Collider’s Perri Nemiroff talks with Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill for Black Phone 2 at Fantastic Fest 2025.

The sequel enters a dream world when the Grabber makes a call from hell, with family secrets fueling the mystery.

The pair discuss filming Super 8, casting Anna Lore, Madeleine McGraw and Mason Thames’ evolving relationship and powers, and more.

Four years ago, Finn (Mason Thames) killed his abductor and escaped, becoming the only survivor of Ethan Hawke’s Grabber, but true evil transcends death. In Black Phone 2, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) begins to receive calls in her dreams from the black phone and experiences disturbing visions that lead her and Finn to a snowed-in winter camp and a shocking discovery about the Grabber and their own family’s past. The sequel is directed by Scott Derrickson, who co-wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator C. Robert Cargill, continuing the nightmare they first brought to screens in 2021, adapted from Joe Hill’s short story of the same name from his 2005 anthology, 20th Century Ghosts. Thames and McGraw return as brother and sister Finn and Gwen, with Hawke also reprising his role of the Grabber. At Fantastic Fest 2025, Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sat down with Derrickson and Cargill to talk about the idea that spurred Black Phone 2 forward, the scene that took three reshoots to nail, and the hardest part of the film to get right. The pair also briefly discuss the possibility of a third installment to the Grabber’s story.
The Call Is Coming from… Hell?

Joe Hill thought this killer ‘Black Phone 2’ idea might be dumb.

Ethan Hawke wearing a devil mask and menacing Mason Thames in a phone booth in The-Black-Phone-2Image via Universal Pictures

PERRI NEMIROFF: I have a bunch of follow-ups from our last chat, which happened when I had only seen the first trailer. The first thing on my list is what you were telling me about Joe Hill’s idea for Black Phone 2. Specifically, what you said was that you were looking for an idea, and Joe emailed you a pitch. Some of it you didn’t respond to, but there was an idea within that email that you thought was fantastic that you had never heard of. So now I want to know, in the movie I just saw, what is that specific idea? SCOTT DERRICKSON: The central idea was the idea that the grabber had killed, Hope, their mother, and that the backstory of the movie would be sort of an unveiling and a reveal of how that had occurred. So that was something I’d never, never thought about. And what I liked about it was pitched it to you first, and then, Carter liked it. So then he emailed me. What I liked about it was the fact that it allowed for the movie to be a ghost story. You could create a narrative that tonally is very different, sort of bringing you into the movie, not as a serial killer movie, but as, a mystery ghost story. And then there would be high emotional stakes and and I thought that reveal would really matter when it happened, I hope. But that’s a big spoiler. C. ROBERT CARGILL: There’s a central tenet to when he called me up, because he called me, and then I said, “You gotta talk to Scott.” He emailed Scott because he wanted it to all come out, just like, “Okay, here are all my ideas.” But that core idea was, he was just like, “I have the dumbest idea,” and I’m like, “We love dumb ideas. Let’s go. What’s the dumb idea?” And he goes, “A phone rings and Finney answers, and it’s the Grabber calling him from hell.” He had this additional thing on it that we’ve kind of done, where now the mask is his face in hell. But there is no Grabber without the mask; that is who he is. We were just like, “ Fuck yes.” Did you mention that the role of their mother was written for Anna Lore last night? DERRICKSON: She was the person I had in mind all the time, but we try not to write for somebody specifically, or to do so very loosely. So as soon as that came up, I thought she’d be perfect for it, but Cargill didn’t know her at that time. CARGILL: Oh no, I did. We worked on Valentine together. DERRICKSON: Of course. Yes, that’s right. But I always had her in mind and hoped that she would do it. It makes me really happy to see her have the one-two punch this year with this and Final Destination [Bloodlines]. CARGILL: She’s close friends with Scott’s wife, and so we worked with her in the past. We’ve just hung out with her numerous times, and so when he’s like, “I want Anna for this,” I was like, “Of course. Yes.”

Anna Lore screaming in a garden in Final Destination Bloodlines.Image via Warner Bros.

So good. Sign me up for anything she’s in. CARGILL: And then she really, really looks like Maddie. They look like mother and daughter in a way that when Scott pointed it out, I was like, “Oh man, that’s genius.” That was Scott’s stroke of genius with the casting. DERRICKSON: She also has to play a character with a pretty big age gap. Anna can look so young in the opening. She does look like she’s 18 or 19 years old, and then she needs to play a mother many years later in the movie, when you see her. That was also something, that there aren’t a lot of actresses that can fit the bill there. Yeah, I had that actual discussion with somebody else last night about how impressed we were with that. CARGILL: You see her next to Jeremy Davies, and it’s like, “Yeah, I see it,” even though you just saw her 20 minutes ago in a phone booth looking, like you said, 19 years old. DERRICKSON: By the way, no visual effects on her at all. She can just look that different. That’s also a road I could go down and discuss for quite a while! CARGILL: Yeah. You know what? Fuck her. Fuck her for being so genetically awesome. [Laughs] You said it, not me! Here’s one other thing I really wanted to follow up on with both of you that you had brought up in our last conversation. You said that the screenplay that you guys wrote was very confusing to a lot of people. I was revisiting the interview having seen the movie, and I’m like, what was confusing? DERRICKSON: What was confusing was the fact that you were jumping back and forth so much between the dream world and reality. So every time you got a slug line that says, “Dream world, Super 8, you’re describing, and it goes back and forth so many times.” The structure of the narrative is also kind of all over the place. You’re getting pieces of information from the history in random ways, so when you read it all the way through, it’s very difficult to take it in on the page. Even when we were in prep, I would get lost on things sometimes. I’d be like, “No, wait a minute. Does this take place before that scene or after that scene?” It was a bit of a puzzle. I remember my production designer, Patti Podesta, about three weeks before we finished shooting, she just said, “Scott, I gotta just tell you, I think you’re the only person who understands the movie you’re making,” because it was technically so complicated. I would tell people what to do, and everybody did it, but it was a hard movie on the page to grasp what was visually represented on the screen. CARGILL: Yeah, you’re talking about a movie in which we were operating with three very different cameras to capture very different parts of the movie to visually represent it. So sometimes you’d be like, “Okay, wait, where in the movie are we? Which camera are we using? Which film stock are we using?” There are so many moving parts. It’s one of those things that there’s a handful of people on the planet that could make that work, and Scott is one of them.
One ‘Black Phone 2’ Scene Had to Be Reshot Three Times

The filmmakers discuss the volatile nature of Super 8.

Finn tries to wake up a sleeping Gwen in a bunk bed covered in writing, with a girl watching nearby.Image via Universal Pictures

I’ll dig into the Super 8 of it all now. Can you tell me a little bit about figuring out the right visual language so that it not only feels like an expansion of how it’s used in the first film, but it also almost feels like another step from Sinister to Black Phone to Black Phone 2? DERRICKSON: It’s definitely an evolution of those films stylistically, you know? And rather than drawing on other films, this is the first time I’ve sort of drawn on my own past visual style and tried to evolve it into something that I haven’t seen before. I have not seen a movie in a theater, or maybe ever, that has this much Super 8 material in it. Super 8 is really dangerous-feeling, and it’s actually dangerous to work with. It’s very volatile. Is it underexposed? Is it overexposed? It flutters in the gate. The aberrations are part of the beauty of it, and the dangerousness of it. CARGILL: An entire reel will just be lost because it won’t develop properly, so we’ll have to shoot it again. Are you saying that as a hypothetical? DERRICKSON: No, that really happened. CARGILL: Oh no, no, no, I wasn’t saying that as a hypothetical. DERRICKSON: We have one scene in the movie we had to reshoot three times because the Super 8 was so volatile. But it was worth it, because it’s hard these days to go into a cinema and have a visual experience where you’re looking at something that you don’t feel like you’ve seen before. It just doesn’t look like other movies, and that’s very exciting for me as a film viewer when that happens. I felt like part of the excitement of the movie was going to be the audiovisual power of the medium itself, and that that could be used to really be a storytelling device separating the dream world from reality. Super 8 always feels very dangerous. It ups the tension. But can you tell me a little bit about weaving that way of filming into Gwen’s journey thematically, so that it’s also evolving in a way that supports where you want to take her in the story? DERRICKSON: That’s actually a script decision that we made. I remember calling Cargill one time when we were sort of playing with some of the horror scenes early on, and I said, “I think that maybe we should have all of the terror of this movie in this dream world.” That was a hard decision to make, and Cargill immediately was like, “Oh, I thought that all along.” And I was like, “Okay, well, I was slow to the process.” But making that decision meant that I really did have to create worlds here. And for Gwen, she is this character with these ethereal gifts, and to be able to give her a visual space where, when you see it in her, you know that you’re inside of her own mind to a degree. You know that you’re inside a space that she occupies mentally and spiritually. That became very challenging for me because every time that we were in there, I needed to feel not an intellectual idea, but I needed to feel like her. It needed to feel like her world. The seamlessness is hopefully that you don’t have to experience it intellectually, you just experience it viscerally, and it makes sense to you as it’s happening.
Creating a Dream World for ‘Black Phone 2’

And how they developed the rules on the page and screen.

Gwen, with short hair in pajamas, hiding around a corner from the Grabber coming her way with an axe.Image via Universal Pictures

I have so many follow-up questions. One of the first ones that crossed my mind, just because you emphasized the dream world, and obviously a lot of folks out there are comparing this movie to Nightmare on Elm Street, which I think is very applicable. How do you approach embracing that kind of comparison rather than pushing it away? CARGILL: There’s a phrase I like to use, and I use it quite often: “Turning into the skid.” Sometimes when you’re sliding on ice or water, you turn into the skid instead of away from it, and that’s how you right the car. That’s what you do with things like this. The minute we realized we were bumping up against material that had been done in movies that we love, we were just like, “Why try to ignore that and pretend we’re something else, and instead just turn into the skid and be like, ‘We love Nightmare on Elm Street. You love Nightmare on Elm Street. We’re not going to steal from Wes [Craven], but we will do our own variant on this with the rules that we set up in the previous movie.’” So, it’s like any similarities are a good thing for this audience. As I was saying in another interview last night, one of the great things about horror audiences is they are so film literate and they know their movies inside and out and chapter and verse, and so you’re not going to pull it over on them and be like, “Hey, we made a Nightmare on Elm Street movie that you don’t recognize.” No, they’re going to know. So it’s like, “Well, let’s go for it, but let’s also make sure we honor that material as well by not stealing from it.” I think one of the best things you do is that you do honor it, but you honor it within this really rich world that you two have created, with Joe, of course. I wanted to lean into that a little bit. I believe you brought this up at the Q&A last night, but I forget the exact verbiage you used. Something about overwriting rules, or something to that effect. CARGILL: I overwrite. Like my other job, I’m a novelist, and so I love to overwrite, so then Scott’s first job when he’s rewriting me is cutting out, like, six pages, and just being like, “Let’s cut this down to the bone and make it work.” But I always like to overwrite with the rules there so that we both know what we’re playing with, and then the secret with writing in general is that you then pare that away and pare that away to exactly the point that the audience understands it, but doesn’t ever feel like you’re sitting there and giving them a lecture on how the movie works. That’s always the point at which the movie grinds to a halt is the point where someone looks in the camera and goes, “Let me explain dreaming to you. Let me explain the rules of Inception.” That’s the one criticism of Inception that functions is that 70% of that movie is explaining the other 30% to you. DERRICKSON: I don’t have that criticism. CARGILL: Oh, love the movie. But the point is that you’re always trying to avoid that. So, I like to overwrite, and then we cut down and get to that point where the audience is like, “Oh, this is everything I needed to know.” To follow up on that a little, can you each give me an example of a rule that you knew had to be rather explicit in the movie, but then also maybe a rule that you developed that you didn’t need to flat out mention in the film, but we could still feel informing the film overall and the world that you’re creating? CARGILL: One of the big ones is that one of the great things about this story is it’s about the kids learning that this is not something happening to them, this is something that is happening within them that’s connected. So, having the phone ring and not having both of them hear it, but only the one who’s getting the call, only the one who’s mentally reaching out. So we always had to make sure we knew what that was, because there is no real phone ringing. It’s just the medium with which they’re communicating with the dead, and it’s how their brain processes it. So yeah, we always were making sure that someone would hear it ringing, but it was never both of them because this isn’t some shared thing. They just both have the same abilities from their mom. Also in that vein, Finn is rejecting it, and so he’s not having all the experiences Gwen is having because Gwen is open to it. We’re seeing two people with the same gifts, and one person trying to shut it down while the other person is being open to it, which is why, as she goes through the movie, she starts being able to do things that Finn can do. Because it’s not that they have two separate abilities, it’s that they both developed them in different ways, and he’s not furthering his learning of that while she is. That’s why she, by the end of the movie, would be a much more competent paranormal investigator than her brother would be.
Would Anyone Want ‘Black Phone 3’?

The pair also discuss Madeleine McGraw and Mason Thames’ on and off-screen relationship.

The Grabber with an icy mask, tilting his head and holding an axe down by his side in Black Phone 2.Image via Universal Pictures

This is the greediest follow-up question, but you explain that and I’m sitting here like, “I want more.” I assume you see the potential in a Black Phone 3, right? CARGILL: Would anyone want that? I don’t know. [Laughs] DERRICKSON: No one’s brought that up to me. CARGILL: No, that’s the first time we’ve heard it. Hey, I hope other people would like that. I want to see you expand, especially with the two of them. I thought they were phenomenal in the first film, but when you see what they’re able to do at a different stage of life here, it really is something extra special, so I would love to see them continue in these roles as well. Leaning into them in particular, can you tell me something that you saw Madeleine and Mason do on this set that made the two of you stop and go, “I thought I knew how powerful this scene could be, but you two just took it to another level?” DERRICKSON: I mean, the thing about the two of them is that they are so comfortable around each other and know each other so well that it was much more about feeling continually surprised at how easily they stepped into a scene and felt like brother and sister, and felt like they had real history, because they do. They’ve known each other for years now, since the first film. For me, it’s the more emotional moments when they’re leaning on each other. I think that for me, the greatest performance moment that Maddie has is actually after the first nightmare that she has when she wakes up. She is really crying, and she is really distraught, and she had to get herself into a very dark place, which is painful for her as an actress. Some people can do that on command and it doesn’t affect them; it really affects her. So when I ask her to do something like that, I’m aware that I’m extracting real emotional energy and power from a person for the sake of the movie. The way that in that scene, and to a lesser degree in the basement when she wakes up, but when she wakes up in the dorm, the way Mason is with her and the way he is calming her and talking to her and telling her she’s okay, but then when she sort of folds in on him, and the fear then sets in, all that was instinctive for them. That was something that just naturally would step in and do. They both respect the other person’s skill and they both just understand that relationship and what it is. So, it doesn’t take a lot of work to get that dynamic on screen. CARGILL: One of the great things about the kids is on the very first movie, they all just kind of fell in love with one another and started a text group, so they just have been texting as a group. All the kids on Black Phone have been hanging out online together for several years, and they are super close friends, so when they would be on set, oftentimes when they would be wrapped for the day, they would go get out of hair and make up, and they’d be ready to go home, and then they would just stick around on set because their argument was, “I’m just going to be sitting at home texting the boys anyway, so why don’t I just hang out and be on set with everyone?” And so they would just all hang out together and run around playing together, and that energy comes across in the movie. You get the idea that these kids have a real connection.
Scott Derrickson Reveals the Hardest Part of ‘Black Phone 2’ to Get Right

“I was terrified that it would be the dumbest shit ever.”

Finn kneeling in front of Gwen in a kitchen with a girl sitting against a table in the background.Image via Universal Pictures

I do have to take a minute to highlight the Grabber. Last we were talking, you very lightly mentioned that the look of the Grabber in this movie went through a series of concept art until you landed on what we see in the finished film. Can you maybe paint a picture of what the first piece of concept art you saw looked like, and how that compares to what he looks like in the finished film? DERRICKSON: Boy, that’s a good question. I knew the mask was going to have to be affected by the origin of the character story. I think that it got gradually more violent-looking. I think that what we started with was a tamer version of what we have in the actual movie. As we continued to work on the movie and I started to feel some of the visceral power of some of the scenes, I was just like, “We have to take this further.” Ethan [Hawke] was very patient with the makeup effects work and that sort of thing. And it’s in the trailer, but the ripping off of the mask and seeing his actual countenance under that mask is really the stuff of nightmares, and that was just about progressing and having him get more and more violent until we landed there. That’s really what it was. It looks phenomenal. Now, a very hot topic of conversation, the Grabber on skates. I know you’ve probably been asked about that to death at this point, but one particular thing I’m curious about is, does something like that look scary when you’re on set? Do you know it’s going to work when you’re filming it? DERRICKSON: Oh, no. I was terrified that it would be the dumbest shit ever. We’re drawing very unabashedly on a 1983 horror film called Curtains that has a wonderful scene with a masked killer on skates. It’s just one scene, but that was the origin of the idea. The problem is, I couldn’t just put him on skates, you know? So, the most difficult production design element were the Grabber’s feet. There’s nothing we spent more time on, and didn’t get it right until very late in the process, in post. But the idea, as it was, was that they would be ice-encrusted and bloody, and something that could slide on ice and all of that. When we started to get it right, I started to feel like, “Oh, this is actually actively disturbing in its own right.” So, by the time you have the trailer images, I felt confident that it was going to work in the narrative of the movie. But I was also surprised that as soon as people saw it, they liked it. In fact, from the screening last night, my favorite review I’ve seen so far, my wife sent it to me, was a five-star Letterboxd review that just said “Hail skatin’.”
Why Scott Derrickson Tapped Maggie Levin to Direct ‘Ghost Eaters’

“It was an automatic fit.”

Close-up of Scott Derrickson on the red carpet.Image via Doug Peters/PA Images

I’ve gotta wind down with you, and I did want to end on one unrelated question, because it just so happens that my next interview here at Fantastic Fest is with Clay [McLeod], and I know you two are doing Ghost Eaters. How far along are you with that movie, and what is it about Maggie [Levin] in particular that makes you say to yourselves, “This material is in the perfect hands with her as the writer and director?” DERRICKSON: There’s a great story. Crooked Highway, our company, has optioned Clay’s novel. What happened was Maggie had read that novel a few years ago, and I remember her telling me about it. She reads a lot, but she loved the book. The book was not available. It was owned by another company. I’m not going to mention who, but it was Blumhouse. I’m sorry, was that my out-loud voice? So they put it in turnaround, and I found out what happened is… I didn’t find out about that, but one week I was just sort of surveying all the great, acclaimed horror novels of the 2020s, and the last five to 10 years, and this novel came up quite a bit. I was basing my read-quick survey of just ideas — what’s the concept of the novel? Is it something that we as producers should look at? And when I saw Ghost Eaters, I was like, “Oh, this idea is really fantastic. This is a really interesting idea for a movie.” So I went to Vince [Cheng], who runs our company, and said, “Find out if this is available.” Turns out it was in turnaround at Blumhouse. They optioned it but weren’t going to make a movie out of it, and I said, “Oh, interesting.” Then when I told my wife, Maggie, she was like, “That’s the book I read! Do you remember? That’s incredible.” So it was an automatic fit. I remembered she had tried to get the rights, but they were not available. So, through a different angle, I was trying to get the rights, and then just when we got them, she was the natural filmmaker to do it. CARGILL: Maggie is just such an incredible talent. Quite literally, they fell in love while they were developing a project together that we were all working on. It was just one of those things where we went from being work buddies to all of a sudden, “Oh, she’s family now.” She has shot second unit on several of our films. She’s a very important component to why our films are what they are. So, we’ve been trying very hard to get her first main theatrical feature off the ground, and Hollywood being where it is right now, it’s been so hard. So finally, we’re in that space where other people are waking up and going, “Oh, Maggie Levin is brilliant.” We’re like, “We know. It’s about time you recognize.” DERRICKSON: Now she’s in a place where I think she’s going to have, like, three greenlit movies all at once. CARGILL: Poor us. [Laughs] DERRICKSON: Champagne problems. I like hearing that. I like that problem quite a bit. And just because I didn’t bring up the other element of your family that is involved in Black Phone 2, your son, [Atticus Derrickson], his score is exceptional. DERRICKSON: It’s a truly brilliant score. Black Phone 2 opens in theaters on October 17.

Release Date

October 17, 2025

Runtime

114 Minutes

Director

Scott Derrickson

Writers

C. Robert Cargill, Scott Derrickson, Joe Hill

Bouchra

In Bouchra, 3D animated anthropomorphic animals may populate the world, but the intricacies of their lives are unmistakably human. This approach is par for the course for the film’s co-directors, the Brooklyn-based visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, whose bite-size episodic project 2 Lizards captivated viewers during the early stages of lockdown in 2020—and landed them on our 25 New Faces of Film list the same year. In the latter project, the eponymous 3D-rendered lizards (voiced by Bennani and Barki) shoot the shit about celebrities, news coverage, pandemic-era anxieties and the morbid relief of being able to shirk social obligations. 
With their feature debut, Bennani and Barki retain much of the “essence” of this past project, just with a much higher production value. The 3D animation is far from amateurish, and the real-life locations that they opt for were painstakingly replicated via the process of photogrammetry (more on that below). The filmmakers similarly voice two best friends—Barki stays a lizard, but Bennani instead takes the form of, per her co-director, a “very sexy” coyote. Yet the story here is an ambitious blend of personal revelation, improvisational dialogue and a metatextual narrative that elevates the straightforward hangout vibe of 2 Lizards. 
Bennani voices the titular protagonist, a Moroccan-born, Manhattan-based filmmaker who finds herself creatively invigorated by a series of confessional phone calls with her Casablanca-based mother. These conversations—based on actual discussions that Bennani had with her own mother—address the strain that their relationship has suffered ever since Bouchra came out as queer. Thus she gets to work on storyboarding a feature that follows a fictionalized version of herself that returns to Casablanca for a family visit. Reconnection, resentment and exploration define this trip; Bennani’s own relatives voice their animated avatars, once again blurring whether these interactions are fictional, facsimile or somewhere in between. This question is never more pronounced as when Bennani and Barki (who voices Bouchra’s best friend) share a scene, the effortlessness of their rapport emphasizing the effectiveness of their collaboration. 
I spoke with Bennani and Barki during the New York Film Festival, where Bouchra premiered on Saturday, September 27. It screens once more at 12:15pm on September 29. 
Below, the duo provide insight on their intrinsic chemistry, the team that created the intricate details of the world that these characters inhabit and what the future of their artistic collaboration looks like. 
Filmmaker: When we profiled you for the 25 New Faces back in 2020, you teased the fact that you were looking to develop another project together that was a blend of “animation technique and a certain tone.” Is Bouchra the result?
Bennani: I guess it’s the result, but not from a straight road. When we did 2 Lizards, it was a very spontaneous thing. I guess all things start like that. We were just playing and noticing things that were happening and that then became an entry point to making [short] films. After that, we got the opportunity to develop an animated TV show. We pitched it and didn’t manage to sell it. Maybe it was too weird, too indie, too many languages, not American-centric. We were like, “well, this is disappointing,” but we don’t really need an industry to make things. We like making things in our own way. I function more in the art world; we don’t wait for permission or big budgets. We got an opportunity to do a big exhibition that found us in the [Fundazione] Prada and we asked if we could get financing to do a feature. That allowed us to build an animation studio and start working on this. 

Filmmaker: Can you elaborate on what the TV project was? 
Bennani: It was a kind of dystopian sci-fi about the spywares that are developed by Israel and tested on Palestinians.
Barki: It was like this program that can basically implement a memory that didn’t happen. You would get a spam text message with a photo of yourself at an event that never happened. Once you open that photo, it implements that memory into your brain. There are two main characters: one of them is the daughter of the developer, the other is someone that she met online and lives in a different country. So they start using this software to sort of create memories together, even though they’ve never met.
Filmmaker: 2 Lizards is also episodic, albeit mostly 90-second installments. Can you tell me a little bit about how your collaboration developed to scale up for Bouchra? 
Barki: This feature has some similar elements, like working with reality and then fictionalizing it. We also did that with 2 Lizards; not everything happened exactly the way it is in those little episodes. We really care about using reality to capture an essence, but we’re free enough to make stuff up too. That is something that definitely also exists in Bouchra, even though the process was a little different. We started with writing a script and didn’t want it to be as involved with reality or as personal. As we were writing the script, the meta element of the story started unfolding. Meriem had these conversations with her mom as research for the script to understand this [similar] relationship in a more dimensional way. We listened to these conversations and were like, “It’s very powerful.” We did not want to limit ourselves to making a full-on documentary, but [we decided to] use these conversations. That was very liberating because we felt a bit of a responsibility while writing the script to represent all these different queer experiences. Once we rooted it in Meriem’s personal story, we felt like, “Okay, now we can do whatever we want.” 
Bennani: The other very big difference is that it wasn’t just us. We wrote the script with Ayla Mrabet, and four of us were the core team for this film: John Michael Boling, Jason Coombs and the two of us. John Michael and Jason had a project called Culture Sport. It’s an animation project that I’ve been a fan of for years. When we realized we could make a feature film, the first thing we did was look for people to work with us. Even though I do animation and we made the lizards ourselves, we knew we needed people who are way better than us. So John Michael did the cinematography ,and Jason did the modeling, rigging and animation.
Of course, there are so many more people involved, but those are the people that were there every day. We had the 2 Lizards technique of [using] these anthropomorphic 3D animal characters and these live action backgrounds, but how do we scale up? How do we make it much higher in production value, sustain a longer narrative and still keep this essence and also let it be this new thing? It was very different, actually, having a whole team and having to direct a bit more. You have to know what you want because you’re collaborating with people and have to communicate versus figuring it out on your own.

Filmmaker: This version of New York City is different in so many ways. For one, it’s a bustling metropolis instead of a pandemic-era ghost town, but I’m curious how you approached capturing the city in all of its chaotic glory. 
Bennani: So there’s New York and Casablanca. Sometimes we also shot a few shots in Rabat, but mostly in Casablanca. Whenever [the scene] is indoors, it’s 3D. Then we also have photogrammetry, which is this process of 3D scanning. It’s kind of like a collage of photos and 3D scans to recreate some locations [so that we’re then] able to do a top shot, even though we can’t afford a crane. Casablanca is a familiar place for me and we spent a lot of time there with the team. But we’re New Yorkers. 
Barki: We wanted to go for a darker look in general. On an impressionist level, it was reflecting a bit of a mood that we were in while we were making the movie—just dealing with this story, our personal lives and collectively in the world. It put us in this mood of seeing New York with a melancholy, darker look to it, whereas in 2 Lizards there’s a romantic innocence to it. 
Bennani: But John Michael is responsible for a lot. It’s not like a chain of command, it’s all artists bringing in some things. Then by the time an image is ready, it’s a new idea [compared to] our storyboard and animatic. It’s great. The film has our storyboards [hung up behind Bouchra’s desk] because of the meta layer. You can even see how the film was made in the film itself. 
Filmmaker: As New Yorkers, were there any specific spots you wanted to capture? At the press screening, people definitely reacted when the subway stopped at Myrtle-Broadway. 
Barki: A lot of it is the financial district. I think that’s part of the darker, moodier vibe that we wanted to capture for this film. It’s also more empty at night, because otherwise you can’t film places without people. 
Bennani: [In 2 Lizards] it was possible because the streets were empty so we were able to shoot an empty New York, even Times Square. But for this film, there are all of these little streets and financial districts that were easy to film. In Casablanca it’s the Centre Ville, a specific neighborhood that’s very beautiful and has a mood. I don’t know that there was a specific way we wanted to show New York, it’s more like showing the pace of her life in New York—having this shitty Midtown apartment, [all this] time alone, going out with her ex, going out with her friend. As close as possible to our life is the most specific we can get. 

Filmmaker: We’ve touched on Casablanca a few times. You brought up how you depicted New York as this very dark place, but there’s a sunniness to the Casablanca scenes that contrasts the real emotional weight of them. I’m sure some of that has to do with the actual climate, but Meriem obviously has a personal relationship to the city and you mentioned that the crew also spent some time there. How did you capture the specifics of the city while also allowing for a less familiar gaze? 
Bennani: We went and we saw it with the production team, which was Casablanca-based, but I wanted to make sure that John Michael, because of the cinematography, spent time there. There are so many things that are shot there. There are so many images [that represent Casablanca], but they’re always these touristy images. I wanted him to get a feel for it. I also knew how I wanted to capture it, in a way, because I had this pile of iPhone images. Every time I go there, I take photos. I have hundreds of images that I have organized in groups: restaurants that I like, cafes, outfits, pedestrians. So whenever we needed to make extras or think about what this ashtray looks like, I had it. John Michael and I spent three weeks there. While we were recording some actors, he was going around scanning and doing photogrammetries of things in the streets: fountains, furniture, things that you won’t think about modeling, like a random thing on the street that you don’t even know what it’s called, but it sells it. Like the way this specific sidewalk is. We also went out a lot in the neighborhood where we filmed and went to all these bars, so he had a specific experience with all of the lighting. 
Filmmaker: And is Bouchra’s parents house based on your parents house, or is it a made-up setting? 
Bennani: She’s kind of a Frankenstein of so many types of houses that I’ve seen, [including] from old design magazines from Morocco that my parents collect. I scanned a lot of them and we made a full 3D [model] of it and then had a reference for each [piece of] furniture and every detail that you see. 
Filmmaker: Meriem, you voice the protagonist, and Orian, you voice her best friend. How did you straddle the line between presenting your own personalities, vocal inflections and musings while embodying fictional characters? 
Bennani: We really played ourselves. We didn’t try to be different. The more spontaneous and real we are in how we say things, the better it’s going to be, because we always go for nuance and specificity. We keep the stutters, we keep the hesitations, because otherwise it’s just going to be animals [laughs]. 
Barki: It was very easy to voice my character. I think that there’s something about our voices together that just works. That was a chemistry that we already had in 2 Lizards. Even watching the movie now with an audience, every time there’s a scene with us together, I can feel the air of engagement in the theater kind of heighten. We knew this chemistry is something we could count on. 

Bennani: I think it’s your voice, because I’m in every scene! The second you start speaking, people are laughing so hard. 
Barki: It’s true [laughing]. It has that quality to it. But I also think it’s our chemistry and our dialogue with each other. In a way, the opposite thing was harder, because we were writing for a lot of other characters talking in their [own] voice. Meriem kept telling me when we were writing the script, “You’re making them speak like you! They can’t land that joke because they’re a different person.” I had to learn how to do that.
Bennani: But we made people improvise. 
Barki: We ended up keeping the dialogue writing pretty loose, just the story beats that we wanted to hit. Then we would just go and record it in an improvisational style and edit it. 
We made this film at first for an exhibition; it was a medium-length film with the same storyline. Then we had an opportunity to extend it into a feature film because we wanted it to exist in the film world and do festivals. After we showed the first version in the exhibition, we came back and I told Meriem, “I think we should add more scenes with the two of us because it’s something that people really react to.” So we did a little bit of that, but we ended up adding a lot of scenes with the main character and her ex-girlfriend. But my character speaks more in the longer version. 
Filmmaker: In terms of the character design, how much were you involved in shaping their look? Are they emblematic of either of your tastes, styles, etcetera? 
Bennani: The way it worked is that we made these drawings, then we gave them to John Michael and Jason when we started working with them. Jason was modeling the characters to have the same essence as the drawings and then passed them to John Michael. They would make like a hundred versions of each character, where there’s just the slightest difference in the eyes. But at the same time, these characters are so specific—in the same way that if I changed one little thing about your face, you wouldn’t be you anymore. So we would look at all of these [designs] and choose together. 

Barki: There’s a picture of my character next to a picture of me doing the same pose. If you look at it side by side, you see that captures my essence. For my character, I stayed a lizard. Meriem is the one who made the bigger transition. 
Bennani: But she is not supposed to look like me. We didn’t design her after me.
Barki: Yeah, my character is designed more after me. I also chose her big hoodie. I made the graphic for the back, but because the lighting is very film noir, you never see it. And for [Meriem’s] character, she had a stylist, our friend Becky [Akinyode]. It’s all real clothing. I think Meriem’s character is very sexy. 
Filmmaker: How do you see your collaboration being shaped going forward? 
Bennani: We have a company called 2 Lizards that we started for this film. We think of 2 Lizards as whenever we work together. But also if we work separately, we’re always so involved in each other’s projects that those projects would also fall under 2 Lizards. We think of it maybe as a type of filmmaking, like a tone that we have together. We want to make more movies together. We want to make more animated films with John Michael and Jason. But we also have our separate things. 
Barki: Meriem already started writing our next film. I’ve been kind of busy doing a little bit of freelance work and working on another passion project. Meriem has a successful career as an artist, so she’s doing an exhibition. 
Filmmaker: Is there anything you can share about the film? 

Bennani: Oh, no, I wrote like five pages of it! 

Collider’s Steve Weintraub sat with director Shane Black, producer Jules Daly, and executive producer Susan Downey to chat about Play Dirty.

The movie, based on a character by author Donald E. Westlake, stars Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, and Rosa Salazar as a group of expert thieves pulling off the heist of a lifetime.

During this Q&A, the trio discuss the most unforgettable moments of their careers, Black’s approach to filmmaking, behind-the-scenes of Play Dirty, and what they have in the works, including a potential Sherlock Holmes 3.

Academy Award nominee Mark Wahlberg is never far from a new project, having already starred in Flight Risk, the Mel Gibson–directed action thriller, earlier this year. Now he’s back with another crime thriller, as he stars in Play Dirty, the latest outing from The Nice Guys director Shane Black. Teaming up with Amazon MGM Studios, Black co-writes and directs Play Dirty, based on the Parker book series by author Donald E. Westlake. However, Black is putting his own spin on the books, admitting, “The Parker books are wonderful, but they’re like popcorn,” and promising to deliver a fuller meal for Play Dirty audiences. Black is doing this first by assembling a stacked ensemble, which sees Wahlberg star alongside the likes of Rosa Salazar, Academy Award nominee LaKeith Stanfield, Tony Shalhoub, Keegan-Michael Key, Claire Lovering, Chai Hansen, Chukwudi Iwuji, and more. In the movie, Wahlberg is expert thief Parker, working with a skilled crew to pull off the job of a lifetime, with plenty of double-crossing and twists to keep viewers guessing. Ahead of the movie’s release, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the chance to chat with Black, producer Jules Daly, and executive producer Susan Downey about all things Play Dirty. From Black’s signature spin on the source material to the Bond-inspired opening credits, no stone is left unturned. The trio also discuss upcoming projects, like what Black has in the works, a Sherlock Holmes 3, and John Cena’s Matchbox. You can watch the interview in the video above, and check out the full transcript below.
‘Play Dirty’ Team on the Most Unforgettable Scenes of Their Careers

Get to know Shane Black, producer Jules Daly, and EP Susan Downey.

Shane Black talking on stage with producers Susan Downey and Jules Daly for a Play Dirty Q&A.Image via Trent Barboza

COLLIDER: I like throwing a few curveballs at the beginning of every Q&A. What’s your coffee order? SUSAN DOWNEY: I found this new thing called Ripple, which is like a pea protein, vegan, kind of half-and-half — high recommend. I don’t even know if you can get it out in the world; you have to get it at the grocery. I throw a little bit of that in, and then just coffee on top. If that’s not around, there’s no coffee to be had. SHANE BLACK: I like Ripple, too, but it’s a different one. It costs five bucks a gallon at 7-Eleven. JULES DALY: But, Shane, I think you’re like a Folgers guy, right? BLACK: Yeah. DALY: He’s a simple coffee guy. BLACK: I like black coffee. Period. We’ll call this Get to Know Our Producers and Director. What is your favorite thing to cook? DALY: Spaghetti bolognese from The River Cafe. BLACK: You cook it? DALY: Yeah, I do. Want to come over and have some spaghetti bolognese? Not tonight. BLACK: Yeah. Susa, what do you cook? You cook actual stuff. DOWNEY: Oh, you’re giving me way too much credit. I don’t even know if this counts. I think I can say I prepare this. That’s kind of like cooking. It’s like cooking adjacent. Robert [Downey Jr.] likes tuna melts, and I make a mean tuna melt. I don’t actually eat it, but he loves it. BLACK: Yeah, I don’t cook. I wish I did. When I was in college, I used to make pizza where you keep pushing the dough and it keeps having holes in it, and then you fill the hole in, and then there’s another hole over here. That’s my cooking. So do you eat out a lot, or are you more like DoorDash or Uber Eats? BLACK: DoorDash is a rip-off. It’s like if you ever want two eggs and a piece of cheese for $60… I’m not arguing with you. BLACK: I don’t know what I do. I look at what’s in the fridge: a can of chili, a can of beans, whatever. And healthy stuff, as well. What is the last movie, TV show, or book that you’ve read that you want to recommend? DOWNEY: I just saw [Paul Thomas Anderson]’s new movie, and I thought it was fantastic. DALY: I watched Being There recently. It’s a great movie. BLACK: I’ll put in a plug for a guy I really like, Scott Frank, who did Queen’s Gambit. He has a new one on Netflix called Dept. Q. Great. Exquisite. Really good. Exquisite. And it got renewed for a second season. BLACK: I didn’t know that. DALY: Deservedly. BLACK: I’m happy. You guys have worked on many projects throughout your career, and I am curious, was there a particular shot or sequence that was really challenging to pull off, or you consider one of the toughest of your careers? DALY: I made a movie called The Grey, and there was a hardcore plane crash in that movie. We built a gimbal around a piece of the fuselage that we strapped Liam [Neeson] into and literally turned it, like, 360, and he got sick. Everyone got sick. The camera crew got sick. But it turned out pretty good. Worth it. I completely agree. Joe Carnahan directed that. DALY: He did. Great job. BLACK: I don’t have a single shot. I just have a challenging piece to sort of put together and edit afterwards, which was the whole car show in The Nice Guys. Six things going on at once, keeping the geography, not having time to get every angle you want, but somehow making it fit so that this guy exits frame here, and here he’s in the background with the subsequent shot coming in, and things like that. By the way, I’m assuming everyone in here has seen The Nice Guys, and if you haven’t, you need to absolutely watch that fucker immediately. Seriously, I believe it’s on HBO Max. BLACK: Buy the damn thing. [Laughs] My bad. You should obviously buy it. DOWNEY: God, it’s a hard question. I’m going to go a different direction. So early in my career, I did a lot of genre movies, and I did this absolutely fabulous one called House of Wax. I think it has to be probably the most memorable thing we did because at the end of the movie — this is a big spoiler alert, and I’m sure you’re all going to rush home and watch this — the house melts because it’s made of wax, right? So we’re there shooting it down in Australia, and I was at the monitor, and I’m like, “Wow, they really upped the fire this take.” And then I’m like, “And they’re not putting it out… What’s going on?” And all of a sudden they’re like, “Get out! Get out!” And we all had to get out. No one was hurt, but we all had to get out of the soundstage. We burned the entire soundstage down. It was kind of famous. It was the largest soundstage in Queensland, and we burned it down. I remember my boss at the time called me and I explained to him what was going on, and he’s like, “You’ve got to go back in and take pictures.” I was like, “There’s no “in” to go back to!” The entire thing was burned. So, it certainly is one of the more memorable set moments, I would say. What happened after it burned down? BLACK: Who got fired? DOWNEY: It was just a big insurance claim. Actually, the special effects, the spray they were using was not correct, and it was building it up as opposed to a flame-retardant thing. So, we just had to pivot, as you often have to do in production, and find other things to shoot. We were near the end of the shoot, which was good. I mean, we were burning the house down anyway, but yeah, it was pretty crazy. I’m very happy that everyone made it out without injuries. DOWNEY: Yeah, I don’t think I’d tell the story if it were dark.
Shane Black Is Still Waiting for the Shoe to Drop After ‘Lethal Weapon’

“I suffer from imposter syndrome of the first order.”

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover holding guns while looking at the camera in Lethal Weapon.Image via Warner Bros.

Shane, I want to jump backwards for you. Very early on, when you were 22 years old, I believe, you sold the script for Lethal Weapon, and you sold it for a lot of money for a 22-year-old. What do you remember about that time, and seriously, what is it like as a 22-year-old to sell a movie like that? It’s crazy. BLACK: It is crazy because I suffer from imposter syndrome of the first order, which is to say that every time I finish a script, I think, “Okay, I’ve written the last funny line I’m ever going to write.” How I did that, I don’t know. It seems to work. I don’t know why or how I did it. I can’t do it again. So, all these things would combine. So when I sold something, there’d be sort of a head scratch, looking for the guy who wrote the script that’s worth so much money to somebody. But then, it shifts, because then they try to change something, and it’s like, “Don’t you fucking touch that!” Because now you go, “Oh, I guess I do believe in it now.” So, it’s one of those things where you start with this kind of misguided passion. You write a script, you doubt yourself, and gradually you come to fall in love with and accept, about, I’d say, two weeks in, three weeks in, “I can do this again. I know how to do this.” That, to me, is what was unique about that time, was having to fight my way past the considerations of having made way too much money for someone my age, and say, “Okay, I can do this again. It wasn’t a fluke.” Because everyone would look at me like, “Yeah, what the hell do you think? We’ve been working at this for 10 years.” That’s the thing. Someone says, like, “I saw that show Charles in Charge, and that’s terrible. My writing is at least as good as that. I should be in TV!” So you’re saying that your slightly less shitty writing qualifies you, that they owe you a job? Because mediocrity is your goal. Just anything that you can get over on people. To me, it has to be great, and it has to be your best work. So, to me, the imposter syndrome was a killer because I always thought, “I’m not doing my best work.” But I had people to help me, like one guy who’s in the audience that I’ll introduce. He’s a wonderful director named Peter Hyams, who directed films like Capricorn One, Outland, 2010 [The Year We Make Contact], and he was my mentor for many years. If you hear me say something that sounds quaint and sort of pithy, it’s probably from him. I’m a fan of your work, also.
Shane Black Explains the Significance of Christmas in His Films

He was first inspired by a Robert Redford movie.

Joe Turner (Robert Redford) on the phone in ‘Three Days of the Condor’Image via Paramount Pictures

Why is it that you love putting Christmas in all your movies? BLACK: You could probably answer for me at this point. It’s because Christmas offers a sort of arena, doesn’t it? A sort of hush at the end of the year when lonely people are lonelier. The sense of an outsider looking in through a glass window with people who implicitly got a memo he skipped of how to just sort of live in the daily weeds of life — meet relatives, enjoy dinner, laugh and drink with friends — and a Christmas that seems all but unattainable to the guy outside in the snow. And yet, against the backdrop of people passing and singing and chatting, this person must then find his own personal version of Christmas, and it’s always going to be a weird, dark sort of dive that comes up with something that’s a little more precious because he had to dig deeper for it, those little nuggets of Christmas. In Los Angeles, I was walking late at night with the wind blowing, and there was a little plastic candle of the Virgin swinging on a line from a Mexican lunch wagon, and I looked at it in the dark like a beacon. I thought, in its own way, that’s so moving, this little blowing, cracked plastic Virgin. It’s as impressive and powerful in its own way as the 40-foot-tall Christmas tree on the lawn of the White House. So, I just love the sense of shared experience, the sort of retrospective it gives us, where we’re asked to take stock and look back on our lives. Also, I first saw it and its use in Sydney Pollack’s film Three Days of the Condor, and I thought it just had some magic to it. Now I don’t want to do it anymore because once you start to notice, like he asked that question, it’s like, okay, you noticed, and now it’s a one-trick pony. I gotta get the hell rid of it. This movie, I didn’t want to do Christmas, but I wanted to do winter in New York, so, okay, we can set it in February, or we could just do Christmas. Jules, I do have an individual question for you. I am a huge fan of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I’ve spoken to Roger Deakins about this, and Andrew [Dominik], and Roger was very specific with me about how he saw a longer cut of the film that was an extra 30 or 45 minutes, and how he loved that version. What are your thoughts on the longer version, and how the hell can I and everyone else in here watch it? DALY: I don’t even know if it exists. I think we ended up cutting the better movie. I do. I think that Andrew will always go long, in a beautiful way. It’s hard for him to get rid of anything that he loves, and so he held on tight to it for a long time. But we collectively, with Brad [Pitt], with Ridley [Scott], with Dede [Gardner], came to the conclusion of the best movie. Sure. I would still love to see the deleted scenes. DALY: Let me look. I’m moving next week, so I’ll look for you.

Play Dirty producer Jules Daly smiling and holding a microphone at a Q&A.Image via Trent Barboza

I swear to you, if you tell me I can see them, I will watch them tomorrow. The second you let me know. DALY: Okay. Deal. BLACK: Jesus Christ, dude, relax. [Laughs] I love that film.
Shane Black Is the Expert on Experts

The writer-director credits his passion to author Donald E. Westlake.

Play Dirty writer-director Shane Black talking into a microphone on stage at a Q&A.Image via Trent Barboza

Jumping into why I get to talk to you guys tonight. Shane, you’ve been talking about this for a long time. What is it about Parker that has had like, “I need to make this?” And what was it about the material for both of you guys that was like, “I want to be involved?” BLACK: There’s a kind of old-school sentiment, a feeling in the bones, that comes from when I read these books, I cut my teeth on this since I was literally nine, 10 years old, and this type of fiction, and the dance it represents between the author and the audience. [Donald E.] Westlake is the mystery writer. He’s the one that the people who sell a lot more books go to and say, “You’re the real one.” If you go to a mystery writer and say, “You’re a bestseller writer, who do you read?” They’ll go, “Come here. See, the good stuff behind the bar is Donald Westlake.” If you don’t know him, read him. It’s like a fine bourbon, this guy. He’s been writing for years. He died in 2008, and it’s a legacy that I get to be a part of. All these films that portrayed Parker in their various names, it’s our iteration of it. This woman, she’s so influential to me. I want to learn from her, so ask her something. She can talk, and I will learn. DOWNEY: Well, I can answer that. I love an expert; that’s why I love working with Shane. I’m sure you could tell if you weren’t already a fan of his, even in the few minutes you’ve been listening to him, he knows his shit. When it comes to this genre or this series of books, or honestly, all the Donald Westlake ones, including the ones he’s done as Richard Stark, which is what we took the Parker character from, he knows exactly how to cherry-pick the best things from it, the best lines of dialogue, and he does this with Chuck and Anthony [Bagarozzi], who he writes with, who are also amazing. BLACK: Let’s call out Chuck, the co-writer. Chuck Mondry. DOWNEY: What I think Shane has in common is that Parker, too, is an expert, and so I think you have an expert writing on an expert, and that’s just, like, double the pleasure for me. But I’ve known Shane a long time. We did a little movie together called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I remember we actually shot some at his house. I’d actually been to parties at his house in my younger years before that, and he has just bookshelves filled with all of these kinds of pulp novels, and he just knows this stuff like the back of his hand. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with this version of it. I got to be sort of a proxy to his work on Iron Man 3, and the way he shapes dialogue, the way he shapes character dynamics, and the crazy twists and turns that are only Shane, I was very excited to see how he was going to take the expert that is Parker as a character and bring him to life. So, I was just thrilled. BLACK: Jesus, thank you, Susan. DOWNEY: Did you learn anything, Shane, or did you just get really embarrassed? BLACK: You just sprayed me with my own scent, basically. DOWNEY: It’s a producer’s job some of the time.

Play Dirty executive producer Susan Downey smiling and talking on stage at a Q&A.Image via Trent Barboza

Jules, talk a little bit about what it was about this material that said, “I want to be involved.” DALY: Not that it wasn’t the material, but it was Shane for me. They seem to like you. DALY: Who writes like Shane Black? I mean, there are a couple of other good writers in town… DOWNEY: Chuck and Anthony. BLACK: Blessed. We are blessed. I am. I’ve been in this business for 40 years, and others have come and gone. When she says that, I’m well aware of the ticking and fleeting time. The fact that I’m still here, I’m not the world’s greatest writer, like you say, I’m just lucky, so blessedly lucky, to have an opportunity still to do this. And hopefully, if this succeeds, I’ll do it again. If it doesn’t, I love you all. Goodbye. DALY: Very dramatic. I’m confident you’re going to be doing this again. I’m very confident.
‘Play Dirty’ Puts a Cinematic Spin on Westlake’s Parker

“It’s the only thing that hasn’t been done. Let’s try it.”

Mark Wahlberg as Parker crouching and leaning against a car in Play Dirty.Image via Prime Video

So I love it when things happen that I’m not expecting, and the opening of this movie has things that I was not expecting. Talk a little bit about the twists and turns of the beginning and the horse race. That shit’s crazy. BLACK: We wanted to do it slightly different. The Parker books are wonderful, but they’re like popcorn. They’re skinny; you read one in the afternoon or a day, and then you read more. And after four of them, you sort of get a sense of this entire world, this backstage dance of a professional thief and his partners. So, what’s missing in any individual book is a scale. Even the movies. I love all the Parker movies that have been made, but it’s usually a bank heist, it’s an armored car, they’re up against a hitman, or it’s a jewel heist. We wanted to craft a slightly more cinematic and larger version without compromising, hopefully, the sense of who Parker is. There’s always going to be the purist who says, “You suck. You blew it. Parker doesn’t smile. There are no jokes. Fuck you!” And maybe there’s someone in the audience tonight, but we wanted to just make it lively. There are so many gloomy mood pieces about criminals these days, and Westlake, even the Parker books, are gritty, and as cruel as they can be, they’re supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a pact between Westlake, the author, and the reader of a cat-and-mouse, and so that’s why we scaled it up. It’s like, “It’s the only thing that hasn’t been done. Let’s try it.” Every production that you work on, there’s always going to be individual challenges you have to overcome. With this, what were some of the big challenges you guys had to overcome behind the scenes in terms of getting the green light? I know that you’ve been working on it for a while, and it’s been in development for a while. DOWNEY: Honestly, a green light is typically a budget conversation. It’s, “How are you going to mount this in a responsible way for the proper price?” And this did bring that challenge. This is a Christmas movie set in New York City that, to do it, Jules had to find a way to make Australia in the summer work. Now, we did get additional photography in New York for a few key things, which was always part of the production plan, but I would say that that was probably the biggest challenge.

Mark Wahlberg and Rosa Salazar wearing jackets while their backs face a car on fire in the street as Parker and Zen in Play Dirty.Image via Prime Video

DALY: Definitely. I read something today that referred to our end scene in the movie, in New York, as a CG shot. So, is that a compliment or not a compliment? Because we shot in New York. BLACK: Well, this is the problem with the internet. They hear the little snippets. They hear it’s shot in Australia, so “I know. I know. Me, me, me. I know it was shot in Australia, so I’m going to go online and wax poetic about how everything…” I wish people would read more than one thing before they become an expert on the thing that was talked about in what they read. DOWNEY: Yeah, that was Times Square. That was Radio City. Those are real. DALY: We were in New York. DOWNEY: That was actually Brooklyn Alley. DALY: Yeah, at one point. BLACK: The actors were all CG, though. I’m going to tiptoe as I ask this question. This film shows what happens when a bullet goes through an ear. I don’t know if anyone’s picking up what I’m saying. Again, I’m not mentioning any words, but I’m just curious, when did you write this? Was it before or…? BLACK: Oh, God, yeah. When was that? That shot occurred in the year of the election, right? 2024. We wrote that in 2023. So don’t go linking me to that shit! I didn’t say any names. I was just asking. Just talking about how damage happens when bullets go through ears.
‘Play Dirty’s Opening Credits Were Designed With a Bond Legend

It’s also packed with Easter eggs for the movie.

Everett Collection 

So, the opening credits of the film are really cool. Can you talk about how that came about and why you wanted to do them? BLACK: These guys made it come about. I said I wanted to do a credit sequence, not necessarily Bondian, and they got me the guy who does the best Bond ones. DALY: Danny Kleinman. BLACK: Danny Kleinman, who did Skyfall, the greatest pre-credit sequence ever in a movie, with that beautiful song by Adele. She got him to do what we could afford, which was a cartoon, but still great. [Laughs] DALY: But you guys had so much fun doing it together, you and Danny, right? Shane and Danny definitely built that sequence together. It was fun because we didn’t do that sequence until after we’d been shooting the film. BLACK: But you guys made it happen. I said it, and you said, “Well, let’s see what happens, because we don’t know where the money’s going to be.” And then you came back and said, “If you want it, you got it.” God bless you both. DOWNEY: That’s the way it works. But it was because it was important. You wanted to set the tone, and it was really a way to set the tone. There are wonderful, essentially, Easter eggs in it. When y’all go back and watch it again on Amazon, you get to see that there are so many pieces of the plot that ultimately unfold that are kind of hinted at, which you don’t know that, it just looks beautiful, and there’s great music, and it’s interesting and all that. But it was quite clever, and it really did set the mood and allowed, also, that time cut without it just being a cut to black. I think one of the reasons the film works so well for me is your supporting cast. I even really, really loved Nat Wolff’s performance. I’m curious how much with him was in the script and how much did he add a little flair on set because he delivered. DOWNEY: His big contribution, which he takes great pride in, was the neck brace. He requested the neck brace. BLACK: I think what he does is just live in the moment and sees what happens, and that’s the best acting advice you could give. You study the role, you figure it out, you learn the beats, you learn the dialogue, you think about your character, you live it. Then, when you step on stage, you forget everything and just live in the moment. Now you’re in the now. And that’s what he would do. He would just react and be in the now. So, that’s what I think made him so great.

Nat Wolff in Play DirtyImage via Prime Video

Talk a little bit about the rest of the supporting cast, because it really lives or dies with these other actors, Rosa [Salazar], LaKeith [Stanfield], and [Keegan-Michael Key]. How did you decide on this cast? I’m always curious behind the scenes about how much the studio is saying, “We would like to put these people in the movie.” How does that all get figured out? BLACK: No studio. DALY: No, they left it to Shane. Of course, there are budget reasons. BLACK: They said, “We can’t afford these guys.” [Laughs] DALY: But I will say that, maybe more than any director, and don’t be shy about this, every actor wants to try to be in a Shane Black movie. So, it was actually really easy to cast this movie, because everyone wanted to be in it. It was sometimes an availability thing, sometimes a budget thing, but we had a plethora of choices, and I think we landed right with our team, with our group. BLACK: Also, because of Australia, we had to add a couple of people who actually were registered in Australia in their version of SAG to get our rebate. So, we found Chai [Hansen] and Claire Lovering. They’re wonderful. Who loves Stan in the movie? That guy is on the most popular show in Australia right now, where he plays a merman. So, let’s get him over here. I love talking about editing because it’s where it all comes together, so talk a little bit about what it was like when you guys first got in the editing room and how the film possibly changed as a result of showing it to friends and family? BLACK: Well, I had these two helping, and that helps because the edit is where everything comes down. Look, if you hear a film wraps, “wrapped photography,” and you think, “Wow, they’re done now.” No, it’s like, “Wow, 15% there.” Because shooting a film is just shopping. You get the ingredients — you get your cucumber, your tomatoes, your lettuce, your croutons. Then you’ve got to go cook it, and the edit is the cooking process. We had three or four cooks. DALY: We also had Chris Lebenzon. BLACK: Oh, and Chris Lebenzon, the greatest editor ever. He’s probably my favorite editor ever. DOWNEY: He’s fantastic. He’s always willing to try stuff. I love the edit, as well. You really get to see things come to life, and you have to try things, you have to bring things down. It’s like a great puzzle because you’re just like, “What if we just took that little piece out,” and all of a sudden everything falls. It’s like a whole different rhythm comes into play. You can try things. And when you do have a good editor and when you do have an open-minded director, there are many possibilities. Sometimes you’re like, “Something’s not working. Here’s what we’re going for.” And then by tomorrow morning, your editor might have, like, three different versions to show you of something, just to see what we could do. So, it’s actually really fun. There’s a bit of discipline you have to do to it because you have to adhere to the time, but within that, there’s a lot of opportunity to play. BLACK: And we’re talking about like, “Give me two less frames here. Put three back over here,” because it’s that chancey. DOWNEY: I remember the scene after he drops Nat out. You stayed with Nat, initially, and you saw him get up and this and that, and then you kind of went inside, and then you were with Mark [Wahlberg] when he heard it. And we said, “What if we didn’t do that? Just stay with Mark, and he hears it in there for the first time.” I don’t know how it played tonight, but it usually gets a laugh. BLACK: Yeah, it plays like a Python bit. He walks away, and the guy goes, “I’m not dead!” DOWNEY: [Laughs] But it’s those kinds of things. It’s, “Whose point of view do you stay in?” Because if you’ve covered it, you’ve got a lot of options.

Claire Lovering, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, LaKeith Stanfield, and Mark Wahlberg in Play DirtyImage via Prime Video

That’s the reason why I love talking about editing, because that changes the entire scene, whether or not you are on which person. Sometimes, a shot that you remove changes everyone’s perspective on a character. For example, without going into spoilers, in the third act, somebody gets shot, and it’s off-screen, and the way you feel about a character might be different if you saw it being done. BLACK: Exactly. It’s like a piece of film that goes from here to, like, a mile away, and you get to walk along and tinker. There was always a guy in my neighborhood at midnight, he’d have his garage door open and a car in there, and he’s making noise and playing fucking music. Now I understand the tinkering, and it’s night, and, “Oh, shit, do I have to go home?” Because you’re just tinkering. It’s infinitely obsessive. It’s good for obsessive people. I’m a recovering alcoholic; I used to be obsessed with, “Where am I going to get my next drink?” I just shifted it over here. So, hopefully this works. DOWNEY: You know what Robert always says? I think he got this from [Jon] Favreau; it’s a very Favreau statement. Certain people, and I’m definitely one of them, like to pick fly shit out of pepper. That’s the phrase, and I am definitely one of those people. BLACK: Details.
‘Sherlock Holmes 3’ Would Take the Franchise in a “Different Direction”

The trio share what’s in the works for the future.

Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law chat on the street as Sherlock and Watson in 2009’s Sherlock Holmes by Guy Ritchie.Image via Warner Bros.

We’re almost out of time, and I’m going to go down the line because I just have a few individual questions, if you don’t mind. Susan, what can you tease about what’s coming up at Team Downey? DOWNEY: Well, if all goes according to plan, we have actually a little psychological horror movie that we’re hoping to be doing before the end of the year, based on Paul Tremblay’s bestselling novel, A Head Full of Ghosts. You guys made two really good Sherlock Holmes movies, and I’m just curious, how close did you guys ever get to the starting line of a third one, or has the script never been there? Or was it scheduling? What ended up happening? BLACK: Is it upcoming? DOWNEY: God, that is loaded. How much do I give? We came pretty close at one point, and I think I am grateful that we didn’t make that version of it. I won’t go into what that was, which isn’t meant to sound cryptic. It just didn’t work out timing-wise, because we couldn’t get it in before Jude [Law] was going to be unavailable. I think it was a good thing that we all stepped back. And then there was a big old pandemic and all that kind of stuff. I would love to bring a third Sherlock to the world. I really would. And we’ve been playing with it for a long time. We’ve been talking about a slightly different direction. It’s always been kind of set in America, and whether that’s a good idea or not, I’m not sure, but I love it. I love that idea. So, I would just love to do it. It’s just hard. It’s been a while, the bar is really high, or at least Robert [Downey Jr.] has set the bar really high, so I don’t know. Do you guys want to see a third Sherlock? BLACK: Or a fourth Iron Man. DOWNEY: Double header. I have so many things to respond to that one. Jules, you are doing two projects that I’m very curious about. One is Matchbox, and it’s being directed by Sam Hargrave, who’s done the Extraction movies, and I believe it’s his first thing outside of Extraction. And you have John Cena as your lead. What can you tease people about it? DALY: It’s Matchbox on steroids, I would say, action-wise. I would definitely say it’s the best and most fun action movie I’ve ever made in a PG-13 way. Cena was great. He was great with Jessica Biel. They’ve got this incredible chemistry, and it’s just a whole lot of fun, with stunts that are pretty off the charts. With Sam Hargrave directing, there are going to be stunts that are off the charts? I am shocked. BLACK: What’s the other one? I’m curious about War Party, which is Andrew Dominik again. It says “plot unknown.” It’s described as an adventure film about Navy SEALs with Tom Hardy. DALY: Tom Hardy is no longer attached to that one. He kind of aged out. This happens. I don’t know, it’s hard because it’s a true story about a Navy SEAL, and he’s been struggling with how he tells that story with Andrew. So, it’s still in play. Got it. Thank you for the update. Shane, the most important question I have of the night: what are you currently writing or working on? Because as a fan of yours, I’m curious what’s going on behind the scenes. BLACK: I’m hoping to be lucky enough to write an original script that someone gives me the money to sort of control and make, per my own vision of it and my own standards for it. So in other words, I gotta keep the budget to, like, $20, not $150. If I can make a movie that’s tough and character-driven and also whimsical and hysterical and underwater and supernatural and outer spacey, whatever it is, I just know that there’s a whimsical kind of thing about the death of magic and life that I want to write. Could someone write it for me, please? Whatever comes out, I’ll know, because now that this beast is lumbering away, it’s out of its cage, and I’m waving goodbye to Parker. It’s time to go and get the cabin and start writing something new. You’ve written a bunch of scripts throughout your career, and I’m sure a number of them haven’t been made. If you could get the financing to make something that has not been able to get off the ground for whatever reason, what’s that one script that’s in the desk that you would really love to bring to life? BLACK: There’s an old piece I did, neither version worked, but there’s a version that could, a vintage 1980s version, set in the ‘80s, of Shadow Company, the very first script I ever sat down and wrote. It could be scary. It could be really creepy. And it could be about a generation having stepped away, given the passage of time and the reflection and the retrospective that gives us about Vietnam. I’d love to do, potentially, a Vietnam horror film again. The last one I can think of was House, right? Vietnam horror. Oh, Jacob’s Ladder.

Release Date

October 1, 2025

Runtime

125 Minutes

Director

Shane Black

Writers

Donald E. Westlake, Shane Black, Anthony Bagarozzi

Producers

James W. Skotchdopole, Jules Daly, Marc Toberoff, Robert Downey Jr.

Evidence

Documentary essayist Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature Evidence is, artistically speaking, both a concerted continuation and marked departure. On the one hand, it furthers her career-long penchant for braiding political rhetoric, environmental portraits and American mythology; on the other, it filters these observations through a distinctly personal lens, even featuring a rare on-screen appearance for the director.
The film opens with Schmitt showcasing an impressive collection of dolls, childhood gifts that her father brought back from frequent international business trips. Their national diversity and craftsmanship is impressive—most adorn traditional garb, some possess the ability to blink—yet they all translate the devotion of an otherwise physically absent father. However, Schmitt has more of a gripe with the company he was representing than the fact that he was constantly away. Her father worked as the head of international for the John M. Olin Foundation, a manufacturer of munitions and chemicals that has one of the most environmentally noxious legacies in American history. It’s been responsible for the poisoning of countless communities (notably those with large Black, Brown and impoverished residents), but beyond that, it’s also funneled money into a multitude of conservative causes (spurred, apparently, by Olin’s moral outrage over the student occupation of his alma mater Cornell in 1969). This long list of endowments includes efforts to appoint conservative Supreme Court Justices and countless texts that argue against equity itself, including the infamous Bell Curve.
Conspiratorial thinking, fascistic indoctrination and rampant scapegoating are currently emblematic of American ideals. Schmitt carefully traces Olin’s direct hand in orchestrating our current discontent on ecological and political fronts alike. Though replete with a wide variety of sources that support this thesis—which the filmmaker often cites by simply pointing to the excerpts of physical books that she’s underlined in pencil—the narrative is refracted through her own perspective, offering insight into her staunchly gendered upbringing and subsequently complex relationship with motherhood, the nuclear family, property ownership and patriarchy.
Schmitt and I spoke over coffee in Lincoln Center Plaza the day before Evidence’s final NYFF screening on September 30 at 4:30pm. Below, our conversation encompasses the origins of this years-spanning project; how the right “despises the self-esteem movement”; and working with her partner, musician Jeff Parker of the eclectic post-rock group Tortoise, on the film’s improvisational score.
Filmmaker: How long have you known that you wanted to make a film about the John M. Olin Foundation? What made this the perfect moment?
Schmitt: I don’t really think of it as a film about the John M. Olin Foundation. That piece actually came later. I knew I wanted to make a film that kind of picked up from my last film [Purge This Land] in certain themes. That film played with this tie between living within political spaces in a more personal way, and I knew I wanted to talk about this kind of encroachment. I knew I wanted to use these childhood objects. Out of that came the focus and the reading about this one foundation, which is sort of typical of an era. I don’t know if it’s even the beginning, but definitely a fulcrum of how corporate money was used to influence intellectual and ideological ideas. As I did research, I was like, “Oh, this is actually very coherent in terms of what they specifically funded.” But the beginning of the film was maybe six years ago when these objects came from my mom. I knew I wanted to do something about my childhood and the company was a big part of it. I looked at the EPA sites and then it expanded into how to talk about this other impact, which emerged over the five, six years I worked on it.
Filmmaker: So when you first decided that you wanted to make a film about the corporate funding of these conservative think tanks, your father’s relationship with the John M. Olin Foundation wasn’t at the forefront?

Schmitt: No. I mean, his relationship to his job and growing up in corporate America was, but not this specific relationship. But when I grew up, everything had “Olin” on it. We had notepads and tote bags, there were summer events and t-shirts. Everything was kind of branded. It was a huge part of his life, especially when he started traveling as much as he did. But the part of the film that I finished first was the family essay towards the end of the film.
Filmmaker: You began filming some of the landscape shots in 2019, but you’ve also said that the heightened domestic realm of the COVID lockdown caused some fundamental changes to the film. Can you elaborate on that?
Schmitt: My thoughts around gender and parenting have started since I met my stepdaughter and then had my son. I started the film like I’ve started my other films, which is through landscape. I did this trip to the industrial sites, I can’t remember exactly when, but it was right before COVID hit, maybe the winter before. I expected to continue more in that vein. Instead, I was home with these objects and at the same time my immediate family was very present in this sort of spaceship of our house. I just started filming. Being home, you get to know your house and the seasons of it very well. When you have a kid of that age — he would have been like eight at the time — the house fills with his emerging identities and writings and objects of his own. Then having these things from my childhood just seemed like an interesting parallel, though I didn’t totally know what to do. But the title, Evidence, came really early. This is something that’s been in all my films, but I wanted to see the traces of these political systems in how people live, how gender shows up, how family structures show up. Then I did a lot of reading that really, really helped me focus on what exactly I was interested in. Sophie Lewis has a couple books that were really influential, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now. Melinda Cooper has a really amazing book on family structures and social policy. Jacqueline Rose has a great book on motherhood. DW Winnicott, who I just think is incredible around parenting and childing, helped me articulate some of what I had always felt growing up and then see how that connected, especially with the Melinda Cooper book, to very intentional choices by political forces.
Filmmaker: It’s clear that you undertook a significant research process here. I’d be interested to know if there were any interesting morsels of knowledge that you weren’t able to fit into the narrative.
Schmitt: There are so many little cul-de-sacs. One I’ve thought a lot about is for a long time I had a whole section on empathy and how much the right despises the self-esteem movement and just the word empathy.
Filmmaker: Isn’t there a Charlie Kirk clip about that that’s been going around?
Schmitt: Yeah, exactly. That’s been around the last few weeks, but it’s so true that these concepts of society are based on empathy. Alfie Kohn wrote a lot, and has been under attack a lot, for these ideas of education. So I went deeper into that and foundation-specific stuff; there were so many dark rooms and specific people, judges and cases. I spent a lot of time tracking case histories or specific appointments. It’s really important, but it was so dense to try and get across. So I ended up with these few case studies. I really didn’t want to get too far away from this main idea about family, so everything had to keep coming back to that and be, I guess, tolerable enough for people to exist within it to get to this other space—the tie between body, environment, family and control. But I wish I’d left those three minutes about empathy.

Filmmaker: There are sparse clips of archival film material here, like from PBS’s Firing Line. What made you choose these specific visuals, particularly when you don’t necessarily utilize an external archive in your work very much?
Schmitt: It’s interesting, almost every film [of mine] except the very first one has little moments of archive. I felt like I was creating my own archive of the domestic space and archive of the natural space, so I touched on the images that they intentionally created. The books are also an archive of what was really out there, you know? I found these things along the way and some of them I just thought were so interesting. I like the part of the video that goes to the audience and shows who’s listening to this and who it is impacting. I think it’s important to understand how mass-marketed so much of this became. Dobson’s [Dare to Discipline] was a popular book. It traces back to a certain evangelical movement, but I hear friends say things about rigor and discipline, both in academia and family, that really trace to the same ideas.
Filmmaker: You also teach, and I’m curious in what ways you’ve noticed the landscape of higher education respond to this record. You certainly feel the pronounced infiltration of these conservative donors and their interests in academia; I, for one, am glad I didn’t end up attending Columbia. Yet the major conservative mouthpieces continuously bash universities and liberal arts programs.
Schmitt: Yeah, there’s this whole narrative around the liberal bias of education. I don’t even know if that even necessarily holds up, but there is study after study that shows education leads to critical thought, which leads to a certain kind of liberalism. I teach at a very small school. I think there’s two things, like one of which it’s very true. Lewis Powell wrote about business and corporate leaders taking positions in education directly. That has had an unbelievable impact. You can see it throughout higher ed, you can also see it throughout arts administrations and donors. You can control through the influence of money and you see that play on again and again. Then the fear and the personal risk of academics has just gone up. I feel relatively protected because of where I’m teaching, but I know other academics and friends who don’t feel protected at all. I think people were really being asked to look at the ways they teach and what a classroom was intended for and what it means to be in a critical conversation. For a lot of academics whose sense of self was based on their writing, that was actually really challenging. One of the things about the film is you start to look at your own practices, and that’s hard. I have been surprised to watch academics themselves kind of echo out some of these hierarchical conservative thought processes in reaction to what they felt like they were being challenged to do. A lot of it comes under ideas of rigor, discipline and expectation, this kind of real degradation of who the student is today. I don’t have the same experience as a lot of people. I think it’s been a tough time to be young and people are coming out of education systems that have been challenged. I really love my students and I think there’s a density to the way they’re coming at things that I really appreciate. I was saying last night to someone that most of the institutions I was brought up to respect, whether it be higher ed, the legal system, or the government, are deeply under attack. That’s been hard to see. At the same time, I think there are these moments of self-examination that have just proven harder, particularly for white liberals to address, than they should have been.
Filmmaker: Some of what you’re saying reminds me of this interview you did out of Berlin with Ted Fendt and Christiane Büchner. You brought up the need to understand our role in these institutions, how we play into these systems of oppression that somehow feel conducive to our own way of life. What conversations are you maybe having with your students or your children about understanding our place in these systems and how we navigate the pressure to conform or reject it?
Schmitt: Everybody’s navigating in their way. I think my teaching has changed a lot in the last 10 years. COVID introduced all these other ways to think about being together around knowledge. I hope my students would say that they see that reflected in the terms of the roles we’re playing in the classroom. I think one of the hardest things as a thinker, an artist, a person, a parent, is to keep a lot of generosity towards yourself but also keep some attention to questioning the things you’re participating in, being aware that it’s always gonna be a compromise. I mean, film festivals are a compromised system. Academia is; I teach at an art school that’s incredibly expensive but is actually one of the places I most love. I own a house.
Filmmaker: Yeah, you bring up home ownership in the film directly.

Schmitt: Exactly. Property is a system that as you get older, it gets harder and harder if you don’t own property. And participating in where you buy and how you do that in almost any city is really complicated. Generally, power dynamics in the US are all organized around capitalist thinking. There are even so few US art collectives, because they’re almost impossible to keep going in terms of funding, but also in terms of psychology. All psychology is basically [yearning to] get attention; in the US and in the West, [you get this] from the name you make, from making a body of work. Having a body of work is actually something to grapple with, what that means in terms of ambition. I’m watching my child and stepdaughter navigate ideas of ambition in a world that’s not offering them a lot of confidence in the future.
Filmmaker: How old are they now?
Schmitt: My stepdaughter is 24 and my son’s 14. Two really strange ages. One graduated high school during COVID and one was in third grade. Then we were impacted by the fires, the impact of climate disaster. They have a very, very different relationship to the excellence that I was pushed very hard to [achieve]. Part of the reason I appear in the film, which is much more than I have in the other films, is to at least acknowledge that these are things I grapple with and deal with all the time. The first place you start with parenting is how you were parented. When parenting is hard, which it often is, you have to really ask where your instincts are coming from. Instinct is always a cultural thing.
Filmmaker: You obviously have a lot of ideas, but they’re so impressively streamlined in the film. You bring viewers down a road that is very easy to follow, even though the ubiquity of this system is somewhat claustrophobic. I know that you typically take a couple of years to edit your film, so I’m curious about the process of distilling all this information here.
Schmitt: Editing my films takes a really long time, a minimum two years usually. This one took longer in some ways because there was a big gap. I started editing in 2020, but I had to put it aside. I took on a huge administrative load during COVID and there was a lot of care happening, so I didn’t work as much. I did a lot of filming around the house because that is joyful. I have a whole process where I do paper outlines, then I speak to the images, then I edit out. I cut the voiceover down as much as possible–there’s still a lot of it, but I try–and then I just keep reworking it. When I started the project, there are certain things that wouldn’t have been as well known, like the Federalist Society. Now there have been so many great articles, books and ideas about dark money and I could rely a little bit more on some knowledge. But this boulder of history was rolling down the hill. I added a line about Elon Musk and the election right before the film was finished. Even looking back on the film now, I feel like it’s starting to be a bit of a document of a time, but it is a little bit about what’s led to where we’re at. I wanted the film to be useful as a document in 10 years–if that exists [laughs]–looking back on this time and these ideas about family structure and history. All of my films dealing with the US have been somewhat topical, but I also want people to see that this is embedded from the beginning. It’s not about what happened in 2016, it’s what happened when we decided to write a constitution based on these compromises; what happened when we allowed land grants to give most of the country to four corporations. These decisions along the way have led us to where we are. Recovery only comes from really acknowledging that.
Filmmaker: I think the US is notoriously incapable of reckoning with the past.
Schmitt: I mean, it’s not the only country that has cyclical political amnesia, but it is loud. It’s so built into its mythology, this reinvention and newness. We sprung from the earth in a place that was already deeply inhabited. I started to think of the pace of the film a little bit spatially, like where you go and contemplate things in a way that feels useful. You can call it meditative. There’s something about a classroom, where you come together for a certain amount of time. There are spaces where we are supposed to collectively experience something together.

Filmmaker: To your point about how this film is starting to feel of a certain time, I wonder if any of these very big recent news stories have impacted your perspective on the film or if audiences have been bringing up anything about Charlie Kirk, the demonization of trans people, the Epstein files and pedophilic conspiracy theories?
Schmitt: It premiered on February 16th in Berlin, not quite a month after the inauguration. In those screenings in Berlin and then at Cinéma du Réel, it did feel like every night would feed into the next day in that way. My point was this is a system, so it makes these different things.
Each audience would be filled with [thoughts about] whatever executive order was happening, including the trans-exclusive executive orders. But because it was overseas, you were either making useful alignments to something that’s happening across the world, or it’s like, “those crazy Americans!” I haven’t shown that much in the US. I’ve shown in Camden and this is the other screening. I don’t actually have a lot of US screenings lined up. I think sometimes the Q&A can come where people are like, “Well, what’s next?” I do think we’re in a different moment where maybe we’re at the bottom of the hill and everything’s crashed and now what? Are we okay? Can we sustain? It’s also much worse than anyone imagined. It’s just accelerating, and this is such a precarious time in terms of how much is going to be turned on the cities. It was important for me to name really explicitly what’s happening now in terms of trans legislation. I don’t know what the next step is, but it’s terrifying. It’s kind of an incomprehensible time in terms of what narratives can be put out there and let stand. That’s another institution I grew up believing in — some collective reality. It doesn’t feel like there’s a collective reality anymore. Another use of the film and films like it is to help people affirm, [to not feel] gaslit and crazy. I think 15 years ago around political films people were like, “You’re preaching to the converted.” That’s okay. I think giving space for people to reaffirm things they know or help them make connections across things is really useful in the same way coming together for a piece of music is really useful.
Filmmaker: Since you just brought up music, my final question will be about working with your partner on the score. How much did the influence of his solo albums or work with Tortoise and other groups impact the sound that was created here?
Schmitt: I very intentionally didn’t have music in my earlier films. He wrote music for Purge This Land that very intentionally echoed a certain kind of Black creative music in Detroit and Chicago. For this film, he’d been working on The New Breed and solo albums. He’d been improvising for them, so he gave me some of the things he hadn’t used to play with. Then he looked at some of it and made some other pieces and did some improvising around that. He would work it and give it to me and then I would work it and we’d talk back and forth. It felt a little bit autonomous and reactive, I guess, rather than a traditional, “Here’s the film, score the film.” I’d lived with that music for the years he was making and recording it. His studio is the other half of the garage [laughs]. It felt very much like it was part of the home.
Filmmaker: That feels perfectly apt.
Schmitt: I had a couple of more songs in there and I took it apart a little bit at the end. It felt like it would come and go, the ambient really felt like another arc. He was very generous just to let me play with things.

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with the directors behind Shudder’s V/H/S/Halloween at Fantastic Fest 2025.

Kick off October with a brand-new installment of the V/H/S franchise, with segments dedicated to honoring the spookiest time of the year!

The directors discuss how Shudder and the franchise allow them to unleash all their weird and take us behind the scenes for each of their segments.

The V/H/S franchise is back with a new installment this fall. V/H/S/Halloween is a collection of Halloween-themed videotapes that unleash twisted, blood-soaked tales and turn trick-or-treat into a fight for survival. As the latest addition to the long-running found-footage series, the film brings together directors Bryan M. Ferguson for “Diet Phantasma,” Paco Plaza for “Ut Supra Sic Infra,” Anna Zlokovic for “Coochie Coochie Coo,” Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman for “Home Haunt,” Casper Kelly for “Fun Size,” and Alex Ross Perry for “Kidprint,” each offering their own Halloween tricks. For all the blood and chaos, V/H/S is just as defined by its extremes behind the camera, where freedom under Shudder and risk go hand in hand. “It requires you to be present in the moment, at every moment,” Norman said of making a V/H/S segment, continuing:
“Any mistake you make is going to wreck your segment because you have five days, and you don’t have enough money for those days. You cannot make a good V/H/S segment as a mediocre filmmaker. You cannot. It’s like a storm, and they find talent who can withstand it.”
Norman’s partner and co-director, Pitt-Norman, likened it to “the ultimate warrior competition,” adding, “the complete and utter freedom of creativity with V/H/S we will, as filmmakers, not experience probably ever again.” And Shudder is the horror-lover’s platform that provides a home for these now-annual October treats, along with producers like Josh Goldbloom, allowing the self-proclaimed “weirdos” a place to let their nightmares run wild. Ferguson says, “They actually champion bizarre ideas, which is so unusual,” adding, “They just want to make the best thing possible for psychos like us.” In addition to genre classics and horror movie originals like Host, Mad God, and Speak No Evil, Shudder now brings together filmmaking favorites and new voices in the horror sphere each year for feature-length anthologies with V/H/S, becoming a new tradition for many viewers. Being one of those filmmakers is both liberating, with the boundaries they’re able to push, and a ton of pressure. As Perry says:
“I’m watching [V/H/S] no matter what. No matter who’s making them, no matter what the theme is, I’m watching it, and I know there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other people who are like, ‘Whatever it is, I’m watching it. I trust the name. I trust these producers to curate.’ And knowing this will be seen, it’s not like this is going to come out, and who cares? No, all the nerds are going to watch this right away, and I know that because that is me. That’s a lot of pressure because this has to be a part of somebody’s very good October night, and you only get so many of those. There’s nothing worse than when it’s October 20th, and you’re down to the wire, and the movie you choose is bad.”
At Fantastic Fest 2025, Collider’s Perri Nemiroff spoke with all the directors of V/H/S/Halloween about the freedom and risk that come with making a V/H/S short. The directors discuss how Shudder’s support allows filmmakers to go weirder and bloodier, and how they each built Halloween into their stories, and the challenge of balancing scares with the holiday’s sense of fun. Check out the full interviews below, along with a time index for key points throughout each converation.

Diet Phantasma, Ut Supra Sic Infra & Coochie Coochie Coo Interview

Perri’s conversation with Bryan M. Ferguson, Paco Plaza, and Anna Zlokovic.

00:20 – “V/H/S Favors the Bold”

02:40 – Zlokovic on Filming With Friends

04:36 – Zlokovic Couldn’t Believe Shudder Allowed This

05:27 – Casting Authenticity for Found Footage

09:43 – Plaza on Evolving His Craft With V/H/S

11:40 – Capturing the Spirit of Halloween

Fun Size, Home Haunt & Kidprint Interview

Perri’s conversation with Micheline Pitt-Norman, R.H. Norman, Casper Kelly, and Alex Ross Perry.

00:22 – Why We Love Shudder

03:09 – “You Can’t Be Mediocre Doing V/H/S”

07:26 – Kelly Shares His Breakstory Moment

08:22 – Designing Fun Size

08:57 – Crafting an Epic Home Haunt

10:23 – Justin Martinez Brings the V/H/S Scares to Life

12:54 – What Lines Won’t V/H/S Cross?

14:16 – Blending Kills with Holiday Magic

16:55 – Crafting Pop Horror in Segments

V/H/S/Halloween is available to stream now on Shudder.

Release Date

October 3, 2025

Runtime

115 Minutes

Director

Paco Plaza, Casper Kelly, Alex Ross Perry, Bryan M Ferguson, Anna Zlokovic, R.H. Norman

Writers

Anna Zlokovic, Bryan M. Ferguson, Micheline Pitt, R.H. Norman

Producers

James Harris, Michael Schreiber, Brad Miska

Jade Croot in Rabbit Trap

What does the sublime sound like? For Graham Reznick, serving as the sound designer for Bryn Chaney’s psychological thriller Rabbit Trap (available on digital Sept. 30, from Magnolia Pictures) was a sustained exercise in experimenting with aural narrative storytelling, searching for the same sorts of subliminally haunting sound effects that alternately entrance and unsettle the film’s musician protagonists.
When Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) move to a remote house in rural Wales, they seek to draw sounds out of the local landscape, with Daphne interpolating and manipulating Darcy’s field recordings to create experimental compositions marrying electronic distortion effects to more organic sounds from their surroundings. But the music they make after recording strange and very potentially mystical vibrations in a nearby forest awakens local ancient folk magic and the couple suddenly discover a nameless child (Jade Croot) on their doorstep. At first a welcome visitor, the child gradually infiltrates their lives and proves resistant to escalating attempts to free themselves from its influence.
Chaney’s feature directorial debut is a terrific showcase for how the alchemical qualities of sound design and composition can deepen a film’s atmosphere; as the couple’s unease and befuddlement is amplified by unexplainable events, Reznick’s sound design—intertwined so deeply with Lucrecia Dalt’s musical score that the two often feel inextricable—grows increasingly hallucinogenic. Located between bucolic nature sounds and metallic drone ambience, with the couple’s analog tape machines capturing both even as they become progressively degraded and distorted, Reznick’s sound design ably carries Rabbit Trap’s central idea: destabilized with enough force, a sound can take on a life of its own.
Also known for his work as a writer, director, and actor, Reznick is a long-time collaborator of Larry Fessenden, having made his feature directorial debut—the vivid and psychedelic I Can See You—under the auspices of Glass Eye Pix, Fessenden’s New York-based independent film studio, in 2008. Reznick has been prolific as a sound designer on productions by friends and peers like Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), Jim Mickle (Stake Land), and Jon Watts (Clown), but he’d taken an extended hiatus from professional sound design in recent years to focus on other projects. With Rabbit Trap now available digitally, Reznick spoke to Filmmaker Magazine—coincidentally, on the 10-year anniversary of the release of Until Dawn, the horror video game he co-wrote with Fessenden—about the challenges of working in sound on studio productions, the vast auditory magic of mushrooms and the vibrant colors of sounds and frequencies.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Filmmaker: I first became familiar with your work through Glass Eye Pix, where you oversaw the sound design on early features from Ti West, Jim Mickle and Glenn McQuaid while making your own feature debut. I know you hadn’t worked as prolifically in sound design for a number of years before Rabbit Trap, but I’m curious why that was.
Reznick: So, Ti and I grew up and made films together. We started working with Larry Fessenden at Glass Eye Pix in New York. In about 2015 or so, Until Dawn came out, which Larry and I wrote together. I was writing and directing enough that I took a break from sound design—for years, actually, except for my own work. I had always really enjoyed sound design; because of working with Larry and Ti, being a filmmaker amongst a group of peers coming out of NYU and Glass Eye Pix, I had a kind of access that you might not normally have coming to a project as a sound designer at a studio or a post house. It was the greatest thing in the world, being able to work with my friends and push the sound part of the process forward in a way that I might not get to if I was just one person assigned to a project. Because I was a filmmaker, that helped directors trust me to try things that they might not have otherwise. I was certainly very green and not intending to be a sound designer professionally; it was just something that I could do, and friends asked me to work on sound design because of that.

Anyway, I didn’t do a whole lot of sound design for hire for years—and it wasn’t because the opportunities weren’t there. I was asked to do it fairly often, for people I would have liked to have done it for, but I had a TV show I was doing called Deadwax and couldn’t work on any projects during that period. There was also work that just didn’t work out. I had a directing project set up with Daniel Noah and Elijah Wood at SpectreVision we spent a long time trying to make. Daniel and Elijah are great guys and loyal cheerleaders for people they work with. They’re constantly trying to get people involved, trying to get things moving, trying to get projects going, and I trust them.
When they came to me in 2023 about Rabbit Trap, they said,”We have a script we really like. It’s a first-time director named Bryn Chaney, and we think you’ll really like the script. Would you be interested in coming on board to do sound design?” I had a bunch of video-game things going on at that point, and I was like, “I’ll read it and check it out.” And I loved the script so much; it spoke to everything that I want to do as a sound designer, as well as everything that I’ve liked doing as a director and as a writer. So, I spoke to Bryn and we got along great. I realized, “Okay, this is the kind of project that I would love to be a sound designer on, because I can work with Bryn as a creative peer.” All the stars aligned for me to say yes to the project and, two years later, here we are.
Filmmaker: What had your experiences been like since those early days at Glass Eye Pix? I have to imagine your choices are often more limited, to an extent, on productions where sound design isn’t as intrinsic to the story as it was on Rabbit Trap.
Reznick: I got used to a particular way of doing things, being involved from the script stage with people I knew very well, and could have conversations about the sound design with prior to production, during production, then in post-production as well. In my experience of independent film over the past 20 years—though it changes constantly and is also different from studio films that approach things more holistically—an independent film is produced, then made, then they think about post-production. Once they get into editing, they think about sound design; they either make a deal at the beginning for a post house that does sound or start looking after filming. For a lot of films, that’s fine; lots of films don’t use sound as a creative narrative element but rather to support the film. A lot of times, you can get away with structuring your schedule and business deals that way. But we wouldn’t have been able to do the kind of sound design we did on Glass Eye Pix films without having thought about it at the outset. The budgets were incredibly low, but I was being paid to be almost on staff, in a way, so I was thinking about sound for four or five upcoming movies at the same time over the course of a year. I could start piecing things together and putting things aside, so it wasn’t as if I was jumping in for six weeks once the picture was locked, then mixing. It was an ongoing process of collecting material, working with directors and sometimes even adjusting the script itself to incorporate what they expected out of sound. I’d say that’s the best case scenario, for any element of filmmaking. For instance, there are sections of the script for The Inekeepers where it just reads, “Sara Paxton is sitting in a ballroom at the hotel, holding a microphone up and recording ghosts,” for three minutes. There were elements of that scene that Ti and I talked about that weren’t necessarily in the script, but we knew what we were going to do and could plan ahead of time. Part of me knew how good we had it. In retrospect, there was a very potent scene of people that we could all draw upon. We were all very close to being out of college and didn’t need to make a lot of money, so we could ask each other to work for free constantly.
Filmmaker: Rabbit Trap is set in the mid-1970s, and your designed audio was initially created using gear or methods that would have been available in that era: manipulated reel-to-reel tape, speed-modded cassette players, degraded tape loops. There’s a certain analog fetishism to the sound design, which feels true of plenty of the films you made with Glass Eye Pix as well. Has that been personally important to you?
Reznick: Absolutely. I think analog fetishism is a good way to put it. It’s definitely not frivolous; it’s part of the underlying experience. It goes back to The House of the Devil and other projects like Deadwax: the medium is the message. Ti and I would always talk about how, as soon as you shoot something on film, it looks real. It didn’t look real before, but now it looks like a real movie. Most people alive right now have experienced some amount of the analog world. There are younger people who have grown up almost entirely in the digital world, so this will probably go away at some point, but Brian Eno made a quip about how everybody hates the medium for its flaws but, 10 years later, it’s what they celebrate the medium for. [“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”] I have no problem leaning into that. To me, it’s similar to the idea of your personal style as an artist being a collection of your “flaws.”
What was appealing to me about working on this film was exactly this: the allure of being able to manipulate audio to the point of making it something unknown and unique. Being able to do that in the digital world is very easy and fun, but it almost always has a digital quality to it; to do it in the analog world is a different thing entirely. It’s a form of athleticism. You practice at it, and you become better at it as you do it. For example: with the opening monologue in the film, which the child says while there’s an oscilloscope on the screen, we had a recording of that monologue from the studio that she recorded in. It was sent to us, I processed it a bit originally to clean it up and make it sparklingly crystal-clear. We ran it to tape, then ran it back into the computer 15 times, and each time we would mess with the sound. We’d shake the reels and play with the Azimuth, with the way it sat on the playback heads, then stack those up and carefully intercut between them. We weren’t being analog absolutists, but rather using both analog and digital tools in a modern way to carry the story.

Filmmaker: What can you share about that array of analog and digital tools you were using on Rabbit Trap, particularly in terms of reel-to-reel cassette players and tape loops?
Reznick: I love collecting gear, getting new toys to play with, but I don’t have the kind of money to get fancy equipment. I also don’t want to, because I like abusing the equipment to see what happens with it. I’m the same way with video, but especially in audio, it’s exciting to see how far you can push a piece of equipment past its intended use. The whole ethos, for some companies, is creating gear that takes you to that point right away. I don’t want to break their gear, but they allow me to use their gear in a way that I don’t have to push it that far.
This company, Landscape in Brooklyn, makes this piece of gear, called the HC-TT, which is a hand-cranked cassette tape transport. You put a tape in, and you can crank it like reel-to-reel; most of the fairy-circle voices in the film were made using this. I recorded my seven-year-old singing a few minutes of the theme song to Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse; after cranking those snippets back and forth very slowly in the HC-TT, I ran them through an array of guitar pedals, including one that allows you to simulate low voltage, as if the power is shifting in and out. I put all that together in Pro Tools with other plug-ins, and it created those little voices you hear throughout the film. It took several days of recording, editing and layering audio to create that effect. I also used the Stereo Field, which has these touch-capacitive metal plates you can touch with your hands to create a circuit. I could put anything organic on it, so I would run audio and electrical currents through mushrooms, flowers, leaves. I would manipulate the mushrooms, then use that noise as a starting point for a lot of the textures you hear in the film.
Filmmaker: Did different mushrooms create different sounds?
Reznick: I went to Ralph’s and got as many different mushrooms as I could. I wasn’t in Wales, and I didn’t think I could have imported Welsh mushrooms. But the larger mushrooms were better, because they could cover a larger expanse of the sensor, so you could touch and manipulate them a little more easily to create sounds as you’re running an electrical current through them. Learning how to manipulate audio, you realize quickly you can turn any sound into anything else with enough manipulation. You can get to any finish line from any starting point.
What’s exciting is finding certain audio that thematically or emotionally resonates with particular narratives. Using mushrooms allowed us to create a guardrail, to see what sounds we could get out of them. I enjoy finding places for spectogram material—inspired by Aphex Twin, who’d hide self-portraits in the audio of songs he released—so we would also take specific occult symbols that meant something to Bryn and the film, transform them from image to audio with a spectogram analyzer, then use that as the basis for drones and other sound elements.
Filmmaker: The whole practice of analog electronic work, for me, brings to mind that Andrei Tarkovsky concept of cinema as sculpting in time. It feels elemental because it’s so physical: manipulating electricity, wrestling with the sounds you draw up, until you’ve created music.

Reznick: Sculpting is one of the best ways to put it. Initially having plotted out a career in visual art and then having moved into the broader gestalt of filmmaking, writing and sound, sculpting or painting are ways I think about all of those aspects of filmmaking. With sound, especially, you’re looking at 200 audio tracks, as if you’re layering paint. Different sounds and frequencies have different colors to them, the way that paint does—not synesthetically, per se, but you are blending ingredients in the same way you’d apply paint to a canvas.
Most of the films that I have worked on as a sound designer, I have also done a good portion of what’s considered the music for the film, even though I’m not a composer—additional music, right? Luckily, I’ve worked with a lot of composers who are very open to us manipulating their work, bringing it into the broader soundscape and fitting things together. In Rabbit Trap, it can be incredibly difficult to say, at any given point, whose work you’re hearing, because there’s a good portion of Lucrecia Dalt’s incredible score blended together with my work. We were lucky our styles were so compatible. There are times where it’s definitely just hers, or definitely just mine, but for example there’s the scene where Darcy first walks up to the fairy circle and is recording these sounds, and it does shift at various points between my work [and] Lucrecia’s work.
Lucrecia recorded most of her music prior to the edit, so she was also working very early, as was I, though I wasn’t delivering finished material that early. But I had done a lot of tape manipulation experiments, including everything with my daughter’s vocals and a bunch of weird soundscape or tape-track elements that I gave to Brett W. Bachman, our incredible editor. He came onto this film and did the second pass, working with Lucrecia’s material and my material. He did a first pass laying out where things would go and how they might blend together, and we deconstructed it a lot later in the process and pieced it all back together. But for me to see what was envisioned holistically by the editor was insanely helpful. It helped me to see where all the work fit together; and since I wasn’t involved in the picture-editing part of the process, seeing everything seamlessly blended together was permission to keep going further.
Filmmaker: The film opens with Darcy recording the sounds of a murmuration of starlings, which his wife Daphne then manipulates to create this piece of music. Interplay between the field sound recordist and the sound designer is so directly a part of Rabbit Trap. Tell me about working with your production sound recordist Adam Fletcher and how you were bringing in what he was recording on set.
Reznick: That opening section is 90% sound design until the beat starts coming in, then it changes over again very seamlessly and blends right into the music, which is how the scene is meant to play out. That was the first scene we attempted. We had to do a submission for Sundance, so we did a vertical slice of the opening scene very early on. I believe in January of 2024, Bryn and Brent and myself came together and spent a week working on a version of that, figuring out exactly how the balance and blending of those elements would work. That set a template for the film. With Adam, who was recording as much on set as one does, my only request was for the production to send him out to get additional recorded material, because that doesn’t often happen. He was very excited to record a lot of ambiences that could feed into the soundscape, so that was very important.
Filmmaker: Was he recording the sounds of flora and fauna, as well as the ambience of the setting? Where did those kinds of living sounds, like birdsong, come into play?
Reznick: We added a few animals in post. Bryn and I spent way too long looking for the right cuckoo to put in the background of one scene—which I think may have actually been cut from the film, though we spent three days auditioning cuckoos, going on different sound effects libraries and field recording libraries, trying to find the right one. Since Bryn is from that area, he is very sensitive to specific kinds of sounds. I would add a lot of animal sounds in, and there were insects and crickets in certain scenes that I’d read were native to the UK or that area, and Bryn would go, “No, that is not what it sounds like there. We can’t do that.” Because Bryn has that knowledge, we were able to be a lot more accurate with the palette of the soundscape.

Filmmaker: I’m curious whether you brought in any particularly leporine sound effects, given the role that rabbits play in the story. I can’t really articulate this clearly, but there’s a quivering sort of tension to the sound design that feels evocative of this heightened awareness or alarm that I could see relating to rabbits.
Reznick: I looked into rabbit sounds, and they don’t really make sounds, which is kind of weird. There’s this little, squeaking whine that they make every once in a while, but they’re relatively silent creatures. I mean, they don’t purr. There’s a little bit of a squeak when they are agitated, and this snipping sound, but there wasn’t enough to do much with it. That was an earlier idea for a theme that I looked into, but I ended up utilizing a lot of the starling sounds throughout the film, because that was one that we needed as part of the narrative. That said, I did think carefully about the child’s place in the narrative, and—while trying to avoid spoilers here—there was meant to be this feeling, the same one as when you see a cat lying on the ground and put your hand on its side. You do that with a rabbit, and feel this pulsating warmth and know that it’s alive. The sound design of this film was like that.
There are a lot of low, bass-y drones and throbbing, thrumming, humming low-end sounds throughout, and they’re meant to induce dread to some degree, but I also felt the life in them. Then, there is a certain point in the film where, very consciously, the characters are all together, and something is about to leave the world of the film, and all that low-end just slowly drains out. You just feel this breath, like a death rattle. We worked on that scene in the mix of that scene for a very long time, because it was meant to feel like that. I’ve had a lot of pets, and I had two cats that we put to sleep about five years ago, and it was one of the saddest things that I have gone through as a pet parent. We did it at home. We had specialists come. You put your hand on them—you’re holding them, essentially, as life is ebbing away. That scene of the film was meant to feel like that, to me.
Filmmaker: Thank you for sharing that. It’s an extremely moving scene.
Reznick: It was meant to be gentle, letting go in this moment. Bryn drew a very beautiful portrait of that experience, so my goal was to have the sound express that for him as much as possible.
Filmmaker: One last clarifying question on recording equipment, if I may: the reel-to-reel tape recorder that Darcy and Daphne use is called the Nagra E, which was made in 1976 and treated as a narrative cut-off point for the equipment that appeared on screen in the film. Did you get to use that Nagra at all in your work?
Reznick: Man, I wish. No, I think that was a rental, or they borrowed it. I’m not sure exactly what the provenance of that was on screen. I used a ’78 Akai reel-to-reel, so not so different, and a lot of the audio that we manipulated went through an Akai deck. It’s fairly similar. But it’s funny you mention that—on I Can See You, I hired a sound recordist specifically because I heard he used a Nagra. There was a huge dividing line in energy of performance, when people started recording digitally about 35 years ago, and switched from recording on tape to recording digitally. When people shout, and they get that pop on tape, it sounds real. Somebody shouts and they blow out on a Nagra tape; that’s how movie shouting should sound. When things sound too limited and clean or clear on a digital recording, it doesn’t work as well to me. We manipulated things quite a bit through tape. There’s a scene where the child gets very loud and screams, and there’s some manipulation going on there to try to accomplish that as well. I did have a second request with the sound team, which was to record through the mic as much as possible, which they did. It wasn’t always totally possible. Some things we had to fake. I don’t remember if the Nagra could be recorded onto; it might not have been possible to actually record onto it. Working with old gear is temperamental; you have great ideas and plans to do things like that, but then you get into the realities on a set, and there are 100 people trying to do things in 10 minutes or less.

Rabbit Trap is available digitally Sept. 30, via Magnolia Pictures.

Platonic creators Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco break down Season 2 and how difficult it was to crack the story.

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne weren’t originally signed on to do a series that would have multiple seasons.

Giving Charlie a midlife crisis was a way to engineer a new storyline for Sylvia and disrupt their marriage.

Seth Rogen is the king of Apple TV+, with his star-studded hit series The Studio recently taking over the Emmys. A show that deserves just as much hype, however, is Platonic, the critically-acclaimed comedy series starring Rogen and Rose Byrne as ultimate platonic best friends. While the Season 2 finale clearly sets up the possibility of many more shenanigans for Will and Sylvia, that wasn’t always meant to be the case. Believe it or not, the hit Apple TV+ series was supposed to be an anthology, with a completely different cast and story for future seasons. Platonic creators Nicholas Stoller (who appeared as himself in The Studio) and Francesca Delbanco were thrilled that Season 2 got the greenlight, but realized the show would work best if Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne (who had previously worked together in Neighbors and its sequel), would reprise their roles. During this conversation with Collider, Stoller and Delbanco break down what it was like cracking the code for Season 2, why they decided to give Luke Macfarlane’s Charlie a midlife crisis, and how they managed to continue Will and Sylvia’s story. COLLIDER: I love this show so much. It just means a lot to me because I feel like we don’t see these types of stories told enough. You’re co-creators, but you’re also married. What’s something that the other brings to the table creatively that you can’t imagine making the show with anyone else? NICHOLAS STOLLER: From a very fundamental standpoint, it’s a show about a man and a woman, and so it’s written by a man and a woman, and I think that that’s a big part of it. I would say generally — and correct me if I’m wrong — I would say I’m the person with my foot on the accelerator, and she’s the person with her foot on the brake a little bit would be the way to describe it. I think I’m just pitching crazy bad stuff and being like, “what about this? What about that? What about that?” We usually have that sort of dynamic. Francesca is very much like, “that makes zero sense. How about this?” But we’re both sort of coming up with everything together. FRANCESCA DELBANCO: I would say that Nick has a very quick ability to make something funny, which I really respect and admire. When we’re talking about plots and stories, I’m seeing the shape of them and trying to understand how we could turn that into an episode. Before I’ve even done it, Nick has said four different ways of how it could end up being a huge and amazing comedy set piece. So I would say that the quickness of your ability to come up with comedy really is something that helps us a lot on this show. STOLLER: I don’t remember anything that happens in any episodes and she does. So that is also very helpful. A memory of what we’re talking about generally.
Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco Said That Coming Up With Season 2’s Storylines “Took Awhile”

“We had to engineer a way to get them closer.”

I adored Season 1, and what I really liked about it is that it felt so complete. I was thrilled when it got renewed, but I was really curious about where the story was going to go. What was the hardest part of cracking the story for Season 2? DELBANCO: Everything would be the answer. The show was originally conceived of as an anthology series. We thought that every season we would follow a different set of platonic friends and an entirely different circumstance. We thought we would do a period piece next about like the 1970s when colleges became co-ed. We had all kinds of really different ideas, but really in our heart of hearts, we wanted to make the show with Rose and Seth forever. But we just didn’t think that if we approached them and said, “do you guys want to be in a TV series that goes on and on open-endedly?” that they would necessarily sign on. So we wrote this season for them and it is a complete story. The first season was like a beginning and a middle and an end. And then about halfway through shooting the first season, we worked up our courage to see if they would like maybe be open to doing it again, but the season was already written. So we were shooting it and it was what it was. Then by the time they signed on for a second season and Apple gave us the green light to do another, we really had told their story. So it was very challenging when we got back into the Season 2 writer’s room to figure out, you know… they had the happy endings we had fixed to the best of our abilities, like Rose’s career problems and Seth’s romantic problems. And they lived a hundred miles apart from each other and were kind of saying goodbye to each other. So we had to engineer a way to get them closer, get them back into each other’s lives and get them to be total, complete messes again. Took a while.
‘Platonic’ Creators Had To Figure Out Charlie’s Purpose in Season 2 and His Relationship With Sylvia

“What’s a way to change her marriage that isn’t incredibly tragic?”

Luke Macfarlane’s Charlie looking startled in Platonic Season 2Image via Apple TV+ 

Another, one of the standout parts was with Macfarlane’s character, Charlie. Season 1, he kind of had the jealousy type of husband type, you know, naturally, then he really embraces their friendship and just himself. He goes on so many journeys. How was your approach to Charlie? It seems like you made a concerted effort to really give him almost like his own show within the show. STOLLER: The way the show kind of works structurally is both Will and Sylvia have their own separate stories and then they help each other with each other’s lives, and so we needed to give Sylvia a kind of challenge in her life. We had already told the story of trying to get back into the workforce in the first season. We started talking about it and we were like, “Oh, one of the things that she kind of probably wrongly thinks is that her life will never change, that her marriage will never change.” that those. What’s a way to change her marriage that isn’t incredibly tragic? Or, something that would be not fixable by a friend or not be something that Will could help her out with. And we were like, “Oh, if Charlie is a character who’s so secure in himself and so sure about everything, every choice he’s made, if he suddenly is thrown into a bit of an existential crisis for the first time in their marriage, that would be a fun thing for certainly Luke to play, who’s a brilliant performer and super funny, but also would give Sylvia stuff that would be conflicts for her. Then Will could also be in a constant state of flux in his life and wouldn’t be able to help her out.
The “Bachelor Party” Episode Allowed Will and Sylvia To Explore Taboo Topics in ‘Platonic’ Season 2

“Can you talk about that with a friend of the opposite gender?”

Beck Bennet at a restaurant in Platonic Season 2Image via Apple TV+ 

Francesca, you directed the “Bachelor Party” episode, which, seeing that name, you might think it’s going to be crazy. I love how it kind of switches everything on the audience. I’m sure it was exciting to mine a backstory for Will and Sylvia, because we’re bringing in a new character played by Beck Bennett, who is fantastic. What was it like creating that backstory for the third person in their dynamic? DELBANCO: In the first season, we told a lot of the stories that we kind of assumed we would want to tell for these two characters. We came in for the second season and we were like, what’s left? What haven’t we done? And one of the things that came very quickly to the writer’s room was this idea of… who are their other friends and what happens to their dynamic, which we’re so familiar with? When you introduce a foreign element, when they are a threesome instead of a twosome? And we felt like that had a million inherent tensions and fun dynamics to play with, especially because, whoever the friend is, it will be a two against one. We kind of engineer it in some ways that it’s like the guys against the girl and sometimes it sort of shifts around. But we did feel like, as in real life, you’re one way with one person and you’re another way with another person. We thought that it would be fun because we kind of set the sort of thesis of the show that Sylvia and Will are most themselves when they’re with each other. What happens when there’s another one in there who knows them as well as they both do? Where does the tension go? STOLLER: But when we were writing that episode, it did actually start the more kind of clichéd, “let’s have a bachelor party that goes crazy” kind of story. And we just were like, this feels totally false, that the Beck Bennett character would fall off of a balcony or whatever, like anything would happen. We’re all middle aged, really, and also, even when you’re not, like how many crazy things have happened to any of us in our lives? So we started to be like, wait, this wouldn’t happen. It took a while to figure out. But at some moment, we were like, wait, the whole joke would be that she would think something was going to happen and literally nothing would happen. And so that was how we kind of built it. And then it became a story also about sex and talking about sex. Can you talk about that with a friend of the opposite gender? That really became the kind of story spine. Thank you so much for your time and another great season. I hope there’s more! DELBANCO: Thank you so much! We do too!

Release Date

May 23, 2023

Network

Apple TV+

Writers

Francesca Delbanco

In 2012, Mark Jenkin wrote his self-proclaimed manifesto “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13,” a series of vows of chastity à la Dogme 95; among other strictures, the Cornish director promised to shoot his films in black-and-white, keep them under 80 minutes and use only natural or available light, post-synched sound and diegetic music. Only a handful of projects Jenkin’s made since then would meet all those criteria. But even as his productions have steadily gotten bigger after his BAFTA-winning 2019 breakthrough Bait, his filmmaking approach hasn’t drastically changed. Jenkin wears many hats—aside from writing and directing, he routinely edits and shoots his own films. As cinematographer, he works with antiquated cameras, photographing his last three features on a clockwork Bolex H16 with a maximum runtime of 28 seconds per take, and likes to hand-process his films himself, as he did for the stupefying 2015 short Bronco’s House and again in Bait. Flashes, marks and splotches crop up everywhere on his frames, but to call those aberrations would be to miss the point. The scratchiness is neither a gimmick nor a mistake. Cornwall’s rampant depopulation over rising costs and unchecked tourism has long been one of Jenkin’s crucial thematic preoccupations; his films often register as tributes to lifestyles and communities on the brink of extinction. In this sense, the worn-out visuals dovetail with the dilapidated settings, playing like weathered artefacts washed ashore from raging seas. At the same time, every imperfection suggests an openness to the unexpected that imbues his cinema with an astonishing vitality. To venture into it is to wade into uncharted waters, and the feeling is nothing short of electrifying.

Rose of Nevada follows in its predecessors’ footsteps, which is to say it unfurls as another ghost story. When the titular fishing boat magically reappears in the harbor of some unnamed Cornish village—thirty years since it vanished at sea with all hands—the old owner recruits a three-man crew to ship it back out in hopes to bring new luck to the spectrally empty town. Steering the Rose of Nevada is grizzled skipper Murgey (Francis Magee), and working the nets and gutting the fish are two young deckhands: Nick (George MacKay) enlists to provide for wife and child, laconic drifter Liam (Callum Turner) joins to escape his past. But no sooner does the boat return after the first successful trip that Nick realizes the journey has brought them back in time, and the hamlet welcomes them as if they were the original crew. From here on, Rose of Nevada becomes a psychodrama in the vein of Jenkin’s folk horror Enys Men (2022). As Liam happily adjusts to the new circumstances, Nick—the only one aboard the Rose who seems bothered by the time warp—succumbs to an existential panic.

MacKay and Turner are the two biggest actors to enter Jenkin’s cinematic universe, but the presence of renowned stars doesn’t substantially alter the director’s M.O. Jenkin likes to yank your attention sideways, away from his solitary wanderers and toward to the physical world that surrounds them. Objects are key, as the action is punctuated with cutaway shots of quotidian, unassuming items: a mug, a rusty anchor, a pair of boots. You might be tempted to cling on to them as temporal markers, but Jenkin’s films have a way of jamming your bearings. Even when technically set in the present—as is Rose of Nevada’s first act—they still seem to unspool in some undetermined past. An old poster, some cassettes, and a tape player in Nick’s room suggest the early 1990s long before we rewind to that decade. And while Rose of Nevada might be considerably more polished than some of its forebears—Jenkin shot it with his Bolex H16 but did not hand-process it—it still teems with scratches and red-light leak flashes. Where other filmmakers might turn to celluloid as an exercise in nostalgia, Jenkin embraces it out of a staunch belief in its ability to surprise. Rose of Nevada is no ancient relic, but a film testifying to the medium’s materiality and exuberance.

The day after Rose of Nevada premiered at Venice in the Horizons sidebar, I sat with Jenkin to discuss its genesis, his fascination for inanimate objects and his efforts to stay true to his DIY approach while working on his biggest production yet.
Rose of Nevada screens four times, beginning tomorrow, October 1, at the 2025 New York Film Festival.

Filmmaker: Ghosts and time travels have been a feature of your cinema long before Rose of Nevada. I was hoping we could start with your fascination with these temporal jumps.

Jenkin: It’s just a natural state of mind for me. I don’t think we exist in the present at all. The present is just a construct of everything we’ve been through and everything we imagine is going to happen. As time goes on, I’ve realized my concern for time and cinema are the same thing. To me, film is a way to make sense of the fact that maybe we’re the only beings on the planet conscious enough to be influenced by what’s happening in the past and what might happen in the future. I think the reason cinema had to be invented in the first place was to try and make sense of time and stop us from going mad. That’s why it’s humanity’s greatest achievement.

Filmmaker: Anytime I wander into your films I find it difficult to orient myself temporally, and Rose of Nevada is no different in that respect. How much of that disorientation owes to your production design?

Jenkin: Quite a lot. The production design in this film is very deliberate. Nick is supposed to have gone back to 1993; the nineties were my formative years, and I think I still live in that era. My cultural references, the music I listen to, my sense of fashion—they’re all from the mid-nineties. It’s an idealized period of my life. But as I started working with production designer Felicity Hickson, I realized my memories were wrong, because they’d been recorded over with pop culture representations of that period from now, as if all the men walked around looking like Ian Brown from The Stone Roses or Tim Burgess from the Charlatans. But if you consider what people really looked like in that period, especially in a place like Cornwall—not exactly the Haçienda in Manchester—we all still looked like we were in the eighties. Felicity showed me reference pictures, and I just couldn’t believe it. That’s the conscious representation we achieved through the production design, but I think the feeling is also heightened by the camera I worked with. We shot with three roughly identical cameras, all Bolex H16s. We would only have one shot with one camera at a time and would rotate them depending on what lenses I was using. I guess the newest camera we used was from 1976, the oldest probably 1961.

Filmmaker: Did you use the same clockwork cameras with which you shot Bronco’s House? With a maximum length of 28 seconds per take?

Jenkin: Bronco’s House, Bait, and Enys Men. Same camera, yeah. Which doesn’t exactly help you date the look of the film to 1993—if anything, it suggests some earlier decade. But it’s an aesthetic that can’t date, ‘cause it’s already dated. A film shot on 16mm Vision3 color negative is just frozen in time, whereas something that’s shot on a digital format maybe ten years ago… Look, this isn’t an anti-digital rant, and I’m not suggesting those things age badly. But if you look at early digital films from 2005 or 2006, they look so weird now, whereas my films won’t get any older than they look. And the production design was key. Sure, I could have graded or shot the two timelines differently, so that the present-day sections in Rose of Nevada would be easy to distinguish from the bits set in the past, but I didn’t want to do that. That dislocation was all in the production design. My ideal response from a viewer is for them to go, “I don’t know what year this is.”

Filmmaker: I like to think that your films are as interested in their characters as they are in the objects that surround them. As a viewer, I often feel as though my attention is redirected to the nonfictional background. Hence all those cutaway shots of mugs, books, some chairs and boots…

Jenkin: The boots are my foot fetish! [laughs] Somebody told me at the screening yesterday, “No wonder Tarantino is interested in your work!” But mine’s footwear fetish. I don’t think there are bare feet in any of my films.

Filmmaker: But what draws you to all these inanimate objects?

Jenkin: Well, I want the audience to work out meanings. I don’t want them to sit like this [slouches on his chair], but to sit forward like that [clutches the edge of the seat]. Some might not be prepared to do that, and that’s fine. They’ll disregard the film and wonder, “What’s this? Why am I looking at shoes and mugs?” But I want to suggest that there might be some significance to these shots, and it’s for you to find out. Maybe you won’t draw the same conclusions I will, maybe there’ll only be minor and fairly insignificant connections, but it’s a way of getting the audience to engage.

It comes down to two different things, really. One’s the way I work. I shoot on hundred-foot rolls of film and load the film myself. A few feet at beginning and the end of the roll may be fogged; I don’t want to shoot anything essential on them, but I don’t wanna waste them either. Say I was filming our chat right now. I might have to change the roll halfway through. I won’t want to use the first few feet at the beginning of the new roll for your next line of dialogue, just ‘cause it might not come out right. So, I might quickly grab a shot of your phone on the table and forget about it. Then, at the end of the roll, I’d point the camera out there [points at the window] and get a shot of the trees. When I get into the edit, I’ll be cutting the scene of the two actors talking and might slow it down a little bit. There’s a closeup where you glance at the window, and I’ll think, “Oh, well, I’ve got that shot of the trees…” If I cut that into a dialogue scene where we’re talking quite intensely, and suddenly you look away and we cut to a shot of the trees and then back to me, the viewer might draw some meaning from the juxtaposition: this person’s not totally engaged in the conversation, their mind’s wandering. Or, I could use the shot of the phone instead. There might be a moment where my character sort of looks down, very briefly, and we cut to this shot of the phone, so the audience might feel as if I was waiting for a call. Those things might not work; they might be completely incongruous. But sometimes you get these moments where you realize a scene has just gone [mimics explosion] because of those accidents, effectively. That’s an example of form dictating content.

I remember somebody in the States during a Q&A for Enys Men said I give the impression that my films are made entirely by accident… [chuckles] I don’t see it like that. Editing is exactly the same as the writing process for me. Writing is editing with imagined footage, and editing is editing with actual footage. That’s why I end up focusing so much on these objects. Often I’ll walk on set and study the objects the set dresser might have imagined would be out of focus and placed in the background, and I’ll go, “Let’s put that here so I can get a shot of it, ’cause there might be a bit of meaning here…” I think it’s because of the way I work with film. Everything’s so valuable—I don’t mean monetarily, but ’cause I don’t shoot much. Everything I do shoot is very valuable to me. That’s what’s on my mind when I walk on a set; one way or another I’ll try to feature every little thing that’s in there. And that means quite often I will film inanimate objects, which will only gain meaning once they’re juxtaposed to something else in the edit.

It’s also a psychological thing. Sometimes I need a moment by myself to have a think. If I’m on a busy set, I’ll just say, “I’m just gonna get some cutaways!” I might just be two meters away from everybody else but I won’t be answering questions; sometimes I’ll set up a shot and won’t even film it. I’ll just pretend I’m doing something so I can have a moment. But often, if I do run the camera, those shots become really key and will help me out in the edit, because I don’t shoot any coverage, any masters that I can rely on. I might miss a shot that covers a person getting from here to there, so I can cut away to an inanimate object, put the sound of feet over it, then cut back. That’s how I end up with a lot of cutaways, and how I’ve fallen into shooting feet as well. First rule at film school in terms of editing was: “Always shoot feet, they’ll cover you.” But as I was doing that, I realized that people were reading meaning into these shots. In Bait, Mary [Woodvine’s] character, the second homeowner, has these very dainty shoes, while Edward [Rowe], who plays the fisherman, wears working boots. Suddenly you can say something very clear about their two different worlds without getting bogged down with the ambiguity of facial expressions. It’s very like, [taps the table] bang, bang, bang!

One of my favorite sequences in Rose of Nevada is where I tried to capture the idea that George MacKay and Mae Voogd’s characters were a couple who were still in love—not just a family or the parents of a young child. He’s done with the washing up and steps out of the kitchen and sees her and the child drawing. I couldn’t leave it at that; you might have gotten the idea that they were a loving family, but it was still too much about the child. I wanted to show you he was still lusting after his partner. And the way to do that, I thought, was to put a cutaway of her neck—not her face, just her neck. The wide shot does one thing, but a closeup of her neck suggests an intimacy that you wouldn’t even get from looking into her eyes, because then you’d be seeing her own thoughts. That’s the power of film editing, and why I want to keep making movies.

Filmmaker: It isn’t just feet though. The insistence with which Rose of Nevada lingers on shots of hands brought me back to Robert Bresson, and I remember you listing L’Argent (1983) as one of your key touchstones. I’d be curious to hear if his approach to filming actors might have influenced your own—I’m thinking of the statuesque stillness your characters evoke as you frame them standing and staring into space.

Jenkin: L’Argent is probably my favorite movie of all time; I think it’s Bresson at his purest. I wouldn’t go that far with the analogy though, because formally my filmmaking doesn’t really resemble his. I think he’d probably hate my films. They would be too cutty for him, too tricksy in how they portray time. But that’s the reason why I try and shoot everything on a single lens. Bresson shot everything on a 50mm lens with a 35mm camera; I shoot everything on a 26mm lens with a 16mm camera. That’s approximately the same focal length. I try not to move the camera unless I absolutely have to, and I don’t work with a focus puller. That’s why my characters didn’t move initially; I just didn’t pull focus. Because the camera’s totally manual, I would need three hands to be able to run the camera, move the tripod head and pull focus. In Rose of Nevada, there’s a shot where George’s character comes down the stairs, walks around to the door and picks up the letter that he’s tried to send back home but has come back through his own door. That shot has a tilt, a pan and a pull focus. That’s the equivalent of the opening of Goodfellas to me! [laughs] It’s like the greatest shot I’ve ever done—and I did it first take as well. I didn’t know whether I’d got it until we received the rushes back two days later. I couldn’t see the focus in the viewfinder.

The formal restrictions of the camera have led me to embrace that stillness within performances, which I’ve come to really love. But also, when I started working with them, Ed, Mary and the others were all theatre people used to expressing themselves physically on the stage. So when I put ’em in front of the camera, I said, “Right, you can’t move nothing.” We’d do a rehearsal, a hand would go up and I’d say, “No, I want hands down. If I want hands, I’ll do a closeup of a hand.” Obviously they got it, and quite often the footage we’d record was without dialogue anyway. Suddenly you get that stillness; all your focus goes to their eyes, and you realize that even when they’re doing nothing, they’re still communicating so much with their faces.

Filmmaker: I read again your “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13” manifesto before the film’s premiere, and I think Rose of Nevada breaks all the rules you’d laid out there. It made me wonder if you see a tension between your commitment to a certain type of cinema—DIY, analog, small-scale—and the expectations that come from what was presumably a much bigger budget.

Jenkin: To tell you the truth, my first thought when we talked about budget was, “What the hell are we gonna spend this money on?” Obviously I didn’t say that in any meetings with execs, ’cause I didn’t want to talk us out of having a bigger budget. But I was able to entirely preserve the way I work. I didn’t think I’d be allowed, and I fell into the trap of self-censoring, initially. I remember saying in an early meeting, “Well, obviously I’m gonna have to record location sound and have a director of photography and operator.” And everybody in the room went: “No. Why?” I thought that I’d have to make changes based on what I thought other people would require me to do, but the people who want to work with me want that because my method is different. And from that moment on, I was able to really preserve the way I work. The camera crew was the same size as usual: it was me, a first AC and a second AC. That was it. I was my own loader, my own focus puller—on that one shot in the film that’s got a focus pull… [chuckles]

Filmmaker: Was Rose of Nevada hand-processed, too?

Jenkin: No, Bait and Bronco’s House were. I haven’t hand-processed a color feature film yet. It’s just too difficult, because the chemistry must be kept at 37 degrees, and it would require a lot of rushes. Black-and-white is relatively easier. But yes, we used the same film stock, the same camera, same lack of a sound department, same personnel roughly, same tripod and same bean bag that I screw into the bottom of the camera to be able to put it anywhere and keep it static. That bean bag died last week on another shoot; I had it for over 30 years. Where the budget went is something you should ask the producer, but if you’re doing a bigger film, you obviously must do it in a slightly different way—legally speaking, too. And the size of the crew changed a lot. We went from working with 23 people on Enys Men to having 140 on this one, at times. We had a huge construction department, because the street where Nick lives had to be built, and they built in a day. We shot that on the last day of the shoot, and the actual construction started the day before we shot it. They brought in lots of people for that—our wrap picture was like a football crowd.

Filmmaker: Was it just as easy to wander off and shoot some things on your own as you did in previous projects?

Jenkin: Yeah. Because I’m the DOP and operator and always have the camera in my hand, I could walk down to the set with George and Callum and, if I saw something, take the bean bag out, put the camera on the ground and get my shot. I might have my assistant there with a reflector who could bounce a bit of light on the subject, but that’s about it. I can capture those details and moments, and I can shoot them in the same way that I would my diary short films that I make with a Super 8 camera. The opening sequences, all those cutaways of the dereliction around the harbor, were shots I recorded two days before picture lock. I walked down the hill from my studio, put a roll of film in the camera and filmed bits of my local harbor. It’s nowhere near where we ended up shooting, but I just really liked those textures.

Filmmaker: That reminds me of a moment in your 2023 short A Dog Called Discord when you say that what keeps you hooked to film is its sheer unpredictability. Shooting on celluloid, and then waiting for the rushes to come back, you never know what you’ll get.

Jenkin: That’s the beauty of capturing images. Time is always slipping by, and you might want to share it with people who are no longer around you—but the great privilege we have as filmmakers is that we get a chance to capture and preserve it. Hence my obsession with ghosts. Film is a medium of ghosts—you watch a film from forty years ago and while the whole cast might be dead in the real world there they are, brought back to life on the screen, and you’re watching these apparitions on a canvas. I don’t mean to romanticize things—it’s not like when I check the rushes in the morning before going to set I’m there going, “Oh, it’s so beautiful, cinema’s ability to capture time!” Usually I’m worrying about things that came out wrong. Only once I get to talk about the film do I realize the whole thing really is kind of amazing. Cinema is still only 130 years old, give or take, and in the fullness of time we might be thought of as the early pioneers of the medium. If we’re not still excited by cinema’s untapped potential, then we’re in trouble.

Filmmaker: Maybe that’s why your films never register as nostalgic. Sure, their aesthetic might make them look anachronistic when pitted next to much contemporary arthouse and commercial cinema, but I never looked at them as ancient relics.

Jenkin: And I should also clarify that I’m not totally analog! Come to think of it, I’m not analog at all, really, beyond capturing images in a photochemical process with a clockwork camera. Everything after that is digital. I digitally edit the sound; I use tape, but then I must digitize it. My audience exists in a digital world. I often communicate with people via Instagram. I try not to fetishize the analog side of it, and I’m not anti-digital either. When I started out, I imagined that the Q&As for films like Bait or Bronco’s Housewould be full of old blokes who’d turn up just to talk about shooting on film. As it happens, the old blokes who come to my screenings are those who at the end like to ask me why the hell I’m still bothering with film. They pull out their iPhones and go, “Do you know you can make films on these, too?” Of course they don’t actually know how to do that, and I don’t either. They’ve been told this is the future and bought that. Whereas younger people who were born with iPads and iPhones in their hands tend to find celluloid more exotic. It’s a slower process—you must wait for it—and it’s the alternative to what they’re used to. That’s why it becomes attractive. A lot of my viewers seem to be under 25, which is obviously great for me and my films, but also a testament to cinema’s vitality.

Summary

Season 2 of the NBC series ‘Brilliant Minds’ slowly reveals why Dr. Oliver Wolf has become a Hudson Oaks patient, teasing a possible mental break.

The medical cases, from Alien Hand Syndrome to a reality-show delusion, challenge Dr. Wolf and his team and test his treatment style.

New doctors and nurses shake up the team dynamics, and Oliver’s fraught family and romantic ties play a role.

From creator/showrunner Michael Grassi and inspired by world-famous author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, the NBC series Brilliant Minds follows Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto) and his team at Bronx General Hospital as they work to solve medical mysteries of the mind. Following up a case of Alien Hand Syndrome in the first episode of Season 2 with a reality show contestant trapped in her own delusion in the second episode, the new season will clearly continue to challenge how these doctors approach treatment and mental health. When you add in some new doctors and higher stakes, relationship shakeups are bound to happen, but that still doesn’t explain why Dr. Wolf is a patient himself at Hudson Oaks, directly calling his own mind into question. Collider recently got the opportunity to chat one-on-one with Quinto about all things Season 2. During the interview, he discussed adding a layer of unpredictability with the mystery of Dr. Wolf’s mental state, how that will unfold over the season, whether you should mistrust Dr. Amelia Fredrick (Bellamy Young), Wolf’s avoidance of his father, the friendship with Drl Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry), the shake-up in team dynamics with the addition of new doctors and nurses, and the changes coming between Oliver and Josh (Teddy Sears).
‘Brilliant Minds’ Season 2 Will Explore Dr. Oliver Wolf’s Mental Well-Being

“I love this idea that it’s a mystery that we get to piece together.”

Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf looking at someone with concern in Brilliant Minds Season 2NBC

Collider: In the first episode, we learned that Oliver is at this long-term health care facility. We were not even really sure of that initially, but we gradually get more and more information. We just don’t know why it’s happening or exactly what is happening yet. What can you say about what that’s all about? Why did that feel like something you wanted to tease out over more than one episode? When will we start getting answers? ZACHARY QUINTO: It’s a layer of unpredictability that is a nice contrast to the consistency that this show achieved in the first season. For me, it’s an opportunity to explore a totally different side of Wolf’s mental state and well-being. I love this idea that it’s a mystery that we get to piece together as the season goes on. We understand, in a flash forward that’s six months into the future, that between the present moment and that time, Oliver Wolf finds himself in this very unfamiliar and unsettling situation that he’s trying desperately to escape. The question is, did he end up there of his own volition, or did something happen externally that put him there? It’s actually based on a true story, to some extent, that we’ll get to tease out. Michael Grassi, our showrunner, and our writers are exploring a dynamic that actually has been documented and exists in the real world, which I’m excited to be able to explore on the show. I don’t want to say too much, but I think it’ll be an interesting thing for audiences because it’s very unexpected. It presents a question that they’re going to want to have answers to, and over the course of the second season, those answers will be parsed out. Even without knowing what’s going on or why, I also immediately distrusted Bellamy Young’s character. Is that intentional? Is that how we should be feeling about her? QUINTO: First of all, Bellamy is amazing and we’re so excited to have her on this season of the show. She’s just got such a great energy. She’s so collaborative. She’s so curious, and she’s just wonderful. Regardless of the nature of her character, Bellamy, as an actress, is delightful and a really welcomed additions to the cast. In terms of her character, I do think that mistrust is not unwarranted, nor do I think that it’s inappropriate. Sometimes even people who may mean well or may just be doing their jobs, can find themselves at odds with a moral high ground, and I think that’s true of Bellamy’s character. But a lot will be revealed. That’s the most interesting part about that storyline. We just touch on it in the first few episodes, but we’re spending the majority of the first half of the season this year leading up to that time period. The season picks up about a month and a half after the first season ended, and it’s six months after that the Hudson Oaks storyline really takes hold of Oliver and really becomes the primary focus in his life. We’re spending the first 10 episodes, at least, in those six months leading up to that Hudson Oaks period. And then, where the back half of the season goes remains to be seen, even for me. The writers are hard at work right now. I know that they’ve broken stories up through the mid-season finale, but I know that Michael is just starting to really focus the stories for the back 10. That’s part of what’s exciting about being on a network series. We’re all collaborating and evolving as the season unfolds. I love the flexibility that’s required of me, as an actor, and that’s required of all of us, as a creative coalition, to make that possible and to make that all happen. Alien Hand Syndrome is fascinating, but also seems very dangerous, especially when it can lead to you getting punched in the face. I also found that parallel father-son story so interesting, in comparison to what’s going on with Oliver and his father. Was that intentional? QUINTO: It’s very intentional. One of the things that our show has successfully done in the first season and will continue to do in the second is that oftentimes the cases are really reflections back at Oliver and the other doctors on the show. The patients that we encounter and that find themselves in the care of Wolf and team are often thematically tied into the things that Oliver and the other doctors are going through in their own lives. It’s really specific and intentional that there’s this complex and imperfect father-son relationship in the first episode of the show that Oliver has to deal with and that, in many ways, is both a reflection and a trigger for him in his own relationship with his father. The case in the second episode is also an interesting one, with a patient feeling trapped in a reality TV show that’s not actually real. I also found it particularly compassionate of your character to meet her where she is and to act as if it’s all real. What struck you most about that case? QUINTO: First of all, Molly Bernard plays that character, Lauren, and Molly and I did a play together on Broadway last season, so it was amazing to have her on the show. She’s one of a number of friends of mine this season who have come up to do guest spots. We have some amazing guest stars on the show, and Molly was certainly one of them. That story does have a sensitivity to it that, in a way, echoes all of Oliver’s own vulnerability. The feeling of being exposed that that character encounters and is struggling with through the second episode, is really beautiful. There’s something quiet about it. There’s something really sensitive about that story that I love. Oliver Wolf is a doctor whose primary philosophy is to meet his patients where they are. He sees an opportunity to do that with Lauren in a way that is unique and a little bit unexpected and maybe a little bit unconventional, but that’s how he rolls. He’s able to help her more by doing that. He’s able to get into her mindset and help her in a way that he might not be able to if he was just trying to fix her. That story represents that degree of sensitivity and that degree of, nuance to the treatment that maybe another doctor wouldn’t be able to possess in the way that Oliver does.
Dr. Oliver Wolf Will Have to Continue to Navigate His Past Trauma in the Present in ‘Brilliant Minds’ Season 2

“We can’t run from the past that defines us, as much as we might want to.”

How do you feel about the relationship with his father, as far as his avoidance to the point where he’s really not dealing with the relationship at all? Is it something that you would like to see him have to confront at some point? Are some relationships just better left alone? QUINTO: I think it’s something that, in one way or another, he’ll have to deal with. That’s part of the seeds that are being sprinkled around what happens later in the season. Without giving too much away, we can’t run from the past that defines us, as much as we might want to. I think Oliver is really confronted with that truth from the beginning of the season. I feel like that sense of abandonment and that void that is created by an experience such as Oliver has had is incredibly difficult to reconcile or to heal. To fill that void can be a life’s work, and I think Oliver is really engaged in that from the beginning of the season. How successful he’s able to do it, I think remains to be seen. Noah and Muriel, to a certain extent, really did a number on this guy with the decisions that they made in his childhood. Those were indelible, irrevocable decisions that they made without his participation. It’s pretty traumatic. Understandably, Oliver is trying to navigate that and some days are better than others. It seems like he moves him in as a way to force himself to deal with it, but then just completely avoids his actual home instead. QUINTO: Totally, yeah. He ends up sleeping in his office. Someone’s intentions and someone’s best laid plans can get derailed and upended by unexpected emotional triggers and vulnerabilities, and I think that’s what happened with Oliver. His father comes back after 30 years of being gone and says, “I need your help. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Of course, anybody who thought their father was dead for 30 years is going to want to try to rebuild a relationship with them, but you can imagine how complicated that might end up being. That’s what happens with Oliver and Noah. It’s like, “Okay, yeah, let’s try this.” But then, it’s like, “I don’t want to be reminded of these things. I don’t want to be confronted with the past. And I don’t have to be because there’s a hospital that needs my attention and there are patients that require care.” Oliver is like, “Let me go deal with the things that I’m good at, that I’m comfortable with, and that are easy for me, maybe to the detriment of his own well-being. It’s easy to understand where he’s coming from, but at the same time, selfishly, I would just like to see you and Mandy Patinkin do more scenes together. QUINTO: Sure, yeah. Totally. Let’s see where the season goes and if that’s possible. I don’t know. I can’t say, I guess is more to the point. But we’ll find out soon enough. I really enjoy Oliver’s friendship with Carol. What do you most enjoy about that relationship? Is that the most relaxed that he gets? QUINTO: Yeah, that’s really true. I absolutely adore Tamberla [Perry], so I love working with her. She’s so positive and so funny and fun. Ultimately, all of us have a great time on our show. It’s a really good set. It’s a really good energy. It’s a really good company of actors. We all enjoy being there. We enjoy each other’s company. It’s nice when we get to let that translate into the world of the show. I think that is especially true of Carol and Wolf because it’s especially true for Tamberla and me. There’s an ease and a pleasure of being in each other’s company. I love the days when I get to show up and know that I have multiple scenes with Tamberla that day. She’s such a great partner in this show. In so many ways, our relationship reflects the dynamic between Wolf and Carol, and I feel really grateful for that. There’s an ease there. Nobody understands Wolf better than Carol. That kind of trust and that kind of unfettered loyalty and commitment is an important foundation to build on in any show. For those two characters to have that really allows them to navigate all the challenges that present themselves over the course of the season. And I think that’s especially true in the second season of the show. Over the course of the first season, we got to know and care about this team of interns that was working with Dr. Wolf, but that’s shaken up a bit this season. You have one of them off in a different place with the new doctor, and you have this new resident? What was it like to find those new rhythms? It’s hard to get a read on Dr. Porter. QUINTO: Yeah, intentionally so. We really hit the ground running in the second season. We brought in Dr. Charlie Porter, played by Brian Altemus. We brought in Dr. Anthony Thorne, played by John Clarence Stewart. We bring in a new nurse character later in the season, played by Al Calderon. There is new energy at the hospital this season and a whole new department that we get to explore, and that’s been really exciting. Anthony Thorne is a new character in the show, who is the head of the emergency department at Bronx General. The intern you’re referring to is Jacob Nash, played by Spence Moore, who is on his rotation in the emergency department. All of our doctors end up spending a lot more time there this season. We have a whole new wing of the hospital, so we have a lot of new hallways and triage areas and treatment rooms, which is exciting when you’re on a long-running show, to have a new set to play in. That’s really quite rewarding. And then, there are the psychological hallways that open up as a result of these new characters and the dynamics that they bring into the show. It was quite fun for all of us to figure out, as actors, how to make space for these new characters. How they fit into the broader picture of the season will unfold as it goes. There are sparks between Thorne and Carol. Charlie comes in and rubs the interns the wrong way and is a little bit of a foil for their cohesiveness, and is a little bit of an antagonist to Wolf into the dynamic and the equilibrium that he’s established with the interns, which took him a long time to do because he was resistant to them from the first. So, it’s going to be interesting to see what it represents and how it unfolds.
The Nature of the Relationship Between Oliver and Josh Will Change in ‘Brilliant Minds’ Season 2

“Is Oliver capable of showing up in the way that Josh needs him to?”

Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf sitting at a bar with Teddy Sears as Dr. Josh Nichols in Brilliant MindsNBC

There’s a scene in episode two when Oliver tells Josh that he just wants everything to go back to the way it was before his father showed up, which clearly doesn’t work for Josh. Is Oliver going to have to take the time and work a little harder to be able to give Josh what he needs from him? Will we see more of that relationship throughout the season? QUINTO: The nature of their relationship dramatically changes through the course of the first part of this season. How they navigate that and straddle the line between the personal and the professional becomes a huge part of their storyline. The question is, is Oliver capable of showing up in the way that Josh needs him to? Obviously, at the end of the first season, he quite literally didn’t show up. That’s obviously a bit of a metaphor. And so, as we enter into the second season, the return of Oliver’s father and the emotional upheaval that sets into motion really calls into question his preparedness for an actual relationship. Is he able to move past his own limitations and allow himself to be cared for and to be present in an actual mature and functional relationship? I don’t know the answer to that yet. We’ll explore that. But there are some circumstantial developments that will complicate that even further for both Oliver and Josh. Their working relationship changes quite a bit over the course of the first few episodes as well. It’s a really fun relationship to watch because it feels like you and Teddy Sears have an ease between you. QUINTO: I love Teddy. I’ve known Teddy for many, many years. There’s a real shorthand and familiarity and comfort there. It’s great to imbue their relationship with that same kind of familiarity.

Release Date

September 23, 2024

Directors

Lee Toland Krieger, David Katzenberg, Dawn Wilkinson, Harry Jierjian, Jordan Canning, Maggie Kiley, Sudz Sutherland, Charles Randolph-Wright, Deborah Kampmeier

Writers

Sara Saedi, Ryan Knighton, Will Ewing, Daniela Lamas, Davia Carter, Stasia Demick, William Yu, David Carter, Alex Berger, Shannon Looney

Brilliant Minds airs on NBC and is available to stream on Peacock. Check out the Season 2 trailer:

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars

While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, who’s spent the past dozen years painstakingly restoring his uncle Howard’s long-unseen film.
Premiering at this year’s New York Film Festival, the newly restored version (from a surviving 16mm print) is a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson’s outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself, sometimes in laidback settings, such as squeezed between former neighbors on a couch in his childhood hometown of Waco, Texas. Indeed, it’s Howard’s truly intimate access -—an overused term when it comes to docs -—to his lead character that humanizes this abstract avant-garde world. You really get the sense that Wilson’s just hanging out unfiltered with a friend who happens to have a camera, which was probably the case.
There’s Philip Glass, who in response to Howard’s questions about Einstein on the Beach, says that it’s hard to describe something with words that wasn’t based on language to begin with. And Wilson’s partner on the German script, Heiner Müller (disciple of Brecht and member of The Berliner Ensemble), who aims to create a “theater of experience,”  not a “theater of discourse” – one in which “you might only understand what you saw weeks later.” At one point Wilson even confesses that the older he gets the more he realizes that he has to make compromises, an unexpected admission coming from a detail-obsessed man for whom paring down seems an utterly foreign concept.
Just prior to the Lincoln Center debut (September 29th) of Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, Filmmaker reached out to Aaron Brookner, who we last caught up with to discuss his Locarno-debuting Nova ’78). In addition to pursuing a home for his uncle’s archives, Brookner is now also busy developing his own films and series as co-director of Pinball London.
Filmmaker: You began work on your uncle’s archive with 1983’s Burroughs: The Movie back in 2012, and just this summer premiered Nova ’78, which resurrects your uncle’s late-’70s footage from the three-day Nova Convention, at Locarno. Now you’re debuting Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, which played festivals and on public TV in the mid-’80s. So how different — or similar — were all these restoration processes?
Brookner: They were all different, really. For Burroughs we had hoped to find the negative of the film, but what we found were all the negative rolls of footage that never made the final cut (the biggest part of Howard’s archive). So we were working from a print for Burroughs. The print and the sound both needed careful work, but the print had been well-preserved and was in good condition, with a synced sound track.
With CIVIL warS there was no sync audio, and no separate audio soundtrack start-to-end that at some point did not have dubbing. There was also no negative, and the best available print had damage (scratches, etc.). So what happens is you need to walk a fine line between how much you can clean and repair without negatively affecting the image, and the inherent grain structure of the film. I should add that both the films were 16mm, so there is grain and that’s important to the look. If you go too far it starts to look weird. Also, film is alive in a way. It can decay and degrade. And the CIVIL warS print had degraded and changed color. So this was another challenge.

Lastly, with Nova we were working from negative rolls that had been stored differently from the previous Nova Convention negative rolls we’d uncovered in 2014. It’s a good case study in film preservation: one set of negatives shot at the same time and place, stored in different settings over many years…looked very different. And some of the rolls had a lot of damage too. We had to repair the damage, find the sound for these negative rolls, manually sync them to picture, and then find a common color grading so that the two sets of Nova reels could unite as one for a coherent film.
I would also add that over these 13 years technology has rapidly changed. New tools became possible that weren’t before.
Filmmaker: It’s taken you around a dozen years to realize this project, so I’m curious to hear about some of the biggest challenges. Was financing a major obstacle?
Brookner: Financing was a major obstacle of course, especially considering the economics of bringing back an older film. It’s an expensive process in the best of situations, and we all know how hard our industry is on distribution for independents. But given that we knew the print we had would need a lot of work, plus the sound, coupled with the fact that very few people know about this film, made not just the raising of money hard but the planning too. Plus it took time to scour for all the elements because in any restoration you have to work with the best options available, and this requires due diligence. It’s also very hard to bring back a film when the director and producer (Howard) is not there to ask any questions of. And his US co-producer Orin Wechsberg lost all his materials to Hurricane Sandy, then sadly passed away six years ago. Toss a global pandemic in the middle of it all, you got a lot of challenges.
When I set out to make Uncle Howard I faced this challenge of how do you tell a story about a filmmaker whose films are forgotten and not that many people know. You gotta show it — so I made that movie. Similarly with CIVIL warS, few people knew the film, which was a big and parallel challenge. I knew the film and how great it is. But in practical terms that meant sort of having to show it to prove it.
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about piecing together the audio? I believe you relied on video tapes and magnetic tapes.
Brookner: Piecing together the audio was a Frankenstein job because there was not a single version (optical sound, VHS, mag roll) that didn’t have some dubbing over voices. It really sets a different tone when that happens. I have to really commend my partner on this, (Pinball founder) Paula Vaccaro, who fought to keep on the hunt for audio even when it felt like we’d exhausted all possibilities.

At one stage we worked with a studio on the sound, but the results didn’t hold and we ended up starting over from scratch. That’s when Dan Zlotnik came in, recommended through our post supervisor Carlos Morales. With him we could finally pull together all the fragmented sources into one coherent mix.
Over time we managed to construct a soundtrack that was original language except for one part in French. I had paid a lab ,and we were going through the very last possibilities. I thought we were done. I had one more VHS tape, which was an Italian version, so I assumed it was fully dubbed. Remarkably, there was no dubbing at all; and no narration either, but that was fine because all I needed was the French part. Not only was it clean, but in the middle of the interview Howard asks a question I’d never heard. That it was the final piece was really quite chilling. It was actually a very powerful moment.
I’d also like to give a big shout out to the many talented people who helped us work these fragmented parts of the sound, different frame rates, pitches and formats, into one new mix.
Filmmaker: Did you elicit feedback from Robert Wilson — or any of the participants and crew — as you worked on the film? Who’s seen the restoration – and what’s been the response?
Brookner: Bob and I spoke at length about CIVIL warS throughout the process — the progress, the pitfalls, etc. He was always very encouraging and positive. As far as the crew, I spoke to Tom DiCillo of course, who shot part of it, but most of the crew I didn’t know. And sadly, Howard and Orin were not around.
For many years Howard’s German co-producer was MIA,  but now he’s coming to see the film in New York! I’m very excited for that. In addition, Bob Chappell, who was also a cinematographer, will see it. I’d only managed to get in touch with him thanks to digging and finding Orin’s widow, and his ex-wife, who was quite involved with them when they were making this.
So there will be a reunion of sorts around this film, which is very beautiful. A testament to what films mean and can do for our community. So far the audience in Bologna at Il Cinema Ritrovato have seen the film and were really thrilled and stirred by it. It is such a finely crafted film, where you not only get inside Bob’s personal story and his work, but feel the emotion of what it’s like to create under intense pressure and high stakes. Also, it’s not every day you get to see a “revival” or a “classic” of a film you never knew existed. It’s pretty cool.

And of course, thankfully, Bob was also able to see the film in Bologna, just a few weeks before he passed. He had made a big effort to get there, and I’m so glad he did. It meant a lot to him and to me as well to watch it with him on a big screen in a theater. I’m very grateful for that experience.
Filmmaker: I’m also curious to hear about the lessons you’ve learned over the years of working with this vast archive, including the mistakes you may have made throughout this time. Anything you would have done differently?
Brookner: Gosh, I don’t know if there’s any mistakes because it’s not like there is a particular roadmap to follow, nor are there infinite resources. It’s really hard to organize something that was done by someone else, and who isn’t around to ask what is what. Organization is key. Staying up with preservation and archiving is key, and needs regular tending. Also, technology changes. Which is a blessing, because there are many new tools now that are really phenomenal that didn’t exist years back; but at the same time it works the other way, so technical work done years ago may need to be revisited in time to bring it up to speed.
Sound was a particular learning curve. We went through trial and error, and in the end discovered a whole toolbox of techniques for restoring both image and audio. That experience was tough but invaluable. Today we’re even advising other filmmakers on how to deal with their own archives. We hope to pass on the knowledge we’ve gathered to help other collections that may need it.

Collider’s Steve Weintraub chats with Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti for One Battle After Another.

From Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob, a father and ex-revolutionary who will stop at nothing to save his kidnapped daughter.

In this interview, the trio discuss their favorite Steven Spielberg movies and deleted scenes.

Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and newcomer Chase Infiniti bring a different kind of power to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. While Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro are central to the film’s collision, Hall and Taylor add grit and humanity, while Infiniti steps into the spotlight in her first screen role alongside some of the industry’s most iconic actors. In One Battle After Another, DiCaprio’s Bob finds himself on a desperate mission to save his daughter Willa, portrayed by Infiniti, a journey that collides with Del Toro’s world and ignites a relentless cycle of violence. But it’s the women who shift the film’s energy and raise the stakes: Hall and Taylor’s characters navigate code words, impossible choices, and breathless escapes, while Infiniti delivers a debut performance that cements her as a breakout talent. The movie also stars Sean Penn, Wood Harris, and Alana Haim. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Collider’s Steve Weintraub interviews the trio of women about the action-packed film, where they share their Steven Spielberg favorites, reveal deleted scenes, and discuss how Infiniti is on her “Spielberg shit” in her debut role. You can check out the full conversation in the video above or read the transcript below.
Teyana Taylor Responds to Steven Spielberg’s Praise

The trio also share their favorite Spielberg movie.

Steven Spielberg dons a tux in a red carpet shotImage via Collin Xavier/Abaca Press/INSTARimages

COLLIDER: I really want to say this movie is incredible. I loved all of your work in it. So, you’ve been asked a lot of the same questions. I want to throw a curveball right at the beginning. I’m wearing a Steven Spielberg shirt, and it’s because I’m asking everyone: Do you have a favorite Spielberg movie? TEYANA TAYLOR: That’s a hard one. I mean, every time I turn around, his name is on every single thing. Would you like his more horror stuff? What’s your favorite? REGINA HALL: Jaws just had its anniversary. TAYLOR: Agreed. HALL: I mean, the fact that that’s his first film. He did something before Jaws. HALL: He did? What was it? Was it studio released? It was a smaller… HALL: But that was his first major, right? TAYLOR: What’s it called? Duel.

Steven Spielberg’s TV movie, Duel, turns a tanker truck into a monster.Image via ABC

TAYLOR: His first major release was… Jaws was on another level. HALL: So was Duel like his Hard Eight? Yes, exactly. TAYLOR: Smaller thing. But do you know how goated you got to be for your first film to be Jaws? That kind of reminds me of baby Perfidia right here. Her very first movie is with Leonardo, Sean Penn, PTA as the director? Like, you are on your Steven Spielberg shit right now. This is insane! I am not arguing. Wait, so it’s Jaws? Your favorite? TAYLOR: Yeah. Agreed. CHASE INFINITI: I was actually going to agree, too. TAYLOR: I mean, that’s so goated. He just said our movie is outrageous. He’s had so many great things to say about our movie. That means he knows we exist. Hey, Steven! Give me that shirt when you’re done.
Deleted Scenes and Alternate Cuts for ‘One Battle After Another’

“You know he’s got two versions of this movie.”

[Laughs] 100%. I was at the Q&A on Tuesday night at Warner Bros., and I heard you mention something, which led me to this question. I don’t get to talk to Paul, but I’m fascinated by the editing process, so what possible deleted scenes didn’t make the movie that you were sad to see go? TAYLOR: Oh my god. HALL: There was a lot. TAYLOR: It was a lot. We originally had a different opening. So you see you open to me on Sean, but we had an opening running in on Sean as well. But the most important scene I was really sad about seeing go was Deandra getting to Willa, was Perfidia calling her and telling her, “Go get my baby.” You know what I’m saying? “And run.” Perfidia did what she did, but she definitely gave her that call as a best friend. HALL: It was a code speak. It was after everything. But there were a lot of scenes. But the thing is, Paul shoots so much great stuff that it’s hard. TAYLOR: You know he’s got two versions of this movie. If he wanted to make a whole other movie with deleted scenes, he can. HALL: He really could.
Teyana Taylor Is on Her “Tom Cruise Shit”

Taylor says PTA could have made “two versions” of One Battle After Another.

Teyana Taylor talking on a payphone at night in front of a gas station in One Battle After AnotherImage via Warner Bros.

TAYLOR: You know he’s got two versions of this movie. If he wanted to make a whole other movie with deleted scenes, he can. HALL: He really could. TAYLOR: ‘Cause me jumping over the fence with the gun in my hand, I was on my Tom Cruise shit. You gotta bring that scene back! HALL: You know what? Speaking of Tom Cruise, that was another favorite of mine that Steven Spielberg directed. Minority Report? HALL: Well, I loved Minority Report, but no. The other one. The aliens. Oh my God, I know exactly what you’re talking about. War of the Worlds. HALL: War of the Worlds! I did like War of the Worlds, too, a lot. That was a big film. Sorry. I’ve gotten distracted again. One Battle After Another is now playing in theaters and IMAX.

Release Date

September 26, 2025

Runtime

162 minutes

Director

Paul Thomas Anderson

Writers

Paul Thomas Anderson, Thomas Pynchon

Producers

Adam Somner

Carol and Joy

In 1971, Jean Eustache set a camera in front of his grandmother Odette and invited her to speak. The film that emerged, Numéro Zéro, is a vivid document of one woman’s life told without embellishment. The frame is almost fixed—broken only by a zoom or reframe—but Odette’s words animate it with a striking urgency as she chain-smokes, drinks whiskey, fields interruptions and insists on telling her story on her own terms. Domestic minutiae becomes monumental: Eustache reveals not only the power of a raconteur but also the radical act of listening and granting someone the time and space to summon their ghosts.
Nathan Silver’s short documentary Carol & Joy radiantly builds upon this lineage, extending his recent first-time work with Carol Kane on Between the Temples—whose warmth and wit anchor the film—into the realm of nonfiction, while reuniting with regular collaborator Sean Price Williams, whose kinetic camerawork mirrors its unruly vitality. Filmed over two afternoons in the New York apartment that Kane shares with her 98-year-old mother, Joy, the film captures a cascade of memory, music and confession. Friends and family drift in and out, a piano rumbles, stories of abuse and resilience flow without filter. The camera tracks this buoyant energy with feral immediacy, Williams’ lens wild and responsive, inhaling the atmosphere. Silver’s style doesn’t seek to tame or polish. It disarms through its loving looseness, its willingness to let life spill over in abundance. There is nothing sanitized here, only life in its most luminous form. In its non-judgmental presence, the film celebrates the magnanimity of Joy, who has lived nearly a century without shame or censorship, and of her stalwart daughter Carol, whose companionship and care sustain her mother’s voice. To witness them together is to glimpse a way of living that feels rare, almost endangered.
I spoke with Silver about the making of this portrait, the way 16mm reels shaped its rhythm, the art of listening, and the challenge of keeping a fading city alive on film.
(After premiering at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival, Carol & Joy will be screened September 27 and 29 at the New York Film Festival.)
Filmmaker: What I found most powerful was the way the film builds this conjuring space. Joy talks about her father, her childhood, her teaching, her daughter—all these memories flow through a single apartment. What stands out is that it’s a work about listening. Carol and Joy could be talking and suddenly someone else materialises in the apartment in a close-up, on a couch or in a corner. It made me think of how, when you’re at home talking about someone, you sometimes summon them and then suddenly receive a text, a call, or maybe you even cross paths. By talking about a person you evoke an individual’s ghost or presence. You have to be careful about who you talk about. I wondered if you thought about that while making the film or discovered it later?
Silver: For me, it was the apartment itself. It really bustles. People constantly show up. The first time I went there, planning to interview Carol for a press piece for Between the Temples, Joy sat down at the piano and played. Friends came in and out, I was served coffee, I was told stories. It was like stepping into a New York I thought no longer existed, a makeshift salon. I was surrounded by people who adore art, love to talk—Joy’s a real magnet. 
There are probably 20, 30 more hours of stories just like the ones in the film, so you sculpt what you can. Shooting on film felt right—Joy’s an analog lady—and it also imposed limits. A 40-minute portrait was all we could make. The medium itself dictated the rhythm. Everyone warned us: “Don’t shoot a doc on film, you’ll miss too much.” It’s such a fool’s errand. But for us it opened the movie up to what it was to become. John Magary, our editor, embraced the rollouts and used them to shape the tempo.

How do you capture a life? With Joy, when she talks about the past, she summons it. That’s why I liked the music creeping in suddenly or photos appearing—her past becoming present, and then suddenly people arrive to learn from her, listen to her. She has so much to say. An unfortunate thing is that we neglect older people so often; there’s always this obsession with youth. Here’s someone who’s nearly 100, with actual life lived. Why am I listening to kids on TikTok tell me about life? We should go to the source.
Filmmaker: I love that there’s no preciousness to it either. You’re present with her, fully. A memorable moment is when she speaks about surviving her father’s abuse and the camera rolls out mid-story.
Silver: That’s just the reality of what happened on set.
Filmmaker: Exactly. It feels like the film spills over. Even in darkness, the sound continues. Your style bursts beyond the frame. How do you balance being present in those intimate moments without over-emphasizing them, without being too precious or involved?
Silver: From the beginning, it was clear she’d lead the film. I arrived with questions I’d jotted down about her life, but she just started telling stories –and so vividly, too– I stopped her and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow with the crew.” From then on, my job wasn’t to direct but to let her dictate the rhythm and content. She doesn’t speak about A then B then C; she was zigzagging through time and feelings, and it all felt so naturally her. In documentaries, when someone’s trying to get a point across clearly, I think “Oh, this documentary is making this person tell us something this documentary thinks we need, and to me, that’s boring.” I want to see a portrait of someone, how they piece together what they’re trying to communicate. So, this was an attempt to capture an afternoon with her and not try for it to feel forced. To just give us a kind of biography or an autobiography. It was more about what it’s like to spend time with her.
Filmmaker: I love that looseness. You give her the same vulnerability she offers you. We see the crew, the set-up. You don’t erase yourself, you let us feel like guests in her apartment.
Silver: Exactly. Students, friends, the crew, we were all just guests. That’s part of Joy’s greatness: her openness, her love for people. Carol too. They make a home for you. That comfort is why the film could happen. She let us in. That’s documentary—you’re just documenting, but it becomes portraiture.

One of my favorite films is Numéro Zéro by Jean Eustache. It’s just him sitting down with his grandmother, filming her as she tells the story of her life. It’s one of the most lovely films I know. That spirit was always in the back of our minds with this project: simply allowing someone to tell the story of her life. I thought, if we could accomplish something that even borders on being like that, I knew I’d be happy.
Filmmaker: There’s something unsanitized about the film. It captures the act of listening—active but not fragile. Joy presents something and you volley back. I love it when she  says, “He couldn’t handle what I was,” and you dryly ask, “And what were you?” That boldness really landed. I don’t know if I’d have the courage for such a pointed question.You’re sharp but also careful—it’s done with care. Were you conscious of that?
Silver: With any directing, fiction or documentary, I approach it as myself, not as “the director.” I just respond as I would in conversation. If something odd comes to mind, I’ll say it. In school, I studied writing, not production. So, when I started to actually make films, I only had an idea of what a director is but no practice. I tried to have this heavy hand, and I was really over-directing and hated the results . When I tried too hard to dictate things, when I involved myself in that way, the movies sucked. However, when I began using improvisation and allowing life in, that became something. That’s when I found out “Oh, this is how I make movies.” So, that’s become my go-to reflex when the cameras are rolling
Filmmaker: Maybe you’ve been asked this often, but this film really begs it: what were your family dinners like? Did you learn that conversation style from your mother?
Silver: Totally. At home it was always messy—people talking over each other, food everywhere. That’s why so many of my films involve meals. So much of life occurs around a dinner table. I don’t know what it brings out in people, but if you’re forced to sit for an extended period of time with a bunch of other people, as soon as you have more than one person in the room, there’s going to be some kind of conflict. 
Filmmaker: There’s also a calm acceptance that you have that disarms people. It makes them share unruly things. For example, Joy talks about being a bedwetter and admits that she did it on purpose. She comes in with a confession. She admits that she was conscious of it. And then, you have her daughter Carol chiming in: “You can’t blame yourself, you were a child”. 
Silver: Joy never holds back, never censors herself. She isn’t ashamed, which is very rare! She’s just fully herself. She lets stories come in however they may, however they occur to her.
Filmmaker: I’d like to go back to the beginning. I’m wondering whose idea it was to shoot this?
Silver: Carol had talked about Joy throughout the [Temples] shoot and would call her mom to check in. I would hear Joy’s voice but obviously didn’t meet her at that point. Months after we’d wrapped production, I went into their apartment and thought: this is the New York that I long for. I texted [co-writer of Between the Temples] Chris Wells about it and he was like, “We need to capture this.” Carol agreed. At first she was skeptical about me filming in their apartment but said, We need to capture my mom. Carol had become close with so much of the crew on Between the Temples, so that also helped. Emily Schubert, who did hair and make-up, started taking voice lessons with Joy shortly after that shoot and was key in making all of this happen, too. She’d been telling me stories about Joy for ages, planting seeds.

We shot three very short days before I was to leave for a job in Paris, then John [Magary] edited in New York. It was leisurely, he fit it around his other jobs. Nobody got paid or if they got paid, it was barely a rate—it was made with total generosity, which you can feel in the film. The whole thing even made me less cynical, I think [laughs].
I know I’ll return to this film often. Watching Joy gives me joy! And there are parallels—I moved to Paris later in my life too, following my gut, as she did, mere days after wrapping the third day of shooting.
Filmmaker:  I was wondering about the brass tacks here in terms of your production set up. Did you feel like you had many options or did you really have to think about it?
Silver: We thought we’d use the same camera as Temples, but Hunter [Zimny] had a second Aaton, so we started with two, [with] Sean [Price Williams] behind one, Hunter behind the other. We quickly realized we were burning too much film, so we pared down. The gear mostly sat in the hall. Everyone brought their own equipment—no rentals. Kodak helped, as always.The heart of the film was Joy’s apartment. We didn’t touch anything, just shot it as-is. Carol still keeps her own place but lives with Joy now.
Filmmaker: That’s what’s so special: in that space you’re not “talking about” something, you’re just in it. It feels like a summoning—all the ghosts from Joy’s life are present in the room.
Silver: Exactly, and she has many of them—in a good way, I mean, because she’s lived for so many years. 
Filmmaker: It’s like a portal opens into another dimension. Ideally that’s what you hope in film too—you’re watching people talk in a room, but there’s something humming around the edges, beyond the visible.

Silver: What you’re talking about is the bursting at the seams. There’s life around it. That’s what I love in films, so I hope to bring that to my own. 
Filmmaker: Because you offer so much of yourself, people reveal sides they don’t normally show.
Silver: That’s what I aim for—that me as a director and me as a person are the same. In the same way, I don’t see much of a boundary between my fiction films and documentaries. They flow into each other. A doc about my mom led to Between the Temples, then Carol introduced me to Joy and we ended up making this. A documentary can lead into a fiction film, and back again, giving all the movies a feeling of life
Filmmaker: It mirrors Sean Price Williams’ cinematography—not chasing perfect frames but following energy. Did you need to give him direction at this point, or did you trust he’d capture it?
Silver: We knew this one was going to be a lot of close-ups given the tight quarters. Sean and I have now made four movies together and know each other very well. He reacts like an actor, absorbing what’s around him, allowing what would otherwise be written off as a flub to become the intended shot. John embraces these kinds of accidents too. On another film of ours, Sean tripped over a bed following a couple that were making out and John used the camera crash in the cut. That openness is key.
Filmmaker: The camerawork feels in sync with the people, it’s never stilted. The film celebrates what’s happening in the moment.
Silver: Some projects you spend years raising money, sorting out actor schedules, etc. etc. But this one came together quickly, and that ease shows. It was leisurely, which I rarely get on my fiction films

Filmmaker: Watching the final cut, I noticed the color timing: cold blue light outside, warm light inside. It feels like a safe space enclosed from a bitter world.
Silver: Absolutely. Between the Temples was also a winter movie about warmth. Funny to make two in a row.
Filmmaker: I read how you hate the look of digital.
Silver: Yeah, there’s a flattening to it that drives me nuts
Filmmaker: Between the Temples was your first on 16mm. Now Carol & Joy too. What’s it like for you working with that format?
Silver: Oh, I enjoy it. Shooting film is such a pleasure because when you get the dailies and you see it, you don’t want to kill yourself. You see something that captures the world in a way I would like to see the world. There’s an actual feeling to it. It feels like something much more substantial than digital. I still like digital when it makes sense. For my next project, it’s not on film, but that’s because of the story dictating. You know what the story requires. If you’re lucky, you can choose the format. Sometimes that’s not possible because of budgetary concerns, but it’s been so lovely to be able to shoot these past two on film.
There’s another project down the line that will be on film. I love the idea of comedies on film, because there’s something about this that clicks. Digital comedy has driven me nuts. There are certain 90s movies that were shot on film—thank god, because of the softness it gives. Certain directors today who’ve been at it for a bunch of decades, their work is framed and lit similarly to how it was in the ’90s, and it looks like shit on digital. The lighting especially, they don’t know how to light in the digital digital world. It’s lost any sense of atmosphere. I don’t know if you saw, but there were those clickbait articles about Kodak going under, going bankrupt. I don’t think it’s actually happening, but the thought ruined my day.

Filmmaker: The fear of losing film is horrid. This film celebrates the human fingerprint—flaws and uniqueness. Digital lets you roll endlessly, but here every moment feels precious.
Silver: When I was shooting Between the Temples, there was always this question because, you know, I love to embrace improvisation throughout the course of the shoot. Everyone was worried that we wouldn’t have enough film to make that work, and we did. There were questions about shooting a documentary on film. How do you make that work? And yet you do.
Filmmaker: It makes sense out of time passing. You can feel it more. I feel like there’s something about that that is missing on digital, when you could just record endlessly. There’s a certain pressure. The energy of the room changes. 
Silver: Absolutely. It’s a cliché at this point when people say, people are more on when you’re shooting on film. But it is inherently true, because you have a limit to the amount of footage to shoot. Unless you have an insane budget. But I don’t and probably never will.
Filmmaker: I don’t know if this is true. It’s interesting because I think sometimes when you’re shooting digitally, if it’s not happening or someone hasn’t learned their lines, they’re in a bad mood or not totally focused, it’s about disrespecting people’s time and resources. However, when you’re shooting on film, it’s about a disrespect for the medium, I think.
Silver: In spite of whatever the format is, it is disrespectful. Maybe we as people are losing focus. We’re disrespecting time! [laughs] 
Filmmaker: Joy reminds us to respect it all though: life, people, time. The way she and Carol care for each other is such a beautiful portrait of companionship. Could you talk about how they support each other?
Silver: If you talk to Carol for more than 15 minutes, her mother comes up. She loves her deeply. Carol is who she is because of Joy. They live together, and Carol makes it possible for her mother to keep teaching piano and voice while balancing her own work as an actor. She just wants Joy to live fully at 98, which is a really lovely thing.
Filmmaker: Their way of living feels rare and fulfilling.
Silver: I think that’s the thing I keep from knowing Joy. Whatever she suffered throughout her life, she remains an exuberant delight of a person. There’s something about that quality of resilience that immediately hits you when you talk to her. I think that comes across in the movie.
Filmmaker: She also survived such extreme forms of misogyny and sexism.
Silver: Yes. Even getting an abortion meant declaring herself suicidal. She learned to work with life’s insanity to build the life she wanted—ending up in Paris. That’s moving. It shows you can start over at any age. I think about that now, starting my own life in Paris at 42 There’s no reason why any of this should make sense, but you have to have faith in the absurd. Whatever seems impossible in the moment is just in that moment. You have to just follow your gut feeling so that you can get over it. She doesn’t seem to regret a single thing, except she starts off the film by talking about regret. Then you see that her life is about everything outside of that. It’s the starting point of the movie. And she says all that she could have been. 
Filmmaker: “I had all the gifts.”
Silver: Then you realize as she talks through her life, she does have all the gifts. She came out the other end. There’s a heroic quality to her, which is lovely to find. You don’t run into people that often that give you a sense [that] they make sense of the ridiculousness of the world. I hope to meet more people like that, I know they exist. 
Filmmaker: What’s the kind of New York you long for?
Silver: One where you could wander into a person’s apartment and be surrounded by people like Carol and Joy who play music, talk, laugh, argue, and then play music and laugh some more, all while sirens go off in the background and traffic hums below… I have trouble picturing people like Carol and Joy in any other place. Maybe Paris [laughs]. Walking into Carol and Joy’s apartment was a true haven and a window into some kind of time where  it wasn’t about being fashionable, it was about being human. I think that I miss humans.