‘Backrooms’ Is the Future of Movies, With Kane Parsons!

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Big Picture — ‘Backrooms’ Is the Future of Movies, With Kane Parsons!

Podcast: The Big Picture (The Ringer)
Hosts: Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, Chris Ryan (CR)
Featured Guest: Kane Parsons
Date: May 29, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the explosive success of Backrooms, the feature debut from 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons. The hosts discuss the implications of this new kind of internet-born horror movie, how young filmmakers like Parsons are reshaping the cinematic landscape, and the specific aesthetic, narrative, and meta-cultural elements that define Backrooms. The episode also features an in-depth interview with Parsons himself, examining his creative origins, methods, and philosophies.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Rise of a New Generation of Internet-Born Filmmakers

• The YouTube Incubator:
  Both Backrooms and another hit, Obsession, spring from young creators with roots in YouTube, signaling a shift away from the traditional film school to festival pipeline toward real-time, internet-driven creativity and training.

  • “They're doing the training in real time on YouTube.” (Amanda, 06:45)

• Economic Impact & Accessibility:
  The hosts note that these creators are making features with lower budgets and rapid production cycles, democratizing access to filmmaking.

  • “You can make something fast and cheap that looks good and a lot of people want to go see it. That's not a barrier of entry.” (CR, 07:10)

2. Obsession vs. Backrooms: Two Approaches, One Generation

• Obsession is perceived as a horror-comedy with a traditional, audience-friendly structure, while Backrooms is described as more internal, experimental, and intrinsic to internet lore.
• Amanda loved Obsession for its humor and relatable moments, even amidst horror elements.
  • “There was one jump scare that actually made me jump... I would watch a lot of these, so I'm into it.” (Amanda, 03:56)
• Backrooms is lauded but also seen as more challenging and less tethered to standard movie conventions.

3. The Affinity Between Horror and Internet Culture

• Horror as the Gateway Genre:
  The primary genre for these internet-born directors seems to be horror, leveraging the ability to experiment with scares, mood, and world-building on a technical and narrative level.

  • “So much of horror, as I understand it, is based on the technical ability... and you can try stuff out on YouTube.” (Amanda, 09:38)
  • “Horror and low-to-the-ground sci-fi, it's just much easier to pull off. And also it just more easily gets the attention of executives.” (Sean, 10:28)

• The Business of Risks:
  Horror enables low-cost, high-reward experimentation and is easier for platforms and studios to market to young audiences.

4. Backrooms Review & Cultural Context

• Origins & Structure:
  Backrooms stems from a series of YouTube shorts inspired by a meme/creepypasta describing an endless, liminal office space—a “folk art” tale expanded into a film (Sean, 13:47; CR, 13:47). The film follows a therapist entering another dimension to find her lost patient, blending genre storytelling with psychological allegory and themes of lost places and trauma.

• Aesthetic & Emotional Impact:

  • CR describes the movie as "taking a floor buffer to my brain"—a hypnotic, immersive horror experience (13:47).
  • Amanda notes that, even without deep lore knowledge, the film’s mood and production design communicate everything a newcomer needs.

• Liminal Storytelling & Internet Influence:

  • The conversation situates Parsons’s film with other recent movies that exploit “liminal” spaces: Skinamarink, The Outwaters, We're All Going to the World's Fair, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, etc.
  • “He’s placing human emotion in an unreal world, which is something that... I have always really liked, but I was really impressed with it.” (Sean, 20:35)
  • “You made Internet culture into actual cinema.” (Amanda, 12:13)

5. Generational Shifts & Audience Reception

• The rise of Backrooms demonstrates how meme culture, vibes, and collaborative lore have shifted what young people want from movies: less over-explaining, more open-ended, atmospheric experiences (24:31–25:50).
• “They were so excited for Backrooms... they were so invested in it as an idea and were nervous about the movie part.” (CR, 22:26)
• The hosts stress that Backrooms works with or without awareness of its internet origins—it's both an insider’s artifact and a broadly accessible horror flick.

6. Parsons’s Artistic Ethos (Interview Highlights)

• Creative Upbringing:
  • Kane describes an innate drive to create, citing The Simpsons, Star Wars, and especially video games like Portal as key influences on his worldview and work.
    • “I get really obsessed about specific things. Like I find a thing, I latch onto it...” (Kane, 67:00)
• Jumping Mediums & Obsession:
  • Parsons discusses his compulsion to “curate experiences” in any form, whether haunted houses, memes, or films.
• Internet Mentality:
  • He expected audiences to “watch it forward and backward,” scrutinizing every detail—so he insists on “meticulous attention to detail” (73:41).
  • Kane admits avoidance of expository lore in the film: “I was not interested in doing too much of the lore in this film... This is the very beginning of something that probably is going to be very big for a long time.” (Sean, 16:35)
• Thematic Approach:
  • Parsons prefers not to spell out his thematic intent, letting viewers debate meaning.
    • “That’s actually the bit I like to speak to the least, probably.” (Kane, 84:28)
• Rejecting AI & Emphasizing Manual Craft:
  • Kane explicitly rejects generative AI for his work, emphasizing the “obsessive detail” achieved through personal/community craft (94:00).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• CR on watching Backrooms:
  “I just find watching this stuff to be like taking a floor buffer to my brain. And I would honestly watch like nine hours of this...” (13:47)
• Amanda on meme adaptation:
  “You made Internet culture into actual cinema.” (12:13)
• Sean on generational change:
  “It’s not three people, it’s now like nine people who have made widely distributed films who were born out of this experience, which is very different than I went to USC film school...” (08:00)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Backrooms vs. Obsession — New Wave of Horror Directors: 02:47–07:31
• Why Horror and the Internet Are Linked: 09:28–12:46
• Deep Dive Discussion: What Makes Backrooms Effective: 13:01–22:26
• Parsons Interview: Early Creative Influences & Methods: 65:23–72:54
• Parsons on Lore, Thematics, and Intent: 80:53–87:15
• Production, Community, and the Limits of Film: 94:39–98:24

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Memorable Moments

• Amanda’s “backrooms can be void or Tuscany” riff (34:57–35:12): A lighthearted meditation on the subconscious potential of the film’s central metaphor.
• “My favorite holiday down bad” (Amanda, 40:16), after a Christmas tree becomes scary in the Backrooms.
• Kane on obsessive fanbase:
  “There are many people on my Discord server who are far more sophisticated at Blender than I possibly could be... they model every single thing in the trailer...” (94:39)
• Kane’s description of his favorite recent experiences isn’t a movie, but listening to Ted Chiang audiobooks while gazing out airplane windows (103:42).

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Concluding Thoughts

• Backrooms is a generational milestone:
  It signals a new synthesis of internet-born creativity, collaborative lore, meme culture, low-budget technical skill, and accessible yet boundary-pushing horror storytelling.
• A24’s pivotal role:
  Backrooms is poised to become A24’s highest-grossing film, marking a generational shift in that studio’s branding and offerings (57:57–61:29).
• Special Recommendations:
  The hosts advocate for more open-ended, atmospheric, and formally daring filmmaking that encourages audience exploration and conversation.

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Summary Table: Key Participants & Takes

| Host/Guest | Viewpoint | Favorite Element of Backrooms | |--------------------|-----------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------| | Sean Fennessey | Champion of new wave, insightful on film history | Deep immersion, Kubrickian aesthetic, human emotion in unreal worlds| | Amanda Dobbins | Relatable audience POV, skeptical of lore, loves humor and design detail| The design, meditative quality, meme-to-cinema achievement | | Chris Ryan (CR) | Internet/horror culture historian, excited observer | “Floor buffer to my brain,” liminal horror as folk art | | Kane Parsons | Precocious, intuitive, obsessed creator | Experience curation, attention to detail, “let the work speak” |

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Final Word

Backrooms exemplifies the collision of youth culture, internet aesthetics, and cinema—a future in which digital-native creators drive formal, narrative, and cultural reinvention. The episode is a lively, deeply-inquisitive exploration of this phenomenon, anchored both by critical insight and the perspective of the wunderkind creator himself.

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End of Summary.

Transcript

[Sean Fennesey]

I'm Sean Fennesey.

[Amanda Davins]

I'm Amanda Davins and this is the

[Sean Fennesey]

Big Picture 8 conversation show about backrooms. CR is here to help us talk about this new horror sensation, Middle Chair. The Middle Chair.

[CR]

Well you guys are a real like you really played it up the middle with Van when he was asking about that.

[Sean Fennesey]

Just take, hold on, we'll get there, we'll get there, we'll get there. I promise you. We'll take you to the backrooms of the Big Picture. Later in this episode I will be joined by Kane Parsons. He is the 20 year old filmmaker behind Backrooms, one of the most anticipated debut features, I think fair to say, in the history of movies. Kane told me all about his early days as a maker of short films, uploading to YouTube, how he utilized and learned from the platform, and how he made this movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Rheinzeva. Stick around for that conversation. I don't think I'm overstating it by saying he is remarkably wise and thoughtful for a 20 year old. But first, let's talk about a little bit of movie news right after this.

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[Sean Fennesey]

by the Autograph Journey credit card from Wells Fargo. The Autograph Journey credit card from Wells Fargo is built for travel. You can earn rewards wherever you book your favorite hotel site your go to airline and more. You get five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel and one point on other purchases. Whether it's a big vacation or a quick getaway from booking Your stay to that first meal. When you arrive, you're turning your trips into rewards with the Autograph Journey credit card from Wells Fargo. Learn more@wells fargo.com autographjourney Terms apply. Okay, let's talk a little news first. This. When's the last time this trio talked movie news?

[CR]

It's been a minute. It's been a minute. I'm trying to remember when the last time the three of us potted together. Cause I got invited to a mega draft again and I'm like, right. I can't remember last time it was just us three.

[Sean Fennesey]

Oh, you just talking shop. Wow. This is like a little bit of an emotional bid for third chair. Let's just get the trio back together, okay?

[CR]

I'm a busy guy. You guys let me know when you need me.

[Sean Fennesey]

Amanda, did you see Obsession yet?

[Amanda Davins]

I did. I saw it yesterday.

[Sean Fennesey]

Do you want to talk about it right now? Yeah, because there's news about Curry Barker, who is the writer and director of Obsession. You got this sight unseen eight figure offer for his next film because the movie is just a rocket ship.

[CR]

Let's just get a woman's POV on the set.

[Amanda Davins]

I think I fucking loved it.

[Sean Fennesey]

Right on.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah. I would say of the two movies and the like, you know, new horror wave that we are going to discuss in this episode. I'm. Obsession is Amanda's flavor.

[Sean Fennesey]

I see.

[Amanda Davins]

As opposed to backrooms. Even though I like very much admire backrooms. But yeah, as you teased me, sort of. But on the last episode, it is a romantic comedy. I thought it was really funny. I was maybe the only person laughing in my screening, but I. I loved obviously the performance of. What's her name? Help me with her name.

[Sean Fennesey]

Indy Navarretti.

[Amanda Davins]

Indy Navarretti, yeah. And I was engaged. There was one jump scare that actually made me jump and that I thought was very funny. And I would watch a lot of these, so I'm into it.

[CR]

Yeah. Do you feel like laughter is a coping mechanism for, like, sometimes, like, not being comfortable with, like, pure horror? Like when you are confronted with something that's like, I don't know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something like that. But, like, do you find it easier if you have like a couple of release valves throughout the movie?

[Amanda Davins]

I guess so, though I think what I was laughing at this movie was the observational comedy. Observational comedy about relationships, which I thought, you know, I thought it was a good script. I thought it was insightful and amusing. And so I was laughing at the bad speeches or like, I guess there's a will Spoil parts of Obsession now if you haven't seen it. Even though it seems like everyone in America has. When she's frozen and he tells her not to move and so she stays right where she is and then she pees herself. I thought that was funny, you know, but like, that's not gross. That's not me laughing because I'm uncomfortable. I just was amused by that.

[CR]

We should make a mashup of Zack telling Amanda that it's almost equal season and her being like, no, no, no.

[Amanda Davins]

Why are you ruining this night?

[Sean Fennesey]

I think it's probably relatable to you in many ways. I'm glad you liked it. I had a feeling you would like it. Cause it is. It's a little bit more traditional. And I think the movie is obviously getting characterized alongside Kane's movie, which we'll talk about momentarily. Because they're both so young, they both have this YouTube experience and.

[Amanda Davins]

Cause they're both sensations.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes. And they're both so huge. And there have been a lot of people who have come out of this over the last 10 years. I wrote about it a little bit in the newsletter today. But I think there's something about the duality of these two things. One movie that is really funny and a big audience experience, and one that is very internal and really of the Internet and really about lore and construction and them kind of operating side by side is really fun. Curry, I think, is going to go on to make fairly conventional movies and in a way that I like. But like, his next movie is a true horror comedy about ghosts, you know, and then he's going to do Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then maybe even before that he'll do whatever this eight figure offer movie is, if this is even a real story. I don't know how to verify. Like, how does somebody get an offer for $10 million before they've done.

[CR]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

I think Put Pen to Paper, a

[CR]

really good way of looking at the two directors. I think that Parsons seems to be the culmination of a shared aesthetic across multiple platforms, across what we're going to talk a lot about his influences. And Barker seems to be a little bit more like. I found not the Loophole or Cheat Code, but I am a product of this new way of distributing your work that allowed me to get like a foothold in traditional Hollywood.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah, I mean, one is also. There's. One is a technical, you know, Marvel and achievement, the aesthetic that you're talking about. And the other is, I think has humans in it and then. But both are examples of how a younger generation is going to figure out not just like how to get their movies distributed, but how to make movies in the first place. You know, they're doing the training in real time on YouTube.

[CR]

Well, and while, like we've come, we're coming out of like a period of time where I think, like, the cost of making a movie has become almost crippling to the movie industry. These guys are kind of going back to like, the og like, you can make something fast and cheap that looks good and a lot of people want to go see it. That's not a barrier of entry.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. There's something interesting about the timing of the release of the primetime trailer too, that is correlated to all of this stuff. Three years ago, I had Lance Oppenheim on the show for a series of to talk about the documentaries that he's been making for the last seven or eight years. He was 27 then, he's 30 now. He's ancient by comparison to Kane, but he's also incredibly young. And his movie is also about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator and played by Robert Pattinson. And so screens and the way that they influence us and the kind of like, I would say, manufactured reality of non fiction television in a way which kind of intersects with all of these other things that we're talking about here in YouTube and what's real and what's not real. And I'm just feeling very buoyant about the future of movies that I feel like there is like, the cavalry is like kind of on the way here. And we still have like, Denis Villeneuve and Nolan and, you know, Greta Gerwig, all these like, iconic brand name figures. There's a Spielberg movie coming out in a couple of weeks. All that stuff is still happening. It's great. And it's gonna probably be the primary focus of this show as long as we're doing it. But I actually do kind of feel like something for real is happening where there's like, it's not three people, it's now like nine people who have made widely distributed films who were born out of this experience, which is very different than I went to USC film school and then I made a short film, and then that short film played at a film festival and. And then I made an independently made film, and that film played at a film festival and it was acquired by a streamer. And now I'm trying to make my $100 million IP movie. Like, that was 15 years of the growth cycle in Hollywood, and now something different can happen.

[Amanda Davins]

It's also auspicious for YouTube and the Internet, which is. These people got really big on the Internet and instead of like launching a skincare brand, they are making movies and they want to bring them to theaters. You know, like they have embraced a medium that we care about and are bringing a different generation and audience with them is positive. Maybe they can also make a skincare brand.

[CR]

What do you think about the fact that horror seems to be the primary genre on ramp for them, though?

[Amanda Davins]

I.

[CR]

It's not concern trolling. I'm just saying, like, it's like.

[Amanda Davins]

I mean, I mean it makes sense because so much of horror, as I understand it is based on the technical ability to set up the, you know, you know, the aesthetics and the jump scares and the. And the scariness. And so that you have in YouTube specifically a testing run where you can try stuff out and actually, you know, see what works, what doesn't. Kind of learn on the fly. Learn without studios breathing down your neck and millions of dollars on the line. And you can't, you know, a romantic comedy is a lot more dependent on writing, among other things. And so.

[CR]

And performance.

[Amanda Davins]

And you can try. And performance and also frankly, production design and money. And so you can't try those in the same way. So it's a good match.

[Sean Fennesey]

There's a lot of genres that are not suitable to this mode, especially because pure drama is a hard thing to sell people on nowadays. Everything else necessitates a different kind of external component part that creates a barrier to entry, I think. And so horror and low to the ground sci fi, it's just much easier to pull off. And also it just more easily gets the attention of executives who are willing to put in $1 million into the pot. You know, like, it's hard to sell this cute girl and this cute guy me, you know, like, there's just like a more. There's more resistance to it.

[Amanda Davins]

Clearly not actually. It's just that it's in book form, you know, and so it's Colleen Hoover and it's all of the. And it's whoever wrote the Housemaid whose name escapes me and all of the.

[Sean Fennesey]

You don't see something about that? Yeah, because I. I think it's cool that that's happening now too. And I don't know how many of those movies you've actually watched, but we've been talking about them a lot over the last 12 months.

[CR]

I didn't see the Maika Monroe one, but I saw the other two.

[Sean Fennesey]

Shame on you for ignoring her.

[CR]

I only like it when she's being pursued by a demon.

[Sean Fennesey]

But those movies have more in common with horror movies than they do Nora Ephron movies. Because there's always some dramatic incident that is like car crash or it's like a curse of some kind. There's a murder involved. There's something about the stakes in that kind of storytelling, like rom coms and your general teen comedy and even your romantic drama. Those movies don't have the same life or death qualities that all these other movies do. And I think that there's something to that too. That that's the only thing that can kind of get butts in seats right now is like, what's on the line here? Which does feel different than when we were teenagers and going to see movies where it was just like, yeah, this is about a 17 year old kid who fucks a pie. You know, like that's the whole movie.

[Amanda Davins]

Well, but then that would just be a YouTube video.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's right.

[Amanda Davins]

You know, and the thing that it was really exciting to me about backrooms in particular is we talk so much about how all movies now have to have meme culture and have to exist outside of themselves as movies in order to sell and to be recognized and to have any chance of surviving. But this took a meme and made it into like a real ass movie. And I just. That's hard to do and it's essential, I guess, to getting people to the movie. But I was impressed. I was like, hey, you did it. You made Internet culture into actual cinema.

[Sean Fennesey]

Let's use that as our transition to backrooms, I guess. Spoilers for backrooms. I'm not sure that it's really a film that can be spoiled.

[CR]

It's a film that's different, Conversant in the actual projects has been spoiled already on YouTube.

[Sean Fennesey]

So the film is directed by Kane, as I mentioned, it's written by Will Sudik, who I think is the second screenwriter who came on to work on the movie. And we can talk about how the screenplay of the movie operates versus the rest of the production. It is based on Backrooms, the web series that Kane Parsons, AKA Kane Pixels, started publishing years ago now, like five

[CR]

years ago, six years ago.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. Um. It is produced in part by some very notable people, including horror maestros James Wan and Osgood Perkins, as well as Shawn Levy. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renata Rheinzva, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell. The logline is a therapist enters another dimension to find her lost patient. And I Guess that is what the movie is about in some respects. Chris, what did you think of this movie?

[CR]

It's just thrilling. It's like a really exciting time to be. To be like, at the ground floor of this, for this director and to see it realized. I mean, I was like, aware of and had watched some of backrooms on YouTube and I was aware that backrooms is a concept of something that had sort of organically grown out of creepypasta and Reddit and that it was in some ways, like, closer to like, folk art than it is like a single author statement. To see him make something so assured that so perfectly distills some of the liminal horror, some of the sort of modern urban legend or folk horror ideas and blow it out on this level. And just on a personal level, like, I just find watching this stuff to be like taking a floor buffer to my brain. And I would. I would honestly watch like nine hours of this. I've watched nine hours of like, slow tracking shots through these rooms. So it was deeply pleasurable. The movie part of it, like, the more traditional, conventional stuff I thought was like, a little less unique or a little less like, fully realized. But, like, that didn't wind up diminishing my appreciation for the movie itself.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. What did you think? If this isn't your flavor, what did you.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah, I. So I think I admired the parts that thrilled Chris and then couldn't get my arms around the movie part as much, which is why I personally go to the movies. But I will say I knew nothing about backrooms. I mean, I knew it was like an Internet. I knew it was an Internet thing. I knew that Chiwetela and Ejiofor and Renata Renzver were gonna be in it, but I didn't see anything ahead of time. I tried to go in like a blank slate and it worked for me in the room. You know, my brain smooths a little bit in different ways when I see tracking shots into rooms for like three hours. But that's okay, you know, like, what is thrilling to one is meditative to, but you still can't deny that, like the production design and. And the vibe and it is fully realized. And I didn't, quote, get it in the creepypasta sense, but also I got it in the. I understand this movie is communicating to me what it is trying to do and it's working and it's achieving it. The more that I. I've since done my research. The. The more I learned the, like, the less I'm. The less I'M connected with it. I really found it more as just a singular going to the movies experience, which I think is a testament to Kane Parsons pulling something off standalone as opposed to relying on all of the history and lore and everything that goes along with it. That may just be because as soon as you say lore like I run for the hills, but you don't need it actually in the movie.

[Sean Fennesey]

So he and I talked about this a little bit and I don't know if I was careful to not ask him about it, but I know that he has said I was not interested in doing too much of the lore in this film, that there is a ton of lore in my mind and that I have explored it in other aspects of telling the story on YouTube. And this is the very beginning of something that probably is going to be very big for a long time. Like it probably is going to take on a lot of different forms. You know, he talked about the idea of exploring television other films. Like there's clearly just a ton that has come out of this. And I liked what you said, Chris, which is that this is kind of like a fable now. It's like it's an adaptation. It's an adaptation of an anonymous 4chan post describing a space and what that space conjured in this anonymous poster's mind. And then Kane read that and used that as a launch pad for this whole world that he made. I completely agree with both of you guys. The stuff that doesn't really work in the movie is any of the orthodoxy of normal movie stuff. It's like characterization, dialogue, that stuff is fine. It's okay. Yeah, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

[Amanda Davins]

Even. It's not bad.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, it's fine.

[Amanda Davins]

But it's, you know, and sometimes it's a little amusing to imagine a 20 year old being like, okay, so what I really need to do is explore the inner lives of these 40 year olds, these two middle age kids in like middle aged in like 1990 in you know, wherever they. Where are they?

[Sean Fennesey]

Middle of the country presumably. I don't, you know, in a furniture store. Yeah. I think that that stuff is obviously for fundamental to making a narrative feature film. And you've got two really, really good actors, right. So you can kind of just lean on their natural charisma to carry us through the scene.

[CR]

I just think even the concept of like him having a therapist is like incredibly economical for communicating the interior lives of the two main characters.

[Sean Fennesey]

It very much is. And you know, it's almost like sort of like a two strangers Walk into a bar joke. It's like it's a therapist and an architect and they're exploring a mind palace. You know what I mean? Like, okay, like, you know, and I think that it being that on the nose as an exploration of the psyche and kind of like what we do with our past and what we don't do, what goes away that we can't see anymore and what kind of stays above the surface that lingers in our memory. I think he's doing things visually with the storytelling that, like, I don't want to overstate this, but I'm like, this is very rare air for a 20 something to be doing.

[CR]

Sure.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah.

[Amanda Davins]

Of course.

[Sean Fennesey]

Again, this is probably unfair to him, but talking to him, I was like, this is a little like Kubrickian for me, where, like, he has really thought through this and has a very mature understanding of what he's accomplishing and doesn't have any arrogance about it and doesn't have. And he's. He just like, has an idea, sees it in his mind, and then wants to put it on screen. And before he was doing it with software and now he's doing with the.

[CR]

That's what I was gonna ask is like, I was. I've been watching these. Curry Barker. You had a great interview with Curry Barker for Obsession and like, his description of using these 3D imaging apps that you can use on your phone to like, essentially, like, design a set, put animated actors in it to do your blocking, film it with a virtual camera, and then cut it so that you can basically Allah Hitchcock. Be like, all we're doing is doing exactly what's on this piece of paper today. Not only is that efficient, but that also allows you to like, really think through the rhythm of the movie, the look of the movie, the feel of the movie. And I know that Parsons is obviously like, really? I mean, those early backrooms videos are essentially animated, aren't they?

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, they're all. They're all from the software from Blender. Yeah.

[CR]

Just to see somebody who's like, bringing this technology along in a way that isn't Big Jim style, where it's like, only a few people have access to.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's right.

[CR]

Peter Jackson toy box. Like, this is sort of like what I thought was gonna happen when. When Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh were like, we make movies on iPhones now.

[Sean Fennesey]

Right.

[CR]

But now it's like happening now. It's like, oh, you could do this with like open source software on an iPhone. You could make something with your friends

[Sean Fennesey]

in a But you can use that material to envision the world and kind of break the boundaries of our normal world and say, like, what if something looked like this?

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

And then you're able to kind of manifest it visually and then give it to artisans to then build that world and change it. Like I say Kubrickian, because Kubrick did do this in 2001 in A Clockwork Orange in the Shining, where he's kind of creating these surreal landscapes and placing humanity inside of them. And Parsons is trying to do something somewhat similar. He's trying to place human emotion in an unreal world, which is something that I just. It's this kind of storytelling that I have always really liked, but I was really impressed with it. And there was a part of me watching the movie where when I was getting lost inside of what he was doing, when he's giving us this first person perspective, or when you're seeing it through the eyes of a DV camera or just a video camera, where I was like, keep going. Keep going in this direction. Don't worry about going back to what the story is. I'll go along with you on the ride. And I know that that's kind of antithetical to what your most primal experience of joy is at a movie, but I also am like, we can't continue to evolve movies if we don't break them. This is something that's getting to the point of almost breaking it, which I really, really admired.

[Amanda Davins]

I don't disagree with you. It's just that, you know, your mileage may vary on how far you want to go down the. Or how long it will hold your attention, you know, and that's not to say that it's not amazing filmmaking or that it's not, like, an aesthetic that works and communicates something. It's just. And also to your point, like, yes, you do have to break things in order to make something new. But, you know, I don't know whether the trip down that hallway was like the brand, you know, brand new thing to me. We're like, on our direction and on the way we can see it. But clearly, many people disagree because they watched all of the backrooms videos, which are just. They're only the hallways.

[CR]

Very cool experience over the weekend. I mean, I think on. I'm sure you guys do do this, and me and Andy do this on the watch, where we sort of bemoan the death of monoculture and the idea that there is, like, this thing that everyone is experiencing at the same time and having the same conversation about or different conversations, but a conversation about. And I was hanging out with my wife's best friend's daughters this weekend, and they were so excited for backrooms. Like, they're all teenagers. And first of all, you look at the numbers on these videos and you're talking 15, 50 million. You know, like millions and millions of people have watched this. And they were so invested in it as an idea and were nervous about the movie part.

[Amanda Davins]

When you say they were invested in it as an idea, like.

[CR]

Because I don't think they make a distinction between this and, like, check out this static shot of an abandoned Pizza Hut. Like, I think that there is, like, an appreciation or an interest in vibes, you know, and certain, like, motifs online that people just pass the time. And I didn't know that you can play backrooms on Roblox. I didn't know that there were so many video games that take place in backrooms. And it really is kind of like an open source. People can mess around with this. This is his iteration of it.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's why I say it's like a fable. It's like, anybody can adopt this.

[CR]

But they were fully unaware of what the mythology of it was.

[Amanda Davins]

Okay, so they're into backrooms, the universe. Yes. Okay.

[CR]

But I was fascinated to be like, oh, you're not worried about whether or not backrooms makes any sense. You're worried about whether Chiwetel Al Jafor and Renata Rhymes would make any sense

[Sean Fennesey]

inside of your experience of backrooms. And everyone will have a more or less different experience of it. And maybe even if there is an accepted lore, that's the other thing is just for anybody who's listening at home who's just like, you guys keep talking about what 16 year olds want. You don't have to know anything to enjoy the movie. You don't have to have seen any of the YouTube videos. You don't have to know who made the movie.

[CR]

Like, Amanda. I kind of. I kind of wish I hadn't now because I think the experience of the film, the thing that they got so right, is there is never really a moment where they're like, this is what this is and this is how it works.

[Sean Fennesey]

They get right up to it. And then he stops.

[Kane Parsons]

Yes.

[Amanda Davins]

Near the end of the movie. Yeah, we can talk about that later. No, I think because I didn't know anything about the lore, and I was. And again, so you do not have to know the lore. And you do not have to, like, know, you know and understand 16 year olds to go see and enjoy this movie. But because of that, I got to actually experience the. The movie and the filmmaking as filmmaking rather, and then. And all of the aesthetic decisions and the world that he was creating and the vibe that you talk about, but not having to worry about whether it was faithful to whatever was on the Internet before or what I had seen. So I guess in some ways this is like the Gen Alpha version of a video game adaptation, but in the sense that it's like a lived world and medium that they're very familiar with that I don't have any familiarity with. And then how will it translate into a new medium? And what choices do you have to make to get one to fit into the other?

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, I think it's a movie that's really easy for me to situate in the history of moviemaking because there are actually a lot of movies like this that what you can call liminal storytelling. And I'm always eager to be like, oh, it's like David lynch, like any fucking nerdy cinephile. But it's not really like David Lynch. It has maybe some hallmarks, but I mean, you'll hear Kane say, like, he's just not a cinephile. He's seen a lot of movies, but he's not somebody who is poring over the creative decisions. It actually, what it feels more like to me is a much more recent vintage of movie that I know you've seen a lot of these movies like Cube and Pulse and Session 9 and Lake Mungo and Triangle, which I just saw for the first time recently, where there are movies where characters enter worlds in which the unrealities kind of like becomes terrifying and starts to take over. And that's a pretty common horror construct. Those movies, I think, are often very reliant on how good or not good they are communicating why something is happening. And the ones that don't explain it tend to work better than the ones that do explain it.

[CR]

Yeah, there's also been over the last 10 years, like, a bunch of found footage movies that are like, wouldn't it be cool if these influencers went to Chernobyl? Or would it be cool if these influencers went to an abandoned casino? But they're all like, essentially a bad version of the Halloween movie that was set in a reality Big Brother house. Oh, yeah, like the Busta Rhymes one. Like, they're all kind of around. They're being made by like 50 year olds, you know, and like, they're not. This definitely felt like those are products, what you're describing. It's close to like. Again, I don't want to glaze this guy too much, but it reminds me of when Tarantino came on the scene and he was like, my set of influences are completely broken.

[Sean Fennesey]

This is exactly what I wrote about. This is exactly what I wrote about today in the newsletter. I was like, it's like when you're watching Kill Bill and he's showing you all this stuff, but I don't know the name of the actress who stars in Lady Snowblood. And then you see Lady Snowblood 20 years later and you're like, oh, yeah. But the way that maybe these filmmakers. And this goes for Curry too, I think, like, he was like, I was inspired by the Treehouse of horror Simpsons episode that had the Monkey's Paw. I was like, the Monkey's Paw was written in the 1800s. But he doesn't know. He didn't read the Monkey's Paw. He saw an episode of the Simpsons. And so it's this downstream effect where like, maybe Kane Parsons has seen Mulholland Drive, maybe he hasn't. But the vibe that like dread laden sound design where you're like, why is there a humming noise throughout this entire movie? Like he's got that. He figured that. And maybe he heard it in the video game Portal. Maybe he didn't hear it in a David lynch movie. But the guy who made Portal probably saw Mulholland Drive and was like, you know, what you gotta do is you gotta create this sense of doom by applying these tools. So to me, like all this kind of mixed up influence is really exciting and fun and I like to pull it apart and maybe you can overread it by doing that.

[CR]

But, well, we get pretty like maybe over reliant on being like this is like if Jagged Edge was like this, you know, or like it's like Paul Mazursky meets, you know, Wes Craven. And it's like, I'm. I'm very ready, I think now for someone to be like, it's actually old VHS footage of this abandoned mall and maybe a little bit of Mulholland Driver, maybe a Simpsons episode or whatever it is. But the integers are really interesting. I really like whatever the equation is. I like the sort of numbers he's playing with.

[Sean Fennesey]

How does it feel that skinamarink, one of the origin points of one of CR's best voice.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

Adaptations, is now kind of secretly a monumental movie in a way. It's a little bit of the Velvet Underground of movies right now, to me, where it launched a thousand ships and there's been A bunch of movies like this recently, Outwaters was like this. My beloved Night House, which I watched the night my daughter was born.

[Amanda Davins]

Very normal.

[Sean Fennesey]

We're all going to the World's Fair. And Jane Schoenbrunn's work, I thought a lot about.

[Amanda Davins]

I saw the TV glow while watching this. For the recreations of 80s 90s media within. And the media within the media.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes.

[Amanda Davins]

And also seemingly media that is outside the generational reference point of the filmmaker making it.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes.

[Amanda Davins]

Is fascinating.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. And I mean, Kane is so young, even younger than Jane, and so he. Let's talk about 1990 and, like, why that's the time when this is set and what it means. And there's something about the visual signifiers from that period in our lives. We were alive at that time. We saw this stuff in real time. We were in those furniture stores. You know, we were in those. Those empty parking lots. Like, why is it set at that time? Is it an effective period piece in that way?

[CR]

I mean, I think that there's lore answers for that, but from an aesthetic point of view, I think it's just a time when handheld media was available to a mass audience and they could take. You know, it was not uncommon to go to parties and go to hang out with your friends. And if somebody had a camcorder going.

[Amanda Davins]

Right. But also, necessarily before cell phones were the handheld media in question. And also could call someone from the other side to just be like, hey, can you check out what's going on here?

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, yeah.

[Amanda Davins]

Let me pin my location. So I remember where I parked in a different dimension.

[CR]

Don't know.

[Sean Fennesey]

This film has an answering machine that is utilized, which is a very different form of communication. I think it's an interesting choice. I haven't read about specifically the lore answers for this, but it's interesting.

[CR]

Something very significant happens during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

[Kane Parsons]

Right.

[Sean Fennesey]

Something is open.

[Amanda Davins]

It opens it up.

[Sean Fennesey]

It opens it up. Yeah.

[CR]

Yeah.

[Kane Parsons]

Okay.

[CR]

Well, it fires it up. Yeah.

[Amanda Davins]

Oh, it was there, but it fires it up.

[CR]

Ivan has been working on it for a while with some magnetic stuff. But the.

[Amanda Davins]

So it's existed forever, but the portal.

[CR]

Yeah. I mean, I am not in any way a PhD in this. I just was in my. It was funny because, like, you can do backrooms as just backrooms on YouTube and then there is a whole industry of backroom backrooms, explainers. So it's almost like Thrones, where you can just watch Thrones or you can watch the 3 hour explainer about the episode you just saw.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah, I mean, it does have a little bit of this energy even as you're watching it. It's like, okay, like, my children are, like, really excited about something, and now they're telling me about their whole world. It's just done at such an aesthetically advanced level that you kind of have to.

[Sean Fennesey]

You're absolutely right.

[Amanda Davins]

You, like, you hand it over. And I will say, as a standalone movie, before I learned all about the 1999 earthquake and the portals, it works as a movie, you know, and you aren't. It isn't as borne down with the. What, did the portal exist forever? But many science corners could be done.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. I mean, if you want to do an impromptu one. I don't know. Is there anything specific that you want to explore about how it manifests?

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah, so that's the theory that it's. That furniture store is on a fault line. And so then it just. And that's. It had snared Chiwetel.

[CR]

Yeah. I mean, there's like.

[Amanda Davins]

I mean, doesn't the text of the film suggest to us that he was ready, you know, and. Because he didn't have his life together and so he had to go into the back rooms or he was ready, praying.

[CR]

That's definitely his reason for not being like, oh, shit, that seems dangerous. I'm not going back in there. I mean, he's like, I'm obsessed with this.

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

I think that explains maybe his decision making. But I think also the movie is very clearly like a snapshot of mental health, too, where you're like, when you reach a kind of breaking point, when you cross a line in terms of what is real and unreal. So the movie is kind of having its cake and eating it, too. It is a very metaphorical movie about lost places and trying to go to those lost places and the danger that is inside of those lost places in your mind. And then it's also a spooky movie about finding an invisible door that takes you to another land. And there are a lot of movies like that, a lot of kids movies that are about going to ride a unicorn somewhere. And this is about manifesting your worst trauma and having it eat you in a way. Like, if you were to go into

[CR]

the backrooms, oh, my God, I was waiting for this.

[Sean Fennesey]

What would be? Well, first of all, how would you do?

[Amanda Davins]

How would I do? So do the backrooms look like that? Are backrooms customizable?

[CR]

There are many different. My favorite part of backrooms that I've watched is Red City. When this person comes across, basically A red illuminated city that's out a window and is just like, holy shit. But for the most part, they are that kind of 90s abandoned office park.

[Amanda Davins]

No windows.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, but. But decorated. Designed in part by, like, your manifestations of your own visual experiences. Right. Like, the things that are the things that appear in those spaces. So, like, is this mom's house at Christmas time in Georgia in 1993? You know, like, that's the kind of, like, what comes up, what. Or what sinks below in the back room of your mind, but also in the real.

[Amanda Davins]

Is there an option where there's just nothing? Where, like, the back room is like,

[CR]

is there an option where it's Tuscany?

[Sean Fennesey]

I don't know. I don't. I don't totally know the mechanics.

[CR]

If it was the Mediterranean, everybody was.

[Amanda Davins]

We go to the backrooms.

[CR]

The point is.

[Amanda Davins]

But what if there's. What if. Can backrooms be void? Can backrooms just be, like, nothing? What if there's nothing below the surface?

[Sean Fennesey]

This is the reason that I'm asking you and not you, and I want to ask you, and I want to hear about the Wachovia center and everything that you see there, but I. What if it's nothing but you are trying to turn it off, but this place won't let you turn it off?

[Amanda Davins]

I don't know. It wouldn't let you tell Eshafor, turn it off. Okay.

[Sean Fennesey]

Or maybe I'm stronger. Well, that is an interesting question, too. You know, can it be resisted? We don't know. We only see, really four characters enter this space.

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah.

[CR]

I think the question as to whether or not she is equally at a breaking point and equally open to the idea that there is something out there. This coming from a therapist who wrote a book called the Window Within, I believe.

[Sean Fennesey]

Sure.

[Amanda Davins]

But also who has some tough mommy issues of her own and carries around a cement block, but seemingly of her handprint, not her mother's.

[Sean Fennesey]

Just based on the size, you think that was hers? And is that meant to represent her holding onto her childhood or to never forget what was inflicted upon her?

[Amanda Davins]

I think it's meant. It's weighing her down, but she can't

[Sean Fennesey]

let it go until she utilizes it.

[Amanda Davins]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. See what they did there?

[CR]

Did you think that there was any chance that her mom had seen the backrooms?

[Sean Fennesey]

I think there's an indication that she's trapped.

[Amanda Davins]

Can we move into spoiler territory a little bit? So you've already mentioned that Mark Duplass is in the film. Mark Duplass shows up and he, like, Works at the company that's like Async. Yeah, sure, of course, Async. Yeah. And they're researching and.

[Sean Fennesey]

Well, they're an MRI company who has stumbled upon this space and so they're exploring it.

[Amanda Davins]

Okay, but. So he says that he went to the back rooms and then made it out and is now exploring it. So that would suggest. Which I thought was the weakest part, and I was sort of annoyed. But again, that is just kind of. You need a conventional narrative arc in a movie and. I know, let's talk about that explanation. Anyway, it seemed like he was maybe slightly resistant to the backrooms, to the. At least that he could remove himself and then operate in his research capacity.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, he's trying to stay in the real world. Whereas both Renata Rhineserva and Chiwetel Ejiofor, their characters are more vulnerable.

[CR]

Chiwetel Ejiofor goes in and out.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. But he's able. And he's able to kind of exist inside that space for an extended period of time in a way that we don't see other characters do it. And he's not wearing a hazmat suit or anything like the other. Presumably the MRI scientists are doing it.

[Amanda Davins]

Right, right, right, right. So it corrupts him over time.

[Sean Fennesey]

Sure, definitely.

[Amanda Davins]

And like every time he comes out, he's a little weaker and it's slurping him in slowly.

[Sean Fennesey]

It is. I mean, I agree with you that I think that that stuff just doesn't really work. And I wish that there wasn't as much of it in there. I know why it's there, and I think it will probably be a useful hand holding device for the parents who are taking their teenagers to go see this movie. But I. I think it'll.

[CR]

Yeah, it'll be for the parents, not for the teenagers.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's what I mean. The teens, I think, will probably bristle at some of that stuff.

[Amanda Davins]

I'm the parent in this analogy. And I also bristled at it. I was like, I don't.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, but you like good art. And like, to me it felt like a producer note. That's. Some of that stuff feels like a producer note.

[CR]

Maybe that would be. Where you go is like a museum, a never ending museum of great art.

[Amanda Davins]

But it haunts me.

[Sean Fennesey]

By the way, no shots at Mark Duplass, my friend who I love. Like, he's great. And this is another example of like, him signing on to like a young person, just being like, I'm just trying to, like, realize my vision. It's more just like Whatever they're trying to communicate there, like you could have not done it.

[CR]

I also thought that his vibe and his warmth is a nice wrong. Wrong foots the audience. Because it's supposed to be the scientists from ET or something.

[Sean Fennesey]

Right.

[CR]

And instead he's like, I can't believe, like, you've had this experience. Please share with me what's been happening. And then it has a sort of ambiguous ending. But I, I didn't mind it. I was aware of like the Async thing going into perspective.

[Amanda Davins]

I've learned. Yeah.

[CR]

And those guys have a lot of. A lot of stuff happens to them over the course of the YouTube videos.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. I kind of want to look at Kane and be like, keep going. Keep kind of breaking the paradigm of what a movie like this is supposed to be. And I will say there are also a couple things that are more traditional that do work as well. Like there are a couple of scares in the movie that I think are very effective that use traditional horror strategies. There are a couple of jump scares, startle scares. I saw you get startled.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

You jumped in the movie. I did. You got really shocked by something. And there's a scene in the movie where we're going kind of like into the third realm of the backrooms and we enter a red lit room that is illuminated by a Christmas tree. And it was at that moment in the movie where I was like, ah, okay. Like, we are. He's done it. You know, like I've slipped into the movie and I'm scared and I'm excited and I can't wait to see what's around the corner. And what I wasn't asking myself was like, why is this happening? I was just letting it happen. Yeah. Which is what I think. What I. What is the success of the movie ultimately is that I'm not too worried

[Amanda Davins]

about, like, why at that exact moment I thought to myself, another tough beat for Christmas. You know, but. But Christmas is scary. It did communicate to me that it was a. It was a tough beat for Christmas. And I wasn't like, what does this have to say about the birth of baby Jesus? You know, Also say that I just, like, I was just like, oh, my favorite holiday down bad.

[CR]

So much of the thrill of the YouTube videos is that they're found footage or that they're shot by the people who are walking around. They've brought a camera with them or something. And this film is like a real leap forward for him in terms of composition, in terms of how to pace a scene beyond just someone walking Down a hallway endlessly, which I fucking love, but is like not going to be everybody's cup of tea, but to emerge on the Christmas scene and find the other characters there. And the stuff of. I think stuff sinking into the sand of the carpeting is a relatively new phenomenon. I didn't see a ton of it in the YouTube videos, so, you know, I just thought it would have been enough for him to just be like, here is a big screen version of a found footage of my paranormal activity or whatever.

[Sean Fennesey]

Right.

[CR]

And instead I think he.

[Sean Fennesey]

He's leveled up.

[CR]

He leveled up.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah.

[Amanda Davins]

And the design, I think calling it a hallway is reductive because it's really more. They're just a never ending warren of rooms. And the design effectively communicates to you where. Not where you are in relationship to things, but this sense of space and your sense of confusion. And there's something around this way and that it is very convoluted and that you don't understand where you're going. But it's hard to communicate like that actuality.

[Sean Fennesey]

Totally.

[Amanda Davins]

Especially when you are. You're really physically building it.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

[CR]

I mean, there's stuff in there that's like. It taps into a feeling of playing video games. It taps into a feeling of like certain levels of video games where it's very puzzle oriented, or the entire point is that you're lost in a maze. But it also taps into like a childlike thing where you're like that weird experience of like you're. The amount of time it takes to get somewhere is always slower than the amount of time it takes to get back sometimes. So you know what I mean? Like, once you know the route, you're like, oh, it's not that bad. But like the first time you make a walk through the park, you're like, did I make a wrong turn somewhere here? Or whatever. And it gets at some like really a neat kind of childlike wonder at these things. And childlike fears too, I think.

[Sean Fennesey]

No, it's all amygdala, as they say. Everything that's happening there is not about logic and problem solving. It's about the sensation that is created when you're seeing the things that are in that space. And I think that I genuinely kind of don't know how they did a lot of this too, which is something that usually impresses me where just designing those spaces. Were they using one set and then striking it every time to shoot into a new room? Were they building these entire. Use the word warren. Is this an office building? Writ Large. It does also have that experience to the 1990 period piece idea of being in one of those office buildings, which all had that kind of yellowing quality and that kind of rickety furniture. You know, there's the particle board line when Edgy four breaks the chair early in the movie, where everything kind of felt like it was made of that breakable, disruptible material.

[CR]

Pier one kind of vibe.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. Where it's like, it looks nice, and then you touch it and you're like, this is fake. And I'm just kind of. Kind of bowled over by it, you know, like, even in its. In its failures or its weaknesses, I'm like. Very few movies get me in the headspace that this movie got me in, so I'm just delighted.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah. College Freshman dorm was brought to you exclusively by The West Lebanon, New Hampshire, Pier 1.

[Sean Fennesey]

Wow.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

What did you have in there?

[Amanda Davins]

I think my mom dropped me off and then was upset with the sparseness of the room. So, you know, and we'd bought, like, the usual sheets and everything that was on the list, but a lot of throw pillows, you know, like a lamp wicker. No, that wasn't the vibe they were going for that season at Pier 1, fall 2003 was more of like a. A Moroccan vibe, you know?

[Sean Fennesey]

What about like a ship's wheel? Did you have a ship's wheel in there? No.

[Amanda Davins]

Again, I would say we're a different coastal reference point. Marrakesh Bazaar.

[CR]

It's the smell of spices in the air.

[Amanda Davins]

Why aren't you listening to her?

[Sean Fennesey]

Well, now I know what's in your back room. I'm glad we asked.

[Amanda Davins]

What's in your back room?

[CR]

I think it looks like a Pizza Hut. Okay. Yeah. I really find the lighting in those to be really pleasing. There's a bar in Boston called Anchovies that mimics it.

[Advertisement Voice]

Sure.

[Sean Fennesey]

I've been there with you.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah, but isn't so his backrooms? Is it supposed to be a happy memory? No, I think it's supposed to be.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's why I said Wachobea Center.

[CR]

Like, I personally, it. I. I'm trying to think of the.

[Amanda Davins]

That's where the Sixers I, like, abandoned. Can we have a Sixers intervention later?

[CR]

What are you talking about? The patient's dead.

[Amanda Davins]

Okay. Okay, good. I know, but can we. Let's not do it again next year, you know?

[CR]

Oh, like, not watch. Yeah, team.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah. Let's say let's set ourselves free.

[Sean Fennesey]

There's plenty of room on the bandwagon use.

[CR]

That won't be happening. I Assure you I'm not. I'm not taking sides.

[Sean Fennesey]

Welcome all comers. Welcome all comers.

[CR]

But your bandwagon is too full, let me assure you.

[Sean Fennesey]

Oh, okay.

[Amanda Davins]

I'm just. Just think about it.

[CR]

Okay. I'll think about not watching the Sixers because I just.

[Amanda Davins]

I can't do another February of this shit.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's what I'm saying is like in years is, you know, and beat jerseys, you know, like there's like, there's.

[Amanda Davins]

I mean, mine too is just like

[CR]

18 embeds in different states of injury at different heights.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. In different positions. Exactly, exactly. How do you feel like, okay, so the movie's gonna be a huge success. Right. It's already tracking for well over $50 million. This might be like a $75 million movie this weekend, which it will instantaneously become the biggest, a 24 movie of all time. Feels like a big generational change where 16 year olds are powering this and we are like, we are latching onto the bandwagon in many ways. Do you think that this is a profound change that we are at the forefront of, or is this just a blip born of a handful of kind of coincidences in a three or four year window?

[Amanda Davins]

To quote Tracey Letts, I reject the tyranny of your questions. Well, can it be somewhere in the middle? I think that it is part of. I don't. I guess it's profound, the change. But it does seem like we are seeing a new wave of generational filmmakers focused specifically on horror. But, you know, they all learned on the Internet it is connecting with new audiences. It changes the way that were making movies and that many audiences were seeing movies. So I think it is historically significant.

[Sean Fennesey]

Can I add one person to that list that somewhat complicates this? Ava Victor is also a part of this wave as like a primarily online content creator reductress who then went into the world of narrative filmmaking. And I, I think Ava is also kind of instructive for like the ways that you can use the medium and the tools. And like, the other thing we haven't talked about is looking at feedback, like what people are saying about what you're making and then iterating on that and not being as precious about your creations. That I think is also really interesting. Kain talked about the Discord server, his Discord server, and what is happening there and how people are iterating on what he makes. Well, he didn't say anything negative about

[CR]

it, but he was like, oh, they're like, I'm taking What you made. And here's my version of it.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes. So this is a whole other level

[CR]

of like so much optimism, which is not in any way really different then the five years after Reservoir Dogs where everybody was like, what if my friends wore suits and pointed guns at each other? Like, that was amongst friends. And all the movies that kind of came out after that, in some ways just like riffing on a core text. But you know the thing that I think I was most nervous about over the last couple of years when I would watch specifically tv, but I think it was starting to invade movies. Like I would. I would even not I enjoyed this movie, but Anyone but you is like a good example of this where it's like drone shot scene doesn't last more than 90 seconds. Like five needle drops every two minutes. Like, there is like a ADHD style of filmmaking that I was like, I just don't know if I'm going to be able to hang with this. And I saw it a lot in tv. You're seeing a lot of like, if something doesn't happen in the first three pages of a script, it gets thrown in the trash. It again stuffed to the gills with music. Scenes don't last that long. And I was really worried that the sort of language and the almost the grammar of movies was getting broken over the course of like people watching all this short form video stuff. And so to come across somebody who. And to come across teenagers who are like, I actually like watching 40 minutes of a Foggy highway while a Scrutin shop version of Brian Adams's Run to youo Plays. I'm like, you're watching fucking Stan Brackish. Like, this is incredible. Like, we might, we might.

[Sean Fennesey]

I wrote down Man Ray in here. I'm like, we're in a kind of cereal realist territory with the filmmaking that

[CR]

is actually also in the mix. If we can introduce some real wrenches in the works of challenging durational stuff

[Sean Fennesey]

that makes you really either pay attention or just give yourself over where you're not even intellectualizing anymore. You're just letting a piece of art wash over you, which is very powerful. And it's indirect contrast to obsession, which to me is like anyone but you, but made by somebody who knows how to do it. Anyone but you is an older filmmaker who trying to use contemporary methods to appeal to young people. I like Will Gluck. It's no shot at him, but that movie feels like it's trying to. Like it's trying to address the short attention span as opposed to Curry Barker who's like, I am. Of the short attention span. Like, I've been making things that are catching people in the first three seconds for five years. Like, I know how to catch someone. And even though Obsession to me doesn't feel like sloppy or haphazard in its editing, it's tight. Like, every sequence you're like, this sequence has an intention. It's trying to get you to a certain place with these two characters and what's going on between them. And it's gonna get there in under five minutes and then we're gonna move on to the next incident. And they're two sides of the same coin. You know, it's so convenient that these two movies are both coming out in May because they represent, like two different paradigms, both of which feel like they are in a lot of ways the future. Like, I really do think that it's not gonna change whether Dune Part 3 is good, you know, like, that level of filmmaking is probably always going to exist. Are you excited for doing Part three? I am, yeah.

[CR]

It'd be really. That'd be crazy if you had like an Arrakis backrooms.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah. I don't know if that would be the planet that or is that. Yeah. Arrakis is the desert, isn't it? What's the water one? Where. Where is Timmy from originally? You know, where Oscar Isaac is from,

[CR]

Where Atreides is from.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, I forget the name.

[CR]

Yeah, yeah.

[Amanda Davins]

Jack was into that.

[CR]

Camden, New Jersey.

[Sean Fennesey]

Colladan. Caladan. Is that Caladan Caledon?

[CR]

I like how you pronounce it wrong. So you could pretend like you didn't immediately know.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. Like you've been charting Frank Herbert's progress

[Amanda Davins]

through the sort of a Pacific Northwest vibe there.

[Sean Fennesey]

It does. It does. A little foggy.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

A little mist off the ocean.

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[Sean Fennesey]

Copycat potential. Feel like maybe the downside of this is we're gonna see a lot of stuff like this right when this movie takes off.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah. I'm sure every other studio producer is just. Is in, you know, watching the YouTube reaction videos, looking for other stuff, seeing what they can xerox and rush out as quickly as possible.

[CR]

I mean, like, people were joking about it online over the last couple of days, but I'm sure that folks will start looking at creepypasta to see, like, what's another, like, kind of. I don't even know what the IP rules are for stuff like this.

[Sean Fennesey]

Like, no, this one is such an interesting test case. I mean, they tried this already. Like, we did get a slight, but it was just kind of made in the traditional modes of a Hollywood horror movie. It didn't give you the sensation of sitting in your room alone, reading something, and feeling freaked out. No, that's like what Jane Schoenbrunn is trying to do in we're all going to the World's Fair. Like, that's the closest iteration we've seen to that kind of experience. But that movie isn't traditionally commercial, you know, like, it's gonna be. It would be hard to get a lot of people to go out and see that. So kind of, what's the middle ground? Like, can anybody replicate what Parsons is doing? I think it's gonna be really hard. It's more like how he made it and what he was using to make things before he started making Hollywood movies. That, to me, feels like the shift, you know, where it's like, you use Blender. I think Blender's the same software that was used for Flow, the animated film that came out a couple years ago that was nominated for some Academy Awards. The cat film. Yeah. And so it's just like a shot. It's just like a shrinking down of the production process for movies. It's like it's is reducing the barriers. So it's really cool.

[CR]

Do you want to see more stuff set in this world?

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, but I'm not, I'm not the kind. I'm not. Like, I need the TV show now and I need all the lore and I want to see 100 more iterations. Like I do like this as an individual movie and that's still my favorite thing.

[CR]

Yes.

[Sean Fennesey]

So. And it's going to be impossible for him to not make backrooms too. Like they're just. They're going to throw so much fucking money in him to make it. Because this movie's going to make so much money. But I would love to see a side door. I definitely don't want to see Chiwetel edgy for Renata Ryan's fan in the movie. Again, no shots to them. I love them too.

[CR]

Sure.

[Sean Fennesey]

But it's like take.

[CR]

Do you want to speak at all about their individual arcs and or performances?

[Sean Fennesey]

I think he's one of the great living actors and it's cool to see him do something like this. And I think he's been a little underserved in the last 10 years, but he always takes on really challenging parts. This is a hard part. I think he gives the movie a tremendous amount of credibility because he also

[CR]

just gives it like you have to bleed through a wall and then be like, I believe this, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Amanda Davins]

And not make it look hokey.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah, yeah. Her, you know, we love her on the show. We were just talking about how great she is in fjord. I think she's a slightly miscast in the movie and there's something confusing about her accent that took me out of it a little bit.

[CR]

She does get to run though.

[Sean Fennesey]

She does get to run. I mean she's a great screen presence but like I think also some of the weaknesses of the screenplay are revealed in her performance. Especially where like she's playing a therapist who is escaping her own trauma and has created like this kind of idea system navigating but also self help. But like she, she didn't seem like a real person to me. I'll say Ejiofor's character seemed like a real guy who was having a really hard time and.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah, well, some of that is just because you spend more time in the. In the back rooms of his own mind. So he, his character is fleshed out. I thought the construct of the therapist and the architect patient as like a send up of therapy culture was kind of funny. I don't know if that was the intention though, or I don't know whether that was just kind of the execution of the script. And everyone reminds me of performance where I was like, oh, this is. That's not how they talked in therapy in 1990. You know that at least where it was a very, very modern. And anatomy, but that's okay. And I, as someone who thinks there's too much therapy in movies, I thought it was funny. But I agree that it was maybe not intentional.

[CR]

I liked the ad for her book on tape.

[Sean Fennesey]

You know, I read that that was all. All that stuff was a very late add to the movie. That that whole notion of her like having this like self help kind of text and all that was not a part of the original script. And that's the other interesting thing is like he invented this world, which is inspired by something that Previa's previously existed, but then worked with screenwriters to shape the story and give it some of that traditional shape. And that's really the stuff that I was bumping on.

[CR]

I'm just glad that traditional shape stuff. I'm glad they allowed some of the loose threads to dangle there. I like Finn Bennett and Lita Maxwell. They don't have a ton to do in this movie, but there's a moment. Are we doing details? We can say detail. There's a moment where Finn Bennet is exploring the backrooms and comes across his own clothes, which is never really interrogated very much. Yes.

[Sean Fennesey]

His End Apartheid T shirt.

[CR]

Yes. And I just love shit like that. Like, you do not have to cross every T. Agreed.

[Sean Fennesey]

I wanted to just make a quick note on a 24 because now turning

[Amanda Davins]

it around like they just did it.

[Sean Fennesey]

They kind of do it now. Here's what I'm afraid of. There was news last week that IMAX was up for sale. And it's up for sale because IMAX has been killing it for the last five years because everybody only wants to put their movies on imax. So now it's like, well, we better sell. The iron's hot. I really hope A24 doesn't sell because now when you look at the drama and you look at Marty supreme and you look at Civil War and you look at what was the other the Saline Song film. Materialist materialists. Like, they have figured something out that no other studio really knows how to do. And they don't make $500 million movies, but they make $150 million movies now, which seemed impossible five years ago, that they could consistently make movies like this. But this movie is probably going to $150 million, if not more. And that is like the robust health of the middle class of movies that we actually have whinged about for a long time now. They have the A24 flavor, right?

[CR]

There's like, well, if you had to guess of that $150 million box office, how much of it comes from people who self identify as a 24 fans

[Amanda Davins]

versus how many people self identify as

[CR]

backrooms fans or Zendaya fans or. Oh, you mean Civil War fans.

[Sean Fennesey]

I don't think it's an A24 thing, this movie.

[Amanda Davins]

I, I, I think that, I think that people who have been raised by A24 and consider themselves the A24 boys will know about backrooms. They're not gonna go see it because they're committed to their project. But I think more of it is because, you know, this is a 24's version of a franchise movie, Right. Like, they, they, they figured out IP and they have the fan base to come with it.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. And I think that's super savvy. And it's honestly the same thing as.

[Amanda Davins]

But also they let it be good, which, you know, or they let it be good and they managed to make it good.

[CR]

They're so good at marketing. I was watching that, the trailer for this this morning, and I was like, oh, they cut this like an Alien movie and it really isn't.

[Sean Fennesey]

No. You know, but that's something they keep doing is they keep wrong footing your expectations in the movies, but they're not making people mad. Like, they might be frustrated that the Celine song film is not When Harry Met Sally too, but anything about the

[CR]

tightrope walk that was required from the drama and trying to promote that movie

[Sean Fennesey]

and like, it's the craziest thing that's happened this year.

[CR]

Let everyone know, like, you actually do have to come see this right now, because otherwise your friends are going to be talking about it.

[Sean Fennesey]

We ran somebody on the streets at Cannes who was talking about how they did not ultimately participate in the drama and what the kind of sense around that movie was in the industry and how difficult it would be to sell it to an audience because school shooting in quotation marks, and that's just like, that is a taboo that cannot be crossed and cannot be addressed in a widely released piece of culture. And not only did they do it, but they made it like their third biggest movie ever. And obviously you have huge stars and this really savvy marketing machine. But I'm bringing this up around backrooms because this is now the thing that we did discuss two years ago. They are actually starting to be able to accomplish. And I'm very impressed. You know, I traditionally really liked the studio and what they've been making, but the fact that they're now mainstreaming with their own brand of stuff.

[Amanda Davins]

Right.

[Sean Fennesey]

Is also a fascinating turning point.

[Amanda Davins]

Right. Because they tried to kind of open up the tent and start making different variations of what a quote unquote, a 24 movie is. And frankly, like a bigger, more expensive a 24 movies. And it took a minute, but now they've figured out, you know, and so the drama is an A24 Rom com. I mean, it is. It's pretty structurally a rom com. And this is their IP horror movie. But, you know, they are also both very weird, idiosyncratic and potentially alienating movies that they somehow managed to sell to billions of people.

[Sean Fennesey]

Marty supreme is their sports drama.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

You know, like they're traditionally.

[CR]

Is their Lord of the Rings.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes. Yeah. And their video game adaptation.

[CR]

Anyway, it's interesting that Obsession comes through the Blumhouse.

[Sean Fennesey]

It doesn't.

[CR]

It doesn't.

[Sean Fennesey]

Independently financed and acquired out of a festival.

[CR]

Okay.

[Sean Fennesey]

And this movie is also.

[CR]

Is Jason an exec producer on.

[Sean Fennesey]

Only because they acquired it.

[CR]

I see.

[Sean Fennesey]

And Blum is also involved in this film along with a cadre of other Peter Chernigures. Yeah, exactly. Like a lot of people, a lot of very experienced, successful people got in on the ground of this and helped to make it. So which does. I mean, is necessary sometimes. You know, like that's also true of Star wars. Like that you just kind of do need these kind of benefactors to come through and allow for something to scale up in this way. The question is always like, how much do they get in the middle of the creativity? And this feels like it doesn't feel trampled upon, which is part of what's so cool about it. Closing thoughts.

[CR]

Did you have a favorite sequence in this film? I mean, it's hard to separate them because they take place in such a kind of similar world.

[Sean Fennesey]

But I think the moment when he goes into the basement after the lights turn off while he's watching television and he sees the thin shaft of light that reveals that there is something there that he can walk into is very sophisticated piece of sci fi filmmaking.

[Amanda Davins]

When she goes into the very vertical room with the vertical stairs and it's just a wholly different version of scale and a real. How did you do that? And it looks amazing.

[CR]

And I mean, you know, it was very Gondry.

[Amanda Davins]

Exactly. Very cool.

[CR]

I loved a bunch of them. I actually thought the execution of the monster was fantastic and. And legitimately terrifying and practical. Also, he's done videos that you can see him kind of, like, are his blueprint for that monster. They're not actually backrooms videos, I don't think. They're just, like, him messing around or doing something about a giant, and it really works. But I love when he first brings the kids into the world and is just like, there's a pool. Like, you know, like, there's that. Like. Yeah, I kind of was like, this could go on for 20 minutes. Like, I just want to see all these different places.

[Sean Fennesey]

And his performance is so good because, you don't know. Is he actually trying to do the research to prove that he's not crazy? Is he actually treating them more like bait for this world? You know, like, what is his intention?

[CR]

It's weird that he's like, you have to go down there because you have the camera, right? Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

Right.

[Amanda Davins]

What kind of knot is this?

[Sean Fennesey]

And it's like, did the back rooms tell him to do that? And, like, how much of this is malevolence versus him kind of losing a grip on his own sanity? Cool stuff. All right, well, we got one, guys.

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

Let's go now to my conversation with Kane Parsons. Well, Kane Parsons is here. Here to talk about backrooms, and I'm very excited to chat with you. I wanted to start with this. Kane, in addition to congratulations, I've been thinking about what is the first. First thing that you can remember seeing that made you want to create, not make a movie necessarily, but then made you say, I want to make something of my own?

[Kane Parsons]

Would be incredible if I could give you a specific material example. I think it's a tendency that traces back farther than my memory will really carry me. I think, realistically, it's sort of a tendency that did not get shut down in the early years of my life. Like, in the, you know, first three years, somehow some driver there that I don't have my head around kicked off into gear. And I've kept. Been, like, trying to find versions of that over and over again at different points in my life. And I think I can look to early examples of things, I suppose. And I guess in that I would say it was sort of. I wasn't really into, Like, I. I would watch movies growing up. Like, we had a DVD collection, and, like, we'd go camping and I would. Like, I didn't really understand what I was watching overly because I was a tiny little. Is it does it make sense for me to going that be going this far back in time? It gets really abstract.

[Sean Fennesey]

I want you to go wherever you can go.

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, I mean like we had like all the early seasons of the Simpsons on DVD and I think those got in my brain. I mean Star wars all, you know, everything that was out at the time in like 2007 I ingested. Although I wouldn't like, you know, I think those had a. I wouldn't consider myself like a long standing, like huge, huge Star wars fan. But like, you know, growing up, I think that definitely was probably one of the early influences of science fiction. Like materially I start getting like really outwardly excited about stuff. Like I. I started a trend of like. I guess I've actually had this my whole life, but. But I get really obsessed about specific things. Like I find a thing, I latch onto it and then it's my thing for like X amount of time. And then now at this point, like when I was younger, it was like phases and I would grow out of them. But now it's just like anything I get obsessed about, I kind of just hold onto it indefinitely and they just build into a big pile. So I know Portal was kind of like when I played that for the first time because I wasn't like, I wouldn't consider myself a big gamer. I wasn't growing up. But like partially just because I wasn't. I mean I was restricted in what I was, what I had access to. But I know everyone my age, it was like a rite of passage to be playing Minecraft. And so that was like kind of a baseline, a luxury I couldn't afford exactly. Like, I didn't have any devices and so I would have to go to friends houses and stuff for that. And eventually I did get it. I had a PlayStation 3 that one of our family friends gave us. And then I got Little Big Planet and then I got Portal because I played it at a friend's house one time or I got Portal 2. And that, that's what sort of, I think drove me absolutely insane. And that's. I'm going to just keep citing Portal and Portal 2 is the thing because I love it so much and in terms of childhood, it was a big focal point.

[Sean Fennesey]

But did those things when you were consuming them from the Simpsons to Portal 2, did they make you think that you could make things or were they just things that you slipped into and fell into their worlds?

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, I kind of beat around the bush there on the question. I think, I think I started Understanding or at least processing with more clarity that I could make things. Shit, I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to give like an honest, not like, salesman answer about it because I want to say that it was something like, oh, when I started using YouTube, I would watch all these YouTube channels and they would show you behind, behind the scenes and stuff. And that made it seem also so viable and whatnot. But at the same time, like, years before I had any YouTube access, when I was like three or like four, I guess, like four or five is probably more accurate to say I was technically picking up a family camera and obsessively running around the house with it. I still have the. The files. Like we found the SD cards and put them on a drive just like a couple months ago. And so. And not all of it's unwatchable. It's not like filmmaking in a true or like, meaningful sense. But like, I was, I guess my already assuming things could be made. And so like, there was kind of two vectors moving. I like, I think there was just like a. I think I've always really liked just experience curation outside of like the context of any one medium. I think that's kind of what it is. I. I would do like theater. Growing up, I, you know, was the kind of person who. Who would generally just try to, you know, a bit of an annoying kid in that I would like, try to do like silly like, magic tricks or like prank things or like set up an elaborate like, Scooby Doo trap or something like, like Rube Goldberg machine things. Like. I really liked schemes and stuff like that. And all for the effect of like getting some kind of reaction from people. And so I think that mutated to like a really distilled version. So I would like. I loved the I. For a long time. I was like, I just want to make like haunted houses or just like walk, like walking through experiences. Stuff like that. Like, that was really compelling. And then film kind of just started to take shape, I think because I would like, was getting into editing a little bit because I would like, edit little trailers and music videos and stuff from just random things that I was into and. And edit little memes and whatnot. And then I just started slowly filming my own little clips and it just kind of started turning into like YouTube shit posts, which turned into little short films. And. And then it drifted further and further until I was just like applying all of my like, without like a. I think I find a humor in everything I do. But like, I tried to do It a little more seriously, probably around the time I was 10 or so.

[Sean Fennesey]

Do you find that you are historically a very quick study that you can master something quickly?

[Kane Parsons]

I don't know about master. I think I can get excited about something and I think what I've found with everything I've done in any field, because I like to jump around to a few different mediums just because I enjoy it personally, it's not too much about the result for me. I find that I've had a hard time getting discouraged and I don't know what I would really. I think it's probably a blend of a million different things. Again, like, that's the boring answer. It's like probably stuff that I got from my parents because they're lovely people and probably stuff that I got from just my general upbringing subconsciously. And maybe some of it's beyond that. But like I generally have sort of. I think growing up I wrote a curve of like every time I would learn something objectively. Now I can look back and recognize it as pretty. Like if I did a short film, it doesn't look great, the VFX don't look great. But at the time it was like pretty mind blowing and really satisfying. And it would kind of just always be riding the curve where I'm never self aware and self critical enough of the thing I'm making to actually be, I guess, dismissive of it to a degree that makes me want to shut the whole thing down and give it up. So it's like always constantly fun and satisfying. I think I've only just now started to that curve kind of plateaus. And now there's like such an extreme degree of like being technically meticulous over it that you have to live with one thing for so long that it, you know, you start to feel what it's like to stay with a project for an uncomfortable amount of time.

[Sean Fennesey]

I have some questions for you about that because it's just like your amazing prolific nature as a young person and then entering a system that is so deliberate and takes so much time that it must have felt somewhat like creative whiplash to be transitioning to that style of creation.

[Kane Parsons]

Not.

[Sean Fennesey]

Well,

[Kane Parsons]

not really because I. I think that for me that transition started more in around 2021 or like when I started the backroom series on YouTube. I think. I think I was kind of unfortunate. It's not the right word just because it was, you know, a deliberate movement. But I coming from like, you know, a lot of my influences did come from YouTube and whatnot. And I spent a lot of time in my, like, teenage years or, you know, after the, the when I started getting Internet access. My influences were very much derived from people who were making these indie projects online that are, like, very meticulous, like a lot of attention to detail, lots of things to dig into, lots of channels, who are maybe just even hallucinating information out of something that was never meant to be dug into.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah.

[Kane Parsons]

And so all of that kind of created this mindset of like, okay, if you're going to do an indie project, especially if it's mystery or horror or sci fi, which are, you know, all what I want to be doing, you got to be prepared to give people detail at every single level. And they're going to dig into everything and they're going to take the entire series, play it forwards, and then play it entirely backwards in reverse, and they're going to overlap. And then at these exact moments, events need to line up and create a second message. Sort of like the stuff people go crazy with, with, you know, dissecting the Shining and stuff just applied to everything. And so I think that I just got into a habit of really trying to bring that level of meticulous art direction to what I was doing on YouTube. And, and so when we are, you know, scaling to, to this film, again, that was a gradual process. Process of. For all of like the grandiose spectacle around, like the way this could be described or is being described in the media and whatnot. It's like from my perspective, I've been doing this thing pretty solo for a while online. People reach out, I start talking to them over zoom. I never meet them in person. We're just talking, like usually once a week or so or every now and then some scripts start getting made. I start talking with a writer, have like a couple hour phone calls every couple weeks. We try a few different versions, we try working with another writer. Same process, like, stay on the phone for a couple hours and then we're building a. Goes off, writes a script, we get a draft, phone call, notes, another draft. People like that, we want to start green lighting it. When I go to Vancouver, it's just me. I mean, that's a big move. I'm like, I. I am physically going there. And it's just a bunch of people who I've been able to text with a little bit so far, but it's like eight main people. I mean, there's a lot of people, but it's like, you know, really just like a single smallish room full of People who are just kind of on a similar wavelength to what I was already doing. So I just walk into the room and we just talk about things and we just talk about what we want to do with the film. Not in like a. Just in like a literal context. We're able to jump to it right away. And, and I think it became a very. When I say it's, I've said it's seamless in other interviews and stuff and I, I guess I really do mean that it was just me. The biggest transition point was just taking what is usually non verbal work and then just verbalizing it to other people and trusting or putting the right level of trust in certain parts of that. And, and so again, like I think I wanted to make sure I had every piece of. If I can picture the final thing perfectly, I just have to be able to articulate how we can get there to the right people. And then they, they applied their themselves and they did a great job.

[Sean Fennesey]

So I want to ask you more about the production and the conception of the film. But one last thing about, you know, your more early days. I was curious if you could remember the moment when you decided you wanted to start uploading the things that you were doing. Because that feels like kind of a critical decision to make even if you were 10 years old when you started doing it. But just this idea of how much of it is driven by the need for attention, like a sense of pride, just trying to have a test experience to see what it would be like. Can you kind of communicate where that came from and then how that becomes ultimately I think a turning point for a lot of young artists now.

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, I mean for me again it was April of 2015, I believe. And that's when I created my YouTube channel and the first material sort of version of a short film that I was doing repeatedly at the time. The thing I was into was Lego stop motion. And so that's what I first posted on YouTube. There's technically a first video on my channel now, but that's not true whatsoever. That was, I guess actually it feels like forever. That was 2017. That feels like a million years apart from 2015. But there's like I think 200 privated videos before that one. I posted a lot in that time and, and like the early stuff was just, you know, like very short little snippets, no audio because I didn't know how to edit, I didn't know how to do anything other than just use. I think I used this software called Hue Animation or something. On, on like either the family computer. I don't know if I had a laptop at that time and I didn't have like a phone or, or a tablet or anything yet at that point. So I think I was just using like a family computer. And I, I think it was probably like I had watched. I, you know, I, I YouTube was like the main thing I chose to watch when I had the time. And I think it was just an aspect of. I don't know what it was at that point. I, I think it, I'm sure an element of what I do comes out of wanting, like, it's, you know, it's seeking some form of validation socially, of course. I, it's not like in a very clear way, like you don't look at art and, and, or, you know, I, I don't think what I've been doing really has that, has that appearance overly, like it's being done for attention. But I, I think that, you know, that's kind of the social contract that I made in my childhood with like, okay, if I'm a bit of a indoorsy person who is not like the most socially interactive or is not the most. On the same wavelength as a lot of my peers, like, I will make up for that by, by, you know, over relying on these technical trades that I can then exercise to an impressive degree, hopefully. And then, and then the conversation can just be about that rather than anything else. And I think that's kind of worked out, but I think if I had to guess, that's kind of subconsciously what the deeper psychology there was to a certain degree. But I also just, I found it really satisfying. It was just kind of like a really high dopamine reward from doing it. Like I, More, more of making the thing. I think the uploading was just either part of what I just said or a desire to. I'm sure there's more to it. I woke up early, so I'm still alone.

[Sean Fennesey]

No, it's insightful and I'm really curious about it because you're part of a generation of filmmakers now, which I'm sure you're being told over and over again in these last three months of your life. But they're exposing their ideas in different ways than what was the previous dogma, the previous methodology. And so the fact that there is all of this extant work that you have made before a certain age that is publicly available is so interesting. And I really like how you explained how you knew going into the making of this movie and even in the web series that people would watch it backwards and forwards and they would be looking for hidden meanings and secret truths. And I'm curious what that process was like when you were working with the writers on the script. Like, is. Were those the things that you were hunting for? How do you know that the story is the right story that you want to tell when you're working in that way?

[Kane Parsons]

I think it's a. It was. It was a mixture of like. Because. Because what was. What I had on YouTube was something that it's the same like narrative engine. Like it's. Or at least the world is still there. It's like this film is all ended up in a place where it's the same canon. And that was always the hope. So I think it was finding what is a Interesting, genuinely compelling, not just for people who have already followed the project, but what is a eyebrow raising intro film to that concept that does not entrench the viewer in all of this either feeling of being alienated by a mythology that's been going on for years. And how can we make sure that you're not going into the film? And then when you don't get it, people are hounding you with the criticism that like, it's for the fans or you were supposed to have watched the whole series first. And I just, I personally don't really enjoy that. I like being able to, especially because backrooms. The way I've constructed it is usually a little bit in a bit of an anthology type. It's, you know, it's told out of order and it's more of putting together a broader shape of a tree rather than, you know, or that's how I've been constructing it so far. I'd love to do like a TV series. And like, I think as soon as you're picking like an episode and I consider this film an episode, then then you can tell that in order and make sure you're completing that story. But like, I don't think each individual piece needs to be lined up in this one precise way. And so the hope was always this is a branch on the tree. It is not like the fundamental thread that ties the whole thing together. And it's not the ending, it's not even the beginning, it's just a piece in the middle that is hopefully going to be so focused on the fundamental sort of physical details that overwhelm a character with finding this place that there's not even time in the movie to get entrenched in. Like the more underlying who is this mysterious individual who is the vice director of this research institute. And what does he have going on in his life and what happened in 1972 and whatnot? It's like all that stuff is. Is in the YouTube series. But, you know, so I guess. I guess to answer the question, it was sort of as simple as finding a compelling. I think a less is more sort of mundane approach to letting a character interact with the mechanic of the backrooms in a way that really just foregrounds a simple relationship there. Because I. I would love to, you know, I would love to go harder with a lot of things in. In future projects, but I. I do think that to a certain extent, I'm trying to be careful with my own ability to scale properly. Like there's such a thing as moving too fast and. And this has already been moving at light speed. So I wanted to at least work on something that I think would be manageable. And I didn't want the worst thing that I would be afraid of doing is like jumping the shark, I suppose. So I wanted to make sure that we could have a stable, viable version of a film that is not going to, you know, risk falling into a bit of an insane, contrived or convoluted territory.

[Sean Fennesey]

I'm curious about the three tracts of the movie. The way that I see it. The one is just the pure narrative storytelling of the characters that you're portraying. The second is this sort of lore and mythology that you've explored in the web series and that you're obviously very conversant in as an idea. And then the third is thematic. And I feel like thematically the movie is very rich. But I haven't heard you talk about it as much. And I don't know how much you are even thinking about your storytelling in that specific way.

[Kane Parsons]

I think it's easy to over rely on symbolism and the thematics of a project. I do it immensely. So the quick answer is, yes, I have a version of it. The great thing about thematics is that people are probably going to have many different interpretations of it. And so that's why that's actually the bit I like to speak to the least, probably. I mean, you can probably just. If you were to comb over all the interviews, all the press I've done, you could probably get like a flavor of the way I think about this project. But I do think that that's the least interesting thing I could prescribe to people. Like, if it was up to me. I like trying to. In a perfect world. I guess I mainly am just fatigued with seeing Creators, after their project ends, or, you know, after the project ends, like, going on and talking about what it all means in a way that is somehow, like, if it's not clear in the product, then either try again or, like, I want it to be on the screen. And. And this film is not supposed to be like. You're not supposed to get, like, a hard read out of it. Exactly. In terms of. Like. This is precisely what it means in very exact, explicit terms. But it is there. And I'm seeing enough people arriving to the same sort of conversational talking points that I was hoping they would. That obviously aren't mentioned in the film anywhere. So I feel like that works. I feel good with the work that was done there. Yeah. I try not to verbalize exactly what it should be, though.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yeah. I think I'm just curious about how much time you spend on it because I find that with a lot of projects like this, the lore tends to overwhelm the other components. And I don't see that in this case at all. But it's. It's helpful. And there's been a lot of allusions to David lynch with your work. And he very famously sort of refused to explore any of his thematic intents. I'm not encouraging you to do that in either direction. Whatever you want to do, you should do.

[Kane Parsons]

I'm probably going to keep up doing it this way, but, yeah, I think there's a lot that people can look at, and I like to. When I work, and I've been doing this for years now in backrooms and any other projects, I kind of don't do anything else. So I think a lot of it kind of comes from a very forced sort of just drowning in a mindset or a set of ideas that just become. I guess it's just like the way, subconsciously, a culture can sort of encode so much. Just the way information is transmitted and the way it's framed in little ways that sometimes you're not even aware of. I think most of those thematic choices. I'm kind of trusting my subconscious to do a lot of that work after I've kind of fed it so much stuff for so long. And that kind of has seemed to be the case so far.

[Sean Fennesey]

What about the mechanics of horror movies? That's something I'm quite interested in. Because you do have some moments in the movie that are like classical scares that have some of the traditional strategies.

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

And so is that something that you studied and thought about? Is that something that you knew was necessary in a. In A work of art in a commercial work of art like this. How much did you think about that?

[Kane Parsons]

I think, I mean I've never like looked at it from a technical or clinical standpoint. I think mostly it's through osmosis. I haven't watched a lot of horror movies. I think it also can't be understated the role in which that Greg, our editor had on the project. Like, I wish people talked about Greg more because he's a wizard and he did, you know, speak about. It was lovely working with him for so long, you know, and, and I think that like I, I think there's a few places in the film where you're right. There's definitely a reliance on the sort of, you know, build up release of a. I don't want to say jump scare. I, I don't. Personally, I, I don't think anyone is too sentimental about jump scares. So, so I don't think I need to run the risk of sounding like a, like a jump scare supporter. But there's certainly a few moments where we startle the viewer. I think I'm willing to live with those. I think I stand by them to like a 90% degree. And I would say that like,

[CR]

I

[Kane Parsons]

think those are just. We're wanting to set a very specific cadence where we are like showing that we can, you know, we can bring up the tension, we can bring up the, the, you know, the sudden surge of noise or adrenaline or whatever we're looking for. There, there can be things do happen here, but then the longer we go without something happening and then when we sort of like are able to, to subvert that sort of, I, I think it, you know, kind of breaks that language a little bit and you know, leaves us kind of brings the tempo way down for like a long period before it very subtle. You get like a silent jump scare. Just like the shadow moves and you get a slightly different kind of release. So I don't have it in academic terms. That's actually something I think I rely more on intuition for than anything else. I'm sure what I'm planning on doing this summer is watching a whole lot of stuff and trying to do just that. Because it's been about two years working on this film. That's a lot of time for someone who still has a developing brain and wants to be trying to feed it more stuff. And during that whole time I haven't really been able to consume anything. So I am dying to actually get a better academic handle on this stuff.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's funny. I Mean, you should definitely do what you want to do. But one of the things that I really, really admired about the movie is while it does have some of those core components of a scary movie, which is a genre that I really, really care about, and have spent a lot of time watching a lot of movies like that and study them to whatever extent that matters, the movie is working best for me when it is not only subverting, but sort of like ignoring the orthodoxy of narrative feature film. And I hear you when you say that that's intuitive, but there's something very precise about your willingness to sit in moments and to not explain. And my instinct as an older person than you, is to tell you, well, that must be coming from YouTube and whatever you've consumed there that allows you to reject these traditional modes. But I don't actually know. I'm actually very genuinely curious. And did you find that you had to fight for those kinds of moments in the film or to allow for that?

[Kane Parsons]

We did. It wasn't like vicious fights. They're very manageable. But there are certainly conversations, I guess I can say, I think I would say that that stuff mostly comes from the same place where I derive pretty much all of my excitement for projects, which is this is cliche and this is cheesy and this is technically where all of art is sourced from because there's nowhere else to source art from but just, just, you know, non fiction. The real world. My life, I think I never had a moment growing up where I went to the theater and, you know, suddenly fell in love with movies because I was at the theater and, and it was so profound and beautiful and it really got to me. I think if anything I've sort of, you know, I, I, I, I like to think of a better, I have a better way of looking at it now. But like when I was younger than I had an admittedly kind of pretentious view of it, which was like, I don't really want to be making films about my perception of reality as prescribed by someone else making a film already. It feels like you're diluting reality further and further if your inspirations are only non fiction. And I was just like, I don't really want to do that. I want to experience as much of life as possible. If I were to have a dream career would be equal parts trying to just see as much of life as possible and trying to actually meet people and talk to people from as many different walks of life as possible and just have lived experience that I can actually draw from personally. On a personal level, coded with my own life experience and emotion and tonality. And then, I mean that's a sprawling. That's the entirety of life that accounts for everything. And then just use film as a way to process that and sort of summarize. Basically. Here's what I learned in the form of a weird, bizarre, fictional, you know, anything. It could be a movie, it could be a game, it could be a TV show, it could be music. But like, I think that's kind of the way that I framed making stuff when I was younger. And I, you know, maybe it's not that pretentious. I mean, I think there's a very healthy way to do that. I think that's, you know, that's what I'm doing now is what I enjoy.

[Sean Fennesey]

So you did mention that you like to jump around mediums. I mean, do you see yourself working in the mode as a filmmaker for a long stretch of time? Is that what you're going to be doing?

[Kane Parsons]

I think I don't know where things will settle like 40 years from now, but I do currently very much desire to just keep doing the kind. I would say that the balance I have currently is the one I would like to keep. There might be all sorts of strange, bizarre economics hallucinations with the industry and like, you know, strange new trends starts and you know, there'll be a few new technologies in the, in the coming decades that will certainly derail or change or open up new, new avenues. And I think, you know, I'm. That that's why I kind of broadly am interested in the, the whole sort of width of, of what it can be. But I, with the caveat that I, I personally have no desire to lean on generative AI for any of my art. Just have to say that.

[Sean Fennesey]

Thank you for saying that.

[Kane Parsons]

But I, I, you know, I, I think that I just really enjoy the experience of. Like I said, it's experience curation. That's just what I like. I like sort of taking the things that feel potent from lived reality and then just kind of cranking them up to 10 in a way that you can sort of repeat the emotion sort of in an easily sampleable way. So hopefully you can, you know, gain something from an experience you didn't.

[Sean Fennesey]

If you're sponsored self, do you find that you encountered any genuine limitations to working in a traditional film production style as opposed to software?

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, I think there's limitations in what you can ask of people reasonably like the level of obsession that can be required for. There's an example would be on my Discord server. There are many, many people who are on there all the time. And they are probably around my age, some. Some of them even on the younger side. And they are far more sophisticated at, like, Blender than I possibly could be. And they work at it constantly. And if. And for a piece of fan art, like, after a trailer from the film comes out, they go and they model every single thing in the trailer with full. Like, they find the props, the exact props from the exact prop shops, and they model those objects. And they even, like, on the underside of tables and ottomans, they include the little manufacturing label in full 4K resolution, and it's all there. And then they just share those assets around, and then they remake everything one for one. So it's like this feeling of, like, if that could be leveraged. That's incredible. And there's, like, such an intense focus, and it's so. Maybe not professional in etiquette, but so incredibly meticulous and professional in the production quality. And I see that constantly. But, like, that's not something that you can just kind of inject by asking for it. It's something that kind of has to grow, incidentally, and so maybe there'll be a way to lean on some of that in the future. I really enjoy working with people who are obsessed with what they do, and we did have a lot of that on this film. But I think it is such a diversified project that there's certainly places where it is hard. I'm working on this, this and this. And so this one thing maybe doesn't get the same level of, like, obsessive detail baked into it.

[Amanda Davins]

And.

[Kane Parsons]

And on YouTube, that would be fine because I can just take as much time as I need and I can go do that. And I think it's partially the time factor that I run up against on this film. And then I would say also the. You know, the. The way. And I guess the two other things would be the script. Like, the way, you know, I was 16 when this script was, well, when this project started. And then, you know, it was a couple years of making. But, like, I don't think that I had the most creative leverage at the very start of this project. And I think it grew with time. So I think there's certainly ways in which I wish there. Like, I think. I think there are choices that I wish we could have spent more time deliberating over in the early phases before. We just wanted to try to, you know, it was greenlit, I think. I think at a time when could have benefited from a bit more like analysis and going back and forth a bit more, which is all stuff we did while we were in prep and while we were going through the film. So I think it was that. And then I would say it's just generally, and this isn't a restraint, this is actually liberating in some ways. But like the difference between YouTube as the medium or as the place where people are going to go view it and then going to a theater and viewing it on, on a projector screen is going to obviously change so much of how people are perceiving it. The fact that this is a large budget production versus something that they just clicked on a YouTube channel to find is mentally doing a lot of lifting in different directions for people. And I actually find that to be like one of the most interesting sort of paintbrushes available to like choose the medium. And I think you have to pick. I think backrooms was tricky because it took a lot of work to bend certain elements to make sure it was constantly working for this other direction. For a 90 minute film. I think a television series is always where it's kind of made the most sense to drift to. I mean, I've said that from the beginning, but I think that that's so

[Sean Fennesey]

interesting that you say that because I feel like one of the things that is so effective about the movie and I realize you're not a person who was sort of raised in the deep glow of the big screen, but I've

[Kane Parsons]

watched a good amount.

[Sean Fennesey]

But there's something about being captured in a dark room that is so effective for this story and that you can't get up and pause it and you can't look at your phone and there's something very specific in the DNA of the creation that makes it effective in that space. And maybe not for the story that you want to tell, but I don't know. You know, I'm not, I don't. It's not a happy ending, of course.

[Kane Parsons]

I think it's more effective. I think it's more effective for that. I think what I'm speaking to is maybe a distinction between a project like this and there's some projects I've done on YouTube where episodes of this, of a given series might be like 10 minute long screen recordings from a video game that was made in 2003 and you're, it's like kind of compressed and it's supposed to feel like you're just viewing messy files and you have the freedom to click around and, and download files from the description and there's like metadata in the files. So like arg stuff really. And so just a medium switch there, where I think things are framed a little bit better there. And if you tried to throw those onto a theater screen, I think, honestly, maybe. I don't know, maybe this is just somewhat uncharted territory. And maybe the next thing I should do is literally just try to see how scalable some of those things that seem unscalable are. Because if they're not, I mean, or if they are scalable, then. And that'd be pretty cool. There's some stuff to be done with that, I think.

[Sean Fennesey]

I mean, as an observer, I think it's just incredibly intriguing, the idea of just kind of breaking the form a little bit and delivering things in a slightly different way than we are used to receiving them. But I'm curious about if you are able to do this. Take stock of this exact moment. I mean, we're speaking hours before the movie will be released widely and there's obviously a big frenzy and people have been watching your work en masse for a long period of time. But this is a scale, at least in terms of the way that the media communicates about something that is very, very different. How close do you feel to it? How much do you feel like you understand it? How are you feeling about it?

[Kane Parsons]

I feel close to it. I don't feel particularly well, I guess I feel very looped in. I am checking and you know, I despise Twitter. I do not enjoy using Twitter in the slightest. I am checking Twitter, though, and it's. I could. I am only more affirming in my desire to never go back on there outside of this. But that's more for just like, seeing what, like, stuff is leaked so far from the theater, recordings and whatnot, just to, you know, just seeing what information is traveling where. And I. So. So I feel like I've got a good finger on the pulse right now. I think most of. I mean, I've just come off like, a pretty hefty press tour, so I'm a little mentally drained from talking about, which is why I appreciate this conversation, which is not about the normal talking points, because, you know, I've. I'm very thoroughly done with a lot of that, personally.

[Sean Fennesey]

Like, I've been trying to avoid them for your sake and mine.

[Kane Parsons]

I enjoy. I've enjoyed the experience, but at a certain point, I think everything that I have to say has kind of been said. I think I always maybe do have more to say, but, like, I think you need time to incubate and like find those new things and, and when you're doing it back to back, you kind of run out of new options. So I think, I think right now I'm kind of just, I mean, I. Every now and then I do get a moment of like, I'm kind of done with this and I'll get a video on Instagram of myself just talking and I'll click the not interested button just so I don't have to get more clips of myself.

[Sean Fennesey]

That's a back roomsian move by you.

[Kane Parsons]

Yeah, I, you know, I. It feels good. Like, again, like I. We talked about it when I first got on the call. I just got back home to, to, you know, my childhood home where my family is. And my brother's wrapping up high school right now. He graduates next week. And I am just kind of going. I'm just letting my nervous system kind of reset to where it was before I did all this. I think because it was very much. I've been at home my whole life. And then I go to Vancouver, I do this film, don't leave Vancouver the whole time. And then now I'm immediately coming back in this kind of like everything that happened with this movie from beginning of prep to release, it's just kind of an insulated event that I kind of want to be able to just keep going to different places and repeating. So although I do love Vancouver, I'll probably do more stuff there, but I don't know, it feels like I don't want it to turn into a whirlwind that never ends because that would drive me completely insane. Like you need the sort of, you know, the breaks to find what's actually meaningful to go towards next. So I'm trying to do that now.

[Sean Fennesey]

Welcome back to your life, Kane. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they have seen. Now, you said it's been hard for you to see things, but you also have this very wide ranging sense of what is seen. It doesn't have to be a movie, but what is something that you've looked at that, that you loved.

[Kane Parsons]

This is more of a. This isn't like a firm, like IP experience as much as it is a combination of being on the plane back to back with this press tour everywhere and, you know, just looking out the window. And he's a mixture of like reading and audiobook. Just going through like all of Ted Chang's short stories is what I'm. I'm currently on A TED Ching, TED Ching kick. And so I don't know if this is a. This is an accepted answer, but I think it's just like I'm really enjoying the headspace that that's put me in. Just going through tales of your life or stories of your life and others and exhalation and just looking out the window for hours and hours and hours and the sun rises and falls and it's just like. That's kind of been like, you know, the mountains, the sea, everything. Everything you see when you fly around the planet in a plane. I think it's just been. All of those things have kind of just bled together into a single kind of hum. Just like a tone that I think is less interesting to sort of describe in intellectual terms than it is to just kind of say that it's really peaceful and I think just feels like a very. Like a place I just want to keep living in. It feels like a comfortable sort of little bubble.

[Sean Fennesey]

I guess that's a perfect answer. Kane, congratulations. This is a truly unique moment. I hope you are able to appreciate it back home.

[Kane Parsons]

I'm enjoying it. All right.

[Sean Fennesey]

Thanks for doing this.

[Kane Parsons]

I'm going for a hike. See ya.

[Sean Fennesey]

Get outside. Thanks to Kane. Thanks to cr. Thanks to our producer Jack Sanders for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for production support. We'll be back next week to talk about 10 movies we missed in May.

[CR]

10.

[Sean Fennesey]

Just about close to there, you know, like what's on the list? So Sheep Detectives.

[CR]

You guys didn't do a sheep detective. Oh, because it can.

[Sean Fennesey]

Because it can. Billie Eilish. Hit me hard, hit me soft. Live in 3D or whatever it's called. We're going to try to go see Pressure, the World War II film. I'm going to try to see Passenger, the horror movie that's out this weekend. Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat 2. What else is on the list?

[Amanda Davins]

I love boosters.

[Sean Fennesey]

I love boosters. Of course. What else have you been watching? Anything you want to hear us address?

[CR]

Nothing, movie wise, that you guys have not either hit or are about to hit.

[Sean Fennesey]

Okay.

[CR]

It's all TV stuff.

[Sean Fennesey]

Cool. Anything you want. Any. Want to raise your hand for any last final movie? Something else that you want to add?

[Amanda Davins]

I was just googling it, but I mean, that's a lot. Anything. I'm trying to think. All the Cannes movies are listed. AI is useless.

[CR]

Did you guys do Ready or Not 2? I watched that.

[Sean Fennesey]

Yes, I did address it. I didn't love it. What did you think?

[CR]

I didn't love it as much as the first one.

[Sean Fennesey]

The first one is great.

[CR]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennesey]

All right, well, hey, Chris, thanks for coming on this journey with us.

[CR]

Next time I can contribute. It's always really a joy for me.

[Sean Fennesey]

Well, okay. Last licks here. Since Van just did this.

[CR]

No, I just.

[Sean Fennesey]

Where are you at? Where's your head at with third chair?

[CR]

I think that it was interesting, you know, John Cornyn, four term senator in Texas, just lost his primary to Ken Paxton.

[Sean Fennesey]

I know. And that must have been so hard for you.

[CR]

And he immediately.

[Sean Fennesey]

All that time devoted to corny Ken Paxton.

[CR]

And I just thought I'd like to see that kind of commitment from you guys, you know, commitment to party, commitment to. And you putting yourself up for bidding and for auction and just being like, I am just the watcher. I can't, you know, I can't win.

[Sean Fennesey]

I think I made a fairly cogent defense of the work that you've done last time this was discussed. So I'm on the record as being very pro. CR said it was.

[CR]

The friends we've made along the way. What about the friends we've had for a long time? You know. No, I. I'm enjoying. I'm enjoying the bands, you know.

[Sean Fennesey]

Do you.

[Amanda Davins]

I'm almost caught up with all of the Tracy material that you recorded in May that ran while we were in Cannes. It's good. I took a couple shots that I did. I'm not. I'll wait and. Yeah, respond to it later. Mostly from you. Yeah. Tracy always comes to my defense. So really my problem is with you. Interesting.

[CR]

So maybe it's the first chair.

[Sean Fennesey]

Well, honestly, if someone wants to come for first chair, I welcome it. I welcome the challenge.

[CR]

The gladiator fight or you're waiting for someone to kill you?

[Sean Fennesey]

I'm looking for an opportunity to reveal what really goes into making this show. That's what I want to be able to do, you know? Looks easy, doesn't it?

[CR]

I didn't say that. I have to run my own shop.

[Sean Fennesey]

You know, I know what happens backwards. You're safe here with us.

[CR]

You keep touching me in such a weird way.

[Sean Fennesey]

You're safe here. You want to hold second chair?

[Amanda Davins]

Yeah. Listen, people can try, but I just. It's really. It's a one of one situation. No one can do what I'm doing.

[Sean Fennesey]

I will not take that away from you. I promise. A mind palace us all your own. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.