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Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White. Join me once again as mister Jedediah Ayers be in the Movies Tanto. Also back in the booth is mister Spencer Parsons.
I think Salivation Army has added to my permanent lexicon.
After The Brave, our look at rare, overlooked or seldom seen films continues with one that is relatively easy to find outside of these United States. The Brave, based on the book by Gregory MacDonald yes the guy that wrote Fletch, and adapted by Paul McCudden. The film stars and was directed by Johnny Depp. Here he plays Raphael, a Native American who, in desperate need of money for his family, decides to sell himself to a group of shady men
who cast him in a snuff film. We will be spoiling this film as we go ahead, so if you don't want anything ruined, track down the movie. Like I said, it's available on dvdvia import, but never officially released in the US for reasons Jenny did. Was this a first time watch for you?
Actually no, I saw it probably twenty years ago, a little bit more than that. I was working at a bookstore and there was another cinema nut there and he had a copy of it and he loaned it to me. Actually he had, I think he had a VHS copy of it that he longed to me, So I'm not sure where he got that.
But I watched it and.
I remembered it.
It was memorable, but it didn't make a big I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it in the last twenty years before before this opportunity to talk about it. Yeah, I've watched it a couple of times recently, and my impression of it has improved. I do think it's a little more noteworthy than I originally thought.
How about you, Spencer, Yeah, this is my first time seeing it, though its reputation really precedes it. Victorious premiere can that I remember reading about back in the day, and it definitely is the kind of thing that had it been available in the United States more easily, I would definitely have wanted to check it out, but kinda forgot about it for a.
Long time because it just wasn't very available.
Yeah, I was excited to finally check it out, and yeah, we'll get into it.
But I think it's a really fascinating, singular kind of movie. It's nothing else.
Quite like it, and a lot more actually, a lot more interesting than I expected initial response. It definitely suggested something more incompetent than I think this is. So yeah, I'm excited to dig in.
I don't remember the con well of the kind response. How was that.
Treated as a total embarrassment?
Johnny Depp is quoted in one place a hard experience for him, maybe harder than I think he led on he took a punk rock fuck you sort of response to American critics. But yeah, he talked about feeling attacked, like how dare he direct a film in the responses, and you know, I'll be honest, I.
Like cutting down this kind of hated film.
From festivals like con and generally it's a little easier to eventually catch up with them.
But yeah, just I guess because of when it happened.
Too much time passed before maybe I could have chased it down and I lost some interest. But yeah, it was really despised and was treated as incompetent and an embarrassment not just to Johnny Depp but token for running it, which I think is more telling about the people that have that opinion. And that's without thinking that it's a really great film. I just think this is the kind of thing where you're telling on yourself a bit. If this is the biggest embarrassment you've ever witnessed.
Yeah, I'm very curious to talk about that as we go along, because this one, yeah, you wave a lost film in front of my nose or a you shouldn't be watching this kind of movie, and I'm all right there, I'm like, okay, well, now I need to track this
thing down. So I think I tracked it down probably ninety eight, ninety nine something like that, and it's the thrill of the chase rather than the actual Once you get it in your hand, it's like, Okay, it's going up on the shelf and I kind of forget about it. One of these days, I'm going to watch that movie. And it just sounded so fucking depressing. I was like, this guy sells himself to be in a snuff film. Okay, Wow,
how am I going to process that? And yeah, it's not the most uplifting film in the world because the material itself is so depressing. But I think it was handled with a lot of respect. I think it was a really good adaptation. I mean, we'll hear from Paul mccutten later on, and he doesn't necessarily like this adaptation. For him, it's strayed a lot from where he was
going with the screenplay. It was ironic. I was watching some press conferences and interviews from that period of time at con and Depp is like, oh, yeah, well, I wrote the first draft. I'm like, no, you didn't. You and your brother rewrote the draft and changed some things around, but you didn't write the first draft of this, and it was going around before. I don't know if it was the stuff too that happened before this movie was made that also colored what happened.
I tend to think, So this is one where I think this is a film mody in the truest sense.
It is cursed, is like truly a cursed film.
I agree. And it's really weird too, because I was looking at other movies, like I just watched Fletch Live recently, and I really have never gotten into the Fletch phenomenon until starting to do this Chevy Chase podcast that we also do, so that was really my excuse. I think it was maybe the second time I ever watched the original Fletch, and then second time watching Fletch Lives was
just a couple of weeks ago. I didn't realize that McDonald's work had been adapted one other time with a movie called Running Scared from seventy two that David Hemmings directed, and that is also a lost film, as in, I cannot you know me, you know, the guy who's such a mad dog when it comes to tracking down movies. I cannot find that movie whatsoever. And I'm like, so two of this guy's adaptations are lost to America and
one of them is lost to the world. And then I watched Confess Fletch, so nothing to do with this whatsoever.
I was really happy for the chance to rewatch Confess.
I really loved that movie.
Yeah, that's a lot of fun, right. I really thought that John Hamm captured that pretty darn well.
Though.
I have to say that the original Fletch films that that was kind of ideal for chevy Chase. And I don't know why he didn't make a third, or fourth or fifth. It seems like it was ready made for him to be in a series. I guess maybe because Fletch Lives didn't do that well and that one wasn't based on McDonald at all, just based on the characters. So I think they made a poor mistake by not actually adapting the books like they should have.
My guess is that would just be a budgetary thing, like more expensive to license another book, rather than it's something new what the character you already have a license for.
So the film really takes place for me in about three main locations. There's the office building that he goes to where he meets Marshall Bell, and I think it's the same office building where he meets Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando who had worked with depth on what was it don Juan DeMarco, So I guess they had become fast friends at that point. That was also a big selling point of this is, Oh, look at Marlon Brando's in
this movie, and he does a fine job. Tho he's only in what one scene, really and then he shows up towards the end. But I don't know if those almost look like outtakes towards the end, like they didn't get this guy for a second day. They probably just paid him a million dollars for one day kind of thing.
It looks a lot different at the end.
So the first scene he's in, he's got that long hair is all a mess, and he looks very bedraggled, and then at the end all the hairs pulled back a tight ponytail, and he looks a lot more put together, and wish we understood why he's not playing harmonica.
At the end.
I think there's a little bit of a comment in the book that didn't quite make it into the movie, where the title of the book is the title of the film, the snuff film that he's going to take, which I think comes out of the tradition of very careless ethnic casting of Native Americans in Hollywood movies.
Anyone that's looked ethnic could be cast.
Is that great joke in Blazing Saddles with the Yiddish speaking Indians as big as ay and DNA laben they dark and.
They're not whop.
And then of course, thinking about Johnny Depp playing Tanto in The Lone Ranger several years later and the kind of blow up around representation that started, it's really interesting. It's different time, but I do suspect that there would have been some similar blowback if it had been released in American theaters at the time.
It's certainly not nearly the same.
As with The Lone Ranger, but that's one of the aspects of the film that is, you know, once like really a fascinating attempt to try to understand something and also in a very problematic tradition of using Native Americans indigenous people in America as allegories for all manner of different problems in the world. And I did find it interesting that the screenwriter was really disappointed that his christ allegory was scrubbed out of it, and that.
Definitely is something that's also in the book.
But I'll be frank, I think That's one of Johnny Depp's good moves in fact, because the situation and it is a very stripped down kind of allegorical treatment. There definitely scenes that are highly allegorical messages built in throughout the film, but I think just embracing that sense of how allegorizing Native Americans in American history, not very directly and not importing kind of Christian mythology into it.
For a Norman Steel Lesson, I'm a writer, Ted oakming a lot of thing right as Gum and Go, we always need Indians.
Marlon Brando famously all about Native American causes, you know, having sesshin little feather go and pick up his oscar and everything at the ceremony where he was supposed to win for what was that The Godfather? I think so this movie really addresses a lot of problems that Native Americans were having at the time and probably still having today and just being completely disenfranchised. That was interesting. In the book, they don't really ever say for sure that
he is Native American. They say, oh, are you Italian? Are you Mexican?
Are you this?
Are you that?
And they just kind of assume that he's an Indian.
It also feels like Depp's approach to it is to treat this as I want a horrifying crime, but also more of a philosophical experiment.
This notion of.
Death and what the image of someone dying and or pain can reveal is the pitch from Brando's character, whereas in the book and in the original screenplay it is much more of a to be quite frank intended's pornography.
And I find that to be an interesting divergence in this movie, because again, this is all tricky and problematic, but in another interesting way, it speaks directly to not merely the exploitation of Indigenous people, which it takes as a given, but it also deals with this idea of indigenous people as a kind of allegory thought experiment for the benefit of white people. Found that to be an interesting take because obviously then the movie itself is.
Doing the thing that I think it means to critique.
There is this history that is very uneasy that I felt that moment of the film drawing on in a way that I wouldn't as I call it deep, because I think it's so sparse. The scene is so sparse, and it's referential, so I don't know that I can really quite make an argument that it's mounting a philosophical case, but at the same time it's referring to I think a bigger philosophical idea than the notion of pornographic snuff film.
Doug.
Yeah, I think it was a good call by Depth to take it out of the screenplay because it was in that original screenplay too, pretty much straight out of the book, and it's a horrifying description of what awaits in is. The idea of it is heavy enough to cast. As you said, we were already maybe avoiding it because we know what the plot is and it sounds so so depressing. That might have really taken it over the edge with that end film.
Yeah, it's like whole ironized Cody thing. This guy what he was actually Sicilian, but he became like the most famous Native American that we ever saw on screen. He's the guy who's like crying in the commercial and stuff. I want to say, Yeah, it's just like I think Depth can pass if he wanted to, and he kind of does in this He looks very natural amongst the
actual Native Americans. And then you get you know, like Louis Guzman and I'm trying to remember the other actor's name, so they're more Latino, but I think it's just like again disenfranchised people, so it really becomes I mean, like the place where Depp and all of his friends live is a literal garbage stump, like they are the scavengers of the world, just going through the garbage stump and
trying to fix things up, resell things. You meet the Frederick Forrest character who's got this weird oh voice that he's doing in here with his I guess maybe mentally challenged son played by Max Perlick, who used to be like what Parker Posey was to women roles in independent films, Max Perlock was to male roles in independent films insofar
as he would show up in everything. It was like I think him and Steve Zoon probably had like a turf war as far as who's like the most indie of the independent actors, and he was everywhere for a long time. I think he even shows up in Dead Man, which is another movie where Johnny Depp plays a Native American as well, playing William Blake. Though wait, actually I take that back. He's adopted by the Native Americans. He's not a Native American in that one, because there is
an actual Native American, if not more than one. But I do remember the one guy, yeah, like really telling him off, which was pretty great. It's been a long time since I've seen that movie, but I remember really really enjoying it when I saw it, And yeah, you're right about the whole thing with the snuff film that
they want to make. They actually tell him because they don't talk too much about it in this but they really go into a lot of detail in the book for sure, but talking about how they want to put like a white stripe across his nose like war paint, and just really, yeah, play it up this whole thing, Like I think they'll probably even put like a feather in his head kind of thing in his hair, just to be like, oh, yeah, here's this brave Native American
and we're killing this person. And some of the details they go into in the book, and I like that. McDonald actually in the beginning of the book is just like, yeah, there's a chapter in here that is really rough to read, but I really had to put it in here. If you want to skip it, go ahead and skip it. But I really had to have this here because it looms over the rest of the book.
Yeah, So Marlon Brando's character, the McCarthy character, is one who has changed maybe the most. It's changed a lot though from the book and the original screenplay to the film,
in that you don't really buy into it. You do think this guy's just a sleazy criminal and things like that, but you do think that he sells the idea that he believes his own bullshit in the scene where he talks about the service that he provides and that he's asking Johnny Depp to provide, whereas in the book, in the original treatment that the Raphael character, the Johnny Depp character is really a lot more kind of naive and being that sort of devastating reveal at the end of
the book where you get the contract. You see the contract it was written out and it's just nonsense on a It's just a couple of scribbles on a piece of paper and he was just really do pretty much. And yeah, and the Yeah, so the character of course doesn't give the speech that Brando gives in this, but yeah, it changes a lot, and I'm not sure that I'm
not sure that it works entirely. There's a lot of elements of this film that I think are really good that seem to be existing in a different film than other elements that I think are good.
They don't quite gel into a satisfactory whole, but taken on their own, I think, oh, that's interesting and that's worthwhile.
And I'd watched that movie that consistent with that, and I'd watched the Machine that's consistent with other elements that are in opposition to that in this film.
The way that Brando sells it in the movie, for me, really reminds me of the film Martyrs, that whole idea of like you see the face of God and the person that is about to martyr themselves, and with this it seems very much like, yeah, we're looking for that kind of thing, but there is that tinge of and that really gets us off, like that is the ultimate orgasmic material as seeing somebody who is losing their life for us.
It reminds me of Peter the James Mason movie Odd Man Out. He's dying throughout the film, and the artist goes from vignette to vignette because people discover him and how they react to him. But the artist is obsessed with painting his face because he knows he's dying and he's not really concerned about his fate.
It's just for his art.
He's got to paint this face because yeah, he mumbles that same stuff about seeing God and see the truth in that consistent throughout film history.
I think I think they make a better point in the book and the screenplay than they do in the realized film as far as will he get the money at the end, And when you read the book and when you read the screenplay, you know that he's not. You know that he is completely illiterate, that he cannot read the contract. Like you said, it's just a whole bunch of nonsense, and he's never going to get that
money for his family. So what he ends up getting, at least in the book, as far as I remember, it's a very paltry sum that he gets, and he goes through the same thing. He gets like almost it's like a deposit. But yet the Marshall Bell character is just like, why would we give you money? That doesn't make any sense. Why would we give you anything at all? Because you're just gonna waste it. You're just going to go get drunk. You know, you're just gonna throw this
all away. We're not going to give you shit. But they end up giving him a little bit of money and he goes out and does what he does in this as far as like, oh, I'm going to buy stuff now, I'm going to buy stuff for my family. I'm going to buy some new clothes. And then every single time he tries to do something nice, people are after him and in his shit and just being like, would you do how'd you steal this money? You know, like in this movie it's you know, what robbery did
you do? Like you're going to go to jail, and there's this whole thing. It's interesting as far as his wife and his kids keep thinking he's going to go back to jail, that he's going to be out of their lives soon. He is going to be out of their lives soon, but it's for a completely different reason, and it's just for the sacrifice that he's trying to do to them. But he's such a fuck up that they're never going to see one red scent out of this.
There's a toggling between genuinely playful, kind of fun moments.
The trip to the grocery store.
I think, in particular, which even has this like on their way home, they have this enormous bird, it looks like an ostrich that they've even put the flannel shirt onto as they're headed home from the grocery store on the bus, that they've made such an outrageous kind of purchase with the grocery cart filling up, and then yeah, there's this giant, gray plucked bird beyond a turkey that
they take home. There are these like kind of wild moments, and then metronomically after each one, somebody wants to know, whether it's his wife or Louis Guzman or other characters, the priest, they all want to know, how.
Did you steal this? Where did this come from? Are you going to jail?
This is going to seem like a really nutty comparison, but this movie is an interesting quinn with Preston Sturge's His Christmas in July, which has it has a similar messed up situation. Preston Sturges is one of the funniest filmmakers ever, and this is one of my favorite films of his. But I don't find it funny at all.
It's so stressful. It's like a Fosspender movie because the premise is that this guy is being trick into thinking that he's won this big prize, and so he goes on a spending spree and throws a little carnival for the kids in his neighborhood. That's very much like Carnival that seems to get bigger and bigger as the Brave goes on and with everything that he's that he buys. I'm just like, no, don't do it, don't do it. This is different because, like in the one case, he's
been tricked. But I think Sturge's is working a similar kind of allegory about American capitalism and consumer capitalism in particular, that all involved depth, various writers are all kind of tapping into in a kind of similar way.
But dep really loves that carnival to a point that it's one of the things I love it too. But it unbalances the film.
There are so many if one of the reasons why it's two hours long is that there there's so many shots, and they're elaborate shots moving among all the different carnival rides with the kids and all this kind of stuff, And it's even mysterious where did all this money come from?
How does he do this? How is he showing it off?
But it's interesting because in The Sturges, we know that eventually this guy is going to find out that it's a ruse and that he's spent all this money that he doesn't have and it's.
Going to ruin him. And in this movie we know that all the money is coming from torture and death that Depp is going to have.
I doubt that Johnny Depp was thinking of Christmas in July, but I do think that these two movies make for really interesting sort of comparison, given they're like parallel setup and then the specific for the imagery that they get into.
It's not the Coffee, it's the Bunk. Absolutely one of my favorite movies ever.
Lady Eve can only edge it out because of Barbara Stanwick and because it really is like the funniest movie I've ever seen.
I love that reveal of the carnival scene when you see him and he's like jumping on a trampoline and then the camera's like just doing the slow pan, so you see him doing one thing and then it's completely
seamless from him. Actually it's him opening up a refrigerator showing all of the stuff that he stocked it with, and then the camera keeps panning and then boom, he's on a trampoline and I like that he's kind of moved under there, and then some balloons come up to kind of mask the cut, and then he's on a kind of makeshift Merry Go Round And I thought that was really nice the way that he presented all this, and that he's the one going through all of these
rides and kind of like exploring and showing like, hey, wife and kids, look at all of this stuff, and yeah, it is completely nuts that he would do this, and it is something that his wife is just like, you woke us up in the middle of the night to show us this, Like what are you doing? Where did you get this?
You know?
When are you gonna be going to jail? And she lays him out with a punch right across the jaw and I love it. I love her character. I think the only character I love more is the Marshall Bell character, because Marshall Bell is just always amazing and to see him in this he's just he loves playing these unhinged characters, like of course, when he shows up in Starshift Troopers.
Oh God, we're gonna die. Don't you understand we're all gonna die.
Control yourself general quato and total recall and stuff. Oh it's so good. But yeah, here, he's just this. He's the right arm of the Marlon Brando character, and he just seems to show up all the time, and I guess he's kind of he's almost like an Angel of Death type character who just keeps showing up. And like, at one point, Death past to put all of these bottles that kind of slung over his shoulders, and he's going to get water from this creek, and I'm just like, oh, man,
that water is probably so dirty and so filthy. And Belle even says, no, wonder you people die so early if you're drinking that kind of stuff. And he's just there to taunt depth almost the entire time, to taunt him and then also to hurt him. There's some one scene later where and I'm guessing it's the other guy that was in the office with Bell when we first meet him.
I recognize him, and I checked it out a couple of times and then just decided no, it's so like a bizarre sort of it reminds me of the theatrical punishments of various apparatics in the trial for the benefit of Joseph k I'll be coming back to Kafka again in relation to this, But yeah, it was like a strange, not quite recognizable person.
But Depth reacts in a way that seems not just like he's shocked.
That there's this victim of his tormentor, but also that he seems to recognize him, which I guess he would in such a small community, but it is it's a really strange moment.
I'm pretty sure it is the wizzy character that Chuck Weiss's character who's in the office at the beginning in Marshall Palo's office. But what the significance of that character is outside of showing up twice and Depth being pretty thrown off by him when he's alive, So I guess he'd be is thrown off by him dead? What purpose he serves other than to be a cameo, I'm not sure.
Fucking Marshall Bell just sitting out there by his van, has a very shallow grave, dug just kind of and it's like in the middle of nowhere. But Depth ends up running across him, and I'm like Okay, this feels very much like a moment of fate and it's basically like, oh yeah, see what I'm doing to this guy like that. It's almost like that long goodbye thing where it's like, this is this the guy is my friend? Imagine what I would do to somebody who's not my friend.
The figure of that character.
And like the setting in a garbage stump, and a lot of elements of the movie abstract, even the desert setting is used in this kind of absurdist fashion, like really stripping things down to icons and allegory. Absurdism isn't as allegorical as this movie is, but there's a real strain of absurdism here. Then, Jed, you mentioned this the different movies and how they fit together. Absurdism doesn't generally veer into such sentimentality as.
The Brave does in some moments. But I'm not gonna say that it works like I'm not.
I don't exactly want to throw down for this as a great movie or even altogether a good movie, but I find it a fascinating movie in the way that it is using these kinds of influences, sometimes quite well and at other times can't quite make them fit together.
Yeah.
In the book as well, there's a strong kind of stripped down absurdist streak that I think in some ways the limitations of doing this movie on its budget militates toward absurdist world that then alto includes is some more standard melodrama and exploitation. It is absolutely an exploitation film set up. Some of the reviews referred to it as a kind of neo Western, and I don't think that is actually the case.
I think this is more like one of those rural noirs.
This is more in a tradition of a kind of fated character in a crime narrative than particularly a Western setting.
It is obviously the place is like the West, but that's not really what puts you in the.
West as a genre, and I think we've got something that's much closer to a crime film, which is again related I don't know if this is the case as an influence on the novel, but related to the trial and other Kafka absurdist stories that are about guilt and crime following characters in an extremely abstract and therefore almost supernatural kind of fashion.
I can almost see this being like a doa but you with that you know Edmund O'Brien is going to die because he's been poisoned. In this movie, it's like the world is poisoning.
You know.
Depp is going to die by the end of this.
I think one of the standout qualities of the film is really the production design, because, as you noted, the book is very stripped down. There's a lot of detail in the dump and things like that, but you don't really come away reading the book with a very good idea of what things really look like. And the film put together this world, and they put together a really
fascinating world. It doesn't really make much sense. It doesn't have to when you're in these sort of fantastic and allegorical spaces, but they do such a good job of grounding the world in some areas that it does butt up against the more fantastic elements of it. Like they've got to go up the dirty creep to get water,
but they've got electricity everywhere. They've got a TV. In fact, my favorite detail of the carnival that he builds and sets up is that right in front of it is a comfy chair with a giant TV in front of it, so you could just sit in the comfy chair and watch TV. You don't have to actually play on the carnival world. You could just sit there and watch TV.
That seems like a nice touch. But there's a really nice shot early on the first introduction to the little community that they live in, where there's a woman with a very tiny patch of grass that she is watering. She's got a fence around it with stones, and it is very guarded. She is just trying to make something
grow in this really dusty, horrible place. But several shots of characters in there with fresh vegetables and peppers and things like that that they're stringing together, and it's like, well, I don't understand how all the fresh vegetables are there. You make such a point of this patch of grass being so precious. So there's just all these nice, really great details that, like I said, really ground it in reality at times. That almost like a Cherry Gilliam film.
And I guess probably right after this was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, So who knows if Depth was already thinking of Gillium, but the Fisher King quality to it, or Brazil sort of quality where those films go in and out of fantasy very seamlessly, but clearly the audience really understands what's a fantastic vision and what the reality of it is there, especially the carnival scene and scenes and things like that really deserve that otherworldly Does it
really look like this is it? Or is this just amplifying the emotional the ecstatic reality of their emotional state. Really, it hats off to the production design and to for orchestrating some of those great shots and great scenes.
But again, two good and.
Strong elements that don't really gel for me in the film, and had been happy to see either one of those films that really lean into the one aspect more. No, it's usbun. I don't think that's right.
I have a dumb question for you guys, because I was reading there's not that much written about this movie, unfortunately, but I was reading some reviews last night and one person was writing about how Depth kills the Marshall Bell character.
I don't remember him killing Marshall Bell. Did I forget something and just completely blank out on this because and they even talked about him being covered in blood and stuff and like did he kill Bell on his way after like doing a Mike Tyson on Louis Guzman and murdering Louis Guzman. It's like, no, that's not in here, so yeah, it's It is interesting though that Guzman kind of takes the place of Belle, because Bell not only is he a threat, he's not really a threat for Depp.
He's more of a threat to Depp's family. He's like, if you don't go through with this, I'm going to murder your family. And then when Guzman shows up, and it's basically it's almost like a swap because at one point around like I don't know an hour or something, maybe it's like an an hour ten something like that, Bell just disappears. It's like that last scene that we
saw with the Shallow Grave. The grave is the last time that we see him, and then Guzman shows up maybe right before that, and starts to become this threat. And then he again is the one that's threatening Dep's family. He's just like, Oh, if you don't cut me in on this deal, you know, I'm going to be taking care of your wife. And there's one point where he talks with him. Actually I think that might be Belle where he like goes running home to make sure that
his family's okay. And that's also interesting too. You're talking about the whole Christ metaphor, and what does Bell do the last time we see him. He pokes Step right in the hand with a it almost looks like a fire iron, and he's got the wound of Christ right there in his hand. You know, it doesn't do it
to both hands, but he's like got that there. And then Depth, you know, the scene of him running through the desert and the blood and the moonlight and everything, I'm like, oh, that's pretty nice.
Guzman and Bell are related as a kind of pair or thematic twinning going on within the story.
I do think that this speaks to the way that the larger Allegory.
Works about its world of depravity and exploitation, where it's possible for Raphael Depth's character to fight and kill Guzman, but ultimately the battle take place among the working and criminal class and does not extend to overthrowing or in any way really opposing the wealthy people exploiting them.
And the final images of the film.
And this works a little bit differently from how the book can, because it's a purely sort of cinematic montage.
Thing is as heads toward his fate. We see all the trucks and the bulldozers come in to destroy the community that he's been living in, and miss trailer that's much smaller on the outside than it is on the inside, and a kind of wonderful absurd fashion gets hoisted into the air as Depp is about to get into this elevator, and we left not knowing whether his money has allowed his family to get out of there in any meaningful way on time, and it seemed.
Like probably not. He's not necessarily a compli anything.
But again, I think though, like not knowing at the end, as these images are presented next to each other, depth headed to his fate and the community in this garbage heap being destroyed, I think the ambiguity of it for me is actually more satisfying than having a real notion of was the money delivered or not the money and all of this.
Becomes so secondary to the human concerns.
Even if that family does receive it's only fifty thousand dollars, and even in late nineteen nineties money that's really not going to get them very far in the scheme of things, especially if they've been living in a garbage heap.
Really not that much. I find the ending of the movie to me more affecting.
Than the book by far, because it is the final abstract and absurd playing out of the economics that are running the world that it takes place.
In well, and that he comes back and gets in that elevator with no one else there. That it's he doesn't need the Marshall Bell character to watch over him. He is he's a dog coming back to the kennel, you know, and just getting ready, or he's a pig coming back to slaughter kind of thing, because that's all
he's doing. Is I mean, we've thought about this so many times on this show, the whole elevator ride to Hell, you know, I mean Jeded dyeh you run the literally the elevator to the gallows episode, right, So it's like, yeah, here he is getting on this elevator and he's just gonna go into the depths and we just get the doors closing, and that's how the movie ends, you know,
roll credits kind of thing. But yeah, it's it's it is interesting that Guzman is preying upon Depp and his family, and Guzman doesn't live in the dump, but he is basically of that criminal class and is yeah, just praying
on something that he shouldn't be praying on. And I think it's very telling too that the one I don't know, redemptive type character that Clarence Williams the third character that that is a African American priest, not a white priest, that is taking care of him, and by him being Clarence Williams a third, I'm like, Okay, I can trust this person. I can trust that he is going to give that money that Depp gives to him to the family when he's done. And I love that moment at
the end when he takes the collar off. It's just like, all right, he's he knows that he's broken his val because he's basically aided in this self made suicide of Depths, and he really can't be a man of the cloth anymore. He basically sees the world for what it is, in my opinion.
Tells dep that he's sold his soul, and Depth comes back with no, I sold my body, which is I think a pretty interesting ugue under the circumstances with these and I like that these characters are not terribly articulate. They can throw out these opposing points and then there's a larger there's larger implications that we can get at with them, but we're not going to get a full philosophical argument.
It's not Destfeyevski where we're going to get each one of those sides.
And for the movie, I find that to be really effective and hold together even some of the less successful elements. For me, one thing about this film I'll just I'll veer into this direction. And this is one level and which I guess for me, this is both a plus and a minus. This is like an overgrown student film
in so many ways. There are these big grand ambitions to how the allegory is to work, and there's some there's actually like some really beautiful technical work that I would really want to praise from depth as a director. And the minus on a student film is, yeah, the pretension and that the movie couldn't possibly live up to everything that.
It seems to be aiming at.
But on another level, I'll take the pretension sometimes even when it becomes laughable or when it doesn't fully hold together, it is I will say that it's refreshing to see a movie by somebody who's trying. Yeah, it's a bit of a white elephant, and myself, I prefer the termite arc. But there are a lot of people not particularly termiting either, who don't even go after very interesting kinds of white elephants.
And an interesting film. They're really strange elements that don't quite go together. One thing, back to the student film thing.
I want to praise Depth technically, and I think is work with the cinematographer is really excellent. But you can really see a big difference with most of the dialogue scenes. Almost anytime there's dialogue, the camera just locks down into close up shot and reverse for long periods of time. It's only with Guzman and Depp on screen at the same time. Oh now we're going to get a walk and talk because we know that both of these actors are really capable of it.
They're good for it. But in most other.
Cases, Depth is not really He does some amazing blocking and staging and some really nice and consistent and narrational kinds of moved every time. It's strictly visual that I really respect. And yeah, okay, so first time that he directed, he's going to come down an easier approach whenever he's got to do dialogue.
But I don't know.
There's some really beautiful shots where he's constantly revealing things about spaces, he reveals characters. There's the nice playful one that you described earlier, Mike, where he appears several times within the same long take.
It's doing some really cool stuff. There's even a shot in it.
I watched this ten times to try to figure out what was going on, and I still don't have an answer to it. Probably my favorite scene in the movie is that bizarre wrestling match with the television that just suddenly goes roll across the floor and it's done in this like static. It's not exactly a wide but as wide as you can get inside that trailer, it's done
in a static wide master. As the TV starts to roll one direction and then Dep's wife goes for it and tries to wrestle it back to where it's going, and it's sign off is happening for TV? And you've got the national anthem playing in flags, and so wrestling.
With a TV that has flags on it if all too obvious.
But then at the same time I'm like, how is this?
What is going on? How this happening?
And the sort of grange whimsy of it that doesn't seem to work by the same rules as the rest of the movie.
Here for it.
It even ends up with the TV going to static at the dead center of the frame as Depp comes in and grabs his family to take them outside to see what he's been up to. It's really strange, and I could never figure out what was supposed to be happening, other than I guess maybe an homage to Poulter Geys to be Poultergeist activity all of a sudden, and the use of that television but wonderful stuff. Does it precisely fit? I don't know, and to some degree I don't care the movie.
It's slow, it's too long, but again it's slow and too long in a way I'll take it in order to get such a bizarre, interesting jumble as what it serves up.
Yeah, I'm surprised that it's not the old test pattern that they used to have sometimes with the Indian head. I was just watching a collection of commercials the other day that were called I think it was something like inappropriate commercials from the I think it was from the seventy there might have been the eighties, and just how often there were Native American characters in these commercials that were not portrayed by Native Americans, and they were just
completely exploiting Native culture for selling things. And it was just like, oh okay, I mean there were inappropriate things other places too, like this whole ad campaign where these women are getting their skirts ripped off so they can show their underwear and legs and talk about how whatever product is working so well on their legs. I'm like, Wow, we've come a long way, baby, And I think there
was even a Virginia Slim's commercial in there too. All right, we're going to take a break and we'll be back with an interview with screenwriter Paul mccutten. Right after these brief messages.
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Well.
I want to know a little bit more about you, and especially how you got into show business.
It's an odd story. I was a physics student. I was in graduate school in physics. In college at the University of Chicago, joined the Legendary Doc Films, which is this student film club that is the oldest film club in the country. And it's quite an intense experience, and I immersed myself in films to an extent that's really pretty frightening. And I watched everything and it was just I became so obsessed with films that when I got to graduate school in physics, I ran a film group
at Harvard and spent more time doing that. They're doing my studies. I said, I'm going to take a year off and I'm gonna try to think about something to do with movies. And I'd seen every film ever made just about but I had no experience in making them. So I said, maybe I'll apply to film school. They
can teach me how to make movies. So I applied, and why knew and USC and got in and said, I bet NYUS pulled a bunch of film nerds that have seen as many movies as I have, So how about the USC, where they probably know more about Hollywood and make films. So I went to USC, got an MFA,
and originally was interested in being in a cinnatographer. Ever it turned out I was no good at that at all, and just fell into writing and just wrote a bunch of student films, and then Brave came along and other things, and just ended up writing and it turned out to be really a great thing. Got an agent and all that, and broke for a while, and then I aged out and I'm not interested in They used to call them comic books. Now they call them graphic novels. But that's
just not my scene. I wrote a lot of historical dramas and dramatic adaptations of things. And at the time, in the mid two thousands, Hollywood was becoming a franchise factory, and so there were fewer and fewer projects that were interesting in me. I did a few for HBO, which is great, but then that kind of like Peter Dobber little, and so I went back to teaching. So now I'm here in Colorado and I teach both physics and screenwriting.
At quite a double major.
There's, yeah, you know, right brain, left brain. But as I tell people, is they're both about thinking about the world clearly, one physically, one psychologic, and trying to explain how the world works, either physically or psychologically.
So you were going to Harvard and majoring in physics.
I was in the grads program. I was a PhD program in physics at Harvard.
I know how disappointed were your parents.
God bless him. They were very tolerant, and they understood that I had to do what I needed to do. As my mom probably who really got the obsessed with BIZAM As a kid, I used to stay up late at night and watch things like Dark Victory with her. We both we've been yes. So they were pretty good about it, and then of course they got more interested. I had them come out to La into my twifty screenings and things, and that is fine. Should I have
stayed and gotten a PhD and become a physicist. Who knows. But I had a great time in Hollywood. Had really enjoyed storytelling, and to this day still buiddle around with projects and work on things and just am obsessed with the movies, although Hollywood has become a very different place from when I was there.
So what year were you graduating from USC?
I got my MFA in production there and I think it was ninety one until nineteen one, I think it was. Yeah, I went there in eighty six. I stuck around and did a couple of things while I was down there, and then that's actually part of the whole story of the Brave. But there was a feature filmed a bunch of US students worked on that was made by students
at USC. It was directed by a professional director, but I took an extra semester to work on Zombie High an incredible I wouldn't wish it too many people to watch, but it was a great experience and it was the brainchild of not to segue into the Brave stuff, but it was the brainchild of the Zias Gazal I'm sure you've read about, and he was the stock manager at USC.
They they go in and out chip track it and I worked there in the stock room and he had actually a really great idea, which was, hey, we got all these bills tunes, they are dying to work on a feature film in thirty five millimeter and work on professional equipment. Why don't we get a real producer and a real director B producer and B director and get them to raise a little money and we'll have the
entire crew be usc fill students. And after we did, and I had a bunch of credits on it, and I wrote things that I worked with the editors and all this stuff. But it was great. It was a great Crash Courses Bar version of Roger Cornet. I think it'd still widerland Netflix if you really want to torture yourself was really incredible and working with a lot of people who are now really pillars Bollywood community. Bob, do you say a lot of people weren't done that. Yeah,
that was a lot of eighteen hour days. But we shot on Panavision thirty five cameras, we use all our lighting equipment, and it was directed by someone that they actually hired, Ron Link. It is what it is, but it was a fantastic learning experience.
To tell you that, oh, how does the Brave come to you?
I just graduated worked on Zombie High, and like most film school graduates, I got a job working at a production company at Universal reading scripts assistant thing, and one of my fellow students actually was there working the same thing, kind of story editor, script reader, and she came across a little blurb about The Brave, the novel I think publishers weekly as story editors do see what's coming out, and she said, oh, oh, this sounds like your kind
of story, knowing my tendency to go for dark tragedies, and so we got a copy of it, and I read it, and I think I had a good sense of story, and I read it and I said, well, this is absolutely easily going to be incredible self. It's really sparingly i've ever read the novel it's but it's very sparing. It's very visual as a single protagonist, as a clear art. And of course what appealed me was the very clear christ. I said, I could write this, leak it. I know exactly how this was going to
look on screen. I had written a couple of shorts at USC that had a kind of bleaked dark tone and I just knew exactly what the tone the story should be. And so I'm trying to remember. I think I wrote a letter to gregoram donald's the author book, wrote to his agent and let it go well, I said, if you're honest, I think the first thing I did was I went to his ease and I said, because seemed to scrabbling to be a producer. And I said, Disease, I could write this. We could get to give us money,
it's no problem. And he didn't have any connections. I didn't really have any connections. So I wrote to McDonald I think somehow we got his all the dress. There is agent's dress that I wrote a letter and I said, essentially, listen, I poured out my idea of what this film is about. Well, it would be about how I would adapt it. And I said, I'll tell you what. I'll write you the first act and i'll send it. Can you tell me what you think? If you don't like it, fine, just
broke me trash. So I did it. I just wrote the first act, sent it to him and he said I love it. And he said I'll option it to Disease for a very small sum. Because he had no money, and that's what did and so then I wrote it. It got me an agent, It got a lot of attention. People loved it. Of course, anyone in the studio said, yeah, I love it. I can't make it here. Obviously a sort of a stuff rebed, but they all said, oh, I'd love to make this if I had a deal
that was somewhere else. Oh, I'd make this yet And then kind of stuff began to happen. Not to go into too much, but Disease was a volatile person and he saw this as his ticket, as did I, which it was, and so we began to show it around and have meetings all over Hollywood with all sorts of people, and no one, of course, wanted to have him on board. He was just a bald person because he had technically optioned it. He was attached to it and refused to give it up. And we tried to say, listen, we
can get this very big name people. They could get di Spabe, but you're gonna have to step down. He wouldn't. And there was some other personal things going on in his life, which is where it gets really intense. But you can read about some of that stuff. I don't need to go into too much detail, but to be honest, yeah, I'm to have you read the script as it's floating around somewhere, so if yeah, yes they have and it's
the story of a margin. And as I said, said Christling, right, and unfortunately, the Seas began to see himself in that role as someone who needs to sacrifice a lot and a lot of stuff. Then went on in there, and ultimately a very big tragedy happened. And then after we had been meeting with oh Stone and Judy Foster, you name it, the big tragedy happened. And then it was just dropped like a hot potato understandable reasons. It was just this horrific tragedy. There's more to I could say,
but that was what happened. So then for a year or two the rights were still in his name. It was just a nightmare. And so then a couple of young producers, Carol Kemp and Charlie Evans, had formed a company. They managed to buy the rights from this state. I don't know exactly how they did that, but they did, and they said, okay, we're going to resurrect this bill pun intended and see if we can't get this bad,
and to their credit, they did. They did the legwork and showed it around and I was less involved with that at that point because they had the script and they eventually make a long story short found his way to Jaradi deep. This is where I have to just try to understand things from Afar. But he liked it and he said, yep, let's make this. However, I have to start in it and direct it, and so that's what happened, and I was really not involved, to be honest.
They just said, step aside, you're good.
Yeah.
Once Johnny Depp got involved and he was rewriting it, which I discovered, and directing and starring in it. I was the typical writer. I was watching from afart. I got to give Charlie and Carol credit. They did try to fight for me to be involved, but Johnny was not having it. I got to go over to the set once, I to this day had not met Johnny. And then the film went to can and again Charlie and Carroll, to their credit, wangled me some tickets to my wife and I got to go to the PLA
and we saw the film. And I don't know if you've seen it.
I have seen that. Yeah, yeah, I'm curious about your thoughts about it.
I wasn't involved in the making of it, so I it was interesting. A lot of choices made there that I wouldn't admit. That's all I can say. Really. The main one, of course, that it's not a Christal so I think the story of that's the central consteat. But that's okay. Was the great experience. It got me agent, It got me a lot of work, and it taught me a lot. As I like to say, some people have a great beginning in Hollywood, and they I have some kind of terrible things happening later on. I had
the terrible stuff happened right at the beginning. Got it out of the way, get it out of the way, Get all that tragedy, all that real horrific stuff out of the way. So from then on it was great. No, I got to meet some great people, write some great stories. But as I say, HBO was great. I really there were some great executives to HBOS, a great projects, and me in the studios, I was always the one they would bring into and write their kind of pet projects
and production company. I'll really want to do the story to destroy in Joan of Arc and Lorenzo de Medici won on the locker beat playing disaster for Columbia. That was I thought turned out really well for Sean Connery's but those were all production company projects that may or may not get made. Most of course didn't. Some other stuff. I wrote an episode, I'm sure you know, from the
Earth to the Moon. I think they were counting on my scientific backgrounders, I think, But again that one was a little rewritten, that episode, and that was a little frustrating.
I saw it as Apollo twelve was the only all needy crew for the Apollo missions, so I wrote it as short leaves on the women and I don't help they, so quite that way, I couldn't say a lot more about the whole disaster with disease and this tragedy his family and all, and there were a lot of people caught up in that, and usc was caught up in it, and it was a big mess, and to stay it breaks my heart what happened to him and his family and with then the survivors, his two sons, and I
have to separate that from the gratitude I have for it really getting me to be able to write stories. Yeah, it's the oldest story in Hollywood. The writer sits there in the sidelines and pops its bubble of sheets to keep the stress level down.
It was what it was.
It never got released, of course, for reasons you probably can tell. I was curious how that experience was for you, kind of watching that unfold as far as because I've heard different theories as to why it wasn't released here, and I'm curious what your take on it was.
Charlie and Carroll tried to sell it around, and I think a lot of it, to be honest, was there was just this kind of taint from the tragedy that had happened, and people just didn't want to be associated. It was just cursed in a way. It didn't help that the filmmakers maybe didn't understand the central meaning of the story. But I think there was just a lot of sense of, oh, yeah, we met that guy, we weft about this project. We loved it, but now there's
just something untouchable about it. Had a better, different film, it might have gotten released, but it was. It is surprising to me that it never twenty years, whatever it is, it's really seen the light of day anywhere and I think a lot of that is probably because the filmmakers prefer it that way. But I didn't just speculating, Well.
It is good that you're still able to get gigs and everything after that, because if the film's not released, maybe you just get swept away with that. So I'm glad that didn't affect you in that way.
Oh No, I had a great career there for fifteen years, running great projects, so I really not all were great. Most of them are really fascinating and I got to really I enjoy doing research sheet projects into delving into historical ideas, and so that was great. I did one for each that I really liked, and I still think it would make a good film about based on the true story about two identical twin Chinese brothers who were
separated by the Revolution China. One Their father sent one to a fight with the communists and one to fight with the nationalists, thinking one of them will survive, and that the brother fought the Communists went through this hell and high water and survived the revolution and lived in poverty. The one who walked the Nationalists went to Taiwan, became a millionaire, ran at TV station, and then forty years later, the one in mainland hurt his brother's voice on the
radio from Taiwan, and they were reunited. They were reunited, but they were no longer identical twins. They were now as different as your people can be, and in fact they were not even brothers. They learned different worlds. That was a really interesting project and I still think that would make a really good, interesting film. And as I said, HBO, I worked on a few projects them and they were
right there. Really they were taking chances and making writing scripts that were of limiting interests to the HBO audience at the time. But that was great for me from Phoenix, like from the disaster beginning. It really worked out so that I was able to work on some great projects and not all they were not like great was Unicorn in a way, And it's just it's still a shame of such a clear, simple allegory.
You said to your fellow former student and coworker read about this and was like, oh, you're perfect for this. You like bleak material. How did you get that reputation? And do you actually really enjoy bleak material?
It's just yeah, I always say bleak, but I always hate people in Hollywood tragedies win awards, comedies made money, and I was always more interested in tragedies. I don't know why, but I've always the Godfather being the peak example of great tragedies in the Aristotelian sense, and so doesn't mean something dies in the end, but that's just always what I've liked. And the couple of films I wrote short films, I wrote polls through a Sea. There
was one set in the fourteenth century. This Night to Night did got a little buzz at the time, and student fellow students were, well, I think they enjoyed it because it was a tragic, big historical story shot in twenty minutes. In film school, and I know those are just the kind of stories of interest me. I love a good comedy in the Ristatilian sense, not necessarily funny, but I think that there's I don't know, something is attracted to stories where characters pay a bigger price than
they expected to pay. And when I teach film and I always tell my students, look at the films that win big awards, they're usually tragedies. And look at the films that make money, stopping over charge, they're all comments. And that's fine. It's a place for both. But I'm just attracted to characters who have laws that are brought out. Don't ask me why, no, baby, it's watching too much
Dark Victory with my Bob Steel. Something. I remember watching The Night cowbolaying the fact when I was probably came out seventy years so and just being for ad bites in that Storytelle, That's true, And I still always have a spec thing, and I'm working on the background and for better one. Several of them are indeed the blot characters can pay a price, unfortunately, and then I want to get out of myself box here. Those are tragedies.
Theirs detealing tragedies are free, rare. The entire Marvel subculture. I just don't get those films, just don't get them. But there are still some filmmaker out there who understand storytelling in a deep way. They're getting older, of course, he is still a genius. It is getting older, but I think that there's still some sense that there are other kinds of stories. They're ones that have numbers in the time, and I would I'd love to work on
some of those projects. And as I said, I've got always working on a couple of spec ideas, but it's tough that only as the business changed since the graphic novel Coming with World came out. Kind of when I loved Hollywood mid two thousands, then the whole streaming world. I'd missed that tire. That's real change, Sason Covid. So I don't even I have an ancient apparently somewhere. I think it's still out there, but I don't know who's buying.
It's really crazy upside down world. It was great to see Netflix in them for a decade, pouring money into projects that was great, some really good stuff, But now that seems too drive up. So yeah, you probably have a better sense of the business, how the business is changing. But yeah, I don't know who bakes those kind of HBO type films. Kind of was Netflix for a while, Hulu, but yeah, who does it? In studios? Gosh wow, I mean, these horror film studios interesting because they've carved out a
space for them in the horror genre. And some horror films are interesting. Our asters could be talented filmmaker, and Mike's Flanning plan against pretty talented. Those are interesting, but they're just such a narrow genre, such a fine line between that and the torture more. It's really tough to have bought that line. I just watched It's a parenting and you could see a really interesting idea there and then just follows into the goopy guts. Yeah, I don't know,
it's tough. They're small mid budgets, not sty mid budget, but just brahmas and tragedies that aren't based on dry historical English history that we're going to do something historical.
I'm interesting is I said the locker be playing as that was a great watch shot and that was stuff with I see them they well, we just came out with that the locker bew one with it was on one of the streams and it was interesting actually because they chose the point of view one of the parents, and I showed the point of view of the cow. But hey, yeah, because it was shocked.
There's not a lot I can ask you about your physical class, but I'm curious do you have any sort of specialties when it comes to the film classes that you teach.
I'm now in the small time. I live in Steamboa, Sphings, Colorado, and it's about it as far from all in this get but I do teach a class, and we have some yellow students. There's some high school kids.
I really enjoy hating young people and teaching them what film is because they are this is their idea to right and to really preach about what film really is and storytelling this and visual storytelling.
I think that's a lot of fun. So we worked with a lot of younger kids and some older. They just try to get them to think visually and write fishing and it's telly insta these days, even if it's Netflix, the Beautiful Cinematograph and it's still a dialogue based still, as I tell my student students that when you watch Netflix, even the best things on Netflix, to keep the lights on in room. You wouldn't do that in a movie, Richie.
And because you're listening basically not reading, watching, you're enjoy that pictures but ridicously. So I liked to get on myself bobs and talk about visual storytelling. They're mostly young, all of me. Their stories are some signs of the whole realm. But I enjoyed that and it's fun to proctize. I absolutely believe that film is twenty to cent shorty American and French art form that will never be curseed. COVID won't kill it, streaming won't kill it, and nothing's
going to kill it. We love to be your stuts there. I think it's essential that we feed that love as much as we can, and not by doing Spider at twelve or something. So yeah, it's a chance for me to spread the gospel about building a little bit. But yeah, it's far from Bob. It's fun. Although it's interesting because I sometimes bill as a student the storytelling has changed
in seventy five years, it's still all the same. I try to watch all the Oscar Moltadata shorts each year and there's some good ones and bad ones, but nothing has changed, just the technology. They're all shot beautiful two K and great sound and beautifully lit. But the stories there's could be there, dear Center. Yeah, no, the Brave was a great experience and our horror experience, and to
be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. Of course I would have well people well trenched, But personally I think it was a great experience to learn and as except I like my tragedies.
There you go.
It confirmed my world vide that bad things could happen, bad things could happen the gogfile. Best of intentions can lead to the worst of outcomes sometimes and go to my sapbox. But we're living an interesting time.
Thank you so much, mister mccutnon. It's great talking with you.
Thanks Mike, I appreciate it. And as I said, give a cuestion to me any time.
All Right, we are back and we were talking about The Brave and yeah, watching some of those clips from CON, it did not seem like Depp had a good time making this movie. He just kept talking about how hard it was and how hard it was directing himself, and just not really enjoying it. I know he had done a couple shorts and some music videos. I think he's done music videos since this period of from ninety seven, but I guess he just got kind of scared off
of it. And apparently the reason that we don't have the movie in this country is because of that critical reaction that happened after the CON screening and just all of the reviews that were coming out just lamb basing this film. And I just don't think it's that bad. I agree with you, Spencer does feel very student filmish.
But the oddest thing was that there were so many critics who were really on top of depth because he was showing his body and they're just like, oh, it's just all of these close ups of him and he's so handsome and all this. I'm like, yeah, and basically like, that's the only thing this man has left in the world is his body. So why wouldn't you kind of fetishize that with this film, because that is ultimately what he is selling to this underground establishment or to the
you know, to the entire world. I mean, basically, Depp is useless to anybody. His character is useless to anybody other than a person who wants to buy him to kill him, even.
Within a plot that is about fetishizing his body. I had read that before I saw the film, and then I was surprised to find out. But wait, he's walking around with his shirt open in a really hot place and also conjuring the movie image of the brave that kind of a filmic iconography, and it just did not seem that much. This is like a director with an actor.
Just compare this movie to like The Place Beyond the Pines and the way that Ryan Gosling's body is constantly fetishized and built up in the first big chunk of that film. Depth is not doing anything near that to his own body, when certainly the fiends of the film could do that could justify it.
So I find that to be odd and bogus.
Again, if we want to have a fight with it, it's that goes along with when he played Tanto, that more problematic way of taking on a very traditional Indigenous iconography that's been very much controlled by white people and fetishized by white people, And so that just raises the question of how much is critique and how much is it just playing out the cliche. I think that's an argument worth having. But yeah, it's really strange to me that they needed to make a case against that was personal.
It's certainly possible to dislike the movie but just just treat it like this ultimate bad object and treat Depth so poorly at that time as a director, the kind of how dare you I find this to be?
Like?
Since we were talking about this at the very beginning, Mike, the kinds of films that generate these sorts of responses at film festivals. Yes, sure, quite often they're bad, but they're also they're often like bad in ways that are not nearly so terrible as people say.
I personally happen to like Southlands Tales, and I know plenty of people who don't, and that's fine, we can disagree.
But Southland Tails is not some kind of crime against aesthetics.
And honestly, when I first saw it, I expected it to be much much crazier in some way. My point here being, I do think that these kinds of movies are really interesting to look at because they are actually quite revealing about the frankly, very staid and conservative standards for cinema. At whatever moment that they are unleashed upon an unsuspecting can or sun Dance or tell you ride audience, that they become an outrage.
I think the movie's definitely going to have a rediscovery at some point, if nothing else, just upon the incredible cast, When you got all of those guys Marshall Bell, Frederick Forrest, Clarence Williams, Louis Guzman and then mac Perlick and all the cameos in there, people are going to find it. It'll someday have a US release some confident To your point, Spencer, I think people will say what was going on? What was in the Water in ninety seven that this was
so reviled, and honestly, maybe it's depth. Maybe he'd never had that kind of response, Maybe he was particularly vulnerable, and had he released this in the US, that rediscovery or possible reclamation may have already happened.
By now.
I'm glad that he was able to especially because it sounds like he puts a lot of his own money into the production knowing that it wasn't going to be made back. I think it's great that he was able to say, flying fuck it, you don't deserve it. I'm not going to let you see it.
And to the point of putting in his own money. That's mentioned in I forget which source, but one of the.
Stories about how this film was losing its way in the world back at the time just tosses off that Depp committed the ultimate cinema sin of putting his own money into the movie.
And I just have to say fuck off to all that.
Not just because there have been a number of movies where people put in their own money.
I guess that's also one of the knocks on orson Wells, which I refuse to take.
Yeah, okay, so he put some of his own money into a bunch of his films and nobody else made it for fake fuck off with that. And also it is it's like one of those things too, where it's like even somebody wealthy and influential depth has to be taken down a peg for doing the thing that people from much less lofty backgrounds have to do in order to get a film made at all, so that then they can get into the world of auditioning to get somebody else to pay for their movie. On many levels,
I think that's really strange and problematic. And also you mentioned Jed the performances, and this is a really rare late brand O performance where he's not trying to torment
the director. If like the other movies that he did at this point in his career, he's doing crazy stuff and getting people fired, and refused to call Frank Oz anything but miss Piggy when they were on the set of the score, and also wouldn't wear pants so that they would have to photograph him only from the chest up most of the time.
Brando actually on good.
Behavior, and I'm not going to say that this is an amazing performance from him, but I do think that there's something valuable if you're interested in Brando as an actor and as a figure, And certainly I am to see a performance from this point of his career when he did actually show up to work and not just see what he.
Could get away with, like on Island of Lost Souls for instance.
That was the year before was when he was getting Richard Stanley fired.
There was more than Val Kilmer actually, but yeah, what a disaster there.
But yeah, definitely Brando's behavior did not recommend him on that particular film.
As far as the fetishization of depth, going back to what we were talking about before the Break, I think the only real fetishy type scene it plays into the narrative, like towards the end, after he kills Guzman, he goes to see the Floyd Redcrow Westerman character and he takes him in, cleans them up, and there's a shot of depth coming out of this water in the moonlight, and you get to see his body and everything, and it's just like, okay, but not only are they showing you
his body, but they're showing you this huge cut that he has on his chest, and I'm like, okay, yeah, this isn't just like look at how beautiful. This man is because Johnny Depp was Slash is possibly a beautiful man, just an absolutely gorgeous guy to look at. You know, He's one of these guys who just had that about him. And he was such a pleasure to look at, and
he was such a pleasure to watch. And the thing, and I probably have said this before on the show, and if so, I apologize, the thing I always liked about Depp is that he was not just a pretty boy actor, like he could have easily have parleyed the success that he had on twenty one Jump Street into a whole bunch of plain old leading man characters. But what does he do. He goes out, he makes freaking cry Baby, he makes Edward Scissorhands. He's making Arizona Dream.
You know, he's doing these challenging films. I mean, what's eaton Gilbert Grape? It might have been the first Loss of Hellstrom film in the US. He's making ed Wood, the way that he ties his star together with Tim Burton, I mean, he's playing with all of these very interesting directors for the longest time. I mean, you mentioned Terry
Gilliam before that. He comes back and does a part of the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassis and stuff, it's like, yeah, that's great, Like, of course, I think he probably should have broken with Burton a little bit earlier. Like nobody needed that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, nobody needed Alice in Wonderland, nobody needed Dark Shadows. You know, the list goes on and on. It's like, please unhitch your star
at some point. But even when it comes to like this stuff that he's doing, you know, like he had Viki o'phelak as his one of his two dp's on this movie, who he had met on Arizona Dream, and it's like that's great, Like he's taking all of this town. I mean, fucking Iggy Pop is the one that does the soundtrack. He probably met him on Crybaby because Iggy Pop had that small rolling cry Baby. I remember him sitting in that tub scrubbing his back and stuff. I
mean dead man. I mean yeah, working with working with with Jarmbush is a fantastic thing. He's working with all of these great directors from all over the world, and yeah, it's just amazing that he was doing that. And I remember telling the story before about you know, when young girls would come into the movie theater buying tickets to go see Crybaby, and I'm like, uh, this is a John Waters film, Like, you probably will not enjoy this, but they were all for it because it was Johnny Depp.
We had so many complaints, so many refunds, because girls just thought that they were going to see beautiful Johnny Depp on screen, not hatchet face, not you know what they ended up seeing on screen. It was so wonderful and I loved it so much. And yeah, I just
always appreciated that about Depp in these early days. And I don't know if to your point, if they were just kind of the critics laying in wait for this guy who just seemed to be making a lot of really interesting choices with his early career.
This is an eccentric film, But I think one interesting thing about this is that this is a little bit more in the Gilbert Grape territory.
As a performance, Johnny Depp has.
Made an incredible career of weirdo roles, strange, restrained, heightened mannered kinds of performances. This is one of the more restrained and recognizably human performances from him, and I think it's a really excellent one.
There is a kind of blankness built into the character.
But what gives us is a lot of sense of thoughtfulness of someone who is at once not necessarily very smart, but who is presented with a lot of situations where he is kind of very desperately thinking and feeling on screen. And also he didn't have an expert director. He was not used to working with first time directors, and here he's doing both of these things. And I think that
might really contribute to having made a first feature. That it's enough to break anyone, and if you come back for another round, that is something.
So it's very hard on the most basic level. But yeah, for him to act in this and direct it, and it is an elaborate production, for the.
Budget and everything, I'm really not surprised that it was an unpleasant shoot.
For him, and I think it's unfortunate that he didn't direct again. But there we are.
I barely want to mention this because I don't pay attention to it myself, But in terms of the future fortunes of this, I'm with you, Jed. I think it's ready for reevaluation, but I wonder how many people are going to be ready to reevaluate it after a grotesque and awful divorce that got a lot of attention. I'm personally not a Calvinist, so I can't quite see this sort of the sin back to the point when Depp made this movie, and I'm not really interested in playing those games with how we.
Evaluate Bart.
But I do think that this is like a really strange and challenging movie that's ripe for reappraisal for the Brave, if you will.
Well, we mentioned it very early on. I don't really want to get into all of the details of this, but I would recommend if people want to know more, especially Paul mccutten mentions this all of the things with Azi's Gazal, the one of the original producers of this film, that is a bizarre and gruesome story, and what I was reading about him, he was very not healthy, and that he murdered his wife and one of his daughters
before killing himself. So that was in ninety three, I think, and that almost put this project completely off the rails because we was supposed to start in ninety four, that it ever got made at all, that they were able to come back from that. Like you said, I think this is kind of a cursed film, because there was that that whole thing just a lot of times. Oh yeah, we're supposed to do this movie. One of the producers murdered two people his family and killed himself. Normally, that
just puts the whole project in turnaround forever. But it's amazing that this ever actually got to the screen.
Well, I guess the.
Curse extends in that the say problematic a bunch of times, but that just goes with the territory. With the people generating the project are not Indigenous people dealing with and
commenting upon issues of an indigenous genocide. It there's I suppose also that behind it, and again a tradition and filmmaking and and art making more generally, that is a problem, but I think also a problem that deserves any number of responses, and in particular since the time that this was made, thankfully there are a lot more Indigenous filmmakers making their comments and telling stories from their experiences out of a truly horrifying history that unfortunately is too close
for comfort in our current moment. Yeah, I guess there is also that that's a lot of curse. I do really think it's a worthy object to wrestle with. This is not just some terrible film that nobody should ever acknowledge, and that's very much how it's been treated, and I think that's unfortunate. I was really pleasantly surprised, because there are cases where there isn't something to rescue in a movie that's known to be really bad, much as one might want to.
I guess I'll throw it as an example.
Maybe the new.
Director's cut of Blairwitch two Book of Shadows is a vast improvement. Much as try as I did back in the early two thousands to watch that movie and try to rehabilitate it, to no avail. That's unfortunately just a bad movie. I don't know that it's quite so terrible. It's just boring, quite so terrible, as a lot of people said at the time. But some movies, yeah, sure,
you can't recover when you're going diving for outrages. But this is definitely one that I think is worth a look, worth some attention.
I kind of wish that there was a proper version of The Lone Ranger, because I've read that Elliott and Rossio script, which was so different than the movie, and if you watch the movie and know that the William Fickner character is supposed to basically be like a flesh eater, and there were originally more much more mysticism. There are were wolves in it. The whole thing with the silver
bullets actually played out with the were wolf stuff. It's just like, that was such a much more interesting movie than what we ended up with, which it's a flawed film. But then, like, now, talk about that word that we hate so much. Problematic to have Ernie Hammer and Johnny Depp in the same movie. Oh my god, next thing, you know, like you know, Kevin Spacey shows up and you're just like, oh my god, what is happening here?
I definitely agree that depth did deserved a little bit better than just having this completely lambassad by critics, And I would like, I think more people should check this out. It's not the best movie in the world, but it doesn't deserve this kind of lost status that it has here in the States. All right, guys, let's go ahead and take another break and play a preview for next week's show. Right after these brief messages, We've.
Given you everything you've ever wanted.
How can you do this?
To work?
This nice house, your own car, swimming pool.
What more do you want?
I want to be a star.
Hello, finally going to meet a real man.
Richard Nixon is a lesbian.
I didn't know that.
That's right.
We will be back next week with a look at Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers. Until then, I want to thank my co host Jedidiah and Spencer so JEDEDDI, what's been keeping me busy these days?
Just watching movies?
You want to know anything about it, you can find me on Letterbox Jededi airs, but I'm not on any other social media at the time.
I am following you on letterbox, my friend, and it's always great to see what you're up to. And Spencer, what's the latest with you?
I am finding my way into editing whenever I can, so I can finally have a movie done and move on to making the next one.
Well, I look forward to seeing it. Can you invite me to the premiere when that happens?
For sure? Yeah, you're on the comp list for the premiere for sure.
Well, thank you again guys for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get help some projection Booth take over the world.
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