Good day. This is Peter Hell. Are you welcome to you ain't seen nothing yet?
The movie Podcast where our chat to a movie lover about a classic or beloved movie they haven't quite got around to watching until now.
And today's guest Pop Icon Darren Hayes. Do you really think you have a chance against us?
Mister cowboy?
Open the pod bay doors.
Hell, I'll have what she's.
Having happen right, So don't see nothing new.
Darren Hayes used to be in a little band called Savage Garden who happened to sell over twenty million records. Yes, before Spotify and streams, these guys actually had people paying for their records, over twenty million records sales, huge numbers in the US and the UK and of course Australia. Truly Madley Deeply to the Moon and Back, I Want You, I Knew I loved You, the Animal song.
They were huge hits, and.
Savage Garden were the hottest band on Earth. In fact, you'd struggle the name a bigger pop sensation that's come out of Australia.
Now.
I know you might think Kylie Minogue, but Savage Garden they wrote their own hits. I'm not having a go
at Kylie, I Love Kylie. The Savage Garden were self made, okay, it was Darren Hayes and his mate Daniel Jones, not Daniel John's he was in a different Sensation band at that time, but Daniel Jones and they fond u his massive partnership until you know, a couple of albums in they went their separate ways and Darren went solo and released the album Spin, the Ten and the Spark, and then he actually started up his own indie record label called Powdered Sugar and had the album's This Delicate Thing
We've Made.
And Secret Codes and Battleships.
Darren has always presented as a genuine, funny, passionate artistic guy. He has even tried his own hand at stand up comedy and improv at Groundling's Over in the US, which is actually very good at which.
I do find slightly annoying.
He has a new album out, boldly called Homosexual and it's bloody genius. It sees Darren taking back control of his identity and coming to terms with the things that this crazy business has made him go through. He has a world tour coming up and tickets are on sale now get to a show. Often these introductions about what people have done in their past, but perhaps for the first time, I just want to say.
This from the get go and sprew this episode.
This may be my favorite episode of You ain't seen nothing yet that we've ever done. You may already have noticed the running time. It's a monster episode. We get into so much here. Darren's three favorite movies alone all represent something very deep inside of him. Darren was so completely open and vulnerable and honest during our chat.
I really he's busy promoting an album.
He's organizing a lot of it himself as he's an independent artist now, and I was really thrilled.
And stoped that he made time to be with me today.
Hey, I'm Darren Hayes. My three favorite films are Eaty Well. Can you just beam up?
This is reality for.
The Emperor structs back, The Sun of Skywalker must not become a Jed Day and Donnie Daco. Sometimes I doubt your commitment to sparkle over shit. But up until last nighte I'd never seen singing in the rain.
You're seeing and in the range.
What a glorious feel. And I'm Ergain, I'm laughing at.
Us a dile.
Yes, It's nineteen twenty seven and a revolution is coming to Hollywood. When rumors of film being able to record dialogue is largely dismissed until the jazz singer becomes a bona fide hit, it turns the movie industry upside down. It's particularly concerning for silent film co stars Don Lockwood, screen legend Gene Kelly and Lena Lamont.
Gene Hagen, who's nominated for an oscar in this.
Role, who happens to have a voice like a chattering of cockatoos. When Kathy seldom played by Prinsus Layer's mum, Debbie Reynolds, it throws a spanner in Lena Lamont's world and threatens the future of Hollywood's Golden Couple with his longtime friend and now composer Cosmo Brown, the brilliant Donald O'Connor singing and dancing alongside Singing in the Rain is pure Hollywood magic, co directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan from a screenplay by Betty Comdon and Adolph Green.
Singing in the Rain Amazingly, he was only.
Nominated for two Oscars, who were Best Music and Best Supporting actress Geen Hagen. It received mixed reviews upon release, perhaps suffering in the shadow of another gene Kelly movie released the year before, and American in Palace, which won six Oscars. But time has been kind to Singing in the Rain and it's often listed in the top ten American films ever made. It's toad tapping, showstoppers, stunning choreography, and the chemistry between the film stars and yes, gene
Kelly is a complete boss. Darren Hayes, be honest. Is this your real voice?
Yes? There was a time when I may have had a stand in, but now I'm full anti Milli Vanilli. This is the real deal. Mate.
You are right in the middle of doing promo for your new album and a tour announcement.
Homosexual amazing.
We don't talk about it later, but at first that's an amazing title for an album, and we'll get we'll get to that. So thank you for doing your homework and making time. But why hadn't you seen Singing in the Rain?
Yeah, such a great question, because people don't know. In order to do this show, you know, there's a little chat with you beforehand about like what film haven't you seen? And I was a little coerced into seeing it because I tried to rig the system. I tried to kind of suggest some other films that maybe I hadn't seen, and I put this in there and thinking, please don't pick this film. So I don't know why. I already had a sort of a bias against this film and
I don't know why. And part of it, you know what the movie poster. I don't love the movie poster. So there's something about the movie poster that at first looked goofy to me.
Tell us about the movie poster, Well, what's the remind us of the movie.
So I when I imagine this film, I imagine the three leads in their bright yellow trench coats and you can't see me, but you know they're pulling a like face like look at it, just looking like idiots, you know, tap dancing in the rain or whatever. I'm just like, what what is this about? You know, singing in the rain. Whatever. So I'm you know, I have no idea what the film's about from this poster. And also I'm sure everyone experiences this. I call it like the good Netflix show effect.
If you didn't watch say Breaking Bad, Like I was one of those people, and then years went by and everyone said, this is the best television show ever made. After a while you developed this, I'm never gonna watch your attitude, right, So I am aware that Singing in the Rain has a reputation of being one of the best films ever made. And I guess I had a chip on my shoulder which was like, look, I'm never gonna watch it. Why. I think that's a human characteristic.
It needs to be a word for because it happens a lot.
In fact, I was listening to the SmartLess Podcast is a fun podcast with Jason Bateman, Will Arnette and Sean Hayes, and they were talking about it this just recently, the idea that the bigger I think.
Who are they talking to? I forget who they were, but you're talking to But.
They were saying, the bigger the film is, or the bigger the series is, and the more people will tell you to watch it, there's a tipping point where you're like, no, I'm not watching it. And will Arnette was saying that Jason Bateman would come to him on like Arrested Development. He would say something like, you know, finally gave in and watched the Blues Brothers. That's a really good film, and it's like, what that nineteen seventy two classic that
everyone loves, The Blues Brothers is. It's a hot take, Jason, but it is. There's something about there must be a German word for it.
Something.
There's a tipping point when too many people will tell you to watch something and you're gonna love it.
It's like, you won't tell me what I'm going to love. Thank you very much.
You know. It happened to me with even with technology. It happened to me with the iPod.
Oh.
I was like a resistor of the iPod and friends of mine eventually just bought me one, and I was annoyed when they brought me one. I was like, oh I have I've already got my city Walkman, I don't need this. And then a day later I was like, do you realize that I've got a thousand songs in my pocket? And they were like, yeah, we do. Isn't it amazing? I'm like, I'm never going back.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs, he's probably trying to call you to get you know, I want you to the moon and back for an ad and You're like, nah, I'm not into the iPod, but.
Yeah, I think you did hit on something. I think we want to feel like we've discovered something. And so if you're the person that you know, I used to
do this with music. Didoh back in the day before Eminem sampled her for that fantastic song that Eminem did stand or whatever, you know, she had an album that wasn't really very successful, but I loved it and it had all of those these singles of hers on it, and I used to I bought probably twenty copies of that album and I would give it to people and yeah, it's I'll admit it's probably my ego. You like to
feel like you're the early adopter. You're the person that's like, hey, I want to show you this really obscure film called Singing in the Rain.
Yeah you want that. There is something about very powerful about that. I remember working today at fem in Sydney and at an album.
It was not even in a proper CD cover.
It was in like a little paper sleeve thing and it had Missy Higgins the Sound of White written on it, and I thought, oh, I'll.
Give it a give it a listen.
Somebody says she was local and was a stunned, you know, by it. I hadn't even I hadn't heard Scar on the radio before, and it was on Scar was on. I'm like, this is amazing. And we had like Matt Damon come in the next week, and I was like, Matt Damon.
He introduced me to Elliott Smith through Goodwill.
Hunting, so I was like, I'm going to do a cool thing and actually introduce him to somebody. And I gave him the Missy Higgins CD, thinking the next Matt Damon film is going to have Scar on or you know, the Sound of White or something you know.
No, no, I did not, and I never heard whether he liked it or not.
But but every Matt Damon film I'm watching it go on is a special two going to be on this.
It's a very powerful thing.
Hey, let's talk about your three favorite films before we I am now more curious than ever as to whether you like Singing in the Rain or not. But let's talk about I mean, I knew one. I knew Star Wars was going to be represented where we're spoken about Star Wars over the years before.
But Empire strikes back? Why Empire?
Oh gosh, the shortest version I can tell you is that we were too poor to go to the cinema really, and Empire came out when the VCR you know, explosion happened in homes and that was at the point when if you couldn't afford a VCA, you could rent one, so you know, that was a huge financial debt for our family. But we rented a VSR, which was such
a ripoff. And I remember my first viewing of the Empire Struck's Back was well, it was at our parents were separated, and I remember going to the drive in movie theater and it was the second film they played late at night, and everyone in the car had fallen asleep but me and mum. And you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to realize that film's all about fathers and sons. I didn't have a great relationship with my father, and that whole series is really about a boy who
believes his future lies somewhere else. So did I born in Brisbane, desperately wanted to escape my home surroundings or whatever, but also a boy who desperately wants to believe that his father isn't a monster, you know, And in that film, the monster in the film says I'm I'm your father and joined me, joined me, you know, And there's this this sort of reach out from the villain of the film to the boy that is an orphan or thinks he's an orphan, and it resonated so deeply with me,
that idea that somewhere out there in the world, there was another destiny for me. And it didn't matter that I was from Woodridge, didn't matter that my parents were fighting, didn't matter that my father beat my mother up every night, didn't matter that I was bullied as a kid and called, you know, every name under the sun for being gay. Maybe there was this destiny within me. Maybe there was this magical force within me that was untapped, and it
was profound, profound feeling. And then the VCR thing was that I remember a New Year's Eve and you know, all the parents were off getting drunk and stuff like that. But I watched that film on VCR. We had it for a week and I just watched it two times a day every day and was just fascinated with it.
That's the magic of movies right there, to be able to transport you and whether you're in a situation where you're just going to see a movie and you may have a you know, a happy home life, and it can still transport you. But it's even more powerful when you can feel like you are escaping a situation in a way.
And that's that's that's really powerful.
So when you obviously you continue watching the Star Wars movies, what were your hopes for Darth Vade or what how did you feel when there's almost you know, I guess in Jedi, when there is I guess redemption for the data bade, how did you how did you feel about that?
Well? As a child, that's all all I wanted. All I really wanted was my own father to take the mask off and to say sorry and to become well, to acknowledge me, I think, And in my real life what was happening was, you know, my father was the first person that ever called me we can bleep this, but ever called me a fagot. That word was introduced to me by the person that was supposed to love me. And the first song I ever wrote I played for
my father and he didn't even have a reaction. I remember, he just said, huh, I walked away, And even when I I remember, I did very well at school, and he came from quite a rich family, even though we were poor, because you know, alcoholism and handling of money don't really go well together. And I was supposed to go and study like law or something like that, but from space, I was supposed to be an entertainer and I wanted to go and study acting at a school
in Brisbane. And he told me that I would end up living in the gutter if I did that. And even years later, when I became famous, you know, I bought that man a house and I remember, now our family don't have anything to do with my dad, but I remember him saying to me, you know, what do I have to do, and me saying to him, just as a young man in my twenties, just saying, just be kind to me, you know, just be kind. But in the films, it was incredibly satisfying because, well, the
father acknowledges how special the son is. The son forgives the father, which I've done. You know, I think everyone who knows anything about forgiveness knows you have to do that to release that burden in yourself. And Luke had so much compassion that between the two films, you know, he became like a Buddhist, you know, and he had so much compassion, and there was so much weight on his shoulders and so much grief, you know, when he
was holding all those secrets. I was holding secrets. Couldn't tell anyone what was happening at home, couldn't tell anyone what was happening inside me. And as you know, so my thoughts about boys and knowing that I liked boys became almost like this secret sin, you know. So in the films there was that parallel that Luke's essentially related to, well, the space Nazi really, you know, right, and so he's so ashamed of that, can't tell anyone whatever. So I
really related to those themes of shame, redemption, forgiveness. So when he did, when his father did redeem himself and forgive himself and tell his son that you were right to believe that I could become someone else, I think that sustained me for a long time in hoping that my father would would change, and those values have continued in my life. I think George was very smart as someone that read Joseph Campbell and to sort of understand that,
you know, these equalities. Maybe besides Donald Trump, and Adolf Hitler these equalities that we probably should try to extend to most human beings, that everyone can at some point stop and change course, and we should allow them to be forgiven.
I'm not sure if you've seen the movie still in cinemas here in Australia. I also think it's available to rent on the streaming services, but everywhere, everything, everywhere, all at once.
Oh gosh. Yeah, it's profoundly affected me.
And the message what you just said about kindness, and we won't I don't want to spoil but it's a very powerful message and a very powerful point made by short round that they make in that film, and that movie blew me away me too.
Yeah, anyone who's ever you know, I've been married for seventeen years. I think anyone that's been in a really long term relationship. It's the anti romance film, but it's the real romance film, and it's about the stuff that matters in life. And that line that you're talking about broke me. And there was a moment in the car park afterwards with my husband and I where we looked at each other and we were just like, God, we're lucky.
And you know, I think anyone who's been married for as long as that couple have been, and I have been as definitely realized that that those first three years of just chemicals and you know whatever, that's just designed to get you to stick together. But the real stuff is you know what he talks about in the film that I won't spoil, but yeah, amazing line.
It's an amazing line.
I love hearing you talk about all of that stuff because people often with Star Wars and I'm a massive Star Wars fan, and I don't necessarily obviously I'm not bringing a lot of that any of that to my love of Star Wars, but people will often see a Star Wars fan and they think, oh, the Lightsabers or the you know, and you know, you can kind of seem a bit cartoony people's love of Star Wars, but it's a great reminder that really it's the magic of movies like in be Transported the way. And so thank
you for sharing that. Another few thanks for asking another movie that also is about a boy who you know, I guess there is some kind of escape ord the somebody coming from another land. He's et I saw this in the cinema when I came out in Melbourne, and my memory, my first memory of it is that I lost my mum before the movie, so I was already a little bit emotionally, you know, on edge, and then just I think it was the first movie, perhaps I remember just balling in.
Well, I'm sorry, Pete. Yeah, that's heavy, that's beautiful. No, that's there. No, I mean, how old were you when you saw the film?
I was I was eight. I was eight.
Sorry, I want to be very clear, So I want to be very clear on this guy. I it might be misunderstanding when I said I lost my mom. I physically on that day lost my mom. I could not find her.
She was there.
Piece of shit.
Actually that was not a setup.
Piece of shit.
I spun this is what happened. This is what happened. I spun around.
This is amazing.
I thought, you mean sarcastic because you had shared so much and misplaced my mom for like three minutes, and and you were like, that's a beautiful story piece.
And I'm like, yeah, it does seem a bit.
No. I was just like, oh wow, I just here, I am talking about my insignificant life and heat he lost his mother at eight, You literally just lost her any more.
Wow, it was three minutes. I'll never get back.
But this is incredible. This is incredible. I love this. This may be my podcast.
This may be my favorite moment of the podcast ever.
I think incredible because I'm so here's the thing. I'm so earnest. When early on in my career people didn't really get this about me, and often in reviews at my shows, people would like be like, is he for real? Like, because I am very earnest. So I listened to that and I was like, that poor man, I need to hug him. Now, I need to just hold his hand. We're going to talk about ET and what it means to me. This is amazing.
I literally just spun around as an eight year old in the city, and I must have been facing the wrong direction. And then I just walked off, And I was like, where's not even smart enough to turn around?
Work out? How are three sixty works?
You lose your mom and then you just go to a movie without.
No we have found it. Literally, I reckon, I was, I was.
I walked off and I might have been away for like two minutes, it might not even been that.
And then she took you to the movie.
Yeah, Well, we'll go into the movie that day. That's what we're in the city to go do.
Okay, well, we probably already had our tickets, right and then yeah, But so I was. I was a little bit emotionally on edge because I thought I'd lost physically, I'd misplaced my mom's listening.
I just want everyone to know that everything is about perspective. Did okay, So in Pete's world, in his ven diagram, Okay, let's remember that this is akin to losing his mother on a grand scale. He's a child, he has you know,
I was. I was an expert school teacher. So for Peter, the trauma that he's experiencing this moment, you know, it's very very real, and we have to scale it down and understand his his you know, he's going into the film understanding loss and potential future without his mother, and that was what he was experiencing in that moment. But you're still a piece of shit, amazing love it.
And all I wanted was my mom to be riding a bike with a basket in the front and me to be in the front of it with a little blanket over me.
That's all that's all I wanted that day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But tell us about it, tell us about your love of.
At Okay, So, first of all, I've studied this film so much because I'm obsessed with and I've watched so many making making of films. I was, you know, it just hit at right at the right age. It was nineteen eighty two, so I'm ten, so and you all know about my home life at the time, right, so, and the marketing was extraordinary, you know, I still remember the poster. It said He's afraid, he's alone, He's three
million light years from home. That was the catchphrase. And there were just these little fingers creeping out of a door and you were like, what is this? Is this a horror movie? Is this? What is it? And then but then he was so beautiful because he was the design of this creature was so intriguing. He had the kindest eyes, and I think just in general, you know, I have a five year old goddaughter now, who I
sort of half raised with her dad. He's a friend that I met at grambling them you know anyway, that she's been a part of my life since she was a little baby. And so you know, if you have if your dad or if you've been around kids, you understand, like there are certain qualities that kids love about little animals and puppies, and so he had all those things.
Very clever. He had the big eyes and the you know, he was frail, and the way the character was designed he fed into that secret wish that little kids have, of like having their own little friend, their own little pet that they can keep or whatever. But Stephen made
this film about divorce. Stephen had gone through divorce as a child, and he did these fantastic things with the film where everything was shot from a child's point of view, so you don't see any adults unless they have childlike qualities.
So the only adult that you see in the film up until maybe the very end of the film is and She's Become a Friend of Mine, actually is the actress d Wallace, who plays the mother, and so every other add on the film is shot from the waist down, so it's ET's point of view and also Elliott's point of view. And the premise of the film essentially is it's this mom who's raising these three kids on their own. And there's this boy, Elliott. He's the youngest, well he's
a middle kid, but he felt like me. He was the same age as me. When I'm watching this film and he's grieving his dad, and the premise of the film is, well, maybe the DNA in the script is that he has to let go of the idea that his father is ever coming back, and it's the transition from boyhood into an adulthood because he in order for him to get over this pain, he has to let
go of his father ever coming back. And the way that Spielberg teaches this child how to do this is that this alien is abandoned and it's in Elliott's care, and Elliott gets to become a parent. Elliott gets to be the one to take care of this frail little friend who is slowly dying every day that he lives on this planet. And all that Elliott wants to do is him and he says it several times in the film,
I'm keeping him his mind. I found him his mind, I'm keeping him and he hides him from everyone, but ultimately what he has to do is let Et go. And the power of letting go is so huge in that film because it's only when Elliot lets e t go that et lives, and it's only when Elliot lets go of the idea of holding on to this little creature that his relationship with his mother is repaired. You know, all throughout the film he has a strained relationship to
his mother and his brother and his sister. He's so angry and he's so alone, and he lashes out at his mother so much, and yet it teaches him how to think about someone other than himself. In the very first scene in the film, he hurts his mother so badly where he knows where his dad is. Their divorce and it's one of those divorces where the dad tells
the kids everything, the mother doesn't know anything. And at one point they you know, Elliott says, you know, dad would understand me, and she says, well, maybe you should talk to your dad about it, and he goes, I can't. He's in Mexico, and he says it in such a cruel way, and the mother starts crying, and the youngest is the amazing Drew Barrymore, and she says, what's Mexico? And the mother's crying, and the camera does that amazing Spielberg thing where it's all eyes and Dean Wallace is
just crying. She has tears in her eyes, and she just says he hates Mexico, and anyone who's ever broken up with anyone or knows exactly what she's talking about. And it just shows that golf between these two people have like, Wow, we used to be so close together. Now I don't speak to you anymore. Now I don't even know where you are. Now you're in the place that you used to say you used to hate, but now you're there with your new girlfriend. And that's how
cruel Elliott is to his mother. And yet towards the end of the film, hold her, he can hug her, he can say I love you, he can let go of this thing, he can let go of the idea that his dad has abandoned them. And it was it was really important to me as the kids loved it.
And all the elements have come together beautifully with et that like they said.
The writing is so good.
The performances, I mean, Drew Barrymore on debut is just as Gerty is just brilliant and just acutesting any of us ever seen Elliott, Have you seen the audition that he gives. It is an extraordinary piece of work on its own.
One could almost say, it's almost child abuse because they I'm joking.
But yeah, they're they're.
Basically improvising with him and saying some pretty full on things to him.
Yeah, they're saying, we've got this a friend and we're going to take him away, and they're they're you know, he's really locked into the improv and he's crying, you know, And you were amazing. The comments you said about the other kids is amazing because Melissa Matheson, who wrote that screenplay, she also wrote Black Beauty, which is how she got that gig, and that's another extraordinary film about childhood and loss and whatever. But she really worked with those kids.
The dialogues extraordinary. That's that amazing Spielberg dialogue where everything feels conversational and improvisational, and maybe some of it was, but it was just all that cross talk that was in those early Spielberg films like Close Encounters and polter Geis and whatever you like. You just hear people talking over each other and it was so naturalistic. Also, it was revolutionary at that time to show families as they were. They were in a product, they were in like a
new housing project. The streets kind of looked like they did in Australia back then too, you know, because we were a newer country, our homes and those new building projects were sort of happening. We had those dirt roads, half built houses, and divorce was a new thing. You know.
It was very relatable to a lot of kids that were going through that and just mums struggling with groceries and stains on andre cleaning and you know, brothers and sisters just kind of getting up the high jinks and some of those lines from you know there's that famous none of your business Penis breath and her as a parent like laughing but then going I can't laugh at that, and it just seems it just it was amazing, like we felt like we were in on a secret watching it.
I can't think of another film where it's clearly the kids versus the adults that does not come across as tweet one one ioda like often if it's like, yeah, the kids are going to take on the adults and the authorities, you know, and they're very young kids. I mean, he's got the older brother who's you know, a teenager,
an older teenager, but you know, Henry's very young. Girtie is extremely young and they're kind of taking on the adults, yeah, the authorities, but it never comes across as I just can't think of another movie where it doesn't.
It doesn't become like schmaltzy.
No.
And it's because of that wonderment. I think it's because what maybe that central theme is is that if we really really take it down to if this was a film about divorce, you know, it's the one thing that we miss sometimes is the child's point of view. So he's gone back to a child's point of view, and everything is just really through wonderment. And sometimes what we lose as we get older is to just be in the moment, be in wonderment. Have you know. That's why
Mary the Mother is so attractive. I think she's one of the sexiest moms in cinema history in that film, you know, because she's still she still is a bit of a child. You know. There's a moment when they order a pizza and she's like, who told you could order pizza? You know, and someone says douchebag and she slaps them on the None of that douchebag talk in
my house. Kids, But she's just kind of one of the kids and but you know, that's why she's allowed to be seen in that film, because she sees them. She sees them, and Etie also sees her. There's there's a frame when she's reading to Gerty and it always amazed me, and she's reading Peter Pan and she says to she says to Gerdy, there's a line in the film that says, clap your hands, clap your hands. And then she says to her daughter, do you believe in fairies?
And Gertie and I believe it's Drew Barrymore really answering, saying I do. I do believe. I do believe in fairies, you know, And she says, then clap your hands if you believe in fairies. And you can tell that that young actress is clapping her hands to try to bring tinker Bell back to life, because that's how real the connection was between everyone on set, you know. And that's all children want, you know this, like children hate it when you're condescending to them, and they just want you
to talk to them like adults. I don't want you to like hey were you to do and talk to them like a pet. They want you to see them. And this was one of the first films. I think when the camera really saw children, Yeah, and I felt seen, and.
Jake Gillenhall makes I think.
I'm sure it was his debut, not a very He certainly exploded onto the scene three with the Donnie Darko. Some people get it, some people don't. I really enjoyed it. Tell us about your love with Donny Darko.
I'm obsessed with the eighties and I'm obsessed with time travel and something so fascinating about this director, because I mean, this was so much love. He seems to be like a genius, but this feels like the only film where he's really got it right and on his first attempt. It has all these icons in it. Ironically, Drew Barrymore's in it, so I love that she's in it. The soundtrack is some of my favorite music. Music plays a huge role in it. But what's the iconic tears for
fears head over heels. Yes, But you know, I've always been fascinated with the idea of time travel and the idea of parallel universes, and that's kind of what this film is about. And you know, he's the ultimate anti hero. Even the fact that he has the name Donnie darker, and one character says, you know, you sound like a superhero and he says to her, who says, I'm not, you know, And I like it because he's a kid
who on one level he has mental illness. And his mother, you guys will have to IMDb this, but but his mother is incredible. She's you know, she's she loves her son so much. But he's a teenager and he has some sort of mental health issue that is never really diagnosed in the film. He's possibly bipolar, he's possibly has an identity disorder, or he is a time traveler who knows, but who knows. But at one point and he says to his mother, what does it feel like to have
a freak for a son? And she cries and she says, it feels wonderful, you know, And she's got this grief about his self, hatred about himself. But the film essentially opens with a countdown and it basically says, on this date, the world will end. And you know, it's that classic premise of writing a screenplay where you put a ticking bomb under a table in a cafe, and so you set up that expectation and we're thinking, what the hell is going to happen, and I don't know, it's magical
to me. It's just the idea that happenstance in the world if it weren't for this or that I have a personal experience of. So this film, without spoiling much, involves the idea that there is a plane flying through the air and one of the engines of a seven four seven just falls off and crashes into a home or does it all right? So that's one major catastroph that happened in the film that sets off all sorts
of events. There are some legends in it, like Patrick Swayze and Drew barrymore As I spoke about, I have my own sort of plane what if moment, But that happened around September eleven, which is that I was almost on one of the planes that crashed, the one that was traveling from New York to San Francisco and it ended up being hijacked and it was on its way
to Washington. So the one where everyone fought back, and if it weren't for just some intuition on my part where I had just a change of heart, I would have been on that plane. So I think about that a lot.
So your intuition was that you thought that something bad was going to happen. I obviously couldn't have ford seen what happened, But was it just based on that want to go and visit that person, or go and do that gig or what was.
Yeah, I thought something bad was going to happen. I was in New York and I was living in San Francisco at the time, and i'd been I flew out. I flew out there because Bono was doing this charity record for Haiti to Was. It was talk about bad marketing. The idea needed to be refined. If you're listening Bono, just know you've had better ideas. There was no USA for Africa. It was an amazing idea, but it just wasn't refined enough because I can't even remember what it
was for. He had every star in the world. It was Beyonce, Brittany, you know, just everyone you could imagine on this record. And then I was on it and we all flew out to New York to record and it was extraordinary. He was producing the vocals, Michael Stipe was in the room, like I was so star struck. And it was two thousand and two. I guess or
two thousand and one, whenever. September two thousand and one, and it was the year that my first solo record was coming out and Michael Jackson was performing his thirtieth anniversary show at Madison Square Gardens and I was a huge Michael Jackson fan, so for me, it was like, Wow. My friend from Australia, Claire, who's a choreographer, I flew her over from Australia to come with me. It was going to be this big, big deal and just something was off. There was an energy in that city that
was just really really off. And I did the recording, which was kind of magical, and I was single, and there was someone there was a publicist that was working that event that I had a connection with, and I'm such a romantic And I remember saying to a friend of a friend who knew him, like, Oh, I'm due to fly back on a certain date, but I'm thinking about staying for a few extra days. And she was like, yeah,
you should do it. You should do it. So I called up my publisher, called up my team and basically just said, can you change my flight to September eleven? And this is the joy of working with people that know you and know that you're a flake. So the flight was the It left at like eight forty in the morning or whatever, and they know I'm not a
morning person. They're like, are you sure that's really early for you and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the only flight available, the only seat available, so yes, just put me on that flight. And they're like okay, and they didn't do it. So I then went to see the Michael Jackson show. Mike bless him, was not in the great shape. He was in the midst of a lot of his sort of prescription drug
sort of issues. At the time, I didn't know what was going on, but my heart kind of broke because he was a childhood idol and I saw him and they take that show over two nights. In the night that I saw it, he was two hours late. He struggled to do the show, and it was heartbreaking to see an idol kind of in the midst of all that sort of stuff. And Claire and I were just like depressed after that. And then the next day we had this walk around the city and it felt like
a montage of just no it was hot. I can still remember moments of seeing like there was one guy that was on a payphone who's slamming the phone into the payphone. That's how old am It was a payphone, and there was there was just this violence in the city. There was violence that would describing this, this awful feeling. And I also remember just thinking, what am I doing waiting around for some guy like who hasn't called me back? And I'm better than this and whatever. So I called
up and Claire had a vision. I'm not kidding you. Claire had a vision about the towers. And this sounds so crazy and disrespectful, but she did because she just we went to the what's that amazing building where sleepless and seat all is set, you know, the Empire State, Empire State, and she looked at the towers and she
said they're going to fall down. One day when we were on this trip, it was creepy, so creepy, and I called up the office and just said, look, I got a bad feeling, I don't want to be here. I'm going to you know, don't change my flight. And they said I didn't presco we they held it or something, but they said, I didn't. You still have the original flight, just come home. So I came home, and then I dreamed about the morning of the event. I was at home and I dreamed that I was in this field
and I was standing around what looked like Stonehenge. There was this beautiful, like rocky moment, all these sort of like monuments around me, and I was watching a hot air balloon overhead and it caught fire. It hit the monuments. They burst into flames, and I just remember in the dream looking around and all my friends and family were with me, and I said, out loud, oh my god,
thank god, everyone's okay. The phone rang. It was an ex boyfriend who thought I was in New York because I told everyone I was staying until September eleventh, and coming home that day, thought I was on the flight. And he just said, are you okay? And I told him that dream, I just told you, and he got the shivers and just said, you need to turn on the TV. I turn on the TV and that flight had crashed and it was in a field and all
that happened. Shit, I know, really, it sounds unbelievable, and I'm not I mean, I'm not Shirley McLean, and I think you know now after twenty five years in the business.
I haven't made a history of making these wild like weird things, but that happened to me, and after all of this time living, I just think that an event that big and that horrific if animals in the wild, like if you look at, say, when a lion is attacking, like a herd of wild animals, and you watch them and imperceptibly they all moved just a second before it
attacks or whatever. I just wonder as human beings, like I think if an event that evil was being planned, I wonder if there was just a vibe, and I think when that moment happened was just so horrific. I think that the human emotions, like if the brain has electricity in it whatever. I don't know. I just feel like there was something in the air and I picked up on it and I listened to my gut a lot.
Now I'm gonna say, what do you what do you do with that information?
Well?
How does it how does that experience? How does it?
How does it change your lucke you think? How often do you think about it?
Just? Yeah, I do. I just go with my gut all the time, because I think our gut is just information. I think what we're really picking up on is just subliminal cues. I don't think it's magic. I don't think I'm psychic. I think what it is is, you know, I really broke it down. I think that was just I'm probably just lucky. And I think that there was some energy in the city. And you know, I don't know, but in general, if I get a bad vibe about someone,
listen to it. You know that old Maya Angelo quote of people tell you who they really are when you first me them.
I believe them.
Yeah, we just have the human The naive part of us wants to just be like, nah, they're not bad, they just just it's like, no, they're really showing you that there's a tell. You know, gamblers have a tell. Everyone has a tell. And in that situation in New York, the city is almost like an organism New York City, it's a person. You know you've been there. It doesn't negotiate.
No, no, you never experienced anything like the first time I was on New York, I was like, oh, okay, I get it now. I get all the songs, I get all the I feel like I'm in the middle of the universe right now, like it's it's it's and it's a real feeling you get that doesn't quite exist. I mean Paris kind of I look around Paris and go, this is like the coolest city in the world. Like I love, I love all these old notch of dams there.
Well it used to be, but you just kind of thing, I love this place and I love I can feel the history here. Yeah, but in New York, you really feel like the world is a spinning around you.
Yeah, And I think that really comes from our DNA, Like I really think, like if you really break it down, like so New York was, like you know, it's a place of immigrants. It's a place of the blood and sweat and death had sacrificed that people went through to get there and finally make it. And then the generations of people that survived same thing with the West in
order to have made it in California. You know that there's a certain amount of grift, you know, even just in the the idea that you had to survive that treacherous trail. You know of so what type of person that frontier mentality. It's no wonder these Americans who love their guns, love their guns because it was a certain type of person that had to be able to survive that.
It being Australian a similar thing, you know from you know, it's changing now, but to set aside the incredible, wonderful and digits culture and country that came before, you know, white people invaded it. But those criminals, those discarded types that were put on ships and just thrown here and left to whatever. You know, that's a type of person too, you know, and that that shapes the culture and shapes
the city. So it's it's the people that end up in a place, what they had to endure, what they had to survive, or what really does it's in the soil, I think too, Darren.
We need to move on to the movie we are here to talk about. This may be a two part or I think it's been amazing, but I'm really curious now. Nineteen fifty two, Gene Kelly, it's Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connell, what did you make of Singing in the Rain?
I loved it so much and it was exactly what I needed. Yes, loved it. Oh that was good, and it was so arming and so magical and everything that I really missed from movies now, and when I watched it, yes, like I had no idea. What's stopped me watching it all these years? I understand now because I did a lot of research afterwards, understanding, oh, this movie is considered to be one of the best, well the best musical
ever made. I read that about it. I read, you know, I went in blind, so I was like, going, why is that woman so familiar? I didn't realize you know who I didn't realize that was DeBie Reynolds. You know, she was just so delightful and you hit it right off the top of their chemistry. And I looked at a movie like La La Land, which I love, and just thought, this is Lala Land's nothing like Wow, Okay, they were really making a love letter to musicals when
they made Lala Land, because this is the template. You know, I've always loved Gene Kelly. You know, I'm so cheesy that I'm the person that loves Xanadu, right, and I do. It's a terrible film, but you know there's a moment where Geane Kelly tap dances with Olivin Newton John and he insisted on directing that moment, and you can tell all of these moments in the film are just magical.
But from the very inception of the film, the device that they use, you know where you you get invited to this red carpet at Man's Chinese Theater, and you know it now because you're a tourist and you're like, oh my god, that's Man's Chinese Theater. But it's like, oh, it's set in the twenties and the thirties, but this is color. So the fact that's it looks now, it's like history has eaten itself. So this looks intentional.
This looks like bes Leman. I imagine I's watched this film many many.
Times, absolutely so now a lot of this film looks like cliches, but this is the original. So there are so many techniques in this film and so many colors that are put together for the first time, and and you can tell they're doing things because they have the technology to be like, we must paint their set yellow
because it's gonna look incredible in technicolor. So before he was so handsome too, I didn't realize just what like the jawline and the killer smile, and I saw so many things from pop culture and music videos that have stolen from this film that I didn't realize that even I have absorbed and not realized where they've all come from.
I saw Michael Jackson's love of gene Kelly. I saw a lot of Michael's moves in gen Kelly Vincent Patterson, who's a choreographer that worked with Michael Jackson for a long time. I saw like you little thieves. Good for you, you know, because pop culture eats itself. But the chemistry between those two and I love that simple like that I hate you, I love you. You know. That first moment of the way they set them up was just so incredible that at first, you know, he's this swanky, you know,
movie star, but it's the silent era. What a wonderful thing to kind of set up.
The idea alone.
I mean, we'll go through some of the songs and talk about it, but the very idea, which I believe comes from the two screenwriters, Betty Comdon and Adolph Green. Adolf's name hasn't aged well, but they moved into they rented a house, so they had all the songs that the Alfred fried is the producer who's a songwriter lyricist, so he'd had all these songs. I think the term that they kind of coin later on is called a jukebox musical.
Yes, and the songs aren't really connected to the story. Richard and I were talking about this. My husband were just saying, it is a musical. That you could take most of the songs out and put them in a different musical that wouldn't matter. Yeah.
Yeah, because Singing in the Rain, I think that song is in seven other films, for example, and it's you know, it was written in nineteen twenty nine, and I think and there's very loose you know, you could loosely tie the songs into part of the narrative, but it's really mainly chemistry building, I think. But the very idea, because I like you, I just had this idea that I had the image of Gene Kelly singing and I thought, that's impressive, but you know, maybe it's not for me.
And then it was Tony Martin on this podcast who hadn't seen Top Gun, but one of his favorite films was Singing in the Rain, and I never knew that it was based on the idea of the transition from silent films to talkies, and I thought, wow, wow, that's such an interesting idea. It reminded me of feeling enough Boogie Nights when they go from film to the videotape,
you know, and everything goes hey wire after that. But the story, I think this film feels very modern in a weird way, but it lends it that's the storyline alone, lends itself to comedy, to color, the silliness.
To all these things.
But the Debbie and that off move into this house, and the guy who they rented the house off was selling it because he was a silent movie star who had lost his wealth because he couldn't trans he couldn't go to the talk, he wasn't working for him.
So that's where the idea actually came from.
So they built that, worked out the songs that they already had, and then made this And it sounds like an awful like there's no way that movie should be as good as it is based on those things, I don't think.
Yeah, And it's held up by you know, the pins of the tent is held up by the pins of the three leads who are just so fascinating to watch. Sorry, who is Who's Don? Who's the other?
Donald O'Connor, Donald O'Connor.
His name is Robert Face his expressions, but also the film the fictitional, fictitious lead that Gene Kelly plays opposite. She's hilarious and you don't realize, you know, because they're silence stars, and they set up this joke where they turn up at first and I'll do all the talking, darling, and he's talking and stuff, and she's just she seems like she looks a bit like a Marilyn Monroe or a Bridget Budo or something. But you know, she's just
so beautiful. And then when she lets out that voids, which is just horrible.
Let's have a listen of the first time. And like you said, we've been on the red carpet. We've noted that Don Lockwood has done all the talking. Then they're on stage and every time she goes to talk, Don come of you that kind of gives her a nudge or steps in front of her and does the talking. She gets off stage where all the executives are waiting, and then be picking up there.
What digg any kids as a smash?
Mister Simpson on Lena, you were gorgeous, Yehlen you look pretty good for girl.
What's a big idea?
Can the girl get away at edge Y after all?
Down my public too, Elena, the publicity department right here thought it would be much better if Don made all the speeches for the team.
Why, Lena, you're a beautiful woman.
Audiences think you've got a voice to match.
The studio's got to keep their stars from looking ridiculous at any cost. No one's got that much money.
What's the big idea? Am I done this something? I mean, if that voice, like the whole movie hinges on her, really, like, it's the idea that this voice, her voice, cannot make the transition and she's not now suitable for this new world. And if gene Hagen, who gets not many for the oscar, If that doesn't work, and apparently she has a beautiful voice so it is a real performance. If that doesn't work, the movie actually falls apart.
Yeah, it's funny listening to it. Separate from the vision. She sounds like she sounds like Missus Costanza.
Yes, yes, but.
When you pair her voice with the act, with that beautiful actress, it just it's like wow, you know, like anyone would take ten steps away and just step back because it just yeah, just did not work, an incredible premise, so funny, and I found myself laughing from because you know, a lot of comedy doesn't date, it doesn't age well. And I was laughing from the first five minutes of
the film. And I was cynical, you know, like it was a bit like this and you know what you're like when you have homework to do as well, it's a bit tired. And I was like, oh God, I got to watch this film. And then I was like, I love this film. And it put me in such a good mood too, because I had a bit of a rough day and it was just so charming, so
charming and lovely and like disappearing. Like I talked about the qualities of the films that I loved in my life, but this was such a like stepping into a beautiful bath or into diving into a pool or whatever. Like it's such an immersive experience of just this wonderland of cinema in the way that when Bads gets it right, he does it. But this was just delightful.
It's pure joy.
Everything about joy.
It is like even like the villain is is the Alena, but she's not, you know, like she's still funny. You know, we kind of get it. There's another version of this movie. It's told from her perspective, and you know, the others are the villains who are trying to, yeah, maybe not help her out. But what you said about it being funny,
I cannot agree more. Which was the thing that really surprised me when I first watched it, And so Tony was on the podcast about two years ago, and I've watched it about four times since.
I just love it.
There's lines on the red carpet, like the idea where he's talking about you know that well, first of all, I think when there's there's people who are introduced and she refers to somebody as an eligible bachelor, a bachelor, and he's like eighty, it looks like he's like ninety or something.
You know.
There's there's a point where there's all the motors he's talking about his career.
The motorcycle stunts are one way.
This goes off a cliff and the song about is him and Cosmo's career and he's just lying through his teeth and we're seeing straight down the battle of the camera and we're seeing the flashbacks of his career and he.
Goes, yeah, we work always about dignity.
We study that the Conservatory of the Fine Arts, and this says them in a pub and a piano.
It's so good.
There's a line where somebody's watching a movie and I think they're watching Don Lockwood on screen, and she says he's so refined, I think I'll kill myself, which really.
Got to like.
It made me laugh and it's like, wow, I wasn't expecting that line in nineteen fifty two.
Yeah, so dark. And there's another dark moment too later on when people watch so later on in the film, when they commit to the transition to sound and spoiler that it sort of goes disastrously. And they have a test screening and some of the audience comments as they're coming out, Oh, man, if you've ever made anything and you've had to as we are, you know, listen to some feedback. It's brutal some of the audience comments, you know,
and they're thinking, well, is it that bad? Right? And then it just keeps escalating the comments that people are making as they come out. They're like, that is the worst film I've ever seen. They're like, well, it's just one film, right, They're like I'm never gonna watch one of his films ever again. It's great.
Let's ever listen to. Possibly is the I haven't only thought about it. Possibly might be the inciting incident where we the news comes in. There're having a party, one of the Hollywood party, one of the execs, uh you know, palacial homes, and he has an announcement to make to all the silent film stars gathered.
This is a demonstation of a talking picture. It is a picture of me and I am talking no how I live, and the sound issuing from them. I think our eyes together in perfect the.
Earliest there's somebody talking behind that street.
Of the island than mister Simpson. I'm right here of our tie on.
Then my voice has been recorded on a record, a cock picture.
Goodbye.
Well it's just a toy.
It's as great, it's vogue.
Do you think they'll ever really use it? I doubt it.
The Warner Brothers are making a whole talking picture with this gadget the jazz singer.
They'll lose their shirts.
What do you think of a dexter?
It'll never amount to a thing.
That's what they said about the horseless carriage.
I mean, it's done always.
I mean he he's got no character art at all, Cosmo, but he's just he makes every scene better.
And he keeps falling upward. He keeps getting promotion every time some thing happens in the industry. Like, you know, he goes from I don't even know what he is. He's kind of like, you know, a sidekick, and then he's suddenly like, you'll be the musical direcord, You'll be the this, You'll be that, You'll be studio owner. Like I did notice in the film too, like it seemed very easy to get a job in the movies in this in this film, Yes, very easy.
Yeah, yeah, it's a fair point. It's a fair point.
Was there anything Yeah, you've had a twenty five year career in music, was there anything like this is is a massive moment in time for these people, like going from silence to talking. Was there anything that you went, oh shit, this is the industry has changed? Was it Spotify? Was it social media? What was the biggest thing you thought, Oh, hang on, this is everything that the landscape has changed.
Yeah, that's why I took ten years out of the business, to be honest, I mean, not the only reason, but in retrospect, I realized that in twenty twelve Spotify was really just becoming a thing, and that ability for the public to really curate their own experience of music had
fundamentally changed the network, the landscape. Sorry, So it wasn't just there were two massive shifts, you know, that first one, which I still think was a massive mistake, which was when Steve job said a song is worth less than a buck. That was hard because there is music in everything. You know, there's music and films, there's music in commercials. Music is such a huge part of every art form, every commercial output, everything that happens, and so it has
this value to it. But then we decided, once we decided the song was less than a buck, it just that was the end of one huge part of the commercial world of music. So that changed things. And what happened was budgets just dramatically dropped. You just couldn't make the quality of things that you wanted to make anymore. So music videos just didn't look as good anymore because
no one wanted you weren't getting the same return. That didn't bother me so much, because you know, I'd made a lot of money selling plastic discs and I've always been about art, and I just poured money back into that and into touring. But the Spotify thing, it took a while for me as an artist to catch up. I was like one of those those silent picture actors.
It took me a while to realize that I was still trying to do things the old way, you know, whereas now we live in a world where you can secretly record a record and just drop it the next day. You know, you don't have to make it ironically, even though I've done it. You don't have to make music videos. You don't have to ask a radio session to play record, you don't have to do all those things. You can just decide if you wanted to. I have a record, it's going to come out on this day, and here's
how you can pre order it. And I'm going to go touring next week. And this is it. You have this direct connection to your audience. And there are young people who are born into this model and that's the only thing they know. And you know, I had to learn to adapt very very quickly.
Did you have a singing in the rain. Did you have a favorite song? There was a one that blew you away more than another one, and for what reason.
There were two things that, I mean, the first confession of love that gene Kelly has where he says, I'm so used to I'm such a hand I have to do this the right way, and he takes it into a studio stage. I can't remember the name of that song, but it's.
You Were Made for Me or something like that.
It was so beautiful. I love that song. But there's also the staging of one dance number that he does in the end, where it's this endless sort of pink and purple sunset and there's the stairs and this will blow you Away. On the cover of my album, I'm on this sort of peachy staircase and there's a sunset
and whatever. And I had actually pulled a still from this film in my mood board for the photo shoot from my album without even realizing it was from Singing in the Rain Wow, and it's yeah, and it was from this film. So when I saw that sequence unfold and gene Kelly's dressed all in black and there's an actress who's in this white outfit and there's this what looks like a mile long piece of white fabric just so beautiful what.
She has called Broadway Melody.
The whole the bigger piece is called Broadway Melody, and the actress dancer is Sid Chares.
Wow.
And that portion of it was I think called brought Broadway Ballet. And yeah, that was Gene Kelly's idea to have this kind of this shoal. This went forever, And I've heard the actress dances yes, and I've heard I've heard her talk about it going because I had of the fans and the wind.
They had to really work out.
It took it took a month of rehearse, two weeks to shoot because six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was a fifth of their budget. And I've heard the actress talk about it and she was saying the wind was the wind machine because I had to work out, Okay, if I move here, the shoal is going to go over here. And she said the wind it was such a heavy wind machine that it was actually even hard to keep my balance. Wow, Like yeah, so get to
get that result. It was originally spasically, I'm not sure how this really would have worked. Has been a completely different dance sequence because it was supposed to be Donald O'Connell and then he had a TV commitment, so he had to leave, he had to go do blankety blanks or something, I don't know, and so they had the very.
Right of the sequence.
But it's an extraordinary The whole secrets goes from your gutta dance, gotta dance into this. It's it's it's extraordinary. It's it's beautiful and if you notice it, you're.
Very modern too.
It's extremely modercause you see like that, not just seeing La, but you see a lot. You know, they were using those you know, Pink does it in her shows, which you know, the acrobatics of tying yourself up in these these shoals, and it's it's very sexy.
It's extraordinarily sexy.
Very sexy and modern, and it reminds me it could have been a it could be a tom Ford Gucci campaign today. It could be. It was ahead of its time and that it looked almost like Bob Fossy stuff. And this was in the fifties, so it had a real future Sixties like, there are moments in this film that looked so Maude, yeah, meaning you know, like Maud from the sixties. And I had to keep reminding myself, oh,
this was a nineteen fifties film. The other thing I want to say about gen Kelly too, was that, you know, he made dancing so sexy and so masculine, and he was doing ballet, you know, he's tap dancing, and it.
Was so.
There was so much testosterone in the room. I was just like, you know, that's literally balls, Like I don't know it just he managed to be so like, you know, he was like Brando.
Well, funny you say that, because he said he said, because Fredis Staire obviously was the other massive, you know, dancer of the day, and he said that quite was. Fredistae is a carry ground of dance, on the Marlon Brando of dance, and that's he is.
Yeah, And I just blew me away. I didn't because I knew Gene Kelly obviously from later on in life. But wow, what a what a movie star he really was.
I mean, he looks always trying to think, always think. Jimmy has come up a few times, Jimmy Stewart. If you modernize him, he's almost Tom Hanks, you know, like Tom Hanks is almost America's dad, you know. And I get the George Clooney kind of vibe and Karry Graulsey. George Clooney doesn't do the singing and the dancing, but just on screen, the way he holds himself to me is George and there. I'm sure if you noticed in that dance, there was a little jump cut when they're together.
If you rewatch it, there's a bit where she yes.
So what happened was there was they warned not to, you know, there were certain things they couldn't couldn't do, and it's a very sexy dance and one of the things I want to do is not for her to for sid cheries to wrap her leg or legs around Gene Kelly. So that jump cut, it's believe they obviously did that and then they couldn't they couldn't show.
Is that because of that?
Because I don't know.
I think it's just the rating and they wouldn't have been able to. I'm not sure what the where the rating system was back then, or it would have affected the releases, and it was in the various pressure groups. I'm not sure it was McCarthyism. I think it came through you know, Christian standards and those kinds of things.
So released the Kelly Cut released the Kelly Cut.
Well, the original the original print of this film was burnt in a fire, so it doesn't it. Actually, I was wondering whether they could find that, and they it's gone.
They will never I'll never find it.
There was also just imagine some fundamental Christian going kill it with fire, kill it anyway. Sorry.
There was also a two hour stop during this sequence at the start because there was cid. Urie was wearing a very you know kind of her dress and had to dance sexy, but you could actually there was somebody had noticed you could see pubic hair, and they had to shut down for two hours. For two hours. I get the impression, Darren, it wouldn't been It wouldn't be an issue these days. It wouldn't be an issue in the Los Angeles.
No.
Well actually yeah, and also just because of ya, does anyone have future apart from me?
She also had to learn how to smoke.
Somebody had the teacher how to smoke for this role and for this and there's the only there's no talking in it.
She's just dancing. She was amazing.
Gene Kelly also choreographed it to make it look like you couldn't see that she was taller than him, so there's no none of them side by side standing standing up.
Very clever because it's on very graduated scares the whole thing.
Yeah, very clever. Yeah, it's very good.
I insisted on that with this podcast. You can't see at home, but I insisted that Pete be on a sort of an air pressure seat, that he was a slightly short.
Trying to slouch as well.
So the thing that made me laugh in that sequence, because the idea behind it is that she is like that the girlfriend of a mobster.
Lot scarface.
And the flipping of the coins, I thought it just made me laugh every time, the flipping. He was flipping coins, and then these henchmen would come over those flipping coins.
It was just out about It made me laugh a lot. It made me laugh.
Yeah, I guess she she got lured by the money, Pete. I don't know it's subtle, but I guess that's what they'll get.
I think that's what they might have been getting at My favorite song was and sequence was make them laugh, make them.
Laugh, make them laugh. Don't you know everyone wants to laugh?
Laugh?
My dad said, be an act of my son but be our comic.
Come on, they'll be sad in lines.
For those old monkey talk monkey shines. Or you could study Shakespeare and be quite elite, and you could charm the critics and have nothing to eat. Just slip on a banana, peel the world at your feet. Make them laugh, make them laugh, make them laugh, make.
Them load.
Don't you know everyone wants to laugh. My grandpa said, go out and tell him a joke. But if I'll make a row, make them screen take a call, but a lost let us see it's not off by pretending you're to dancer.
With great if you wiggle to look jignalant.
All over the place and then you get a great, big custom lion a face and make them lap, make them laugh, make them laugh.
Well, the sequence is incredible. I mean that looked like a lot of that was in one take, but I was I couldn't stop laughing at make him laugh because it went from him cheering up Gene Kelly sort of right,
the camera just pans off Geen Kelly. But I would love to see someone film what Gene Kelly was doing while this is happening, because I'd love it if Gene was just like I don't know, checking his phone, not interested, you know, because so much effort goes into this is he's basically doing parquet.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's incredibly physically and it's so funny. And I didn't realize that that's where this song comes from. It's so famous, right, maybe it was really I think it's this and I always sort of feel like that was a super cheesy vaudeville type song, but in the sequence it's hilarious and he's just beating up on himself and his rubber face is just and body is incredible.
The rubber faces was amazing, they say. Carry Grant thought he needed to have his own solo and he thought he had a vaudeville background.
So he was like, are you choreographic? You just do it.
All the tricks you can do, you just put it into one song. So this wrote down all the things he could do, the props of the planks and the rubber face, and then he goes and do that thing you do with the wall. And apparently Donald Connell was a four packs a four pack of smoke to day kind of guy, like that's a lot of smoke, really, yeah, And he said I wasn't particularly fit and he suffered exhaustion, very painful carpet burns. Apparently he was in bed for
three days afterwards. And then there was an accident with the film stock. Somebody hadn't checked the aperture so it got ruined, so he had to go do it. They had to ask him to do it again. So it was I mean, there's stories with this, like even with Good Morning.
That Debbie Reynolds.
That's a beautiful song. It's a beautiful song, such a beautiful song. And Debbie Reynolds was carried off set. She burst blood, vessels in her feet, she had blood in her shoes. But by the end of it, I mean, we should point out Debbie Reynolds and you may have come across this not a trained dancer, was like a gymnast, was almost like a young veteran when it came to movies. She'd done a lot, but she was not a trained dancer.
So what I understand, she was almost forced upon Gene Kelly, and so the key pup with Gene Kelly.
And uh and Donald.
It was like and that sequence where they're dancing on stairs, like yeah, I'm not sure about you, Darren, but I'm at the age now, and I have been for a few years where stairs it's the only thing that I could empathize with Trump about.
Trump had a fear of stairs.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm getting to the age where I just need to hold the rail just a little bit, even if it's just a finger.
There's a light finger on a rail, you.
Should try to do it on stage. People opening like, you know, like, oh my god, I've fallen off stage in front of you know, an arena crowds where there's been catwalks and stuff, and it's it's so embarrassing. So stairs are definitely like and you can't really have rails on stage because you look, it's embarrassing.
So yeah, but they're like they're like like almost barreling the camera at least, looking straight ahead and in perfect sync and doing these moves whilst they're moving down the stairs. It's it's if you take time to think about it for a second, it's incredible.
It is incredible. I don't know if I'm going to spoil something you'll bring up later, but I thought it was so meta that part of the story of the film was that Debbie Reynolds character is basically doing the Millie Vanilli thing. So she is replacing the voice of someone who can't sing. Yes, but it's not Debbie reynolds voice in the movie either. In the singing, they had someone else sing for Debbie Reynolds. Yes, this is and they're open about that is crazy.
It's so amazing.
So when Debbie Reynolds is doing the talking not the singing, at the end of the talking for Lena, that's actually it's not her voice. It's actually gene Hagen's voice, who actually plays Lena.
So wow, yeah.
So and then when she sings later on that is yeah, like you said, another another singer at the end, so.
That like, yes, it is. It's a really it's a really fun fact.
You had the power all along, Dorothy.
One of the slight elephants in the room is is that gene Kelly when you're discussing this, And for all the research I've done, and it seems nobody's arguing with it, not even gene Kelly. In fact, he said, I am surprised to be reynalds. He's still speaking to me like he was a hard task master.
Because he was directing.
It was co directing, and there was a point where I've seen Donald I kind of say that. There's a point where after they was shooting a Good Morning sequence and Gene Kelly said to Donald, he said, in front of everybody, he said, you got to stop, you got to stop being mucking around and let's get serious and this is you know, we've got a lot to do,
We've got a lot to get through. And he was a bit taken aback, and he goes across the road that they wrap in his favorite ordering hole with some of the crew members, and Jean Kelly walks in and he says to him, I'm sorry I yelled at you in front of the crew.
It was actually I wanted to.
Yell at Debbie, but if I yelled at her again and again, I'd probably lose her for the rest of the shoot. You know, it should be emotionally distraught. So I just yelled at you. But it was actually my
I was trying to get through to the Debbie. There's a there's a story of Debbie Reynolds crying like under a piano, just hiding under a piano one day and Fred Astaire, who was in the next studio shooting a movie, came and came and saw her and like this took her out and this had a word and said this, you know, the hard work you're putting in is worth it, because she was like she was working hard.
She's nineteen years old.
She's still saying at her parents place a few hours away. She takes she wakes at a four am each morning, gets three buses.
She's only nineteen, nineteen years old.
Yeah, yeah, so, I mean.
She's such a star in that film. You know, I don't know much about the life of Gene Kelly. I always just I did a little Google search and saw, you know, he was married three times. But I read one disturbing fact about him. It said that he was cremated and he has had no funeral.
Yeah it's I did not know that.
Yeah, And I just thought, oh god, that's a bit sad. But you know, recently Olivia and John passed away and I've been watching a lot of stuff with her and she worked with Geen Kelly, and I consider her to be basically one of the nicest people who ever lived. And she never said a bad word about him. And I don't know. I know that he was a lapsed Catholic and he fell out of the Catholic church because
he was disappointed that they weren't compassionate. And I know that he was the reason I was McCarthyism is because he was He was one of those actors who was thought, you know, was a part of the pushback against censorship. And so he was a Democrat. So I sort of add all those things up and think, oh, kind of my kind of person.
Yeah.
So, and then because I'm an egotist, I think that means he's a good person.
Well, I mean they mean god open, and I kind of say, you know, he was he was a hard task master. There's been a reckoning and an awakening in recent years which has been really really good and positive. It seems like not to have gone into any murky areas outside of being unpleasant sometimes you know, and being and I guess when you taking the pressure of but he's doing the choreography, he's also directing.
The pressure is on him.
He's you know, he's come off a huge hit with an American in Paris. Was it just stress or was it you know something else?
It's it's yeah, it's a tough one because I mean he sounds like a perfectionist. I am a perfectionist, and sometimes I have to think, you know, I always struggle and care deeply about what people think about me, and I always think about that too, Like god, am I mean?
Am I? You know? I had a similar thing recently on a video shoot where and it was nothing like that, but where I the lighting director was doing something and she had an assistant do this move with a particular gobo and it just wasn't I was directing, and it just wasn't how I wanted it to be. And I, in front of everyone, just said, no, I really think you should you should do it. And the lighting director is sort of you know, clapped back at me in front of everyone and just said she's a kid, give
her a break, right and fair enough. And I felt really bad because I realized I'd embarrassed this young intern, this kid, And so I took a moment on set and I just said, I can I just I just want to apologize everyone, like I shouldn't have, you know,
you know. And so I made a point of like apologizing for humili getting someone on set, and like I knew where it came from, which was that, you know, I am perfectionist and this is what I wanted and whatever, and Afterwards, the DP came about the lighting director counter to me and said, you didn't have to do that. You're like the director and you can do you know.
But I felt like in these times and everything, I was like, no, I did have to do that, like I wanted to, you know, like I just felt like, yeah, I wouldn't want someone yelling out in front of everyone, some comment about my performance in front of the whole crew. I'd want someone to pull me aside. And I didn't do that. So I don't know why I say gued into this is this my therapy session.
Maybe it always turns in a little bit of this one. I mean you should hear carry a bit more. During a commercial break to the project, she ripped into me, like nobody else. I mean, it's it's it's frightening.
It's frightening.
Really.
Of course, I want to be very clear, very clear, that is not what's amazing about this film, though we'll wrapping up soon. Is just like it's parodying Hollywood, but so early, like in a way this is nineteen fifty two.
And then yeah, obviously they write it and it takes a couple of years, so I guess they're right, and make I guess, you know, the talkies have only been around for like twenty five years, and they're still parodying the vanity of Hollywood, the studio system, the star system, fandom, you know, the bullshit lies that go on in Hollywood. Like it's a very very early kind of look bird's eye view of Hollywood in the way to be able to step back and kind of realize so early on in Hollywood, I.
Think, yeah, and that whole like it starts with that device of the gossip columnist, you know, and that power of the red carpet and that insatiable appetite for gossip, and it's always you know, the whole thing is that fear of like being exposed or your crib ending. And then you know, the studio head in this film, he's
very morally ambiguous. You know, he has to be almost blackmailed into like doing the right thing, and they talk about the contracts and the studio contracts they're under, and yeah, it's it's a bit you know, it is a bit better because he's there. He is one of the biggest stars in the world, sort of doing an autopsy on how the industry kind of works, but getting away with it because he's saying, oh, this was in the thirties.
But not really.
Yeah, yeah, well you satisfied with the ending, the reveal and the way that the curtains and the I was the.
Only thing that really and it's great. But the only thing that just broke my heart was when he yelled at Debbie I forget her character's name, Kathy, when he said, you'll go out there and you'll sing this and whatever. And just because of the times that that film was written in that men could speak to him and like that, and she just obeyed him, and she said, I'll do it,
but I'll never speak to you again. Yeah, you know, when she was in love with him, and and I knew why he was doing it was throwing a stone at a puppy, and he needed her to do it in order to expose the villain. But it just broke my heart that for a second she had to experience thinking, this man isn't who I think he is. I just forget that this way. I don't write movies though, because that's that was you were meant to experience that. But for me, I just wanted him to be like, oh, sure,
let's do Yeah. I wanted all three of three of them to be in on it, But it wasn't clear to me that that anyone was going to be on it. I knew he was going to do something morally positive, but but yeah, I was. I loved it and I loved it. They ended up together and they're on a little Yeah. I loved the ending. I loved it. I was so happy.
Yeah, I love the film.
Well, mate, like I said, thank you so much for doing your homework. You are, like I said, you are busy doing a whole lot of press anoun seeing.
Your world tour well is yeah. Yeah, tell me tell me I did.
You When did you decide to call it homosexual? When did that idea come to you? Because I imagine if you had, like twenty years ago, said to your record company, you know, you know what reactually would have got twenty years ago as opposed to how it works.
Now, Well, you just answered it. That's why I called it that. Yeah, Because ultimately I remember so distinctly wondering why one day I went from being one of the biggest pop stars in the world to suddenly couldn't get a call back, couldn't get a phone back from a major,
major record company. Because as a solo artist, made a music video where I danced in it, and they were all just so embarrassed to really just tell me the truth, which was that they felt like I looked too gay, which in itself is a repulsive thought and statement, but that was their thing. They're like, oh my god, he
looks too gay. Their first response was, we need to make him shoot this video and we'll put it on his tab and they this is in America, and they decided that, yeah, we can't let this kid do a traditional promo run on this like I'd just come off the back of singing with Pavarotti. You know, I was known for my voice, and they just any TV promo that I had in the US was pulled. So I didn't you know, I'd had five six appearances on Jay Leno,
all those shows like that in the past. You know, I launched a solo career in the US without a single live performance on television because apparently when I moved, I looked too gay and that was just too obvious that was going to turn off the public. So, you know, twenty years later for me to have this neon sign on the front from my album and I'm lounging in
front of it. You know, it's tongue in cheek, but it's also really making peace with that shame of like wow, in the the history of that word obviously is so clinical and whatever. But I'm you know, I'm reclaiming it. I'm redefining my relationship to what that meant to be called that as a child and this when you hear the title track, it was named that. As soon as I heard the music, I was just like, oh, I
have the most genius idea. I am just gonna because the song was called that, but I was like, I'm going to call the whole album this because it's not a song about sex. Actually, it becomes an adjective that's never been used before. It's like, this is the highest compliment I can give you. This is the highest compliment I can give the person I love. It's like a jinasi qua. It's like, you know, the only way I can describe this is that it's homosexual, therefore making it
an extremely positive word. And just yeah, the reading reading sh and what's funny too. I just love it when I go on a show and I just have someone just says to say that word. It's just so funny to me, so funny.
But I often think of like I often I've spoke Aba it's recently on a TV showdown here, where I still feel like I'm answerable to the fourteen year old me, you know, And I often think of that, the twelve, thirteen, fourteen year old me, and would he be happy with what I'm doing? And you know, the way I'm raising my kids, the way my career has panned out, decisions I make, you know, the way I treat people.
I imagine.
I'm not sure if you do the same thing, but I imagine your thirteen year old self, who head would have fucking explode looking at this with prepride, looking at this album cover.
Yes, there's a video that I posted on my social media where I have a little distance from it now, so I'm not so emotional. But when I described it, I it just came from a nowhere, I said, crying just because of the emotion and the release and the emancipation that you know, you feel. Because I couldn't imagine a world. I couldn't imagine a world where it was
okay to even feel how I felt. I couldn't imagine that, you know, I didn't even know how to put it into words because I didn't think there were gay people, you know. I thought that all I knew was there was a television ad with a grim reaper on it with a bowling ball saying aids it, you know, it doesn't discriminate. And I thought, if I thought about a boy, I was going to get AIDS. That's how that's how
alien the concept was to me. And you know, being half Catholic, I guess my mum was a lapsed Catholic, but she had all of that, you know, guilt, and so I still prayed to God and I would pray to God, please just don't make me gay because I don't want to die. That's what it was, you know. So I couldn't imagine it. And yeah, it's mind blowing.
And the final thing I say is I love that we live in a world now where there are young people that are like so what, Like it's no big deal them, And it's a very specific experience of mine. You know, I am a fifty year old man who grew up in the nineteen seventies, and so it's a lot of my album is talking about also midlife, you know, and I think a lot of women will relate to it, where that feeling of like feeling a bit invisible, you know,
feeling like what now? You know, when you get to that age in your life where the person in the mirror doesn't look like the fourteen year old or the twenty four year old or the thirty year old, that you still feel like you are and you're like, huh, that doesn't Is that what that looks like? From behind? You know, you're really starting to struggling to love yourself.
And that was the place I came from and coming back to music was really just trying, you know, trying to find a place where it was like, how can I love me today and really accept me today? And putting that word in neon was the beginning step.
Well, my congratulations, I think I think it's a genius. I cannot wait this. You know, the cee you back down under on tour and I'll put the links on our on our website for where you can get some tickets. But thank you so much for doing your homework. This it's a pleasure I'm going to say to you right now. This I think has been my favorite episode we've done. I think you've been so open and so informative with your opinions on your three favorite films and also singing in the rain.
I'm so glad you enjoyed.
I kind of I was sometimes I when we agree on a film, I'm excited. You know, Tom Tom Ballard, he watched in Bruges, and I just knew he was going to love it.
And I had to love it.
Yeah, I had a feeling you'd love this, and I'm glad that I've got a little bit nervous when you when you were opened with how much you had visit, like pushed away, you know, pushed after this film. But so I'm glad you had a tough day and you watched it at the end of a tough day, and I'm glad it's now it's now part of your life.
It's it's one of my favorite films now.
Pete, this is the dream. That's for real, This is the dream.
So thank you. And it's just you know, I'm a huge fan of you, and it's always so lovely to get to actually, you know, spend time with someone that I love and admire and the show is great. So I can't believe I finally got around.
To do it.
So thank you for having Thanks Manome.
And sanging Lorae.
Well there we go.
That was well, that was a monster episode of You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet with Darren Hayes, who it was just fun hanging out with him. Our paths across a few times over the years, and never have we been able to chat for almost two hours about movies. He was so open and giving and those I mean, I do love and I know from the feedback we've been getting from our listeners that you love the almost as much as the film where we purport to discuss that
their favorite three films. You love hearing my guest talk about those and wow, Darren hear and Darren talk about Star Wars and his connection with that movie was just incredible and et and that's Donny Darker. The story about ninety eleven was just incredible. This I said it the Darren. I'll say it again. I think this is my favorite episode of the podcast. If you're looking to you know they get somebody into the podcast. This is an episode
of Direct Him to I reckon Darren Hayes. His album Homosexual is out now and his tour.
Will be kicking off.
So I just google Darren Hayes and you know things are easy to find these days. But loved it, really loved it. Derek Mayers runs Cassways Studios dot com dot au. If you're trying to get a podcast up, this is the man you need to talk to. Each of my guests who comes through Castaway Studios here in Collingwood, they leave with the card because Derek is forcing them on. Then they just they beg, they beg for a card in the end, and he's here with me today, Derek.
That was amazing, an absolute mind blowing episode. It was so much And I want to talk as a as a listener of Yasney as a listener, like what I get out of this show is just like everybody you can see, I can feel it, like hearing people look look into movies and see what they get out of it makes you actually realize that as well, just as a normal listener. And it's fantastic And I was. I loved every second of Darren's insights into his three favorites and seeing.
In the Rain.
I really I often say this because we had this lovely often exchange with a lot of our guests once we stopped recording, and they're like oh, thank you that it's always it's it's I think uniformly been such a positive experience for people who have come in. And what I say to them is is the bit that I love about it is we just don't we have this romantic idea that we'll go see movies as adults and then go off to a restaurant in the cafe and
discuss the movies. If we don't do that, you know, I mean, I'm a comedian, and so I see a lot of movies by myself mid morning before I head off to the project. So and then I might say to somebody, I saw this movie. But to actually discuss a movie and to do a little bit of deep diving and learning about it, it's been a joy, it really.
I love doing this.
Funnily enough, when we're discussing all the songs, and the one song we probly spend much time on was the titular song, Singing in the Rain, And I'll tell you this a few little fun facts about that, which was it wasn't in the original draft. It was well not as was not in the original draft, not as it turned out. It was supposed to be the three characters, you know, returning from hearing about the talkies and been a bit downhearted and trying to cheat themselves up.
And then Gene.
Kelly thought, I think, I think Don deserves his own his own song and so, and he was right and incredible. He was suffering a temperature of one hundred and three on the day. I'm not sure what that means in Celsius. It's obviously fahrenheit. I imagine it's bloody hot and a little bit sweaty with a sheen, I imagine. So the fact that he pulled off one of the most iconic sequences in Hollywood history as far as imagery goes, I mean,
you think Holywood. I think one of the first images you have ever before I saw this film, I knew that sequence.
So incredible performance. They shot it at the shoot it twice.
They shot it originally in the late afternoon, and they time it got it badly without realizing it because everyone was coming home from work and putting their sprinklers on, which meant there was less water pressure coming through the pipes, so it wasn't quite working. So Gene Cowley suggested they reshoot it in the morning when everybody had gone to work and less sprinklers on, I guess, and the result
was there for everybody to see. Just a genius, a genius sequence, soteric like that, you know, the exact for him to you almost had to place the puddles, you know, like because there's moments where there's heavy splash coming, you know, from the ground.
It's just genius. Wow.
Thirty nine point four four.
By the way, thirty nine point four four, that's about COVID. That is that is only doing that. I could, you know, barely get out of bed and then with that temperature, so lots of fun.
Thank you again, Darren Haze.
Oh you know, I I need to give him a hug next time I've seen because he thought my mum was dead for a second. There there's a moment where I thought, do I'm not telling him that my mum is still alive? And I only got lost for two minutes after he told me that really amazing story about his dad. But you know I couldn't obviously, And yeah, I love the episode. I think you can tell. We've just recorded it. So I'm still on a bit of
a hum. If you haven't seen Singing in the Rain that the same stylist did also gone with the Wind. He said he worked harder on Singing in the Rain because of all the He said, people have more of an idea, they're more cluey as to maybe what it was in their memory, because it was more like recent history that their memory was sharper, as opposed to how people looked and how they dressed in the twenties in
the late twenties, as opposed to the Civil War. So he said he worked much harder on Singing in the Rain than he had to Ongone with the Wind, which, when you considered Gone with the Wind, was the biggest epic of all time. It's quite a feat and quite a statement. Next week on the show, we are following up with a huge movie, a movie that's been nominated for this podcast by so many people. They're asking, can you find somebody who hasn't seen this movie. It's been
hard to find somebody who hadn't seen this movie. It's considered perhaps one of the most loved, maybe the most loved movie certainly the last thirty odd years. It's the highest ranked movie on IMDb. It is the most replayed movie in the history of US television. We finally found somebody. Todd Samson my great mate from the grew and Transfer. He's a filmmaker. He's made Body Hack, The's amazing documentaries.
He's got a new one called Mirror Mirror. We are finally watching from nineteen ninety four Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, directed by Frank Darabon from a novel by Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption next week and you ain't seeing nothing yet.
Strap yourselves in it.
There's going to be a bumper episode and I can't wait to chat with Todd about it.
He's so insightful.
He'll have opinions, he'll have thoughts, and I can't wait to take them all in. Yes, let's get busy living or get busy dying to Shaw Shaving Ntion next week and you ain't saying nothing yet until then Bye for an hour.
And so we
Leave old Pete safe and soult and to our friends of the radio audience, we've been a pleasant good time.