Future Projects and Creative Balance

I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture and Conversation Show about Backrooms. CR is here to help us talk about this new horror sensation. The middle chair. The middle chair. Well. You guys are a real like you really played it up the middle with Van when he was asking about that. Just just take- Hold on. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. I promise you. We'll take you to the back rooms of the big picture. Later in this episode, I will be joined by Kane Parsons. He is the 20-year-old filmmaker behind Backrooms, one of the most anticipated debut features, I think fair to say, in the history of movies. Kane told me all about his early days as a maker of short films, uploading to YouTube, how he utilized and learned from the platform, how he made this movie starring Chuatel E. Jeffor and Renata Reinzvah. Stick around for that conversation. I don't think I'm overstating it by saying he is remarkably wise and th oughtful for a 20-year-old. But first, let's talk about a little bit of movie news right after this. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Trimphya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremphya, proper training is required. Tremphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfia today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tremfaiaradio.com . This episode is brought to you by the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. The Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo is built for travel. You can earn rewards wherever you book, your favorite hotel site, your go-to airline, and more. You get five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Whether it's a big vacation or a quick getaway, from booking your stay to that first meal when you arrive, you're turning your trips into rewards with the Autograph Journey credit card from Wells Fargo. Learn more at Wells Fargo dot com slash autograph journey. Terms apply . Okay, let's talk a little news first. This when's last time this trio talk movie news? It's been a minute. It's been a minute. I f I'm trying to remember when the last time the three of us potted together because I got invited to a mega draft again and I'm like I'm I'm I can't remember last time it was just us three. Oh you just talking shop. You're wow. This is like a little bit of an emotional bit for third chair. Like just let's just get the trio back together. Okay. I'm a busy guy. You guys want to know when you need me . Uh Amanda, did you see Obsession yet? I did. I saw it yesterday. Do you do you want to talk about it right now? Yeah. Because there's news about Curry Barker, who is the writer and director of Obsession. You got this sight unseen eight-figure offer for his next film because the movie is just a rocket ship. Let's just get a woman's POV on the show. I think Side fucking loved it. Right on. Yeah. I would say of the two movies and the like you know new horror wave that we are going to discuss in this episode, I'm obsession is a mana's flavor, as opposed to backrooms, even though I like very much admire backrooms. But yeah, as you teased me sort of, but um on the last episode, it is a romantic comedy. I thought it was really funny. I was maybe the only person laughing in my uh screening, but I I loved obviously the, performance of what's her name? Help me with her name. Indy Navaretti. Indy Navaretti. Yeah. And I was engaged. There was one jump scare that actually made me jump and that I thought was very funny. Um and I I would watch a lot of these. So I'm into it. Yeah. Uh do you feel like laughter is a coping mechanism for like sometimes like not being comfortable with like pure horror? Like when you are confronted with something that's like, I don't know, Texas Chainsaw Masker or something like that. But like do you find it easier if you have like a couple of release valves throughout the movie? I guess so though, I think what I was laughing at at this movie was the observational common observational comedy about relationships, which I thought I you know, I thought it was a good script. I thought it was insightful and amusing. And so I was laughing at the bad speeches or and like I guess there's a and we'll spoil parts of obsession now. Uh if you haven't seen it, even though it seems like everyone in America has . When she's frozen and uh he tells her not to move and so she stays right where she is, and then she peased herself. Uh I thought that was funny. You know, but like that's not gross. That's not me laughing because I'm uncomfortable. I just was amused by that. We should make a mashup of Zach telling Amanda that it's uh almost eagle season and her being like, no, no I think it's probably relatable to you in many ways. Um I'm glad you liked it. I had a feeling you would like it because it is it's um it's a little bit more traditional. And I think the movie is obviously getting characterized alongside Kane's movie, which we'll talk about momentarily, because they're both so young. They both have this YouTube experience and because they're both sensations. Yes, and they're both so huge. And there have been a lot of people who have come out of this over the last 10 years. I wrote about a little bit in the newsletter today, but I think there's something about the duality of these two things. One movie that is really funny and a big audience experience, and one that is very internal and like really of the internet and really about lore and constru ction and them kind of operating side by side is really fun. Curry, I think is going to go on to make fairly conventional movies. Yeah. And in a way that I like, but like his next movie is a true horror comedy about ghosts, you know, and then he's gonna do Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And then maybe even before that, he'll do whatever this eight-figure offer movie is, if this is even a real story. I don't know how to verify, like how does somebody get an offer for $1 million before they've done pen to paper. A really good way of looking at the two directors. I think that Parsons seems to be the culmination of a shared aesthetic across multiple platforms, across what we're gonna talk a lot about is influences. And Barker seems to be a little bit more like I found not the loophole or cheap code cheap code, but I am a product of this new way of distributing your work that allowed me to get like a foothold in traditional Hollywood. Yeah. I mean, one is also there's one is a technical, you know, marvel and achievement, the aesthetic that you're talking about. And the other is I think has humans in it. And then um, but both are examples of how a younger generation is gonna figure out how not just like how to get their movies distributed, but how to make movies in the first place. You know, they're doing the training in real time on YouTube. Well, and while like we've come we're coming out of like a period of time where I think like the cost of making a movie has become almost crippling to the movie industry. Um these guys are kind of going back to like the OG , like you can make something fast and cheap that looks good and a lot of people want to go see it. That's not a barrier of entry. Yeah, there's something um interesting about the timing of the release of the Primetime trailer too that is correlated to all of this stuff. Three years ago, I had Lance Oppenheim on the show for a series of to talk about his the documentaries that he's been making for the last seven or eight years. He was 27 then. He's 30 now. He's ancient by comparison to Kane, but he's also incredibly young and is making his movie is also about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator and played by Robert Patt inson and screens and the way that they influence us and the kind of like I would say manufactured reality of of nonfiction television in a way, which kind of intersects with all of these other things that we're talking about here in YouTube and what's real and what's not real. And I'm just feeling very buoyant about the future of movies that I feel like there is like the cavalry is like kind of on the way here. And there we still have like Denny Villeneuve and Nolan and you know, dude, Greta Gerwig, all these like iconic brand name figures. There's a Spielberg movie coming out in a couple of weeks. Like, all that stuff is still happening. It's great. And it's gonna probably be the primary focus of this show as long as we're doing it. But I actually do kind of feel like something for real is happening where there's like it's not three people. It's now like nine people who have made widely distributed films who were born out of this experience, which is very different than I went to USC film school and then I made a short film and then that short film played at a film festival. And then I made an independently made film and that film played at a film festival. And it was acquired by a streamer. And now I'm trying to make my hundred million dollar IP movie. Like that was 15 years of the growth cycle in Hollywood. And now something different can happen. It's also auspicious for YouTube and the internet, which is these people got really big on the internet, and instead of like launching a skincare brand, they are making movies and they want to bring them to theaters. Even like that they have embraced a medium that we care about and are bringing a different generation and audience with them is positive. Um maybe they can also make a skincare brand. What do you think about the fact that horror seems to be the primary genre on-ramp for them, though? I It's not concerned trolling. I'm just saying like Yeah, I mean I mean I mean it it makes sense because so much of horror as I understand it is based on the technical ability to set up the you know, the aesthetics and the jump scares and the and the scariness and so that you have in YouTube specifically a testing run where you can try stuff out and actually, you know, see what works, what doesn't, kind of learn on the fly, learn without studios breathing down your neck and millions of dollars on the line. And you can't, you know, a romantic comedy is a lot more dependent on writing. Yeah. Among other things. And so performance. You can and you can tr and performance and also frankly, production design and like money. Um, and so you can't try those in the same way. Um, so it's a good match. There's a lot of genres that are not suitable to this mode, you know, especially because pure drama is a hard thing to sell people on nowadays. Everything else necessitates a different kind of external component part that creates a barrier to entry, I think. And so horror and like low-to-the-ground sci-fi is just much easier to pull off. And also it just more easily gets the attention of executives who are willing to put in one million dollars into the pot. You know, like it's hard to sell this cute girl and this cute guy, me, you know, like there's just like a more there's more resistance to it, clearly. Because I I'm I think it's cool that that's happening now too. And I don't know how many of those movies you've actually watched, but we've been talking about them a lot over the last 12 months. I didn't see the Micah Monroe one, but I saw the other two. Shame on you for ignoring her. Um I I only like it when she's being pursued by a demon. But those movies have more in common with horror movies than they do Nora Efron movies because there's always some dramatic incident that is like a car crash or it's like a like a curse of some kind. You know, there's a murder involved. Like there there's something about the stakes in that kind of storytelling. Like rom-coms and and your general teen comedy and even your like romantic drama, right? Those movies don't have the same life or death qualities that all these other movies do. And I think that that there's something to that too, that that's the only thing that can kind of get butts and seats right now is like what's on the line here. Um, which does feel different than when we were teenagers and going to see movies where it was just like, yeah, this is about a 17-year-old kid who fucks a pie. You know, like that's that's the whole movie. Yeah. Well, but then that would just be a YouTube video. You know, and the thing that it was really exciting to me about backrooms in particular is we talk so much about how all movies now have to have meme culture and have to exist outside of themselves as movies in order to sell and to be recognized and to have any chance of surviving. But this took a meme and made it into like a real ass movie. And I just that's hard to do. And it's essential, I guess, to getting people to the movie, but I I was impressed. It was like, hey, you did it. You made internet culture in to actual cinema. Aaron Powell Let's use that as our our transition to backrooms. I guess spoilers for backrooms. I don't you know I'm not sure that it's really a film that can be spoiled. It's a film that's your conversant in the actual pro uh projects has been spoiled already. Mm-hmm. Okay. So the film is directed by Kane, as I mentioned. It's written by Will Sudek, who I think is the second screenwriter who came on to work on the movie. And we can talk about how the screenplay of the movie operates versus the rest of the production. Um, it is based on backrooms, the web series that Kane Parsons, aka Kane Pixels started publishing years ago now. Like five years ago, six years ago. Yeah. It is produced in part by some very notable people, including Horror Maestros, James Wuan, and Osgood Perkins, as well as Sean Levy. It stars two Tel Eji for Renata Ryan's Mark Duplas, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. The log line is: a therapist enters another dimension to find her lost patient. And I guess that is what the movie is about, in some respects. Um Chris, what did you think of this movie? It's just thrilling. It's like a really exciting time to be to be like at the ground floor of this for this director. And to see it realized, I mean, I was like aware of and had watched some of Backrooms on on YouTube and I was aware that backrooms is a concept of something that had sort of organically grown out of creepypasta and read it and that it was in some ways like closer to like folk art than it is like a a single author statement to see him make something so assured that so perfectly distills some of the liminal horror some of the sort of modern urban legend or fulcar ideas and blow it out on this level. And just on a personal level, like I just find watching this stuff to be like taking a floor buffer to my brain. And I would, I would honestly watch like nine hours of this. I watched nine hours of like slow tracking shots through these rooms. So it was deeply pleasurable. The movie part of it, like the more traditional conventional stuff stuff. I thought was like a little less uh unique or a little less like fully realized, but like that didn't wind up diminishing my appreciation for the movie itself. Yeah, what did you think? If this isn't your flavor, what did you make of it i so i think i admired the parts that cr thrilled chris and then couldn't get my arms around the movie part uh as much which is why i personally go to the movies. But I will say I knew nothing about backgrounds. I mean I knew it . I knew it was an internet thing. I knew that Chuatella and Egia 4 and Renata Rans were gonna be in it. Um but I didn't see anything ahead of time. I tried to go in like a blank slate and it worked for me in the room. Um you know, my brain smooths a little bit in in different ways when I see tracking shots into rooms for like three hours, but that's okay. You know, like what is thrilling to one is meditative to the other, but you still can't deny that like the production design and and the vibe and it is fully realized. And I didn't quote, get it in the cre epypasta sense, but also I got it in the I understand this movie is communicating to me what it is trying to do and it's working and it's achieving it. The more that I I've since done my research, the the more I learn the, like the less I'm the less I'm connected with it. I really found it more as just a singular going to the movies experience, um, which I think is a testament to Kane Parsons pulling something off standalone as opposed to relying on all of the history and lore and everything that goes along with it. That may just be because as soon as you say lore, like I run for the hills, but you don't need it actually in in the movie. So he uh he and I talked about this a little bit and I I was I don't know if I was careful to not ask him about it, but I know that he has said I was not interested in doing too much of the lore in this film. That there is a ton of lore in my mind and that I have explored it in other aspects of telling the story on YouTube. And there probably this is the very beginning of something that probably is going to be very big for a long time. Like it probably is going to take on a lot of different forms. You know, he talked about the idea of exploring television, other films, like there's there's clearly just a ton that has come out of this. And I I liked what you said, Chris, which is that this is kind of like a fable now. It's like it's an adaptation. It's an adaptation of an anonymous 4chan post describing a space and the what that space conjured in this anonymous poster's mind. And then Kane read that and used that as a launch pad for this whole world that he made. I completely agree with both of you guys. The stuff that doesn't really work in the movie is any of the orthodoxy of normal movie stuff. It's like characterization, dialogue. That stuff is fine. It's okay. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's not bad. Yeah. It's fun. But it's, you know, and it sometimes it's a little amusing to imagine a a 20-year-old being like, okay, so what I really need to do is explore the inner lives of these 40 year olds in in like like middle aged in like 1990 uh in you know wherever they where are they? Middle of the country, presumably. I don't know. In a furniture store. Yeah. I I think that that stuff is obviously f fundamental to making it a narrative feature film. And you've got two really, really good actors, right? So you're you can kind of just lean on their natural charisma to carry us through the thing. I just think even the concept of like him having a therapist is like incredibly economical for communicating the interior lives of the two main characters. It very much is. And then the you know, it's almost like sort of a like a two strangers walk into a bar joke. It's like it's a therapist and an architect and they're exploring a mine palace. You know what I mean? Like okay. Like I, you know, and I think that it being that on the nose as an exploration of the psyche and kind of like what we do with our past and what we don't do, what goes away that we can't see anymore and what kind of stays above the surface that like lingers in our memory. I think he's doing things visu ally with the storytelling that like I don't want to overstate this, but I'm like, this is very rare air for a 20-something to be doing. Sure. Yeah. And of course, I again, this is not, this is probably unfair to him, but talking to him, I was like, this is a little like Kubrickan for me, where like he has really thought through this and has a very mature understanding of what he's accomplishing and doesn't have any arrogance about it and doesn't have and he's he just like has an idea, sees it in his mind, and then wants to put it on screen. And he he before he was doing it with software and now he's doing with the that's what I was going to ask is like I was I've been watching these Curry Barker. You had a great interview with Curry Barker for Obsession it like his description of using these 3D imaging apps that you can use on your phone to like essentially like design a set, put animated actors in it to do your blocking, film it with a virtual camera and then cut it so that you can basically a la Hitchcock be like, all we're doing is doing exactly what's on this piece of paper today. Not only is that efficient, but that also allows you to like really think through the rhythm of the movie, the look of the movie, the feel of the movie. And I know that Parsons is obviously like really I mean, those early backrooms videos are essentially animated, aren't they? Yeah, they're all they're all from the software from Blender . Yeah. Just to see somebody who's like bringing this technology along in a way that isn't big gym style, where it's like only a few people have access to that's right. This is sort of like what I thought was gonna happen when when Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh were like, we make movies on iPhones now. Right. But now it's like happening. Now it's like you could do this with like open source software and an iPhone. You could make something with your friends and in a but you can use that material to envision the world and kind of break the boundaries of our normal world and say, like, what if something looked like this? Yeah. And then you're able to kind of manifest it visually. And then give it to artisans to then build that world and make and change it. Like it I say Kubricking because like Kubrick did do this in 2001 in a clockwork orange in The Shining, where he's kind of creating these uh surreal landscapes and placing humanity inside of them. And Parsons is trying to do something somewhat similar. He's trying to place human emotion in an unreal world, which is something that I just gen it's just kind of storytelling that I have always really liked, but um I was really impressed with it. And I there was a part of me watching the movie where when I was getting lost inside of what he was doing, when he's giving us this first person perspective or when you're seeing it through the eyes of a DV camera or a you know just a video camera where I was like, keep going, keep going in this direction. Don't worry about going back to what the story is. Right. You know, like I'll go along with you on the ride. And I know that that's kind of antithetical to like what your kind of most primal experience of joy is at a movie, but I also like we can't continue to evolve movies if we don't break them. Like this is something that's like getting to the point of almost breaking it, which I really, really admired. I d I don't disagree with you. It's just that, you know, your mileage may vary on how far you want to go down the or how long it will hold your attention. You know? And that's that's not to that's not to say that it's not amazing filmmaking or that it's not like a an aesthetic that works and communicates something. It's just and also to your point, like yes, you do have to break things in order to make something new, but I, you know, I don't know whether the trip down that hallway was like the brand, you know, brand new thing to me. We're we're like on our direction and we on the way we can see it. Um but I clearly many people disagree because they watched all of the backrooms videos, which are just their only the hallways. I just very cool experience over the weekend. I mean I think uh on I'm sure you guys you guys do do this and me and Andy do this on the watch where we sort of bemoan the death of monoculture and the idea that there is like this thing that everyone is experiencing at the same time and having the same conversation or about, or different conversations, but a conversation about. And I was uh hanging out with um my wife's best friends daughters this weekend and they were so excited for backrooms like they're all teenagers and first of all you look at the numbers on these videos, and you're talking 155, 0 million, you know, like millions and millions of people have watched this. And they were so invested in it as an idea, and were nervous about the movie part. When you say they were invested in it as an idea, like because I don't think they make a distinction between this and like check out this like static shot of an abandoned pizza hut. Like I think that there is like an appreciation or an interest in vibes, you know, and certain like motifs online that people just passed the time. And I didn't know that you can play backrooms on Roblox. I didn't know that there were so many like video games that take place in backrooms and it really is kind of like an open source, like people can mess around with this. And this is his iteration of it. That's why I say it's like a fable. It's like anybody can adopt this. But they were like fully unaware of what the mythology of it was. Okay. So they're into backrooms, the universe. Yes. Okay. But I was like fascinated to be like, oh, you're not worried about whether or not um like backrooms makes any sense you're worried about whether Chihuahua Al Jafor and Renato Rhines would make any sense right inside of your experience of backrooms which and everyone will have a more or less different experience of it. And maybe if the even if there is an accepted lore, you don't have you don't have that's the other thing. Is just for anybody who's listening at home who's just like there, you guys keep talking about what 16-year-olds want. You don't have to know anything to enjoy the movie. You know, you don't have to have seen any of the YouTube videos, you don't have to know who made the movie. Um like Amanda, I kind of I I kind of wish I hadn't now. Because I think the experience of the film they the thing that they got so right is there is never really a moment where they're like, this is what this is. Yes. And this is how it works. They get right up to it and then he stops. Yes. He does near the end of the movie. Yeah. It w we can talk about that later. Um no, I I think because I didn't know anything about the lore and I was and again, so you do not have to know the lore and you do not have to like know, you know, and understand 16-year-olds to go see and enjoy this movie. But because of that, I got to actually experience the movie and the filmmaking as filmmaking, rather, and then and all of the aesthetic decisions and the world that he was creating and the vibe that you talk about, but not having to worry about whether it was faithful to whatever was on on the internet before or what I had seen. Um so I guess in some ways this is like the gen alpha version of a video game adaptation, but in the sense that it's like some uh a lived world and medium that they're very familiar with that I don't have any d familiarity with and then how will it translate into a new medium and what choices do you have to make to get one to fit into the other? Yeah, I think it's it's a movie that's really easy for me to situate in the history of movie making because there are actually a lot of movies like this, um, that you know what you can call like liminal storytelling. Um and I I'm always eager to be like, oh, it's like David Lynch, like any fucking nerdy cinophile. But like it's not really like David Lynch. It has like maybe some hallmarks, but I mean you'll hear Kane say, like, he's just not a cinophile. He's seen a lot of movies, but he's not somebody who is pouring over the creative decisions. It actually what it feels more like to me is a much more recent vintage of movie that I know you've seen a lot of these movies like Cube and Pulse and Session Nine and Lake Mungo and Triangle, which I just saw for the first time recently , where there are movies where characters enter worlds in which the unrealities kind of like becomes terrifying and starts to take over. And that's a a pretty common horror construct. The movie those movies, I think, are often very reliant on how how good or not good they are at communicating, like why something is happening. And the ones that don't explain it tend to work better than the ones that do explain it. Yeah. There's also been over the last ten years like a bunch of found footage movies that are like, wouldn't it be cool if these influencers went to Chernobyl? Or wouldn't it be cool if these influencers went to an abandoned casino, but they're all like essentially a bad version of the Halloween movie that was set in a reality Big Brother House. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the Buster Rhymes one. Like they're all kind of around they're being made by like 50 year olds, you know, and like they're not this definitely felt like those are products what you're describing. It's close to like I I again, I don't want to glaze this guy too much, but it reminds me of when Tarantino came on the scene and he was like, My set of influences are completely broken. This is exactly what I wrote about. This is exactly what I wrote about today in the newsletter. I was like, what it's like when you're watching Kill Bill and he's showing you all this stuff, but I don't know the name of the actress who stars in Lady Snowblood. And then you see Lady Snowblood 20 years later and you're like, oh. Yeah. But the way that maybe these filmmakers, and this goes for Curry too, I think, like he was like, I um was inspired by the Treehouse of Horror Simpsons episode that had the monkey's paw. It was like the monkey's paw was written in the 1800s, but he doesn't know he didn't paw. He saw an episode of The Simpsons. And so it's this downstream effect where, like, maybe Kane Parsons has seen Moholland Drive, maybe he hasn't. But the vibe, that like dread laden sound design where you're like, why is there a humming noise throughout this entire movie? Like he's got that. He figured that. And maybe he heard it in the video game Portal. Maybe he didn't hear it in a David Lynch movie. But the guy who made Portal probably saw Moholl and Drive and was like, you know what you got to do is you gotta create this sense of doom by applying these tools. So to me, like all this kind of mixed up influence is really exciting and fun. And I like to pull it apart and maybe you can overeat it by doing that but well we get pretty pretty like maybe over reliant on being like this is like if Jagged Edge was like this you know or like it's like Paul Mazursky meets you know w Wes Craven and it's like I'm I'm very ready I think now for someone to be like it's actually old VHS footage of this abandoned mall and and maybe a little bit of Mulholland drive, or maybe a Simpsons episode, or whatever it is, but the the integers are really interesting. Like I really, I really like whatever the equation is, I like the the sort of numbers he's playing with. How does it feel that Skin of Marink, one of the one of the origin points of one of CR's best voice adaptations, um is now like a kind of secretly a monumental movie, you know, like in a way, I it's it's like a little bit of the Velvet Underground of movies right now to me, where you know, like it launched a thousand ships, and there's been a bunch of movies like this recently. Like Outwaters was like this, my beloved Nighthouse, which I watched the night my daughter was born, you know. Um very normal. We're all going to the World's Fair, you know, and Jane Schoenbrunn's work. Yeah. Um I thought a lot about I saw the TV glow while watching this for like the the recreations of eighties, 90s media within and the media within the media. Yes. Um and also seemingly media that is outside the generational reference point of the filmmaker making it. Yeah. Which is fascinating. Yeah. And I mean Kane is so young, even younger than Jane. And so he I let's talk about 1990 and like why that's the time when this is set and what it means. And there's something about the visual signifiers from that period in our lives. So we were alive at that time. We saw this stuff in real time. We were in those furniture stores. You know, we were in those those empty parking lots. Like why is it set at that time? Is it an effective period piece in that way? I mean, I think that there's uh lore answers for that, uh, but from an aesthetic point of view, I think it's just uh a d a time when handheld media was available to a mass audience and they could take you you know, it's not uncommon to go to parties and go to hang out with your friends and if somebody had a camcord er going. Right. Um but also necessarily before cell phones were the handheld media in question and also could call someone from the other side to just be like, Hey, can you check out what's going on here? Yeah. Yeah. Let me pin my location so I remember where I parked. Don't know if this film has an answering machine that is utilized, which is a very different different form of communication. I think it's an interesting choice. Um I didn't I haven't read about specifically the lore answers for this, but it's interesting Something very significant happens during the nineteen eighty nine San Francisco earthquake. Right. Something is opens it up, right? Okay. Well it fires it up. Yeah. Oh it was there, but it fires it up. So it's existed forever. But the portal . Yeah. I'm like, I am not in any way a PhD in this. I just was in my I I it was funny because like you can do backrooms as just backrooms on YouTube, and then there is a whole industry of backroom backrooms explainers. So it's almost like Thrones where you can just watch Thrones or you can watch the three hour explainer about the episode you just saw. Yeah, I mean it does have a little bit of this energy even as you're watching it. It's like, okay, like my children are like really excited about something and now they're telling me about their whole world. Yeah. It's just done at such an aesthetically advanced level that you kind of have to you let you hand it hand it over. And I will say again, in as a standalone movie, before I learned all about the 1999 earthquake and the portals , it it works as a movie, you know, and you aren't as it isn't as borne down with the what did the portal exist for ever. But many science corners could be done. Yeah, I mean if you want to do an impromptu one, I don't know. Is there anything specific that you want to explore about how it manifests? Yeah. So that's the theory that it's that furniture store is on a ult line and so then it just and that's it had snared Chuatel ? Yeah. I mean there's like I mean w doesn't the doesn't the text of the film suggest to us that he was ready? You know, and because he didn't have his life together and so he had to go into the back rooms or he was he he was ready pregnant. I'm not going back in there. I mean he's like, I'm obsessed with this. Yeah, I think that explains maybe his decision making, but I think also the movie is very clearly like a snapshot of mental health too. Where you're like when you reach a kind of breaking point, when you cross a line in terms of what is real and unreal. So the movie is like kind of having its cake and eating it too. It is a very metaphorical movie about lost places and trying to go to those lost places and like the danger that is inside of those lost places in your mind. And then it's also a spooky movie about finding a an invisible door that takes you to another land. And there are a lot of movies like that, a lot of like kids' movies that are about going to ride a unicorn somewhere. And this is about manifesting your worst trauma and having it eat you in a way. Like I if you were to go into the backrooms. Oh my God, I was waiting for this. What would be well first of all, what how how would you do? How would I do so? Do the back rooms look like that? Are are the backrooms customizable? Uh there are many different like I the my favorite part of backrooms that I've watched is Red City, like when this person comes across basically like an a red illumin ated city that's out a window and it's just like holy shit. But for the most part , they are that kind of nineties abandoned office park. No windows. Yeah. But but decorated, designed in part by like your manifestations of your own visual experiences. Right. Like the things that are the things that appear in those spaces. So like is this mom's house at Christmas time in Georgia in nineteen You know, like that's the kind of like what comes up what or what sinks below in the back room of your mind. But also in the realm of Is there an option where there's just nothing where like the back room is like a walk. I don't know. I don't I don't totally know what the case is. If it was the Mediterranean, everybody would go to the backrooms. The point is. But what if there's n what if can backrooms be void? Can backrooms just be like nothing? What if th what if there's nothing below the surface? This is the reason that I'm asking you, not you, and I wanna ask you and I wanna hear about the Wokovia Center and everything that you see there. But I what if it's nothing? But you are trying to turn it off. But this place won't let you turn it off. This is I don't know. It wouldn't let you until Echie turn it off. Okay. That's well that that that is an interesting qu question too, you know? Can can it be resisted? We don't know. We only see really four characters enter this. And equally open to the idea that there is something out there. This this coming from a therapist who wrote a book called The Window Within, I believe. Sure. But also who has some tough mommy issues of her own and carries around a cement block. Just based on the size, you think that was hers, but and i is that meant to represent her holding on to her childhood or to never forget what was inflicted on her? I think it's meant to it's it's weighing her Until she utilizes it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. See what they did there. Did you think that there was any chance that her mom had seen the backrooms? I think there's an in in indication um that she's trapped. Can we can we move into spoiler territory a little bit? So what you've already mentioned that Mark Duplas is in the film. Mark Duplas shows up and he like works at the company that's like Async, yeah. Sure, of course. Async, yeah. Uh and they're and they're researching. And they're an MRI company who has stumbled upon this space. And so they're exploring it. Okay. But so he says that he went to the back rooms and then made it out and is now exploring it. So that would suggest, which I thought was the weakest part and I was sort of annoyed. But but again, that is just kind of you need a conventional narrative arc in a movie and some sort of explanation. Anyway, it seems like he was maybe slightly resistant to you know to the backrooms, to the at least that he could remove himself and then operate in a resource capacity. Yeah, he's trying to stay in the real world, whereas both Renato Ryansava and Chutel Edu4 are their characters are more vulnerable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And but he's able and he's able to kind of exist inside that space for an extended period of time in a way that we don't see other characters do it. And he's not wearing a hazmat suit or anything like the other the presumably the MRI scientists are doing. Right, right, right, right. But it like corrupts him over time.. Sure. Definitely And like every time he comes out, he's a little weaker. Yes. And it's it's slurping him in slowly. It is. I I I mean, I agree with you that I think that that stuff just doesn't really work, and I wish that there wasn't as much of it in there. I know why it's there, and I think it will probably be a useful hand holding device for the parents who are taking their teenagers to go see this movie. Um but I I think it'll yeah it'll be for the parents, not for the teen the teens I think will probably bristle at some of that stuff. But I'm the I'm the parent in this analogy and I also bristled at it. I was like, I don't Yeah, but you're you you like good art. And like to me it felt like a producer note. That's some of that stuff feels like a producer, but it's maybe that would be where you go, is like a an a a museum, a never-ending museum of great art. Trevor Burrus But it haunts me. By the way, no shots at Mark Duplas, my friend, who I love. Like he's great. And I the this is another example of like uh him get signing on to like a young person just being like, I'm just trying to like realize my vision. It's more just like whatever they're trying to communicate there. Like you could you could have not done it. I also thought that his vibe and his um warmth is a nice wrong you wrong fo ots the audience because it's supposed to be uh the scientist from ET or something. Right. And instead he's like, I can't believe like you've had this experience. Please share with me what's been happening. And then it has a sort of ambig uous ending. But I I didn't mind it. I was aware of like the async thing going into the spectrum. I've learned, yeah. And those guys have a lot of a lot lot of stuff happens to them over the course of the YouTube videos. Yeah. I um I wanna I kind of don't want to look at Kane and be like keep going, like keep kind of breaking the paradigm of what a movie like this is supposed to be. Cause and and then I will say there are also a couple things that are more traditional that do work as well. Like there are a couple of scares in the movie that I think are very effective that use traditional horror strategies. There are a couple of jump scares, startled scares used we was I saw you get startled when you're watching the movie. I did. You got you got really um shocked by something. And there's a scene in the movie where we're going kind of like into the third realm of the backrooms and we enter a a red lit room that is illuminated by a Christmas tree. And I was at that moment in the movie where I was like, oh, okay. Like we're we he's done it. You know, like I am I've slipped into the movie and I'm scared and I'm excited and I'm I can't wait to see what's around the corner. And it what I what I wasn't asking myself was like, why is this happening? I was just letting it happen. Yeah. Which is what I think what I what is the success of the movie ultimately is that I'm not too worried about like why. At that exact moment, I thought to myself, another tough beat for Christmas. You know, but but Christmas is scary. It did communicate to me that it was a it was a tough beat for Christmas and I wasn't like, what does this have to say about the birth of baby Jesus? You know I was just like, uh oh, my favorite holiday, damn bad. So much of the thrill of the YouTube videos is that they're found footage or that they're shot by the people who are walking around. They've brought a camera with them or something. And this film is like a real leap forward for him in terms of compos ition, in terms of uh how to pace a scene beyond just someone walking down a hallway endlessly, which I fucking love, but is like not gonna be everybody's cup of tea, but to emerge on the Christmas scene and find the other characters there and to the stuff of I think stuff sinking into the sand of the carpeting is a relatively new phenomenon. I didn't see a ton of it in the YouTube videos. So, you know, I just thought it it was it would have been enough for him to just be like here is a big screen version of a found footage of my paranormal activity or whatever. Right. And instead, I think he 's leveled up. He leveled up. Yeah. And the design, I think calling it a hallway is reductive because it's really more there just a never-ending war in of rooms. And the design effectively communicates to you where not where you are in relationshi p to things but uh this sense of space and your sense of confusion and there's something around this way and that it is very convoluted and that you don't understand where you're going but it's hard to communicate like that actuality. Totally. Especially when you're you're really physically building it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's stuff in there that's like it taps into a feeling of playing video games. It taps into a feeling of like certain levels of video games where it's very puzzle oriented, or the entire point is that you're lost in a maze. But it also taps into like a childlike thing where you're like that weird experience of like you're the amount of time it takes to get somewhere is always slower than the amount of time it takes to get back sometimes. So you know what I mean? Like once you know the route, you're like, oh, it's not that bad. But like the first time you make a walk through the park, you're like, did I make a wrong turn somewhere here or whatever? And it gets at some like really innate kind of childlike wonder at at at these things and childlike fears too, I think. No, it's it's it's all amygdala, as they say, you know, like everything that's happening there is not about like logic and problem solving. It's about the sensation that is created when you're seeing the things that are in that space. And I think that um I I genuinely kind of don't know how they did a lot of this too, which is something that usually impresses me. Where just like designing those spaces, like were they using one set and then striking it every time to shoot into a new room? Were they building like these entire, you know, use the word war and like is this like an office building or at large, it it does also have that experience to the nineteen ninety period piece idea of like being in one of those office buildings, um, which all had that kind of yellowing quality and that kind of rickety furniture. You know, there's the particle board line when when uh edgy four like breaks the chair early in the movie where everything kind of felt like it was made of that, you know, breakable, disruptible material , like Pier one kind of vibe. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's like it looks nice and then you touch it and you're like, this is fake. And uh I I'm I'm just kind of kind of bowled over by it. You know, like even in its in its failures or its weaknesses. I'm like very few movies get me in the headspace that this movie got me in. So I'm I'm I'm I'm just a light. Yeah. College freshman dorm was brought to you exclus ively by the West Lebanon New Hampshire Pier One. Wow. Yeah. What did you have in there? Uh well I think my mom dropped me off and then was upset with the sparseness of the room, so you know, and we'd bought like the usual sheets and everything that was on the list, but a lot of throw pillows, you know, like a lamp. No, that wasn't the vibe they were going for that season at Pier 1. Fall two thousand and three was more of like a um a Moroccan vibe, you know? What about like a ship's wheel? Did you have a ship's wheel in there? No, again, I would say we're a different coastal reference point. Barrake bizarre. It's the smell of spices in the air. Why aren't you listening to her? Well now I know what's in your back room. I'm glad we asked. Um What's in your back room? Uh I think it looks like a pizza hut. Okay. Yeah. I really find the lighting in those to be really pleasing. There's a bar in uh Boston called Anchovies that mimics it. Sure. I've been there with you. Yeah. But is it so is backrooms are is it supposed to be a happy memory. Like so many. That's why I said we'll call it a center. Like I personally it I I'm trying to think of the That's like abandoned money. Can we have a Sixers intervention later? What are you talking about? The patient's dead. Okay. Okay, good. I know, but can we like let's not do it again next year, you know? Oh, like not watch team? Yeah. Let's say let's set ourselves free. It's plenty of room on the bandwagon. Use that won't be happening. I assure you. I'm not I'm not taking sides. I want your happiness. Welcome all comes. But your bandwagon is too full, I mean, assure you. Oh okay. Um just just think about it. Okay. I'll I'll think about not watching the Sixers. Because I just I can't do another February of this shit. That's what I'm saying is like in yours is you know M B jerseys. You know, like there's like there's I mean mine too is just like eighteen M B'ds in different states of injury. At different heights. Yeah, in different positions. Exactly. Exactly. Uh how do you feel like okay, so the movie's gonna be a huge success, right? It's already tracking for well over fifty million dollars. This might be like a $75 million movie this weekend, which is pretty crazy. It will instantaneously become the biggest A24 movie of all time. Feels like a big generational change where 16-year-olds are powering this. Um, and we are like we are latching onto the bandwagon in many ways. Do you think that this is a profound change that we are at the forefront of? Or is this just a blip born of a handful of kind of coincidences in like a three or four-year window. To quote Tracy Letz, I reject the tyranny of your questions. Um it well can it be somewhere in the middle? I think that it is part of I don't I guess it's profound the change, but it does seem like we are at seeing a new wave of generational generational filmmakers focused specifically on horror. But you know, they all learned on the internet. It is connecting with new audiences. It changes the way that we're making movies and that many audiences are seeing movies. So I think it is historically significant. Can I add one person to that list that somewhat complicates this? Ava Victor is also a part of this wave as like a primarily online content creator who then went into the world of narrative filmmaking. And I I think Ava is also kind of instructive for like the ways that you can use the medium and the tools and like the other thing we haven't talked about is looking at feedback, like what people are saying about what you're making and then iterating on that and not being as precious about your creations that I think is also really interesting. Kane talked about the Discord server, his Discord server, and what is happening there and how people are iterating on what he makes. Well he didn't say anything negative about it, but he was like Oh, they're they're like, I'm taking what you made in here's my version of it. Yes. So which is a whole other level of like so much optimism, which is not in any way really different than the five years after Reservoir Dogs where everybody was like, What if my friends wore suits and pointed guns at each other? Like that was amongst friends and all the movies that kind of came out after that, in some ways just like riffing on a core text. But you know, the thing that I think I was most nervous about over the last couple of years when I would watch specifically TV, but I think it was starting to invade movies. Like I would, I would even not I I enjoyed this movie, but anyone but you is like a good example of this where it's like drone shot, scene doesn't last more than 90 seconds, like five needle drops every two minutes. Like there is like a ADHD style of filmmaking that I was like, I just don't know if I'm gonna be able to hang with this. And I saw it a lot in TV. You're seeing a lot of like if something doesn't happen in the first three pages of a script, it gets thrown in the trash. It again stuffed to the gills with music, scenes don't last that long. And I was really worried that the sort of language and the um the almost the grammar of movies was getting broken over the course of like people watching all this short form video stuff. And so to come across somebody who and to come across teenagers who are like, I actually like watching 40 minutes of a foggy highway while a screwdrient shop version of Brian Adams's run to you plays. I'm like, you're watching fucking Stan Brackage. Like, this is incredible. Like, we might, we might. I wrote down Man Ray in here. I'm like there we're in a kind of surrealist territory with the filmmaking. Yeah, my advantage. That is actually also in the mix if we can introduce like some real like uh like like wrenches in the works of yeah challenging durational stuff that makes you really either pay attention or just give yourself over where you're not even intellectualizing anymore. You're just letting a piece of art wash over you, which is very powerful and is it's in direct contrast to obsession, which to me is like anyone but you, but made by somebody who knows how to do it. Like anyone but you is an older filmmaker trying to use contemporary methods to appeal to young people. I like Will Gluck, it's no shot at him, but that movie feels like it's trying to like um it's trying to address the short attention span as opposed to Curry Barker who's like, I am of the short attention span. Like I've been making things that are catching people in the first three seconds for five years. Like I know how to catch someone. And even though obsession to me doesn't feel like um sloppy or haphazard in its editing, it's tight. Like every sequence, you're like, this sequence has an intention. It's trying to get you to a certain place with these two characters and what's going on between them, and it's gonna get there in under five minutes, and then we're gonna move on to the next incident. And they're two sides of the same coin. You know, it's it's so convenient that these two movies are both coming out in May because they represent like two different paradigms, both of which feel like they are in a lot of ways the future. Like I really do think that um it's not gonna change whether Dune Par 3 is good. You know, like that level of filmmaking is probably always going to exist. Um are you excited for doing part three? I am. Yeah. Game. It'd be really that'd be crazy if you had like an Arrakis backrooms. Yeah. I don't know if that would be the planet that or is that Yeah, Arrakis is the desert. Isn't it what's the water one ? Where where is Timmy from originally? You know, where Oscar Isaac is. I forget the name. Yeah. Yeah. Jack was into that. Camden New Jersey. Caladan? Caladan? Is that Caladan? I mean, I you pronounced it wrong so you could pretend like you didn't immediately know. Yeah, like you've been charting Frank Herbert's progress through the side. Sort of a Pacific Northwest vibe there. It does. It does. A little foggy. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by AMC. Entertainment Weekly calls AMC's The Audacity, a gripping, funny, and sometimes chillingly of the moment tale, starring Billy Magnuson and Sarah Goldberg. The Silicon Valley satire looks at what happens when the people building our future are falling apart themselves. From Jonathan Glatzer, a writer and producer on Succession and Better Call Saul, don't miss the Audacity every Sunday only on AMC and AMC Plus. Learn more at AMC This episode is brought to you by State Farm. 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Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your C LinkedIn ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $200 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash the big picture. That's LinkedIn.com slash the big picture. Terms and conditions apply . Copycat potential? Feel like maybe the the downside of this is they're gonna see a lot of stuff like this, right? When this movie takes off. Yeah, I'm I'm sure every other studio producer is just is in, you know, watching the YouTube reaction videos looking for other stuff, seeing what that they can Xerox and rush out as quickly as possible. I mean, like people were joking about it online over the last couple of days, but I I'm sure that folks will start looking at creepypasta to see like what's another like kind of I I don't even know what the IP rules are for stuff like this. Like No, this one is such an interesting test case. I mean they they tried this already. Like we did get a Slender Man movie, but it was just kind of made in the traditional modes of a Hollywood horror movie. It didn't give you the sensation of sitting in your room alone reading something and feeling freaked out. No. That's like what Jane Schoenbrunn is trying to do in uh We're all going to the World's Fair. Like that's the closest iteration we've seen to that kind of experience. But that movie isn't traditionally commercial. You know, like it's gonna be it would it would be hard to get a lot of people to go out and see that. So kind of what's the middle ground? Like, can anybody replicate what Parsons is doing? I think it's gonna be really hard. Um, it's more like how he made it and what he was using to make things before he started making Hollywood movies. That to me feels like the shift, you know, where it's like you use Blender. Like Bl I think Blender is the same software that was used for um uh flow, the animated film that came out a couple of years ago that was nominated for some Academy Awards. The cat film. Yeah. And so it's just like a it's a shot . It's just like a like a shrinking down of the production process for movies. It's like it is reducing the barriers. So it's really cool. Do you want to see more stuff set in this world. Yeah, but I'm not I'm not the kind I'm not like I need the TV show now and I need all the lore and I want to see a hundred more iterations. Like I do like this as an individual movie. Um and that's still my favorite thing. Yes. So and it's gonna be impossible for him to not make backrooms too. Like they're just they're gonna throw so much fucking money at him to make it because this movie's gonna make so much money. But um I I would love to see like a side door. Mm-hmm. I don't want I definitely don't want to see two Chuitelle edgy for Renato Ryan's been in the movie again. Um no shots to them. I love them too. Sure. But it's like take go go Do you want to speak at all about their individual arcs andor performances? Um I think he's like one of the great living actors and it's cool to see him do something like this. And he I think he's been a little underserved in the last 10 years, but he always takes on really challenging parts. This is a hard part. I think he gives the movie a tremendous amount of credibility because he also just gives it like I you have to bleed through a wall and then be like, I believe this. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um I so And not make it look hokey. Yeah. Yeah. Her um, you know, we love her on the show. We were just talking about how great she is in Fjord . I think she's a slightly miscast in the movie, and there's something confusing about her accent that just took me out of it a little bit. Um she does get to run though. She does get to run. I mean, she's she's a great screen presence, but like I think also some of the weaknesses of the screenplay are revealed in her performance, um, especially where like she's playing a therapist who is escaping her own trauma and has created like this kind of idea system . Navigate Yeah. But also self-help. But like shh, she she didn't seem like a real person to me. I'll say. Edgie Force character seemed like a real guy who was having a really hard time. And yeah, well, some of that is just because you spend more time in the in the backrooms of his own mind. So he it his character is fleshed out. I thought the construct of the therapist and the architect patient as like a send up of therapy culture was kind of funny. I don't know if that was the intention though, or I don't know whether that was just kind of the execution of the script and of Renata Rhymes V performance, where I was like, oh, this is that's not how they talked in therapy in 1990. You know, that at least where I was a very, very modern and anachronistic, but that's okay. Um, and I, as someone who thinks there's too much therapy in movies, I thought it was funny, but I agree that it was maybe not intentional. I liked the ad for her uh book front tape. Yeah. You know, I read that that was all all that stuff was a very late ad to the movie. That that whole notion of her like having this like self-help kind of text and all that was not a part of the original script. And that's the other interesting thing, is like he invented this world, which is inspired by something that previous previously existed, but then worked with screenwriters to shape the story and give it some of that traditional shape. And that's really the stuff that I was bumping on. I'm just glad that they allowed some of the like the loose threads to dangle there. Like I I I like Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, they don't have a ton to do in this movie, but uh there's a moment are we doing details? We can say det ail. There's a moment where Finn Beta is exploring the backrooms and comes across his own clothes, uh which is never really interrogated very much. Yes. And I just love shit like that. Like you do not have to um cross every T . Agreed. Um I just wanted to just make a quick note on A24 . Turn it around. Like they just did. Yeah. Like they kind of did. Um now what I here's what I'm afraid of. There was news last week that uh IMAX was up for sale, and it's up for sale because IMAX has been killing it for the last five years because everybody only wants to put their movies on IMAX. So now it's like, well, we better sell the iron's hot. I really hope A24 doesn't sell. Because now when you look at the drama, yeah, and you look at Marty Supreme and you look at uh Civil War and you look at uh what was the other uh Thessilian song film? Um Materialists, like they have they are they have figured something that no other studio really knows how to do? And they don't make $500 million movies, but they make $150 million movies now, which seemed impossible five years ago that they could consistently make movies like this. But this movie is probably going to $150 million, if not more. And that is that is like the robust health of the middle class of movies that we actually are like have whinged about for a long time. Now they have the A twenty four flavor, right? There's Well, if you had to guess, of that $150 million box office, how much of it comes from people who self-identify as A24 fans? Versus how many people self-identify as backrooms fans? Or as Zendaya fans. Or Civil War fans. I don't think it's an A twenty four thing, this movie. I I think that I think the people who have been raised by A24 and consider themselves the A24 boys will like know about backrooms and aren't gonna go see it because they're committed to their project. But I think more of it is because um , you know, this is A24's version of a franchise movie, right? Like they they they figured out IP and they have the fan base to come with it. Yeah. And I think that's super savvy, and it's honestly the same thing as but also they let it be good, which you know, or they let it be good and they and they managed to make it good. They're so good at marketing. I was watching that the trailer for this this morning and I was like, oh they cut this like an alien movie and it really isn't. No. You know. No, but that's something they keep doing is they keep wrong footing your expectations into movies, but they're not making people mad. Like they might be frustrated that um that the Celine Song film is not when Harry met Sally too. But um And you think about the tight walk that re was required from the drama and and then and trying to promote that movie and like let everyone know like you actually do have to come see this right now because otherwise your friends are gonna be talking about it. We ran into somebody on the streets at Cannes who was talking about how they did not ultimately participate in the drama and what the kind of sense around that movie was in the industry and how difficult it would be to sell it to an audience because school shooting and in in quotation marks. And that's just like that is a taboo that cannot be crossed and cannot be addressed in a widely released piece of culture. And not only did they do it, but they made it like their third biggest movie ever. Yeah. And obviously you have huge stars and this really savvy marketing machine, but I I'm bringing this up around backrooms because this is now they did the thing that we did discuss two years ago, they are actually starting to be able to accomplish. And I'm very impressed. You know, I I traditionally really liked the studio and what they've been making, but the fact that they're now mainstreaming with their own brand of stuff, right? Is a is also a fascinating turning point. Right. Because they they tried to kind of open up the tent and start making different variations of what a quote unquote A twenty four movie is and frankly what like a bigger, more expensive A twenty four movies and it and it took a minute, but now they've figured out, you know, and so the drama is an A twenty four rom-com.. I mean it is It's pretty structurally a rom-com and this is their IP horror movie, but you know, they are also both very weird, idiosyncratic, and potentially alienating movies that they somehow manage to sell to billions of people. Marty Supreme is their sports drama. Yeah. You know, like their ring is their Lord of the Rings. Yes. Yeah. And their video game adaptation. Um anyway, anyway. It's interesting that Obsession uh comes through the Blumhouse? Um It doesn't. It doesn't. Independently financed and acquired out of a festival. Okay. And this movie is also Wait, what is Jason an exec producer on only because they acquired him. I see. Um and and Blum is also involved in this film, um along with a cadre of other Peter Turner figures. Yeah, exactly. Like a lot of people, a lot of very experienced , successful people got in on the ground of this um and helped to make it so, which does, I mean is necessary sometimes, you know, like that's also true of Star Wars. Like that you just kind of do do you need these kind of benefactors to come through and allow for something to scale up in this way. The question is always like how much to they get in the middle of the creativity. And this feels like it doesn't feel trampled upon, which is what part of what's so cool about it. Closing thoughts? Did you have a favorite sequence in this film? I mean, it's hard to separate them because they take place in such a kind of similar world, but um I think the moment when he goes into the basement after the lights turn off while he's watching television and he sees the little thin shaft of light that reveals that there is something there that he can walk into um is very sophisticated piece of sci-fi filmmaking. Uh when she goes into the very vertical room with the vertical, you know, stairs and and it's just a wholly different version of scale. And you're just and and a real like, how did you do that? And it looks amazing and I mean you know it was very gondry. Exactly. Very cool. I I l uh very uh loved a bunch of them. I actually thought the execution of the monster was fantastic and and legitimately terrifying and practical. Also not CG He's done videos that you can see him kind of like are his blueprint for that monster. They're not actually backrooms videos, I don't think they're just like him messing around or doing something about a giant and it really works. But I love when he first brings um the kids into the world and is just like there's a pool. Like, you know, like there's this, there's that. Like I kind of was like this could go on for 20 minutes like I just want to see all these different places and his performance is so good because you don't know is he actually trying to do the research to prove that he's not crazy is he actually treating them more like bait for this world Yeah, it's weird that he's like, You have to go down there because you have the camera. Right. Right. What kind of knot is this? And it's like did the backrooms tell him to do that? And like what how much of this is malevolence versus him kind of losing a grip on his own sanity. Cool stuff. Um all right, well, we got one guys. Yeah. Let's let's go now to my conversation with Kane Parsons. Well, Kane Parsons is here, here to talk about backrooms, and I'm very excited to chat with you. Um, I wanted to start with this king. In addition to congratulations, I've been thinking about what is the first thing that you can remember seeing that made you want to create, not make a movie necessarily, but then made you say, I want to make something of my own. Uh it would be incredible if I could give you a specific material example, um I think it's a tendency that traces back farther than my memory will really carry me. Uh I think realistically it's sort of a tendency that did not get shut down in the early years of my life, like in the you know, first three years, somehow some driver there that I I don't have my head around kicked off into gear and and I've kept been like trying to find versions of that over and over again at different points in my life. And I think I can look to early examples of of things, I suppose. And and and I guess in in that I would say uh it was sort of I wasn't really into like I I would watch movies growing up. Like we had a DVD collection and like we'd go camping and I would like I didn't really understand what I was watching overly because I was a tiny little is it does it make sense for me to going that be going this far back in time? It gets really abstract . I want you to go wherever you can go. Yeah. I mean like uh we had like all the early seasons of The Simpsons on D V D and I think those got in my brain. Um I mean uh Star Wars, all you know, everything that was out at the time in like two thousand seven, I ingested although I I wouldn't like you know, I think those had a I wouldn't consider myself like a long-standing, like huge, huge Star Wars fan, but like you know, growing up, I think that definitely was probably one of the early influences of science fiction. Um like m materially I start getting like really outwardly excited about stuff. Like I I started a trend of like I guess I've actually had this my whole life, but but I get really obsessed about specific things like I find a thing I latch onto it and then it's my thing for like X amount of time and then now at this point like when I was younger it was like phases and I would grow out of them but now it's just like anything I get obsessed about I kind of just hold on to it indefinitely and they just build into a big pile. So I know Portal was kind of like uh when I when I played that for the first time. Cause I wasn't like I wouldn't consider myself a big gamer. I I wasn't growing up, but like partially just because I wasn't I mean, I was restricted in in what I was what I had access to, but I know everyone my age, it was like a rite of passage to be playing Minecraft. And so that was like kind of a a baseline, a luxury I couldn't afford exactly. Like I didn't have any devices, and so I would have to go to friends' houses and stuff for that. And eventually I did get it. I had a PlayStation 3 that one of our family friends gave us. and then I got Little Big Planet and then I got Portal because I played it at a friend's house one time. Or I got Portal 2. And that that's what sort of I think drove me absolutely insane. And that's I'm gonna just keep citing Portal and Portal Two is the thing 'cause I love it so much. And in terms of childhood, it was a big focal point. But did those things when you were consuming them from the Simpsons to Portal Two, did they make you think that you could make things, or were they just things that you slipped into and fell into their worlds? Yeah, I kind of beat around the bush there on that question. Um I think I think I started understanding or at least processing with more clarity that I could make things shit. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to honest, not like salesmany answer about it because I want to say that it was something like, oh, when I started using YouTube , um, I would watch all these YouTube channels and they would show you the hinds behind the scenes and and stuff. And that made it seem also so viable and whatnot. But at the same time, like years before I had any YouTube access when I was like three or like four, I guess like four or five is probably more accurate to say. I was technically picking up a family camera and obsessively running around the house with it. I still have the the files. Like we I found the SD cards and put them on a drive just like a couple months ago. Um and so and not all of it's unwatchable. It's not like filmmaking in a in a in a true or like meaningful sense, but but like I was I guess my already assuming things could be made. And so like there was kind of two vectors moving. I like I think there was just like a um I think I've always really liked just experienced curation outside of like the context of any one medium. I think that's kind of what it is. I I would do like theater growing up. I, you know, was the kind of person who who would generally just try to, you know, I was a bit of an annoying kid in that I would like try to do like silly like magic tricks or or like prank things or like set up an elaborate like uh Scooby-Doo trap or something like like Rube Goldberg machine things. Like I really liked schemes and stuff like that. Um and all for the effect of like getting some kind of reaction from people. And so I think that mutated to like a really distilled version. So I would like I loved the idea. I for a long time I was like, I just want to make like haunted houses or just like walk like ex walking through experiences, stuff like that. Like that was really compelling. Um, and then film kind of just started to take shape. I think 'cause I would like I was getting into editing uh a little bit because I would like edit little trailers and music videos and stuff from just random things that I was into and and uh and edit little memes and whatnot and then I just started slowly filming my own little clips and it just kind of started turning into like YouTube shit posts which turned into little short films and and then it drifted further and further until I was just like applying all of my like without like uh I I think I find a humor in everything I do, but like I tried to do it a little more seriously probab,ly around the time I was 10 or so. Do you find that you are historically a very quick study that you can master something quickly? I don't know about master. I think I can get excited about something and I I think what I've found with everything I've done uh in any field because I you know, I like to jump around to a few different mediums just because I I enjoy it personally. I it's not too much about the result uh for me. Um I find that I've had a hard time getting discouraged and I don't know what I would really I think it's probably a blend of a million different things. Again, like that's the boring answer. It's like probably stuff that I got from my parents because they're lovely people, and probably stuff that I got from just my general upbringing subconsciously and maybe some of it's beyond that. Um, but like I generally have sort of, I think growing up, I wrote a curve of like every time I would learn something. Objectively now I can look back and recognize it as pretty like if I did a short film. It doesn't look great. The VFX don't look great, but at the time it was like pretty mind-blowing and really satisfying. And it would kind of just always be riding the curve where I'm never self-aware and self-critical enough of the thing I'm making to actually be uh I guess dismissive of it to a degree that makes me want to shut the whole thing down and and give it up. So it's like always constantly fun and satisfying. Um, I think I've only just now started to that curve kind of plateaus and now there's like such an extreme degree of like being technically meticulous over it that you have to live with one thing for so long that it, you know, you start to feel what it's like to uh stay with a project for an uncomfortable amount of time. I have some questions for you about that because it's just like your amazing prolific nature as a young person and then entering a system that is so deliberate and takes so much time that I it must have felt somewhat like creative whiplash to be transitioning to that style of creation. Well i i i not really because I I think that for me that transition started more in around twenty twenty one or like when I started the background series on YouTube. I think I think I was kind of fortunate it's not the right word just because it was, you know, a deliberate movement, but I coming from like, you know, a lot of my influences did come from YouTube and whatnot. And I spent a lot of time in my like teenage years or, you know, after the the when I got started getting internet access, my influences were very much derived from people who were making these indie projects online that are like very uh meticulous, like a lot of attention to detail, lots of things to dig into, lots of channels who are maybe just even hallucinating information out of something that was never meant to be dug into. Yeah. Um, and so all of that kind of created this mindset of like, okay, if you're gonna do an indie project, especially if it's mystery or horror or sci-fi, which are you know all what I want to be doing, uh you got to be prepared to give people detail at every single level and they're gonna dig into everything and they're going to take the entire series, uh play it forwards and then play it entirely backwards in reverse and they're going to overlap. And then at these exact moments, events need to line up and create a second message. Um, sort of like the stuff people go crazy with with uh, you know, dissecting the shining and stuff just applied to everything. And and and so I think that I just got into a habit of really trying to bring that level of meticulous art direction to what I was doing on YouTube. And so when we are, you know, scaling to to this film. Um again, that was a gradual project process of for all of like the grandiose spectacle around like the way this could be described or is being described in the media and whatnot, it's like it from my perspective, I've been doing this thing pretty solo for a while online. People reach out. I start talking to them over Zoom. I never meet them in person. We're just talking, like usually once a week or so or every now and then. Uh some scripts start getting made. I start talking with a writer, have like a couple hour phone calls every couple weeks. Um we try a few different versions. We try working with another writer. Uh same process, like stay on the phone for a couple hours and then we're building a like goes off, writes a script. We get a draft, phone call, notes, another draft. People like that. We want to start greenlighting it. Um when I go to Vancouver, it's just me, I mean, that's a big move. I'm like I I uh am physically going there and it's just a bunch of people who I've been able to text with a little bit so far, but it's like eight main people. I mean, there's a lot of people, but it's like, you know, really just like a single small-ish room full of people who are just uh kind of on a similar wavelength to what I was already doing. So I just walk into the room and we just talk about things and we just talk about what we want to do with the film, not in like a just in like a literal context. We're able to jump to it right away. And and I think it became a very when I say it's I've said it's seamless in other interviews and stuff, and I I I guess I really do mean that it was just me the biggest transition point was just taking what is usually nonverbal work and then just verbalizing it to other people and trusting or putting the right level of trust in in certain parts of that. And and so again, like I think I wanted to make sure I had every piece of if I can picture the final thing perfectly, I just have to be able to articulate how we can get there to the right people. And then they they applied their themselves and they did a great job. So I I want to ask you more about the the production and and the conception of the the film, but one last thing about you know your more early days. I was curious if you could remember the moment when you decided you wanted to start uploading the things that you were doing. Because that feels like kind of a critical decision to make, even if you were 10 years old when you started doing it. But just this idea of how much of it is driven by the need for attention, the like a sense of pride, um, you know, just the just trying to have a test experience to see what it would be like. Like can you kind of communicate like what what where that came from and then how that becomes ultimately like I think a turning point for a lot of young artists now. Yeah. I mean for for me again it was it was uh it was April of uh twenty fifteen, I believe. And that's when I created my YouTube channel. And I the first like material sort of version of a short film that I was doing repeatedly at the time, like the thing I was into was like Lego stop motion. And so that's what I first posted on YouTube . Uh there's technically a first video on my channel now, but that's uh not true whatsoever. That was I guess actually it feels like forever. That was 2017. That feels like a million years apart from 2015, but um there's like I think 200 privated videos before that one. I I posted a lot in that time. Um and and like the early stuff was just you know like very short little snippets, no audio because I didn't know how to edit. I didn't do anything other than just use I think I used this software called Hue Animation or something on on like the either the family computer. I don't know if I had a laptop at that time. Um and I didn't have like a phone or or a tablet or anything yet at that point. So I think I was just using like a family computer. Um and I I think it was probably like I had watched I you know, I I YouTube was like the main thing I chose to watch when I had the time. And I think it was just an aspect of I don't know what it was at that point. I I I think it was I'm sure an element of what I do comes out of want ing like it's you know it's seeking some form of validation socially, of course. Um I it's not like in a very clear way, like you don't look at art and and or you know, I I don't think what I've been doing really has that has that appearance overly, uh like it's being done for attention. But I I I think that like, you know, that's kind of the social contract that I made in my childhood with like, okay, if I'm a bit of a indoorsy person who is not like the most socially interactive or is not the most uh on the same wavelength as a lot of my peers, like I will make up for that by by uh you know over relying on these technical trades that I can then exercise to an impressive degree, hopefully, and then and then the conversation can just be about that rather than anything el se. Um and I I I think that's kind of worked out. Um but but but I think if I had to guess that's kind of subconsciously what like the deeper psychology there was to a certain degree. Um but I also just I found it really satisfying. Uh it was just kind of like a really high dopamine reward from from doing it. Like I more of more of making the thing. I I think the uploading was just either part of what I just said or a desire to uh I'm sure there's more to it. I woke up early. So it's still. No, this it's it it's insightful and I'm I'm really curious about it because they're, you know, you're part of a a a generation of filmmakers now, which I'm sure you're being told over and over again in these last three months of your life, but like that are ha that are having they're exposing their ideas in different ways than what was the previous dogma, the previous methodology. And so the fact that there is all of this extant work that you have made before a certain age that is publicly available is so interesting. And like you, I really like how you explained how you knew going into the making of this movie, and even in the the web series, that like people would watch it backwards and forwards and they would be looking for hidden meanings and secret truths. And I'm I'm curious like what that process was like when you were working with the writers on the scripts. Like, is were those the things that you were hunting for? How do you know that the story is the right story that you want to tell when you're working in that way? I think it's a it was it was a mixture of like I because because what was what I had on YouTube was something that uh it's the same like narrative engine, like it's a or at least the world is still there. It's like this film, it's all ended up in a place where it's the same canon and that was always the hope. So I think it was, you know, finding finding like what is a interesting , like like genuinely compelling, not just for people who have already followed the project, but like what is a like a eyebrow-raising just intro film to that concept that does not like entrench the viewer in all of this this either feeling of being alienated by a mythology that's been going on for years, and there's like how how can we make sure that like you're not going into the film and then when you don't get it, people are hounding you with the criticism that like it's for the fans or you were supposed to have watched the whole series first. And I just I personally don't really enjoy that. I like being able to, especially because background to the way I've constructed it is usually a little bit in a bit of an anthology type, it's you know, it's it's told out of order and it's more of putting together a a broader shape of a tree rather than um you know or that's how I've been constructing it so far. I'd love to do like a a TV series and like I think with as as soon as you're picking like a an episode, and I consider this film an episode, um, then then you can tell that in order and make sure you're completing that story. But like I don't think each individual piece needs to be lined up in this one precise way. And and and so the hope was always, um, this is a branch on the tree. It is not like the fundamental thread that ties the whole thing together and it's not the ending. Um, it's not even the beginning. It's just a piece in the middle that is hopefully going to be so focused on the fundamental sort of physical details that overwhelm a character with finding this place that there's not even time in the movie to get entrenched in like the more underlying who is this mysterious individual who is the vice director of this research institute and what does he have going on in his life and what happened in 1972 and and and whatnot. It's like all that stuff is is in the YouTube series, but you know , uh I guess I guess to answer the question it was sort of as simple as finding a compelling, I think a less is more sort of mundane approach to letting a character interact with the mechanic of the backrooms in a way that really just foregrounds a simple relationship there because I I would love to, you know, I would love to go harder with a lot of things in in in future projects, but I I do think that to a certain extent, I'm trying to be careful with my own ability to scale properly. Like there's such a thing as moving too fast. Um, and and this has already been moving at light speeds. So I wanted to at least work on something that I think would be manageable and I didn't want the worst thing that I would be afraid of doing is like jumping the shark, I suppose. So I I I wanted to make sure that we could have a stable, viable version of a film that is not going to, you know, risk falling into a into a bit of an insane, uh, contrived or convoluted territory. Aaron Powell I'm curious about the three tracts of the movie, the way that I see it. The one is just the pure narrative storytelling of the characters that you're portraying. The second is this sort of lore and mythology that you've explored in the web series and that you're obviously very conversant in as an idea. And then the third is thematic. And I feel like thematically , the movie is very rich and but I haven't heard you talk about it as much, and I don't know how much you are even thinking about your storytelling in that specific way. I I I think it's easy to overrely on symbolism and um you know the thematics of a project. I I don't I do it immensely. So so the answer, the quick answer is yes, it's all I have a version of it. That great thing about thematics is that people are probably going to have a many, many different interpretations of it. And so that's why that's actually the bit I like to speak to the least, probably. I mean, you can probably just if you were to comb over all the interviews, all the press have done, you could probably get like a a flavor of the way I think about this project, but um I I do think that that's the least interesting thing I could prescribe to people. Like I if it was up to me, I I like I like trying to in a perfect world I I guess I maybe I'm just fatigued with seeing creators, you know, after their project ends or you know, after their project ends, like going on and talking about what it all means in a way that is somehow like if it's not clear in the product, then I don't know either try again or like I I want it to be on the screen. And and this film is not supposed to be like you're not supposed to get like a hard read out of it exactly in terms of like this is precisely what it means in a very exact explicit terms. Um, but it is there and I'm seeing enough people arriving to the same sort of conversational talking points that I was hoping uh they would. Um that obviously aren't mentioned in the film anywhere. So I feel like that works. I I feel good with the work that was done there. Um Yeah, I try not to try not to verbalize exactly what it should be though. Yeah. I I think I'm just curious about how much time you spend on it. Cause I find that with a lot of projects like this, the lore tends to overwhelm the other components. And I don't see that in this case at all, but it it's helpful. And you know, I there's been a lot of illusions to to David Lynch with your work and, and you know, he very famously sort of refused to explore his any any of his thematic intents. I'm not encouraging you to do that in either direction. Whatever you want to do, you should do. this way. Um but yeah, I mean I mean uh I think I I I think there's a lot that people can look at and I like to when I work and I've been doing this for years now in backrooms and any other projects I, I kind of don't do anything else. So I think a lot of it kind of comes from like a very forced sort of just drowning in a mindset or a set of ideas that just become I guess it's just like the way the way subconsciously a culture can sort of encode so much um just the way information is transmitted and the way it's framed in little ways that sometimes you're not even aware of I think I think most of those thematic choices I'm kind of trusting my subconscious to do a lot of that work after I've kind of fed it so much stuff for so long. Uh and that kind of has seemed to be the case so far. What about um the mechanics of horror movies? That's something I'm I'm quite interested in because you do have some moments in the movie that are like classical scares, you know, that have like some of the traditional strategies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so is that something that you studied and thought about? Is that something that you knew would was necessary in a in a in a in a work of art, in a commercial work of art like this? How much did you think about that? I think I mean I've never like uh looked at it from a technical or clinical standpoint. Um , I think mostly it's through osmosis. I haven't watched a lot of horror movies. I think um it also can't be understated the the role in which the the the Greg our editor had on the project. Like I w I wish people talked about Greg Moore because he's a wizard and he did, you know, it was lovely working with him for so long. Um uh you know, and and I think that like I think there's a few places in the film where you're right, it was definitely r aeliance on the sort of, you know, uh build-up release of a I don't want to say jump scare. I I I I don't personally I I don't think anyone is too sentimental about jump scares. So so I don't think I need to run the risk of sounding like a like a jump scare supporter, but um there's certainly a a few moments where we startle the viewer. Um I I I think I'm willing to live with those. I think I I I think I stand by them to like a ninety percent degree. Um and I I would say that like I think I I think those are just we're wanting to set a very specific cadence where we are like showing that we can , you know, we can bring up the tension, we can bring up the the uh you know the sudden surge of noise or adrenaline or whatever we're looking for. There there can be things do happen here. Um, but then the longer we go without something happening and then when we sort of like are able to s to subvert that sort of, I I think it, you know, kind of breaks that language a little bit, uh, and you know, leaves us, kind of brings the tempo way down for like a long period before it very subtly. You get like a silent jump scare, just like a shadow moves. Um , and you get a you know, a slightly different kind of release. So I don't have it in academic terms. That's actually something I think I rely more on intuition for than anything else. Um, I'm sure what I'm planning on doing this summer is watching a whole lot of stuff and and trying to do just that because it's been about two years working on this film. Uh that's a lot of time for someone who who still has a developing brain and wants to be trying to feed it more stuff. Yeah. And during that whole time I haven't really been able to consume anything. So I am dying to actually get a better academic handle on this stuff. That's funny. I mean, I, you know, you should definitely do what you want to do. But one of the things that I really, really admired about the movie is while it does have some of those core components of a scary movie, which is a genre that I really, really care about and have spent a lot of time watching a lot of movies like that and studied them to whatever extent that matters. The movie is working best for me when it is not only subverting, but sort of like ignoring the orthodoxy of narrative feature film. And I, you know, I I hear you when you say that that's intuitive, but there th there's something very precise about your willingness to sit in moments and to not explain. And my instinct as an older person than you is to tell you, like, well, that must be coming from YouTube and whatever you've consumed there that allows you to reject these traditional modes, but I don't actually know. Like I'm actually very genuinely curious. And and did you find that you had to like fight for those kinds of moments in the film or to allow for that? We did. Um it wasn't like vicious fights. They're they're very manageable, but they were certainly conversations, I guess I could say. Um I think I I would say that like that stuff mostly comes from the same place where I derive pretty much all of my excitement for projects, which is this is cliche and this is cheesy and this is technically where all of art is sourced from because there's nowhere else to source art from, but just, you know, nonfiction, the real world, my life. Um I think I never had a moment growing up where I went to the theater and, you know, suddenly fell in love with movies because I was at the theater and and it was so profound and beautiful and it really got to me. Um I think if anything, I've sort of , you know, I I I think I I like to think of a better I have a better way of looking at it now. But like when I was younger, I had like an admittedly kind of like pretentious view of it, which was like, I don't really want to be making films about my perception of reality as prescribed by someone else making a film. Like already. It's like it feels like it's like you're diluting reality further and further if your inspirations are only nonfiction. And I was just like, I don't really want to do that. I want to experience as much of life as possible. Like if I were to have like a dream career would be equal parts trying to just see as much of life as possible and trying to actually like meet people and talk to people from different like as many different walks of life as possible and and just have lived experience that I can actually draw from personally on a personal level, coded with my own life experience and emotion and tonal ity. And then, you know, I mean that's a sprawling. That's the entirety of life. Like that, that accounts for everything. Um, and then just use film as a way to process that and sort of summarize basically here's what I learned in the form of a weird, bizarre fictional, you know, anything. It could be a movie, it could be a game, it could be a TV show, it could be music. But like I think that's kind of the way that I framed making stuff uh when I was younger and I, you know, maybe that's not that pretentious. I mean, I think there's a very healthy way to do that. I think that's, you know, it's what I'm doing now. That's what I enjoy. So do you you did mention that you like to jump around mediums. I mean, do you see yourself working in the mode as a filmmaker for a long stretch of time. Is that what you're gonna be doing? I think I I don't know where things will settle like 40 years from now, but but I I do uh, you know, currently very much desire to just keep doing the kind I I would say that the balance I have currently is the one I would like to keep. Um, there might be all sorts of strange, bizarre economic hallucinations with the industry and like you know strange new trends start and uh you know there'll be a few new technologies in the in the coming decades that will certainly derail or change or open up new new avenues and uh I think, you know I,'m that that's why I kind of broadly am interested in the the whole sort of width of of what it can be. Um but I uh with the caveat that I I personally have no desire to lean on generative AI for any of my art, just have to say that. Thank you for saying that. But I I, you know, I I think that I just really enjoy the experience of like I said , it's experience curation. That's just what I like. I like sort of taking the things that feel potent from lived reality and then just kind of cranking them up to 10 in a way that you can sort of repeat the emotion uh sort of in an easily sampleable way. So hopefully you can, you know, gain something from an experience you didn't live yourself. So you know. Did do you find that you encountered any genuine limitations to working in like a traditional film production style as opposed to like software ? Uh yeah, I think I think there's limitations in what you can ask of people, uh reasonably. Um like the level of obsession that can be required for like there's an example would be on on my Discord server. There are many, many people who are on there all the time, and they are probably around my age, some some of them even on the younger side, and they are far more sophisticated at like blender than I possibly could be. And they work at it constantly. And if and for a piece of fan art, like after a trailer from the film comes out, they go and they model every single thing in the trailer with full degree, like they find the props, the exact props from the exact prop shops, and they model those objects. And they even like on the underside of tables and ottomans, they include the little manufacturing label in full 4K resolution, and it's all there. And then they just share those assets around and then they remake everything one for one. So it's like this feeling of like, if that could be leveraged, that's incredible. And there's like such an intense focus in it, so maybe not professional in etiquette, but so incredibly meticulous and professional in in in the production quality and I see that constantly but like that's not something that you can just kind of inject uh by asking for it it'.s somet Ithing that kind of has to grow incidentally. And so maybe there'll be a way to, you know, lean on some of that in the future. I really enjoy working with people who are obsessed with what they do. Um and and we did have a lot of that on this film, but but I think, you know , it is such a diversified, diversified project that um, you know, there's certainly places where it is hard. I'm working on this, this, and this. And so this one thing maybe doesn't get the same level of like obsessive detail baked into it. And and on YouTube that would be fine because I can just take as much time as I need and I can go do that. And I I think it's partially the time factor that that I run up against on this film. then And I would say also the, you know, the the way in the I I guess the two other things would be the script. Like the way uh you know, I was 16 when this script was well when this project started and then um you know it it was a couple years of making but like I don't think that I had the most creative leverage at the very start of this project and I think it grew with time. Um so I think there's certainly ways in which uh I I I wish there like I I I think I think there are choices that I wish we could have spent more time deliberating over in the early phases before we just wanted to try to uh you know, it was greenlit I think I think at a time when could have benefited from a bit more like analysis and going back and forth a bit more um which is all stuff we did while we were in prep and and while we were going through the film. So I think it was that. then And I would say it's just generally, and this isn't a restraint, this is actually liberating um in some ways, but like the difference between YouTube as the medium or as the place where people are going to go view it and and then going to a theater and viewing it on a projector screen is going to obviously change so much of how people are perceiving it. The fact that this is a large budget production versus something that they just clicked on a YouTube channel to find is mentally doing a lot of lifting in different directions for people. And I actually find that to be like one of the most interesting sort of paint brushes available to like choose the medium. And I y I I I think you have to pick . I think back rims was tricky because it took a lot of work to bend certain elements to make sure it was constantly working for this other direction for a 90-minute film. I think a television series is always where it's kind of made the most sense to drift to. Um that's I mean I've said that from the beginning, but I I think that's um That's so interesting that you say that like I because I feel like one of the things that is so effective about the movie, and I I realize you're not a person who's sort of raised in the deep glow of the big screen, but you know. I've still watched I've watched the good amount. But but you know, there's something about being captured in a dark room that is so effective for this story, and that you can't get up and pause it, and you can't, you know, look at your phone. And there's something very specific like in the DNA of the creation that makes it effective in that space. And maybe not for the story that you want to tell, but I don't know. You know, I'm not I don't it's not a happy accident, of course. I think it's more effective for that. Um I think what I'm speaking to is maybe a distinction between uh a project like this and there's some projects I've done on YouTube where episodes of this of a given series might be like 10 minute long screen recordings from a video game that was made in 2003 and you're it's like kind of compressed and it's supposed to feel like you're just viewing messy files and you have the freedom to click around and download files from the description and there's like metadata in the files. So like ARG stuff really. Um and so just a medium switch there, where I think things are framed a little bit better there. And if you try to throw those onto a theater screen, I think they I think honestly maybe maybe I don't know. Maybe this is just somewhat uncharted territory and yeah maybe the next thing I should do is literally just try to see how scalable some of those things that seem unscalable are. Because if they're not, I mean or if they are scalable, then um then that that'd be pretty cool. There's some there's some stuff to be done with that, I think. I mean as an observer, I think it's just inc incredibly intriguing the idea of just kind of breaking the form a little bit and delivering things in a slightly different way than we are used to receiving them. But I wanna I I'm curious about um if you are able to do this, take stock of this exact moment. I mean we're speaking hours before the movie will be released widely. And there's obviously a big frenzy. And you've been people have been watching your work en masse for a long period of time, but this is a scale, at least in terms of the way that the media communicates about something, that is very, very different. Like how close do you feel to it? How much do you feel like you understand it? Um how how are you feeling about it? I feel I I I feel close to it. I don't feel particularly like well, I guess I feel I feel very looped in. Um, I am checking and and you know, I I despise Twitter. I do not enjoy using Twitter in the slightest. I am checking Twitter though, and it's I could I am only more firm in my in in my des ire to never go back on there outside of this. Um, but that's more for just like seeing what what like stuff is leaked so far from the theater recordings and whatnot, just of you know, just seeing what information it was traveling wear. Um and I so I feel like I've got a good finger on the pulse right now. I think most of I mean I've just come off like a pretty hefty press tour, so I'm a little mentally drained from talking about, which is why I appreciate this conversation, which is not about the normal talking points. Um, because you know, I've I'm very thoroughly done with a lot of that uh personally. Like I've been trying to avoid them for your sake and mine. I enjoy I've enjoyed the experience, but at a certain point, I think everything that I have to say has kind of been said. I I think I always maybe do have more to say, but like I think you need time to incubate and like find those new things and and when you're doing it back to back you kind of run out of of of new options. So um I think I think right now I'm kind of just I mean I every now and then I I do get a moment of like, I'm kind of done with this and I'll get a video on Instagram of myself just talking and I'll click the not interested button just so I don't have to get more clips of of myself. Um That's a backroomzian move by you. Yeah . I uh you know, I it it feels good. Like again, like I we talked about it when I first got on the call. I just got back home to to, you know, my childhood home where my family is and and my brother's wrapping up high school right now. He graduates next week. And I am just kind of going , I'm just letting my nervous system kind of reset to where it was before I did all this, I think, because it was very much I've been at home my whole life and then I go to Vancouver, I do this film, don't leave Vancouver the whole time, and then now I'm immediately coming back. And it's kind of like everything that happened with this movie from beginning of prep to release is just kind of an insulated event that I kind of want to be able to just keep going to different places and repeating. Uh so although I do love Vancouver, I'll probably do more stuff there. Um but uh I don't know. It feels like it feels like I don't want it to turn into a whirlwind that never ends, uh, because that would drive me completely insane. Like you need the sort of you know, the brakes to find what's actually meaningful to go towards next. So uh I'm trying to do that now. Welcome back to your life. Uh Kane, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they have seen. Now you said it's been hard for you to see things, but you also have this very wide ranging sense of what is seen. It doesn't have to be a mov This is more of a this isn't like a firm like IP experience as much as it is a combination of being on the plane back to back with this press tour everywhere and you know, uh just looking out the window and he's a mixture of like reading and and audio book, um just going through like all of Ted Cheng's short stories is what I' Im'm currently on a Ted Cheng Ted Cheng kick. Um and so I don't know if this is a val this is an accepted answer, but I think it's just like I'm really enjoying the headspace that that's put me in, just going through Tales of Your Life, uh or stories of your life and others and and uh Exhal ation um and just looking out the window for hours and hours and hours, and the sun rises and falls. And it's just like that's kind of been like, you know, the mountains, the sea, everything, everything you see when you fly around the planet in a plane. Um I think it's just been all of those things have kind of just bled together into a single kind of hum, just like a tone that I I think is less interesting to sort of describe in intellectual terms than it is to just kind of say that it's really but peaceful and uh I think just feels like a very like a place I just want to keep living in. It feels like a comfortable sort of little bubble, I guess. That's a perfect answer. Uh Kane, congrat congratulations. This is a truly unique moment. I hope you are able to appreciate it back home. I'm enjoying it. All right. Thanks for doing this. See ya. Get outside . Thanks to Kane. Thanks to CR. Thanks to our producer Jack Sanders for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for production support. We'll be back next week to talk about 10 movies we missed in May. 10? Probably just about close to there, you know? Like what's on the list? So sheep detectives. You guys didn't do a sheep detective. Oh, because it can. Because it can. Billy Eilish, hit me hard, hit me soft, live in 3D or whatever it's called. Uh we're gonna try to go see Pressure. Yep. The World War II film. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to see Passenger, the horror movie that's out this weekend. Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat Two. Um what else is on the list? I Love Boosters. I Love Boosters, of course. What else have you been watching? Anything you want to hear us address? Uh nothing movie-wise that you guys have not have not either hit or are about to hit. Okay. It's all TV stuff. Cool. Anything you want any you want to raise your hand for any last final movie? I was just Googling it, but I mean that's a lot. I'm anything, I'm trying to think of all the canned movies are listed. AI is useless. Um Did you guys do ready or not too? I watched that. Uh Yes, I did address it. I I didn't love it. What did you think? I didn't I didn't love it as much as the first one. The first one is great. Yeah. Uh all right. Well, hey, Chris, thanks for coming on this journey with the first time I can contribute. Well, okay, last licks here since Van just did this. Where are you at? Where's your head at with third chair? I think that um it was interesting. You know, John Cornyn, uh four term senator in Texas, just lost his primary to Ken Paxton. I know, and that must have been so hard for you. And he immediately Paxton. And I just thought, I'd like to see that kind of commitment from you guys. You know? Commitment to party. Commitment to and you putting yourself up for bidding and for auction and just being like, I am just the watcher. I can't, you know, I can't wait. I think I made a a fairly cogent defense of the work that you've done last time this was discussed. So I'm on the record as being very pro CR. You said it was the friends we've made along the way. What about the friends we've had for a long time? You know? No, I uh I'm enjoying I'm enjoying the bands, you know. Do you I'm almost caught up with all of the Tracy uh material that you recorded in May that ran while we were in can. It's it's good. I took a couple shots that I did I'm not I'll wait and yeah, respond to it later. Mostly from you. Yeah, Tracy always comes to my defense. So really my problem is with you. Interesting. So maybe it's a first chair. Well honestly if someone wants to come for first chair, I welcome it. I welcome the challenge.