Hello, welcome to Sock Talk
with JNab and the Sundance Kid.
We are going to explore the frontiers of
technology, art and the human experience.
Hello everybody, welcome
to Sock Talk, episode 4.
We threatened last time to potentially
talk about cinema and film.
Now because of that, we thought this
would be a fantastic
opportunity to have our first
guest and we've done that.
So here we have Nicky Thompson.
Nicky introduce yourself.
Hey, thank you.
That's kind.
Hey, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure.
My name is Nicky Thompson.
I'm a lecturer in the School of Creative
and Cultural Business
where I kind of teach film,
media, screenwriting, bits of marketing
and so on and so on.
I'm also co-founder, director of Crow
House Projects and Crow
House Films with yourself.
My background is filmmaking,
screenwriting and storytelling.
Various degrees have always been based
around film, history of film and so on.
I've been lucky enough to live in the US
and make some films, make
some projects over there.
I got my degree over there and yeah,
always looking and
making fun, cool stories.
I'm waffling now already.
No, no, you'll be very, you're a very
good company as you know.
As you well know, it's not like we've
never talked before.
So today we thought we'll give ourselves
a general topic to kind of go over and we
thought it would be interesting to look
at some of the history
of cinema and specifically
how concepts and ideas have changed over
time just through
techniques and technology and
methods.
So if we go all the way back to Mielez.
All the way, all the way back.
All the way back.
So one of my absolute all-time heroes as
a VFX fan because he
was an absolute ground
breaker in terms of
technologies and techniques.
Have you ever seen the one
where he takes off his head?
Where he takes off his head.
Oh yeah, of course.
Yeah, so he takes off his head, he plops
it down over there and he
was doing double exposure,
masking off bits of film and then
refilming again double
exposure which is early, early
methods of compositing
and techniques and all that.
From back in the day when
it was actually compositing.
Yes, exactly.
Instead of just digitally
faking that you were compositing.
Yep, yep.
And if you watch A Trip to the Moon it's
absolutely fantastic.
And the sets, the paintings, the forced
perspective, it's all absolute genius.
But what's interesting, it was all this
genius level of
filmmaking and innovation.
He never once thought to move the camera,
which is crazy, crazy to me.
Sometimes you have no idea some of the
simple things are
restricting you in some ways.
No, it's true.
And I mean, Millie is
for what he did for film.
I mean, he's probably the first
storyteller of film, creating
a building of worlds, George
Millie is.
And what he did with his studio and for
100 films, I think he did.
And just unbelievable kind of vision to
kind of tell stories.
But you're right, it was like theatre.
It was a fixed lens, theatre,
choreographed movement, changing of set,
changing of backdrop
and so on and so on.
But then when they learned about moving
the camera, it kind of
changed the whole dynamic.
It was like something with the great
train robbery and
various things like that that
we were able to kind of do.
Wings.
Yeah, we were talking about that.
Yeah, we were literally referencing ways.
Easy.
We were actually going to build a shot of
Red Wings because
Skorskis did it with Hugo.
Ironically, it's a
story about George Millie.
Hugo is a phenomenal piece of work.
Skorskis is a film for filmmakers, but
it's for anyone wanting
to learn more about it
and how that kind of storytelling led
itself through
generations of other artists.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Nicely put.
I have a question for you both.
I'm a fan of the genre myself, but my
opinions of the history
of film changed when I read
Ben Dazzie's book,
cartoons, 100 Years of Animation.
Do you ever see that?
It came out in 1994 in Italy and then a
few years later in English translation.
Years ago when I was asked to repair a,
for those of you
listening that was air quotes,
repair an animation school, just try to
fix a few things that
were suffering there.
One of the things I did was to introduce
a mandatory history of animation course.
And I managed to get Ben Dazzie's book.
Ben Dazzie traces it back and shows how
animation predates film and how the
moving picture really
started with that because of the, just
named the fellow who
wrote the Thesaurus, Roger,
who talked about the persistence of
motion that when you,
what you're really seeing is
still pictures, but we create an illusion
in our brain that they're moving.
And that was sort of the
beginning of the whole thing.
You talked about wagon wheels, how when
they start turning at a
certain speed, they appear
to be going backwards because they're
turning faster than you can see.
And all of a sudden everybody was doing
cutout animation and
personal projectors and group
projectors, the beginning of what led to
the Melier and the
Lumiere brothers and all of
them.
So to me, all of that
sort of predates film.
And it's very controlled when you're
doing the animation about
the perspective you want
people to see from.
You control that.
So I wonder, do you think really that he
never thought to move
the camera, as you said?
Or do you think he thought about it and
decided it was too hard?
It was definitely a lot harder back then
if you see the cameras.
If you see the cameras, that's where
technology opened it up a lot.
Sure.
When you see the cameras, but also the
setups he was doing for
the course, the perspective
would change.
Yes, force perspective.
All of that was, you know, everything was
dependent on a linear optical illusion.
Yeah.
Well, I guess he was
also a magician as well.
Well, that's what he understood very
well, that where your
audience is looking is very,
very important.
So having your audience go and move
around definitely changes things.
Well, before he did, I think the camera
he created was a cinematograph.
Yeah.
But before he did that, he
talked about moving image.
The first thing he did
before all that was the car cells.
So he had these car
cells in parts of circuses.
They were treated like peep shows.
She spent a penny or whatever and you
went in to look and
these things would spin and
it would be horses galloping.
And that was before he moved into the
kind of creating the
camera and moving image.
But even when he kind of the first camera
came out, it was
actually treated as a form
of it was more for observing and even for
medicine, for human movement.
Because the first images was people
walking upstairs or walking
from one side to the other.
So on, so on.
There was one guy who
took all those photographs.
Yeah, I heard one.
Yeah.
One Matt.
Was it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's literally Matt.
You know the story of that?
Why?
Please, please.
Sequential images of a running horse.
No.
So there were these two guys running for
governor of California.
I believe it was governor of California.
This was a bad wasn't it?
Yes.
So one of them said in a speech as
certainly as a running
horse must keep one foot on the
ground at all time.
You want stable government or some
ridiculous comment like that.
The other guy said running horses have
all feet in the air at
some point and it became
a big debate.
So one of them hired this photographer to
figure out how can
you take photos of every
step a horse is taking and
all of the points in between.
So they got this man who was much more
crazy than anyone
realized at the time to set up
triggers that would go off and he put
cameras, sequential
cameras one after the other on
the posts of a fence on a racing track.
As the horse ran past cameras were
triggered
automatically one after the other.
So that sequence that you were describing
of the running horse
that came from him doing
that.
He became so famous for that as a
participant in winning a fight.
I think it was a $5,000 bet for a
politician against his
rival that he started getting
calls for doing other things.
And that's where the
art studies came from.
He had a lot of stuff of naked men and
women walking, standing,
striking different poses
just to capture motion.
He also, just as another side note inside
my side note, if you
watch any animation at
all of birds flying or if you were ever
trained to animate a bird
flying like I was a billion
years ago, it looks, if you really look
at it, it looks like the
wings are going backwards.
And that is forward stroke.
I mean, like they're stroking forwards
instead of backwards.
So it looks like they're doing the
reverse of what you'd expect.
The reason for that, his photos, because
in order to capture
the movement of a bird's
wings, she put bait down on the ground.
Oh, so they were slowing down.
So they were slowing
down when he captured them.
And the result is everybody who used his
photos for references,
which every animator did,
and I think to some degree still does.
Basically when I was training for it,
everybody used his photos.
You're capturing a bird slowing down and
treating it as though it's
animation of a bird flying
along.
And he eventually killed his wife.
Oh, the wife's turn there?
Such is the history
of film and animation.
He killed his wife and was found not
guilty because of reason of insanity.
Blitchey old magma then.
Yeah.
There we go.
Well, okay.
Speaking of...
Good talk.
On a digression ending with murder.
Yeah.
Thank you.
There's a movie there.
Why have you not seen that movie yet?
There, yeah.
Anyway, okay.
If we go through time, well, even before
then, if we think about
photography as well, I was
just recently coming up with history of
virtual reality as well.
And that going back and thinking about
stereographic imagery.
Actually as soon as people figured out
cameras, they also
figured out, take two pictures,
look at them both and you'll get depth
perception, which is, we
think, people put their headsets
on there and they're like, "Oh yeah, we
do two images, by the way.
It's ancient as well."
This is going into lawnmower, man, is it?
No, yeah.
No, yeah.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
But yeah, okay.
So let's go forward through time.
People start moving cameras and a lot of
it is, okay, we're
talking about technology,
big clunky camera, hard to move.
People are literally turning
the reels to maintain the speed.
That's why a lot of early cinemas speeds
up and slows down
because the person's arms
getting sore, turning the crank.
No, this is where doing a little bit of
research beforehand would have helped.
I'm not sure when mechanized
film reel, monitors kicked in.
Well, according to the Flintstones.
Yeah.
There's probably Simpson-Ettson about
that because Simpsons
are never wrong, are they?
No, no, ever.
Boy, let's just jump forward in time to
what we want to talk about.
Nick, you were wanting to talk about
specifically, Cam, lunch and time.
Okay.
Go, go, go, go, go.
No, I like the idea of talking about when
the equipment got
mechanized because that's
a huge step.
Like you say, that makes a standard.
Yes.
I don't know either when film cameras
first got mechanized.
Well, a standard quickly
became 24 frames per second.
Right.
That's when everybody ... Well, it really
figured out 24 frames per second.
There's a caveat to that.
So longing as for each of those 24th of a
second, the shutter is open.
If the shutter is not open, it's jerky
and jolting and it won't look right.
So that's why when ...
Your eyes are trained to ...
That's what your eyes are ...
Well, it's also with video games when
people got video games and
everyone was trained that
you only need 24 frames per second.
If there's no motion
blur, it doesn't work.
But you get natural motion blur when the
shutter is open for the 24th of a second.
Because the video games were doing eight
or 12 or 16 frames a
second instead of 24 at
first.
Okay.
I'm talking specifically ...
I've jumped to 3D video games.
I've jumped to 3D video games.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's lovely, lovely stuff about the
history of that too, which is quite fun.
So when you watch an old black and white
film and it looks like everybody's moving
at double speed, that's because they
couldn't crank at that speed.
The inconsistency of it is
exactly what you were saying.
But the fact that it's uniformly faster
when we look at it
today is because the people
who recorded, rerecorded those films for
television were capturing
them at a rate of 24 frames
per second when they were
actually shot at about 18 or 12.
Exactly.
Yes.
That just naturally speeds them up.
I seem to remember something about the
kid, Charlie Chaplin,
being the first camera that
... There was something changed with him.
I think it was something ... I
don't know the Chaplin either.
Because it was the first automatic
camera, obviously predated
sound, which was Chaplin.
And what was that, like mid 30s?
The kid, yeah, 34, 33.
Well, any kind of Chaplin was in his
heyday, kind of through
the 30s and then through the
war, obviously with the ... the dictator
and so on and so on.
That's when science kicked into it.
Well, yeah, that's a whole interesting
dimension to talk about, including
thinking about opening
a whole new dimension to an art form.
Well, it was only the
artist that did that.
Maybe the artist, was I not?
First of all, yeah.
Absolutely.
They showed the transition, though so
does singing in the rain.
Of course.
If you remember the classic film.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, Hollywood loves to tell
stories about itself, right?
They say every story you see in Hollywood
film is actually a
story about something that
happened in Hollywood.
Just occasionally they admit it, like in
singing in the rain.
The artist there is this brilliant film.
Oh, yeah.
Nice reference.
Yeah.
So is the kid.
Yeah.
I mean, the kid launched the career of
Jackie Coogan, right?
Who was a professional
actor for 70 something years.
Like that's pretty amazing.
But on top of that, it's just one of
those beautiful stories.
Rich Aplin did what
no one else was doing.
Buster Keaton to a lesser degree, Harold
Lloyd to a lesser
degree, telling an emotional
story.
Chaplin just broke your heart.
Just broke your heart.
It's really beautifully done.
It's yeah. It's where it's watching an
older clip of Spielberg
talking about how he feels
saddened that there's a wave of people
growing up on him, which is me.
Grew up on Spielberg and
influenced by him a lot.
Yeah.
And it's any art form, any artist will
say the same thing as well.
It's like, look, look to inspired your
inspirations and go far down as you can.
And you'll really start
learning what's most important.
And of course, with everything we're
talking about with film,
most important thing is story
and storytelling.
Ultimately, a continuation
since the first campfires.
That's how far.
I agree.
You stole my line.
Oh, did he?
I mean, Nicky's got a pitch about our
filmmaking company and
this is part of our pitch.
It's a good start.
OK.
Listen, you know, there's people right
now up there in the
cosmos, astronauts there because
they grew up watching Star Trek.
Hell yeah.
You know, there's doctors that are saving
lives in the air because they loved crazy
and that I mean, we're
teenagers and it's cheesy pie.
And I know that that's what we rely on
Jamie or laughing at.
But it's so true.
I mean, the stories of characters and
worlds inspire because
it's pop culture and media.
It's what we grew up on.
And it inspires and instills a belief
about wanting to do
something with your life.
And it can change.
It can change the world.
It can change your life wholeheartedly.
And I think that there's no I mean, I'm
not saying there's no
because I know music does
do this to people, too.
Of course there is.
But film is is such a powerful way of of
inspiring and
delivering meanings and messages
and commentary and
perceptions in the world.
And I think we're talking about Chaplin.
I mean, like, I mean, Chaplin, the
commentary is he delivered
in some of his kind of early
works that when it broke into proper
narrative and story.
Trailblazer, you know, trailblazer.
And for me, my my my favorite, which was
one of the kind of
main shift and we can talk
about the technological
advancements, you know, constantly.
You're the better person for speaking
about that than I am.
I love for me, I think, you know, looking
at cinema, it's not about
the technical advancements.
For me, it's about the story advancements
and the genre's in the kind of shift.
And we're going through a
really fun time right now.
And so like right now, which we'll get
to, I'm not going to jump ahead.
But we'll drag you back.
I know. I know.
But when we're talking about the Chaplin
era, can I go into the
dictator and that kind of
storytelling, my my my favorite one of my
favorite kind of waves of
cinema was was film noir.
Is film noir still is
constantly being reimagined.
And Billy Wilder, Dublin Demi.
Anything by Billy Wilder.
That that that I mean, that that movie
that Dublin Demi,
specifically that movie,
changed the landscape of
filmmaking, I think 100 percent.
Because that's at times reference to
first ever film noir film.
And what happened was it was 44.
It came out. So it
was made during the war.
And during that time, during that, like
kind of five, six years
of back and for obviously
kind of trading was all over the place.
Kind of Europe, the cultural cinema hub,
which was France at the time.
They couldn't see each
other's work because of the war.
And then once Dublin Demi was made, Billy
Wilder made Dublin Demi, he
was Fred Macaulay, etc, etc.
And that film had a
really different perspective.
And when it got out, the French says, oh,
my, oh, my gosh, what's
happened to the Americans?
This is so dark.
This is so heavy, not just
visually, but aesthetically.
It's so dark. It's so cynical.
It's noir. It's film noir.
And that's obviously a reference in the
kind of shadowy darkness as
well as the kind of characters,
because for one of the first times it was
it was an it was an antihero.
It was our protagonist was a person doing
bad things, making wrong decisions,
getting caught up in things they
shouldn't have for centralised in crime.
And I think that that had such an
influence in like you're you're also
talking about the shift
into postmodernist. Yes, exactly.
Influence at every
else. New Wave as well.
Italian Nereulism, my
one of my favourite genres.
But I'll stop there
before it. No, no, no, no, no.
I would like to back up a
bit. Yeah, yeah, please.
Not to not talk about those things, but
just to say that there's
another thing that happens
at the same time as the storytelling,
which is the technical
innovations that change the way
that you can tell the stories and the
ways that you can evoke
the emotions involved.
So if you'll pardon my
stepping back just a little bit from.
Oh, go for it.
The New Wave and the film film.
Back to the original
storytellers around the campfire.
Oh, yeah, all the way back.
Yeah, I guess a little ways. 40,000 and
60,000 years, something like that.
If you look at the cave paintings, common
from the Andertoller
times and then and around the
call it meolithic,
Mesolithic sort of times.
Um, they tend to have animal figures that
are painted in more than one colour,
but over top of each other. And when I
was studying anthropology,
it occurred to me one day,
and I mentioned it at a forum and was
laughed at because it was ridiculous.
If you were to look at these animal
figures by the
flickering light of a fire,
which is changing in hue
according to temperature.
So sometimes the flame is orange and
sometimes it's yellow.
Then the two different drawings would
appear and disappear and
you would have animation
because the deer is there
with its legs in one position.
And that visualizing I see that.
Isn't that something?
Yeah.
Yeah. I've never heard
anybody talk about that except me.
And I'm pretty sure Jackie got fire made
in here, get some crayons.
Let's let's let's put this to have.
Let's do it. Let's do it.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's
pretty much what has to happen.
And I think there's probably a stage in
cave painting where
they change from doing
single colours at a time to saying, no,
look, we can animate these characters.
Right. Will we ever see that?
I don't know. It's I can't say it's a
theory because there's no way to test it,
but it's just an observation.
I don't know.
It's just a light of fire.
And we can test whether it works.
We can't test whether or
not it's 60,000 years ago.
Yeah.
Right. So that's really interesting.
Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting.
So the technological changes have always
been a part of telling a better story.
Yes.
Or telling a good story in a better way.
And maybe the two are
kind of mixed together.
Talking about technical innovations at
the time of Chaplin, if
you've ever seen his film,
The Circus.
Of course.
There's a scene in that that just had
people screaming in
the theatres where he's
walking back and forth underneath a
swinging sledgehammer.
And the guy's driving
the stake into the ground.
And he's stepping
across it and getting it.
They filmed that backwards.
So he told the actor, no, you got to just
lift it up with all of your mind.
And they practice it and
practice it and practice it.
He was never in danger.
But it looked on the film as though he
was risking his life in
the Harold Lloyd kind of way,
instead of hanging from a clock tower
running across the tower.
Yeah. The train removing the stick.
Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. In front of the sea.
Yeah.
Right.
So Harold Lloyd was really risking his
life when the front of
the house falls down.
He's perfectly lined up
with the upstairs window.
Yeah.
Right.
Chaplin did it by reversing the film.
A point of genius for which I don't think
he gets enough credit.
He also did the roller skating scene in
the store where he blindfolds himself.
Yep.
Yeah.
Roller skates.
That's one of the first examples of...
I use it when I'm
talking about the VFX module,
because it's the concept of
layering different things.
And that's when they get the glass in
front of the camera and paint on.
Map painting. That's
where map painting comes from.
It's literally painting onto glass in
front of the camera.
Amazing, right?
And you watch the film.
And because you've grown up watching
films and you've spent the last five
years watching films,
you know what you're seeing.
And he has deceived you in order to make
a more compelling story.
I love that.
The same kind of thing was happening when
we went into film blind.
There are techniques in film noir
videography that nobody
wanted to risk before.
Lighting especially.
So much beautiful work with lighting, but
also things like the POV shaky cam.
That's right. Yeah.
Even the Dutch angle, I think at times.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you think of the film, DOA.
DOA?
Okay.
With a fellow starts the film waking up
and he's been poisoned.
And he's got 24 or 48 hours to live with
the poison in the system.
They did a remake with Dennis Quaid in
the starring role in the 1980s.
That's equally good.
Oh, really? Okay.
Yeah.
But just that the idea then we're going
to see how shaken up he is.
Because we're going to see
the world from his perspective.
Exactly.
That's a great example of the whole
concept, a method to start
implementing and using as story
that's where genre ends up being built in
the first place is all of these start
these methods and tools and techniques
and people get trained on them over time.
If you look at film, you look at like a
few years later, you look at Orson Welles
and you look specifically at touch of
evil. You see touch of evil?
I have not.
So touch of evil, what
year was touch of evil?
I hate the fact that for this, for the
law for this is we're not
looking at research because
I'm getting dates wrong. Double check
what touch of evil was.
Well, you can do research
the next time you come on.
We will just mock you for it.
We like to be wildly informed and
confidently say things.
I prefer that.
Yeah.
Is that 58?
58.
Okay. Yeah.
So good.
Right.
So, you know, 10, 15 years after, you
know, double endemic,
you look Orson Welles,
Orson Welles, absolute genius, genius.
So you have touch of evil,
which I think won the Oscar.
Um, he, the opening scene of that movie,
right? We're talking about
kind of technical and using
the camera using light is a way to kind
of inspire audience and think, right?
So touch at the start of that movie
starts with a close up of a bomb.
And this is where the whole bomb
mechanism kind of story comes from when
you're talking about,
you know, writing, where's the bomb?
So it starts off with
a close up of a bomb.
The bomb is then placed in
the boot, the trunk of a car.
I've seen the shots.
Yeah.
It's a one right.
It's placed in the trunk of the car.
The car boots close.
The car drives away.
The camera then leaves the car, one or
and goes up around the city,
seeing everything else, planting, you
know, setting the sea.
Where are we?
I don't know what city is, but we see
everything else and we see
everyone shopping and doing
their thing.
But the whole time you're
thinking, where's the bomb?
Where's the bomb?
Where's the bomb?
Where's the bomb?
And then even though we don't see it with
lost track of where it's gone,
it's in her head.
There's a bomb there.
And then the one or two,
three minutes and then boom.
That whole kind of one or the whole idea
of showing the audience
a piece of information
and then misdirecting them over here.
But they won't forget that.
That was so far before it's tight.
Hablob's gone.
Was it?
Hablob's gone.
Yes.
Chekhov's gone.
Chekhov's gone.
Chekhov's gone.
Sorry, one stock attract.
Chekhov's gone.
You know, and it's insane.
It's insane how these tools are
constantly forever being
adapted and used to kind of
empower that one main
thing, which is always story.
You know, it's a, yeah, passionate just
thinking about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as someone who's dabbled in many
forms of storytelling
from trying to make video
games with stories sometimes and films
with stories sometimes,
I'm jumping over in time.
I'm going to do it.
Go for it.
I'm jumping forward in time.
Quite a lot far in time.
I want to go back to the 60s.
So this is.
It's like that anime about the girl who
jumped through time.
I don't know which one the word.
It's called the girl who jumped through.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Well, there we go.
Yes.
Direct reference.
It's a funny thing.
There's a lot of people talking about
virtual reality and how
we're going to tell stories in
virtual reality.
The hardest, and it's where it helps
define what film is
because film is a medium where
the director has complete control over
what the audience
will experience and when.
The difference between video games and
any virtual reality
experiences is that the audience
is given a lot more control because the
audience can look wherever they want.
So you can be doing something interesting
over here, but if the
audience misses it or the
player is missing it and looking over
there or doing
something becomes very hard.
That's why cut scenes are a thing and a
lot of video games
because stop them playing.
Watch this and then it morphs into
filmmaking at that point.
I got of war being example and you're
playing the game,
you're playing the game,
but whenever there are
story elements, it's a film.
It has to cut to.
That's one of the most cinematic games.
Oh yeah.
Ever played.
Great.
But it becomes really interesting because
then there are games that
are kind of getting their
postmodern elements of starting to use
and metamodern
starting to use the mechanics
to help tell the story.
That's when it starts
getting really interesting.
It's like, okay, stop trying to be film.
What can we do to use the mechanics of
our medium to help tell the story.
That's when it will become really
transformative as the more.
Well, there are some
that do it really well.
Stanley Parable is a fun example.
It's a fun, interesting game.
It's basically all you do is walk around
and the narrative plays
through with player choice
and like you're given doors and but all
it has is an orator as
you go all the way through.
And then the rate is really well written.
It just keeps commenting on
everything that you're doing.
It's literally like four dimensional
writing that isn't it?
Oh yeah.
It's really hard to write for.
Hard to write for one perspective.
Nevermind.
Several.
It's funny that even earlier in earlier
video games, they were
actually kind of getting it a
little bit more in the potential video
games because a lot of
them were inspired by D&D,
the very early video games directly
inspired by D&D and D&D is all about.
Well, let's take the
story wherever our players go.
What modernistic
thing inspired D&D though?
Well, what research Dungeons and Dragons?
Well, played a part in research.
Not inspired originally, but researched.
Resurged it.
There's one.
Baldurk Escape 3.
Are you going to talk about it?
No, no, no, no, no.
Stranger Things.
Yes.
Yeah.
Stranger Things is a big part.
And sorry, that's
just a little side note.
No, no, no worries.
D&D itself was, should we stop for that?
It's actually okay now because I've got
AI to clean everything up.
We're talking about our recording room
being right next door to a toilet.
And sometimes we hear the hand dryer go
off, but you may not
hear this on the recording
because the AI has
cleaned it up very well.
Wait, is that AI plugin
you're using on Adobe?
Adobe Podcast.
Has it got an AI plugin for cleanup?
It's a separate thing.
Standalone, you just upload your audio
and it cleans it up.
That's wild.
I'm going to even keep this.
They do make you sign a contract for your
first three children.
That's another industry debt.
You have to cleaning up, aren't you?
Just requiring different levels of
expertise, I would say.
That's it.
Yeah.
Agreed.
Yeah.
It's not perfect.
It gets a bit warmer.
No, I know.
You got to keep it.
It gets a bit warmer.
Remember what happened when they had a
bunch of kids cleaning up the caves at
the, you know, I forget where, one of the
great Neanderthal sites, they sent French
school kids in to clean up pollution in
the caves and a bunch of
them washed off a couple
of caves.
It's not realizing what we're doing.
So giving powerful tools to people who
don't understand the domain
is a very dangerous thing.
It's like an episode of Mr. Bean.
It truly is.
It's sadly part of history
that will never be recovered.
Sorry.
I'm what?
No.
60,000 year old graffiti.
Let's get rid of it.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Because they didn't know better.
Yeah.
Not their fault.
Yeah, not their fault.
Oh, it's yeah.
Yeah.
It's a percent.
We've gone around in a spin because we
got distracted by hand drying.
Yeah.
So what I wanted to say there was D&D was
inspired by Lord of the Rings.
Yes.
Right.
And it was inspired by Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings inspired a number of
things, different types of
games in the 60s and 70s,
some interesting novels, a whole genre of
resurgence of fantasy
from classic fantasy
to modern fantasy.
The idea of different forms of reality
intersecting in fantasy, which Elsprey,
De Camp and others had done really well
with modern fantasy,
cross-dimensional fantasy,
that kind of thing.
D&D sort of encouraged all of that.
But if we look at video games, I think
video games came less
from that originally and more
from the early computer games and the
early computer games,
some of them were video based
like asteroids, who would
eventually became asteroids.
But a lot of it was command line games.
And the original command line games were
entirely two dimensional.
If you didn't follow this line, then you
could choose that line and that was it.
And that line ends three lines from now.
So you've just died.
So go back, start the game
again and choose this line.
Thank you very much.
Until Douglas Adams wrote the game for
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Have I ever had a chance to play them?
Was that like SNES?
Was it SNES that came out that game?
No. No.
Was it before SNES?
Was it?
Just curious.
Maybe there was a variation of it.
There was a few.
There was one with
live action in it as well.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, no, the original Hitchhiker's Guide
game was just a line, a command line.
It was nothing else.
And the thing that he did was being
Douglas Adams, brilliant
storyteller, hilarious writer.
She created a very multi-dimensional
world where you did not
have to follow the game plan.
You could go and get into a conversation
with an elevator and it
would lament to you how tough it
is to be an elevator for
hours worth of interaction.
Oh, I love Douglas Adams.
Was he not referenced
in Ready Player One?
Like quite heavily as well, that movie.
He's a reference.
I don't know.
Pardon me.
I love Ready Player One, the novel.
I quite like the movie, Ready Player One.
I really like the movie.
You weren't key to it.
I know.
I'm great.
You didn't read the novel, did you?
No.
Sorry.
In the movie, it's Warner Brothers.
In the novel, it's all human culture.
So the characters are not
all coming from one company.
Sorry, I just cut you off and dodge it.
No, I'm not always.
But I strongly
recommend the novel to anyone.
The sequel is also good.
I think Jackie's loaded up the game for
us to quickly have a
look at what it looks like.
Yeah, I think so.
Is that what it looked like?
Is that the thing?
It does look like it, yeah.
So it's hard to say.
I want to play that now, but I can talk
to an elevator for a few hours.
Yeah, I know.
It was Douglas.
It's pretty astounding.
Yeah.
If you love Douglas
Adams, you'll like that.
He also worked on another game with one
of the Pythons, Terry Jones.
Terry Gilliam.
No, Terry Jones is the other Terry.
Yeah, Terry Gilliam, the actor, comedian,
animator, and then
Terry Jones, the author,
actor, producer, and director.
I don't know, really.
Yes, they're both actors,
producers, and directors.
Yeah.
Terry Jones did a documentary, I think,
for the BBC on the
Middle Ages, which is worth
seeing even if you don't give a damn
about the Middle Ages just
because Terry Jones is brilliant
or was brilliant.
It's kind of the themes of audience
interaction, isn't it?
Like when you're looking at the kind of
games what an audience can interact with,
like that games when you're looking at
like Ready Player One
about interaction with world's
interaction with
entertainment experiences.
Even VR.
It's about kind of interactions with
world around you and player choice.
And I think that's a kind of really
important thing that we've
seen evolve through the kind
of history of storytelling in cinema is
how the content is
delivered to the audience,
not just tools, not just the tools used
in terms of the visual
stories, but distribution models
as well, like how a person can engage
with the work, where they can see it,
where they can watch
it, where they can react.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's where streaming has changed
things a lot as well.
Every director now feels indulged to make
three hour movies because
we don't get it yet.
I'm building up to that.
I'm building up to that as
a massive Skorskoeze fanboy.
Unfortunately, great filmmakers aren't
the only ones doing it.
I know.
Going back to kind of like the kind of
distribution models and how things are
released to the audience,
like kind of moving on from the look to.
We talked about touch of
evil moving in the sixties.
One of my favorite kind of
stories is Hitchcock's psycho.
Sorry, I'm thinking.
Hitchcock's psycho,
slowly going out of shot.
Before Hitchcock's psycho, there was no
such thing as show in times.
So like if you want to see a movie, you
go to the movie, you
pay your 25, 50 cents.
And then you would go in and the movie is
just, it's just on loop.
So people were just the norm, walking at
a theater halfway through a movie,
sit and watching the second half and then
watching the first half to
where you walked in and then
leave it.
Or you can watch it again.
Have you ever heard the expression?
This is where I came in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is that where it comes from?
That's where it comes from.
All right.
So, so, Hitchcock, this is a really fun
marketing story as well.
Hitchcock's psycho was the
first film to use show types.
It was the first thing to use show times.
And the reason why they did it is because
the marketing was
heavily linked to Janet Lee.
Janet Lee was a
brilliant kind of actress.
There's been loads of things.
She was an A-lister, you know, superstar.
And she was said to be the main
character, but she dies
20 minutes in the movie.
There's no such thing as that.
Spoiler.
There's no such thing as a spoiler.
That movie, 60 years old now.
I'm sorry, a moment ago, you were
encouraging people to see the film.
Well, you still need to watch the film.
You still need to watch the film.
But, you know, she was
marketed as the star of the movie.
She dies 20 minutes in the movie.
So Hitchcock realized that, hi, on a
second, you know, this is a big thing
where I need the audience to see from the
beginning right through.
So he demanded for the,
it'd be screening times.
And if you weren't there five minutes
before you were locked, you
had to go to the next screening.
And that is still with us today.
That little kind of change in how the
audience indulged in the
kind of crafts you give them.
Because if you walked into that movie
half an hour after it started,
you'd be sitting there
waiting to see Janet Leigh.
Where's Janet Leigh?
She's over all the posters.
She died 10 minutes ago, you know?
And it changed not only what theaters can
get away with, which was saying,
oh no, you pay for one
show, you get one show.
Right?
So it gave them the power to do that.
It also changed what
storytellers could do with their films
where you didn't have to be
non-sequentially entertaining.
Yeah.
Right?
Instead of saying every shot
is going to be entertaining,
whether you see the first half of the
movie, the second half, or
in reverse order or whatever.
All of a sudden you could say, this is a
story that starts here.
And it's going to build up.
So be there for the buildup.
Yeah.
And that changed everything
about cinema, in my opinion.
There's, TV's had a
similar cycle as well with them.
Everything used to be serialized.
Meaning, if you take the original--
I'll use Star Trek as the example because
Star Trek's a good example.
You watched the original
series or TNG, Next Generation.
You can drop in any single episode.
Has a start, a middle, and an end.
Self-contained.
And by the next generation,
they were really good at it.
They tell really, really good stories in
30 minutes or whenever they are.
Then, as audiences of more on-demand
technologies have come in,
people have got more comfortable telling
longer arcs along TV series.
To the point where if you
watch any new Star Trek, they--
I'm not a fan.
I know people like it.
But they have these long arcs and it kind
of feels like they're trying to go for
the Marvel audience.
And they're going for all the big--
The movies were good.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They're OK.
Yeah.
Some of them.
The new movies.
Popcorn.
Yeah, I hate them.
Yeah.
And there's--
What?
I hate the new Star Trek movies.
Really?
I don't like them that much.
I agree.
I actually like them.
No, there's some--
The sequel is OK.
No, I'm sorry.
I say that having never watched any of
the other Star Trek.
Well, I've been a fan of Star Trek since
the original series
wasn't called original
because it was the only one.
Yeah.
It was just Star Trek.
Do you know that
there's astronauts in space?
[LAUGHTER]
So, yeah.
Often when I'm criticizing, as I did in a
publication a couple of years back,
the new versions of Star
Trek, the line I like to use is,
does this Len Flair
make my plot look thin?
[LAUGHTER]
There is lots of Len--
JJ is a lot of Len Flair.
There's very thin plots.
If you look at the original concept of
Star Trek, in order to market it,
he had to do episodic television because
that's what people wanted.
People say Star Trek is
just a wagon train in space,
and they're misunderstanding a famous
line from a pitch, which was,
it will be the television series wagon
train, except in space.
Wagon train was the most
popular series on television.
One of the reasons producers loved it was
because you had a core cast
who were directing this wagon train,
which was huge and had
hundreds of people in it.
And you only knew a few.
So every episode, they would land in a
different town or patch of
desert or native reserve,
and they would be
interacting with new characters.
So you could bring in the guest star,
give them a great
dramatic role for one episode.
And if your regulars gave you any guff,
they were in a different part of the
wagon train this week.
That's when space
toys killed cowboy toys.
Thank you, Star Trek.
Well, actually, thank you, Lost in Space,
which was a good few.
Well, you probably know more about this.
I mean, I heard that.
I don't indulge in conspiracy theories,
but some of them are fun.
So sure.
Sure.
Sure.
Some diseases are fun.
There was one of our Star Trek.
And there was one.
There's a group of people that genuinely
believe who creates Star Trek again?
Gene Roddenry.
Gene Roddenry.
Yeah.
So there was if you heard that rumor that
apparently, like people
say that he was contacted
by outerworldly things and gave them
inspiration to start kind of tuning
humans into understanding.
So when it does happen,
we're kind of a used to it.
That's what a lot of
people genuinely believe that.
Yeah.
They're welcome to believe.
Yeah.
I'm not saying I believe.
No, no.
If it gives them comfort at night when
the sky is dark and the world is cold,
then more power to them.
Gene Roddenry, he was a cop and he was
inspired to write Star Trek,
in part because he had a vision of a
post-war world where
people wouldn't care so much
about personal things and they could see
themselves as part of a larger picture.
All right.
In part because of a pamphlet that was
written by Vannevar Bush,
who was the lead scientist of the United
States appointed by a
president who died before he could
read Vannevar Bush's report.
So he was appointed by Roosevelt.
Roosevelt died before Bush wrote his
first prospectus about
the future focus of science,
post-war focus of
science in the United States.
He gave it over to Truman instead.
Vannevar Bush is the guy who wrote the
famous magazine article,
as we may think, where he predicted
things like drive
process, miniature cameras,
people taking selfies, people doing their
own videos, the desktop
as the basis of computer
technology, information being freely
available and the
connections you make with it being more
important than the
information you generate.
So he predicted all those things.
He wrote a pamphlet about the future of
science and post-war where he said,
in the same way that he had coordinated
thousands of
scientists and a huge budget,
I think $5 billion at the time for all
science in the United
States during the war,
leading to the Manhattan
Project and all that stuff.
He said, we can do that post-war and
tackle other things.
And his idea was tackle
the sea, tackle space.
He wrote a beautiful little pamphlet
about space in which he
used a number of phrases
that reappear in the opening sequence of
every Star Trek episode.
- Really? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Great lore there.
- Again, this is another thing that I've
written about and I haven't
seen anybody else write about
it, but hopefully those of you paying
attention to the podcast,
well, now claim it as your own.
- Yeah, confidently say it.
- Whoa.
- Yeah.
- No, it's fascinating.
- So this is where the inspiration for
going to space came from.
It came from Vannevar Bush and this idea
that we could do
something better with humanity
by taking all of the money that we've
been using for war and all of the--
- Oh, yes.
- ... effort.
- Yeah.
- Truman said no.
He decided that the money could end
effort and government
interest could best be given
to the military and to
the development of industry.
And when Truman retired, he gave a speech
in which he first, the
first person to use the phrase,
the military industrial compromise, and
he wanted that it would
take over the world because of
decisions he had made.
- Yep, yep.
- I like to think that that's the
splitting point between our
world and the world of Star Trek,
was that in the world of Star Trek, maybe
a different president,
maybe Truman, listened
to Vannevar Bush and said,
okay, we're developing space.
- Yeah.
- It's quite sad though.
- Sad story.
- It's also--
- Like humanity.
- But Gene Rondry, Gene Elise was
obviously quite
optimistic about the future.
It's all there in the original Star Trek
original, and the TNG especially.
So one of the reasons why I don't like
new Star Trek, it's a
very post-modernist take
on everything.
Like we're all bad, we have no chance, we
are the worst things in the universe.
- What gets me if you'll pardon my
jumping in, but with
Star Trek and I have to,
in the original series and in the next
generation, the crew were
experts who came from a society
where you could be an expert.
And if you had any potential for
expertise, all of society
supported you in being the best
at this that any human has ever been.
So they had these absolute experts who
were solving incredibly
complex problems in nice,
simple narrative.
- Yes.
- The newer versions of Star Trek,
especially the
movies, the latter movies--
- Oh, they're surface that--
- They took the exact opposite approach
on every one of those dimensions.
The characters have not
finished their training.
Some of them haven't even
started their training yet.
So they're experts,
they're emotional children.
- One of them becomes a captain.
- Yeah, that day.
And so they have no expertise.
- I love your passive
aggression towards the new Star.
They're solving incredibly blase
problems, but in a complicated story.
- Yeah.
- So they try to make the storytelling as
complicated as possible.
They give childish
solutions to childish problems,
being performed by people who argue with
each other and never coalesce as a team.
- Yep.
- Star Trek was all about what they
called the Vulcan
ideology of infinite diversity
through infinite combinations.
The more different you are, the better
you can work together.
- Yes.
- Star Trek, the motion picture, or Star
Trek, what was it called?
- I think it's just--
- Star Trek is the movie.
- Star Trek, then Star Trek into
darkness, and it was Star Trek.
- Oh, man, oh man.
- Something, something.
- Star Trek, our ship is being destroyed.
We need to get over to that ship.
Let's fire ourselves out of missile tubes
through an asteroid field
where we will, by sheer force of heroism,
avoid all of the things that could kill
us and find holes in that ship
that somehow lead to
contained atmosphere.
- Plot armor.
Plot armor.
Lazy writing.
- Oh, the worst lazy writing.
- I did that in Star Wars
with Princess Leia as well.
- A lot of it happened
with Doctor Who as well.
- Oh, I don't--
- Doctor Who, his sonic screwdriver just
became the laziest piece of writing ever.
- I've never been a big cube.
I've never been a big--
- But you know it.
- So it's interesting, though,
because I can't really
contribute much to Star Trek.
- No worries.
I'm sorry.
We've talked more than a lot.
- No, but I would love
you to actually guide me
and where it's best to
start with Star Trek,
because I've always
wanted to actually watch it.
- A two-part episode called The Cage,
which was the first episode of the--
was the original pilot of Star Trek.
- And I'm lucky
enough that I've got some--
so like my--
one of my mentors when I
was over in the States,
I haven't spoken to him in a long time,
but he was Adam Nimoy.
It was Leonard Nimoy's son.
- Oh, really?
Adam?
No kidding.
- Yeah.
And he was our directing instructor,
and he used to tell
us all these kind of--
just like the most genius of stories
about being on that set
and how they kind of
overcame various things,
with this dad,
obviously, Leonard, rest in peace,
and all that kind of things.
And I was so--
I couldn't-- I didn't appreciate it as
much as someone like you would.
- No, I would have
been fanboying all of it.
- Yeah.
But he was like the
nicest guy, and he was so--
I actively still input his
teachings into everything we do,
because he was very kind of black and
white, this, this, and this.
But his insight was just
incredible, right, about it.
He used to tell us his kind of stories
about being on set and stuff,
and it was just amazing.
And we had--
but you brought up
Doctor Who there a second.
Now, I've never been a
big Doctor Who guy, either.
I just haven't.
And I know a lot of people that are, and
talk about the new series,
but it's kind of the full circle that
we're talking about.
And what you were talking
about there with Star Trek
was I'm going to try and go
around in a big circle here,
link this back to the Golden Age.
- We like circles.
- We do like circles.
I'm going to link this
back to the Golden Age,
and I'm going to carry
forward both of our talk--
- Thank you for
telling us your red thread.
I appreciate that.
- That's for me.
I want to start track about the kind of
stories in the episodes,
whereas it's complex stories, and people
working together as teams,
and all that kind of stuff.
But every episode had
a form of commentary.
Had something to say.
Had themes, had lessons.
- Yes, yes. Very important.
That's what I think we
believe that's what cinema is for.
That's what the storytelling is.
It's the reason why it's a point in time.
It's about actively
engaging with a problem,
or something that you want to see that
reflects real world,
because that's what builds empathy and
has audience attached.
And that's what we talk about when we're
talking about Elevate genre,
or what's a meta-modernist--
- Meta-modernist.
So the difference being-- and this is
high-level explanation,
I've heard other people
say, but one way to look
at it as post-modernistic is really good
at critiquing and pointing out flaws,
but that's all it does.
Right? And it's really easy to critique
and point things out,
and say, that's rubbish,
that's rubbish, that's rubbish.
- It's about having
the following solution.
- What's harder, yeah, is to come along
and have a positive
outlook for a solution.
That's what meta-modernism is, coming
around and actually having--
okay, pointing out all the flaws,
using everything as tools to point out
all the flaws, and saying,
this is bad, that's bad.
But then figuring out a
way to come back around
and have a positive
outlook on how to improve things.
- Jamie just encapsulated what it means
to mark work from students as well.
- That's wrong,
that's wrong, that's wrong,
but I need to tell you
how to make it better.
- Yeah.
- No, but so that problem about the lack
of that, the lack of depth,
we just came out of a
huge lull in Hollywood.
We've been on our way back out of it,
where we've had this,
the last 10 years, it's not been great.
- There's, like, any
time there's isolated--
- There is, but it comes in cycles,
and it kind of happened as
well in the 70s, in Hollywood.
And this probably had this kind of lull,
because there was the,
what was the name of that?
The company that pretty much censored
everything that you could put in,
you couldn't have a
flushing toilet, a movie.
What was the name of it?
No, it was like the overseer of films, of
what people could and
couldn't say or do in movies.
- Oh, the guidance board.
- Yeah, it was the firm, I
can't remember the name of it,
but it put so much
limitation on creativity,
like, and there's some ridiculous things,
like you couldn't have a flushing toilet,
you could cush, you couldn't swear,
you couldn't have
violence, you couldn't have blood.
And because of that, there was this
constant conveyor belt of
just the same, constantly.
And people got bored of
it, so the numbers dropped.
But then what happened was, in the 70s,
starting at the golden age,
mixed 70s, the industry
thought, you know what,
we need to change for
our younger audience.
This is what relates to
what we're seeing now.
And we said, and they says, okay,
what we need to do is we need to change,
we need to look at our younger audience,
because we're losing them.
So what they did was, they tore up the
guidance of what it was,
and then they empowered young auteur,
young filmmakers, to
come up and make things.
That is Beilberg.
What were some of these names?
Joyce.
Joyce, George Lucas, Star
Wars, and his wife, of course.
There was Warren B. Did
Warren B direct Bonnie and Clyde?
No, who directed the
original Bonnie and Clyde?
Oh, boy.
Bonnie and Clyde, there was Dennis
Hopper, easy writer.
And there was loads of this, Michael
Shimino, deer hunter.
You know, that kind of
rates, what happened was,
they kind of empowered these smaller
budget things to go and
do whatever they wanted.
And look what happened.
It was the golden age of cinema, the
golden age of Hollywood.
And that kind of happened.
But one of my favorite things that
happened, it's linkable to what you were
talking about earlier,
was one of those filmmakers, Michael
Shimino, that did deer
hunts, which was a masterpiece.
Absolutely.
They said to him, right,
well, one year, do another one.
And this is what
closed that circle again.
One year, do another one.
And I wanted to give
him more money to do it.
And he took a project
called Heaven's Gate.
You heard of it?
Heaven's Gate was a project.
It is known to be the biggest bomb in
cinematic history because they,
too much power, they
went well over budget.
Oh, tens of millions at
that time over budget.
And what happened was that closed the
circle where the Hollywood studios
would just have to step back in and say,
no, we're not-- we can't do this anymore.
We need input to make sure our
investments are being protected.
And but now it's gone back again because
what you were saying about streamers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What's happening there?
Now, because Netflix started making a
heck of a lot of money,
and everyone else started coming in,
making their own services and whatever.
But then because the best things that
work on those platforms
is long episodic series.
So our long episodes, 10 part series,
kind of standard-ish,
what they're going for.
Because that model's popular and stranger
things just becomes this
massive industry machine.
Everyone else is going, let's do that.
Let's do that.
Let's do that.
So everyone now has kind of
gone into this emboldened--
like, so because that model was making
money, studios are going, OK, come to us.
What's your creative?
What's your creative?
OK, I've got a feature here.
I want to do this and this.
It's just gazey or no.
I've got this feature I want to do.
And then they say, OK, that's good.
But can you make that a series?
And then all of a sudden, you end up with
a lot of these series that are just
stretched out features.
They're really--
Or you get features that are three and a
half hours long because
the studio wants that the
streamer wants that director.
So they say, you have
full creative control.
And then you give out the-- you never--
even if it's us, you don't
give us full creative control.
I'll remember that.
No, no, you can't because you get
polluted by your work and
it's hard to kind of fall
and there's only a few to do it.
It's what editors are called.
Oh, god.
Editors are a profession that are
massively, massively underrated.
I agree.
But yeah, but we had
the Oscars last week.
And I like Hames Skersky as a fanboy.
You were talking about
your Syphus, Bill, but me too.
But Skersky's, for me, is
the kick, Hitchcock as well.
But man, Killers of the Flower Moon, I'm
still trying to watch it.
I'm still trying to finish it.
It is--
Just too powerful or too long.
Too long.
The content isn't even that heavy
around-- it looks great
and does all the things.
But the pacing is just
like-- I'm just like, oh, my god.
Why is this taking so
long to go anywhere?
And if Oppenheimer was the same-- and I
feel horrible and dirty for saying it
because everyone was
like, oh, my god, Oppenheimer.
And it was beautiful and
well-acted performance.
There's no reason for that to be three
and a half hours long.
OK, now don't take this personally.
Please.
But you also like the new start.
I like the--
There's extremes.
There's extremes.
We all have those
kind of guilty pleasure.
Oh, absolutely.
There's a lot of films that I wouldn't
recommend to anyone
that I absolutely enjoy.
Yeah.
And games and comics and novels, too.
Of course.
There's a time for watching art or
interacting with art.
Yeah, mindset.
Exactly.
Yeah, sometimes-- a lot of the time, I'll
go home in the evening.
And I just want to watch a YouTube video.
I want to watch someone on
YouTube talk about something.
There are other times I want to go on
movie and watch something really good.
It was a really good piece
of cinema and learn from it.
Being moved.
But then, yes, sometimes you just want--
You need something just
2D, something to switch off.
And I get that.
You know, my switch off
movies I have, we all have--
Let's all share a switch off movie that
you would never see.
Let's do that.
It's good fun.
So I did like the Star
Trek and the Kimmock.
Because you know what?
I call them easy watches.
You don't have to overthink it.
In fact, you can't.
We can't really overthink it.
No, because the minute
you do, it's just nonsense.
It falls apart.
And I also really love
the Harry Potter movies.
Love the Harry Potter movies.
I can watch them,
rewatch them constantly.
Because in the world, the story, the
characters, the stuff.
I'm with you.
The chain.
Yeah.
And they're easy watches, you know?
There's nothing wrong with them.
There's some good pieces in them, like
that in the hot ones.
Especially when you get to the third one.
The Goblet of Fire,
when it starts going dark.
See, that's interesting now.
I would say the Goblet of Fire is a
directorial misfire.
You think so?
Not all the way through.
Some of it is beautiful.
I'm thinking, wait, which one?
Prisoner Azkaban.
This is where it's the first see-dart.
That's the third one.
Yeah, that's one.
That's when it starts going dark.
Yeah, the Goblet of Fire
is the first proper death.
The director of Prisoner
Azkaban is, I forget his name,
is Guillemaud de Torre, his friend.
Who did Prisoner Azkaban?
It's on the tip of my tongue.
It's annoying me.
Because it's--
Alfonso Coro.
Alfonso Coro did the later ones, I think.
He's really-- it's fantastic.
It-- yeah, I agree.
Directing.
Absolutely beautiful.
The race-like creatures coming to the
train for the first time.
Cinematically, that's
gorgeous in terms of the graphics,
in terms of the story.
Alfonso Coro, yeah, you're right.
It's Alfonso Coro.
Yeah, so yes, I like that.
What I didn't like is the
way that the new Dumbledore
is directed in Goblet of Fire.
Right.
You've got to--
Well, he came-- he was in the third one.
He was in--
He was.
Prisoner of Us.
Yeah.
I can hear my wife, who loves Harry
Potter, is screaming.
No, that's what the percent is.
Guarantee you.
It was Richard Harris for the first two,
and then Michael Gambon
stepped in from the third onwards.
Yeah.
And he was, I think, directed
incorrectly in the character.
Maybe part of it was making his own
statement on the character.
Oh, OK.
But the character in the
books and in the first two films
is not flustered by anything at all.
Yeah, it's chill.
Yeah.
He is so old and so
powerful and so cool--
Yeah.
That just nothing bothers him.
When Harry's name is found
to be in the Goblet of Fire--
He's a part of--
It's a meme.
It's also a meme of Harry.
Is it?
Yeah.
I don't look at memes because it's a
theft of a proper word.
Well, the meme is,
it's one line in the book.
It's just like one
simple line is something--
I can't remember, but it's really simple.
And then it cuts to
how it is in this film.
And he's like, rah, rah, rah.
He's rushing and
screaming and he's angry.
Yeah.
And it's just like a total
violation of the character
takes you out of the story.
So let me ask you this.
Do you think that's a
choice to up the stakes
for the cinematic purposes?
It might have been, but I don't know
if it was the directors or the actors.
A lot of actors--
The writers probably, maybe as well.
It's possible.
I know that there's a
common thing in stage actors
who go to film.
At least I've read about it
in a couple of autobiographies,
including recently Patrick Stewart's,
that there's a common
thing that they do where,
in the same way that on stage,
they would have many attempts
to show the character,
they keep it alive by taking
slightly different takes on
the character all the time.
Sometimes when they're
filming, they'll do each take
with a different
interpretation of the lines.
And I wouldn't be
surprised if somebody thought,
at some point, Gambon thought, I'm
going to do it once with rage.
Yeah.
And somebody thought,
that's a better moment.
Rage and fear.
That's a more exciting--
Rage and fear.
It could have, at that point, it could
have been the editor.
I believe Spider Robinson's admonition
that anger is always
fear.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
Well, that could have been the editor
deciding it was a better--
Yeah.
I think it could have been.
It could have been a producer.
It could have been any of the
people who get to stand over
the editor's shoulder and
say, hey, you're an artist,
and you're doing really great work,
but I think you should do this.
See, I could imagine
that scene any other way.
If-- like, could you-- it wouldn't work.
It wouldn't work if he was calm about it.
Do you think?
But I don't know.
I think the most powerful
people tend to be very calm.
Oh, yeah.
I think you could show
that scene way better if you
use the Sorcerer's
Apprentice as a reference.
That is a wise, scary man coming in.
OK.
Yeah.
Even if you just imagine--
How have we arrived here?
This is the most tangent conversation.
Welcome to soft talk.
Welcome to soft talk.
Exactly.
We're talking about joys a minute ago,
and we're talking about a
beat and gobble of fire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you think about Dumbledore greeting
the first year students
for the first time--
Yes.
And the beneficent way that he presides
over an entire castle
full of magic that he
had never seen before.
Imagine him doing that in that scene.
Maybe a slight tinge of sadness.
Maybe a slight tinge of surprise here.
But not even that.
He's only asking the question because
everybody wants him to.
Yeah, because Harry--
He knows that it wasn't Harry.
Yeah.
And Harry was-- that's interesting.
Because Harry was--
Harris was in the first two--
unflappable, he would say.
Like, it was very soft.
You know what?
Let me-- let's work on that a second.
Let's do it.
Because-- no, because this is good.
Because-- OK.
So let's have a look at the
second one, "Chamber Secrets."
OK?
So once--
See, I would say
that's when it gets dark.
It does get dark there
because once the chambers open
and we have that scene
with the dude's cat that's
been petrified.
The dude's cat.
Right?
The dude's cat--
felt-- is cat that's been petrified.
It's hanging there and it's got blood.
The Chamber of Secrets has been open.
Everyone arrives.
It's Richard Harris, isn't it?
That's the name.
Is it Richard Harris?
Yes.
Yeah.
Richard Harris arrives.
Everyone's freaking out.
McGonagall's about to lose their shit.
Which does not happen.
Yeah, I know.
Everyone's panicking.
Snape's there.
The janitor guy's wanting to kill them
because they've done his cat.
I wonder-- because he--
Harris arrives.
He's very calm.
He's-- your cat is fine.
He'll be whatever.
Healed.
And then they kind of carry--
he does approach it
with a degree of calmness.
I wonder what that scene would have been
like with McGonagall.
That same scene.
Would he have been lighter or grander?
I mean, I don't know.
I've gone.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I would have been--
Like you were saying, I
don't know if it would have been
the actor who made a difference.
It would have been the
writers who made a difference.
Yeah.
It would have been Christopher Columbus
or Chris Columbus taking a backseat one.
Yeah, Christopher Columbus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
I don't know which of those it was.
But I loved the way that
Dumbledore was portrayed
in the first two films.
Yeah.
In the later films, there are parts of it
where it's just beautiful.
But there are parts,
especially that one scene
in "The Goblet of Fire,"
where there's just an anger there
that, yes, makes a dynamic scene--
Yes.
But doesn't serve the
characters or the story.
And that is exactly how
I feel about the entirety
of the modern "Star Trek" films.
Yep, yep.
It absolutely makes an exciting moment,
but that does not serve
the characters or the story.
So it's never going to let me off the
thing, the best one,
is it?
Never.
Never.
That has changed our working relationship
and our friendship forever.
No, I agreed.
So this is also where--
yeah.
It's where you have to--
me and Nicky are filmmakers
are making sure we try and--
you know, it's a craft
you've got to work on,
and you've got to try and
figure out what kind of filmmaker
do you want to be and what kind of
stories do you want to tell.
And that's something
we've been trying to do,
is to not get dragged in directions
that people end up going down of, you
know, flashing funds.
Take that, realize that.
Yeah, we were really
trying to focus on, OK,
but what is the heart?
What is the heart of it?
If you strip this all the
way back, I mean, there's--
forget-- I forget who wrote the book,
but there's a book--
it's into seven plots.
And it's an argument that there are
basically seven stories.
And--
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You've got right of passage.
You've got the kind of rights to riches.
You've got rights to--
yeah, I've read that.
Who is that again?
Please look for that, the seven plots.
I am--
Is it-- was it Goldman?
I forgot it's sitting on my shelf.
Seven plot books.
We're checking this because we
want to be right on this one.
The seven basic plots, there it is.
Who is it?
It is Christopher Booker.
Is that the right one?
Is that--
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
Is that the one you're talking about?
I don't know.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, that's not the one I was thinking.
No.
Me neither.
Well--
That's from 2004.
And it's based on Jungian psychoanalysis.
Yeah, yeah.
And then there's also
Joseph Campbell as well with--
He was during--
That year of a thousand.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A year of a thousand faces.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
But anyway--
Robert McKeigle, I mean.
Different people saying
ultimately the same thing
is that there are
foundational human stories.
And ultimately, no
surprise, we all kind of go
through similar things throughout life.
And fundamentally, the human experience
is we like to pretend
that we're massively
different than our
ancestors and predecessors,
when really a lot of our
experiences are the same.
And when you strip
back really good stories,
that is what they're doing.
They are-- they are one of the-- we're
going all the way back
to campfires now.
The reason you're
telling campfire stories
is to teach quite often
as well, is to teach--
you can just say, hey,
be a good person in life.
There are lines like, don't
judge a good by its cover,
which, OK, yeah, that makes sense.
But a story lets you
synchronize with a character.
And you go through all the motions.
So it's almost like a
simulation in a way.
It's kind of like a
simulation to go through a journey
and potentially maybe learn
something by the end of it,
where you're not in danger.
You've learned.
Yeah.
I agree.
In fact, I think the simulation part of
it is really important.
As we've discussed before, I think
there's not much
difference between the way--
in terms of our anatomical senses,
in terms of the way we cognitively deal
with the sensory information we collect.
There's not much
difference between experiencing
the story firsthand and
experiencing the story
someone is telling you as
long as you're immersed in it.
Yep.
Right?
It's a recipe.
That's a handstick.
It's a recipe.
You get more and more intense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You start blocking the light on track.
Have to put you on a track.
Like the camera and wings.
The thing I was trying
to say is the experience
of being told a story, if it's engaging,
allows you to feel that you have
experienced those lessons.
Yes.
It's the same thing with cinema.
It's the same thing with video games.
If the story is engaging cognitively,
emotionally, inspirationally,
then you feel like
you've lived those things.
If you talk to people about a video game,
they don't say, and then
the character did this.
Right?
They say, I did this,
and then I did that.
Right?
So they're experiencing it viscerally.
Yeah.
I think that when it comes to that idea
of following this recipe,
as we all speak about the recipe,
and the things that we want to do, right?
We want to go to market.
We want to kind of get a
sense of what people like.
But what we follow the
tried and tested methods,
and anybody that says, don't follow that,
do completely different, no one's going
to watch it or see it.
Because the audience likes familiar
hierarchy to an extent.
And it's about kind of
building the same kind of structures
and stories and themes
that we know people like.
That's why I love horror.
Love horror, you know?
We know what people like with the same
kind of character beats,
the same kind of
structures, the same kind of tones.
But then you kind of take the mechanics
and you change them.
You make them more unique.
That's what you elevate your project to
be something different.
It's a unique spin on something.
So like, I always use this as an example,
and I kind of run with it.
Because I think it help
typifies what we're trying to do,
what we're saying.
Have you seen the movie Taken?
Have you seen the-- what's that about?
Give me a sentence.
What's Taken about?
Liam Neeson goes on a
rampage to get his daughter.
Yes.
I would say it's about the powerlessness
that older men feel when their families
don't need them anymore.
That's an interesting perspective.
That's really deep.
I don't think the writers
of Taken even went that deep
with that to be honest, Joe.
No, of course.
Have you seen the movie Prisoners?
Dennis Villanue?
Yeah.
No.
OK.
What's-- you need to watch.
I loved Denis Villanue.
Yeah, yeah.
It's one of his early stuff.
What's Prisoners about?
It's kind of the same plot.
It's the same plot.
It's the same thing.
It's about a father that
leaves their daughters.
I'll try to win them back.
Two of the same plots.
Are they the same
movie, Taken and Prisoners?
No.
They're so different.
So the mechanics are the same.
It's desperation.
It's need.
It's helpless, powerless fathers looking
for their daughters in need.
And the desperation to go through them
having to kind of unleash the monster
to do whatever they take to do it.
But the way in which these two characters
do their things is so, so different.
One is kind of action quick pace where we
don't really even know
the name of the bad guy.
And one is a father in desperation going
dark, doing everything they can,
sacrificing
everything to get the answers.
Now that's two of the same plots, but the
way in which the mechanics that Villanue
used for prisoners to kind of bring out
that desperation is incredibly different.
And one of my favorite things about it is
when people talk about cinematography,
okay, it was Roger
Deakins that did Prisoners.
Two's a genius, as we know.
Now, when you talk about
like beautiful cinematography,
everyone's going to speak about Dune or
Blade Runner or the
assassination of Jesse James,
which is unbelievable
to watch and look at.
For me, one of my favorite cinematography
films is Prisoners because it is perfect
cinematography for that
movie because it's ugly.
It's ugly.
And it's and it mirrors that of the
character's journey.
And I was a really interesting interview
with Deakins where he was talking about
inspiration.
Now we were talking about
inspiration being inspired.
We're kind of inspired by,
you know, a lot of A24 stuff.
Nope.
You know, Jordan Peele stuff, Elevie,
Jordan, or familiar stories,
but just done in really unique ways.
Whenever you look at any cinematographer
that's going to look big
for a way to do a project,
any cinematographer in that lookbook, if
they had like a 20 page lookbook full of
visual references and comparable smaller
movies, I give you, I give you, you know,
good money that there's going to be at
least one Roger Deakin shot in that book,
because he has that impact
on aspiring cinematographers.
He's everyone's hero Deakins in terms of
what he's going to do.
Being so, he's so modal and adaptable to
what he does to fit the story.
And he did an interview when he was
talking about his
inspiration and he was talking about
his inspiration of photography.
And he was showing these photos of
artists, photographers,
and other movies in his work
that he was inspired by.
And he held them side by
side with some of his frames.
So some of his frames that people were
inspired with thinking,
I saw your Deakins man.
No one could do that.
So I do Deakins.
He's like, no, no, look.
And he showed it and there's a shot in
prisoners where it's like,
it's like a bike in a yard.
It's a beautifully shot
kind of bike in a yard.
And it's like a kind of, it's rainy.
It's a bit rusty and so on.
And there's people walking.
He took the same picture that was just a
snap pull away from an artist.
The next, it's the same shot.
The same shot.
And it's just like, that's Deakins.
People use Deakins in that way, but
there's no level of
inspiration for anyone.
I think that's really beautiful.
That we're going to be people in
pedestals and being inspired, of course.
Like me, I'm really inspired by Steven
McQueen, filmmaker Steven McQueen.
And one of, well, just on that, one of my
favorite ones is the whole
character of Indiana Jones.
Okay.
The whole character of Indiana Jones,
there was one serial
cover that is an adventurer
jumping off a horse onto a
truck and it's Indiana Jones.
It's literally Indiana Jones and even
recreate that shot in Raiders.
George Lucas saw that and was like, I'm
going to make a whole
character based on that.
And it's just one image.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we'll see if you can see it.
See Indiana Jones original serial cover.
Maybe we'll find it.
Maybe we want maybe this.
The horse named after Indiana Jones.
I don't have a wife that.
I put in horse as well,
just because it might.
You were.
We might.
Yeah.
The horse called Indy.
The youngest.
Yeah.
There it is.
I think that first one.
We're getting the dog, is it?
No.
We're getting the dog in there.
Okay.
This is not going to find it.
Oh, there's the actual shot in the film.
I'm jumping.
I'm jumping off the horse.
I've got fun trivia.
I can't find the
truth about Indiana Jones.
Oh, I could talk all
day about Indiana Jones.
Well, you know, you can see me wearing
like, I wear these types
of shirts literally because
of Indiana Jones.
I've got a pair of glasses
because of Indiana Jones.
The circle frame was.
Similar.
Yes.
Not these ones.
The gold ones.
All right.
That's a difference in
our generations, gentlemen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I carried a whip
because of Indiana Jones.
Yeah.
I've got a bull whip as well.
We got it.
I have.
So if you casually
walk through that window.
Every opportunity, any
kind of costume party.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was Indiana Jones.
I had a whip that a friend had given me.
Same.
I taught myself how to use it.
First time I tried to use it,
I only hit myself in the hand.
We're way more every time we talk, we
find out we're much
more similar than same.
Likewise, there's pictures of me and
every time any chance I get
to do dress up, I'm either
Indiana Jones or a cowboy or, or Firefly.
No, no, it's that's not it.
I have to tell you.
Don't worry about it.
One of the great experiences of my
horribly violent youth was
walking to a costume party
and encountering a group of guys dressed
as the KKK while I was
dressed as Indiana Jones.
And I told them to
take off their costumes.
I added a few words that I won't say on
the podcast and we ended up fighting.
So I got to fight a bunch of guys in
hoods with a whip in my hand.
It was brilliant.
That's, that's, that's decent.
That's, that's, that's, yeah, that's,
that's a short film.
Stuff that, you know, that's not what
it's not really funny
actually, because it was,
it was violence.
But one of the, totally true story, me
and my friend were sat outside your
ex-tist beer garden,
triple kirks.
Oh, okay.
We're sitting in triple kirks beer garden
in this, like, no, man,
this is like 15 years ago,
20 years ago.
And we were sitting outside, no, we had
about 20 years ago, it would
have been about 15 years ago,
we were sitting outside having a pint and
a cigarette and I heard
like an almighty shout
and it was right about Halloween.
And there was a net, like two or three
nets, kind of, you know, non-educate
delinquents would call it.
Oh, net.
Yeah, yeah.
Not Flanders.
What?
Not Flanders.
No, not Flanders.
I had a bit of a very different story
about a fun one though.
And then they all kind of ran just
outside the art center and
they would all kind of like,
kind of like, kind of thinking and then
out of nowhere, the
Avengers, the actual Avengers,
people, there's Hulk, Iron Man,
Spider-Man, Captain America, all
descended into the scene.
And there was a massive fight between
like a group of nets and the Avengers.
And I was just sitting there with my
pipe, like, what is happening here?
Wow.
And then the Avengers
won, the nets ran away.
That reminds me, there's
like, surreal, isn't it?
That's when you wish you had your camera
just hanging around.
Yeah, there's an episode of, there's an
episode of "Only Fools and Horses."
Oh, Batman Robin.
They dressed as Batman.
Batman Robin.
[LAUGHTER]
It's iconic.
That is iconic.
Absolutely iconic.
Yeah, yeah.
The eyeshadow for the one where they run.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Look, I think we've actually come, well,
how do we come bring this to our back?
I'll wrap around this in the circle.
So dressing up, we'd like to dress up.
Why do we like to
dress up as these heroes?
Because story is important and--
We whisper.
We step into the characters whose story
finishes in a way that ours doesn't.
Right?
We are faced with the crowd of nets, and
the best thing to do is
to sit and hold your beer.
But if the Avengers were there, we're
walking to a costume party
and a bunch of guys insist
on being the KKK.
It's best to tip your hat lower over your
eyes and pretend you didn't notice them.
Right?
But if you could be Indiana Jones in that
hat, right, you get to
beat the crap out of them
and then ride off on your horse to look
for Miriam, wherever the hell she is.
That's it.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I'd say that's one.
If you'll forgive me
stepping out of your wrap.
No, no, no.
We're inspired.
Inspirably inspired.
And that's what stories can do.
And that's if we're going to wrap it
back, not to violence or
anything, but with at least
what we in the universe are going to do
is at least use the medium
in itself to try and teach
people.
But the things to
teach are never changed.
The old fashioned ways
of being a good person.
They're pretty much the
same throughout human history.
Sure, there's different cultures and
ideas and ideologies, but ultimately,
More those remain.
Be good.
Be a good person.
Be good to your family.
Respect other people.
There's foundational things that
sometimes people just,
it's good to end on it.
So everybody, if you've listened to us.
But let me take that because
exactly what you're saying.
One of the earliest stories we know about
from human history is
the story of Gildamish.
Yes.
A great hero.
And Gildamish goes off and in his hero's
journey, he fights Incadu, the lead
warrior of their enemy
tribe, and the two of them fight and they
have to kill each other.
But they have such respect for each other
as they're fighting.
They become best friends and move forward
on their journey together.
Yes.
And I think that's something that's often
missing from modern stories.
It's the fact that our original stories
have us making friends with our enemies.
Yes.
Our mutual respect.
That's a very good point.
Because I think one of the things that we
always miss and they're really good
films that we see that we always really
like is even the most nasty protagonist,
pardon me, even the most nasty iconic
antagonists often have a very good point
in why they do what they do.
They have, you can actually understand
why you do what they do.
They go about things
in a complete wrong way.
Sure.
That's what they're supposed to be.
That's why it's an antagonist.
But, exactly.
But they've got the rationale.
And that's what makes a good character.
Yes, they didn't.
You wouldn't care.
Yeah.
And that's why there's loads of ones
where you don't really see the rationale.
They're just bad for something.
Modern Star Trek movies.
Yeah.
The road to hell is paved with gold.
And yeah, two characters that have the
same objectives, but one
is misinformed and will
go down the wrong pathway.
So again, what stories Batman and Joker
are showing you with experience,
yes, we all have these ideas of where to
go and how to be good, but
take it from some other people who've
learned the hard way.
Take it from these stories.
That is not the right direction.
Well, Batman and the Joker, especially
Nolan's Batman and the Joker,
they're the same objectives.
They just had different ways of doing it.
They both wanted to save and cleanse
Gotham, to an extent.
You know, cleanse.
No, they didn't.
But they just went two different ways.
Batman wanted to keep Gotham instead.
And Joker needed to believe in order to
cure things, you need to burn into the
ground and let it regrow.
But the attention is the same.
Because he has seen
set something in fire.
He kills him.
He hates the same things
that Batman does as well.
If you look at them side by side,
but Batman is
deliberately written as a psycho.
You'll pardon my using the
careful psychiatric term.
He's a psychotic, right?
He's dissociated from reality
at the age of eight by trauma.
And he has an eight-year-old's idea of
how you deal with trauma.
He's going to punch all the bad guys.
It's the darkest.
He's not going to hear them.
He's going to punch them.
Doc Savage, to go back
to film noir type ideas,
Doc Savage from the pulp magazines from
the 1920s, not the horrible 70s film.
Doc Savage was the original superhero
named Clark with the
Fortress of Solitude,
scientific genius trained to be the
greatest fighter, greatest
thinker, greatest detective.
Very much where Batman
and Superman both came from.
He had a hospital for criminals.
And every criminal that he successfully
captured was sent to the
hospital to have a surgery
performed on their brain and a therapy
conducted on them that would cure them
of their criminal tendencies, which is
horrible and barbaric
by today's standards.
But if you don't know anything about how
the brain works or about how
evil really builds up in someone's life,
it was a lovely idea
because he could cure the
bad guys, not just punch them.
Where's the shadow at the same time?
Funnily enough, Spider
would just kill them.
Funnily enough, recently they went back
to that a little bit
when Spider-Man no way home.
He had all his bad guys in one place and
he tried to help them.
That was so well done.
I remember that.
I love that idea.
He and a couple of the bad guys
specifically worked together.
It was Dr. Octopus.
Yeah, and the Green Goblin.
Well, William the Fourth.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
They were all there in choice to help
them and he talks around and he loses.
Yeah, and he pretends he's on the other
side, but then he isn't.
No, I think it was Dr. Octopus.
I think William the Fourth.
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
William the First kills his eye.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
William Defoe is
pretending to be recovering.
He pretends to be Harry Osborn again.
But yeah, so this idea that Doc Ock could
come around and be Peter's
friend and ally in saving
the lives of all of the other villains,
even the one who isn't
regretful for what he's done,
because he's still in that
drug-induced psychotic state.
I love that.
That's the model I think we should have
for all of our heroic adventures.
It isn't just that you
beat the bad guy and go home.
It's not black and white.
It's not black and white.
It's it and look,
even Star Wars does that.
You think Star Wars is the
most black and white story ever.
There's the evil empire and the good
rebellion, but it's not.
The empire is your father.
Yeah, and then even Kylo Ren at the end.
What?
Oh, let's not.
Let's not jump to those.
Let's not go there.
Let's stay.
Let's stay.
Let's stay.
Let's stay in the original
ones, but the point being,
the empire of the body is your family.
It is your family.
It's like, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I am your father.
Yeah.
As though anyone has any knowledge of
German didn't know that
from the first movie on.
Well, it's silly, but yeah, it's deeply
profound in that way because.
We should all be friends.
There you go.
Just dimensions.
Just give characters.
A smarter way to say things.
Ultimately, we're all human.
Everyone loves their families.
We all tried to solve
problems in different ways.
Landing on a hippie
message, but it is true.
Be better people.
Yeah.
Be good.
Be good.
So everyone, we're going to wrap this one
up and we're going to wrap
this one up and we're going
to end on be nice.
Don't be a dick.
Respect your elders.
Learning is good.
Respect the youth as well.
Respect the youth too.
Exactly.
Star Trek Beyond.
That was the third one.
Sometimes things will change.
They never happen.
Proceed with caution.
Don't mention Star Trek to John.
And disagree in a friendly.
There we go.
Look at that.
Okay, everybody.
Thank you again.
I like to end on thanking you.
If you have listened this long, we
really, really appreciate it.
As always, as I've said each time, if you
have any feedback or
if you'd like to come
on the show or if you have any topics for
us, please do get in touch.
None of you have done it so far.
So I'm going to tell
you this time, please do.
And yes, thank you, Nikki,
for being our first guest.
Thanks for having me.
Great fun.
Really, really enjoyed it.
Bring me back anything that can be
relevant to discuss.
Or things I can waffle on it.
Such as relevant.
Well, then you'd fit right in.
Yes, excellent.
Okay.
And thanks again, Jackie,
for doing all the homework.
Jackie.
Oh, and thanks also to Robert Gordon
University School of
Computing for hosting us here and
allowing us to have this kind of fun.
Absolutely.
I was just going to end.
I've already got that clip.
I'm just going to use that clip now.
But I'm here.
I thought it was my turn to say it.
You can.
Or I'll end it.
But I like it.
I like it because you end with today's
episode was approached by the.
You still use it.
Yeah, I guess.
I'm just using the clip.
This episode was brought to you by an
ending with your own time.
This shows.
I'll say this is an interdisciplinary.
This isn't your disciplinary between.
This is now an interdisciplinary between.
Different.
Jackie, you can cut it where it would.
Salk Talk is a production from the Robert
Gordon University School of Computing.
Today's episode was brought to you by the
letter pi and the number pi.