August 31, 2018 • 64 mins
Chris Weitz made his name directing American Pie, and has since gone on to have one of the more interesting careers in Hollywood as a writer, producer, director and even sometime actor. He and Chuck sat down to talk about his new movie, Operation Finale, and his Movie Crush, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:25):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to Movie Crush. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Here.
I'm in the home studio here at Pont City Market,
but my interview guest, Mr Chris Whites, was in New
York City. Don't do a lot of these remote hookups much.
I've talked about it before. It's not the greatest situation
in the world. But Chris was a really good guy
and very conversational, and uh, I think we pulled it off.
(00:47):
You might know Chris from Jeez. He's done so many things.
He started his career and I got the most attention
right out of the gate with a movie he co
directed with his brother, American Pie. Just got so much
collateral on that first film, being such a big it,
he was able to do a lot of interesting things
after that, like acting in a wonderful, uh sort of
(01:09):
demented little indie that I love called Chuck and Buck.
He also co directed Down to Earth, was nominated for
an Oscar Award for Screenplay for About a Boy, which
he co wrote and co directed as well. Just wonderful,
wonderful film, one of my favorites. Uh. He also was
a writer on Rogue, one Star Wars movie and his
(01:30):
new film in theaters August twenty nine is called Operation Finale,
and they set up a screening for me here in Atlanta,
and boy was it good. It's uh. It's a story
of the real true story of the hunt and capture
and trial of Adolph Eichmann. Uh. He was one of
the UM, one of the architects of the Nazi campaign
(01:54):
in World War Two and kind of the one of
the Big the only one of the Big three that
escaped Ustice for a long time, UH, living in South
America under a different name. They finally caught up to him,
and this is that story, starring um Ben Kingsley as
aikman and Oscar Isaac as kind of the guy who
(02:15):
leads the team UH in a sort of Argo esque
way to to grab and kidnap this man and get
him out of the country somehow under the radar, and
also co stars Nick Kroll and Melanie Lauren and she's
just wonderful and everything that she's in. It was just
a really good movie, A very taught, suspenseful, um sort
(02:37):
of ticking clock, political thriller, period piece. It's all those things.
Really good movie. I hope you guys go out and
see it. You'll really enjoy it. And we had a
great talk today about his career and his interesting life
growing up. It did not know that he had a
long family history and in Hollywood and beyond, so that
was super cool to to learn about. And his pick
(03:00):
was just a little film, just a little nothing Indie
called Lawrence of Arabia, one of the probably the epic
of all epics in the in the age of the
epic hollywhich film Lawrence of Arabia even stands alone. And
I had never seen it, and this is one of
those It's long been on the list, and I got
to watch it um at my house. I'm definitely gonna
(03:21):
go check it out into the theater next time they
have an anniversary screening or something, because it was something else,
what a great, great film. I get the hype now
everyone Lawrence of Arabia is awesome and um, really something
to to behold as a viewer. So we had a
great conversation, even though we were a thousand miles apart.
(03:42):
Here we go with Chris White's on Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah,
I'm glad we're geting to talk because you are a
you're a multi hyphen It as they call it in
the business. Yeah, uh well, let me so. Uh man,
(04:02):
the actor's stuff doesn't really count because I only did
that twice. But Checking Buck is such a good movie.
Checking Buck sticks in people's minds. I loved it. Yeah. Thanks.
I'm a huge Mike White fan and it was just brilliant.
Yeah yeah, great one. Um yeah, I know that that
was I'm so glad I did that movie before. Um,
(04:25):
I got to established to worry, not to worry about it. Um.
It was great. Really bizarre the way that came about,
which is that Miguel Arteta, who who had gone, had
gone to school with my brother and sent us both
the script because we looked alike, basically because he needed
two characters look like and he wanted to have non
actors in it. Um. There were no other qualifications. Really,
(04:49):
I loved it, man, I thought it was great and
it was. It's interesting because you're a guy who and
this is one of my favorite qualities I think in
a filmmaker is, uh, you've really done a lot of
differ print things in your career. I mean, obviously you
and your brother, I mean you co wrote the movie Ants,
an animated film, and then you and your brother really
(05:10):
made your name for yourself with the American Pie movie,
and then right after that you started Chuck and Buck
and then did Down to Earth and About a Boy,
and like you, really, I never knew what to expect
from you guys, and I always appreciate that about We
try to We try to keep things weird in generally
have the strangest filmography as possible. I mean, I think,
(05:31):
um uh we when we got the chance to direct
our first movie, it happened to be American Pie, and
it was It's a movie that I loved and loved making,
but it wasn't like the thing that my heart desired
most of all. I've never been to high school in America, UM,
didn't go to prom, so I was working in a
(05:51):
genre that I didn't really know very well. So so
definitely the intent was to do something different as as
soon as possible, and Check and Buck was the next
thing that we did. It was a sort of strange
indie possibility, you know, feature shot on d v as
close to a dog my film I think as you
can get into America at the time, UM and uh.
(06:16):
And also some some weird kind of sexual politics stuff.
UM L G B. T Q before all of the
letters had been put together in that way kind of um,
interesting intersectional stuff. Uh. That was great to be a
part of, um because also I sort of felt like
I felt little guilty having made a studio. Now guilty anymore. Um.
(06:41):
But it was a way to sort of say, oh,
you know, we we have this kind of foot in
the indie world. My brother still makes independent films, um uh,
which is great. Uh and I will probably do that
next um. But yeah, I think that the thing was
not to be pigeonholed. There's a threat to that too, though,
(07:03):
which is that you sort of don't get a brand
and everybody apparently has to brand themselves um uh. But
because you don't necessarily have an identifiable visual um uh
sort of gallery of things, they're they're quite different um
in a way. But but I'm happy to live with that. Yeah.
(07:26):
I mean, American Pie certainly got you guys a ton
of collateral, like to have a smash it like that
right out of the gate. Uh. And I think, I mean,
I don't know how it works on the inside. You
talked about having a brand, but it seems like you
get a lot of interesting things throwing your way. Whether
it be like the Twilight franchise with New Moon or
for God's sakes, writing Rogue one. Yeah, I mean what
(07:49):
an opportunity. You know, that was a huge opportunity. That
was a dream for me. I mean I saw Star
Wars when I was seven, and my favorite film would
be Star Wars except that I think it's too boring
because it's everybody's favorite film. So, uh, when when I
got to to write Rogue one, it was something that
I've been hoping for for for years since I've heard
(08:11):
that they were going to uh make make new films,
and it happened to be exactly what I would have
wanted to do, which was the opening crawl, that is
to say, you know, I'm kind of an orthodox, ultra
orthodox Star Wars fan, like all that really matters to
me are episodes four or five and six, uh, and
nothing outside of that is kind of to me. So
(08:32):
to be able to work in that area was was
just fantastic. Yeah. Well, I mean I think I even
I rarely do this, but I put out a call
on our Facebook page about you know, I'm talking to
Chris Whitess, what do you want me to talk about?
And I think about of the people talked about Rogue
One and the fact that I think among Star Wars
fans it's uh, I think widely considered the best of
(08:54):
the new lot. Oh that's super cool. Um, I'm glad.
I think that's uh thanks to Gareth Edwards really um
and the what he wanted to do, the stamp that
he put on it. I think that the things I mean,
there are a lot of terrific writers worked on that,
and it's amazing that sort of holes together given how
many people did. Um. But I think the reason is
(09:18):
is his work. Um. You know, he was this fan
as well. I mean, in some ways, Rogue One is
kind of a fan movie. It's just a fan movie
if you were given all of the tools at your disposal.
And I think, um, I mean I like the other
films very much. Obviously I can't judge without bias. But
you know, Solo, when you look at that is a
(09:39):
movie made by some of the original makers of these films.
So um. But but this is Rogue One was um,
the people who grew up on it, um, and who
who had desperately wanted to to to do it and
do it correctly when they had the chance. So I
think there's a lot of deep love of especially episode
four in it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So when you're um,
(10:03):
like for someone who can, uh who writes and produces
and directs, what what goes into your decision making process
career wise? Like when to tackle what right? Um? Well,
I think with directing it it comes down it has
to be something that I really desperately feel I have
to do or I'll regret it deeply. I'm not a
(10:25):
gigging director. I'm not thinking about what to do next.
And I don't make a film a year or even
a film every two years. Um. And in part that's
because I can't necessarily stand the physical and mental pressure
of doing it or whatever, at least what I put
on myself. And you know, it is a lot of work.
Um uh. And I have a family, have three children,
uh and sort of takes me away from them every
(10:47):
time I do that, So I sort of have to
justify being a bad parent for a while. Um so
uh So that's the highest bar to reach. Um. In
terms of writing, I mean I get kind of excite
did about when I feel like I know how to
fix something occasionally, which is sort of rewriting work. And
also I love, um adapting the work of of novelists,
(11:11):
um and and sort of trying to uh to convey
what's great about those books in another medium, uh, in
a way that I would hope that the novelists themselves
can approve of. Um. There's that. So that's kind of
my connection to what I studied in college, which was English. Um.
(11:31):
What else acting, I will pretty much do anything anyone
asks me, but nobody does uh. And and producing is
kind of if I can help somebody do one of
those things, which is to say, like work on something
they really really care about, um, then then that's great. Um.
You know, I've had been really uh fortunate in getting
(11:52):
Cocu Nada's first movie made, Columbus, which was a beautiful
film starring John Show and Hayley Lou Richardson. Uh. We're
uh we are producing Lulu Wang her second movie, which
is based on this American life episode about her family,
which she did. And so it's really cool to be
(12:13):
able to intervene beneficially and early in someone's career. Um.
And also that's that's true of this science fiction film
prospect Um starring Pedro Pascal that uh that went to
South by Southwest this year. Um. Uh that that's sort
of the best part of producing I think. Um, yes,
(12:37):
that's a long answer to your first question. Well, I
mean speaking of working on books. You know, About a
Boy was such a great book, and you guys, uh,
you and your brother did such a wonderful job. It's
a beloved movie. Um. Then you've got an Oscar nomination
for screenplay for that. Yeah, that was crazy. I know,
that's great. Uh. What was it like working with Nick?
How involved was he? Uh? Well, Nick, I think at
(13:00):
the time, you know, now he can adapt his own stuff,
he can adapt other people stuff, you know, that stuff
from scratch, and he's doing just fine on his own, um,
which he probably intended to do all along. So I
think he found it probably a bit of a too
painful of prospect to stay too close to events when
we're shooting it. So we had some some really good
meetings with Nick early and and liked each other a lot,
(13:21):
but I think he decided to step away so as
not to see how we were going to mangle what
what he had done. Um, you know, Fortunately he approved
of it after the fact. I think he's been you know,
really kind about the movie. Um. Uh, I think he
was sort of surprised at people not noticing how much
(13:43):
we'd changed the final kind of act of the of
the novel let alone, um, you know, changing the time period. Um.
But it's really gratifying that he likes what we made
of it. UM. That said, I suspect that um uh
that if he had done this later in his career,
(14:04):
he would have adapted his own work and done it
really beautifully uh. Um. But so the uh, the chance
to adapt that um and thus to get um the
only shred of uh prestige. That's not true, Uh, it was.
(14:25):
It was fantastic. It just felt I felt very much, um,
like I was born to write that script, or rather
sort of educated to write that script, because I kind
of like lived amongst the English for for long enough,
having gone a high school and college there that I
understood what was going on, um, and felt like capable
of translating that into an American mode in some ways.
(14:46):
But in some ways it was an English picture. And
it was like this fantastic moment in a test screening
in London when someone said, oh, it's a good English film. Um. Yeah,
that was a really charmed production and the whole thing
I remember just everything that we decided to do kind
of working out the way that we had wanted it to,
which is which is fantastic, and it doesn't doesn't really happen.
(15:10):
Like I remember at one point, I think I would
be great if you know badly John Boy could write
an original album for this movie. Yeah, would be cool.
And we called him up and he's like yeah, okay.
Uh and everything in that sense kind of worked out,
from Hugh Grant during it to sort of taking a
flyer on Nick Holt um even down to um to
(15:33):
Tony Collette during it. Uh, was was an extraordinary experience. Yeah,
she's so great, is it? Is it weird to uh
do you see Nick Holt today and like, marvel at
what a big grown petso grown man he's become. He
is a complete hunk um and he's he's a really
good actor to uh. And you don't necessarily know if
(15:55):
somebody can play a twelve year old really well at twelve,
is going to be able to play grown ups? Um? Yeah,
I mean we stay in touch and it's you know,
I just love sort of watching him grow. Um. It's uh,
it's really funny. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, where are you
from You said you went to high school in England. Yeah, well,
(16:16):
I'm from New York originally, but my dad had gone
to school in England. He went to to uh grade
school with the equivalent of grade school in high school
in England. And so I was supposed to just go
for a year to check out my dad's old school
in London when I was fourteen, and I ended up
staying and uh doing my exams there a levels they're
called at the end of high school exams, and then
(16:38):
got into Cambridge and I stayed and I stayed for
a few years. Uh and um that and I've ended
up working on a few movies there, which is which
is great. So I'm New Yorker but sort of mid
Atlantic in uh like education. Right. What is your mother
(16:59):
from England as well? Or No, my mom is from
She was born in l A but her mother was Mexican.
Her mom was actually a Mexican silent film actress, and
her dad, my grandfather, was from uh, the Czech Republic,
which at that time was Austria and then became Czechoslovakia
(17:22):
and became the Czech Republic through various World Wars hot
and cold. Um, and yeah, so I'm from I'm kind
of from all over. I mean, like a lot of
Americans are now with with you and your brother was
it was filmmaking something you always wanted to get into,
or I mean, is it in your family lineage at all?
It was? Um. So, my my mom um was an actor. Um,
(17:46):
she's actually in a film which is in my film.
So she was in a phone called Imitation of Life
in ninety nine. Um that she played an African American
woman passing as white. Um in this uh great Douglas
Cirque film. Her father was a producer and agent and
(18:09):
he was an Asian for a lot of European filmmakers
using Mark Bergman's agent. Um, he was Billy Wilder's agent. Um.
And uh yeah, so there's there's that sort of that
part of the family goes goes back in terms of filmmaking.
And my my grandma was um uh known as La
(18:33):
Novia de Mexico, which means the Sweetheart of Mexico. She
was kind of the first uh talking picture star in
Mexico and before that she'd been a silent film actress
in Hollywood. So that's kind of a cool story too. Yeah.
So so I we this is like the family business.
Oh that's amazing, that's really cool. So, uh were you
(18:55):
and you? I mean so obviously you guys. I mean
usually ask people about their influences growing up, and certainly
when you have an older sibling. Um, I have an
older brother and older sister. You get a lot of
culture fed through them, sort of your jams as kids
growing up. That was definitely, um, you know, all the
good music uh and and stuff came through my brother
and eventually he started writing plays, um, which he still does. Uh.
(19:20):
And when I grated from college, we thought it would
be kind of a wheeze to uh to to write
screenplays together. We didn't really have a clear idea of
what was going to come of it. It just seemed
like it might be a cool thing and maybe it
would work out, and uh and it did. We we
we worked hard. We're also very lucky. I remember on
my twenty one birthday we had pitched a story to
MGM and they they said, yeah, you know, we'll pay
(19:44):
you to write a screenplay. It was a long time
between that and getting screen credit, which was on ants Um,
which I think came out eight Uh so that was
like seven years to that. Of just um working on
our own stuff and rewritting other people's stuff, but never
really getting anything made. Um, and then it's sort of
(20:07):
all started with with that for us. Did you ever
have to yell? My grandfather was Billy Wilder's agent forgot to?
I feel the funny thing is, although we did have
the sort of background and film, it was like an
old film and you're seeing film like, I'm a totally
different era. So like by the time the nineties rolled around,
nobody nobody really cared um. But now it's it's nice
(20:31):
to look back on. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, I got
to see Operation Finale, uh two days ago. Great that
it was really good man. I'm uh. I mean again
with kind of uh not having like a direct through
line through your career, You've you've done all these interesting films,
(20:52):
things like Anton American Pie about a boy, and then
you do, uh what it what feels like a highst
movie even though it's not exactly, but it sort of
has the DNA of a heist movie as a as
a sort of a ticking clock thriller, which is, you know,
it's one of my favorite genres and I know that's
something in in screenwriting where they say, hey, if you
(21:14):
can get a ticking clock going, you have the luxury
having a real ticking clock built into the real life story. Ye,
which was really gave it a lot of intensity. Um,
thank you, I'm glad it did. Um. Yeah. In some ways,
it's got sort of all these genre bells and whistles.
It's a it's a kidnapping plot, you know, the true
(21:34):
story I saw kidnapped Adolf Eichman, who was the kind
of logistics coordinator of the Holocaust. Um. They found out
he was in Buenos Aires and put together a team
to extract him and take him to Israel for trial.
Pretty extraordinary cinematic story from the get go. Um and
(21:56):
uh yeah, I I wanted it to be a kind
of a hybrid of um of a genre suspense thriller
and also UM at the same time kind of reckoning
with who this person that off Aikman was and what
it was like for the uh for a team of
people whose families had been destroyed in the Holocaust too
(22:21):
have to live with him for the ten days in
which they wait in a safe house to be taken
out by allow. Yeah. Man, it was it was just
so intense because uh, you know, it felt like about
half the people just wanted to torture and kill him. Yeah,
but you you also as a filmmaker, and I think
to your credit, you know, you needed to tell the
(22:42):
story also of this old man whose responses am I
to blame for all of World War two? You know,
so it was really interesting to kind of and of
course he is a bad guy, and there's some very tough,
affecting scenes in the film. But um, I think to
your credit, to even indulge that line of thought from
(23:03):
him was pretty necessary. I think. So. I mean, I
think it's important to um to see the people who
perpetrate these um crimes as human beings, not because we
should feel sympathy for them, but because we should be
alive to the possibility of it happening in our time,
in our country and our culture, in ourselves as well. UM.
(23:27):
So I think the temptation is always there to make
them as evil as possible, um on the surface. But
I but um, we aimed to sort of try to
seduce the characters and in a way the audience into
viewing them as as people as well. Yeah. And it's interesting,
(23:49):
like you've had this long successful career, worked with all
kinds of people, but I imagine even at this stage, uh,
to be directing those scenes with Ben Kingsley and Oscar Isaac,
just the two of them, like that had to be
pretty cool. It is extremely cool. I mean, on on
the one level, you can just sort of let them,
let them fly, um, and know that you're gonna get
(24:11):
great stuff. Uh. On on another level, um, sort of
to try to keep up with them and what they're
doing is is a huge challenge. And you know, even
with a studio film, time is always running out in
terms of the number of takes you're going to get
to uh to sort of solidify what the what the
(24:34):
character is going to be. Um. So it is, Uh,
it's exciting, it's it's really daunting. Um. You know, any
any actor who's been working as long as I have
been working as a director has actually been in three
or four times as many movies as I have directed.
So that is interesting as well. Um, they bring a
tremendous amount of experience of different performances to the table. Uh.
(24:58):
But it was sleep when all was sudden, unsurprisingly smooth,
the whole the whole process. Um, there wasn't a lot
of hammering, hammering things out. Yeah. Well, um, there were
some scenes with Ben Kingsley as the young Aikman. How
did you do that? Was that all makeup? Or was
there some CG involved? There was some CG. There was
(25:21):
some CG involved. We're getting pretty good at doing that. Yeah,
it really looked believable, I thought, and you didn't. I
think the key to that stuff is not overdoing it
and hanging too long. Um. Not to mention another Star
Wars movie, I won't go there, but you you sort
of played it just right, I think, and it came
off as super believable. Oh thanks, I'm glad. Um. You know,
(25:42):
it's it's really sort of tricky to try to get
that stuff right. Um, to sort of d age a
person to the appropriate level. Uh that Um, that is
right for the scenario, not to have it go into
Uncanny Valley. Yeah. Um, uh, you maintain the the sort
(26:02):
of performance qualities. It was. It was a company called
Shade VFX and Los Angeles and I worked very hard
Los Angeles and New York and we we all worked
very hard together to try to get that right. How
did this story come to you? I was sent the
script by MGM two years ago. Um. Uh, John Glickman,
who's the head of things over there, knew that I
(26:24):
had had some experience with the period because of my
my dad. My dad wrote biographies of prominent Nazi Party members,
and uh, and I sort of helped him put together
his library and did some of helped him with his
research and copy copyright his manuscripts. So I was kind
(26:45):
of immersed in this stuff as a child. Um. And
so in spite of the fact that my first movie
was a teen sex comedy, she was like not totally
alien to me. Um. So I and I hadn't had
a chance to to do something in this period. Um,
that was it was very exciting. Yeah, I mean it
(27:06):
was just beautifully shadows, very very good looking movie. Thank you.
That's um. Heavier, a UM wonderful Spanish DP who also
shot The Others and the Road, which is a very
beautiful movie Blue Jasmine. He has a beautiful sort of burnished,
(27:27):
um yet still realistic style. And he and I have
now worked together on three movies kind of know each
other's ways. And Uh, I think that a great thing
about Heavier's work is that he doesn't have anything to prove.
We're not kind of pushing camera moves and um, you know,
(27:49):
gyrating around uh or or taking on a sort of
artistic angles just for the sake of it. Yeah, it
was not flashy. It just came across as a very
just a good looking movie. That's the best way to
say it, I think. Uh. And then Nick Role was
in it, which UH big fan of his comedy, and
(28:10):
it's uh. I mean there are a couple of lighter
moments with him, but he definitely played against type here
and it was good to see that's a serious role.
And I mean he's actually very serious thoughtful guy, as
I think a lot of uh good comedians are. Um,
there's always a sort of a darkness to uh comedy.
UM and UM, I think uh Nick brought a real
(28:33):
thoughtfulness to the to the part. UM he had actually
when he was a kid known one of the members
of the expedition UM who who was an associate of
his his father's next father worked in corporate security. UM,
so he he also sort of felt connected to the
(28:55):
To the part it was important for you to try
and cast Jewish actors as much as you could for
those roles. UM. I felt like that wasn't a requirement.
There are some non Jewish actors playing Israelis. I felt
like there's there's I mean, there's probably an elusive balancing
point at which you are, um, you know, goy washing
(29:15):
things as it were. Uh. And there's also a point
at which you're you're being a little too restrictive by
saying that only Jewish actors can play Jewish parts. Um,
you know, uh we we There are a couple of
wonderful Israeli actors in the film, uh Leo Raz and Ohadanoler.
I mean the actual the mission itself. On the mission itself,
(29:39):
some of the agents were born in Israel, but the
rest of them were born in Germany and Poland and Romania,
um and Hungry and so it was kind of an
international uh group. Anyway, Yeah, that's awesome. Uh. Well, I
can't wait for you know, I'll give it a good
plug with the listeners before and after in the intro piece,
(30:01):
but I really can't wait to see this thing in
the theater. Um. I think I think you're gonna do
quite well, sir with it. So yeah, we worked hard,
I hope, I hope. So so we can move into
Lawrence of Arabia. Now let's move which is um I
(30:24):
have to admit I had never seen this movie, oh man,
and like if you had to see it? Because I said, so,
did you know you're in for an over three hour
long movie? I did. I mean, this is one of
those that I've always wanted to see a new It
wasn't like, well what is this? I've never heard of this.
Um it's been on the long list and I've I've admitted,
there are so many classics like this I need to
get around to. So I owe you some gratitude for
(30:48):
for quote unquote forcing me to watch this. It's a
great film, oh man, just unbelievable. UM nine six two
David Lean directed. And then uh you know, of course
Peter o'tool. I don't was that his very first movie.
I believe it was his very first movie. That's crazy.
I think it was introducing Peter Ochol. He may have
(31:08):
been in a big part in something or other, but
it's the one that really broke him. Yeah, um, you didn't.
I don't suppose you were able to see it on
a big screen. That was every once in a while,
you're gonna because no, not not because not to sort
of say, like you, I you can't speak properly to it.
But it's an amazing experience too to see it on
(31:28):
the big screen. Yeah, it played here. Um. I believe
the seventy millimeter print played in Atlanta a few years ago.
I didn't get to see it, but now that is
like on my list two because I know they still
show the restored version from time to time. And I
have a great big TV. But I definitely want to
see this on the big, big screen. I mean, it's
(31:51):
all about the big, big screen. Um. It was definitely
shot um, very wide, very big. Um. I think it
was Jack Cardiff, Wasn't it was the the or Is
it pretty young? It's pretty young? Yeah, okay, Um, Nicholas
Rogue shot a second unit. Interesting thing about that? About that? Um,
(32:13):
that's pretty weld Um yes, okay, So here is uh
I suppose the what's problematic about my saying this is
my favorite movie? There are no women in this movie? Uh,
and and so it's like it's hard to uh to
hang onto it uh as a favorite movie in these times. Um.
(32:35):
But I'm going to make an argument that in some
ways there there is a uh a kind of well
as as Nold Coward said about Peter O'Toole if he
read any prettier, they'd call it Florence of Arabia. That
there there are some sort of gender fluid dynamics in
the movie. Um, But I I fully comped to the
(32:58):
fact that it's kind of lame to like a movie
that has zero women in it. However, I do think
that the screenplay and cinematography and performances are absolutely extraordinary. Yeah.
But to be fair, like, would this movie have been
(33:18):
any better if they forced in some kind of lame
love relationship? Yeah, probably not. And probably the fact of
the matter it in a way, it is about horrible
things that men do. Um. And so I don't buy
any means think that this is entirely a heroic story.
As a matter of fact, I think it's got a
running critique of um of the heroic male ideal um.
(33:45):
And so yeah, I'm not sure that that would make
it a better film as as the film that it is. Yeah,
And for the time I mean I had, I went
and did some research afterward, because I didn't know much
about T. Lawrence or his story. UM widely speculated and
generally agreed upon that he was probably gay, and the
(34:06):
way they treated in the movie for nineteen sixty two,
I thought was pretty brave and that they didn't They
just kind of let the movie be, didn't make anything
over the top, but didn't cast any judgments or make
any big statements about it either. Yeah, I think that's right.
Um Uh, I think uh. I think that the his character,
(34:27):
O Marshari's character, Anthony Quinn's character, it's a it's a
bit of a love triangle as well as the um
the young kind of Arab young men who are serving Lawrence.
There's there's clearly something there inasmuch as a film was
able to address those things. I think it did sort
(34:48):
of entertain the fact that these were men who were
in love with one another while they were doing what
they were doing. And I don't I don't think it's
shames them for it either. I think it's very clear
that there's these kind of very intimate um bonds between
between these guys um that weren't seen as beyond the
(35:09):
pale or or something shameful either. Um. You know, there's
this really funny turn in in the dialogue when um Uh,
Anthony Quinn says to Omar shar Reef that you know
Lawrence has lied about something, and he says he is
not perfect um. And it's clear that for that entire
(35:32):
time they've both been kind of maintaining this notion that
that that Peter O'Toole, who is perfect enough looking and seeming, uh,
is some kind of ideal um. And and that idea
is kind of broken down over the course of the movie. Yeah.
I mean, it was a really interesting character piece with
especially having never seen it and heard so much about it.
(35:54):
I knew it was this epic of epics, and that
the photography was amazing, uh and of any millimeter, these
super beautiful wide shots, but I had never heard much
about the story, and like I said, didn't know about T. E. Lawrence.
And it's just such an interesting character piece that this guy,
this you know, blonde, blue eyed, gorgeous Englishman goes by
(36:16):
himself to the middle of nowhere because he has an
affinity for the Arab people and kind of becomes almost
godlike to them. Yeah. Um, and and falls from grace
and and is eventually kind of discarded at the end
of it too. I mean, there are all kinds of
interesting to me, interesting critiques of colonialism, of of heroism,
(36:40):
of of the West, um. Going on in this movie
that if you just sort of went on what people
say about it really seems like kind of a gung
ho war story, a heroic great man war story. Um.
And and you know, there are these extraordinary scenes like
the attack on the Turkish armored train, um, you know, uh,
(37:04):
the the attack on Acaba, all of these amazing war
scenes which are genuinely rousing, and there's there's kind of
a survival adventure uh going on. But at the same time,
underneath the surface, there's this real sense that t. Lawrence
was a deeply troubled, tortured figure who uh, who could
(37:30):
not um live with his englishness, could not become an Arab,
which is perhaps what he most wanted to become. Um
was was lost in the world. Um, was deeply vain,
uh kind of strangely masochistic um and uh and ends
(37:52):
up both becoming a hero and being totally undone by
his experiences. Yeah, I mean it's a long movie, but
it never feels long. Uh. It doesn't feel like I mean,
he hangs on certain scenes, but it always seems David
Lean does. But it always seems like for the right
amount of time, and it should be a close to
(38:13):
four hour movie. Yeah, I think that's right. I know
maybe these days it would be a mini series or something.
But um, to me, like if you if you know
what you're getting in for, it's a pretty amazing ride.
Um and Um. So I had the chance to work
with Anne Coats, the editor of Laurence of Arabia. She
edited The Golden Compass uh for me. Um she recently
(38:39):
passed away, Rest in peace. Um, very very dear, incredibly
talented uh woman ah who you know maybe made the
greatest cut in all of cinema history. Um if you
with the match, the match, Yes, the match cutting to
(38:59):
the of the rising Sun. Um and who had an
incredible sense of of pacing and not pacing in terms
of speeding things up, but in terms of the right
way into and out of scenes. Um you know who
who sort of popularized flat cuts as opposed to transitions. Um.
(39:22):
Uh that this movie, like, amongst the many things that
are working at absolute highest gear uh is the editing
of the film. I think there's just so many aspects
in which this film absolutely shines that that this was
like kind of the obvious choice for me. Yeah, I
mean the cinematography gets so much attention here I'm glad
(39:45):
that you shouted out the editing and uh and the
writing just the I mean you talk about character complexity.
You have a character in Lawrence that wants almost to
be worshiped by the Arab world. Is almost like a
trade or to England in certain ways as far as
where his heart is and willing to execute a guy,
(40:06):
but also having a weird aversion to guns and violence
in some ways. Yeah, it has a very strange It
has a very interesting take on violence and the appeal
of violence and brutality, um the impulse towards it. There's
a very strange moment in the film in which, um h, Lawrence,
(40:30):
he and his kind of band of marauders have derailed
a train and the they're killing the Turkish not just
Turkish soldiers but Turkish citizens on board this train crossing
the desert, and Lawrence looks down and sees a wounded
Turkish officer, and the Turkish officer fires at him and
(40:53):
kind of wings Lawrence and and Lawrence is he says, good, good, good.
It's a very strange line reading too, He's happy to
have been shot but not killed because and and the
movie doesn't set this up terribly carefully. But it's that
is to say, it doesn't set up in an obvious way. Um,
(41:15):
but he is pleased to have been injured, um. I
think in part because he now feels like a fully
fledged male, which of course is sick. Um. And I
think also very carefully the the I think David Lean
cast the Turkish officer very carefully as well, because he's
a very beautiful man. There's something very strange uh and
(41:38):
homerrotic going on in that um and that wounding there. Um,
there's a kind of a you know, it's like a
rite of passage or a loss of loss of virginity
in a way, um, which also frankly happens Lawrences is
raped later. You don't really uh, it's not really um
(42:00):
uh incredibly obvious. Uh. But um that's clue that to me.
It's that's clearly what happens when he was later captured
by the Turks. Right. So they're all kinds of really extraordinary,
intense and deep things going on in this movie. Um.
That really set it apart from say Bridge on the
(42:22):
River Quai, which is you know David Lean's I think
that was his later I think that came later. That
was actually right before right before Okay, he did a
bridge on the river Quai, this and doctor Shivago all
three in a row, which is commanding, what a run um.
But bridge on the river Quine, I think is a
lot more straightforward, uh in terms of how it deals
(42:43):
with kind of men and heroism. Yeah. I mean during
the scene you were talking about where he's uh has
the little flesh wound on his arm. He he he
almost wants to be shot again. I feel like because
he doesn't hide, he kind of stands there right while
this guy keeps pointing and shooting Adam and missing, and
I was I was just like, what are you doing? Man?
(43:03):
Get out of there. But there was this weird that
was definitely a strange scene to kind of unpack, it
is a strange scene. I think he is daring death
at that point. He made me wants to die. He
certainly appreciates getting injured, which is deeply strange. Um and
um ah. And there's that that dynamic works throughout the film. Later,
(43:30):
the reason that he's captured by the Turks is that
he decides to just kind of uh waltz into a
Turkish occupied our village um and thinks, you know, he's
he says to his comrades that he's invisible and he
can never be caught. Um. And then there's this extraordinary
(43:52):
scene with Jose ferrare H in which Um, you know, Lawrence,
who think he has sort of trained himself to withstand
physical pain and punishment, um is is broken um and
and you can see his sort of dawning on him
(44:14):
that he's not what he thought he he was. Um yeah,
um so and and and of course eventually by the
end of the film, he has done all these heroic
fel things, and he has won these great victories against
the Turks at the sacrifice in a way of his um,
(44:36):
his decency um and um. He all with the aim
of of giving the Arabs, as it were, Uh, they're
their own country, um and um. And he's screwed over
by the British diplomat British and French diplomats who negotiate
(44:57):
the Psychspeko agreement, which kind of divvy is up. Uh.
Divvy's up that part of the world into uh Iraq
and Syria and Jordan's um. Which and that's another thing
that I think it's really cool about the movie, which
is that it's about Iraq. Uh. You know, it's not
about Baghdad, but it's but it's about Iraq and Syria
(45:19):
and how uh the Western Powers completely fucked up uh
this part of the world by um double dealing uh
and um exerting their power geographically. Yeah. I did a
big history deep dive after after watching that. They cleared
up a lot of things um. And it was interesting
(45:42):
with the complexity of character. Like you, he almost never
gets what he wants because on one hand, you get
the feeling that what he wants most would be to
be like king of the Middle Eastern country, but he
also kind of wanted to be regarded as an English
war hero. And to the print where he has this
UM journal is following him around photographer based on a
(46:04):
real guy, uh, and you can tell he's eating it
up and he wants to press. But there were there
was speculation, I think still today that he was not
as important as he made himself out to be. I
think that's right. I mean, I think um Uh. Somebody
in the movie says it's a side show of a
side show, UM, that the war in the Desert wasn't
(46:27):
as crucial to kind of winning winning the war as
the outsized heroics and sort of dash of the um
of the campaign, uh seems to let on. UM. So, yeah,
it's it's a it's a sort of in some ways
(46:48):
of a deeply cynical uh telling of this story. Yeah.
You can see at the end two when he's uh
that last scene where he's being driven away in the
car and he passes the guys on the camp moles
and you can see in his face he wants nothing
more than to be on a camel again. Right, Yeah,
he's completely lost um Uh And I mean Lawrence's later
(47:12):
in Lawrence's later life, he actually tried to sign to
just sign up to serve as UM as an enlisted man.
I think it was in the R A F. Actually
I'm not sure of that, but he wanted to have
another run at it, but not as the UM celebrated
(47:34):
war hero. UM. So there's something I mean, I guess
admirable little but also deeply sad about that. And of
course the movie opens with um his death, which of
course has now become an old chestnut UM in terms
of biopics, but is pretty interesting in terms of how
(47:55):
you know, we we see this character riding on a
motorcycle and having a somewhat ridiculous accident due to his
own um um foolhardiness um uh and um we never
see him on a motorcycle again or see him in
England again. Um. So the has sort of been told
(48:16):
in this this interesting reverse order um um, which is
to say, no matter what he's going to achieve in
the rest of the film, this is what he's going
to that's this is what it's going to become of him.
Just some of the shots I mean now as a
(48:39):
as a as a film viewer today, to see, you know,
so many big battle scenes that the more large in
CG they get, the less impressive they become. I feel
like that's absolutely true, and it's amazing to see, like
the scene where they were unletting the horses off the train.
(49:00):
Just the scenes, those big wide shots of the camps
or the or the the guys going to battle on
the camels and horses. I mean, to look at that, no,
those are all real things is just astounding. Yeah, it
is amazing, and I think that you can feel it
as well. I think that that the human mind is
able to process the fact that these big CG battles
(49:20):
are actually not taking place in physical space UM. And
so uh, you know, I think it probably reaches high
water mark in terms of uh CG battle stuff and
in the Lord of the Rings um and everything else
is kind of aping that um massive technology. UM. But
(49:41):
but to see it in camera, uh, it is pretty
extraordinary that the scale of the operation, the fact that
I think it was that the Jordanian Army was was
kind of enlisted in in uh performing a lot of
these battle sequences that they were filming on location in
the desert. H stuff that you wouldn't do nowadays, but
(50:02):
that is incredibly effective for this just in in the days,
so when you would shoot for months and months and
months on end um and you know, wait for the
weather to be right and all kinds of stuff that
we don't we can't do nowadays or we won't or don't. Yeah.
I think one of the big takeaways besides just the
(50:23):
the scope was camels are amazing. Camels are pretty wild
a character in this movie. There's a lot of camels
stuff in this moeting. It's really good stuff. Camels are amazing.
Water is amazing. UM. Yeah. Now, what was your what
was your introduction to Lawrence of Arabia? What was the
when was the first time you saw it? You remember, Oh, man,
(50:44):
I feel like the first time I saw it was
probably part of it as a kid um uh, when
it got mixed up in my mind with this much
more shlocky movie called The Wind and the Lion, um
I think for and and also actually my uncle produced
(51:04):
a movie called March or Die. There's a sort of
brief flourishing around the nineteen seventies of Arabian or foreign
legion war movies. And I must have at this at
that time seen on TV some really crappy, cut down
version of Laurens of Arabia where still went on longer
than I was allowed to stay up. Um. And I
(51:24):
didn't see it again until I was probably like a
film form or something. And then I remember very vividly
seeing it at LACMA on the big screen with with
overture and intermission and everything, um, with my brother and
my friend, uh, Matthew Hoffman, and just being kind of
(51:44):
bowled over, and then reading about uh the making of
the film, Robert Bolt's screenplay, um and um, and just
finding it not only kind of really beautiful but incredibly intelligent. Yeah.
And then that's or is just so iconic. Now, yeah,
just amazing score that. Uh, I believe that the commercial. Yeah,
(52:08):
he wasn't even the first choice. I think he was
sort of third or fourth on the list. It's interesting,
but yeah, and he didn't have a whole lot of
time either, apparently, so he um. And of course you
don't know if it's a chicken or the egg thing,
but maybe it's because the movie was so iconic. But
it really, man, when you hear that music at the
beginning and you see that wide frame, it's just like
chill inducing. Absolutely. Yeah. So it won Best Picture, Director, Score, Cinematography, Art, Direction, Editing,
(52:37):
and sound and lost. Yeah, Peter to a lost to
Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. No shame there, No, no,
I can't. I can't feel bad about that. And oh, Marshall,
although I think, I mean, honestly, I think, um, Peter
Chil's portrayal of Lawrence is more nuanced than Gregory Peck
(53:00):
To Kill a Mockingberg. I think that you're you're winning
not just for the performance but for the character. And
To Kill a Mockingbird is sort of approving nods to
the character. Yeah, yeah, fair enough, little one note? Uh,
And then oh, Marshalif lost. Uh. And then the screenplay
did not win as well. But yeah, I mean I
(53:21):
can't wait screen play Wait, wait what one screenplay? God,
screenplay should have one. That's what I think A Mockingbird did,
if I'm not mistaken. Okay, okay, so it must have
been Do they have adapted screenplay and screenplay at that
time or was it only one category? I think it
was adapted in the and this was considered adapted from
t Lawrences from right seven pilos of wisdom. Um, yeah, okay,
(53:44):
all right, all right, I think I think it's a
rap is a better screenplay. I think I'm with you. Uh.
And here's a couple of bits of trivia. I'm sure
you know this stuff. But for the benefits of the listeners,
fairly interesting. Um, most of the movement and the film
goes left or right very purposely because David Lean wanted
(54:05):
to emphasize the journey aspect of it. Yeah, I agree entirely.
I think that we that in the West we see
Things is going left or right, probably because of writing.
I wonder if it's made by an an Arabic UH filmmaker,
it would have gone right to lapse Oh yeah, I
noticed that O'Toole wrote right to left in one of
those scenes, which I thought it was pretty subtle, was
(54:27):
writing Arabic. Yeah, that's that's cool. Uh. And then for
some of those great shots, David Lean's cinematographer Freddy Young
apparently got ahold of a four and eighty two millimeter
lens oha crap in order to shoot uh successfully shoot
a mirage. And yes, okay, well that that would be
when when omark, when when you first s c O.
(54:49):
Mar Sharif arrived at the at the um the well,
that amazing shot of him and his horse kind of
appearing out of out of this mirrage. Yeah. For the
benefits of non filmmaking listeners, what is the four millimeter
lens mean? A four two millimeter lens is radically outside
(55:10):
of the bounds of what you normally use in making
a feature film. You might go, as you know, you're
usually working somewhere between twenty four millimeters and a hundred
a hundred being very tight, uh narrow frame for for
close ups, twenty four being something very wide, and four
(55:31):
hundred whatever millimeter lens that is is something like a
specialty lens for maybe for industrial purposes or something, um,
who knows, uh. And it means that the degree of
compression between foreground and background is is enormous. UM. So
you can shoot something very far away and it will
(55:51):
appear to move forward very very slowly. Um, it'll kind
of be flattened. Um. And and that's that's what you
would use to I guess catch a mirage, but also
something kind of um, hovering interview in a mirage. Like
all of these lenses, especially when you get to the
length that is going to be being boring now, But
(56:12):
of a four and fifty something millimeter lens, there are
many many elements to the lens. There are many many
lenses uh through that sort of tube of the lens,
so that the light is doing all kinds of gnarly
things and they have to be very carefully, um, very
carefully calibrated in order to work properly. I appreciate that insight.
It was not boring at all. I think people appreciate that.
(56:36):
All right. Well, we finished up with a couple of
quick segments, one called what Ebert said, this movie is
a complete disappointment. I like to go back and see
what Mr Ebert thought of these films. He gave Lawrence
of Arabia four stars out of four fair enough, and
he had this to say, what a bold, mad act
(56:57):
of genius it was to make Lawrence of Arabia, or
even think that it could be made. The impulse to
make this movie was based, above all, on imagination. The
story of Lawrence is not founded on violent battle scenes
are cheap melodrama, but on David Lean's ability to imagine
what it would look like to see a speck appear
on the horizon of the desert and slowly grow into
a human being. It is a spare movie and clean,
(57:18):
uncluttered lines, and there's never a moment when you're in
doubt about the logistical details of the various campaigns. Lawrence
of Araby is not a simple biography or an adventure movie,
although it contains both elements, but a movie that uses
the desert as a stage for the flamboyance of a driven,
quirky man. That's about right, I mean for a quirky
I might I might say sort of unhinged, but yes, yeah,
(57:40):
quirky was a weird word choice there. Uh and then
we finished he was wacky, uh man. His eyes were
just so blue. Uh. And we didn't even mention that
Alec Guinness uh portrayed a Middle Easterner. And well, of course,
now now it would be beyond the pale to do that.
But if you're gonna, if you're gonna white wash, may
(58:01):
as well get out againnis to do it. Make jobs agreed? Uh.
And then we finished with five questions with Chris Whites.
What's the first movie you remember seeing in a theater?
It was Midway starring Charlton Heston about the Battle of Midway.
Super schlocky movie. Uh, total gung ho war film which
(58:23):
actually had a little spot of compassion for uh niss
Americans Japanese Americans. Um. And I saw it in the
sag Harbor uh movie theater on Main Street and sag Harbor,
New York. It burned down last year and it is
just being rebuilt, which makes me very happy. All right. Uh.
(58:43):
First R rated movie you remember seeing? Oh man, Well,
I don't was it was? It was Alien R rated? Yes, Okay,
I think that's the one. I can really first remember
saying there's probably something on in in early HBO that
I saw and shouldn't have seen. Um. Uh seeing Alien
clutching my mom because I was terrified. I was still
(59:06):
a kid at the time. It's a really bad decision
to take. How old are you, ah man? When did
it come out? I was born in Okay, Yeah, I
mean I was not allowed to see it. I was
born in seventy one. And my brother got to see
it and I didn't. It was sort of that thing
where he was just old enough to see these things
and he I've told the story in the show before,
(59:27):
but he came home that night and literally set up
for what felt like the length of the movie telling
me the whole movie, which is pretty great for a
big brother. That's nice. Um, will you walk out of
a bad movie? Mm hmm, I will walk out of
a bad movie made in bad faith? Right? I think
that some movies are clearly uh crappy and nobody is
(59:52):
really really gives a crap about it. Um that, but
not a bad movie made in good faith. Just to
say that, it's hard to make even a bad movie. Um,
so I will hang in there are out of a
kind of a ritual obligation to the filmmakers. Uh. And
sometimes you know, you get a trick or two even
(01:00:13):
that of something that that stinks. But that's a great
answer a bad movie made in bad faith. I know
exactly what you're talking about. Oh, it's like you don't
deserve for me to sit here. Yeah, thank you. Listen.
If you didn't care about it, why should I? All right?
Number four we usually tailored to the guests. So I'm
gonna go with what movie in movie history do you
(01:00:36):
most which I wish you would have directed? Mm? Hmmm
um or written? Or written both? Oh? Man, I mean, uh,
it might be. I mean another one of my favorites
is High and Low, the Kurosawa film, which I think
(01:00:56):
is share Brilliance. Um. You know a film that that
maintains tension even though it's mostly shot in one one room. Um,
something like that, that would be fantastic. All right, good answer. Uh.
And then finally number five movie going one on one? Uh?
What do you do with the movie theater? Where do
(01:01:16):
you sit? And what do you eat? Um? I usually
don't eat anything. Ah. I know that's very sad, but
I don't like crunching. I don't like being distracted by Googer's.
Which if I did eat something to be Googer's and uh,
let me see if it's a full crowd. I would
(01:01:39):
rather be front row center. If not, I'll try to
get the best angle on on the the screen, which
would be about five rows back in the middle. Huh yeah.
Sometimes I like to to be totally immersed in it,
but actually it really depends on the on the distance
between the front row and the screen, is right? Sure? Sure,
(01:02:01):
because I don't I don't wanna um look around too much. Awesome?
All right, well, thanks Chris, thank you. There's a lot
of fun that was really loved operation finale, and congratulations
on that. And that's awesome. Quite an achievement. Thank you,
and thank you to your listeners for listening to me.
All Right, thanks a lot, man, Okay, thank you. See
(01:02:21):
all right, all right, everybody, how did we do? Did
we cover the movie enough for you? I hope so? Uh,
Lawrence of Arabia, there was a lot there, and uh,
he had really good insight on it. It It was cool
to talk to a director, um who was able to
(01:02:44):
explain things like what along lens means to someone like
myself and maybe to you. So I hope you learned
something there, and uh I really enjoyed his take on
the characters and um, just the shooting of this film,
which was just amazing all these years later to see
a movie like this with those huge frames and all
those extras and soldiers and horses and camels and it's
(01:03:08):
all real everyone, It's not like it is today. So
pretty amazing that they could pull a movie like this off.
I believe Steven Spielberg has described Lawrence Arabia as a
miracle of a film, and I couldn't agree more so.
Big thanks to Chris Uh. He was really nice, dude.
It was great to talk to him and maybe we'll
meet in person one day. Support his work. Go check
(01:03:29):
out Operation Finale in theaters August twenty nine. Very good,
beautifully shot, uh taught thriller of a film, highly recommended,
and Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley. It doesn't get any
better than that, everybody, So go check it out and
support his future work. And uh, thanks for tuning in everyone,
And until next time, why don't you go bring a
(01:03:50):
Nazi to justice? YEA movie. Crush is produced, engineered, edited,
and soundtracked by Noel Brown and Ramsay Hunt at How
Stuff Work Studios, Pont City Market, Atlanta, Georgia,
Hey, everybody, Welcome to Movie Crush. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Here.
I'm in the home studio here at Pont City Market,
but my interview guest, Mr Chris Whites, was in New
York City. Don't do a lot of these remote hookups much.
I've talked about it before. It's not the greatest situation
in the world. But Chris was a really good guy
and very conversational, and uh, I think we pulled it off.
(00:47):
You might know Chris from Jeez. He's done so many things.
He started his career and I got the most attention
right out of the gate with a movie he co
directed with his brother, American Pie. Just got so much
collateral on that first film, being such a big it,
he was able to do a lot of interesting things
after that, like acting in a wonderful, uh sort of
(01:09):
demented little indie that I love called Chuck and Buck.
He also co directed Down to Earth, was nominated for
an Oscar Award for Screenplay for About a Boy, which
he co wrote and co directed as well. Just wonderful,
wonderful film, one of my favorites. Uh. He also was
a writer on Rogue, one Star Wars movie and his
(01:30):
new film in theaters August twenty nine is called Operation Finale,
and they set up a screening for me here in Atlanta,
and boy was it good. It's uh. It's a story
of the real true story of the hunt and capture
and trial of Adolph Eichmann. Uh. He was one of
the UM, one of the architects of the Nazi campaign
(01:54):
in World War Two and kind of the one of
the Big the only one of the Big three that
escaped Ustice for a long time, UH, living in South
America under a different name. They finally caught up to him,
and this is that story, starring um Ben Kingsley as
aikman and Oscar Isaac as kind of the guy who
(02:15):
leads the team UH in a sort of Argo esque
way to to grab and kidnap this man and get
him out of the country somehow under the radar, and
also co stars Nick Kroll and Melanie Lauren and she's
just wonderful and everything that she's in. It was just
a really good movie, A very taught, suspenseful, um sort
(02:37):
of ticking clock, political thriller, period piece. It's all those things.
Really good movie. I hope you guys go out and
see it. You'll really enjoy it. And we had a
great talk today about his career and his interesting life
growing up. It did not know that he had a
long family history and in Hollywood and beyond, so that
was super cool to to learn about. And his pick
(03:00):
was just a little film, just a little nothing Indie
called Lawrence of Arabia, one of the probably the epic
of all epics in the in the age of the
epic hollywhich film Lawrence of Arabia even stands alone. And
I had never seen it, and this is one of
those It's long been on the list, and I got
to watch it um at my house. I'm definitely gonna
(03:21):
go check it out into the theater next time they
have an anniversary screening or something, because it was something else,
what a great, great film. I get the hype now
everyone Lawrence of Arabia is awesome and um, really something
to to behold as a viewer. So we had a
great conversation, even though we were a thousand miles apart.
(03:42):
Here we go with Chris White's on Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah,
I'm glad we're geting to talk because you are a
you're a multi hyphen It as they call it in
the business. Yeah, uh well, let me so. Uh man,
(04:02):
the actor's stuff doesn't really count because I only did
that twice. But Checking Buck is such a good movie.
Checking Buck sticks in people's minds. I loved it. Yeah. Thanks.
I'm a huge Mike White fan and it was just brilliant.
Yeah yeah, great one. Um yeah, I know that that
was I'm so glad I did that movie before. Um,
(04:25):
I got to established to worry, not to worry about it. Um.
It was great. Really bizarre the way that came about,
which is that Miguel Arteta, who who had gone, had
gone to school with my brother and sent us both
the script because we looked alike, basically because he needed
two characters look like and he wanted to have non
actors in it. Um. There were no other qualifications. Really,
(04:49):
I loved it, man, I thought it was great and
it was. It's interesting because you're a guy who and
this is one of my favorite qualities I think in
a filmmaker is, uh, you've really done a lot of
differ print things in your career. I mean, obviously you
and your brother, I mean you co wrote the movie Ants,
an animated film, and then you and your brother really
(05:10):
made your name for yourself with the American Pie movie,
and then right after that you started Chuck and Buck
and then did Down to Earth and About a Boy,
and like you, really, I never knew what to expect
from you guys, and I always appreciate that about We
try to We try to keep things weird in generally
have the strangest filmography as possible. I mean, I think,
(05:31):
um uh we when we got the chance to direct
our first movie, it happened to be American Pie, and
it was It's a movie that I loved and loved making,
but it wasn't like the thing that my heart desired
most of all. I've never been to high school in America, UM,
didn't go to prom, so I was working in a
(05:51):
genre that I didn't really know very well. So so
definitely the intent was to do something different as as
soon as possible, and Check and Buck was the next
thing that we did. It was a sort of strange
indie possibility, you know, feature shot on d v as
close to a dog my film I think as you
can get into America at the time, UM and uh.
(06:16):
And also some some weird kind of sexual politics stuff.
UM L G B. T Q before all of the
letters had been put together in that way kind of um,
interesting intersectional stuff. Uh. That was great to be a
part of, um because also I sort of felt like
I felt little guilty having made a studio. Now guilty anymore. Um.
(06:41):
But it was a way to sort of say, oh,
you know, we we have this kind of foot in
the indie world. My brother still makes independent films, um uh,
which is great. Uh and I will probably do that
next um. But yeah, I think that the thing was
not to be pigeonholed. There's a threat to that too, though,
(07:03):
which is that you sort of don't get a brand
and everybody apparently has to brand themselves um uh. But
because you don't necessarily have an identifiable visual um uh
sort of gallery of things, they're they're quite different um
in a way. But but I'm happy to live with that. Yeah.
(07:26):
I mean, American Pie certainly got you guys a ton
of collateral, like to have a smash it like that
right out of the gate. Uh. And I think, I mean,
I don't know how it works on the inside. You
talked about having a brand, but it seems like you
get a lot of interesting things throwing your way. Whether
it be like the Twilight franchise with New Moon or
for God's sakes, writing Rogue one. Yeah, I mean what
(07:49):
an opportunity. You know, that was a huge opportunity. That
was a dream for me. I mean I saw Star
Wars when I was seven, and my favorite film would
be Star Wars except that I think it's too boring
because it's everybody's favorite film. So, uh, when when I
got to to write Rogue one, it was something that
I've been hoping for for for years since I've heard
(08:11):
that they were going to uh make make new films,
and it happened to be exactly what I would have
wanted to do, which was the opening crawl, that is
to say, you know, I'm kind of an orthodox, ultra
orthodox Star Wars fan, like all that really matters to
me are episodes four or five and six, uh, and
nothing outside of that is kind of to me. So
(08:32):
to be able to work in that area was was
just fantastic. Yeah. Well, I mean I think I even
I rarely do this, but I put out a call
on our Facebook page about you know, I'm talking to
Chris Whitess, what do you want me to talk about?
And I think about of the people talked about Rogue
One and the fact that I think among Star Wars
fans it's uh, I think widely considered the best of
(08:54):
the new lot. Oh that's super cool. Um, I'm glad.
I think that's uh thanks to Gareth Edwards really um
and the what he wanted to do, the stamp that
he put on it. I think that the things I mean,
there are a lot of terrific writers worked on that,
and it's amazing that sort of holes together given how
many people did. Um. But I think the reason is
(09:18):
is his work. Um. You know, he was this fan
as well. I mean, in some ways, Rogue One is
kind of a fan movie. It's just a fan movie
if you were given all of the tools at your disposal.
And I think, um, I mean I like the other
films very much. Obviously I can't judge without bias. But
you know, Solo, when you look at that is a
(09:39):
movie made by some of the original makers of these films.
So um. But but this is Rogue One was um,
the people who grew up on it, um, and who
who had desperately wanted to to to do it and
do it correctly when they had the chance. So I
think there's a lot of deep love of especially episode
four in it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So when you're um,
(10:03):
like for someone who can, uh who writes and produces
and directs, what what goes into your decision making process
career wise? Like when to tackle what right? Um? Well,
I think with directing it it comes down it has
to be something that I really desperately feel I have
to do or I'll regret it deeply. I'm not a
(10:25):
gigging director. I'm not thinking about what to do next.
And I don't make a film a year or even
a film every two years. Um. And in part that's
because I can't necessarily stand the physical and mental pressure
of doing it or whatever, at least what I put
on myself. And you know, it is a lot of work.
Um uh. And I have a family, have three children,
uh and sort of takes me away from them every
(10:47):
time I do that, So I sort of have to
justify being a bad parent for a while. Um so
uh So that's the highest bar to reach. Um. In
terms of writing, I mean I get kind of excite
did about when I feel like I know how to
fix something occasionally, which is sort of rewriting work. And
also I love, um adapting the work of of novelists,
(11:11):
um and and sort of trying to uh to convey
what's great about those books in another medium, uh, in
a way that I would hope that the novelists themselves
can approve of. Um. There's that. So that's kind of
my connection to what I studied in college, which was English. Um.
(11:31):
What else acting, I will pretty much do anything anyone
asks me, but nobody does uh. And and producing is
kind of if I can help somebody do one of
those things, which is to say, like work on something
they really really care about, um, then then that's great. Um.
You know, I've had been really uh fortunate in getting
(11:52):
Cocu Nada's first movie made, Columbus, which was a beautiful
film starring John Show and Hayley Lou Richardson. Uh. We're
uh we are producing Lulu Wang her second movie, which
is based on this American life episode about her family,
which she did. And so it's really cool to be
(12:13):
able to intervene beneficially and early in someone's career. Um.
And also that's that's true of this science fiction film
prospect Um starring Pedro Pascal that uh that went to
South by Southwest this year. Um. Uh that that's sort
of the best part of producing I think. Um, yes,
(12:37):
that's a long answer to your first question. Well, I
mean speaking of working on books. You know, About a
Boy was such a great book, and you guys, uh,
you and your brother did such a wonderful job. It's
a beloved movie. Um. Then you've got an Oscar nomination
for screenplay for that. Yeah, that was crazy. I know,
that's great. Uh. What was it like working with Nick?
How involved was he? Uh? Well, Nick, I think at
(13:00):
the time, you know, now he can adapt his own stuff,
he can adapt other people stuff, you know, that stuff
from scratch, and he's doing just fine on his own, um,
which he probably intended to do all along. So I
think he found it probably a bit of a too
painful of prospect to stay too close to events when
we're shooting it. So we had some some really good
meetings with Nick early and and liked each other a lot,
(13:21):
but I think he decided to step away so as
not to see how we were going to mangle what
what he had done. Um, you know, Fortunately he approved
of it after the fact. I think he's been you know,
really kind about the movie. Um. Uh, I think he
was sort of surprised at people not noticing how much
(13:43):
we'd changed the final kind of act of the of
the novel let alone, um, you know, changing the time period. Um.
But it's really gratifying that he likes what we made
of it. UM. That said, I suspect that um uh
that if he had done this later in his career,
(14:04):
he would have adapted his own work and done it
really beautifully uh. Um. But so the uh, the chance
to adapt that um and thus to get um the
only shred of uh prestige. That's not true, Uh, it was.
(14:25):
It was fantastic. It just felt I felt very much, um,
like I was born to write that script, or rather
sort of educated to write that script, because I kind
of like lived amongst the English for for long enough,
having gone a high school and college there that I
understood what was going on, um, and felt like capable
of translating that into an American mode in some ways.
(14:46):
But in some ways it was an English picture. And
it was like this fantastic moment in a test screening
in London when someone said, oh, it's a good English film. Um. Yeah,
that was a really charmed production and the whole thing
I remember just everything that we decided to do kind
of working out the way that we had wanted it to,
which is which is fantastic, and it doesn't doesn't really happen.
(15:10):
Like I remember at one point, I think I would
be great if you know badly John Boy could write
an original album for this movie. Yeah, would be cool.
And we called him up and he's like yeah, okay.
Uh and everything in that sense kind of worked out,
from Hugh Grant during it to sort of taking a
flyer on Nick Holt um even down to um to
(15:33):
Tony Collette during it. Uh, was was an extraordinary experience. Yeah,
she's so great, is it? Is it weird to uh
do you see Nick Holt today and like, marvel at
what a big grown petso grown man he's become. He
is a complete hunk um and he's he's a really
good actor to uh. And you don't necessarily know if
(15:55):
somebody can play a twelve year old really well at twelve,
is going to be able to play grown ups? Um? Yeah,
I mean we stay in touch and it's you know,
I just love sort of watching him grow. Um. It's uh,
it's really funny. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, where are you
from You said you went to high school in England. Yeah, well,
(16:16):
I'm from New York originally, but my dad had gone
to school in England. He went to to uh grade
school with the equivalent of grade school in high school
in England. And so I was supposed to just go
for a year to check out my dad's old school
in London when I was fourteen, and I ended up
staying and uh doing my exams there a levels they're
called at the end of high school exams, and then
(16:38):
got into Cambridge and I stayed and I stayed for
a few years. Uh and um that and I've ended
up working on a few movies there, which is which
is great. So I'm New Yorker but sort of mid
Atlantic in uh like education. Right. What is your mother
(16:59):
from England as well? Or No, my mom is from
She was born in l A but her mother was Mexican.
Her mom was actually a Mexican silent film actress, and
her dad, my grandfather, was from uh, the Czech Republic,
which at that time was Austria and then became Czechoslovakia
(17:22):
and became the Czech Republic through various World Wars hot
and cold. Um, and yeah, so I'm from I'm kind
of from all over. I mean, like a lot of
Americans are now with with you and your brother was
it was filmmaking something you always wanted to get into,
or I mean, is it in your family lineage at all?
It was? Um. So, my my mom um was an actor. Um,
(17:46):
she's actually in a film which is in my film.
So she was in a phone called Imitation of Life
in ninety nine. Um that she played an African American
woman passing as white. Um in this uh great Douglas
Cirque film. Her father was a producer and agent and
(18:09):
he was an Asian for a lot of European filmmakers
using Mark Bergman's agent. Um, he was Billy Wilder's agent. Um.
And uh yeah, so there's there's that sort of that
part of the family goes goes back in terms of filmmaking.
And my my grandma was um uh known as La
(18:33):
Novia de Mexico, which means the Sweetheart of Mexico. She
was kind of the first uh talking picture star in
Mexico and before that she'd been a silent film actress
in Hollywood. So that's kind of a cool story too. Yeah.
So so I we this is like the family business.
Oh that's amazing, that's really cool. So, uh were you
(18:55):
and you? I mean so obviously you guys. I mean
usually ask people about their influences growing up, and certainly
when you have an older sibling. Um, I have an
older brother and older sister. You get a lot of
culture fed through them, sort of your jams as kids
growing up. That was definitely, um, you know, all the
good music uh and and stuff came through my brother
and eventually he started writing plays, um, which he still does. Uh.
(19:20):
And when I grated from college, we thought it would
be kind of a wheeze to uh to to write
screenplays together. We didn't really have a clear idea of
what was going to come of it. It just seemed
like it might be a cool thing and maybe it
would work out, and uh and it did. We we
we worked hard. We're also very lucky. I remember on
my twenty one birthday we had pitched a story to
MGM and they they said, yeah, you know, we'll pay
(19:44):
you to write a screenplay. It was a long time
between that and getting screen credit, which was on ants Um,
which I think came out eight Uh so that was
like seven years to that. Of just um working on
our own stuff and rewritting other people's stuff, but never
really getting anything made. Um, and then it's sort of
(20:07):
all started with with that for us. Did you ever
have to yell? My grandfather was Billy Wilder's agent forgot to?
I feel the funny thing is, although we did have
the sort of background and film, it was like an
old film and you're seeing film like, I'm a totally
different era. So like by the time the nineties rolled around,
nobody nobody really cared um. But now it's it's nice
(20:31):
to look back on. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, I got
to see Operation Finale, uh two days ago. Great that
it was really good man. I'm uh. I mean again
with kind of uh not having like a direct through
line through your career, You've you've done all these interesting films,
(20:52):
things like Anton American Pie about a boy, and then
you do, uh what it what feels like a highst
movie even though it's not exactly, but it sort of
has the DNA of a heist movie as a as
a sort of a ticking clock thriller, which is, you know,
it's one of my favorite genres and I know that's
something in in screenwriting where they say, hey, if you
(21:14):
can get a ticking clock going, you have the luxury
having a real ticking clock built into the real life story. Ye,
which was really gave it a lot of intensity. Um,
thank you, I'm glad it did. Um. Yeah. In some ways,
it's got sort of all these genre bells and whistles.
It's a it's a kidnapping plot, you know, the true
(21:34):
story I saw kidnapped Adolf Eichman, who was the kind
of logistics coordinator of the Holocaust. Um. They found out
he was in Buenos Aires and put together a team
to extract him and take him to Israel for trial.
Pretty extraordinary cinematic story from the get go. Um and
(21:56):
uh yeah, I I wanted it to be a kind
of a hybrid of um of a genre suspense thriller
and also UM at the same time kind of reckoning
with who this person that off Aikman was and what
it was like for the uh for a team of
people whose families had been destroyed in the Holocaust too
(22:21):
have to live with him for the ten days in
which they wait in a safe house to be taken
out by allow. Yeah. Man, it was it was just
so intense because uh, you know, it felt like about
half the people just wanted to torture and kill him. Yeah,
but you you also as a filmmaker, and I think
to your credit, you know, you needed to tell the
(22:42):
story also of this old man whose responses am I
to blame for all of World War two? You know,
so it was really interesting to kind of and of
course he is a bad guy, and there's some very tough,
affecting scenes in the film. But um, I think to
your credit, to even indulge that line of thought from
(23:03):
him was pretty necessary. I think. So. I mean, I
think it's important to um to see the people who
perpetrate these um crimes as human beings, not because we
should feel sympathy for them, but because we should be
alive to the possibility of it happening in our time,
in our country and our culture, in ourselves as well. UM.
(23:27):
So I think the temptation is always there to make
them as evil as possible, um on the surface. But
I but um, we aimed to sort of try to
seduce the characters and in a way the audience into
viewing them as as people as well. Yeah. And it's interesting,
(23:49):
like you've had this long successful career, worked with all
kinds of people, but I imagine even at this stage, uh,
to be directing those scenes with Ben Kingsley and Oscar Isaac,
just the two of them, like that had to be
pretty cool. It is extremely cool. I mean, on on
the one level, you can just sort of let them,
let them fly, um, and know that you're gonna get
(24:11):
great stuff. Uh. On on another level, um, sort of
to try to keep up with them and what they're
doing is is a huge challenge. And you know, even
with a studio film, time is always running out in
terms of the number of takes you're going to get
to uh to sort of solidify what the what the
(24:34):
character is going to be. Um. So it is, Uh,
it's exciting, it's it's really daunting. Um. You know, any
any actor who's been working as long as I have
been working as a director has actually been in three
or four times as many movies as I have directed.
So that is interesting as well. Um, they bring a
tremendous amount of experience of different performances to the table. Uh.
(24:58):
But it was sleep when all was sudden, unsurprisingly smooth,
the whole the whole process. Um, there wasn't a lot
of hammering, hammering things out. Yeah. Well, um, there were
some scenes with Ben Kingsley as the young Aikman. How
did you do that? Was that all makeup? Or was
there some CG involved? There was some CG. There was
(25:21):
some CG involved. We're getting pretty good at doing that. Yeah,
it really looked believable, I thought, and you didn't. I
think the key to that stuff is not overdoing it
and hanging too long. Um. Not to mention another Star
Wars movie, I won't go there, but you you sort
of played it just right, I think, and it came
off as super believable. Oh thanks, I'm glad. Um. You know,
(25:42):
it's it's really sort of tricky to try to get
that stuff right. Um, to sort of d age a
person to the appropriate level. Uh that Um, that is
right for the scenario, not to have it go into
Uncanny Valley. Yeah. Um, uh, you maintain the the sort
(26:02):
of performance qualities. It was. It was a company called
Shade VFX and Los Angeles and I worked very hard
Los Angeles and New York and we we all worked
very hard together to try to get that right. How
did this story come to you? I was sent the
script by MGM two years ago. Um. Uh, John Glickman,
who's the head of things over there, knew that I
(26:24):
had had some experience with the period because of my
my dad. My dad wrote biographies of prominent Nazi Party members,
and uh, and I sort of helped him put together
his library and did some of helped him with his
research and copy copyright his manuscripts. So I was kind
(26:45):
of immersed in this stuff as a child. Um. And
so in spite of the fact that my first movie
was a teen sex comedy, she was like not totally
alien to me. Um. So I and I hadn't had
a chance to to do something in this period. Um,
that was it was very exciting. Yeah, I mean it
(27:06):
was just beautifully shadows, very very good looking movie. Thank you.
That's um. Heavier, a UM wonderful Spanish DP who also
shot The Others and the Road, which is a very
beautiful movie Blue Jasmine. He has a beautiful sort of burnished,
(27:27):
um yet still realistic style. And he and I have
now worked together on three movies kind of know each
other's ways. And Uh, I think that a great thing
about Heavier's work is that he doesn't have anything to prove.
We're not kind of pushing camera moves and um, you know,
(27:49):
gyrating around uh or or taking on a sort of
artistic angles just for the sake of it. Yeah, it
was not flashy. It just came across as a very
just a good looking movie. That's the best way to
say it, I think. Uh. And then Nick Role was
in it, which UH big fan of his comedy, and
(28:10):
it's uh. I mean there are a couple of lighter
moments with him, but he definitely played against type here
and it was good to see that's a serious role.
And I mean he's actually very serious thoughtful guy, as
I think a lot of uh good comedians are. Um,
there's always a sort of a darkness to uh comedy.
UM and UM, I think uh Nick brought a real
(28:33):
thoughtfulness to the to the part. UM he had actually
when he was a kid known one of the members
of the expedition UM who who was an associate of
his his father's next father worked in corporate security. UM,
so he he also sort of felt connected to the
(28:55):
To the part it was important for you to try
and cast Jewish actors as much as you could for
those roles. UM. I felt like that wasn't a requirement.
There are some non Jewish actors playing Israelis. I felt
like there's there's I mean, there's probably an elusive balancing
point at which you are, um, you know, goy washing
(29:15):
things as it were. Uh. And there's also a point
at which you're you're being a little too restrictive by
saying that only Jewish actors can play Jewish parts. Um,
you know, uh we we There are a couple of
wonderful Israeli actors in the film, uh Leo Raz and Ohadanoler.
I mean the actual the mission itself. On the mission itself,
(29:39):
some of the agents were born in Israel, but the
rest of them were born in Germany and Poland and Romania,
um and Hungry and so it was kind of an
international uh group. Anyway, Yeah, that's awesome. Uh. Well, I
can't wait for you know, I'll give it a good
plug with the listeners before and after in the intro piece,
(30:01):
but I really can't wait to see this thing in
the theater. Um. I think I think you're gonna do
quite well, sir with it. So yeah, we worked hard,
I hope, I hope. So so we can move into
Lawrence of Arabia. Now let's move which is um I
(30:24):
have to admit I had never seen this movie, oh man,
and like if you had to see it? Because I said, so,
did you know you're in for an over three hour
long movie? I did. I mean, this is one of
those that I've always wanted to see a new It
wasn't like, well what is this? I've never heard of this.
Um it's been on the long list and I've I've admitted,
there are so many classics like this I need to
get around to. So I owe you some gratitude for
(30:48):
for quote unquote forcing me to watch this. It's a
great film, oh man, just unbelievable. UM nine six two
David Lean directed. And then uh you know, of course
Peter o'tool. I don't was that his very first movie.
I believe it was his very first movie. That's crazy.
I think it was introducing Peter Ochol. He may have
(31:08):
been in a big part in something or other, but
it's the one that really broke him. Yeah, um, you didn't.
I don't suppose you were able to see it on
a big screen. That was every once in a while,
you're gonna because no, not not because not to sort
of say, like you, I you can't speak properly to it.
But it's an amazing experience too to see it on
(31:28):
the big screen. Yeah, it played here. Um. I believe
the seventy millimeter print played in Atlanta a few years ago.
I didn't get to see it, but now that is
like on my list two because I know they still
show the restored version from time to time. And I
have a great big TV. But I definitely want to
see this on the big, big screen. I mean, it's
(31:51):
all about the big, big screen. Um. It was definitely
shot um, very wide, very big. Um. I think it
was Jack Cardiff, Wasn't it was the the or Is
it pretty young? It's pretty young? Yeah, okay, Um, Nicholas
Rogue shot a second unit. Interesting thing about that? About that? Um,
(32:13):
that's pretty weld Um yes, okay, So here is uh
I suppose the what's problematic about my saying this is
my favorite movie? There are no women in this movie? Uh,
and and so it's like it's hard to uh to
hang onto it uh as a favorite movie in these times. Um.
(32:35):
But I'm going to make an argument that in some
ways there there is a uh a kind of well
as as Nold Coward said about Peter O'Toole if he
read any prettier, they'd call it Florence of Arabia. That
there there are some sort of gender fluid dynamics in
the movie. Um, But I I fully comped to the
(32:58):
fact that it's kind of lame to like a movie
that has zero women in it. However, I do think
that the screenplay and cinematography and performances are absolutely extraordinary. Yeah.
But to be fair, like, would this movie have been
(33:18):
any better if they forced in some kind of lame
love relationship? Yeah, probably not. And probably the fact of
the matter it in a way, it is about horrible
things that men do. Um. And so I don't buy
any means think that this is entirely a heroic story.
As a matter of fact, I think it's got a
running critique of um of the heroic male ideal um.
(33:45):
And so yeah, I'm not sure that that would make
it a better film as as the film that it is. Yeah,
And for the time I mean I had, I went
and did some research afterward, because I didn't know much
about T. Lawrence or his story. UM widely speculated and
generally agreed upon that he was probably gay, and the
(34:06):
way they treated in the movie for nineteen sixty two,
I thought was pretty brave and that they didn't They
just kind of let the movie be, didn't make anything
over the top, but didn't cast any judgments or make
any big statements about it either. Yeah, I think that's right.
Um Uh, I think uh. I think that the his character,
(34:27):
O Marshari's character, Anthony Quinn's character, it's a it's a
bit of a love triangle as well as the um
the young kind of Arab young men who are serving Lawrence.
There's there's clearly something there inasmuch as a film was
able to address those things. I think it did sort
(34:48):
of entertain the fact that these were men who were
in love with one another while they were doing what
they were doing. And I don't I don't think it's
shames them for it either. I think it's very clear
that there's these kind of very intimate um bonds between
between these guys um that weren't seen as beyond the
(35:09):
pale or or something shameful either. Um. You know, there's
this really funny turn in in the dialogue when um Uh,
Anthony Quinn says to Omar shar Reef that you know
Lawrence has lied about something, and he says he is
not perfect um. And it's clear that for that entire
(35:32):
time they've both been kind of maintaining this notion that
that that Peter O'Toole, who is perfect enough looking and seeming, uh,
is some kind of ideal um. And and that idea
is kind of broken down over the course of the movie. Yeah.
I mean, it was a really interesting character piece with
especially having never seen it and heard so much about it.
(35:54):
I knew it was this epic of epics, and that
the photography was amazing, uh and of any millimeter, these
super beautiful wide shots, but I had never heard much
about the story, and like I said, didn't know about T. E. Lawrence.
And it's just such an interesting character piece that this guy,
this you know, blonde, blue eyed, gorgeous Englishman goes by
(36:16):
himself to the middle of nowhere because he has an
affinity for the Arab people and kind of becomes almost
godlike to them. Yeah. Um, and and falls from grace
and and is eventually kind of discarded at the end
of it too. I mean, there are all kinds of
interesting to me, interesting critiques of colonialism, of of heroism,
(36:40):
of of the West, um. Going on in this movie
that if you just sort of went on what people
say about it really seems like kind of a gung
ho war story, a heroic great man war story. Um.
And and you know, there are these extraordinary scenes like
the attack on the Turkish armored train, um, you know, uh,
(37:04):
the the attack on Acaba, all of these amazing war
scenes which are genuinely rousing, and there's there's kind of
a survival adventure uh going on. But at the same time,
underneath the surface, there's this real sense that t. Lawrence
was a deeply troubled, tortured figure who uh, who could
(37:30):
not um live with his englishness, could not become an Arab,
which is perhaps what he most wanted to become. Um
was was lost in the world. Um, was deeply vain,
uh kind of strangely masochistic um and uh and ends
(37:52):
up both becoming a hero and being totally undone by
his experiences. Yeah, I mean it's a long movie, but
it never feels long. Uh. It doesn't feel like I mean,
he hangs on certain scenes, but it always seems David
Lean does. But it always seems like for the right
amount of time, and it should be a close to
(38:13):
four hour movie. Yeah, I think that's right. I know
maybe these days it would be a mini series or something.
But um, to me, like if you if you know
what you're getting in for, it's a pretty amazing ride.
Um and Um. So I had the chance to work
with Anne Coats, the editor of Laurence of Arabia. She
edited The Golden Compass uh for me. Um she recently
(38:39):
passed away, Rest in peace. Um, very very dear, incredibly
talented uh woman ah who you know maybe made the
greatest cut in all of cinema history. Um if you
with the match, the match, Yes, the match cutting to
(38:59):
the of the rising Sun. Um and who had an
incredible sense of of pacing and not pacing in terms
of speeding things up, but in terms of the right
way into and out of scenes. Um you know who
who sort of popularized flat cuts as opposed to transitions. Um.
(39:22):
Uh that this movie, like, amongst the many things that
are working at absolute highest gear uh is the editing
of the film. I think there's just so many aspects
in which this film absolutely shines that that this was
like kind of the obvious choice for me. Yeah, I
mean the cinematography gets so much attention here I'm glad
(39:45):
that you shouted out the editing and uh and the
writing just the I mean you talk about character complexity.
You have a character in Lawrence that wants almost to
be worshiped by the Arab world. Is almost like a
trade or to England in certain ways as far as
where his heart is and willing to execute a guy,
(40:06):
but also having a weird aversion to guns and violence
in some ways. Yeah, it has a very strange It
has a very interesting take on violence and the appeal
of violence and brutality, um the impulse towards it. There's
a very strange moment in the film in which, um h, Lawrence,
(40:30):
he and his kind of band of marauders have derailed
a train and the they're killing the Turkish not just
Turkish soldiers but Turkish citizens on board this train crossing
the desert, and Lawrence looks down and sees a wounded
Turkish officer, and the Turkish officer fires at him and
(40:53):
kind of wings Lawrence and and Lawrence is he says, good, good, good.
It's a very strange line reading too, He's happy to
have been shot but not killed because and and the
movie doesn't set this up terribly carefully. But it's that
is to say, it doesn't set up in an obvious way. Um,
(41:15):
but he is pleased to have been injured, um. I
think in part because he now feels like a fully
fledged male, which of course is sick. Um. And I
think also very carefully the the I think David Lean
cast the Turkish officer very carefully as well, because he's
a very beautiful man. There's something very strange uh and
(41:38):
homerrotic going on in that um and that wounding there. Um,
there's a kind of a you know, it's like a
rite of passage or a loss of loss of virginity
in a way, um, which also frankly happens Lawrences is
raped later. You don't really uh, it's not really um
(42:00):
uh incredibly obvious. Uh. But um that's clue that to me.
It's that's clearly what happens when he was later captured
by the Turks. Right. So they're all kinds of really extraordinary,
intense and deep things going on in this movie. Um.
That really set it apart from say Bridge on the
(42:22):
River Quai, which is you know David Lean's I think
that was his later I think that came later. That
was actually right before right before Okay, he did a
bridge on the river Quai, this and doctor Shivago all
three in a row, which is commanding, what a run um.
But bridge on the river Quine, I think is a
lot more straightforward, uh in terms of how it deals
(42:43):
with kind of men and heroism. Yeah. I mean during
the scene you were talking about where he's uh has
the little flesh wound on his arm. He he he
almost wants to be shot again. I feel like because
he doesn't hide, he kind of stands there right while
this guy keeps pointing and shooting Adam and missing, and
I was I was just like, what are you doing? Man?
(43:03):
Get out of there. But there was this weird that
was definitely a strange scene to kind of unpack, it
is a strange scene. I think he is daring death
at that point. He made me wants to die. He
certainly appreciates getting injured, which is deeply strange. Um and
um ah. And there's that that dynamic works throughout the film. Later,
(43:30):
the reason that he's captured by the Turks is that
he decides to just kind of uh waltz into a
Turkish occupied our village um and thinks, you know, he's
he says to his comrades that he's invisible and he
can never be caught. Um. And then there's this extraordinary
(43:52):
scene with Jose ferrare H in which Um, you know, Lawrence,
who think he has sort of trained himself to withstand
physical pain and punishment, um is is broken um and
and you can see his sort of dawning on him
(44:14):
that he's not what he thought he he was. Um yeah,
um so and and and of course eventually by the
end of the film, he has done all these heroic
fel things, and he has won these great victories against
the Turks at the sacrifice in a way of his um,
(44:36):
his decency um and um. He all with the aim
of of giving the Arabs, as it were, Uh, they're
their own country, um and um. And he's screwed over
by the British diplomat British and French diplomats who negotiate
(44:57):
the Psychspeko agreement, which kind of divvy is up. Uh.
Divvy's up that part of the world into uh Iraq
and Syria and Jordan's um. Which and that's another thing
that I think it's really cool about the movie, which
is that it's about Iraq. Uh. You know, it's not
about Baghdad, but it's but it's about Iraq and Syria
(45:19):
and how uh the Western Powers completely fucked up uh
this part of the world by um double dealing uh
and um exerting their power geographically. Yeah. I did a
big history deep dive after after watching that. They cleared
up a lot of things um. And it was interesting
(45:42):
with the complexity of character. Like you, he almost never
gets what he wants because on one hand, you get
the feeling that what he wants most would be to
be like king of the Middle Eastern country, but he
also kind of wanted to be regarded as an English
war hero. And to the print where he has this
UM journal is following him around photographer based on a
(46:04):
real guy, uh, and you can tell he's eating it
up and he wants to press. But there were there
was speculation, I think still today that he was not
as important as he made himself out to be. I
think that's right. I mean, I think um Uh. Somebody
in the movie says it's a side show of a
side show, UM, that the war in the Desert wasn't
(46:27):
as crucial to kind of winning winning the war as
the outsized heroics and sort of dash of the um
of the campaign, uh seems to let on. UM. So, yeah,
it's it's a it's a sort of in some ways
(46:48):
of a deeply cynical uh telling of this story. Yeah.
You can see at the end two when he's uh
that last scene where he's being driven away in the
car and he passes the guys on the camp moles
and you can see in his face he wants nothing
more than to be on a camel again. Right, Yeah,
he's completely lost um Uh And I mean Lawrence's later
(47:12):
in Lawrence's later life, he actually tried to sign to
just sign up to serve as UM as an enlisted man.
I think it was in the R A F. Actually
I'm not sure of that, but he wanted to have
another run at it, but not as the UM celebrated
(47:34):
war hero. UM. So there's something I mean, I guess
admirable little but also deeply sad about that. And of
course the movie opens with um his death, which of
course has now become an old chestnut UM in terms
of biopics, but is pretty interesting in terms of how
(47:55):
you know, we we see this character riding on a
motorcycle and having a somewhat ridiculous accident due to his
own um um foolhardiness um uh and um we never
see him on a motorcycle again or see him in
England again. Um. So the has sort of been told
(48:16):
in this this interesting reverse order um um, which is
to say, no matter what he's going to achieve in
the rest of the film, this is what he's going
to that's this is what it's going to become of him.
Just some of the shots I mean now as a
(48:39):
as a as a film viewer today, to see, you know,
so many big battle scenes that the more large in
CG they get, the less impressive they become. I feel
like that's absolutely true, and it's amazing to see, like
the scene where they were unletting the horses off the train.
(49:00):
Just the scenes, those big wide shots of the camps
or the or the the guys going to battle on
the camels and horses. I mean, to look at that, no,
those are all real things is just astounding. Yeah, it
is amazing, and I think that you can feel it
as well. I think that that the human mind is
able to process the fact that these big CG battles
(49:20):
are actually not taking place in physical space UM. And
so uh, you know, I think it probably reaches high
water mark in terms of uh CG battle stuff and
in the Lord of the Rings um and everything else
is kind of aping that um massive technology. UM. But
(49:41):
but to see it in camera, uh, it is pretty
extraordinary that the scale of the operation, the fact that
I think it was that the Jordanian Army was was
kind of enlisted in in uh performing a lot of
these battle sequences that they were filming on location in
the desert. H stuff that you wouldn't do nowadays, but
(50:02):
that is incredibly effective for this just in in the days,
so when you would shoot for months and months and
months on end um and you know, wait for the
weather to be right and all kinds of stuff that
we don't we can't do nowadays or we won't or don't. Yeah.
I think one of the big takeaways besides just the
(50:23):
the scope was camels are amazing. Camels are pretty wild
a character in this movie. There's a lot of camels
stuff in this moeting. It's really good stuff. Camels are amazing.
Water is amazing. UM. Yeah. Now, what was your what
was your introduction to Lawrence of Arabia? What was the
when was the first time you saw it? You remember, Oh, man,
(50:44):
I feel like the first time I saw it was
probably part of it as a kid um uh, when
it got mixed up in my mind with this much
more shlocky movie called The Wind and the Lion, um
I think for and and also actually my uncle produced
(51:04):
a movie called March or Die. There's a sort of
brief flourishing around the nineteen seventies of Arabian or foreign
legion war movies. And I must have at this at
that time seen on TV some really crappy, cut down
version of Laurens of Arabia where still went on longer
than I was allowed to stay up. Um. And I
(51:24):
didn't see it again until I was probably like a
film form or something. And then I remember very vividly
seeing it at LACMA on the big screen with with
overture and intermission and everything, um, with my brother and
my friend, uh, Matthew Hoffman, and just being kind of
(51:44):
bowled over, and then reading about uh the making of
the film, Robert Bolt's screenplay, um and um, and just
finding it not only kind of really beautiful but incredibly intelligent. Yeah.
And then that's or is just so iconic. Now, yeah,
just amazing score that. Uh, I believe that the commercial. Yeah,
(52:08):
he wasn't even the first choice. I think he was
sort of third or fourth on the list. It's interesting,
but yeah, and he didn't have a whole lot of
time either, apparently, so he um. And of course you
don't know if it's a chicken or the egg thing,
but maybe it's because the movie was so iconic. But
it really, man, when you hear that music at the
beginning and you see that wide frame, it's just like
chill inducing. Absolutely. Yeah. So it won Best Picture, Director, Score, Cinematography, Art, Direction, Editing,
(52:37):
and sound and lost. Yeah, Peter to a lost to
Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. No shame there, No, no,
I can't. I can't feel bad about that. And oh, Marshall,
although I think, I mean, honestly, I think, um, Peter
Chil's portrayal of Lawrence is more nuanced than Gregory Peck
(53:00):
To Kill a Mockingberg. I think that you're you're winning
not just for the performance but for the character. And
To Kill a Mockingbird is sort of approving nods to
the character. Yeah, yeah, fair enough, little one note? Uh,
And then oh, Marshalif lost. Uh. And then the screenplay
did not win as well. But yeah, I mean I
(53:21):
can't wait screen play Wait, wait what one screenplay? God,
screenplay should have one. That's what I think A Mockingbird did,
if I'm not mistaken. Okay, okay, so it must have
been Do they have adapted screenplay and screenplay at that
time or was it only one category? I think it
was adapted in the and this was considered adapted from
t Lawrences from right seven pilos of wisdom. Um, yeah, okay,
(53:44):
all right, all right, I think I think it's a
rap is a better screenplay. I think I'm with you. Uh.
And here's a couple of bits of trivia. I'm sure
you know this stuff. But for the benefits of the listeners,
fairly interesting. Um, most of the movement and the film
goes left or right very purposely because David Lean wanted
(54:05):
to emphasize the journey aspect of it. Yeah, I agree entirely.
I think that we that in the West we see
Things is going left or right, probably because of writing.
I wonder if it's made by an an Arabic UH filmmaker,
it would have gone right to lapse Oh yeah, I
noticed that O'Toole wrote right to left in one of
those scenes, which I thought it was pretty subtle, was
(54:27):
writing Arabic. Yeah, that's that's cool. Uh. And then for
some of those great shots, David Lean's cinematographer Freddy Young
apparently got ahold of a four and eighty two millimeter
lens oha crap in order to shoot uh successfully shoot
a mirage. And yes, okay, well that that would be
when when omark, when when you first s c O.
(54:49):
Mar Sharif arrived at the at the um the well,
that amazing shot of him and his horse kind of
appearing out of out of this mirrage. Yeah. For the
benefits of non filmmaking listeners, what is the four millimeter
lens mean? A four two millimeter lens is radically outside
(55:10):
of the bounds of what you normally use in making
a feature film. You might go, as you know, you're
usually working somewhere between twenty four millimeters and a hundred
a hundred being very tight, uh narrow frame for for
close ups, twenty four being something very wide, and four
(55:31):
hundred whatever millimeter lens that is is something like a
specialty lens for maybe for industrial purposes or something, um,
who knows, uh. And it means that the degree of
compression between foreground and background is is enormous. UM. So
you can shoot something very far away and it will
(55:51):
appear to move forward very very slowly. Um, it'll kind
of be flattened. Um. And and that's that's what you
would use to I guess catch a mirage, but also
something kind of um, hovering interview in a mirage. Like
all of these lenses, especially when you get to the
length that is going to be being boring now, But
(56:12):
of a four and fifty something millimeter lens, there are
many many elements to the lens. There are many many
lenses uh through that sort of tube of the lens,
so that the light is doing all kinds of gnarly
things and they have to be very carefully, um, very
carefully calibrated in order to work properly. I appreciate that insight.
It was not boring at all. I think people appreciate that.
(56:36):
All right. Well, we finished up with a couple of
quick segments, one called what Ebert said, this movie is
a complete disappointment. I like to go back and see
what Mr Ebert thought of these films. He gave Lawrence
of Arabia four stars out of four fair enough, and
he had this to say, what a bold, mad act
(56:57):
of genius it was to make Lawrence of Arabia, or
even think that it could be made. The impulse to
make this movie was based, above all, on imagination. The
story of Lawrence is not founded on violent battle scenes
are cheap melodrama, but on David Lean's ability to imagine
what it would look like to see a speck appear
on the horizon of the desert and slowly grow into
a human being. It is a spare movie and clean,
(57:18):
uncluttered lines, and there's never a moment when you're in
doubt about the logistical details of the various campaigns. Lawrence
of Araby is not a simple biography or an adventure movie,
although it contains both elements, but a movie that uses
the desert as a stage for the flamboyance of a driven,
quirky man. That's about right, I mean for a quirky
I might I might say sort of unhinged, but yes, yeah,
(57:40):
quirky was a weird word choice there. Uh and then
we finished he was wacky, uh man. His eyes were
just so blue. Uh. And we didn't even mention that
Alec Guinness uh portrayed a Middle Easterner. And well, of course,
now now it would be beyond the pale to do that.
But if you're gonna, if you're gonna white wash, may
(58:01):
as well get out againnis to do it. Make jobs agreed? Uh.
And then we finished with five questions with Chris Whites.
What's the first movie you remember seeing in a theater?
It was Midway starring Charlton Heston about the Battle of Midway.
Super schlocky movie. Uh, total gung ho war film which
(58:23):
actually had a little spot of compassion for uh niss
Americans Japanese Americans. Um. And I saw it in the
sag Harbor uh movie theater on Main Street and sag Harbor,
New York. It burned down last year and it is
just being rebuilt, which makes me very happy. All right. Uh.
(58:43):
First R rated movie you remember seeing? Oh man, Well,
I don't was it was? It was Alien R rated? Yes, Okay,
I think that's the one. I can really first remember
saying there's probably something on in in early HBO that
I saw and shouldn't have seen. Um. Uh seeing Alien
clutching my mom because I was terrified. I was still
(59:06):
a kid at the time. It's a really bad decision
to take. How old are you, ah man? When did
it come out? I was born in Okay, Yeah, I
mean I was not allowed to see it. I was
born in seventy one. And my brother got to see
it and I didn't. It was sort of that thing
where he was just old enough to see these things
and he I've told the story in the show before,
(59:27):
but he came home that night and literally set up
for what felt like the length of the movie telling
me the whole movie, which is pretty great for a
big brother. That's nice. Um, will you walk out of
a bad movie? Mm hmm, I will walk out of
a bad movie made in bad faith? Right? I think
that some movies are clearly uh crappy and nobody is
(59:52):
really really gives a crap about it. Um that, but
not a bad movie made in good faith. Just to
say that, it's hard to make even a bad movie. Um,
so I will hang in there are out of a
kind of a ritual obligation to the filmmakers. Uh. And
sometimes you know, you get a trick or two even
(01:00:13):
that of something that that stinks. But that's a great
answer a bad movie made in bad faith. I know
exactly what you're talking about. Oh, it's like you don't
deserve for me to sit here. Yeah, thank you. Listen.
If you didn't care about it, why should I? All right?
Number four we usually tailored to the guests. So I'm
gonna go with what movie in movie history do you
(01:00:36):
most which I wish you would have directed? Mm? Hmmm
um or written? Or written both? Oh? Man, I mean, uh,
it might be. I mean another one of my favorites
is High and Low, the Kurosawa film, which I think
(01:00:56):
is share Brilliance. Um. You know a film that that
maintains tension even though it's mostly shot in one one room. Um,
something like that, that would be fantastic. All right, good answer. Uh.
And then finally number five movie going one on one? Uh?
What do you do with the movie theater? Where do
(01:01:16):
you sit? And what do you eat? Um? I usually
don't eat anything. Ah. I know that's very sad, but
I don't like crunching. I don't like being distracted by Googer's.
Which if I did eat something to be Googer's and uh,
let me see if it's a full crowd. I would
(01:01:39):
rather be front row center. If not, I'll try to
get the best angle on on the the screen, which
would be about five rows back in the middle. Huh yeah.
Sometimes I like to to be totally immersed in it,
but actually it really depends on the on the distance
between the front row and the screen, is right? Sure? Sure,
(01:02:01):
because I don't I don't wanna um look around too much. Awesome?
All right, well, thanks Chris, thank you. There's a lot
of fun that was really loved operation finale, and congratulations
on that. And that's awesome. Quite an achievement. Thank you,
and thank you to your listeners for listening to me.
All Right, thanks a lot, man, Okay, thank you. See
(01:02:21):
all right, all right, everybody, how did we do? Did
we cover the movie enough for you? I hope so? Uh,
Lawrence of Arabia, there was a lot there, and uh,
he had really good insight on it. It It was cool
to talk to a director, um who was able to
(01:02:44):
explain things like what along lens means to someone like
myself and maybe to you. So I hope you learned
something there, and uh I really enjoyed his take on
the characters and um, just the shooting of this film,
which was just amazing all these years later to see
a movie like this with those huge frames and all
those extras and soldiers and horses and camels and it's
(01:03:08):
all real everyone, It's not like it is today. So
pretty amazing that they could pull a movie like this off.
I believe Steven Spielberg has described Lawrence Arabia as a
miracle of a film, and I couldn't agree more so.
Big thanks to Chris Uh. He was really nice, dude.
It was great to talk to him and maybe we'll
meet in person one day. Support his work. Go check
(01:03:29):
out Operation Finale in theaters August twenty nine. Very good,
beautifully shot, uh taught thriller of a film, highly recommended,
and Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley. It doesn't get any
better than that, everybody, So go check it out and
support his future work. And uh, thanks for tuning in everyone,
And until next time, why don't you go bring a
(01:03:50):
Nazi to justice? YEA movie. Crush is produced, engineered, edited,
and soundtracked by Noel Brown and Ramsay Hunt at How
Stuff Work Studios, Pont City Market, Atlanta, Georgia,
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.