Blue Steel himself Ben Stiller sits down with me to chat Zoolander 2 and the tragedy that held back the sequel for 15 years.
Ben Stiller on the Tragedy Behind Zoolander 2
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
SBS
Inside South Park Studios with Trey Parker & Matt Stone
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
Just how do you make an episode of South Park in six days? And what happens when you drop acid at the Oscars? Matt Stone and Trey Parker are getting set to bring the excellent blockbuster musical The Book of Mormon to Australia. For the first time ever they let Australian cameras into their studios to see how it's done.
Remembering Alan Rickman
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
RIP Alan Rickman. I was very lucky to sit down and chat with the man last year and the first story in the interview about his drama teacher hating his (now iconic) voice still astounds me. They said it was “like a drain pipe”. Remember him well because - by Grapthar’s hammer - he was bloody good.
Favourite Interviews of 2015
in Interviews, SBS, The Feed
I’ve been very lucky with The Feed. I get to interview some of the most fascinating people in popular culture, technology and media.
This year William Shatner opened up about losing his wife, Jeffrey Tambor spoke about his alcoholism, the girls from Orange is the New Black just mocked me, bearded Eurovision icon Conchita Wurst spoke powerfully about coming out, and electronic artist Porter Robinson taught me how to make music with Japanese robots. M Night Shyamalan wanted to end the perception of him as the 'surprise twist guy'. Rachel Taylor opened up about violence against women.
We challenged the director of The West Wing to a walk-and talk-interview, and Hugh Jackman was uncommonly political about the proposed shut-down of remote indigenous communities. Chris Pratt just straight-up flirted. Yes, that’s how I am choosing to interpret it.
These are a few of my favourite experiences this year. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoyed meeting them.
Also, you can sit back and watch them as a YouTube playlist here
GEORGE TAKEI
From Japanese internment camps as a child to becoming the iconic Mr Sulu on Star Trek to coming out as a gay man in his 60s: George Takei is a master of reinvention and he is more than happy to call William Shatner on his bullshit. In fact, it's worth it for that alone. This is my favourite interview of the year.
ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK CAST
Yael Stone & Uzo Aduba are crazy fun. We talk representation of women on screen and it turns out that they both thought they were going to get fired off OITNB, like, every single day.
JEFFREY TAMBOR
Jeffrey Tambor has been involved in 3 of the most groundbreaking American comedies of recent history. The Larry Sanders Show pre-empted the rise of HBO & cable television, Arrested Development pushed American network narrative comedy further than it's ever gone before and Transparent has lead a wave of transgender representation on our screens in 2015. Tambor himself is one of the most generous, sensitive and articulate people I've come across.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The original Captain Kirk has certainly lived long and prospered but Shatner's personal & professional life has been far from smooth sailing. At one point he was living out of a truck despite being a household name from Star Trek. He opens up about losing his wife Nerine to alcoholism.
CHRIS PRATT
Somehow in the space of a year Chris Pratt has gone from being an adorable side character in Parks and Recreation to anchoring the 2nd biggest movie/nostalgia-fest of the year (Jurassic World) and the best Marvel movie (Guardians of the Galaxy) But what is so striking about this interview is that you hear an actor talking about actually making a conscious choice to *become* a movie star. Many times in the past I’ve asked actors to explain their career choices but this is the first time I felt like an actor was honest about it. Also you can enjoy the fact that Pratt dances like a sexpest, falls over repeatedly and simply cannot whistle.
JOHANN HARI: WHY THE WAR ON DRUGS IS FAILING
Most people don't make a comeback with drug addiction. But Johann Hari is an exception to the rule. He was an award winning young journalist - and then 2011 it all came crashing down. He was outed as plagiarising his interview quotes from old articles. He quit. Handed back the prizes. And went away to travel the world, meeting drug dealers, mob hitmen and doctors, all to explore how our war on drugs is failing. Badly.
TROYE SIVAN
The YouTube star turned musician and actor talks beautifully about coming out of the closet in the age of social media and the power of the internet with a new generation. Sweet, articulate and very talented
CORNEL WEST
To many people ‘Racism’ is a sort of abstract concept. To the legendary preacher, activist and thinker Cornel West it is a lived experience that has coloured the way he sees the world. That’s not to suggest that he’s bitter. He’s not. But a life-long experience of bigotry has given him a view of politics, 9/11, Barack Obama that is fundamentally different from most people.
GEORGE MILLER: MAD MAX FURY ROAD
This is the man that invented the Australian Blockbuster. The original Mad Max trilogy was a modern action movie franchise that WE exported TO America. Not the other way round. The process of making the original nearly wrecked George Miller, and indeed his best friend Byron Kennedy passed along the way.
EUROVISION WINNER CONCHITA WURST
The Bearded Lady is the Eurovision Winner to rule them all. There’s a fascinating origin story behind the character of Conchita Wurst and the family that gave birth to her.
AMY POEHLER
Handcuffs, Hilary, Mental Health, and why you want John Hamm on hand when you give birth.
WALKING & TALKING WITH THE WEST WING DIRECTOR
Thomas Schlamme discusses Mike Myers, a blowjob and the surprise visit to The White House which changed the course of the career from one of the most prolific directors of our time.
MELISSA McCARTHY
Kristen Wiig made her have sex with a dolphin. In an audition. IN AN AUDITION. Melissa McCarthy is forthright, funny and fierce.
JIM MORRIS: PRESIDENT OF PIXAR
It's so rare to hear a business person speak with this amount of honesty about failure & frustrations. Disney Pixar are the most successful studio in the world. So what happens when you have to scrap everything halfway through and start again?
BILL HADER
Amy Schumer's hit film Trainwreck got a lot of attention this year as did Schumer herself but it was her co-star that was the real pleasure to talk to.
GRAHAM BURK: AUSTRALIA'S BIGGEST ANTI-PIRACY CAMPAIGNER
Village Roadshow's Graham Burke wants to sue you if you pirate movies. And he's very happy to say so.
ADAM HARRIS: AUSTRALIA'S ULTIMATE STAR WARS FAN
What would you do if you found out who had an inoperable brain tumor? For Star Wars fanatic Adam Harris, it was to fulfil a lifelong dream of travelling to a convention in the USA.
So, that's my list. Who would you like to see interviewed in 2016? Lemme know in the comments down below.
Harrison Ford talks Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Rolling Stones and more
in Film, Interviews, SBS
Harrison Ford is the living embodiment of the phrase "zero fucks given". In our interaction he's totally polite, considerate & militantly non-plussed. Also he can't remember partying with Monty Python and the Rolling Stones while making Empire Strikes Back. Which, I assume, means it was a truly epic gathering.
Making Sherlock: Steven Moffat Interview
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
Sherlock's creators on sending him back to the Victorian era for their upcoming special, and why Matt Smith was a perfect Doctor Who.
How To Make a North Korean Propaganda Movie
in Film, Interviews, SBS
Australian filmmaker Anna Broinowski wanted to learn how to make a propaganda film about coal seam gas. So she flew to the agitprop capital of the world, North Korea, to learn from the best.
Anna's appearance at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas
Rachael Taylor talks Jessica Jones, Feminism and Domestic Violence
in Film, The Feed, SBS, Interviews
Rachel Taylor has come a long way since Launceston. The Tassie born actress has fought off Transformers, she's been one of Charlie's Angels, she's even starred in Grey's Anatomy. She's also a campaigner against domestic abuse and violence against women, having taken out an AVO on her then-boyfriend, Matthew Newtown. This week Rachel Taylor is entering the Marvel Universe in the new Netflix series Jessica Jones.
Walking and talking with The West Wing director Thomas Schlamme
in Interviews, SBS, The Feed, Film
Schlamme discusses Mike Myers, a blowjob and the surprise visit to The White House which changed the course of the career from one of the most prolific directors of our time.
The West Wing, ER, Ally McBeal, Sports Night, Friends, Mad About You, The Americans, Manhattan. If you’ve seen any of these shows then there’s a fairly good chance you’ve seen the work of Thomas Schlamme. He has set the tone for the most influential television programmes of the last two decades. And of course he is the architect of those famed ‘walk and talks’ on The West Wing. So, that’s exactly what we do.
The Feed goes on a steady-cam mounted tour through the making of The West Wing.
Marc Fennell walks with Schlamme and discusses Mike Myers, a blowjob and the surprise visit to The White House which changed the course of the career from one of the most prolific directors of our time.
Here's a web extra: Schlamme explains the network battle behind Sports Night's incongruous laugh track
Thomas Schlamme, director of The West Wing & Sports Night, tells Marc Fennell about the network battle over the incongruous laugh track on Sports Night. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SBS2Australia Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbs2 Tumblr: http://sbs2australia.tumblr.com/
Bassem Youssef: The Jon Stewart of Egypt
in Interviews, Film, SBS, The Feed
"People were calling for my death while I was writing jokes" Meet Egypt's answer to Jon Stewart
Bassem Youssef has long been called ‘Egypt’s Jon Stewart”. The heart surgeon-turned-comedian has racked up millions of YouTube hits and his seditiously funny TV show Albernameg ridiculed politicians in a land where, well, they don’t often ridicule politicians.
He was drummed out of his show, declared a national security threat and now he lives in exile.
Marc Fennell sits down with Bassem to find out exactly how government pressure works in a nation like Egypt and whether comedy really does have the power to change minds and topple tyrants.
Joel McHale dissing Chevy Chase & Kissing Dana Scully
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
I like to think of The Soup as like, once you watch this you kind of don't need to watch the rest of American reality shows.
That's right, but the problem is if you don't watch the reality shows then there won't be the shows, and we wouldn't have the clips, and then it's an animal that eats it's own tail.
Of all the different shows that you've lovingly made fun of over the years, which do you reckon makes the greatest contribution to popular culture?
The Feed, probably. What is the greatest contribution? It's hard to say because it's been eleven years.
It's a long time.
Yes, I'm 64.
You don't look a day over 61.
Thankyou very much. When Tyra Banks had her talk show that was very helpful to us. Whitney Houston and her crazy reality show with Bobby Brown... that was a remarkably sad.
With big celebrity deaths...
Oh, this will be fun! Yes! Hilarious.
That's what I was going to ask - how soon is too soon for you? What's the window when you can make jokes about it?
It's not like we have a chart where we say, let's go after Judy Garland now, guys! We try to stay away from sad things and scary things. When celebrities are really going crazy with drugs and stuff, we stay away.
Really?
Oh yeah. We see ourselves as a late night chat show monologue. People will ask, what's the latest gossip? And I'm like, I don't know! [Inexplicably, said in an English accent].
Is your audience exclusively people who work in Buckingham Palace?
That was trying to be my Melbourne accent.
The Melbourne accent is weird. They say Malbourne. We don't understand anything they say.
They think they're better than you guys.
Yeah, they definitely do.
I did also want to talk about Community: the journey behind it is as storied as what goes on in front of the camera.
It should have been a reality show.
Would Chevy Chase have been the villain then? Is he as bad as rumours say?
He did not want to be there. If you go to Variety or Hollywood Reporter there's multiple quotes from him saying he doesn't really like the show and doesn't want to be on it. There were times when it was great to have him, but he didn't like the hours. There was a lot of drama behind the scenes. And we would never know if we were going to get picked up or not, every year.
What does that do to a show, when you're constantly on the edge of coming back or not - does it bother you? Is that why you keep doing The Soup?
I keep The Soup because it's fun, and it's with my friends and we have a great time, and I get to go to Australia and be in a strangely lit room with a piano behind me.
We expect you to play it at some point.
Oh, I will. Believe me. I'm going to be doing 'Rhapsody In Blue' in a second. Community was stressful, but you know, you just kind of give it to God and who knows.
There's also talk about Dan Harmon, the creator, delivering scripts late and eventually he was fired, for lack of a better term...
And then rehired.
What was that year like without Dan?
There's a few shows that come around that are created by one person, and they need to be written by that one person. Community was definitely that way. That came out of his brain, and it could really only come out of his brain and when it wasn't coming out of his brain it was not the same. I said, I'm not going to come back to the show which was completely different. It was not our show.
You've also made this move into dramatic acting; you were in Deliver Us From Evil with Eric Bana -
Yes, I was! Eric Bana - what a son of a bitch.
Arsehole.
Ugly, too.
Yes, the worst.
He's super-racist.
And also the new X-Files. I assume you can just tell us all the secrets?
Yes. Everybody dies.
Because the rumour is that you're the love interest for Scully. Why are you breaking up the greatest couple in television?
We just have a lot of sex.
The X-Files: Tinder edition.
That's right. I play a conservative radio and chat show host, and I believe everything that Mulder believes. Except I made money from it. I would say - how would I say it without getting into trouble? - I am an alien.
Scoop!
I couldn't believe was there. I couldn't believe I was saying their names. I was just like, Scully! Mulder! Wow, I said that out loud. On camera. To the people who are those people!
I'm looking at what Greg Kinnear did, who hosted The Talk Soup before you - have you always wanted to move into dramatic acting?
I took a lot longer to do it. I don't have my Oscar nomination yet.
Give it time...
I always thought Spy Kids 4 was going to be the one.
I thought your cameo in Spider-Man 2 was going to be the one.
Me too. It hs been a career disappointment for me.
I had always wanted to do dramatic and comedic acting, and it was just that comedy was the access point. For whatever reason in Hollywood people go, well that's what you do, you can't do anything else. So Scott Derrickson, the director of Deliver Us From Evil, wrote the role for me and then I had to audition to get it. And that's why the movie was the biggest hit in the history of cinema. We opened against Transformers, which I don't recommend. I don't recommend that. It was great fun andI got to know Eric Bana - he's salt of the earth.
It sounds like a backhanded compliment!
He really is! I mean, for an Australian.
Is there a point at which you will have to say goodbye to The Soup?
I signed a contract in blood, so...
Did Seacrest make you do that?
Yes. He is the devil.
Second scoop!
Not like the arch-devil, though.
I still love doing it and I hope the shows are fresh and different. This week's episode is a fake reuinion episode. We got Hayey Joel Osment and Jon Cryer, Connie Souphanousinphone, and we just fight each other the entire time.
Is it as good as the NASCAR episode?
I'm going to say it's even better. If you thought people drink at the Melbourne Cup, or on Anzac Day, you have not been to Talladega. It's an entire society set up of smoked meats and American beer. It's amazing.
Whoever worded you up on Australia, with Melbourne Cup and Anzac Day, has done an excellent job.
I've been here for both.
You have seen us at our worst. I am sorry.
Or your best? BecauseI think a sober Australian is super boring.
Okay. We're going to go drink now.
Why Pixar Shut Down Production on Good Dinosaur
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
Pixar is the world's most successful movie studio, but that doesn't mean they don't have near-misses.
Pixar Animation Studios have an incredible strike rate when it comes to hit movies. They've made over $6.2 billion at the box office and have an average review rating of 93 per cent.
So what happens when it all goes wrong?
That's what faced Pixar Animation Studios president Jim Morris on the new film The Good Dinosaur. Originally due out last year, they had to stop production, fired almost the entire cast and completely rework the story.
We started on The Good Dinosaur a long time ago and we had a basic pitch we all liked very much. We worked on it for a long time, and it took us a while to figure out that there were some basic things in the story idea we were trying to tell that we couldn't fix, and weren't going to work out.
We were fairly far down the path; we were three years plus into the making of the film and we just realised that it wasn't going to be good enough. Everything we tried to do to fix it just felt like we were overplotting or bolting something on that didn't feel organic. So we made the hard decision to stop working on that film and do a reboot.
There were still things about the world and the characters we liked a lot, but the story just wasn't working. All that is survived is some of the design of the two key characters. Everything else - about the story, what it's about, even the look of it - has changed.
Thank God Disney trusted us, and said, 'if that's what you guys think you need to do'; because otherwise we'd all have been fired for incompetency.
When you do make that decision to reboot and you've got an army of people working on a film, what does that do to the building? How does that news reverberate?
It can be fairly traumatic when we make a big change to a movie that's been cooking along. We've had we've had great luck, and great misfortune. I've had a lot of my career in different films I’ve worked on. Some have gone through the roof, and others just haven't landed in the same way. We take solace in the leadership ranks.
The point is to not put a bad movie out, and get the best possible movie. But it’s a little disturbing to people working on the project. It's a disturbance in the force.
There's lots of talk about the quality control that goes into Pixar movies. When do you know it's working?
We never know for sure that it's working…
Opening week box office is how you know?
That's how we know if it's connecting, and you hope it does. It takes a long time to feel like it’s working. We do a lot of screenings with different people; six or eight times we’ll project the rough version and watch it. They’re usually pretty ragged the first few times but there’s some core we keep working on, and getting at.
You eventually feel a time when it turns a corner, when it falls in to place. We’re more palaeontologists than anything else. We find a nice dinosaur bone, and then we find another, and another, and we put them together, and we think we’re making a nice brontosaurus, and then it turns out to be a stegosaurus. It turns out to be something completely different, but it’s gotten there in this naturally organic way out of the work of everybody. You discover what you’re making along the path sometimes.
Pixar is an extroadinarily successful company, but John Carter was the biggest bomb of 2012. Jim Morris reveals to Marc Fennell where they think they went wrong.
You were the producer of John Carter in 2012, a film that I really love, but didn’t necessarily get the sort of respect it might have deserved. When articles and numbers start to come through… what goes through your head when you’ve experienced how much work it takes to get a film like that made?
You question yourself; what could I have done better, what did we miss here, what were the things that went wrong? You try to take everything in your stride; you don’t pat yourself on the back, and when something doesn’t do well, you don’t shoot yourself. You live to fight another day.
There have been a lot of creative risks that have paid off for Pixar over the years. What was the one that made you the most nervous?
WALL-E probably made me the most nervous. I thought for sure we would be the ones to screw up Pixar’s success. It just seemed like, 'oh, this may not work'. The audience might look at this and go, 'what is this?'
WALL-E is such a ground-breaking film in so many ways, specifically that you’ve got the first 40 minutes of the film with no dialogue. Was there internal reticence at Pixar about that?
There was less reticence at Pixar, but some of our Disney executive friends were very curious about how that was supposed to work.
“Curious” is a good word...
Well, when you do the pitch, you say, 'here it is: we've got broken down trash compactor who is living on a post-apocalyptic earth compacting trash'. It does not sound like a great idea for a film offhand.
I think it would be safe to say that every producer, every director there has felt that. They’ve felt, 'we’re trying to make something good here, but what if it doesn’t work?'
Now that andy's grown up and left his toys behind, what story is left to tell? Jim Morris tells Marc Fennell what aventures lie in store.
Even Inside Out, which has turned out to really connect with audiences, but was an unusual idea. We all loved it, but at some point you go, 'I don’t know if this is going to work'. You work on these things, but you just don’t know.
I think a Pixar film is one that uses animation to try to get at basic human truths and emotions. They’re not things that we decide to be themes and then work into the movies; they rise up organically from different filmmakers and storytellers, but I think there’s a like-mindedness at all films at Pixar. They have that within.
Roadtesting Playstation VR
Sony released their new VR headset today at Paris Games Week. I take it for a spin. Much embarrassment ensues.
How Close Is An Accidental Nuclear Detonation?
Just how close have we come to the apocalypse? A lot closer than you might imagine. Just between the years between 1950 and 1980 alone the United States experienced a recorded 32 accidents involving nuclear weapons. That is according to journalist Eric Schlosser, who has documented the many times we've come close to Code Red in his book Command And Control.
There was one nuclear weapons accident in 1961 over North Carolina where a B-52 bomber started to break apart mid-air because there was a fuel imbalance on the plane, and as it was breaking apart the fuselage started to spin. The centrifugal forces on the plane as it was breaking apart pulled a lanyard in the cockpit. And that was the lanyard that a crew member would pull if they were above the Soviet Union and about to bomb.
There were two hydrogen bombs on the plane and hydrogen bombs are dumb. They're machines. When that lanyard got pulled the bombs didn't know they were over North Carolina not over Moscow. One of the bombs went through all of its arming steps, and when it hit the ground there was a firing signal sent. There was only one switch inside the bomb that prevented a full-scale detonation. That would have been a bummer because John F Kennedy had just become President and they literally would have had to evacuate Washington D.C.
Now this particular switch the following year was found to be defective in many of our nuclear weapons. They would have unloaded the weapons from the airplane and realised that the weapons were fully armed because the switch hadn't worked. If one of the defective switches had been in that bomb... it sounds so corny but it would have changed the course of this world.
Again and again, you find examples of hundreds, if not a thousand or more, accidents involving nuclear weapons that could have ended very badly.
The direction which military history has gone since the end of the Cold War has been to very targeted kinds of warfare, drone warfare - and nobody's suggesting that drones are perfect, they're certainly not - but there's a much more surgical approach to modern warfare and in that sense nuclear weapons don't seem to necessarily fit that trend. Do you think nuclear weapons still have a role to play in keeping the world safe? Does the idea of mutually assured destruction still apply?
I think it's more complex. The threat to kill all the civilians of your enemy country is effective. But at the same time it's a psychological threat. And if you get a madman as a leade.r or if you have a group like ISIS or Al Qaeda, who believe that dying on behalf of the cause sends you to heaven, then threatening to kill doesn't have that impact. So in the 21st century nuclear weapons have no purpose whatsoever.
This summer was the 70th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima; that was a really crude, inefficient, rudimentary nuclear weapon, and in an instant it killed 80,000 people and knocked down two thirds of the buildings in a big city.
We built, in the Cold War, nuclear weapons a thousand times more powerful than that. The nuclear weapons that Russia, the United States, China, France and Great Britain have are vastly more powerful than that. So I think everyone has to realise that we either work towards reducing the number of these things and eliminating them, or they're going to be catastrophes that make 9/11 - I was in New York City on 9/11, and I saw the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center - that will seem trivial compared to what's possible with these weapons.
Can you ever see a future where we are disarmed, or is it just too complicated, and politically and practically difficult?
I think it's within our power, if not to solve it 100 per cent, then to greatly reduce the danger, and the first step is for people to be aware. These nuclear weapons are out of sight, out of mind, literally. They're in silos underground, they're in submarines under the surface; there are these machines waiting to kill you. It's as simple as that. There are still 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world. They're wired up, they're ready to go and if one of them goes off it's going to be a catastrophe beyond description.
RJ Mitte: Breaking Bad Stereotypes about Disabled Actors
in Film, Interviews, SBS, The Feed
Brett Lee: From Cricket to Bollywood Star
in Interviews, music, SBS, The Feed, Film
People have started to see the trailer for Unindian and they're going, ‘Brett Lee in a Bollywood movie - how in the hell did that come about?’
Well it goes back to 1994 when I first went to India. I was 17, got sick, hated bowling on the wickets, but I got home after two months and thought, I really loved that trip. There was something about India that struck this beautiful chord within me.
Over the years the love grew for India, from the culture to the people. Fast forward a few years, and I got a couple of Bollywood offers, but I wasn't ready. I was still playing cricket. Then this Australian movie came across the desk. I had a look at it and loved the script, loved what it stood for, and I thought, this would be a good chance to do my first movie. So why not?
One of the things I've discovered while researching this film is that this is not necessarily your first appearance. If you go through the credits of the movie Babe, there's the name Brett Lee there. How is it that you ended up there?
I was looking after some pigs in the agricultural shed when I was in about Year 7 or Year 8. In the movie Babethey used 52 pigs, because obviously the pig grows up, so they'd go, here's the next pig, and then that one grows up, because pigs grow pretty quickly. Apparently I may have helped with one of the pigs.
So did you not realise at the time?
No, I didn't have a clue. Someone said, 'Your name is in the movie', so whether it is me or not? Still don't know.
Just own it. Nobody's going to question it. It's on your IMDB page now. You do have this massive hit song in India that you wrote - how did that come about?
In 2006 I was over there for a tour with the Aussies, I met two people from a company and they said, ‘We'd love you to do a collaboration with Asha Bhosle'. They asked if I'd heard of her and I said, 'Yeah, of course!' This girl is an absolute legend.
She's the voice of every Bollywood song.
I didn't realise at that time she was 74. Not that there's anything wrong with 74. I wrote this cheesy, pathetic little love song…
No it's not! We've been playing it in the office for two weeks on a loop.
Your ears must be burning. When I went home and I asked if I could have a go at writing the song, they said yes. So I picked up the guitar, got the speakerphone on, played it and sang some lyrics down the phone. He said he loved it.
No one knew I was doing it from the team so I was sneaking out of the hotel. We're in this locked down hotel where security is tight - people can't really get in, you can't really get out. So I sneaked out and did this song, put down the vocal, put down the guitar, put in the bass, did it, went home, and then six weeks later get a phone call to say it's on the charts.
You making a hit song in secret is my favourite part of this.
Yeah, no one knew about it.
What's the most misunderstood thing about Brett Lee?
I get the tag 'injury prone' and that type of stuff. I've had two elbow operations, six ankle ops, broke my back twice...
Do you think sport fans in Australia recognise how much pain you guys go through?
It changes from person to person. Doing the trade that I do as a fast bowler, so your spine... I always say it's a bit like a school ruler. You get the ruler and you bend it and you get this little white line coming up, and you keep bending it and eventually it snaps. Well, that's what happens with your spine. If you keep putting your body under immense pressure and putting power through your body, something needs to give.
The person at the ground doesn't see the hard work that goes in behind the scenes, doesn't see the thousands of hours of rehab. And I thought it was a gentleman's sport! Mum and Dad said, 'Play cricket because you won't get injured, don't play rugby’.
We've had some interesting experiences this year in the interaction between sports fans and players on the field, like with Adam Goodes and Buddy Franklin. Do you think we prepare elite sportspeople enough for that kind of scrutiny?
No, I don't think so. I think it's becoming better these days. I think young guys who are 15, 16 years of age have had no life experience. They throw you into a team, put you in a jersey with a number of your back, and you become the perfect role model.
That doesn't always happen; kids are growing up, they're finding out about life, about guys, or girls, depending on what team they're in. They're trying to work out who they are as a person.
And you're also under an incredible amount of physical pressure with your time being taken up with lots of training.
Then you get thrown in a press conference and you've got 20 journalists, it’s just, 'Okay, you've got to make your test debut - good luck’. I think I remember saying, 'I want to bowl really fast and see some blood on the pitch'. Steve Waugh said, 'You might want to do that mate, but maybe forget the blood thing’. Then you sit back years later and go, ‘What did I say that for?’
Ending the War on Drugs: Johann Hari
in Interviews, SBS, The Feed
Kevin Smith Has Seen Batman's Dick.
in SBS, The Feed, Film, Interviews
A) Kevin Smith cannot resist talking about what he saw on the set of Star Wars
B) Bruce Willis is terrible to work with
C) Ben Affleck's dick.
D) You don't need D. Clearly A, B and C were all gold.
EXTENDED INTERVIEW
I guess the thing with you and your career is that it's so much caught up in words...
It's all talk. That's what it is. Most people say [screenwriting], 'it's deeds, it's not words!' I'm the other guy, I say, 'words! Not deeds."
Was there a moment when you realised that you did have that power to write, that you could string together amazingwords?
This was 1981. I was 11 years old. I typed a story, kind of like an essay that I had read. There's an author named Jean Shepherd, who wrote a book called In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. If you ever sawChristmas Story, that whole movie is taken from the words of Jean Shepherd; he's the voiceover artist who narrates the whole movie, that's the actual author. He wrote a lot of personal essays about growing up that I loved.
I believe that anybody can be creative. I don't think it's like that there are talented people and then there are people that don't have talent. I think anybody can tell stories. We can all communicate. Telling a story is just a version of communication; put a plot in it, and some made up details.
And that's what you have to do. That's what every creative person does. Nobody starts off instantly doing 'them'. Do somebody else first, because you saw somebody do something once and it appeals to you, and you say, 'oh, I want to try that'. So you imitate until one day you think, ‘I can do that, but now I want to try my version of it’.
So the moment for me was reading, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, and thinking, I could do this. I love the personal voice - it was very reflective, sentimental, and nostalgic. Also funny, but not gross; not my type of humour. He's very gifted, so I was thinking, I might try this. I started writing a story about going to the relatives; our parents would always make us go to a relative’s house every weekend. So I wrote this ridiculous satire about going there, and turned them into monstrous characters, and I showed it to my brother, cos I figured he would get it, because he too was trapped going to my relatives every weekend. And he laughed.
I'll never forget the feeling of sitting there across from him and watching him laugh. What that felt like. That moment birthed an entire career. I wouldn't know for years what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to write.
And for a few years I thought, well, what does one do as a writer, like, where I grew up? Nobody said,’ you can go into the movie business, or go into TV.' From Highlands, New Jersey, what could I do? And I figured I could write obituaries one day, or maybe work for the newspaper? Something like that. I thought that was the only writing. I didn't know what else. Nobody in our world... nowadays, pre-schoolers have a film school class, and kids are told they can do anything. But where we came from that wasn't the case. It was much more of an overprotective generation. Like, 'don't do that! You might get hurt.' Or 'don't do that, you're going to be embarrassed'. So I was never pushed to try something.
So it was the imitation of Jean Shepherd that kind of led to that feeling; watching my brother laugh at something that I wrote, knowing that I engineered that laugh. Knowing that, he wasn't saying, 'this is stupid’. He said, 'this is funny, you should do it again'. So right then and there, I knew was a writer.
It wouldn't be until my 21st birthday ten years later that I figured out I wanted to be a filmmaker. And that was when I saw Richard Linklater's movie Slacker, up in New York City, at the Angelica Film Center. I was thinking, 'man, if this counts, I want to make a movie!' And Richard Linklater's a gifted filmmaker, don't get me wrong, we all say Boyhood, but Slacker was a call to arms for anybody remotely artistic, or anyone remotely on the fringe.
Watching this dude tell his story, not in New York not in LA, but in his world, and with no ongoing characters, no three-act structure, no car chases, no movie stars, or anything like that. That made me go, 'okay, I would like to try this. If this counts as a film, I would like to try.' And for years after that - when I made Clerks and thankfully Miramax picked it up and distributed it to the world - I would have people come up to me saying the same thing. 'I saw Clerks and that made me want to be a filmmaker.' And I know what that means. It means, ‘your movie looks so bad and doable that I figure, I should give this a shot'. And that's true.
Awe, because you're like, 'I've never seen anything like this before'. But arrogance because you're like, 'I think I could do this'. 'If this counts, if the bar is here, I think I might be able to cross that bar'. So I'm happy about that flick because it is the movie that launched a thousand ships. Now, not all of them are good ships, some of them are creaky and sank, but it made people take a step they wouldn't normally have taken.
The fact that a person who was never going to do that in this life, did that? That to me is better than an Oscar. And I say that because I'll never win an Oscar.
Hey, you're young.
I'm not that young. And we've seen the best I can offer, trust me, I'm not winning an Oscar. I think my best days are behind me.
Of your work, what do you think is the best thing you've done?
I love Clerks II. I think Clerks II is wonderful, but there are people that say it's not nearly as good as Clerks. But that's because Clerks is a punk rock song. It’s a call to arms. It makes you want to make some art. You look at clerks and you go, oh, I can do that. It's about something we all do, which is hang out and talk to our friends. It was the internet before the internet happened, and stuff. So you look at that movie and it makes you go, 'I could totally do that', and that's why I love that movie. But Clerks II is a better film. Clerks II, at that point in my career, was the absolute best I could be.
I'm way off from everybody else on this but it's that movie we made? Tusk. That walrus movie. That, to me, is like, sublime. And I don't mean that it's genius; I get it, I know some people hate that movie, some people think that movie is religion... it's the one movie I've made that I can stand up in the face of criticism for. When people would attack Clerks or Chasing Amy, that was being attacked personally, because that was my life through different characters. Tusk has nothing to do with me other than 'this was some weird shit I just thought up'. So people could come up to be and be 'oh my god, I love Tusk, it's brilliant', and I go, 'oh, isn't it?’ And people can come up to me and say, 'I hate Tusk, it's the worst piece of shit I've ever seen' and I go, 'yeah, isn't it?' It totally works on both levels. So I like that. So it's a movie that nobody else could have made.
It came from a podcast...
We were doing an episode of Smodcast 259:The Walrus and The Carpenter and we talked about this story we read online where a guy in Brighton, England was offering a room for rent in this mansion. You could have any room you ranted, the run of the mansion, except for two rooms; his bedroom and his 'workshop'. In exchange all you had to do was for two hours a day dress up in a very realistic walrus suit that he had put together. He would then throw you fish and crabs and you would try to catch them with your mouth, and you couldn't speak as a human you could only speak in walrus.
It sounds true.
So very true, so much so that 2000 people applied for the room. So many people were like, I'll do that, and I’ll dress up like a walrus for a free room. It turned out to be a hoax, thank the lord. But we talked about it on our podcast and first we couldn't believe it, then we started making fun of it. I was saying, 'man, you show up, this guy is going to knock you over the head, he's going to sew you into that walrus suit, and it's going to be the human centipede, but the human walrus’.
And from that moment we start building this dopey movie that I start falling in love with, you can hear me on the podcast literally falling in love with it. And it was one of the only times in my life, the only time maybe, in my life, that we had a microphone on a moment of inspiration. That's what thrilled me about it. It's like oftentimes you show the audience the movie when it's done. They weren't there for when it began, for how it germinates, what it came from. That audience heard a movie come together that I desperately wanted to see. The stupidest movie ever came up with, but was like I need to see this movie. And in the middle of the podcast I go, I'm going to do this.
What was important about that for me was the audience was there to hear the moment when it was born. The audience had given me everything that I have, in life. I'm allowed to be this idiot that I am for a living where I'm wearing whatever I want, my face on my own shirts, because of the audience. So I try to give back as much as possible. The podcast stuff is free. When you make a movie there's millions involved so you've got to charge people for that. When you're doing a show, we gotta charge people for tickets but we tend to give the recordings away to people online. But that's not giving back enough. This audience afforded me the dream life. Anything I want to do, I wake up and I go, ‘what do I want to pursue today?’ because of them. The best way I could give back is to show them anything's possible.
I burned my career to the ground three years ago. I stopped making movies for three years. Then I talked about this dopey walrus thing and turned it into a flick. And if I could take it through, beat or beat, open source it; they saw the moment it was born. No audience really gets to see that. They see the finished product. So they were there for the birth of it, the idea.
You were saying that you quit movies - is that Cop Out? Is working with Bruce Willis that bad?
Absolutely. I take performance very seriously. That's my favourite thing in this world. It's the only reason I'm involved in film is because I love acting. Not acting myself, because I'm not an actor, but I love being around actors and actresses. If there's any way I want to spend my life, it's watching people tell the lie that tells the truth. That's what acting is. I didn't learn that much about me sitting in a classroom, and I never learned that much about me sitting in a church, but I damn skippy learned a lot about who I am watching art, reading books, listening to music, even devouring some TV and stuff like that, live performances. That's where found myself. It's sacred to me, it's a church. Every one of those movies that I made, dopey as they may be... every one of those people in the cast were there because they wanted to be there. You don't do a Kevin Smith movie to help your career, because it's not going to help your career. You don't do it for money because they're all low-budget, you do it because you're in it for the joy of performance. Willis was the person I worked with in my entire career who was a paycheck player. A straight up paycheck player. Nothing wrong with that, it's not against the law, but if you're going to get paid to do the job, do the job. He didn't want to do that.
So you're sitting in a directors' chair, you're watching this performance; what's going through your head?
On day one, I said, oh my lord. He wasn't giving a bad robotic performance. But I could tell a, he couldn't care less, but also b, Tracey scared him a little bit. Tracey Morgan is a comedic genius who will do your scene as scripted, and then do ten variations on that scene all equally as funny. You just have to find a way to make it germane to the script. But he watched Tracey adlib for like half a day and I saw it in his face, it was on the monitor. You could just see the colour draining out of his face. 'What am I doing here?' And that remained in that guy for the rest of the shoot. Which is fine. Again, it's idealistic and stupid and youthful and naive and childish to think he should want to be here because he loves it, not for the money. He's a movie star. They all do it for the money.
An adult would look at me… actually, most adults would look and me and say, 'grow up, you've got a dream job', and I understand that. But it was like there was a thief in the temple so to speak, and that destroyed me.
Movie stars like are like the NHL of performers, supposedly. They're the highest paid, so they must be the best at what they do. At least that's the logic we work under. We all know it's not true but they're high profile. This is the first one I got to work with. I've worked with people who have been in movies, but they're not a movie star. Ben and Matt became movie stars, but I worked with them before that. So he was the first bona fide movie star that I worked with, where I sat there and was like, here we go. This was me going, I'm going to get to work with one of my childhood heroes, one of my favourite actors in the world. Came from New Jersey man. I lovedMoonlighting. Never mind all the Die Hards, I loved those as well, I was in one of them. But then I got there and he's not interested anymore. He's really not. And I'm not the only one who feels that. When I first said it, people were like, sour grapes'. Woody Allen just fired him from a movie. Go watch any interview with him online.
I've done one. I know.
Which is fine. If you're over it, get out. Don't do it anymore. But he talks about not wanting to do action movies yet he still continues to do them because that's where the money is.
Let's talk about a good on set experience.
The flip of that is Johnny Depp. Bruce Willis was the biggest movie star I had worked with at that point, and after the Cop Out experience I went, if this is what it's like working with the best, I'm going to go make dirty cartoons with Jason Mews.
When I came back and did Tusk, Johnny Depp came and did two days on the movie. There's the biggest movie star on the planet. Sweetest dude in the world. And was there to absolutely play. Didn't get paid. Was in one of the world's stupidest movies.
You've got to stop calling your movies stupid!
That one is! That's indefensibly a stupid movie. And yet it somehow holds together. But that stupid movie attracted Johnny, and he was just like, I would love to do this. And working with him, even though we one had two days, it made up for all of Cop Out. He's just happy to play. walked into the makeup room on day one, and we said, is there anything we can get for you?' And he said, 'if you want to bring up my makeup artist, that would be amazing'. And I went to his trailer and knocked on the door, and he said come in, and he turns around and he's got this long prosthetic rubber nose on. He's like, buried in makeup. And I was like, oh my lord! Look at you! You're treating this so seriously! That’s crazy; you're actually putting on facial appliances! You could have phoned this in! Literally, you could have called a phone, and we would have shot it with a camera. If we heard your voice, the audience would have been, 'that's impressive!' But you're here in makeup! And he's going, 'what do you think? Doesn't it look like a dick?' And I said, 'now that I look at it, it does kind of have that appearance. And he said, 'me and Joel were talking about painting a blue vein down the side'. And I said, 'are you telling me you want to wear a dick on your face in my movie?' If you're ever going to wear a dick on your face in a movie then Tusk is the movie to do it!' That dude comes to work, ain't even getting paid, and is like, 'let's put dicks on our faces'. We had fun. The other guy's just not interested anymore.
I did want to ask you about another positive on set experience. I assume you can't tell us anything about what it's like to walk on to the set of Star Wars, but I want you to tell me what's going on inside your head.
I'm so ready to see the flick, as is everybody. We've now seen a couple of trailers and some more footage. We've had Force Friday where they released all the toys... you can't step anywhere in this world without stepping on a rolling BB8. So we're all loaded for bear. We were all loaded for bear back when they did Episode One. The difference I think between Episode One and Episode Seven is Episode One happened: JJ is going, all I have to do is not do that. So he goes, 'what's missing from Episode One?' Everything we loved about the first three movies. Haan, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Darth Vader; all that stuff. Not Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader. So right away the ingredients change up the game, where everybody's like, 'I'll eat that; I don't care what kind of broth it's in... every one of those meaty ingredients is what was missing from the last stew, so pour it out all over my face now.' So you start there, with the dude already taking a step up by doing the logical thing and bringing back everybody that everybody loves, all the characters.
Is that you saying Darth Vader is in the new Star Wars movie?
Smells like it to me, doesn't it? They show it in the trailer! Picture the burnt mask!
How hard is it for you not to give away stuff?
Dude, I wish I knew. I'm terrible like that. That's why I don't get invited places. I went to the set and they had me sign a non-disclosure agreement to say that I wasn't going to talk about anything I saw.
And JJ takes that stuff very seriously.
Very seriously. So much so that his assistant Morgan was pointing to a sign; they made a poster, based on WW2 propaganda poster, and it's Imperial Starship commander going like this (fingers on lips). And it says 'Loose lips sink starships'. So I signed my NDA and said, 'this is awesome! Can I take a picture of this?' And they said, 'You just signed! Did you not read it?!'
I kept quiet on a lot of stuff until it got out. But now people know what Simon Pegg is in the movie, because he was in a little short that they showed at Comic Con. He was there the day that I went to visit the set and I never said anything, because I thought, obviously that's a huge spoiler. But when I was there, he didn't tell me about being in the movie either. I was like, you're here? And he was like,you're here? And he said, of course I'm here, JJ's here. And I was just like, man; this must be amazing for you. And he was like, dude, I live down the street. So I come here every day for a free lunch and to watch Star Wars.
So it was pretty sweet to visit. But I don't know anything more than what those cats know. I know little things, but not nearly enough. I'm like everybody else, chomping at the bit, waiting for day one, which hopefully for me a little before everybody else. JJ showed me a cut of Star Trek early, and of Mission Impossible III, way early. But I think he's probably going to be like, 'Kevin, if I show you anything - I let you come to the set and you told people. If I show you anything of the movie you're going to tell everyone!'
You're obviously a really huge Batman fan, and one of your friends is playing Batman. Of course the weird thing that happens when Ben Affleck got announced as Batman, there’s this quote that 80% of people hated it, 12% of were indifferent, and the rest were Kevin Smith.
How is it to watch a friend of yours to go through that amount of internet hate?
At this point for him it's probably no big deal at this point, because he lived through the Bennifer thing, which got really hostile and vicious at one point.
For weirdly nondescript reasons.
It seemed like people just got sick of seeing people in love, or something like that. That was the nearest beat I could figure. 'These people, they seem so in love'. And then they started turning on them. Gigli didn't help. But I feel like he lived through that, and that was really really bad, the Batman thing, when they announced it and people were like 'boo'... you know, I'm sure it bugged him on some level but that's just an internet gut reaction. But you noticed how it un-booed the moment they put up a trailer.
Now everybody is like, 'I believe in Batffleck’, and it feels good to be an early adopter, but I just think, all you had to do was see him in the suit. All you had to do was see that one shot in the trailer and everybody goes, 'that's Batman'. At that point it don't matter whether or not people go, 'I wouldn't choose Ben Affleck'. They're going to buy it. He's suddenly become the Batman for a generation. Which is so weird because ten minutes ago Christian Bale was the definitive Batman, and nobody would ever touch Nolan's most serious treatment of Batman. But now we've got Zack Snyder going, I think I can treat this even more seriously. That's what I love about that trailer. I was very heavily involved in the architecture of Ben Affleck Version 1. Version 2 I don't have nearly as much to do with, but it's nice to see him ascend. Honestly, the directorial thing was fantastic. He always had a good eye. He's a storyteller. So that was awesome to see, him as a filmmaker and standing on an Oscar stage. But the Batman thing is just... that's personally amazing for me. It's in my heart. This is a guy who is going to play my childhood hero. And now my connectivity to Batman is much deeper. I've seen Batman's dick! I can't say that about Adam West, George Clooney, Christian Bale... but Batffleck? I've seen it. Plus, I live in his house! I bought his house! So technically I live in Wayne Manor now. And I did direct him as a young man so that kind of makes me like Liam Neeson in those movies. I trained the Batman! Him being Batman has benefits. It's all about me, naturally, when he got cast, I was just like, 'well, this is great for me'.
Where in the world, be it on set, it could be a place, it could be a country, where do you feel most at home?
Hands down, my office, in my house, back in Los Angeles. That's where we do all the podcasting. Even though it was Affleck's house for half a year, and I've been there 13 since, we still call it Ben's house. He looms large.
That room; so many good things have happened in that room. I've watched my kid grow up. I've watched my kid grow up in that room in that room. I've written some of my favourite things in that room. I've recorded some amazing things in that room. I've smoked incredible amounts of weed in that room. Sat down and spoke to my heroes in that room. Grant Morrison came over, and we spoke there. All the people I've ever had on the podcast have been through there. So that's the womb for me. That's definitely the inner sanctum.
INTERVIEW BY MARC FENNELL
TRANSCRIBING BY MADELEINE PALMER @ THE FEED.
North Korea Undercover: Suki Kim
in Interviews, SBS, The Feed
This woman went undercover in North Korea. Her name is Suki Kim and she spent 6 months posing as a teacher & missionary in Pyongyang. She wrote notes, kept them on a USB stick attached to her body and eventually emerged with a book.
M Night Shyamalan: I'm not the 'twist' guy.
in Interviews, SBS, Film
He was supposed to be the new Spielberg. But after iconic successes like The Sixth Sense,Unbreakable,Signs, and The Village, it all started to fall apart. M Night Shyamalan has been a critical punching bag, with some of the worst reviewed movies of the last decade. But the twist is that his brand new film The Visit, which he shot entirely in secret and paid for himself, might just be the first step towards the redemption of M Night Shamylan.
How comfortable are you being known as The Twist Guy?
It's not how I think of myself at all, it's like, he does the moonwalk, he does the moonwalk, he does the moonwalk; do the moonwalk, do the moonwalk. You're like, oh jeez. But I don't think of it that way. It doesn't burden me when I write. So I don't really think of it as that. I get that that's what people say, but breaking that expectation is just as exciting as fulfilling it.
Whether there is something dramatic or not dramatic that happens, a paradigm shift that happens; it’s unimportant to me. It's really about the characters and their journey, and if I'm listening to them. Have I fully listened to them, or have I put my agenda on it? That’s always the struggle that goes on. That’s my job.
Before you made this film you were saying you were trapped inside your head; what does that mean?
I'm a super self-reflective guy about dealing with the repercussions of fame and expectations; all of those things are really suffocating but I always strive to try to understand them, not beat them, you know what I mean? Your survival gut tells you to try to win, win, win; but really when you're at peace. You're just understand it, you know, and then you're fine. Cut, and scene. Reset.
I’d like to believe that I'm the guy that can go, I just now came up with an idea that I know is going to be subversive and polarising, and I have to make it. But the cowardly side of me would say, no, you probably would tack away from that and try to be a little more accepting. Making smaller movies has allowed me to break free of that kind of thinking.
So you made a film kind of in secret, and you paid for it yourself.
I would like to believe if I was a professional basketball player I would have in my contract that I'm allowed to go and stop at any playground and tie on my sneakers and go play basketball. In fact the opposite is true in the NBA contracts, you're not allowed to go play, anywhere, because they're scared you're going to get hurt. But to keep in the game, is what I'm talking about. To keep the love of what you do,
I always said to myself, like, I would love it to be like, let's take everyone in Hollywood, and say, you have only X amount of money, and your imagination. Go do whatever you can. And for me that's all you ever need. Here is minimum amount of money and your imagination and go tell this incredible story.
So it's kind of an exercise in, ‘can I make this from my raw skill’?
Yeah. For me, the other stuff, you know, the trailers, the cranes, all those things that come... that's all fun and wonderful, but it isn't storytelling. And it doesn't end up on screen, most of the time. A lot of the money doesn't end up onscreen. And in The Visit, obviously, every single dollar ended up onscreen and that's so satisfying.
For whatever reason, you're sitting there and you're going, huh. I wonder if I did this shot, and I wonder if did that shot, or you come up with the exact thing you want to work on, or something that was nagging you from the morning: that's the version of the filmmaker that you want to be. All in.
know every film you do is a quite personal, it's a piece of you that you put onscreen at a certain time of your life - what is this film saying about you right now in 2015?
That's a good question. The first thing that came to mind is what happens as a writer, I do, that is I write a scene, or I write an outline, or I write a character moment, and I ask, why is that working so well for me? And then I analyse it. Why does that feel like a sweet spot? Why does that feel so comfortable? Why does that feel so right?
I have a board in my library and I'll write down gut things, not from your analytics, but your intuitive mind; you don't even know why you're writing it. And I'll write down forgiveness. And then I'll say, wow, you know that scene's also about forgiveness. This whole thing is about forgiveness. You know what, this whole thing that's going on is about forgiveness. And then I realise, that's the movie I'm making.
Where in the world do you feel most creative?
When I'm not thinking of it as a business. When I'm thinking about how I felt when I saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark in the theatre; that kind of awe. Coming back and pretending, oh, the pillow is falling on me, it's a boulder, ah! When you're a kid; the need to say the pillow is the boulder, I have to run for the boulder.
That need to tell the excitement of the story, becoming another character, wanting to be that character... it's the greatest feeling in the world. When you come up with a great idea, or a great moment, a great scene - that high you get? You can't beat it.