Transcript
Marc Maron (0:01)
Let's face it, folks, life at work can kind of suck sometimes, and it's easy to feel stuck in your routine. Well, there's a podcast that can help make your work life not suck. It's called Work Life with Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist, and on work Life, he interviews experts who share their stories and offer tips that can help improve your 9 to 5. Hey, maybe it'll bring back a sense of excitement about your career. Check out Work Life with Adam Grant. Wherever you get podcasts, lock the gate. All right, let's do this. How are you? What the fuckers? What the fuck, buddies? What the fuck, Nicks? What the fuck? Adelecs. What's happening? I'm Marc Maron. This is my podcast. WTF? It's been my podcast for almost 16 years. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah. How you doing? Today on the show, I talk to Scott Frank. He's a writer, director, producer, and one of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplays for Get Shorty, out of Sight, Minority Report, Logan, and a lot more, including dozens of uncredited rewrites on films like Saving Private Ryan and and Gravity. He's the writer and director of the Netflix series Godless and the Queen's Gambit, as well as the new crime thriller Department Q, which I watched. All of you know, I've never been a binge watching series guy, but I've had a few guests lately where I get it. I get how it's satisfying. And Department Q was very satisfying. And I also watched Friends and Neighbors, and now I didn't get all the screeners. So now I'm hanging out, just hanging here like everyone else, waiting for Friday for the end of that thing. Anyway, my buddy Jack came over, and I love Jack. I've known Jack for years. We became friends back in the San Francisco days. I guess that would have been. Geez, when was that, man? 92, 93. Somewhere in there. And we don't stay in touch as much as we should because sometimes, you know, friendships, it's not even that they get strained all of a sudden, just time flies. No, I don't even like that. You just kind of realize one day like, oh, fuck, I haven't talked to that guy in a month or two or three or six. I can't even really remember the last time we hung out, but it had been a while. And it's just an interesting moment when you haven't seen a friend in a while and your contemporaries, and you look at him and you go like, wow. We are old guys. And look, I'm not saying I'm old. I'm not whining about it, but I'm 61. You know, when I was 15 and someone told me they were 61, I'm like, holy shit, that guy's almost gone. But now I'm 61, and Jack's a couple years older than me. My buddy Steve, who I've known since college, he just turned 63. There's a zone of aging that seems to happen in, you know, around 60 to 65, where you make this one of the major turns physically. And that's just my speculating, but it just was this moment where I'm like, oh, man. Cause Jack doesn't have kids either. And so we can't really judge ourselves against their growth or anything else. So there's some part of us that are still 1994. There's some part of me, I think that's still, like, 1980. I think there's some part of me that's 1972. They all exist within me, and a lot of them haven't really aged, but there is this current of. I don't know if it's youthful thinking. It's just not really knowing if you're just spending most of the time alone or with one other person that you see a lot. You just don't know until you see a pal you haven't seen in a year or so with that, like, oh, my. It's happening, dude. Look at us. Because, like, so many of the cities I've lived in have changed dramatically over time. So many of the people that I knew are either gone or have disappeared to. To where. I don't even know where they are. He was talking about San Francisco, and we were there in the 90s and how amazing it was before it all crashed. Covid really knocked the. Out of that place. And all this stuff that him and I were brought up on, you know, I grew up in. I mean, in terms of formative years. So I graduated high school in 81, and I was 10 and 60 and 73, 15 and 78. And all the stuff that we were picking up was the stuff left over from the 70s and everything that San Francisco represented. All the free love and sort of celebration of. Of weirdness and the embracing of. Of the. The gay community and all the. The sort of wild underground comics, underground art, all the weirdness of New York and la, all the freedom of. Of expression that used to define some of these cities. All the beautiful diversity of creativity and just like, pushing the envelope to find out, you know, what the, what is the edge of the human expression. All that stuff is exactly what's being steamrolled and buried today with anti diversity policy, anti diversity movement, anti gay movement. All this stuff, you know, moving towards this, this homogenization of mediocrity and thick mindedness and bigotry is a fucking disaster for, for the arts, for creativity, for human potential, for things that are interesting and provocative. It's all being pushed aside in the name of anti woke policy or in the name of anti censorship so we can do hack jokes about vulnerable marginalized communities. It's just such a. It's so like when I was talking to Jack and what we kind of grew up with, you know, R. Crumb, weird records, all kinds of strange, like the residents, like just, just the entire expanse of. And I watched that Pee Wee Herman documentary, Half of it the World He Came from, the arts of the 70s. It's just all of that, it was defining and essential and interesting. And now we're just moving into this zone of authoritarian boredom and fear. And it's such a fucking shame, it's such a fucking shame to have people on podcasts looking at some of the greatest art of the 20th century and going like I could do that. Just so thick minded, out of context, without any sort of sense of, of, of open mindedness or exploration. And these are people that pay a lot of lip service to freedom of mind and freedom of speech. And I just, it just fits so snugly into a very fascist point of view. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. Above everything else, it's angering and it's scary, but above everything else, the sort of movement to erase the kind of progressive and truly edgy creativity that was evolving and progressing in music and painting and dance and writing, in, you know, live performance, it's just, it's such a heartbreaking thing to grow up with such an exciting full spectrum of human expression and just seeing that just bulldozed also just by the nature of media in general. It's just sad. And I guess this is like an old guy talking, hey, what about what's going on now? It's not the same. Doesn't have the same visceral connection. Doesn't have the blood, guts and soul and sweat of, you know, actually being around exciting things happening. But is this just me being old? I don't know. I don't know. I do know that I just did the beginning of the press junkets for the show Stick, which premieres June 4th on Apple TV. Me and Owen and Mariana and Peter and Lily, we're all doing sort of press tour stuff. That's. That's going to be exciting. I haven't watched any of it. I'm going to watch it with everybody else or maybe not watch it at all, because that's what Owen does. I can follow his lead. It's not great to watch yourself. Sometimes it is, but usually it's not great. But everybody seems to like the show. Also, if you're going to be in New York on June 14th or 15th and you want to come to the showings of Are We Good? The documentary about me, the premiere is on the 14th. You can go to wtfpod.com tour to get tickets to that. And. I don't know, a lot of things going on, a lot of things going on, a lot of them bad. But my life, you know, if I can continue to celebrate what I believe real creativity is and just hope to God that people are out there still doing it, still pushing the envelope in a way that takes real risks. God, I hope you're out there. I'll be looking for you. So, look, Scott Frank is here. His new series, Department Q, premieres on Netflix today. And it's good. It's a good watch. It's one of those kind of traumatized angry police situations, cold cases. You know, I. I don't know the genre, but it turns out that it's better that I don't binge these kind of shows because I can't stop. And I guess that's the idea. But I've managed not to get too, too completely absorbed by. By too many of them. But I really enjoyed this one and I enjoy talking to Scott. And so I'll let you listen to it now. And also before I got a pretty big announcement on Monday. Got a pretty big announcement on Monday. This is me talking to Scott Frank. Hey, folks, I'm not a big clothing shopper. I just usually stick with whatever I have in my closet, and I don't think about changing it up too much, but sometimes you need new things. And thankfully, Quints is a place where I can order some clothes without any stress or overthinking. Quints has all the things you actually want to wear and at this time of year, like organic cotton silk polos, stylish beach shorts, and comfortable pants that work for everything from backyard hangs to nice dinners. I just picked out some European linen relaxed shirts. Got the short sleeve and the long sleeve. There's a nice range of colors and styles. I Was able to pick one out in mineral blue and then another in chambray stripes. And none of the stuff on quinta is going to put you in the hole. Everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.com WTF for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com WTF to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com WTF I think people get very, you know, very comfortable with their discomfort. I don't know what do you. Mind manifests itself in catastrophic thinking and.