Kermode & Mayo’s Take - Nosferatu (or Yesferatu?) with Robert Eggers

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Happy New Year from Mark, Simon, The Redactor and the rest of us on the Take Team! We’re kicking off 2025 with a top-drawer guest—’Nosferatu’ director Robert Eggers. He tells Simon about his new remake of the1922 silent classic, originally by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau, in which Bill Skarsgård’s vampire nobleman terrorises a town in pursuit of Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, the object of his desires. They chat about his longtime fascination with the story, creating a monster for a modern vampire movie, and a sprinkling of the occult... Will Nosferatu meet Mark’s high standards for horror? Find out if he thinks it has bite—or whether it’s just a little bloodless? More reviews too of ‘‘We Live in Time’, the time slip rom-com starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh that crashes its lovers into each other’s lives (literally)—and ‘Nickel Boys’, a formally innovative new drama charting the friendship of two young inmates at a sinister reform school in Jim Crow era Florida. Listen back to last week’s episode to hear Simon’s interview with its director, RaMell Ross. Plus another chance to hear the best of our guests from the year behind us, and the best of Mark’s reviews from the drooling raves to the Kermodean rants for the ages. Looking at you ‘Megalopolis’.... Review: Nickel Boys – 03:03 Review: We Live In Time – 49:39 Best of the guests: 09:51 Best of the reviews: 54:14 Interview: Robert Eggers – 23:19 You can contact the show by emailing [e-mail] or you can find us on social media, @KermodeandMayo EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/take Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts To advertise on this show contact: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, this show is sponsored by NordVPN. Hey Mark, you know what people say about this time of year? That it's perfect for huddling together with a warm blanket, a mug of cocoa, and the best movies and of course movie podcasts around? Well, ideal for taking an early ski trip to L'Alp de Huy. What's wrong with the Alps? Yeah, well, I was going to say that it's dank, dark and miserable, but you convinced me really. And if you're here or there, whatever you're watching, Pleasures, Nord can help. It connects you to servers in 111 countries.

You can use it on up to 11 devices and unlock content from around the world. Whether you're under a woollen blanket or gliding across a blanket of snow, Nord keeps you safe from trackers and hackers by hiding your details when you're connected to public Wi-Fi, built-in threat protection and even dark web alerts. This January with our link you get an additional four months free on the two-year plan and with Nord's 30-day money back guarantee there's zero risk. Check out the link in the episode description. Well let us be the very last people to wish you a very happy new year. A happy and a joyous and prosperous and peaceful new year.

And also with you, Mark. What's the moratorium on wishing people a happy new year? Because there's always that weird thing, isn't it, that you'll see people, you know, you've been away for the Christmas break, and then you come back and you see people that you haven't seen since before Christmas, and you say, oh, happy new year. But then there comes a point when it's like you can't say that anymore because we're so far into it.

Second week of January. Also... Second week of January, yeah. Second week of January, okay. Also, I was going to say, of course this doesn't happen anymore. We all get used to writing the wrong date on checks, but then nobody writes checks anymore, do they? My bank won't even take checks anymore, I don't think.

There you go. What's wrong with the world, Mark? What's wrong? What's happened? I know. Anyway. I know. So as ever, we'll be, you know, as is traditional really, we look backwards and forwards back

at some highlights of last year because that's what we're thinking. Guests and reviews, positive and less positive. Also looking forward to a few smashing films, which are some are out today, some are out this week, some are on the way, which are Mark, what are you going to be reviewing? Reviews of Nickel Boys, you spoke to the director already, We Live in Time, which is a time-shifted romance, and Nosferatu with your very special guest. Who is the director, Robert Eggers. Wow.

I haven't interviewed before, so that's an entertaining conversation on the way. Also for Vanguardistas, Mark reviews the new Asif Kapadia doc, 2017. Is it a documentary? Is it like a documentary? No, it's a science fiction, dystopian science fiction thing using documentary elements. So it's a perfect mix of documentary and drama. And Rocco and his brothers, a re-release of the 1960 classic with Alain Delon. We'll have an item remembering some of those who left us last year, Shelley DeVal, Donald Sutherland, Day Maggie Smith and many more. One frame back is related to Nosferatu.

Mike will recommend some further watching related to remakes of silent classics. As if that wasn't enough, we're also introducing accents, shmatsense. This is not going to, a chance to hear some syllables pronounced in ways you never thought possible from people you assume should be able to do better. You can get all of that via Apple podcasts or head to extra takes.com for non fruit related devices. Seven day free trial, which will take you to the second week of January when you don't have to say happy new year anymore.

And if you are already a Vanguardista as ever and as always, we salute you. Okay, so Nickel Boys spoke to the director last week, but we made it very clear that Mark was going to be reviewing it this week. So here we go with Nickel Boys. What did you think? Okay, so Nickel Boys, which is the new film by Rommel Ross, who you interviewed on last week's show. Although because of the way that we're pre-recording these things, I haven't yet heard the interview that you did on last week's show, because actually you haven't yet done it. Anyway, this is an adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead,

which Time magazine named as one of the great books of the decade. I haven't read it, I'm afraid. Drama plays out against backdrop of news footage of the great books of the decade. I haven't read it, I'm afraid. Drama plays out against backdrop of news footage of the Apollo mission going behind the moon and news reels of Martin Luther King. The story follows two African American boys, Elwood and Turner. Elwood is a smart kid with a college future in Jim Crow era Florida, who was picked up by the police and sent to this abusive reform school, Nickel Academy. It's a brutal institution.

Inmates are denied access to their families. All manner of horrible abuse is meted out. It's based on a real life institution that operated for over a century in which after it had closed, numerous unmarked graves were found. In real life, there is a horrible story behind this. So the thing is, the subject matter is grim. There's no getting around that. What's remarkable about the film

is how weirdly full of love it is. That it's about the experience of finding love, and I mean love in the broadest sense of the word, in this brutally cold environment, and being passed from one character to another. Obviously, the director was a photographer before and made Hell County this morning, this evening, which we talked about.

That is, it was Oscar nominated and it was a very expressive artistic experiential documentary. It clearly laid the groundwork for Nickel Boys. Because in Nickel Boys, the story is told from this POV perspective, although not the POV, not the point of view of one character. You see the story from the point of view of characters plural.

The way in which this was done, I mean, I only know this from reading a very long article about it, was that with the DP Jean-Baptiste Frey and the editor Nicolas Monceau, they set out to create this experiential film. Sometimes the actors would be operating the cameras themselves. Just the sheer technicals of it are quite dazzling. I read the director saying they started not with a script, but with a series of visual images,

which they then put together as a collage storyboard from which the co-writer, Jocelyn Bronson, got to work on what we would now think of more traditionally as a script. This all sounds madly contrived, but the weird thing about it is that when you watch the film it isn't contrived at all. There is a scene in it, and you'll know exactly the scene, in fact you may have talked about this in the interview, in which Angelou Ellis Taylor, who is brilliant, has to hug someone in the absence of someone else, which sounds like a narrative contrivance.

We see that hug from the point of view of the person who is receiving it and who is then going to pass on that hug or that love to somebody else. The really weird thing about it is that if you describe it as I just did, it sounds weird and mechanical. But when you see the film, I guarantee you this is going to be one of the scenes that people will talk about for years to come. We talk time and again about Roger Ebert saying cinema is a machine for creating empathy. What the POV perspectives of the film do, I think, is create empathy. And, you know, when cinema is done properly, it genuinely shows you the world through other people's experience, through other people's eyes.

And I think that's what happens here. There's also a really interesting thing that there's a section where the movie has to jump around in time in order to tell the story. The way in which the POV of the film works moves to behind one of the characters. Although it's very organic, but I think what it's doing is it's flagging up. It's a different time, a different state of mind, a different state of being. In fact, even a difference of identity, fabulous score by Alex Thomas and Scott Lario, shaping up as one of the major awards contenders of the year 2024. Obviously, from our point of view, this is a 2025 release because it's 3rd of January. It is remarkable. Whilst I was watching it, I was thinking of the kind of response

that I had to Moonlight the first time I saw Moonlight, but thinking this really is a very, very impressive piece of work. I think Nickel Boys gets you in the fields because it does something that is so visually thought through. It is so purely cinematic in the way in which it tells its story. Like I said, the idea of starting with these photographs and images, somehow it just bypasses everything and gets right into your emotional core. I thought it was very, very powerful and trying to analyze why afterwards is quite complicated,

because it's a very complicated process, but when you watch it, it is simplicity itself because it makes emotional sense. Also, and I don't think we've said this ever, maybe it looks unlike any other film, certainly any other film this year. I haven't, I was talking about this with a colleague who said that, you know, peep show used a similar technique, but I've never, cause you've just explained the hug. And when you, when, when that happens, you think, okay, I've never, I don't think I've ever seen anybody try this in a mainstream film.

And although cinema is art, this feels like art with a capital A, you know, you actually have to visualize this before you can understand what we're talking about. Yes. That be fair? I agree completely. But when you say art, you mean art in the best sense of the word. I know sometimes there's minutes somebody hears the word art, whichever studio head it was.

When I hear the word art, I head for the exit. But it is art. I mean, all cinema is art. Even Steven Seagal movies are art on some level. But the artistry involved in telling this story and there's a phrase that Douglas Adams uses once, which is something is easier said than done. In the case of this, it looks like it's easier done than said, because when you watch it, it just makes sense. But when you try to explain what it was that you watched and how you watched it,

I mean, thesis will be written about that hug. So that is Nickel Boys, which is out now. So you're going to be hearing from some of our favourite visitors to the show in our next section. First up, Mark nerding out on horror with Ty West. There's a great sense of the feeling of the time. As somebody who started watching movies in the 70s and absolutely loved watching movies in the 1980s, I'm seeing a lot of sort of nods to films that I love.

There's a bit of cruising in there. There's some of Dario Argento's gloves. There's a kind of glow to it. Tell me about getting the feel of that period right. Yeah, that was a big part of all three movies was to kind of, one of the connective tissues throughout the trilogy was how cinema of the time is affecting the characters. And so to set it in the 80s,

it was no different in the sense that I was trying to represent, recreate an era and represent an authenticity to that. But I was also trying to represent kind of what media and what films of the time felt like. And so as horror movies are concerned, because it was a sort of a whodunit kind of noirish story, having elements of jallow and this sort of neo-noir feel, I just love all that stuff.

And so it was a way to not repeat ourselves and to tell a different kind of story within the same franchise, as if people like to call it. Do you have an audience in mind? I mean, I used to write for Fangoria Magazine, and there's a moment in the film in which we see a front cover of Fangoria.

So, okay, the horror crowd are obviously on board, but do you have a wider audience in mind? Yeah, with this movie, there's a lot of people out there that say, oh, I don't watch horror movies, and they have the stigma against it. And then if you say to them, well, what about The Exorcist, or what about The Shining, what about Rosemary's Baby?

They say, no, no, no, no, not those. Those ones are fine, but horror movies and Jo. And then you start to list more movies, and you realize people like more horror movies than they think that they do. They've just seen a couple that they didn't think were good, or were too violent, or too whatever, and then they've kind of put it all in a box, which is really on brand for what this story that I'm telling in the third movie

is about. But, you know, I think a lot of times people think that they won't like a movie and if they give it a chance, they will. And with this trilogy, each movie is very different. So if X is a little too much for you, maybe Pearl isn't. And if Pearl is too weird for you, maybe Maxine isn't. And that's kind of the fun of it. But I don't think you need to be a horror fan. You'll know when to close your eyes if you're gonna be afraid of violence. You see it coming, you know?

And so I think that if you're just a fan of movies in general, this trilogy is very cinema-focused. And I think there's a lot to be had there that's not just the scariness, for lack of a better term. There's an amazing held smile at the end of Pearl, which always reminded me of the final shot on Bob Hoskins at the end of The Long Good Friday, when he's in the back of the car and you can see

the whole movie play out on his face. That smile has now almost become a meme in and of itself. What were the difficulties of doing that? Because that smile is held for, what is it, like, it's three minutes or something? And during the course of that, you see so much going on in that wordless performance. Yeah, it's funny.

I mean, that has traveled so far. And I think rightfully so. But basically what happened was when we were filming that, I knew that I wanted to do a freeze frame. I wanted her to smile and then I would freeze frame and that would match the opening of the movie, freeze frame. But I didn't know at what point I wanted to freeze frame. So when I said we're going to do the shot,

we'd rehearsed and we talked about, okay, you're going to smile and hold this up and say the line. I'm going to let it run a little bit longer because it might be like a freeze frame the moment you smile, or I might wanna just like wait a beat to see when the right moment is to freeze it. And I just wanna let you know,

I'm gonna let it roll for a little bit longer. And I thought I'd let it roll for an extra like 10 seconds or something like that. And that would be awkward, to be honest with you. But it was like, you know, when you're freeze framing, you wanna make sure you have the footage to do it. So anyway, we did that and I was watching her for about 10 seconds and she was holding the smile. And then I thought, well, I'll just wait another five seconds because I don't think I need it, but it's kind of interesting to watch her.

And then that turned into another five seconds and then turned into another five seconds. And then I was just so intrigued by watching her try to hold the smile. I started seeing things change in her. I started to see the performance that ended up in the movie, and she started tearing up and crying, and it was so, like, compelling to watch that I just let it go for about two and a half minutes. And as that was happening, I was like, I can roll the credits over.

Like, I could see the ending of the movie while it was happening. And so we did that, and then I finally cut, and we just did it that one time, and that was it. You know, it is a very spontaneous moment that has really become kind of defining Of the of the movie and of the trilogy in many ways It's a great moment and then my chat with Billy Crystal for before wearing his lovely glasses was the original Scripts when they came in were theirs was their humor no at all

Oh, actually the first one did the first one had some because you're Billy Crystal The little scripts when they came in, was there humor at all? No. Actually, the first one did. The first one had some... Because you're Billy Crystal. Yeah. But then you have to say, no, it's not right for the tone, the overall tone. He banters with his late wife.

He can't shake her. It's his grief. He can't... Here's a man who is a very, very good pediatric psychiatrist who can't deal with his own problems. And so there was some funny stuff, sort of funny stuff, teasing between Judith Light, who's an amazing actress, as his late wife, Lynn. And when we made the first cut, it just didn't seem right.

It didn't get us off the ground right. Because if it was that, then it sort of lessens the tension that is about to happen. So we just cut, it was like three or four lines, but there was something. There's a couple of sharp moments of sarcasm where I'm thinking, oh, just. A little bit.

Nice timing. Yeah, just a little bit. And it was more with my little dog, my little pug, Larry. It was more of a contentious relationship. You and your neck, can you tell us what you do? You see something on your neck. Well there's a fantasy, show two and show two. Okay that's early on. Where I'm getting to, I'm in on how can I help him.

Because I'm seeing symbols in what he's drawing that's making me think he's trying to tell me something. Not unlike how a good psychiatrist will examine dreams and find symbols in dreams and try to piece together a logic to it or an explanation to it. and dreams and try to piece together a logic to it or an explanation to it. And he's in the hospital. He stabs me in the neck with a pen. And there was a rig in my hand, there was a plastic tube that ran down my leg to this fellow offstage with like a canister filled with air that

he would pump it and look like it would hit an artery and it was covered and I had to fall backwards over a chair and I did all my own stunts in the show too and so on and so forth. So there is, and then he wakes up and it didn't happen. And it's shocking but the kid has thrown me totally off Kilter was the purposeful of that. Have you ever done anything like this before? No, was that quite exciting to be? Oh, I loved it I love it, you know with like after that I'd be they go cut and I'm laying on the floor covered in tons and tons of

The stage blood giggling going I love this job But the thing is to play, is not to play into the horrors, it's to play the reality of it. And that's when it's more terrifying. And finally, Saoirse Ronan and Papa Asiedu. Saoirse, you're a producer on the movie with your other half, Jack Loudon. And I think the story starts in COVID and lockdown, and he hands you the book. Is that where this began? Yes, it is for Jack and I. He had visited the Orkney Islands a few years before. And since then he had had the outrun on his bookshelf.

He finally read it in lockdown and as soon as he finished it, he handed it to me and he said, I think this is the next role that you have to play, not just as an actor, but as a person because he is aware of my own relationship as a sort of bystander, a person who has watched a loved one go through this particular experience or a form of it. And he knew that it was something, you know, as someone who's very close to me that I would need to do at some point. And he knew that it was something, you know, as someone who's very close to me, that I would need to do at some point. And it felt like the right time. And I think it wasn't a coincidence that during the pandemic, it was such a, you know, it was a completely surreal time, but it was also quite helpful, I think, to re-examine what was important to you and who you wanted in

your life and how you wanted to spend your time. And I think ultimately that re-examine what was important to you and who you wanted in your life and how you wanted to spend your time. And I think ultimately that's what the Out Run is about. It's sort of re-evaluating what life means to you and actually what can give you a natural high without having to turn to a substance. Saoirse, I'm intrigued by the whole acting drunk routine that you have to do. Routine, that's the wrong word. But I know you've done Blitz with Stephen Graham and you've mentioned him and his incredible performance in The Virgin.

Oh, my God. Which is one of the most astonishing performance I've ever seen. Yes. How do you begin to approach the role of someone who has such a problem with alcohol? I spoke to a lot of people who have been through it themselves. And, you know, there are so many people in my life of different ages who are either at the beginning of that journey or they're only new to recovery, or they've been sober for a very long time.

And one in particular who's someone I'm close to straight away said, if you want to watch the most accurate portrayal of someone when they're drunk and like red haze drunk, watch Stevie Graham in the virtues. And I did and it was my sole reference. That was the only thing really in terms of another performance that I drew from. And I told Stephen that when we didn't get any scenes together in Blitz, but I had to find him and be like, you've been very important to me for a long time and you're even more important to me now, so thank you. I think you're watching someone who has a very deep understanding of that experience.

I do in a different way. I've seen it. To embody that, I needed to connect with someone else's performance and that was my way in. I'm eternally grateful to him for being so brilliant in that show. Once you're up in Orkney, there's a scene, it's a sort of an unremarkable scene really, but you step outside of a building. So we're up in Orkney, one of the Orkney Islands, and you step out of a building where there's a party celebration, you've got your orange juice and the kind of the island shop guy steps out and talks to you and he clearly has spotted another addict and that idea that addicts can spot other addicts I found.

Yeah and I think that's another really interesting element to this portrayal of this story is that it's also showing the community. it's also showing the community and the togetherness that can come from going through an experience like that. I mean, it's something that if you haven't been through it yourself, you'll never really understand how much reckoning you've had to do with yourself. And to do that with another group of strangers, to be more vulnerable than you've probably ever been in your life. And most of us will ever be with anyone. probably ever been in your life and most of us will ever be with anyone.

And it binds you to that experience and the strength that it takes to, you know, recover from something like that. And he's in recovery himself. And, you know, he, again, kind of felt like a guardian angel in a way. I was speaking to someone who really knew what they were talking about. And there was no, with anyone who was in recovery that we had in the movie, they didn't indulge in it. It was very sort of matter of fact, the way they spoke about it. They also, many of them had a sense of humor about it because I think they probably got to the point where they were like, if I don't laugh, I'm going to cry. So they weirdly have this very, I don't want to call it a healthy relationship, but they've had to look at themselves warts and all. And I think that's given them an awareness and a sort of groundedness that a lot of us probably lack.

What a lovely bunch. And we could hardly squeeze any in. So find any that you missed and give them a re- real listen because there's loads to listen on our back catalog more highlights on the way in part two along with mark what are you gonna be reviewing we live in time and nos for all day with our special guest robert eggers on the way doggy barking. What's up Mark? All's well, how about you? Well I've been thinking about that cushion that we gave away at our live show. Yeah. That and the pencil case.

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Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of junior chicken, McDouble, or chicken snack wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. So our guest this week is Robert Eggers, best known, I suppose you could say, for Vvvitch.

Mark's been a big fan for a while, although he's only been responsible for a very small number of films, considering how well he's caught up. Those films, you know, The Vovitch and The Lighthouse were absolutely kind of, you know, they're like Mark Jenkins movies. No one else was making movies like that. Yeah. And his last one was The Northman and he's back to talk about his fourth goth folkloric offering. Folkloric.

I suppose that works. Anyway, it's Nosferatu. So you all know what's coming. We're going to hear a clip from the movie and then my chat with Robert Eggers. Standing before me, all in black was death. But I was so happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, we embraced and when we turned around everyone was dead. Father and everyone, the stench of their bodies was horrible and but I've never been so happy. And that's a clip from the new Nosferatu movie. It's directed and written by Robert Eggers. I'm delighted to say Robert is with us. Hello, Robert. How are you?

I am wonderful. I want a happy new year, by the way. Oh, thank you. I mean, it's not New Year's now, but I'm guessing this will be aired that way. When this goes out, it's a happy new year. Okay, wonderful. Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

So Nosferatu, so what a film you have introduced us to here. A long time in the making. You and Nosferatu go back how far? I watched the More Now film for the first time when I was nine years old. So yes, it is, it is a long, it has a long history. Yeah. And you've put it on before. Yes. When I was so inspired by the film that when I was in high school, I did like a modest senior directed play of that. And the artistic director of a local theater company

saw that production and invited me to do a more professional version of it at his theater. And it kind of changed my life. It instilled that I wanted to be a director and made Nosferatu a powerful part of my identity, I hate to say, you know? And so even if this film had never happened, like Nosferatu would always be some kind of obsession. Okay.

And did you have a role in that early production? Embarrassingly, I was indeed Count Orlok. Okay. So, for new arrivals, what's the difference between Nosferatu and a Dracula movie, if anything? and a Dracula movie, if anything. I mean, traditionally, well, I mean, it takes place in Germany. The thrust of the story takes place in Germany and not England and in the 1830s rather than the end of the 19th century. So it's more about German romanticism than Victorian modernity versus the past or something.

The final act of the previous two versions of Nosferatu ends with the female protagonist being being the heroine rather than a bunch of dudes staking the vampire. And that's some of it. The vampire doesn't create more vampires in the More Now film. They simply die. And of course, originally it was a copyright thing because you could... Well, that's actually not true. So basically, Mournau and his collaborators in 1922, they didn't get the rights to Dracula. Yeah. And they didn't get the rights. So, and Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker's widow, sued them and won and tried to get every copy of the film destroyed. But I believe that they were actually changing the story to suit their own taste and their own interests. And it wasn't just about like trying to not get caught making Dracula. I think that and in fact, you know, Stoker's novel is the story of it, what it has inspired in cinema and like and in so many art forms is incredible, but the book itself is okay,

you know, it's okay. And I think that, you know, Nosferatu distilling Stoker's story into a more enigmatic fairy tale is much more powerful, which is also why I chose to do my version of this story as Nosferatu. Mason- Yes. And as soon as you say the word Nosferatu, people will have an image immediately coming to their mind. Maybe it's Max Schreck, maybe it's Klaus Kinski. Is it difficult to move from, I was going to say it's a contamination, but is it difficult to move beyond that when you're trying to create something that's new? You always have to be respectful of the past and obviously have utmost respect for this. But I think if I'm being really harsh on something that I love,

like what the hell is Max Shrek? Like what are those teeth and the ears? It's like, he's a creature and he's not a human, which is cool. And it's iconic and it's incredible. But in the sort of evolution of the cinematic vampire from Shrek to Edward Cullen, you know, vampires are no longer scary. And so in trying to, you know, one of the main things

that I did in trying to make this my own was to understand, like, how to make a vampire scary again. And so I went back to the folkloric vampire, back to the time when people actually believed that vampires were real. And the early folkloric vampires are, you know, dead humans. And they're a walking corpse. So then you have to ask yourself,

what would a dead Transylvania nobleman actually look like? And so then we have this, you know, the costume of a Hungarian finery from the 16th century. We have certain hairstyles, you know, but I also make nods to Shrek, the shape of his skull, his profile a bit, the fingernails, you know, because again, you have to respect what came before. And also while I think people are ready for something new,

they also, you know, wanna feel cozy if they're coming to see a familiar story. And Bill Skarsgård is Nosferatu. We know he can be scary. We've seen him be Pennywise and other characters. But why did you particularly want to go for Bill Skarsgård? I had known Bill for quite some time and we had been trying to find something together

and it struck me actually when watching a scene from IT Chapter Two, where he plays IT as a man, as a middle-aged man, that I really believed that age. I believed the darkness and the depth. And I thought, you know, I think he can do this. And we had a discussion, and we spent 10 days working together to prepare Bill for a screen test, which he nailed. And it was a long process, but when he finally put on this,

all the prosthetics and the costume, and it was the third screen test, I remember Bill disappeared and in his eyes was Orlok and it was frightening and exciting. Bill has the ability to transform and that is something that not every actor can do. And it is a special gift that he has. Alexander Skarsgård, who you worked with previously in the Northman, he's played a vampire in True Blood. Maybe there's just something in the Skarsgård family that they can do this. Well, I think Ethan Hawke played a vampire.

Willem Dafoe's played a vampire more than once, I believe. I tend to cast vampires all over the place. And Bill, you said he, you know, he, Bill disappeared and Count Orlok appeared. He sounds as though he went to a pretty dark place to play this role. In fact, he said, I went through a, I think it was a brief period when he said, I thought the movie was evil. Yeah. I mean, I remember, I mean, and I'm into some pretty weird occult stuff, but I remember Bill like talking to me at the final phases of getting his prosthetics on one day about some of the things he was thinking about, you know, to become this corpse. it was pretty frightening and dark even for me.

He also lowered his voice an octave. Mason- I was going to ask you about the voice because it's an astonishing voice with a dead language, like a dead dialect. Is that where you've taken him? Jason- Yeah. The voice is, he did work with an opera singer to lower his voice, is not like digitally altered. But yes, he also speaks ancient Dacian, which is a dead language and the language of the ancestors of the ethnic Romanians. And it was, you know,

reconstructed by Florin Lazarescu, a Romanian playwright and poet and screenwriter who I collaborated with on the film. Mason- Your attention to detail is legendary and I think we were just hearing some of the examples of that. Can you also talk about Lily Rose Depp who puts in an astonishing performance as Ellen. Was that there from the beginning? Was she always the person who you wanted to play this role? Jason Suellentrop So the main thrust, the main reason to actually

bother to tell this story again, was making the female protagonist the central protagonist. And because she emerges as the heroine in the in the Moore Now film, it was great because I could still tell the same story with the same movements of the Moore Now gallein screenplay, but make it something I had a hunch that it was from her perspective, I would have the ability to have it be like a more emotionally and psychologically more emotionally and psychologically complex. And Lily Rose Depp's performance is absolutely astonishing. You know, she plays a character who is a somnambulist. She is a somnambulist in the Moore Now film.

And sleepwalkers in the 19th century were believed to be in contact with another realm. And so this character that Lily plays is very isolated. She's not, she doesn't, like, exist, uh, normally in 19th century society. And, uh, and she, and, and, and, and she, you know, she loves her husband, but he can't understand this side of her, this side of her that she also doesn't have language for. And tragically,

the person who she has this connection with is a demon lover, is this vampire. doesn't have language for and tragically the person who she has this connection with is a demon lover, is this vampire. And so it becomes this love triangle triangle between She's possessed. She's obsessed. She's possessed, you know, the, the, the, the doctors say he's hysterical. The doctors say, you know, she's a melancholic and all these things, but no, you know, no one can see what's actually going on until Wilhelm de Vaux's character, who plays a sort of cult expert named Von Franz, sort of Van Helsing character, he comes along. But in

these hysterical spells or these possessions, Lily undergoes an incredible physical performance. She trained with Marie Gabrielle Roti, who is a choreographer who specializes in this Japanese dance art form called buto. But we also studied Charcot's hysterical attitudes. He had an engraver detail all the poses of his patients. And so we were able to work with Lily on creating, uh, like this incredible dynamic performance

of all these wild body movements that she does throughout the film. And, you know, and people often think, like, we must have used CG, we must have used wires to get this, but this is all Lily's own hard work. Yeah, she does appear to be a contortionist at various stages in your film. We must have used wires to get this, but this is all Lily's own hard work. Yeah. She does appear to be a contortionist at various stages in your film.

Is there any sense to which everything that happens in the film then is her fault? Is she responsible for what happens? I think that there has been a lot of literary criticism about this major trope in Victorian literature where these are where female characters who like have a lot of power, but also a sexual side are destroyed, like are sacrificed and must be killed at the end of the novel. And this is partially like the unconscious wish of the male writer of the story to punish this woman for having these desires. But I also read a lot of literary criticism

by some feminist writers saying, but it wasn't interesting that in this repressed Victorian time that all of these men also found the unconscious need for this female savior who was in touch with the dark side to emerge as potentially the savior of society. So I think that it is a complex question with a complex answer. Yeah. And in a more sceptical age where we don't believe, most of us don't believe in vampires, do you have to work harder as a story maker, as a filmmaker, to make us believe

this and to be scared? Probably. I mean, like, my approach is to strive for historical authenticity, which doesn't make anything better, and it is also impossible, but it is what I'm after. So, and I put a lot of effort into getting all the details of the period right to make sure that the material and physical world are articulated as authentically and realistically as possible, and also the mindset of the period.

And hopefully, if that's all grounded in history and some kind of reality, even if it's an interpretation of that reality, you can hopefully as an audience believe in more metaphysical things like vampires. Mason- Which extraordinary tale are you going to tell next? Jason- We'll see what extraordinary tale the studio wants to green light. But I've got a lot of things up my sleeve, so we'll see. Mason- Robert Eggers, thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. Lovely.

And that was Robert Eggers talking to me a few days ago. And you only, I think regular listeners know exactly how this works. You only have a limited amount of time to spend, but obviously we could have spent a lot longer. And so running through my head, when he referred to the, oh yes, I've got lots of occult stuff. I really, really wanted to say, really? So what's all that about? Yeah. I thought that then the interview would be a completely different interview and we won't bring up all the things that I wanted to bring up and still I didn't

mention William Defoe's enormous pipe. But anyway, yes. But all will be explained here. So Mark, tell us about what you thought. Firstly, I think that was a great interview. As you heard at the end, I mean, he was clearly sort of really delighted with it and absolutely right.

So just the background again, for those who don't know, so the Murnau film Nosferatu's Symphony of Horror, which kind of combines this fear of disease with this vampire narrative, which is lifted from Bram Stoker, despite what Robert Eggers said, it was a copyright issue. I mean, I know that obviously when they change things, and he talks about it then becoming a more fairy tale thing, yeah, fine, they did it. But they changed things because it was a copyright issue. And in fact, it was such a copyright issue, as was pointed out, Bram Stoker's widow sued, and the case was won.

And theoretically, all copies of Nosferatu should then have been destroyed. I think they destroyed the negative, but of course copies survived, and the film, like a vampire, somehow came back even more powerfully after having been in inverted commas, killed. There's also the whole thing about the etymology of the word nosferatu, exactly what it means.

I was reading a very interesting piece that Kim Newman, who's the great authority in all of this, he was saying that there is a Greek word nosophoros, which means disease bearing. Stoker was obviously using it in the kind of in the undead tradition. But so that whole thing about disease and, you know, vampirism being connected with that, that all fits in. And then again, of course, in the original, because of the copyright thing, so names are changed. You know, Dracula becomes Orlok by Max Schreck, the settings, this is, it's Germany, it's 1830s. The basic story is eerily similar to Stoker's novel, and that's why the copyright thing

played out. Then in 1979, there was a remake by Werner Herzog of Nosferatu, which had Klaus Kinski in the vampire role. Here comes the Eggers version in which Bill Skarsgard is Count Orlok, Nicholas Holt, who we were talking about in the Order just recently, is the young solicitor, Thomas. Lily Rose Depp is Ellen. Thomas is sent by Simon McBurney's hair knock to take some title deeds to this count in this distant land.

Despite the warnings of the locals when he gets there, they all go, you really don't want to go up there. He does, he meets Orlok. They literally go, no, don't go anywhere near there. As tradition demands, the villagers don't want it. The villagers are not happy about it. And so he goes up there and he meets, again, what Eggers refers to as an undead Transylvanian nobleman. And I thought it was very interesting in that interview that he said, well, what is Max

Shrek? What is he? What I was trying to imagine was that this is quite genuinely an undead nobleman, so he has a mustache. He does the thing about when he cuts his finger, drools over the finger, and then becomes obsessed with his partner. And then when Orlok comes to, as it was, or wherever it is, on the boat, the boat is full of plaguey rats. Thomas and Friedrich, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson, are led to a vampire specialist,

Professor Von Franz, who's kind of the Van Helsing character played by Willem Dafoe, who, trivia lovers, played Max Schreck in the 2000 mystery thriller Shadow of the Vampire about the making of Myrna's Nosferatu. Now, considering the reverence that Eggers has had for this text, as he said in that interview, he did it as a play when he was young because he was so struck by it because he saw it as a kid, I was really expecting Robert Eggers' Nosferatu to be a very, very somber affair. This is much more of a romp than I had expected. There was a quote that I read from an interview in which Eggers described it as like if Merchant Ivory did a Hammer Horror

movie. The Merchant Ivory thing is a, that's a red herring. The hammer part of that sentence is the part that's doing the heavy lifting. I mean, yes, the visuals by the regular cinematographer, Jaren Basker, are terrific. I mean, it's a strangely monochrome form of color. You know, it's a color movie, but it's a black and white color movie and there's only just color. Exactly. There is plenty of Murnau-inflected shadow play and the kind of candela interiors that Stanley Kubrick had to go to NASA for when he was doing Barry Lyndon.

But now, things have moved on. There was huge sections of it in which I was thinking, it's just remarkable that they've managed to capture those images so crisply on screen. But, and here's the really important thing, there is real lusty blood in this Nosferatu, not least in the portrayal of the central female character who, like Isabella Gianni in the Herzog, and of course this goes right back to the original Nosferatu, and Robert Eggers was talking very interestingly about how he thinks Nosferatu is more interesting because of that central female role in the narrative. I mean, here it's absolutely central. It's pretty much the thing around which the rest of the movie spins. I mean, you raised the question of, is it her fault?

I think fault is the wrong word. I think it's an interesting question, but I think it's much more empowering than that. This is a world in which that central female character has real agency, a world in which somnambulism was seen as demonic possession and in which a rebellious spirit was considered as something that had to be stamped down. Whether you think of that rebellious spirit as a sexual appetite or just an independent

appetite or an independent of thought, it's absolutely clear that Thomas is not up to the challenge. I mean, Thomas doesn't really understand the facets of this woman who is sort of being sidelined by society for the fact that she is independent and powerful. So she is a woman out of time and that makes her somehow branded as evil or mad. But if she is indeed drawing the count to her, then she is also controlling it. It's not just sacrifice, there is an element of control.

I think that what Eggers' film does is properly give that character agency. I was just surprised by how much of a romp this was. I mean, bits of it are scary, bits of it are full-blooded. Simon McBurney absolutely steals the show. Didn't you think he was on fire? He was having so much fun. Yeah, you want to know how much Eggers is into the occult. Look at Simon McBurney's character. I think this is Eggers back on the form and the promise of the Vovitch, because obviously

he was talking about doing this immediately after the Vovitch. The projects were genetically linked. I think at one point Anya Taylor-Joy was in the frame as well. But I think it's his most accessible film. I think it looks amazing. I think it's done really interesting things with the narrative. I was just surprised by, and I mean this in the best possible sense, how much fun it was. On the subject of Skarsgård's, you were talking about what he did Pennywise the clown and the dancing clown., you know, has this kind of,

there is something about the way in which he's embodying the monstrousness. Even with the distracting mustache, I think that thing that what Eggers was saying about, let's try to make it an undead nobleman as opposed to, you know, a character that is a Nosferatu as opposed to a human being, I think there is enough humanity in there to get that across. So I think this version is enough of its own version to distinguish it from other versions, whether you think there have been two other versions or 25 other versions, as Kim was saying. And I think that it romps along.

I think it looks splendid. See it in a good cinema. You wouldn't want to see this in a cinema in which they hadn't refreshed the bulbs recently because it uses darkness visible. But I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed it. So I've got a question for you. Yes. So you're in Transylvania. Yes.

Okay. And you want to get to Germany. Okay, you're going to do the. So what, so what else for art who does is he gets on a boat. Now I'm, I'm looking at a map of Europe here and from Romania to get to Germany, you go through Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, you know, Slovakia, at no stage do you go on a ship at NAP, unless you're going way, way out of, I mean, it helps that they arrive and they bring the rats and it's a plague ship and all that kind of stuff. And they're trying to stay faithful. But if you look at a map of Europe, there is no way you

go from Romania to Germany on a boat. Yeah, but also vampires don't exist. I'm just saying. Yeah, I mean, I'm just saying. It's like my friend Charlie Baker said the reason he couldn't get on board with Videodrome was that when the television started pulsating with Debbie Harry's face, the varnish on it should have cracked, but it didn't. What are we doing in our final segment, Mark? Okay, coming up, We Live in Time, a time shifted romance.

And the best of Mark's reviews on the way. Hello, it's Elizabeth Day from How to Fail here. How to Fail is the podcast that believes all failure is data acquisition. Coming up on How To Fail, I talked to actress Lashana Lynch about dealing with racism as a child, her most difficult stunt in a movie, and this. I didn't know when I was auditioning that Nomi was going to be 007. Didn't you? No, no, no, no, no.

How cool. When did you find out? When you got the script? Well, kind of, yeah. Listen to How To Fail wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast, Dinner's on Me, where I chat with some of my friends over food, like Catherine Hahn, who told me about working with a Broadway legend on the Marvel and Disney Plus series, Agatha Allalong. I mean, it was nuts to be able to do all of that And Wigs, and Aubrey, and Patty Lepone. Patty the Wolf Lepone.

Check out the full episode by searching Dinners on Me wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, they were a cracking series of commercials, thanks to our sponsors. Okay, what else is out? What's new? We live in time, which is a nonlinear love story from Irish director John Crowley, who made intermission in 2003, Brooklyn 2015, written by playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne, who got a Tony nomination for Constellations in 2015 and Olivier nomination for Elegy in 2016. Benedict Cumberbatch is an exec producer. Andrew Garfield

and Florence Pugh star as Tobias and Alma. He is a Weetabix rep. Yes, really. She's a chef. They meet after she hits him with her car. Although, because the central device of the narrative is that it is non-linear, you don't immediately know that. In fact, you originally think that he was distracted and stepped into the road because he was getting divorced from Alma. But we then find out when they meet after he wakes up in the hospital that this is the first time they've met. Here's the clip. This was all you had on you. The chocolate orange was pronounced dead at the scene.

I'm Alma by the way. Alma. Almond. Tobias. So sorry, but do we know each other? And at that point you think, oh, either they're meeting for the first time or he's got amnesia. And then you realize that what's happening is that you're seeing the story in different order. And the rest of the film then plays out in similarly time shifted fashion. We see in rearranged order, their meeting, their courtship,

their talk of differing plans for their life, their life together, her battle with ovarian cancer, his battle dealing with her battle, her question over whether to have treatment or just to live the best life possible for whatever time she has left, the balance between life goals, personal goals. It's one of those films in which all of these things are happening at the same time because

of the way in which the narrative is time shifted. This premiered at Toronto in September. The central performances are extremely engaging. I think that Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield do a great job of convincing us that they are this chalk and cheese pair who find common goal despite very, very different approaches to life, that there is something between them. There is a real spark. I mean, it reminded me of that film I've talked about a lot, Only You, which has got Josh

O'Connor and Ly us to end there is something about their relationship. You really believe these are two people who meets and there is something there there is something intangible but it's a real spark and i think. This has that this isn't as good as only you but very few things are because i the u is one of the great indy movies of recent years but it does have that romantic magic element that gets you completely invested in the relationship and wanting their relationship wanting only the best for the relationship also there is a comparison in the only you tackle the similarly thorny issue of children and which of the parties want children or can have children or how does that affect two people who have just met and fallen in love and what does it mean to be having those conversations fairly early on? As for the nonlinear thing, I had heard some critics complaining that it was a gimmick. We were talking recently about Better Man, the Robbie Williams thing, and saying, well,

is the fact that he's rendered as a chimpanzee, is it a gimmick? I said, it's not a gimmick. Actually, it is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick that works. In the case of this, there are times, I think, that the time shifting thing is used for slightly clunky dramatic purposes, like you think that he's been run over because he was distracted by her, but then they only find out they haven't met. I think those things ring slightly oddly. It's not without flaws, but there are things in it that are very, very tenderly done.

There are moments between the two leads that I thought really captured genuine love on screen. Will it be making your possible end of year 3.5ers? Yes, yes, yes it is. Well done. Okay, so we've had the best of the interviews. Only fair we get to the reviews. Mark, which of your reviews are we going to be hearing?

Well we've got The Substance, Megalolis, and Christmas Eve at Miller's Point. So at first she's skeptical, but she's also desperate. So she signs up for this kind of cloak and dagger ritual, which involves going to this weird location, getting an anonymous package, which has got a syringe, some substance, some tubes and some basic instructions that tell her, you are the matrix. You take this drug, it produces a new you, which is also you. The new you, which will be initially sort of,

this kind of young, fabulous version, then has to feed the comatose old you for seven days. But after seven days, you have to switch back into the old you and you have to feed the now comatose new you. It says every seven days you have to switch. That's it. That's the deal.

So effectively there are two yous. There is the old you and the new you. Seven days of one, seven days of the other. That's the process of the substance. So it's a science fiction body horror fantasy. The transformation process is nicely scrungy. The body of Demi Moore birthing the body of Margaret Qualley, who is the sort of younger, new you version, is who calls herself Sue, is really nice if you're a horror fan. Sue then applies for Elizabeth's

old job and gets it on the proviso that she can only work every other week because every other week she has to be old Elizabeth. This works for a while until Sue decides that she wants to spend more time awake and the new and the old version start to find themselves at war, even though as they keep being told, they are the same person. They are two sides of the same person. Now, as a piece of body horror cinema, this is really impressively audacious stuff. I mean, it's surreal in its substance.

It's outrageous in its execution. The effects are fabulously jaw-dropping. I mean, it's like the invention of Rob Boteen's work. There's some of the thing in there. You think of Dick Smith's bodysuits for altered states, all that kind of emotional heft of Jeff Goldblum transforming in The Fly. I mean, that stuff is really wonderfully out there. And as with all the best body horror things, all the effects are metaphors made flesh. I mean, the central idea is a satirical deconstruction of ideas of youth and beauty and of a world in which, as Dennis Quaid says, you know, pretty girls should always smile

and young flesh is a saleable commodity. It's also a grand guignol pastiche, I mean, the cannibalism of a consumerist society in which desire feeds upon and eats itself. Films which were just kind of spectacular grossness, but the idea was that somehow the shock breaks through the fabric of society and tells you something different.

The central story, as I said, it is a satirical story about the way in which society works, the way in which youth is fetishized, the way in which flesh is saleable. But it's done in a way which is absolutely full of moments of really full-on, and I mean really full on theatrical gasp inducing horror that makes you go, I mean, thematically there's riffs on Frankenstein, Todd Browning's Freaks, The Elephant Man, Hunchback of Notre Dame.

You can feel the spirit of Julie DiCorno's Titane, which is a film that I know you absolutely loved Simon. I enjoyed the hell out of it. It was unbelievably squishy and disgusting in some ways, in a way that made me smile and wince and laugh. Like I said, it was like a real sort of feast of body horror. But all the way through, It's got a point. It's got a really great down-to-earth, satirical, cynical point about the way in which these things are commodified

and the way in which somebody can be at war with themselves and with the world around them. The third act is one of the most deranged things I have seen in the cinema in a long time. The film is over two hours, I think it's like two hours 15 or something like that, but the time just flew by. I thought it was fantastic. I just really, really, really enjoyed it and believe me,

you are going to come out of it going, blimey Charlie, I didn't think I was going to get that. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, which is the new film from Tyler Thomas Termina, who made Hamon Rye and who, according to the press notes, puts his uncanny cinematic stamp on a holiday movie. Four generations of the Balsano family, gathering together for what may be the last family home

in Long Island. This is set in 2006 apparently. Aunt, uncles, grandmother, they all eat, drink, get cross with each other. Group starts to sort of fall apart. We learn that the matriarch of the family is in need of care. They're squabbling about selling the house, putting her in the home. Meanwhile, young members of the family go off and do young people stuff. Definitely a family affair, keeping it in the family. Cast includes Francesca Scorsese, daughter of Martin,

Sawyer Spielberg, son of Stephen. Cast also includes Elsie Fisher, who's been great in the past, not here. Maria Dizia, who was great in Martha, Marcy May-Marlene, not here. Ben Shenkman, Greg Turk in Martha Marcy May Moline, not here. Ben Shenkman, Greg Turkington, Michael Cera is also a producer. So it starts with Sarah and Turkington as two comedy cops speed camera-ing in hilarious deadpan silence. And then it moves into typical American indie fashion into a house full of people who clearly mean an awful lot to the

writer and director, but about whom I could not give a space monkeys. Essentially this is like being in an annoying family reunion, but it's not your family. You don't know them, you don't care about them. Everything about the film, which incidentally has been critically quite well received in the manner of American indie cinema. Everything about the film is annoying. From the characters to the visual palette, to the air of smug certainty about how cuckooly,

entertaining, and yet tragically heroic they all are. Sarah and Turkington are particularly terrible, playing cops who appear to be wearing dress-up costumes as cops. They couldn't even be bothered to actually make themselves look like cops. Because hey, everyone's just going to be so crazy about the fact that this thing is so quirky. It's just going to be fabulous. And it's quirky. And these people are quirky. And they're really, really interesting are quirky and they're like really,

really interesting and quirky and offbeat. And the soundtrack is this jukebox onslaught that goes all the way through the film of like do-wop bangers. And at one point they play Hey Rock and Roll by She Waddi Waddi. Now imagine this, this is a film with loads of do-wop and She Waddi Waddi on the soundtrack and I hate it.

Imagine how bad it must be to make me dislike that. Watching this made Margot at the wedding seem like a walk in the park. The entire film gave me a headache. I longed for an asteroid to fall out of the sky and wipe the entire neighborhood off the planet so I didn't have to spend any more time. This was American independent cinema at its most insufferable. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an 83% fresh rating with a summation of reviews saying, capturing both the cheer and the frustration that accompany holiday gatherings, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point is a Yuletide Chronicle that rings true. And if that's not proof that Rotten Tomatoes isn't worth the paper, it's not written on,

then I don't know what it is. I saw it with a fellow critic who had been to see it before, really didn't like it, but was going back to give it a second chance in case he had misjudged it the first time around. And at the end of it, I virtually shook his hand because that was service above and beyond. It was absolutely insufferable. Hey, quirky American independent cinema, come and spend time with all these crazy, kooky people. They're strange and sad and a bit, and honestly, I literally wanted a very big asteroid to knock them all off the face of the planet. I hated it.

to knock them all off the face of the planet. I hated it. Megalopolis, this is a labor of love pet project for Francis Ford Coppola, most famous for Godfather probably. He started working on this project at the end of Apocalypse Now, so that's many, many decades. Coppola made the film his way on his terms, and the result is, I think, not only his worst film, worse than Jack, but one of the worst films I have ever seen. Bloated, indulgent, pretentious, and unbelievably dull. I mean, it says at the beginning it's a fable. It's not. It's a folly.

And not even a grand folly, just a folly. If it's a fantasy, only in that it's fantastically dull. It's the film that you would make as a first year film student, but you happen to have made it at the other end of your career with big stars and a massive budget. It begins like a NAF remake of Caligula with bright young things debauching themselves in kind of vaguely Roman attire. Although I have to say Caligula in any of its versions is sharper, funnier and more incisive than anything in Megalopolis. Then it turns into a kind of sub-fountainhead Ayn Rand's light ramble about ethos and architecture,

but again without any of the controversy or bite of the source or the film adaptation. Then it disappears completely up its own fundament amid a bunch of staggeringly boring set pieces in which people stand around and philosophize in theatrical tones against a bunch of incredibly naff blue or green screen superimposition. Early on, early on, Adam Driver in one of the vainest performances I've ever seen starts quoting Shakespeare, they start quoting Hamlet and quoting it badly. This is just simply designed to, oh yes, we're very heritite, yes, we've read Shakespeare. Have you heard of Hamlet?

Wonderful play, let me read you some of it. The plot isn't just incoherent, it's stupid, it's facile, it's portentous, it lacks any wit, invention, or interest. The script, and I use the word advisedly, because Copland was throwing things around and letting everybody have a go and taking all these different ideas, but if there is a script, it's a car crash. It is filled with unspeakable dialogue that should have remained unspoken and makes you want to take your ears off with a cheese grater.

As for the performances, I haven't seen so many people swallow so many acting pills in a really long time. Shia LaBeouf is the worst of all. He literally skips, jumps, and preens his way through it like an annoying brat in a kind of, in some theatrical workshop group in which he would be the least popular person in class.

Aubrey Plaza, God bless her, as wow platinum, somehow manages to come out of it with her head held high. But I think the reason for that is Aubrey Plaza was in, is it called Dirty Grandpa? And she came out of that somehow, you know, with her head held high, because somehow she's like nothing sticks. She's just great. And this, like I said, there's two films out this week. She's brilliant in one of them and in the other one, well, she just, she just gets away

with it. Like I said, a couple of works on this for 40 years. That's what it felt like watching it. It's two hours and 20 minutes long, and it was so, so dull. I came out slack-jawed at just how bad it was, and not in an entertaining way. I mean, I've seen really, really bad films that are funny, and I've seen really, really bad films that just like you have to see this because you can't believe how bad it is. It's the cinematic equivalent of toothache. It just sits there, gnawing away at the inside of your head. It left me with two thoughts.

The first one is people talk about, oh, well, it's incredibly ambitious and it's incredibly bonkers and it's incredibly... No, no, no, no. Let's be absolutely clear. The substance is ambitious and bonkers and it's brilliant and it's entertaining and it's like, wow, I can't believe they went there. This is just fantastically boring. And the second thing is having watched Megalopolis, I felt prouder than ever that I have spent

my life flying the flag for disreputable filth like Caligula and Last House on the Left, because those films put pompous nonsense like this in the shade. It is stunningly dull and very, very, very, very full of itself in a way that just, yeah, I, well, you know, it's the old joke, isn't it? I suffered for my art, now it's your turn. Well, they were some of the review highlights. Though to be honest, we could have played hours and hours of highlights from Mark's reviews or we could fit in.

Just scraping the tip of the iceberg really. Special mention to Caligula and Twisters, which didn't make it in, but for very different reasons. Loved Caligula, loved Caligula, loved Caligula. As the end of take one, this has been a Sodi Music Entertainment production. This week's team Jen, Eric, Josh, Vicki, Zachy and Heather. The producer was Jem, the redactor was Pooley Face and if you're not following the pod already, please do wherever you get your podcasts. Come back next week because I'm going to be talking to Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg. The movie is a real pain.

That's the title, not a review. But Mark, before I go, I shouldn't forget to ask, what is our film of the week? Well, I think we're starting the new year with a bang. So it's a double bill film of the week. It is Nickel Boys and Nosferatu, Yesferatu.