I've been up for 23 hours and maybe I'm making a mistake trying to answer some of this now but here goes.
This discussion started because of my comment that "The two biggest "dropped the ball" episodes for me are Looper and Pans Labyrinth."
I have said how I experienced the the show and what I took away from it.
Dave has said that he always found it to be a hybrid with focus on story. I agree with that wholeheartedly and a good episode for me is an episode with a good mix of, talk about story, technical info, behind the scenes trivia, funny shit people in the industry have said about funny shit, good natured ribbing between the DIF crew. I also love the how did this get made aspect of the the podcast. Arguments have been made that they are anomalies and only the episodes where some of them has worked on the project. I would add that some of the most interesting episodes in that regards are the one's where the DIF members had had some personal history with the movie, maybe not worked on it but grown up with it, read a lot about it, care about them for one reason or another. Movies that spoke to them.
But why do I feel the DIF dropped the ball on Looper?
Like Pans Labyrinth, Looper was an powerful story that affected it's viewers. Both critics and moviegoers have praised Looper because the movie made them feel something. I would argue it was because RJ told a story about redemption that spoke to the audience. It spoke to me at least but that's my pavement. I'll take a story that's flawed and has something interesting to say over a "perfect movie" that check's all the boxes but does not speak to me any day of the week. I would prefer them to be both but I take emotional, thought and discussion provoking movies before technically well made movie that has little to nothing to say.
I made a sort list about things that I thought were interesting about the movie and were not even mentioned in the episode.
Some of this was covered in the episode I pointed Teague towards but most of these things have been readily available information for a long time. I tried to exclude anything that came forward in the Kevin Smith interview but frankly other than his religious background (30 pieces of silver) I feel like most of these things I had heard before.
(My brain is fried from lack of sleep so If there are any elements on the list that were covered by the commentary then I'll totally dropped the ball on that and apologise in advance)
- RJ has strong social media presence. He has dedicated tumblr sites for each of his movies. He has updated regularly during filming and post-process. He's active on twitter. He has been on many podcasts and very open about the process of making films and what they mean to him. He has a forum where he communicates with his core fan-base.
- RJ directed two episodes of Breaking Bad and an Terriers (Manifest Destiny) episode. All these episode were a break from the normal style of the shows. The fly being the most obvious one of them. After the episode was aired RJ won DGA Award for the second Breaking Bad episode "Fifty One".
- Sizzle real - He made a sizzle real for Looper to sell the feel of the movie (RJ calls them clip-o-magic trailers). It is interesting how these trailers are being used more and more to get investors and the studios interested in projects.
- Budget vs. Box Office - No discussion about anything about how it was funded. How the backers of the movie were the same backers as for Brothers Bloom. Brothers Bloom did not make them money but they did not loose faith in RJ and backed his next movie even if Brothers Bloom was a financial dud.
- Some money came from Chinese companies. How they replaced France with China and made no script changes. Shot some scenes in China. The access to Chinese markets. Added Chinese footage for the Chinese version.
- Shot on film not digital. (OK this may or may not be a topic to talk about. They can't all be winners)
- All the old school tricks the cinematographer was doing, pulling off the lens manually moving the camera or lens.
- Kitchen scene designed to be lighted by the refrigerator.
- Rian's relationship with his DP Steve Yedlin. Been friends since film school. Has shot all his movies.
Like the Raiders remake, Yedlin as a kid had made shot for shot version of Back To The Future II.
- Visual effects companies from all over the world. There was a even a vfx company from Nepal who did some work on the movie. (OK this one might only be interesting to me)
- The story beats where he took the Witness and charted out the story beat for beat. Starts out as urban crime fiction and then movies overt to the farm. How often they show the city after they move over to the farm (Lukas Haas was in Brick).
- RJ relesed an in-theater commentary with the film on his own (with permission from the studios).
- On opening night RJ went to Arclight dressed as an usher and introduced his own movie.
- Locations - The Farm was there but the barn was built specially for the movie.
- Greens - Shot in winter time they had to paint the corn for it to look like sumertime.
- Axe scene with Emily Blunt. Had a log delivered to her LA home where she practiced tirelessly for weeks using the axe. When it came to takes the axe scene was one of her first days. She went so hard on these shoots she messed up her shoulder and had problems for the rest of the shoot. At times she was so bad that prop guys would support her gun out of frame because she could not hold it without support.
Few trivia tidbits from IMDB that could have been fun talking points.
- According to director Rian Johnson, Noah Segan (Kid Blue) took a number of classes to learn how to spin his GAT gun around his finger. Johnson told Entertainment Weekly that he filmed numerous takes of Segan spinning the 8-lb gun, but ended up using the one take where he accidentally flubbed and nearly dropped it, because Johnson thought it was funny.
- In the future, the Rainmaker's henchmen dress in black overcoats and wide-brimmed cowboy hats. During shots of Cid's boyhood room, you see a poster for "Bad Bob" and an action figure on his desk wearing the same black overcoat and wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
- Cid eventually takes on the moniker of "The Rainmaker". In the film, his mother on the farm uses a futuristic crop duster which essentially makes rain.
- A recurring motif in the film is clouds, including actual clouds in the sky, cigarette smoke, and even creamer poured into black coffee (when Cid kills Jesse, the blood also has a cloud-like appearance). This ties into the "Rainmaker" plot, as well as foreshadowing the dust cloud that Joe uses to defeat Kid Blue.
This is just a few talking points that come to mind right now. I could sit here for a long time and pull out other things that my feeble brain can't remember right now. But as it is, each item here on it's own is a just that, interesting tidbits (to me) but taken as a whole. Looking at how much you talked about how you would have made the movie and not about the movie that was made I truly feel that a ball was dropped.
It boils down to this for me. When I tell people about the show and try to get them interested in becoming a listener I never say "they sit around and talk about how they can fix the problems they see in the movie".
I do say that they are interesting funny guys who many work in the film or entertainment industry. They have amazing insight into films and filmmaking you could do a lot, lot worse.
Bro, do you even lift?
