This week on the Hollywood and Total Podcast.

Well, Sidney Sweeney stood up to the woke mob, but did conservatives have her back.

It's complicated and we have not one, but two cool interviews this week.

First off is Joseph Holmes, who's behind the new film Jim Versus the Future.

It's a head scratcher for sure, and he's got some great stories about how he may do with so much less.

And then we also have a conversation with John Stalberg Junior.

He's the man behind the Muzzle franchise.

The new film is Muzzle City of Wolves, and he'll share more about the creation of the film and also why it's almost impossible to make a movie in LA these days.

It's suppressing, but it's illuminating.

Welcome to the Hollywood and Total Podcast.

Entertainment news and reviews without doubt, woke Hollywood narrative, free speech, free expression.

Now that's entertainment.

And here's your host, oh winning film critic Courstion Toto.

Well, Cidy Sweeney survived.

Now, of course, she's a young actress.

There's no reason for her not to survive.

I'm talking about the battles in the culture wars.

Now ciney Sweeney was swept up, and this just a few months ago when she started a commercial for American Eagle Gens.

You've seen the spot.

She equips that she's got good genes or kind of gives a nudge, nudge, wink wink to that effect, meaning not only is she wearing genes that she's promoting, but also just look at her, she's lovely.

She won the genetic lottery.

It's a pretty innocent joke in general, and a nice hook for the commercial.

But of course the far left went berserk, saying, this is about white supremacy.

How dare you?

You must apologize?

And Sidney Sweeney said, nothing, bubkis.

She just ignored it and went on with her life.

I've got better things to do than to play games with you.

But more recently, the subject came up again during an interview with a GQ interviewer, and it turns out this interviewer was as woke and as liberal as most journalists these days.

So what happened, Well, she stood her ground, she didn't backtrack, she didn't apologize, and when it comes to political matters, she basically said, if I've got something to say.

I'll say it.

When I want to say it.

Now, if you think about this from most perspectives, it's a nothing burger on Rye, isn't it.

It's just a woman not bowing to an interviewer's question.

But we live in complicated times, and of course the woke mind virus has forced actors to bend the knee, to say what the left wants them to say, or else or those consequences.

And she said nothing of the kind.

She just went out, did her work, didn't apologize for it, and moved on.

But still that is brave.

And just if you think it's not brave, think about the big time actors and celebrities who have bowed to the woke mob who have bent the knee.

Talked about Scarlett Johansson, Halle Berry, Stephen King, many many more.

Those are three that just kind of jumped to mind for me.

When the woke mob came for them, they said, oh, I'm so sorry, I'll be an ally.

They couldn't even stand tall for.

Their own beliefs.

I'll do what you're saying, and Sidney Sweeney did just that.

Now is Sidney Sweeney a conservative?

Is she a maga fan?

I have no idea there was a story a few weeks ago saying that she was a registered Republican.

But beyond that, we really know nothing.

She hasn't come out stating anything positive or negative about the President, about any political positions in recent weeks or months, or even years.

We have no clue.

She's just not interested in that part of her career, and God bless her, there's no reason to get involved.

I mean, she could speak, she could not speak.

It's up to her.

But I think conservatives owe her a bit of gratitude.

I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but this is the world we live in right now, and just not bowing to the woke, just saying what you want to say, standing up and refusing to bow and bend.

That matters.

It really does from a culture war perspective.

And yet conservatives don't seem to have her back in any way.

And I'll just mention two examples.

One, she's had a string of recent films that have done very poorly the box office, including Americana, Eden, and now her most recent film, Christie and Christy's, by the way, is very good.

I haven't seen the other two, but this is a solid film with a great performance by Sydney, so they haven't supported her the box office.

They haven't say, my gosh, this is a woman who's basically sticking your neck out for sanity and not bowing, and maybe we should support her.

That's my point of view.

I think artists who are brave and bold deserve our consideration.

And you could just mention Gina Carano, who is treated terribly by Disney.

She was fired, she sued them, They came to some sort of agreement, but conservatives by and large rallied around Gina.

They said that was wrong.

What happened?

They support her next project.

I don't know.

But that's where I get a little tricky.

I did a very informal survey on social media x my favorite lastination, and I said, you know, what is it about Sidney Sweeney and what she said?

And do you think that conservatives should have her back?

Should they support her new movie?

Should they rally behind her in some ways?

And the answers I got were basically, know, you're wrong, buzz off, and why should I bother?

And actually that bothers me as a conservative, as someone who looks at pop culture the way I do, because I think conservatives too often don't know how to handle pop culture.

They ignore it, they refuse.

To engage with it.

Now, part of that I get completely.

A lot of Hollywood figures have said, you know, I don't like you, I don't like the politicians you support, I don't like your values, and so there's a lot of animosity there.

I get that.

But the bottom line is simple.

If there is anything right of center in the culture, if there's a movie, a TV show, an actor or actress who stands up and puts out a different kind of message, or maybe even a film or project that has Heartland values, we really should rally behind it because if you don't, we'll get even less of it.

So if you want to complain, oh my gosh, Hollywood doesn't understand me, Hollywood insults me, Hollywood puts out product that I don't like, and then Hollywood does and you ignore it.

That's setting a message saying, hey, Hollywood can keep on ignoring this community.

They'll just keep making the movies that they've been doing for quite some time.

And I think the same is true to a degree with Sidney Sweeney.

She's not an out and out Republican.

She's not crying for the Conservative Party to make progress.

But she did stand her ground, she did stand tall, she did refuse to bend, and that really does matter.

And again, if someone like Sidney Sweeney can be brave and strong, it sends a message to others in the artistic community that they can too.

That's why these things are so important.

It's why looking back a couple of years ago, it was such a critical consequential moment when Dave Chappelle and Netflix had that big issue where he told a few trans jokes.

Now, Netflix could have thrown Dave under the bus, it could have disconnected ties with him.

It could have said we're not going to do business with him anymore.

No, they basically told their Netflix employees, who were upset about this, to pound sand.

You're welcome to leave any time you want.

And that was a really significant moment because if Netflix essentially canceled Dave Chappelle, what about the other comedians.

This guy's one of the biggest comedians in the world right now, so call him the goat.

That's a matter for agreement or disagreement.

What if he couldn't stand up, if he couldn't say the jokes he wanted to tell.

Now, again, this is around the early twenty twenties, where a lot.

Of people are being canceled.

Artists were memory holding their own work, like Tina Fey with thirty Rock episodes when they were blackface adjacent.

This was a tricky time in our culture, and Dave Chappelle and Netflix stood tall, and I think that was a significant moment in the culture and from there we've gotten better and more free.

So kudos to Sidney Sweeney for just standing her ground, for just being the person she wants to be, for not following the strip that she's been forced to read.

Nope, she didn't do it.

But I really want conservatives, my fellow conservatives, to think about this moment, to think about why it matters, to think about why I'm in bringing up in the first place.

Because the culture wars aren't affecting everything.

It affects the world we live in.

It affects the culture, obviously, but it also affects our political scene.

You know, what President Donald Trump does sometimes really does matter above and beyond decisions.

You know the jokes he tells, the memes he shares, the way he engages with Hollywood.

From time to time.

These things matter today.

And maybe it's silly, and maybe it shouldn't, but it does.

So I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Sidney Sweeney, young actress trying to make her way in the world, putting out a good performance in Christy.

Maybe maybe go check it out.

First of all, you get a good film, there's no harm in it.

Second of all, just show a little support to an actor who stood tall.

I think she deserves it, and I think others who might just stand tall next do too.

Joseph Holmes writes film reviews and cultural essays.

But that didn't fully scratch his cultural itch.

He wanted to make movies as well, but he doesn't have a lot of resource to do just that.

He's not plug into Sony or Universal or Paramount pictures.

But he's just an independent filmmaker who wanted to make movies on his terms.

So he did so.

He dialed back the budget, he realized what resources he had at his disposal, and he made a movie his way, on his terms, with his story.

The film is called Jim Versus the Future, and it's available now on Apple TV and YouTube and Amazon Prime.

You could check it out multiple VOD platforms.

And it's a story about a young man who's considering breaking up with his girlfriend.

It's rather serious, but this may be the time to kind of go in a different direction.

But these figures magically enter his life that are from the future and who are tied to his relationship, whether it continues or whether it ends.

And I don't want to say more than that because I don't want to spoil the story because that's kind of part of the fun here.

But this is just his way of looking at culture, relationships and also spirituality.

Again, the film is Jim Versus the Future, and I was glad to have Joseph on the show to talk about the film, the corners he had to cut to make it happen and why.

You know what, if there's a will, there's a way, and it very sounds I got kind of a cliche of all cliches.

But the filmmakers who want their stories to be told, they just get it done.

Joseph got it done.

It's called Jim Versus the Future, and here's the story behind it.

Well, Joseph, thanks for joining the show.

You know, I always start with a very basic question when it comes to filmmakers, you know, the why, the why connected to a certain film, and this one is certainly ambitious.

It's thoughtful when you talk about Jim versus the future.

What was the Was there a spark that ignited it?

Was it a series of events?

Give it?

Give me the with the quick origin story, because I'm always fascinated by that.

Yeah.

The origin story for this specifically was desperation because I have been wanting to make my first feature film for a long time and I had a script, but I just didn't have the money to make the movie I wanted to make.

So I had a producing partner, Nathan Clarkson, who's also my co host on the Overthinkers podcast, and he told me straight up like, look, you have enough money to have five actors in one location, So can you tell tell a story?

Tell to make a movie with that.

And so I sat down and was like, Okay, you know what story can I get excited about telling That does what I want to do, does what I want to add to the world as an artist, et cetera.

But is in one location with five actors and what And this this story came out of that where I said, well, this would be cool, this would be interesting to me.

And you know, again, as somebody who's been sort of a film critic culture critic for a long time.

One of I've also, you know, have been wanting to make movies and tell my own stories.

And what I felt was not being in the space now is there's a lot of say, you know, Christians, anybody even non Christians who were trying to tell stories, but not telling stories kind of in the way that I would want to see on screen, in the sense that there's a kind of way that a Christian in my generation imagines the world and wants to wrestle with the experiences and ideas that has in the world that you know, whether it's sort of the faith based industry, like they're very limited.

Well, we can tell this kind of story about a person who their life sucks and they give their life to Jesus and then they reconcile with their friends and family and then other people.

It's like, Okay, I want to tell an exciting story about heroes and danger and interesting ideas, but it's all from kind of the imagination of somebody who doesn't share kind of a more you know, religious metaphysics.

You know, I, you know, deal a lot in this movie with the multiverse, and you know, one of our common modern kind of cultural myth of the multiverse, you know, has this idea of meaninglessness at the bottom of it.

And so one of the things I had fun with doing is saying, like, is there telling a story that is metaphysical and says something about reality the way multiverse does, but does it in a way that's more reflective of my experience and how I imagine the world.

So that's sort of the very specific inspiration of it, and then the larger goals of what I wanted to express.

Yeah, you mentioned your film critic as well.

It's it's an interesting kind of to wear both hats, and obviously you can't take a point at the other.

Did do you find that being a critic helps.

You as a filmmaker?

Does it make a little more complicated How do those two worlds kind of collide when it comes to the creative process.

That's a really good question.

It's probably the question I get asked most often in connection to this.

And I would say that I wish I remembered who told this to me or where I read it.

But there's a phrase that I keep going back to, which is you write drunken, edit sober, and you know what this means is that you know, when you're doing a creative endeavor, you do what comes out of you naturally, what you're excited about, you what you follow is like, this would be cool.

You know, this is what's emotionally satisfying to me.

And then when they were in the editing stage, you start picking it apart and analyzing it.

And I think that being a film critic helps with the editing stage of it because you know better than that.

You have so much practice with the with the part of saying, Okay, this doesn't make sense, this doesn't feel right.

This is because you're looking at it as an audience.

It's not you know, it's you're but it's still an audience the way you have always done.

But it is sometimes a struggle to just turn that part off when you're in the creative space of it.

Yeah, what you want to say this is this is just cool.

This doesn't make any sense, it doesn't matter, it's just cool.

Just go with it.

When you you know, I talked to a lot of independent filmmakers and there's always a the budget is this, we can't do more than that, And you've got to impromote, impromise, and you've got to set.

You've made the setting more constricted where it allows you their freedom to tell the story you want to tell.

But even then, I'm sure there are hiccups along the way, bounce, you know, things you don't plan for.

Can you Was there anything along the way in this particular journey where that, oh I wanted to do this, we just can't.

But when you pivoted, it actually ended up being better for the film.

Yeah, there's actually a really cool story about that.

One is the fact it's the location itself, because location ended up being my apartments and my roommates, and the what I originally was gonna do is get an Airbnb, because there it's like, okay, I can create a space that will be exactly the way I want it to look, and that I have a freedom to do that.

And then you know, I found a place.

It seemed like there was go work.

We were getting ready to do location scouting and you know, bring everything there to set up the world the way we wanted.

And then of course the person who was on the Airbnb dropped off the Airbnb and I was like, well, what's what's wrong?

And then Airbnb said, hey, this person's you know, we're no longer affiliated with us.

I was like, okay, what am I going to do?

And so then I realized and I got more advice on this, like can could you possibly do this in your apartment?

Where Nathan was like you get he was a producing partner.

Can you possibly do this in your apartment?

And I was like, actually, I just lost a roommate who has just moved out, and so maybe I'll go to my other roommate and say, hey, can I pay the difference for this month that you know, I'd be shooting this film, so we don't get a roommate for that month, and then I get to use that as a green room.

I can film here without disruption.

And it ended up again.

Like you talk about, you know, God orchestrating things, it really was like the perfect timing that made it possible, and the apartment ended up again.

It was so much more convenient to do it where I lived and have people be there, and I'll have to you know, go somewhere else or stay somewhere else.

And it ended up again because it's you know, my roommate is an academic, he's a professor.

It's like a having it's a movie about somebody who has all these books and all these spaces.

I could mold the space the where I wanted it to buy, had a base for it, to make it that felt lived in.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I did w comes across on the screen.

You know.

I think one of the reason why I want to talk to you is because there are so many people who say, oh, I want to write a book, or I want to make a movie or you know, and then they build the the roadblocks along the way.

Well, I don't have the funding, I don't have this, I don't have that, And I is there's sort of a moment in your creative life where you just said, essentially, bleep it, I'm going to get it done no matter what, Like, is there a barrier you have to break through to kind of get to that side, Because I think it it holds back an endless amount of people who maybe are creative and thoughtful and have a great story to tell in any medium, but they're just they just can't get there.

Yeah, And it was definitely for me.

I think, as I said, you know, I when I was told you cannot, you don't have the budget to do this thing.

You want to do.

This is your choice.

You can either not make something, or you can make something with this limitations.

Was that moment for me because I think up until that point I a lot of for artists, a lot of it is I have a thing in my head.

How can I put it in front of other people?

But the thing is, the thing that's in our head is based on what we've experienced, what we've seen, and we watch movies that have much bigger budgets than we have, and so I think a lot of so I was trapped in that for while it's one of the reasons why you know, my first feature film I had, you know this is is coming out now rather than than earlier.

And I think it was that moment I was confronting with that, Okay, these are the resources I have.

What can I do with this?

That still is beautiful about what I want to do?

And you know?

And and I had, you know, already kind of done some of the work at that point of saying, okay, you know, who can I ask for money?

Who are my partners?

Who are my friends?

Who are so I think there is an aspect of you know, people don't look at you know what resources they do have, and you know and and put the work into like developing those relationships that are maybe necessary.

But then oftentimes, again that image they have in their head of what they want to do in their ideal world, you know, it's the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.

They don't say, oh, well, here's what I can do, here's why I do have.

What can I do with that?

And once I I was you know, kicked out of my delusions of of of what I could maybe do, I was able to actually create this story with what I could do.

Yeah, talk about sort of the uh, the faith based themes of the story without giving too much away, And why that why that's important to you?

And why do you think the culture needs that kind of storytelling.

Yeah, that's a really good question.

I think you know.

Again, for me, one of the things the movie is a gym versus the future.

It's about a grad student who gets kidnapped and held hostage by people from future timelines who each are competing timelines that want to force him to make a choice that will preserve their future timeline expensive other peoples and they and of course that choice is whether or he's going to stay with or break up with his fiance.

And I think for me, Again, I don't see stories about, you know, heroes who are doing their heroism from sort of a faith based mechanism or metaphysics again.

You know, again you have the Marvel heroes who are doing you know, superheroics and stuff like that, but they're doing that kind of in defiance of reality or in defiance of all authority, metaphysical authorities.

Again, even in eternals.

It's like, literally, the gods who made us are evil and we have to rebel against them, and that just doesn't resonate with my experience.

You know.

Again, the world I inhabit is sort of you know, shaped by the Bible, and like C.

S.

Lewis, where it's like, if you are you know, you're fighting evil, you're fighting as a knight in the soldier of what is some is a cosmic king.

And but a lot of the faith based stories don't kind of do the C.

S.

Lewis route.

They more do you know, here's here's a way which we suck.

Here's a plan God has for our lives, and if we you know, embrace his plan for our lives, then you know we'll reconcile with people close to us.

And there's there's no element of kind of the heroic, that our choices have some kind of triumph over cosmic evil in a way that I think is really satisfying.

But again, like I said, the secular world is not doing it from a base of imagination that reflects either me or like most people I know who are in the religious space.

And I think, you know, there's a lot of hunger right now for alternative narratives.

I guess you could say, because a lot of people feel like the broad sweeping monoculture.

First of all, it's just dying out.

We're all splitting off into our various own internal stories, but it's not enough to kind of cohere us anymore.

And so there's a lot of room for people to say, are there alternate stories we can tell about our lives and about the world.

And I think there's an opportunity for religious people to say, well, we do have an alternate story about our lives about the world, but maybe we haven't been doing well imagining that for other people as we could have.

Again, we've been doing what I've been doing, which is being a film critic, which is criticizing other people's worldviews and saying here, look at Bible, here is alternate worldview.

Maybe we haven't done the job of imagining in new ways for people how they can see their own ordinary lives being part of this cosmic struggle.

Gotcha.

You know you're based in New York City, not the only filmmaker to be based there.

Is certainly an artist haven through and through.

Talk a little bit about why that feeds someone like yourself and so many other people as born in the Bronx, I grew.

Up on Long Island.

I have some New York roots and some sentiments and sensibilities about that.

But I'm just you know, you could be anywhere at this point.

It's one of the beauties of life now is that you could be in Chicago or a small city and then still create art and spread it far and wide.

But obviously you're choosing New York City.

What's as a storyteller?

Does it feed you?

Does it does.

It exasperate you?

New York does all the things.

But curious that your take on it.

Yeah, I mean the answer, like as you alluded to, is yes, it feeds me and exasperates me.

But what I love about it is that you can and have people right next to you who share your loves and your values.

And again, there are so many Christians who live here and they do that you know, I'm deep friends with them, And there are so many people who are passionate about creativity here.

You can't go everywhere and have people who enjoy talking about ideas, who enjoy pursuing creative things, and who share your faith.

Like New York is this kind of place where everybody goes to kind of try to make the best version of themselves, and that includes all different kinds of people.

So it's not just creatives, it's not just religious people, it's not just people who are interested in ideas.

But believe me, they're here and you can find them, whereas in other places you're not able to find all of those people in one place.

And so I think for me, that's really the opportunity is like, yeah, I could be making a film elsewhere, I could be going to church elsewhere, but the likelihood that a lot of my deepest relationships would be online with people who share my values rather than in person with people who share my values and interests, and I value that New York City gives me the opportunity to have in real life relationships with people who share those.

Things that's right with they called it irl.

Yes exactly, touch grass or touch concrete.

Yes, at the expensive move of looking ahead and we obviously we're got to focus on Jim versus the future.

But now that the film is proverbly in the can and it's out, now we'll get to that in a minute.

Do you want to tell more stories?

Have you kind of said, Okay, I've got that feature film under my belt now, you know, obviously you know, the budgets are always there, but I did it, and now I can tell another story.

How do you emerge as a storyteller after this experience?

Yeah, I mean a lot of it depends on, you know, what opportunities I have in the future to make, you know, movies, and the kind of movies I have with those opportunities.

Again, I made this movie because this is the budget that I could do, but I could tell the story that I wanted to tell.

I always, I think will want I always will want to tell stories, not just talk about them.

I think what making this was a beautiful, amazing experience because again, like I said, as a film critic and as a culture critic, as somebody who talks about ideas, I spend a lot of time looking at the ways that other people are imagining the world for us and saying, here's you know what I liked about it, or I didn't like about it.

Here's where they I think got it wrong.

A lot of what I do is I will compare stories being told to statistics and to sociologists say like, well, here's how this doesn't exactly map out on the way things actually are.

But I also there's a huge part of me, and this is the reason why I wanted to tell this story, is well, what's another way of imagining the world I can share with other people that they can then comment on and tell me it's wrong in some way.

I want to be a part of that side of the conversation too.

It is kind of funny you're seeing all of these people in the kind of the YouTuber generation of people who are like, you know, Chris Stuckman who just came out with Shelby Oaks.

So then I've seen a bunch of other people on TikTok, and the algorithm is feeding me since I got doing this film, all these other cultural commentators who are doing the same thing.

Yeah, I think that that's and however, I get to do that, whether opportunities God brings in my way or that I'm able to piece together to tell those stories.

I want to be able to do that.

Yeah, it is.

It is fascinating the process and one of the joys of what we are experiencing right now is the ability to talk on a podcast, share on social media and all of a sudden, a creator who doesn't have the budget or the marketing savvy as Helton Sudden can reach out to the masses and that's that must be very exciting as well.

One last question, when you think about moving forward, what's been the taking the money aside?

Because money is every every independent filmmaker.

Money is an object and an issue and they wish you had more.

But what was the toughest part of this journey as far as you know, getting from I've got the script too, I'm talking to people about it and spreading the word.

Yeah, I think the toughest part is not knowing what you don't know.

The first time that you, you know, make a feature film is again people don't realize and you, as a film critic, think that you realized everything that goes into making a film, and you know, whether it's the budgets, whether it's you know, the the contracts, whether it's the marketing, whether it's you know, the relationships and dealing with all these things.

This is stuff that you only learn by doing.

And again, one of the things in the film is this idea of going from theory to actually living out real relationships, and that's where redemption lies.

And I think that for me, that one of the toughest parts was thinking I knew more than I did and learning oh, okay, I'm having to learn a bunch of things on the job.

Because one of the things about film is that it's a multi artistic media.

It's you know, writing and camera and color and sound, and as the person who's directing all of this, you have to kind of be an expert in all of them.

And so I think that's what people often don't realize, is they think they know what film is and what it will take to do it, and you don't actually until you do it.

And so that's why I always advise just do a lot of it and work with people who've done it more, and that's how you get halfway decent at doing it.

That's right, well, you've done more than that.

Of course, the film is Jim Versus of the Future.

It is available now and DVD and digital outlets.

I'll have the links in the show notes.

You can check it out there.

Congratulations.

I mean, it's an amazing achievement just to make a film.

I know, I thought about scriptwriting years and years ago.

I kind of abandoned that.

I was thought, well, you know, maybe when I'm retired I'll get back into it.

Who knows, but done it, and I'm sure more is on the way.

So just congratulations in the film and best of luck with future projects.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, if you follow me on Instagram or check me out on x you probably know I love dogs, Love dogs, love dog movies.

Also think that Aaron Eckhart is one of our more underrated actors.

He's just terrific and everything he does.

So when twenty twenty three's Muzzle came along, starring Aaron Eckhart as a cop working with a K nine officer, I thought, yeah, I'm in and it's good.

It's a good, solid B movie.

I love B movies, action movies that actually aspire to something more.

They're not just straight ahead actions.

More, there's more meat on the bone.

As they say, to kind of pursue the dog metaphor.

Well, the director of that film, John Stalberg Junior, is back with Muzzle City of Wolves.

Of course, it's a sequel to that film and again starring Aaron Eckhart.

It is in theaters right now, so you check it out.

But you're much You just tell me what you want and then you can shoot me.

I'm going to this future.

But John's got some great stories to share about working with Aaron, about the corners he had to cut to make sure this movie was made, and also why it wasn't shot in la even though the story is set in la.

He really wanted to do it.

But of course the forces that be made it almost impossible.

We'll get into that as well, and it's pretty eye opening, I have to say.

So here's my conversation with John Staalberg Junior his new film, Muzzle City of Wolves.

Check it out.

It's in theaters right now.

And of course thank you for listening.

Well, John, thanks for joining the show.

You know I'm a dog lover.

I enjoyed Muzzles so much.

I think Aaron Eckart is a brilliant actor.

You've got me in six different ways with City of Wolves here.

But I want to just.

Dial back real quickly the origin of this whole concept.

You saw a canine officer, you were intrigued by it, That was the spark.

But tell us a little bit when obviously you got to dig around a little bit with the subject because I didn't even know that that canine officers got full funeral treatments, his dress funerals, I guess the term.

So let's start there.

What did you learn about about this kind this part of the police world that was intriguing to you.

Yeah, Well, when I first saw that officer in New York, we just wrapped Crypto that we filmed with Kurt Russell.

We were in Manhattan.

I saw the canine officer talking and as I pulled up alongside of him, revealed he was talking to his dog on the passenger seat.

And I realized that these guys really consider their dogs their partners.

They are also considered their weapons, but they're also considered their pets because they train these dogs.

What I found interesting, besides the full dress funerals for them, when when a criminal or suspect assaults one of their dogs, that's an assault on a police officer.

It's contempted murder of a police officer, so criminally in terms of the staff, they're prosecuted as if they've shot at a police officer.

If they shoot it an attacking dog.

The dogs are given full dress funerals when they retire, they're giving full they're given full retirement proper celebrations and they do announcements and everything which is really touching, and they go viral on you could see them on social media, people doing their sort of retirement and the trainer, the handlers are usually very broken up about it because it's like saying goodbye to a tennteen year partner relationship.

But the thing about it is they spend all day when they're not on patrol, these guys, and they train all day.

When we went to the actual training facilities, and they train their dogs to attack.

And these dogs, it doesn't come naturally to them.

They're badass dogs with unbelievable foot pounds of pressure in their jaws, with fangs.

I mean, they are really really dangerous, but it's not their instinct to bite, so they train them to bite and all day bite suits, ropes, all kinds of things that they're doing, and they're they're training them to attack and be incredibly vicious, but then they bring them home to live with their families.

I thought that was amazing that you're training it all day.

They had covered in scars these officers in real life from accidental bites, you know, and they have their their toy that the dog wants nothing more than their toys.

So these officers who are they carry narcan and you know, because of all the fentanyl, their dogs accidentally sniff up, right, and so they own narcan for their dogs, which I found interesting, and all their gear, but also included in their gear is a dog toy.

So they have this like little rubber like you know, kevlar dog toy because these things are just so gnarly, and so they're always kind of, you know, offering the dog toy.

But these guys are they're they're you know, they're they're these are their partners, so they're their confidant, partner of family member.

It really almost transcends any relationship in law Enforcement's very interesting.

Yeah, and both films obviously covered that so well.

You know, when Muzzlim comes out, I'm sure listen you you live and breathe and films, you probably were thinking I'd like to make a sequel, or were you at all?

Or you just focused on the first one and thought, let me just get this done and make the best movie I can and take it from there.

Yeah, the latter, I was thinking, let's get the best movie done, and it was about how we end the film.

And so originally Muzzle One had like a slightly more I would say, bleak ending.

It was a pretty misanthropic view of the world at the end.

But instead what I did was I tried to contrast it because I had such a difficult experience making the first film for various reasons, and when I got back to La, I realized I wasn't making a hate film of La.

I was making kind of a love story about La in a way, because I kind of missed what it was in my hometown and kind of it's got a disease to it, and although it's still incredibly fascinating, I still live here, so I must love it.

So I had to kind of reconcile that with myself, and I ended the film on a sort of weirdly hopeful note with that Sixth Street or whatever it's called, that bridge, that brand new, beautiful municipal piece of architecture they built over the city, even though we're revealing Jake as being sort of a callous psychopath because he's just switches off the radio listening to the bodies that he buried being discovered in the landfill.

So we go, whoa, this guy's not broken up about it at all.

He feels like justice was done.

So he's a very morally ambiguous anti hero kind of guy, even though he's trying to do the good thing.

And he's talking to his son now, So that was a little bit bleep, But we ended it on this kind of weirdly, kind of contradictory beat of there's optimism and a bleakness about his character.

And so when the sequel came around, we thought, well, now there's a lot of logical questions here to take the film to two and maybe three and maybe four In that it opens up a lot of questions.

Okay, we left the film on these bodies being discovered, Okay, so what's happening with the investigation there?

You know, he was on sort of effectively a suicide mission, was not wearing gloves, dropped a shotgun, going in to kill you know, when at the end, he throws his gun down.

He says, you know, kill me.

He's confronting all this suicidal ideation he'd been he'd been working through in these mandated psychiatry sessions by the LAP.

So now he's he survived it, and now he's got a kid and on the other side, and a wife and you know, a girl he's intends to marry, and so where does that go.

Now he's a guy with all of this, those problems don't go away.

So suicidal ideation PTSD, these are things he's going to have to wrestle with now in the context of being a protector and a provider for his family.

And that's fascinating.

So we wanted to explore that and the cartels in Mexico who have the skid Row streakangs distributing their their narcotics product that they're you know, cutting from all the story and muzzle ion from the fentanyl coming in from China and they're smuggling it up through the border.

To kill one of your distributors would be the equivalent of someone killing like my French distributor who's releasing the film in Paris, or my Japanese distributors releasing the film in Toko.

I wouldn't be happy about it as the producer, So what would I do about it?

If someone went and killed my film distributors, one of them internationally, I would probably have something to say about it.

So similarly, it raised natural questions of like what would the cartel say about some rogue guy messing with their output deal.

Yeah, it's one of those sequels where it really does flow nicely at all that the piece is going to of a snug in the way that they kind of connect real quickly.

You know this film was shot in South Africa.

I understand you wanted to shoot in La.

It didn't work out.

There's so much talk about you know, LA production moving elsewhere.

Can you real quickly just describe it must be maddening to you because, like you said, in a way, it's sort of a fractured love letter to the city, but you couldn't shoot it there.

What are the key I mean, I know it all boils down to money at the end of the day, but maybe just break it down a little bit why it could be frustrating for a filmmaker like yourself with the best of intentions.

I think I wanted you to hear, but then I can't.

It comes down to making the best movie possible.

So when they say to me, if you shoot it in LA, because of the crazy amounts of permit fees, the bureaucracy, the logistical nightmare, the unions, frankly, who are just committing highway robbery on productions left and right and really spooking everyone off to run elsewhere when they mandate that you pay these exorbitant bonds and then they won't return them, and so people are getting spooked off.

And you know, for me as a filmmaker, I shot two splinter units in LA for muzzle one muzzle to So because I live here, I'm able to kind of say, oh, well, I could shoot that bridge.

I could do it organically, and then I could cut that into a point of view shot and you won't know that.

You know, it's not one of those things where I want to cut to like a stock footage shot of LA and you know, I can do it really organically, but I had to steal all that footage.

So I just stole it.

I just drove around my cinematographer.

We jumped out of the car and we filmed the police precinct and I remember some criticism was like, oh, he's putting homeless people shooting up on the police precinct.

That is the fakest thing I've ever seen.

That was me just filming the police preasing.

So I would film skid Row, film the police precinct.

It's all real.

People say, oh, he put tens everywhere.

It's that's real.

I'm just filming.

And so now I'm just trying to match that.

And so I go off to Africa because instead of getting eighteen days to shoot in La or fifteen days with no rebates, you know, the rebates system here is a lottery that's ridiculous.

You can't build a business on like playing power ball.

That's basically what it is.

It's like if you win the lottery, well then how are you supposed to move towards pre production if you're playing the lottery and then twice a year.

It's ridiculous system.

And so suddenly I have to go to Africa to shoot the media of the film because I get thirty days to shoot versus eighteen.

So that allows me to make a vastly better film, you know.

So I want to make a better film of more action and excitement and drama and performance and take the time to get that right requires production time, which is expensive.

So we go off to Africa and I said, take me to the worst slums in Africa because I need to double for La And to my shock and horror, they weren't bad enough.

So I had to bring in tents into these like chantytowns in Africa, and it was, you know, it was kind of unbelievable.

But you know, there were some people there that were glad to you know, great crews and stuff.

They're glad to help you, help me do it, and you know, so it was a beautiful experience being in Africa with a great crew and met a bunch of beautiful, great creative people and amazing crew.

You know, it's like, oh, my grip was the guy who did Mad Max, and this guy just did this huge Mark Wahlberg movie, and my steady cam operator was from this movie.

It's like the drone crew just did gorver Binski's movie, and my assistant was gorver Binski's assistant from Good Good Night, Good Luck, huffundn Die.

And so it's like Ridley Scott was there doing Raised by Wolves and you know months earlier and his son and it's a very like lively production community until of course their government just stepped in and put the kibosh on all production there and just said we are pausing the rebate.

And they still never paid the rebate back for this film.

So they killed They just like stopped on the breaks and they had such great momentum there.

So you know, you just see governments like getting in the way and like messing up film production, and you know they've sure they've got their own reasons.

But from a film producer and director, I want to make badass, unapologetic cinema and it's just hard to make it.

So I'm going to go to where I can make it.

Yeah, and by the way, listen, I can understand that if South Africa wants to go in this direction.

But we're talking to LA I mean la is Moviesla Hollywood.

You know, that's another level of frustration.

I talk a little bit of Aaron Eckhart.

He's such a good actor and he's so committed.

You know, this is an action movie, but he doesn't give an action movie performance.

He's really dialed in.

And this is the second time I was you working with him.

Just give a quick snapshot of what he's like behind the scenes or what he brings to the film above and beyond, because it shows on screen.

He's as committed to this performance and this character as I am to the movie.

So he is very practiced and rehearse guy.

He works very hard at getting his stuff down so that he can seem very natural, and he has this ability to come across incredibly natural and affable, which makes the characters that he excels at playing the kind of duality of man thing that he did so well in the Company of Men and famously as two Face, playing this sort of like very likable, affable guy.

But then the shadow side and what monster and animal in this case lies within all of us.

The film is about a guy trying to control his animal right, control physically and emotionally, spiritually, psychologically.

So we have a guy who is really dialed in terms of a method actor where he's playing a dog trainer, so he wants to go there and bond with the dog, and he's got the script memorized from a year in advance, he's got every on day one, he can do a monologue from the last day of shooting perfectly, so he's that kind of guy.

He's always there on time.

He knows all his life.

That's not even a question.

He's in character.

So he's Jake Rosser and he's working with the dog.

So he allows me to pull the camera back and I don't have animal handlers all around him with you know, signaling the dog and doing all the stuff that they typically do.

He's controlling the dog.

He's the one feeding the dog, he's the one rewarding the dog, bonding with the dog.

So that stuff's really real.

And so he finds a way to make stuff real in terms of his action and his fight training stuff like he's great at that and serious about it and wants to you know, have an audience of you know, military personnel, which we showed it to in DC.

We showed it to active military and veterans, and he wants it to hold water for them.

He holds a gun and moves tactically, and so all that stuff in terms of the action stuff is just the same way.

It's like make it real for the audience.

The dog training, the fighting, the action, the fact that he's a you know, a combat veteran, a former cop.

And then in the drama, trying to relate to his wife, and he can speak to his dog much more comfortably than he can communicate to his wife and admit to her the stuff that you know, he talks all about the war to his baby, you can't respond his dog.

But to his wife, who's there, she says, you know, he says, I don't talk about it's all he's conflicted, and he portrays that as committed as he does all the other stuff.

So it is a great performance.

He's a great actor, and it's not for lack of trying.

The guy tries really, really hard.

It's about of years ago I interviewed Caesar Milan, the famous dog trainer, and he said to me, in a moment of honesty, he said, you know, actually ideal and relate.

To ducks much better than people.

So it kind of relates to Jake's character of the film.

Yeah.

You know.

One of the things that I love about your film that they I know, this is a smaller budget production.

It's not a massive blowout superhero movie.

But your films always look good.

They're rich, they've got great cinematography, and I always think in my head, if the big studio is going to hire someone like you, John and just say, okay, can you reduce the budget and still make it look great?

Like I feel like, you know, indie filmmakers are able to do that, especially in twenty twenty five, and yet these big studios just blow all the money, and yet I don't think your films look that vastly different at times.

What is there a secret sauce to kind of doing more for less?

Is it?

I mean, maybe it's too big a question even ask.

You, but oh no, it's just maybe just just any thoughts on that.

Well, first I have to just get props to my cinematographer, Peter Vermire.

So the films of mine that maybe you've seen Pat's Muzzled, this Crypto were shot by Peter Vermire.

He's a fantastic cinematographer and he's a good friend, and he takes it as seriously as I do.

So we don't phone it and we're not getting rich on these movies.

But we're making these movies because we want them to be great, and we want a little bit more as we go, and we want to grow and we have and we want to continue continue doing it.

I think when you get into the big studio thing, it's really difficult to kind of sneak in there or like I said, steal footage or do stuff.

When you're a big studio and you're also renting from yourself and so you're not there's synergistic components where you don't want to give your sister companies deals because you're trying to keep them afloat, and you've got shareholders, stock press, you've got all these other concerns with this sort of like behemoth that is a movie studio.

You need to keep your sound stages occupied, so you book your movies in there, but you don't want to you have to charge them the full full freight, and so there's all kinds of stuff in terms of network operations and studio operations that is insanely complex, and it sends my job as being a filmmaker.

So I'm super gritty, like I'll steal it, I'll just go shoot it, I'll go do it.

And when you have a great DP, you know he can do things like, okay, we don't have one hundred thousand dollars translight for New York City.

You know, when we shot Crypto, for example, So I called my friend who owned a hedge fund, and I said, hey, man, can we shoot in your office in Manhattan?

He was he went to high school with Memes on my baseball team, and he said, yeah, man, go do it.

So we got in there on a Sunday and my cinematographer just said, if we shoot this with Manhattan in the background at four thirty, it's gonna look like we had one hundred thousand dollars lighting setup.

And so we shoot it at four thirty, you know, and Boon Napp is in there at the boardroom at the end of Crypto, and it's just the most spectacularly beautiful thing you can imagine.

And if you do it like that incredibly resourcefully and creatively, because you have to in filmmaking, you know, it's weird.

It's like the Jaws log and the Jaws experience is the famous story, but like the obstacle is the way.

Yeah, yeah, if you don't have the time to shoot it, it's like that's the obstacle.

Or you don't have the money to afford the light, that's the obstacle.

Now that, yeah, you don't avoid that, lean into that, and there's like magic in that.

I mean, and in Jaws, for example, the magic was the shark didn't work.

They had alias right the USS Indianapolis speech and you Jaws transcends an action movie and becomes one of the great films of all time.

So the you know you have to it forces you into the situation where you have to overcome these insane obstacles, and through the overcoming of the weird obstacle as an indie filmmaker, that's where you find gold.

There's a famous thing where it just says, you don't want enough rope where you're going to hang yourself.

And I think with these massive, bloated budgets, they you know you have an endless so there's no obstacles and therefore it's difficult to mind the magic.

It's so fascinating.

I've heard that from many many independent filmmakers who say similar stories where they just they make do, and often what they compromise with is.

Even better than the original plan real quickly.

You know.

It's funny.

When I was growing up, I used to watch Star Trek and whenever there's a fight scene, the camera would pull away and you could tell it was William Shattner duking it out because they got the stunt people in.

And I feel like modern actors really take pride in being more physical, being more capable.

Is there kind of a push and pull on set when Aaron Netguart's there and he wants to do something that maybe you're thinking, maybe we should call in the stunt person or talk a little.

Bit about that.

Sort of that tension on the set.

It's a it's a good tension.

Obviously, you're trying to make the best pot.

Yeah, and Aaron is he fight trains every day, so he's really physical.

I mean he's a few years older than me, but he's incredibly good shit and he knows how to do it.

So he'll work with the stunt team and we'll choreograph the whole you know, fights and action sequences together, whatever, and there's usually no question about it.

Like if I'm throwing someone through drywall, you know, two levels of drywall and wood through a glass table.

This guy Aiden, one of our stuntmen, did the stunt for Jake when he comes through those walls and through a glass table, and when the glass exploded, he had to have surgery on his It cut his whole hand open.

There was blood all over the set.

So there's there's certain moments where that wasn't even a question.

You know, when when Jake has to jump out of a moving car at thirty five miles an hour with it holding a dog, there wasn't even a question.

And I have camera rigs hanging over the car.

This was going to be aiden same guy.

He did some amazing stuff for us, and and then there's other things when like you know, when it's fighting in physicality that Aaron's just we know Aaron's just going to do And by the way, that's no picnic either.

In the fight scene that happens in the kitchen, there was an accident and Aaron got his head cut open and was bleeding, and we thought, oh no, this is going to cause continuity issues.

I believe the next scene was him in the hospital after he gets kicked in the face by you know, one of the cops.

So it actually made sense that he would have like a little bit of some swelling and a little bit of a shiner.

So we just left.

Again.

The obstacle is the way, but he you know, he wants to do it all.

He wants to make it real and he you know, I'm with you, Like cutting wide is almost unintentionally funny sometimes, so it works in comedies when you do it, when you go y and the guy does you know what the stunt guys call a fart knocker?

That's like one of those bad falls.

But in an action movie, especially the one that's supposed to be thrilling and dramatic, you have to be careful about about doing that stuff because if you take the audience out of it, you've failed.

Yeah.

I just don't want to get a quick.

Sense of where you are as a filmmaker working in twenty twenty five.

Today, Hollywood is changing so dramatically.

There's streaming, there's digital as the threat of AI, there's you know, increasing costs, there's new places to watch everything you produce.

Do you feel emboldened by this culture in Hollywood where there's so much change?

Is it a little frightened for you as a storyteller?

You wonder if you'll get the opportun cotunities moving forward?

Is it?

Do you have a different feel every day?

I'm kind of curious, you know where you stand right now?

There's so much flux going on.

Yeah, there is, Wait, there's culture in Hollywood.

No, there is a lot of things.

I feel good about it, and I'll tell you why.

Because all of this AI is kind of fun and wild and it's a novelty and its great, and I feel there's an instantaneous artistic revolution that it almost happened organically with the audience and the filmmakers, and I've seen an instantaneous rejection of anything artificially generated with AI.

People don't want to pay to go sit in the theater to watch that.

They just don't and everyone knows it, and the filmmakers instantaneously knew it.

I remember watching a clip of the New Spider Man and they actually have the stunt guy and this crazy rig flying through the city practically as it's blowing up practically, and I was like, that's amazing because of all this sort of CG stuff reached this kind of pinnacle and now you can press a button and see Spider Man flying to the city and it's fake.

Well, now let's see it for real.

And that's the sort of allure that Christopher Nolan has, like doing everything in camera for Oppenheimer doing everything real.

I mean those were all in camera things he was doing with the atomic particles and all that stuff was kind of really incredible.

And so I feel like there's this immediate Bragging Rights when you're like, all our stunts are real.

We use no visual effects.

All the camera effects are in camera.

All of the muzzle flashes and the gunfights and the squibs are real.

We did all that in Muzzle.

There was the occasional moment where we had to tweak it because there was an animal or something, but for the most part, we've always done that in Muzzle one.

In bat Ombrays, all that stuff is practical, and so there's like a premium on that, and I think that's cool.

And the more that a gets pushed out, the more there's a premium on doing the difficult stuff, like they really blew this building up, they really blew that car up.

I mean, we did all that stuff practical, and it's like bragging rights.

It's cool.

Yeah.

No, And even if you don't think of it, like you don't try to think of it, you recognize that your brain sort of process it in a different way, which is I think why this return to practical effects is so important.

Well, last question, the obvious one.

A third muzzle outing the endy of this film.

I don't even go near describing it, but it's interesting.

It could go in a very fascinating direction.

Is it in the works?

I mean you have to wait for a box office receipts.

What's the status of that?

Yeah, that's all true.

But we originally when they studio called and said they wanted a sequel, we designed two and three even designed it to be done together.

And then there was a decision that we should do them separate and let's just focus on two.

And that's what we did.

So we focused on two.

There is part three, it's scripted and Aaron is attached and we have it all ready to go, and it's the best one yet.

It's like amazing, picks up where two leaves off exactly, and you know that Jake is painted into a really tight spot.

But the thing about it, like I said about filmmaking, is like the tighter of a spot you're painted in, the more you're forced to come up with something brilliant to get out of it.

And when you put a character in a position where he was in, how is he going to get out of this?

Now?

This is and and now we were then forced to figure out a way to get him out And yeah, it's pretty it's pretty cool, Jacob wrote.

The second one wrote Jacob King.

He wrote the third and it's it's incredible.

So I really hope we get the opportunity to make it this year.

Well I hope so too.

But before then, of course, you have to go out and see Muscle City of Wolves in theaters right now, in a theater near you.

John, thanks so much for taking the time to speak to me.

I really enjoy your films and give our best at Aaron Eckart, he's terrific.

I met him years ago for on a junket for another film, but he just he's the real deal man.

He's just and I think he's in his fifties.

He looks like he's thirty five.

So I don't know what he's doing, but he's Yeah, he's doing something right.

So i'll tell you something.

I'm a little jealous, that's all.

Well, I'll tell you the one thing that he's doing, like like we're talking about and I know we got to go, but the pushback, like we're saying, the thing that he doesn't do is he looks like a real guy in his fifties to a certain degree, and that's what's refreshing about him.

He looks great, but he's got like you know, wrinkles, and he doesn't look like he's had a facelift, and he looks like a real man, and that is appealing to me.

When I'm casting a guy who's a former marine and an LAPD cop who's you know, lives in Ventura County, it's like that guy didn't get a facelift.

So Aaron looks awesome because he looks like the way a man is supposed to look, and that's very important.

So there's that, and I will give him your best and he's a great actor.

Underrated and go see the film November fourteenth, This Bridery.

Yeah, excellent.

Thanks again for your time and I hope we can talk soon.

I appreciate it, Chris, so thank you so much.

Your character actor of the Week is the late great Charles Burning.

Well.

That's it for the Hollywood and Total Podcast this week.

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