we're three people who don't have children. Like, I don't think you need that. You need like basic human empathy. And a lot of people, people just don't have because they're like, if it's not going to hurt me now, I don't need. And it will make me uncomfortable to confront it, then I'm just not going to confront it and not change the way that I like use fossil fuels or whatever the case may be, you know. So like, I think about that a lot and I thought about that when I was thinking about that line.
- [141:21]
A
There's a major gigantic, huge comedian right now that I was in a conversation with maybe like, I don't know, 10 years ago ago, something like that. 10 years ago, whatever was having a conversation, climate change came up and I was like, 300 or 400 years from now, there was a report on Great Britain and how climate change was impacting Great Britain. Not a thousand years, like a hundred years, 200 years, just talking about it. This person went, I just don't care about 200 years from now. And I was like, that fundamentally, fundamentally told me who you were. And I don't care how it sounds or how it comes off, if you legitimately only care about your existence and you do not consider the part that you are a part of a tradition and a community of human beings. And not just you, nigga. What about the seals? What about the world whales? What about all the stewardship that you're supposed to have if that's how you are? I'm like, ah, I can't be fucking with you like that. That's just the way that it goes. Like it's because you just, that's just too reckless. And I'm enough of a piece of shit already to where I don't need to the death of the fucking beluga whales on my conscious too. I'm already doing enough fucked up shit.
- [142:41]
B
I just really agree. So I, I think this line about, like in thinking about yourself as individuals versus a species, species, or to your point, Van, beyond your own species into the stewardship, stewardship that we have for the world is. That really got me corn fritters coming up.
- [142:57]
A
Ten years.
- [143:00]
B
There's a. There's a point when plucky young Murph brings Coop like a cornbread sandwich. It's like a sandwich with, like, the cornbread is the bread of the sandwich.
- [143:12]
C
That's yummy.
- [143:12]
B
That sounds so dry. That sounds so unbelievably dry.
- [143:16]
C
Dry.
- [143:17]
A
Well, it depends on the cornbread. Like, if. If the way my mama made the cornbread is actually more like a.
- [143:23]
C
Some.
- [143:24]
A
Like, more like sweet cake almost.
- [143:26]
B
Yeah, like a cake, but, like, you wouldn't want a cake as, like, the bread of your sandwich. And, like, also, I don't know what's in the middle of that sandwich if there's no meat, so I have no idea.
- [143:35]
A
Corn on corn on corn.
- [143:36]
B
Baby corn on a cornbread sandwich. Baby corn, like, moist cornbread is delicious, but you usually want to have it with, like, a chili or something like that. But as, like, the. It's a lot. It's a lot to get through. Okay. Speaking of devastating things, you think darkness is your. You think darkness is your alley. I adopted the dark.
- [143:57]
C
I was born to the voice.
- [144:00]
B
Most devastating moment. Does anyone not have Come on.
- [144:04]
C
This is the easiest pick of the pond.
- [144:06]
B
Sobbing as he watches.
- [144:09]
C
It can't be anything but this.
- [144:10]
B
And he's like, my kid turned into Casey Affleck. I can't fucking believe.
- [144:15]
C
Can't be anything but this. Going right to the log to watch the home video saying, start at the beginning. And then watching 23 years worth of updates about everything that has happened in the time that he has missed. And like you guys said earlier, an instant for him, a huge chunk of life for the people he loves most in the world. And the way that we crest from. I mean, the tears start right away. This is like a very iconic and famous, you know, meme and gif still to this day for a reason. Very memorable, visually. But the way we move from happy things, happy updates. Tom has finished school. Tom has fallen in love. And Cooper is crying because good things are happening to his son. And he is full of joy and possibility, but also misses that he's not there. And then the despair. Like, you get to meet your grandpa. You get to meet this baby Jesse. And then, oh, my God, Jesse has died.
- [145:08]
B
Died.
- [145:08]
C
And Donald has died. And not only have they died, but they're buried out in the back where we would have buried you if you'd ever come back. And what is not said you didn't. And Lois has told me I can't I have to let you go. Yeah, I have to let you go. So this is it. You're not going to hear from me anymore. And that devastation. And then the cut to black and the reach toward the screen. And then Murph Jessica Chastain, here she is and she's grown and she says that it's her birthday. And it's a special because you told me, you once told me that when you came back, we might be the same age. And today I'm the age you were when you left. And he is just shattered, sobbing that he has missed this much of their lives and that they don't. I love too. When we build later toward, like the.
- [145:52]
B
The.
- [145:52]
C
The logs from home are always used. Well, I think in the film, like when we're getting the update on. When Amelia is getting the update on her father dying in coup years, then we also get one of the twists in a film of twists is revealed. Did my father know, too? Dad, I just want to know if you left me here to die. I have to know. And his face as he has to confront the fact that she might think that for a second. That's so good.
- [146:19]
A
I once thought about if I was Coop. No, if I was Murph and my dad was cooperating, and then I had left all those videos and then he came back to see me when I was old. He would have brought some of that shit up, okay? He'd have been like, by the way, June 3rd, 2045. Who the fuck you think you talking to? You talking to. Everybody out the room. Give us the room. Like, everybody, everybody out. Who the fuck you think you talking to? You talking to me? You talking to your daddy? All right, go ahead and take them last breaths. So I always. My problem with this is, like, I struggle with this. He's trying to save the world. Just cut the motherfucker some slack, man. I know it's upsetting, but you guys don't feel me at all on this. It's like, I know he didn't come back. He was supposed to come back, but there was a giant. He's not Kelly Slater. He did his best to try to get off the wave.
- [147:25]
B
They don't know that I know. They don't know. That's the whole thing that, like. The whole thing that I love about this is, like, when Tom talks about it in terms of, like, faith, you know, like, Lois says, I have to let you go. This idea that, like, Murph doesn't know and Tom doesn't know and Bran is talking to Murph and he's like, I believe they're still out there. It's this like, faith thing of like, you know, know, older Professor Brand dying before Murf can get the information about whether or not her father knew to, to that point of like what you just said, you know, she's like, did he know? And then he dies. And then she just has to like, have faith. And so then it all comes back to the, to the end when she's like, you know, cuz my father promised me like that idea of finding that faith again. Losing the faith in your father, in God if you prefer, and then like finding it again. Um, all that stuff really, really works for me. And I don't know, like, I, I both agree with you, Van. And also just sort of like, I have highly, highly irrational feelings about my parents, you know, and it's just sort of like. And especially the ones that originated when you were young.
- [148:27]
A
Yeah.
- [148:28]
B
So it's like.
- [148:29]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [148:30]
B
That's just how we are as animals.
- [148:31]
C
I think. I think too, the way that Murph, like, you know, there's that moment where she's like, the ghost is a through line, obviously, but there's that conversation where she says, you know, I didn't call it a ghost because I was afraid. It's like, because it seemed very human. And like this, this seems very human to me too. Especially if you're young, to Joe's point. The idea that. And honestly, Coop says a version of this too. When Amelia's like, you didn't explain relativity to your kids. She's like, sorry, we didn't have time to go over Einstein before I left because we were on the clock. But also she's 10 and like, in a world like this, where it is so hopeless and you have been deprived of like the capacity to pursue all of your own abilities and optimize your own potential. And the thing you have around you every day is like, are you going to say it'll be better next year?
- [149:16]
B
Right.
- [149:16]
C
And then the one thing that you can count on is the person you love and then they're gone. That you would blame them for that, like, even if you got to the point of being able to understand it.
- [149:24]
B
So in, in that original script, which again is not nearly as good as the finished product. So I want to give Krister Nolan his credit, but this sequence is there and Jonathan Nolan has talked about this. This was the like, scene. The whole movie is built around this idea of relativity. And he was talking about how Einstein, Einstein, he's like, when he, you know, it was so cute he was talking about it. He's like Einstein, brilliantly depicted in my brother's new movie, Oppenheimer. But he's like. But he's like, Einstein didn't really fuck around with the math that often. He was often talking in terms of concepts and stories and word problems. And so he was talking about the absolute heartbreak and despair of two twins, one set on a different timeline than the other and coming back and the different ages of these twins and what you lose inside of that sort of story that Einstein tells. And so General was talking about the quote he uses. He's like. He says the thing he's scared about the most is where does the story go? What's going to happen to all these people you love when you're not around to see what happens to them anymore? And this idea of going through a black hole and the closer to death you get as you go through the black hole, the closer to godlike powers you have. Have that you can see through time and space and all this sort of stuff like that. So this concept of, like, what happens to you as you die, which Dr. Human brings up, you see your children's faces and stuff like that. But, like, all of this stuff is in the mix and like, John. Johnathan Nolan coming with this idea of, like, what would happen if you went to space and time, something time dilated. And all of a sudden these children that mattered to you, you missed it and they didn't even know. They didn't have a good reason to know, like, why. You know, they have no idea and they. They just think you were abandoned. And in his version of the script, Coop is like watching these videos for days, right. If it's 23 years of videos, like, he's sitting there and you cut back and there's like, growth of beard on his face. Like, he's just like, there for. I think this is a more effective, like, cinematic, you know, just watching it over the span of like, a few minutes. But just like this, this incredibly impactful cinematic moment that can only happen inside of a sci fi story is. Is. Is the building block for the. You reverse engineer the entire movie around it.
- [151:40]
C
Yeah.
- [151:41]
B
And it becomes a meme for a reason. Like, it just bec. It. It just, you know, it's not just McConaughey's cry face. It's just sort of like what we know that that means kind of set
- [151:51]
A
the stakes for the entire story. Yeah.
- [151:54]
B
Yeah.
- [151:55]
A
Tough.
- [151:55]
B
All right. Most unforgettable Zimmer ism. Mallory. What do you.
- [152:02]
C
A lot of great candidates for this as well. I'm going to go with two hours into the movie, man's escape attempt and blowing up the endurance and then saving the endurance. I think the like frantic beating heart and ticking clock in the score, the rhythmic nature, but also the race against time that we get from the musical composition there. And you know, you mentioned, Joe, the score, the use of the score earlier, that ticking clock element really primes us for the music being deployed in this way. And then it's amplified here and I just think it's really hypnotic. So that's my pick. What about you, Ben?
- [152:38]
A
It's not. The cornfield
- [152:42]
C
can be.
- [152:43]
A
Oh, okay. I thought it was the cornfield. I thought we were. The cornfield is very rousing. I loved it real quick. So I'm just. That's. It's cornfield for me. Look when they.
- [152:53]
C
Which part? Which cornfield part?
- [152:55]
A
The cornfield at the beginning. The drone.
- [152:57]
B
The very beginning.
- [152:58]
C
The first stretch. Here's my note on this. You ready?
- [153:01]
A
Go for it.
- [153:02]
C
If the crops are dying and the food is that rare, you can't drive through the crops. It's distracting and disqualifying. I'm sorry. Otherwise, great pick.
- [153:13]
A
That always kind of sweeps me away.
- [153:15]
C
Yeah, that's a good one.
- [153:16]
A
I thought. Are Williams and. And. And Zimmer, the Beatles and the Stones.
- [153:25]
B
That's controversial because, I mean, all composers. But, like, hasn't Zimmer. I think this is right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Zimmer is like one of those guys who like, employs a bunch of musicians under him to, like, also, like, he gets the credit, but then like a bunch of other musicians actually write a lot of the pieces of his scores. You know what I mean? That's not the case here. The story of Hilahan Zimmerman wrote. This score is like, incredible. We can talk about it in a second. But wasn't there a whole thing? I think some other composers got sort of put their feet in the fire a bit more about this, but they employ a raft of composers underneath them to sort of buoy up their work. Because Hans Zimmer cannot possibly have written all of this stuff just himself. Do you know what I mean? So it's a bit more complicated than that. But in terms of reputationally, I would say, yeah, it's correct. Correct assertion. I love Zimmer. Sorry if that was a killjoy answer.
- [154:19]
A
I was. You fucked me up. This is very upsetting.
- [154:24]
B
Hoddragons. Gmail.com. if I got that wrong and just completely Besmirched Hans Zimmer. This is how Hans Zimmer wrote the score to Interstellar, which along with like, the score to Howl's Moving Castle, has become this, like, very tik tok. Like, I hear that score all the time on like, tik toks and Instagram reels that have nothing to do with Interstellar. It's become just like background music for a lot of, of content these days. But this is a quote from Hans Zimmer. Chris said to me in his casual way, so, Hans, if I wrote one page of something, didn't tell you what it was about, just give you one page, would you give me one day of work? Zimmer told Shon, whatever you come up with on that one day would be fine. And so apparently he wrote a letter about, he wrote a letter to Hans Zimmer about a man having to leave home for a job and explain to his son why he had to go and that. And so he didn't say anything about space or like, space libraries or time paradoxes or anything like that. He didn't say, give me a sci fi score. He said, this is the story. It's about a man leaving home. And so the organ music that is played inside of, of this movie is like, that's the vibe Han was going off of. And I just kind of love that. It's like, I don't know, if someone, if someone comes to you and is like, I want to write a pantheon sci Fi movie. I think you have, like, how could you possibly escape some of the, like, if you're a composer, like, some of the references you would want to make to other famous sci fi scores or something like that. And so the fact that he's like, I'm just going to give you this, this emotional centerpiece and you tell me what that musically says to you is how we get the, like, main interstellar theme, I think is really cool story. So fascinating.
- [156:11]
C
It is fascinating.
- [156:12]
B
Chris Nolan might not let people sit on his film sets, but he has some great ideas and he uses them sometimes. What are you going to say, man?
- [156:19]
A
No, no, no, no. I just, I didn't know where y' all find this goddamn shit at. I know, I, I've never heard this. I've, I've done a lot, I've done a lot of work called Interstellar. I never heard that before.
- [156:32]
B
I don't know. I, I, I get, I fall down rabbit holes. Okay. For me, I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship that's a tenant line actor who never Returned to the Nolan verse, but should have. Who's in this movie? Who should have been in another Nolan movie but never was. Mallory, you've got this.
- [156:49]
C
It's Timmy.
- [156:50]
B
It's sh.
- [156:52]
C
Right. And I feel like, yes, this is a. For now. I mean, they just did. You know, Timmy's been doing.
- [156:57]
B
Doing the.
- [156:59]
C
What's it. What's it called? Timothy Shaw.
- [157:01]
B
Give me an Oscar. Give me an Oscar tour.
- [157:03]
C
The screenings across LA of all of his films. And so he's, you know, he was with McConaughey. He was with Nolan and he like talked then and, you know, you can find these clips online about how like, Interstellar is like his favorite movie all time and he loves it. He obviously worships Nolan. So it seems like they will work together again. But it's kind of surprising that it hasn't happened. Happened yet. That said, he hasn't made that many movies since Interstellar. Nolan, not. Not Timmy.
- [157:30]
B
Yeah, Timmy's been busy. I think equally important anecdote to come out of that give me an Oscar tour was when he mentioned that Matthew McConaughey left a giant. A diet giant in his toilet.
- [157:41]
A
What's going on there, guys?
- [157:45]
C
Wild stuff. Yeah, wild.
- [157:48]
B
I don't know. He's a child and that's the name of.
- [157:50]
C
Okay, but like, Timmy could have been in Dunkirk, you know. Sure.
- [157:55]
B
He could be Telemachus and an Odyssey, you know.
- [157:59]
A
Oh, my dad.
- [157:59]
B
Absolutely. All right.
- [158:02]
A
It's not Jessica Chastain. Does she ever do another one with him?
- [158:06]
B
No, that's.
- [158:08]
A
That seems to me to be a Nolan coded female lead. Jessica Chastain. I love her. She's one of my faves to get them.
- [158:18]
B
She's great.
- [158:18]
A
Get them back together.
- [158:19]
C
Most of the women in these movies are dead, though. Only so many spots.
- [158:28]
B
The credit I will give Chris Nolan in this, in this instance is that. I think I already said this, but that Murph was a boy in Jonathan Nolan's treatment and he changed it to a daughter. So Jessica Chastain, a whole living, breathing woman is something Christopher Nolan added to this movie.
- [158:45]
C
I know.
- [158:45]
A
You know, this would have been a fucking song to every.
- [158:47]
B
For every dead wife.
- [158:48]
A
What the fuck, Murph? Like this would. This movie would have been Interstellar at the front house if there's no Murph. What the fuck?
- [158:57]
B
Yeah.
- [158:57]
A
How is that gonna work? It's all dudes.
- [159:00]
B
Like, yeah, well, and Anne Hathaway.
- [159:03]
A
And Anne Hathaway. But still though, like, that's it. And the woman that don't believe that we landed on the Moon. That's the whole fucking movie.
- [159:09]
B
That's right. That's Inception. Okay? So some men just wanna watch the world burn. The most Nolan thing about this movie, Van, what's the most Nolan thing about this movie?
- [159:25]
A
To me, how heady it is. Like, there's not really an attempt in this movie to make this easier for people to understand. And he doesn't really do that. He is on top of explaining the science and the world building, but only to service the plot, not to make it easy for. Think about the. Like, the Big Short assumed that we wouldn't understand finance. So there's a device in the movie. Fantastic.
- [159:55]
B
Margot Robbie and Ibassa.
- [159:56]
A
There's a device. There's a device in the movie.
- [159:59]
B
The device has a name and it's Margot Robbie and I.
- [160:01]
A
They do it a couple of times, right? They come back to it.
- [160:05]
B
Selena Gomez, right.
- [160:06]
A
But Nolan, if he was making the Big Short, he would not have done that. He would have had deep scenes of people, deep thematic scenes of people talking about finance and explaining it on a whiteboard of something. And he'd have been like, either you got it or you don't. Move the fuck on. That's what he does. Tenet this Inception. I hope you're staying with us because I'm not slowing down the plot or slowing down anything else so that you can get it. And that, to me, is the most heady thing about the film.
- [160:38]
B
Yeah, I love. Jessica Chastain, in an interview was talking about how they were all talking about Kip Thorne being on set, the scientist who came up with this idea in the first place and sort of what he taught them or whatever. And Jessica Chastain said she tried to memorize all of the numbers and figures that she had to the equation that she had to write out on the chalkboard. She was trying to memorize it so that it would look natural as she did it or whatever. And she was like, this is so hard. This is impossible. How can anyone do it? Kip Thorne was like, that actually should be like 20 chalkboards. And she's like, oh, okay, I'll be grateful. I'll be grateful for this instead. Mallory, what's your.
- [161:13]
C
Just, I think, as we've discussed across every one of these pods pretty much so far, just his obsession with time, specifically inside of the headiness and inside of the idea of great pursuits and a quest. You know, the way that he thinks about time and the passage of time and how you experience time relative to other people in a distinct way. Obviously, we talked a lot about that on the Dunkirk pod and obviously a ton about that on the Inception pod. You know, what does that do to you? How does it influence your choices and. And how you think about your place in the world? It's just like, one of. It is one of Nolan's core tenants.
- [161:48]
B
Can't wait to talk about this when I get to tenant. But, like, it's so funny because I also have Inception and Dunkirk written down here for my answer, which is when we're cutting, and it has to do with time, when we're cutting between, like, the man and Cooper fight. And then we're cutting back to Murph having to, like, figure something out that cut back and forth between, like, two very urgent if this does. If she doesn't figure this out, and if, like, Casey Affleck isn't distracted by fire long enough for her to figure it out, or whatever the case may be, and if Coop can't miraculously find that communicator a couple feet away from where he landed on side of the this planet, like, none of this works. And so the tension is high on both of these things. They're both operating on different timelines, right? Because Murph's whole thing of, like, I need to figure this out is happening in the case span of like, an hour, maybe something like that. Like a couple hours maybe. Whereas, like, everything with man and Coop and then continues into, like, the docking and the explosion and all that sort of stuff like that, that back and forth of like, figure it out, figure it out into the tesseract in space. So, like, like with Dunkirk or with Inception, we're watching these, like, high stakes. We're watching Joseph Gordon Levitt have a gravity zero gravity fight in a hallway while we're watching the Van fall. While we're watching this thing happen with Dunkirk, we're watching, like, Tom Hardy, you know, try to land the plane while this boat is trying to take off in different timelines over different tempos of time. But the stakes are high on both, and we're cutting back and forth, and there's just something so. So to Van's point, like, he's just gonna trust that you're gonna hang with him while he executes this. And it's so, like, I don't think I would have appreciated the nature of that if we hadn't done Inception and Dunkirk. And I was just thinking about, like, this is a classic Nolan kind of across time in different timelines, high stakes. It all converges on something sort of set piece. So, yeah, did Tom Hardy Have a
- [163:49]
A
place in the this movie.
- [163:52]
C
The answer is always yes. I mean, we have to speak on behalf of cr.
- [163:55]
B
Tom Hardy is the poor deceased Wolf Edmonds Tom Hardy with a beard.
- [164:04]
A
We got there.
- [164:05]
C
That's who it is.
- [164:06]
B
Tom Hardy with a beard.
- [164:08]
C
Really, really, really bushy beard. So you can't see parties.
- [164:12]
B
His peaky blinders beard.
- [164:13]
A
Yeah, really bushy beard. Tomorrow, Tom Hardy is the guy. That's him. Think about it.
- [164:19]
B
That'd be great.
- [164:19]
A
We got there.
- [164:20]
B
We did it.
- [164:21]
C
I am Tom Hardy right now.
- [164:23]
A
We should find a place for Tom Hardy in every single Nolan movie. Because I don't think that Nolan has made a movie yet that Tom Hardy could not have been in.
- [164:33]
C
I quite agree.
- [164:34]
A
Yeah. I don't know if there's a non Tom Hardy situation.
- [164:37]
B
Last but not least, our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us. What aspect of Nolan's upcoming the Odyssey are you thinking about most hyped for this month right now? Van Lathan, what are you most excited for when it comes to the Odyssey?
- [164:50]
A
Well, really, it's kind of boring.
- [164:54]
B
That's okay.
- [164:55]
A
I want to Nolan both. Nolan does. How can I put this? So Nolan does Batman. And the shit that Batman is doing in the movie, you can't do in real life. Okay? You. You can't do it, right? It's Batman. It is fucking Batman, by the way. So people know. It's like, it could happen next week.
- [165:15]
B
It can't happen.
- [165:16]
A
It's fucking Batman. Okay? It's a Batman movie. However, he has a way of making that story dramatically accessible. He has a way of making Batman feel like Batman. I can't really. I don't know how to explain it. He brought Batman to us. We normally have to go to Batman. You know, Tim Burton's take on Batman is in this gothic painting come to life and all of that stuff. Or Joel Schumacher had two completely different takes on Batman. We normally have to go to Batman. Nolan brings Batman to you. I'm interested to see somebody bring the Odyssey to us. It is in many ways the formative work of Western method in a lot of ways, but it is fantastical. There are. There are elements of the film that stretch your imagination, and that stuff is sometimes hard to bring to an audience. You have to make the audience walk to go find it. You have to make them. But Nolan doesn't do that. So what I'm interested to see is how the tension, how his style, how his approach to practicality in movies, how he's able to bring that story, which is very formative but also not Accessible wouldn't be traditionally accessible to me in a Nolan way. How he makes it that I'm interested in feeling in a tactile way. Seeing the viscosity of the Odyssey all running over the screen. I'm interested to see how he does that.
- [166:58]
B
I love it. I'm so excited. Mallory, what do you have?
- [167:01]
C
It's what we talked about at the beginning. Trying to get home to your family after a great trial. These are like the core animating principles behind both of these stories. And if we want to add something else to the mix, I would just say water stuff. Go some great boat stuff.
- [167:19]
B
There was a rumor going around that Tom Hardy was in this movie in Odyssey.
- [167:26]
C
I don't know if Chris Ryan be the same.
- [167:32]
A
Yeah, it would be tough if that happens.
- [167:34]
B
I will say since. Since we. Since we last recorded, since we did Dunkirk, we've just gotten much more information about the cast and who they're playing and stuff like that. So I think I'm just excited about. Excited about to know who all the characters are. And I'm most. I mentioned Eurylochus already, but Himesh Patel, who I'm like. Who I love is in this movie in a.
- [168:00]
C
In a.
- [168:00]
B
Like. Well, we'll see how it all shakes out and what we have time for. But like, in a non, like, insignificant role. I just didn't know like, how big his role was going to be. I still don't. But, like the first look. Images of him look great. And I'm really excited that he's here. So same, you know, a tenant alum, station 11. He's our guy. I'm really excited for him. And. And I'm excited for the Odyssey, man. Will you go watch the Odyssey with us? Can we all watch it together?
- [168:24]
C
Yes, that'd be great.
- [168:25]
A
I think that we should all go see it together. We have a great time when we go to the movies together. I would like to see this. I am nervous. I don't know why I'm nervous. This is a big one. This is a big movie. It's nervous. I know I'm nervous, guys. I'm not nervous about the quality of the movie. I just. It's very low chances the movie doesn't hit. But like, I don't know. There's so much talk around this one. We're in such a precarious state. It feels like I got a lot on the line with this.
- [168:51]
B
I don't know why that's interesting. Do you mean we're a precarious time in the industry or the Industry itself.
- [168:58]
A
Yeah.
- [168:59]
B
In the world we live in. Yeah, yeah.
- [169:00]
A
It's like, you know, the world we live in is what it is. The movie theater is my sanctuary, but, like, just the Odyssey. I don't know. Just the whole thing. I'm gonna be hanging on every word and every scene in the movie.
- [169:12]
C
It's a big one, I think.
- [169:15]
B
I. So I remember when Dunkirk came out, and I was like, I was skeptical that Dunkirk would do well. And then it, like, did so well. And then. And then, of course, Oppenheimer was like an absolute juggernaut. So now I almost feel like Nolan is, like, too big to fail. Do you know what I mean? Like, I just don't. I don't think that a flop is possible, but, you know. Well, I don't know if that's what you're talking about.
- [169:37]
A
No, no, no. Flop isn't. I don't think a flop is possible, but I just like how I. This take with this. This is a. How about this? I actually feel like this is a bigger swing than people think that it is. This is a fucking gigantic swing.
- [169:55]
B
I agree.
- [169:55]
A
I think this is a bigger swing. It's in such capable hands that no one is really discussing it, but this is a gigantic, gigantic swing.
- [170:04]
B
Yeah, but wasn't Oppenheimer, you know, like. Like, who thought that. That many people would go see Oppenheimer? And that's like the whole Barbenheimer, like, phenomenon, but, like, still like Oppenheimer. There's like, if you heard about anyone else making Oppenheimer, you wouldn't be like, that's gonna be a massive hit. You know what I mean? Like, it's just. I think people are just ready for whatever. Christopher Nolan. I'm excited. I'm excited. But. But I. I hear your nerves. I hear it. Anything else that we should say? We did it.
- [170:35]
C
Had a blast. Yeah. Great time.
- [170:37]
B
Yeah, great time.
- [170:38]
C
I don't.
- [170:39]
B
Since we're not there, I don't know everyone who's in the studio helping today. Who can we assume is. Who's. Who's helping? What do you think, Mallory? Do we know?
- [170:45]
C
I'm sure that. Well, we know for sure that Carlos and Arjuna are there, right? That Jomi is on the Social.
- [170:53]
B
Yes.
- [170:54]
C
I don't know who else is in the studio because I'm not there. I think I might have heard. Did we hear Chris Wallers voice, perhaps?
- [170:59]
A
Is CT Chris, CT Jack, Kevin, everybody here at Sycamore.
- [171:05]
C
There we go.
- [171:07]
A
Hey, we. We changing the world over here.
- [171:10]
B
We'll see you soon. Bye.
- [171:23]
C
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B
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- [171:46]
C
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