I'm just trying to work out how much I would sell you out for in a three-year contract.

I think it would be very cheap, sadly.

$8,000?

Hi, I'm Chas Fisher.

And I'm Stu Willis.

And welcome to DraftZero, a podcast where two aspiring filmmakers try to work out what makes great screenplays work.

Emerging filmmakers.

Sounds a little bit better, don't you think?

Than aspiring.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Fine.

So what are we talking about, Stu?

What are these two emerging filmmakers talking about?

What we are going to be doing today is kind of picking up on previous episodes that we have done looking at choices and decisions.

And we've done quite a few episodes going right back to like episode four with catharsis, which we kind of revisited with a later episode on agnoresis.

And we're kind of be looking at what we kind of sometimes have been calling the hero's choice or the final choice, right?

Which is this decision, this big decision that our hero, and I'm using that as a broad term to cover whether it's the protagonist, our main character, our point of view character, they're all interesting questions, has to make at the end of the film.

And our three main examples, which all kind of subvert the traditional way of thinking about this, this is what's interesting, are going to be Michael Clayton, promising young woman, and talk to me.

And we're doing Talk to Me last, because I actually think it's the film that kind of got us interested in finally doing this episode.

We've been talking about doing this episode for a while, but both of you, when we saw it, were a little disappointed in the ending, right?

It's a great horror film.

The sequel's coming out.

It deserves a sequel.

But both of us kind of had to unpack why that ending was a problem for us.

And then recently kind of revisited it in the context of like horror films and talking about like the catharsis of that film and why it didn't work for us.

So the parts to pick up on our choices and decision episode.

What we kind of came to is this language is that the choices that we are talking about are the options presented to the character that they could choose between.

A decision is a knowing act.

There is a knowing them.

We're kind of separating the distinct, there is a distinction we're drawing between someone just being reactive and someone making a knowing act.

Yep.

And then we're going to add a new thing, which I think we kind of talked about in those episodes.

I didn't re-listen to them.

Oh, we absolutely did if you're about to talk about narrative point of view.

No, I'm going to talk about, I'm going to add consequences to it.

Oh, no, no, we did talk about consequences, but it was kind of a mind bomb that occurred to you during recording, having re-listened to them recently.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Where I was like, oh, why are we not talking about the consequences of the decision?

Because we were talking, we were trying to distinguish between decisions versus choices.

And the language we developed is a choice is where the character is presented with options.

Like there's a selection from an array of options that the audience can or cannot be made aware of.

The character makes their selection, makes their knowing decision or choice.

And then we talked about the consequences flowing on from that choice.

And what we noticed is that there was different power in the narrative point of view of Because to the character, that's all happening in real time.

They're presented with their options, they make their choice, and then there's consequences.

And then each of these three films in particular, in the hero's choice moment, has changed the narrative point of view, the relationship between the audience and seeing the order of those things.

Whether they see the choices being presented, and then the actual character making the choice, and then the consequences of that choice.

They all happen not necessarily in real time in all three of these films.

I don't think the character's always going to experience the consequences immediately.

But as you say, it's kind of real time.

And in the case of Promising Young Woman, she doesn't even get to see the consequences of her decision at all.

Spoilers.

Spoilers.

So obviously, given we're talking about the endings and writing better endings, there are going to be lots of spoilers.

And look, we've already used this in our writing before where we wanted to kind of beef up the character because I think what's the important thing about decision making, giving a character's decisions is its action.

Right?

It's a way of making your character more active and connecting to like the adolescence discussion around stillness of characters.

So if you've got characters that are powerless or there's a high cost to rebellion, right, then you can still give them the choice.

In adolescence, Jamie could tell his father the truth that he did kill this girl and he has chosen not to, right?

And that's something that we realize later.

I'm just saying that because it's those little decisions that are creating choices that the audience are aware are choices.

right and seeing our character make a knowing, making a knowing decision is going to make a character feel more active, which is obviously very important.

And this kind of sets us up to a larger, you know, at some point this year, we're going to be doing, looking at character arcs and this kind of, the character arc discussions springboarded off this.

So this is kind of in some way setting the, combining a few ideas, the agnoresis as part of it, but through the lens of decisions and choices.

Yeah.

The main reason we're looking at final choices and hero's choices is, as you say, they are often, if you're following the guru formula for these things, is that it should dramatize the entire character's kind of journey, if you can.

Not should is a didactic word, but I think that is certainly present in these three heroes choices we're looking at in these three films.

So, what I'm hoping to do in all our explorations of character arcs is look at better tools for dramatizing the internal, dramatizing the character's journey, not just the plot that the character is going through.

But to your point about agency and kind of active versus still, you know, I've been going through the back catalog of episodes, like listening to myself is like the most narcissistic thing I'm doing, but sometimes I just forget stuff that we learned like two years ago and I have to go back and re-listen to it and go, oh, yeah, that's what it was.

Look, as long as you're listening to the finished episode with both of our sides of the conversation and just not your original recording.

Unfortunately, I haven't taught AI to say, can you please just mute Stu?

If you would like that feature, you should sign up for a big cover of Patreon and we'll look into it.

We'll do the Stu edit and the Chaz edit.

We did two other episodes.

One was on splitting character function between the characters that are driving the plot versus the main characters, the point of view characters.

And one of the things we identified particularly in The Fighter was we often didn't see the Mark Wahlberg character, Mickey, the act of him making decisions or act of him making choices.

We would see the options being presented to him and then the consequences of those, but they would often cut away from him making the choice to make him feel more kind of at the expense of his brother and less in charge of the plot.

And then the other thing that we did was, I didn't realize we did two Game of Thrones episodes.

We did one in season six and one in season eight.

But the second one in season eight, we were particularly looking at how Sansa and Cersei making two enormous decisions that impacted hugely on two different episodes on the plot.

Were experienced completely differently by the audience of them as characters because one we got to see Cersei making the choice and Sansa was largely absent from the we saw the consequences of her choice but we didn't see her making the choice we didn't see her presented with the options it's.

A great callback and and and oh man I should really listen to that episode but I remember it kind of came out of like a argument.

On the internet because.

Someone was on on the internet and are complaining about Sansa.

And I was just like, it feels like, because we don't get to see her decision-making, it's about her coming in at the Battle of the Bastards to save Jon.

And she arrives in the nick of time and then it's played as a surprise.

We don't know whether, and we don't know whether she's like belted her soldiers to get there in time or that she's been holding back to the moment.

All these things which can reveal character, right?

And they've chosen to align us with Jon's experience of it.

Yeah.

Right.

But then there's no kind of real exploration of her decision making there, which I think we consider as a character because we quite literally do not get access to her as a character.

And I think I, and then the comparison, correct me if I'm wrong, you've obviously listened to it more recently.

And then the comparison with Cersei was her blowing up the sept, right?

And us sitting in that decision and seeing the consequences of that decision.

Yeah.

Those are both decisions at the climax of the season.

Yeah.

Right?

Right.

And so we are talking about this hero's journey.

Michael Arndt also kind of talks about it as the decisive act in his excellent, insanely great endings, right?

And he's got this whole beat by beat breakdown.

And then he kind of puts the decisive act as smack bang in the middle of the climax.

So then you get to your decisive act and your decisive act is positive, right?

It's surprising and it's meaningful.

And it's meaningful because, and this is crucial, the decisive act speaks to and is an embodiment of the underdog values of your story so your hero doesn't have to get up at the climax of your story and give a big speech right that's just bad writing the underdog values are embedded in the decisive act itself and that's the thing that again is going to turbocharge the emotion at the end of your story and give your story an insanely great ending.

But as i think as you can see when we get to michael clayton and promising young woman they're not in the in the two minute climax but an example um that i think we can use to kind of give a i mean you can watch his videos for his examples including a new hope and i think part of the reason we've actually put new hope into our character arcs is because michael did such a great job of breaking it down as a traditional ending i think dungeons and dragons does this kind of treat is it traditional i don't know the michael aren't kind of approach the decisive act being in the moment in this big climax i.

Should start by giving you some context so she unleashed hell on earth so i built the perfect team with magic and.

So, we're talking about the excellent Dungeons and Dragons film, and it is excellent.

If you haven't seen it, it's actually one of my favorite fantasy films.

It nails a fantastic tone.

I have now seen it four times.

Wow.

There are so few films that I've seen four times.

Part of it is because my kids love it.

I took them to see it in cinemas, and it pops up on Netflix, and now we're just like, yeah, let's watch Dungeons and Dragons.

But yeah, it is so easy to watch.

It's so delightful.

So, Chris Pline plays Edgen Darvis, a bard, right?

And a member of the harpist.

His wife was murdered, and he's raised his daughter with the help of his friend Holger, who's played by Michelle Rodriguez, right?

They basically run a party and doing heists.

Edgen and Holger are caught.

They're in a prison.

They escape.

And Edgen's quest is to gain this powerful MacGuffin to get this- Tablet of reawakening.

And his goal is to bring back his wife from the dead.

But then Forge told me that among the relics in Khorne's Keep, there was a tablet of reawakening, capable of bringing back a single deceased person, even one killed by a red wizard's blade.

You can probably see where this is going.

The tablet has one use, and he plans to use it to resurrect his dead wife.

And that's pretty much the driving quest of the film.

And it culminates in the third act where our adventurers, a party of our adventurers, are going on this elaborate heist to break in and steal the tablet from under the noses of the big bad, the red wizard, Safina.

The final battle, they manage to retrieve the tablet and end up in a final battle with Safina, who's a very powerful wizard, and she stabs, fatally wounds Holger with this blade that means the normal heal spell can't work.

They end up defeating the Red Wizard, and then Holger is dying.

And Darvis is basically there with his daughter.

His daughter is like mourning the loss of, of her, effectively her step-mom.

Right.

And in that moment, and they've dramatized it with this interesting blue, um.

Dragonfly?

Dragonfly.

They've dramatized it with this blue dragonfly to show this idea that he's beginning to let go.

And then he makes the decision in consultation with his daughter, right?

He basically says, I can only use this tablet once to his daughter who nods his head.

and he uses the tablet to save Holger, meaning that he can no longer resurrect his wife.

Yeah.

So, that is the decision that he is giving, right?

We can see the choice, which is clearly save Holger or save his wife.

We understand it's a choice because he actually talks to his daughter about it, right?

And then he knowingly, he has to recite words.

So, this is not just an instinctive reaction to bring her back, right?

And then Holger comes back and is like, why did you waste that onto me?

And it's a powerful ending.

The agnoresis, I think, is him realizing that his daughter's mother effectively is Holger, right?

And so it's got a really big uplifting emotion.

I rewatched it this afternoon and I cried even though I literally just watched the last couple of minutes, right?

It is almost into catharsis territory.

But to me, when you think of that being a classic, what I would go, ah, the hero's journey is a choice like that.

I can save this character.

I have to get what I, you know, it's giving up what you want for what you need, that kind of thing.

What he wanted was to bring his wife back.

What he actually needed to was realize that Holger was really the family unit.

And I love the fact that it's actually, he doesn't have a romantic relationship with Holger.

No, no.

Right.

Not at all.

I know, but I love that, that they can be good parents together for this child.

I think you can phrase the choice even clearer than that, because Edgen, from the beginning of the film, everything comes from him wanting to bring his wife back, but even he knows that he's responsible for his wife's death because he stole some treasure, he broke Harper's oath, right?

That brought the Thayans into his home, they killed his wife.

So he's responsible because he was wanting more for himself, right?

I lost everything that ever mattered to me and it was all my fault.

Wouldn't it have really killed my wife?

I did.

I decided we deserved a better life than a Harper's Oath would allow us.

But i didn't know that red wizards marked their treasure, i led them right to our door, i didn't even have the good luck to be home when when they got there.

He keeps saying it's for his wife for his family for his daughter he keeps telling his daughter that he's trying to steal the the tablet of reawakening for her to bring her mother back.

Here look at me look at me i swear to you it was a tablet of reawakening.

I was doing it for mom, for all of us.

You have to trust me.

You told me to trust you when you left.

But it's still for him.

And he's finally confronted with, do I make a choice with this tablet between what's good for me or what's good for my daughter?

And he chooses his daughter.

Yeah.

To the kind of structural stuff, this is all experienced with the audience and character's point of view absolutely aligned.

Yeah.

And pretty much in real time.

Yeah.

Right?

So, it really aligns us with his character and that maybe is what kind of gives us this upswell of emotion.

I mean, you were talking about Catharsis.

Like, there's Catharsis beats.

There's a reversal of fortune.

We see that Holger's dead.

It throws us back to the beginning of the film.

She's actually stabbed with the same weapon that his wife was stabbed with.

You know, then he's- I can't remember off the top of my head what the beats were for Catharsis were.

But it would not surprise me if we went through them in order and they would be right there.

Yes.

If you want to give us a moment, I can actually look it up.

I mean, this isn't an episode about catharsis necessarily.

We're looking at heroes' choices and how these good, I think, or interesting or subversive heroes' choices actually, through their craft tools that they've used, are better or more interestingly dramatizing the character's entire arc, the entire journey.

While I look up the catharsis beats, because it would be interesting to see if they also apply to Finding Nemo, you brought up Finding Nemo as another example of exactly this kind of real-time, really tightly aligned narrative point of view with character point of view.

So you do want to kind of talk through the net scene from Finding Nemo?

I've got to find my son Nemo!

Fish are friends, not food.

Grab shell, dude.

Grab...

No hurling on the shell, dude, okay?

Just waxed it.

Duck!

That's not a duck, it's a pelican!

Everybody hold up!

A little help over here.

Some way.

Beyond the sea how's it going bub you know i speak whale just as well he might be hungry don't worry whales don't eat clown fish they eat krill, yeah.

Sure i mean look i wanted to bring up you wanted to bring up dungeons and dragons and i wanted to bring up finding nemo as like these classic relatively recent examples of the hero's choice being pulled off and i didn't even necessarily say finding nemo in particular i just said i think we should talk about the pixar formula of the character has learned their their choice they've gone through their low point they've changed and then they put those characters they test the change how much has it stuck how much have they learned their lesson and um i re-watched just the ending of finding nemo uh just before recording and i am surprised about how immediate it is.

So Marlin thinks Nemo is dead.

Nemo and Dory track Marlin down and Marlin meets, like is reunited with Nemo.

It's amazing.

It's wonderful.

And as they're hugging, like it's within 10 seconds of them seeing each other, a net swoops them all up and Marlin and Nemo are small enough to be outside the net but dory is caught in the net with a whole lot of other fish and marlin like nemo knows he's learned in the fish tank that if all the fish swim down together they can break the net and escape and save dory and marlin the whole thing the whole.

Movie it opens with marlin losing his wife and every single egg that they had except for one and it posits his like you know want versus need you know he wants to keep nemo safe and what he needs to do is learn to let nemo go and look uh craig mazen has got uh it's it's an episode on script notes uh i saw him do this lecture live at austin it's just an he does an incredible narrative breakdown of finding nemo through the lens of theme so i'm not gonna steal his thunder or repeat it, but Marlin literally says to Nemo.

No, I am not going to lose you again!

Dad, there's no gun!

It's the only way we can save Dory!

I can do this!

You're right.

I know you can.

And Marlon chooses to let his son go to save Dory.

He doesn't say, no, screw Dory, I'm going to keep you safe.

They test the lesson that Marlon has learned, which is, I mean, there's plenty of ways to look at these, plenty of structures and formulas and different guru lessons about these lessons.

I hope that we do actually come back to the Michael Arndt great endings and apply it to other movies, uh, recent movies with great endings to see if how they stack up against it.

Yeah.

So in that, what's interesting is that we see the choice, which is either he, he doesn't risk Nemo's life.

He loses Dory.

Right.

Or he risks his son life, potentially saving Dory.

Right.

And there is a consequence, which is they save Dory.

And then there's this moment where they milk it at the end where Nemo is under the net and he may be injured.

Right.

So, we've kind of learned that he's kind of got to see that these things do come with risks.

Yeah.

And it is a powerful ending, and it is kind of dramatizes this theme.

What is interesting, because I found the catharsis beats, but in my notes I've also found, it connects to the adolescence episode, I found Will Dunn's, his articulation of this idea is he calls it the crisis decision.

Okay.

Right?

And it says that a character has to make the most difficult decision of their life, and it becomes the crisis because each alternative poses a loss as well as a gain.

And so, therefore, characters have to weigh what really matters most to them.

I think you saw that in Dungeons & Dragons.

He can resurrect his wife but loses Holger, or he saves Holger and loses his wife.

You don't see that in Finding Nemo.

The decision, he's risking something.

Right?

But he's not definitely losing something and definitely gaining something, right?

And I just think that's an interesting idea I wanted to float because I think you kind of do see that a little bit in the other films, but not as, like, I think it's a really cool idea.

I just don't think most stories are going to have this crisis idea of, like, I mean, rom-coms definitely do it.

Like when Harry met Sally is the example one of Will Dunn gives, which is giving up, Harry giving up his friendship with Sally in order to pursue the romantic relationship and risking it.

The catharsis beats are a twist, a change of fortune, and this kind of sets up the circumstances, surprises the audience.

Dory getting in the net, Hulk getting stabbed.

There is a revelation, a plot revelation that throws you back to the beginning of the story.

Surprising, but inevitable.

And I think in both cases, I think Finding Nemo is connecting it quite literally back to what Nemo in the first place in the very opening.

And there is a flashback to him as an egg, reminding us of that opening scene.

And in Dungeons of Dragons, there's a flashback as well.

Yeah.

And they've used the blue dragonfly to connect us because it's basically a symbol of his wife.

So, they've used that in order.

It's a talisman.

It's a talisman, right?

And then in the Catharsis Beats, the protagonist has a moment of understanding.

They get it.

They get it before the audience, which is a narrative point of view, think.

So, they understand something before we do.

And then when we catch up to them understanding it, then we feel the emotion in Dungeons & Dragons.

We understand just slightly after him that he's gone, oh shit, Holger is actually my daughter's mother.

Yeah.

Right?

And I miss my wife, but I've been saying that I want to bring back her mother.

But the thing is, I miss my wife.

She wasn't a mother to her.

Right?

Which is a very powerful idea.

And that's want versus need very well.

articulated in finding nemo i think that upswell is a little bit um doesn't isn't as powerful right because you're not sitting in there but that's i mean that's me i mean it's i i don't have kids i don't have young kids i know finding nemo hits stiff if you've got young young children and then there's a moment which we talked about in our episode on catharsis which you haven't listened to possibly the one and only episode of draw zero everyone should listen to in the entire our world, except for the first 20 minutes, because we haven't actually moved that, re-edited this episode.

And there's a separation where we separate from what the characters experience to reflect upon our own lives.

So, there's meant to be an aesthetic distance to allow us to reflect on those people with us.

And I certainly think Dungeons and Dragons did that for me.

Can't remember what moment.

I think they just sit in the spectacle of it, right?

Well, I guess maybe it's that line from Holger.

Why did you waste it on me?

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

Because it's even...

I'm getting emotional about it now.

It's even Holger not understanding her value.

Yeah.

Right?

And there's actually something...

Yeah, I'm getting emotional about it.

There's something powerful in her realizing the power of her relationship with their kid.

Right?

Yeah, definitely.

That she kind of took it for granted.

And I know we've just spent a lot of time laying the groundwork with these two examples that aren't our three hero examples.

Yeah.

But I think that's going to be really useful.

So, should we jump into Michael Clayton?

Finally.

If nothing else, I think that groundwork that we've laid is to go, and surely anyone can conceive of this, but in the hero's journey, that final choice, that hero's choice is so pivotal to making a good ending.

It not just presents the arc, it resolves the plot, it can be strongly thematic, all these things.

So that's what we want.

Indiana Jones closing his eyes.

That's a very clear choice.

Yeah.

And you say it's Hero's Journey.

I don't think it's necessarily comes from the Hero's Journey.

Hero's Journey is finding the elixir and returning it.

But anyway, we'll talk about that when that comes to character arcs.

Yeah.

Because I think the Hero's Journey is actually often more a steadfast character arc where the hero changes those around them rather than themselves changing.

I would agree.

So, Michael Clayton.

Michael, thank God.

Look, I got a situation.

Arthur Edens just stripped down naked in a deposition room in Milwaukee.

You are the senior litigating partner of one of the largest, most respected law firms in the world.

You are a legend.

I'm an accomplice.

Romantic, depressive.

I am Shiva, the god of death.

Hi, I'm Michael Clayton.

You're late.

This is a $3 billion class action lawsuit.

The architect of our defense has been arrested for running naked through a parking lot.

He's building a case against you, North.

Nobody's going to let him do that.

Let him?

Who the hell's going to stop him?

I spent 12% of my life defending the reputation of a deadly weed killer.

Arthur.

No way!

They killed the Michael.

You, North, need to know he's under control.

They've been shook up.

They need to be reassured.

What are you telling me?

That I'm counting on you.

I don't want to say exactly what it was.

Just that it was something that would win the whole case.

I'm not the enemy.

Then who are you?

You got all these cops thinking you're a lawyer.

You got all these lawyers thinking you're some kind of cop.

You got everybody fooled, don't you?

You know exactly what you want.

Get out.

Get out of the car now.

I'm not the guy that you kill.

I'm the guy that you buy.

Are you so blind you don't even see what I am?

Do I look like I'm negotiating?

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy, as we are reveling in Andor season two right now at the time of recording.

And we're going to be doing this same film for our episode on subtext being overrated.

But a very different moment in the film.

Yes, but it's motivation for everyone.

If you're in the Gilroy hype train of like, oh, Andor's pretty good, you should go and watch Michael Clayton.

Because you're like, everything that Andor does right, you can see it in Michael Clayton and, you know, the Bourne movies.

So, Michael Clayton is a legal thriller where there is a big evil corporation.

Evil lawyers.

Yeah, and evil lawyers or amoral lawyers.

How do you think we pay the rent, Michael?

Uh uh and in into this uh falls michael clayton the fixer of a law firm that is defending the the big weed killer company that's subject to a class action lawsuit particularly around and this is important background because it's framed around the choice so one of their key litigators Arthur discovers a document that basically proves the guilt of the company but he's working for that company he's retained by that company he's supposed to act in their best interest but he actually possibly for a range of reasons but really falling for one of not falling in love like not in not romantic love but cherishing the innocence of one of the witnesses that he's He is going to reveal this smoking gun document that's a report that has been printed with a red cover.

They killed them, Michael.

Those small farms are family farms.

Did you meet Anna?

No.

Oh, you gotta see her.

You gotta talk to her.

She's a miracle, Michael.

She's God's perfect little creature.

And for $50 million in fees, I've spent 12% of my life destroying perfect Anna and her dead parents and her dying brother.

When was the last time you took one of these?

No, no, no.

I'm not losing this.

Everything is now finally significant.

The world is a beautiful and radiant place.

I'm not trading that for this.

If it's real, the pill won't kill it.

I have blood on my hands.

You are the senior litigating partner of one of the largest, most respected law firms in the world.

You are a legend.

I'm an accomplice.

You're a manic depressive.

I am Shiva, the god of death.

He's going to reveal it.

And the company whose key counsel is played by Tilda Swinton.

Karen.

I love that she's called Karen.

Yeah.

She arranges for Arthur to be killed.

And Michael comes across the report.

Now, it's interesting.

you we've got this wonderful snow piercer moment that we'll talk about uh but that's not actually here's my my hand grenade is the snow piercer moment the left versus right michael's got literally the red covered report in one hand and a check clearing his debts for in the other hand, that is the low point of the movie it's not the final it's not the hero's choice because.

I think this is really interesting because i think we've talked about this two minute climax.

And look.

The the shiva the god of death.

Speech holy.

Fucking shit like i mean you know.

Which one the michael one or the uh the arthur one well look.

There's lots of great speeches in andor and there's great speeches in this film if you're like a really good monologue we should finally and do that monologue.

Episode.

Now, that's just not the way to go here, Karen.

For such a smart person, you really are lost, aren't you?

This conversation is over.

I'm not the guy that you kill.

I'm the guy that you buy.

Are you so fucking blind you don't even see what I am?

I'm the easiest part of your whole goddamn problem, and you're going to kill me?

Don't you know who I am?

I'm a fixer.

I'm a bag man.

I do everything from shoplifting housewives to bent congressmen, and you're going to kill me?

What do you need, Karen?

Lay it on me.

You want a carry permit?

You want a heads-up on an insider trading subpoena?

I sold out Arthur for 80 grand and a three-year contract and you're going to kill me?

What do you want?

What do I want?

I want more.

I want out.

And with this, I want everything.

But I think what is interesting, because it dramatizes what his choices are.

Yes, so clearly.

But I don't think it's when he makes the decision.

So, what we're seeing here is we're experiencing, we are learning what his choices are with him, which is, I've got the report or I can just take the money.

But they're not compressing the relationship between, here's the choice and you've got to make a decision, like in Dungeons and Dragons and Finding Nemo, right?

In the Michael art, this is a two-minute climax, we're going to compress it and it's going to have this intensity of emotion.

This is actually pulling it out, right?

He is going to be wrestling with that decision.

It's that anxiety that I think Michael Clayton does a good job because when you compress it, it's kind of a different experience.

I'm like, oh, fuck, let's do this.

As opposed to, oh, I have to really weigh these choices.

But I agree because something else happens in between.

They attempt to kill him with a car bomb.

Give me the cell.

That signal's good.

Quite a significant plot development happens in between the uh i'm calling it the snow piercer moment but it you you brought it up because you were re-watching michael clayton for this other episode that we're going to do on subtext and you noticed that there was literally a still shot where he's holding the the the two different items in his hand and there couldn't be a clearer you know dramatization of what his choice is do i take the money or do i you know do what is quote unquote right um i mean it but it's it's you know talking about other great speeches the sydney pollock speech is great you know it's like what.

If arthur was on to something what do you mean on to what you north what if he wasn't crazy what if he was right right about what that we're on the wrong side wrong side wrong way everything all of it this is news this case reeked from day one 15 years in i gotta tell you how we pay the rent but what would they do what would they do if he went public what would they do are you fucking soft they're doing it we don't straighten the settlement out in the next 24 hours they're going to withhold nine million dollars in fees then they're going to pull out the video of arthur doing his flash dance in milwaukee they're going to sue us for legal malpractice except there won't be anything from the wind because by then the merge you with london will be dead we'll be selling off the goddamn furniture that's 80, we'll call on it a bonus.

He's just like michael of course we're wrong we're lawyers right that's essentially the gist of of what he's saying but while we'll get to the car bomb the reason why i think the the hero's choice is another choice between the money and doing the right thing but it's not this choice right here because we see him straight afterwards cashing the cheque.

Like he hands it over to the loan shark to pay his debts.

He's still got the report in his pocket.

So it hasn't, they're not mutually exclusive.

He's still got, he's still living with that choice as you say, but he has taken the money.

He hasn't shown the report to his boss and, And he's spent the money.

And he literally, you know, you're talking about Shiva, the goddess of death speech.

Part of his, one of the lines that he says that convinces her to betray herself is, I sold out Arthur for 80 grand in a three-year contract.

And that line works in that moment because it's true.

His low point is he sold, he sells out Arthur for 80 grand in a three-year contract.

In that speech, when he ultimately confronts the architect, Karen, well, not the architect, she's the, what is it, the general counsel for the evil corporation, and she is playing dirty tricks.

She is the one who orders the hit, and that's the scene we're going to be talking about in subtext.

She orders the hit on Michael Clayton, but also on Arthur.

Yeah.

Right?

But clearly, she knew this memo existed and has gone out of her way to suppress it during discovery.

Isn't that part of it?

It was that effectively, she knew they had the smoking gun and kind of effectively tried to dispose of evidence.

Well, she's killing everyone who knows about it.

Well, I mean, that's one way to dispose of evidence.

I hope things don't get messy like that in food regulation.

Better uh the um but the big moment what they what they do so beautifully is they combine uh an actual character moment with michael wrestling with the consequences of his decision because he was presented with an option he was holding them in two hands and he spent one of them right he spent the check and he's driven out and he's in the early morning and he sees some horses on a hill and he's compelled to go out and connect with these horses and it's just this, quiet moment where you can feel all the things like it's not talking it's not verbalized it's just a very internal moment of sitting of michael sitting in the consequences of the decision he made at the low point.

As as someone who has stopped what they're doing for both cats and horses.

Totally get it i mean your cat slaps you if you don't so i think there's some stakes to that choice.

Yeah.

Random cats.

There's a lot of, I take, I'm definitely someone who stops and pats the cat.

But then the car explodes, and the next time we see Michael, he is confronting and essentially extorting, blackmailing the general counsel.

He's saying, unless you pay me $10 million, I will release this report.

And we believe him in the moment.

Oh, yeah.

It's consistent.

We are not presented so.

So leading up in between the car bomb and this confrontation, we're not with Michael.

We're actually with other characters being told that Michael's been killed in a car bomb.

We know he, as an audience, we know he survives, but we're not with him when he's going, what am I going to do next?

Right?

He's not planning his strategy.

He's not talking to any other characters.

He's not laying out the options that he's choosing between.

There's not a Snowpiercer envelope versus report, right?

What we are seeing as he confronts the Tilda Swinton character is the strategy or the implementation of the choice.

We're seeing the choice in effect.

And we think the choice is to extort her for money.

That goes back to that low point decision, money or doing the right thing.

And he's very convincing.

He's so convincing that she agrees to pay him.

And turns out he was wearing a wire and that is the confession that the police need to arrest her and her boss.

You have a deal.

You're so fucked.

What?

You're fucked.

What do you mean?

Take a wild guess.

Is there a problem?

I don't understand.

Here, let me get a picture while I'm at it.

You don't want the money?

No, you keep the money.

You're going to need it.

Is this fellow bothering you?

Am I bothering you?

Karen, I've got a whole board waiting in there.

What the hell's going on?

Who are you?

I'm Shiva, the god of death.

Well, yeah, arrest her for one, because she owns up to effectively...

Killing Arthur.

Arthur trying to attempt murder on him.

Yeah.

And all the other stuff around the company.

Like, effectively, them admitting their guilt.

And yes, you're right.

Because what is interesting is this is really decoupled.

Right?

We presented a choice that he actually resolves early, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that is a great, not hand-graded, it's a great carbon.

Maybe that should be, in the same way that we're talking about Snowpiercer.

Oh, it's the Snowpiercer moment.

And everyone's like, what the fuck is that?

The Snowpiercer moment is not just a reference to the movie, it's a reference to every frame of painting's video essay on the movie about dramatizing the choices between two things that's left or right.

And we've talked about it before.

In fact, this is one of the oldest traditions in cinema.

How do you show character choice?

Left or right?

That's it.

We often forget that screen direction is a tool and that character choices can be presented simply by having them look.

It's really just the clear, like, the path, you know, you're in the fairy tale.

Do I go the left?

You know, do I go this path or do I go this path?

Do I go forward or back in terms of Snowpiercer?

It's reducing options to a binary.

Yeah, it's about reducing options to a binary that can be very visually explained.

The red cover report, right, versus the check in my hand is very visual.

The Mass Effect, which is one of the great game trilogies, but the first one has a very powerful choice that echoes over the whole trilogy.

We have to choose which of your companions survive.

And it's literally, do you run left and rescue Ashley?

Do you run right and rescue Kanan?

I'm going to look up if that's the actual directions you've got to run.

But it is that very clear, here's the binary, and that's what we mean by the snowpiercer moment.

Are you dramatizing it?

So, what we actually see in this moment is because we weren't presented with the choices before Michael goes into this meeting, right?

We don't know what he's choosing between at that point.

We assume he's good for his word, right?

That he's the guy you buy, not the guy you kill.

Right?

And it turns out that he had already made the choice off camera before coming into this scene, and it was other than what we think it is, and then they reveal the consequences of that.

And it's powerful and it works because it is the same choice dramatically and thematically, and from a character perspective as that choice in the low point.

It's like, do you take the money or do you do the right thing?

Yeah.

He is definitely going to, his law firm is definitely going to get sued for malpractice now.

He is throwing everything away in his life to do the right thing.

But they don't actually spend time in the consequences of that.

Yeah.

Right?

That's true.

That, like, I mean, he's kind of won both worlds.

He didn't gain and lose in the context of the film.

He both was able to pay off his debts, right?

And he was able to do the right thing.

What happened in between was that they nearly, like, they had to have the car bomb to kind of motivate him to go, these are very bad people.

And look, he could have let them think he was dead.

A more cynical version of this.

Is that he waits until he actually gets the money and then reveals the report anyway.

Yes.

Right?

And they chose not to do that.

No, no, no.

He has kind of done a deal with his brother who talked to him earlier and was like, you know, you're not a cop and you're not a lawyer, you know, like is in this in between.

So, it is interesting because I think the point of view structure makes it a powerful ending.

Yeah.

Whereas I think if we had gone into that scene knowing he was trying to entrap, it's not even trap, but bait Karen, it would have been a lot less powerful.

Yeah.

Because what it's doing is actually playing the experience of his choice from her perspective.

We're actually getting aligned into her perspective.

So, we see her getting ready for her big presentation.

Yeah.

We see how nervous she is and they're doing a really good job of like humanizing her.

Yeah.

You know, coming back to, you know, just Andor, I think the most, what's so great about Tony Gilroy is he's, in some ways he's a humanist.

In many ways he's a humanist.

He tries to present his characters as humanistically as possible from, you know, we kind of feel sympathy for them.

Yeah.

Right?

Whether they're an imperial intelligence officer or the general counsel for an evil corporation who herself has done evil things.

In that moment, you're kind of with her desperation.

And it actually works from a plot point of view because we understand why she is like, just take the fucking bribe.

Please just take the fucking bribe.

This is nearly over.

Right.

And we've seen how much stress it's caused her throughout the whole film.

They do a good job of that.

But we experience it through her.

We experience his decisions through her.

But I think part of what makes us realise the power of that choice is that they have dramatised, from a thematic and character perspective, the same choice earlier in a subtly different context.

So that- So where I think- what you're saying is that it's the same choice delayed.

I think you're actually right in some ways, but they, from a narrative perspective, that cheat works because they kind of have resolved that choice.

And it makes you think he is corrupted himself.

He has chosen the money.

Right.

And that, that version of Michael is the one that sells both Karen and us as the audience on that climax.

Yes.

So what do you think?

I'm just curious, like you mentioned is the thematic ending what makes it a thematic ending for you.

Uh because i think michael clayton is all about the uh the cost of making the moral moral decision right and and they're in a world where no one makes moral decisions there's there's a whole lot of subplots like around michael forgiving his drug addicted brother or not who's put michael in this position where he's financially insecure anyway and has lost his dream restaurant.

Arthur is murdered for making a moral decision.

He's actually seen as mentally unwell for making a moral decision.

As good as this feels, you know where it goes.

No, no, no, no.

You're wrong.

I mean, what makes this feel good is that I don't know where it goes.

How do I talk to you, Arthur?

so you hear me like a child like a nut like everything's fine what's the secret because i need you to hear me.

I mean exploring the cost of moral compromise i mean that is and all yeah oh yeah you know what is the cost of rebelling and smear i mean it's everything to use that speech and in some ways this is exploring similar territory it's just interesting that we don't see the complete she she's told us we are given a speech earlier about the cot like the malpractice etc these are the of going public this will destroy the firm blah blah blah blah yeah we don't actually see that in the in the what we're told what it is but we don't see it yeah because i guess they're making they could have they could have tony gilroy knows what he's doing and i think it's really because he's actually wanting her to leave us with this the victory of like he is hanging on i love the fucking last shot we're hanging on michael clayton walking out having, fucking won this mm-hmm, Right.

And him going, shit, I actually feel pretty good about who I am.

And look, maybe I'm saying theme because I think an expertly resolved character arc, if you've watched that play out, then as an audience member, I tend to go, what was that all about?

And, you know, Dungeons and Dragons is about a man learning how to live for his family as opposed to for himself.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and also the family of the people you choose around you and all that kind of stuff.

You know, I take a narrower view of theme than you do where I am more about the, you know, I guess the philosophical argument that's being dramatized with these character journeys.

So, for me, they're kind of somewhat connected if you've got a character arc that resolves in a very clear binary hero's choice.

Where that hero's choice is a dramatization of what has been the thematic conflicts that these characters are playing out as it is in all of these three films yeah i guess that's why i find it thematically powerful as well.

Yeah and look i'm just connecting it to our immediately previous episode but kind of the revelation to that character and theme character questions are theme questions, the theme questions are character questions.

I absolutely do think this is a good example of that, that is dramatized in the ending, right?

Yeah.

You know, what does the price of morality or the price of immorality, you know, because she's bought, the whole company has bought, it's all about a company that knows that they have done the wrong thing, choosing to work out what is the cost, what are they, the literal cost for them in the settlement.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, the Tilda Swinton character and your humanist observation is she is the mirror journey to Michael, right?

She does end up selling her soul for the money and for the prestige and for the position.

And he does that at the low point, sells out Arthur for 80K in a three-year contract, but comes out the other side of that.

So, do we want to move on to Promising Young Woman?

Yeah.

I'm just trying to work out how much I would sell you out for in a three-year contract.

I think it would be very cheap, sadly.

$8,000?

No, there's a lie, a green light.

I'll sell Chaz out for a green light in a three-year contract.

Whisper something in your ear Good God Almighty.

You know, they put themselves in danger, girls like that.

There was a perverted thing to say You'd think you'd learn by that age, right?

I need to let go.

What are you doing?

It's okay, Kate.

You're safe.

What are you doing?

Hey, I said, what are you doing?

Every week I go to a club I act like I'm too drunk to stand, And every week a nice guy comes over to see if I'm okay You're so pretty I'm a nice guy Are you?

One, two, three, four I thought we had a connection Okay.

How old am I?

What are my hobbies?

What's my name?

Sorry, maybe that one's too hard.

Just like we've actually looked at Michael Clayton, I believe, before and will again, we've looked at Promising Young Woman before and maybe again.

It's one of those examples recently, I think it felt so different to me that it's something that I keep narratively wanting to come back to but in the previous context that we looked at it was in our keeping genre fresh episode which we also were looking at get out and the invisible man with reference to parasite john wick taken knives out and more and in that i felt that promising young woman the had two very different storylines that were shot differently.

And those two storylines were what created both the character tension and the dramatic tension.

Which is an excellent observation.

Well, thank you.

So, it's about a young woman, Cassie, whose friend was raped in college and the fallout from her friend's rape, her friend ended up killing herself.

And Cassie has, we're introduced to her at the beginning of the movie is going on a mission to basically reveal to nice guys their own monstrosity by basically putting herself in the position of uh being appearing to them as being uh too drunk to consent and showing them that they will cross that line and and not seek her or not care about her consent and so she's got a book she's got a tally she's trying to uh target these nice guys and it's it's holding the the film posits that it's holding her back in life from you know she left her medical career she's working in a cafe it's stopping her from having intimate or close friendships or relationships but she ends up falling for a guy, a nice guy, played by Bo Burnham.

The casting of this movie is sublime, particularly all the nice guys and their casting.

And so, as she becomes more...

Connected with him it it reduces her need and efficacy for her sort of revenge addiction right and the flip side is her revenge addiction causes problems in her relationship and ultimately it comes to a head when the she finds out that her nice guy boyfriend actually witnessed her friends rape and did nothing and did not tell her and.

He's denied it.

Yeah like.

Knowledge earlier so it wasn't just that he was present and did nothing.

And he's and he's gaslighting her yeah.

And and there's a sense of in of self-preservation in the video it's like don't film me don't film me.

It's.

It's that thing that he knows what is being seen as wrong in that he doesn't want to be associated with it but he doesn't have the moral fortitude to actually intervene.

Yeah i mean and And he even has these great lines when she confronts him with the video.

Like, I don't remember.

I don't.

Didn't make an impact, huh?

I was a kid.

And then she blackmails him with the, I have this video that shows you were there and, and was, you know, and that you were there and did nothing and everyone else was there and did nothing.

And she goes for, kind of reputation, like, did he do anything criminal?

Probably not, but it's not going to be a good look, given that he's a pediatric surgeon.

And she uses that to extort information about-

Al Monroe's bachelor party.

Al Monroe being her friend Nina's rapist.

So, and she gets that information.

That sets up the third act.

And what is interesting about this is this is definitely one of those POV things where we know that she's got a plan.

Yeah.

Because, I mean, she effectively says, I am going there.

We turn up, she sees.

And this kind of does connect to the beginning because we see her putting on this makeup and practicing things when she goes and picks up these nice guys, picks up, she doesn't pick, they pick her up.

Right.

And then she kind of turns the tables onto them.

So, we know that she's got a plan, but we don't know what the plan is, right?

Is it the same as, is she just going to confront them?

Is she going to make them look at the video?

She could just release the video.

So, we are absolutely behind her in what's going on.

Yeah.

From a narrative perspective, she has the choice of- She's made her choice to choose revenge addiction, but we don't know how, like you say, we don't know how that's going to play out.

We haven't seen her planning what she's going to do.

We know that she's made a choice.

We don't know what options she was considering.

And again, we're into the implementation of it.

We are behind her in the same way that we were behind michael in weirdly in the same way like in michael clayton where we're put into karen's point of view we're almost in al monroe's point of view in this uh confrontation do.

I know you i'm not sure you remember me al you were so popular, you're nina's friend, fuck you're nina's friend so you did notice me after all.

Yeah and look it's it's an interesting end sequence because there's this rule of thumb that we've talked about before which is if they tell you the plan in the heist movie it's all going to go wrong.

Yeah they.

Don't tell you the plan, it's going to go right.

Yeah.

Because it's where you get the dramatic power from.

If you know what the plan is, the story is how do they adapt to the changes, the diversions from the plan.

If you don't know what the plan is, then it's like about enjoying the revelations.

It doesn't mean these things are not tense.

Things kind of can go wrong in these heights, but this is a simple thing.

We're not told her plan.

So we think it's kind of working.

Yeah.

She gets all the guys, she gets Al Munro upstairs in the bedroom, handcuffed to the bed.

She drugs all the guys like they're all unconscious.

She seems like she has all the power, right?

So when I heard your name again, your filthy fucking name, I wondered when was the last time anyone had said hers?

Or thought it even, apart from me.

And it made me so sad because, Al, you should be the one with her name all over you.

No.

So, it's a scene that's kind of similar to me to the scene in Girl with Dragon Tread 2 where Elizabeth Salander confronts her rapist.

And is going to basically carve her name into it.

The difference is, it's not Nina.

Cassie's using the name Nina in the moment, in this moment.

She reveals who she is.

She reveals she knows Al's everything she goes to to carve it and then Al manages to get her hand free and kills her.

Yeah.

And this is what we think was meant to be her moment of victory and it seems like a moment of defeat.

I mean, then talking about a low point in a story, there's like the other low point is her learning that her boyfriend and she's getting her life back on track is actually, turns out he's just a piece of shit like everyone else.

Yeah.

And that spurs her onto this.

Yeah.

And then we kind of sit in the consequences of that.

We sit.

So it's not really presented as a decision.

It's something that happens to her.

Yeah.

Right.

we see um her parents fire a missile missing persons report bo burnham get a visit from the cops he's at first and i really like that they play the reality of that which is like oh shit did cassie actually release the video and then you kind of see him relax that it's actually about cassie being a missing person him actually also seeming relieved right and i think part of what it works is the police like is she someone that's likely to self-harm and he's like yes because Cassie is someone that has kind of self-harming behaviours.

She isn't going out and actually getting drunk, but she is definitely putting herself in, let's say, risky situations.

Yeah.

Right?

And the film certainly portrays it as kind of risky behaviour on her behalf.

Yeah.

Right?

And this is the scene where that risky behaviour, she paid the price for it.

So, we think we've seen her make a choice and act on the choice and be murdered or killed, and then that's the consequences of the choice.

And now, suddenly, we're sitting in other characters' POV.

Yeah.

And then we get to Al Munrud's wedding- And then Ryan gets a text message from Cassie that he's scheduled.

At the time, I was like, eh, scheduled text messages.

Now I'm someone that uses them all the time.

They've just scheduled emails.

I'm like, hey, Chaz, we're recording Giraffe Zero, schedule for 3 a.m.

Completely by it now.

At the time, I was like, hmm, really?

So she's sent a scheduled text message.

To Ryan.

Yep.

There is an envelope, a package goes to a lawyer, right, who, was he on Nina's case?

I think he defended Al Monroe or other people.

Anyway, she was on, he was on the revenge list, but actually showed contrition.

So didn't get Cassied, but yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

So his name is Jordan and yeah, he's shows that he's deeply like he is.

Yeah.

Contrition is the right word for it.

Um, and explains how the whole thing works.

I got a bonus for every settlement out of court.

I got another bonus for every charge dropped.

We all did.

There was a guy.

His only job was to comb through all their social media accounts for any compromising information.

He contacted old friends, past sexual partners.

Oh, you'd be amazed how much easier it is now with the internet to dig up dirt.

In the old days, we had to go through a girl's trash.

Now, one drunk photo at a party.

Oh, you wouldn't believe how hostile that makes a jury.

You gotta help me.

I can't sleep.

I can't sleep.

And she sends him a package incriminating his clients right his client in the event of my disappearance please let her and package to the police right which i think actually kind of does a lot of heavy lifting so.

What what we we've now seen is that is the additional what happens in the in the in the climax of the film is that we actually see the consequences of decisions that we didn't even know choices that we didn't even know she had made right.

Yeah because what happens is basically this incriminating video is given to the police.

We see them arrest Al.

We see Joe run off.

We're assuming that Joe is going to ultimately also be tracked down, right?

For burning her body.

I mean, Al is totally going to fucking flip on him.

But from a hero's journey or from a final choice perspective, we are, again, we were not with her.

we didn't see her mail that package to the lawyer, or schedule some text messages, right?

We cut straight from her saying she's going to Al Monroe's bachelor party to seeing her outside the bachelor party doing the final finishing touches on her makeup and hearing that amazing Britney Spears cover as she's wandering up.

So we haven't seen her make the choice.

We're only learning that she made the choice to go, you know, and she's been reckless the whole film.

Like you said, she's put herself in dangerous situations.

So we as the audience totally buy.

That her plan was working perfectly until it wasn't and then she died as a consequence and that that might be it.

And maybe we're sitting in this film that is talking about thematically about good guys getting away with it, right, with hurting women.

Maybe that's what we're sitting with.

But ultimately, we learned that her choice was to prepare better, I guess, prepare a contingency plan for her own death.

Yeah.

And so they play the whole thing as a surprise.

Cassie's kind of come back from the dead to get justice.

Right.

And so what is interesting is, as you've talked about, we're not really shown her as having the choice.

What were her choices to go or not to?

Well, I guess her choice was just to give the information to the police.

Right.

She kind of talked about, I could just turn this over.

She could have not sought revenge.

She could have not put herself and her life at danger for the opportunity to carve Nina's name into Al Monroe.

And what was her decision?

Well, she went.

Yeah.

Right?

Do you think it was a decision of hers to effectively let herself be killed a la Gran Torino, where Clint Eastwood basically mired us himself?

This is an interesting question, I think.

I, you know, does she let herself be killed?

I think there is a read of this where she deliberately lets herself be killed to set up Al Monroe.

My preferred read is that she was recklessly indifferent to her own demise.

And she knew it was a possibility.

Yeah.

She was only an avenging angel of death and that she had one way of seeking her revenge.

But if that failed, she had another.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, whichever way you look at it, while it would make you look at Cassie differently as a character, as an audience member, what makes this ending so confronting and so powerful powerful you totally buy just the way that you totally buy that michael is going to take the 10 million you totally buy that cassie has recklessly put herself in the path of death and has failed in her justice mission now we kind of get i think as an audience a an emotional bump that she's triumphed you know that text message from cassie and nina with a wink emoji.

So

It feels triumphant but i i still think that the film is a deliberately a tragedy.

Yeah i think it is a tragedy and i'm glad you found that connection with michael clayton because both of them are withholding our experience with the characters to speak in a way more towards theme and i'm using theme in a broad sense there you know it does make a sit in this idea of like oh he's gonna what he's al's gonna get away with this too fuck of course right and then he doesn't and look there is possibly an interpretation of the film where it's like a death dream i think that's a pretty weak interpretation i think the only thing that makes it feel like a decision that she's chosen to go in there and let herself be sacrificed, is the fact that it repeats the motive of the one, two, three, and the four, where it writes the numbers from her book, and we see four get crossed out, that she has achieved, you know, what she's after with him, but I think she would have crossed him out had she lived.

I do think she probably would have given that information to the police, right?

Yeah.

Whether she would have done that or not, or whether she would have been satisfied with his wife-to-be seeing, going, why is there the name Nina carved all over your skin?

Whether that would have satisfied her or not, I don't know.

Yes, because there's no reason that Hasse believes that the justice system will work because it clearly failed Nina, right?

Yeah.

And that's why she's doing these things in her own hands.

In a way, maybe all she's just trying to do is embarrass Al.

We don't know whether they actually get away with it or not.

Yeah.

I mean, they might.

You know, Al might retain a lawyer similar to the Alfred Molina character and actually get away.

If they hadn't burnt the body, he would have a strong self-defense argument.

She was coming at him with a scalpel while he was handcuffed to a bed.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yes.

It's letting us enjoy the sense of justice.

Right.

And in a way, what's interesting is they've chosen to play it from Ryan's point of view, as opposed to from Al's.

So, there's some interesting point of view stuff about who we're shifting.

And the fact is, we're still talking about this film.

The ending being not necessarily emotionally powerful, but I definitely think thematically powerful is part of the reason we're still talking about it.

And yet, it is so different from the Michael Arndt, you know, insanely great ending.

I mean, it's got like some of those things, like it's got the Judas moment, which Michael Arnn talks about.

Yeah.

Okay.

It turns out Bo Bannon is, is again, you know, um, betrays her, but does this happen?

Does it, is there a decisive act in this two minute climax?

No.

I mean, the decisive act doesn't happen.

It's revealed to us that it was made in that two minute climax.

Yeah.

Like the decisive act happens at some point in between her confronting Ryan and getting Al Monroe's bachelor party address and her showing up at that bachelor party.

And what's kind of interesting is that you've got two choices here.

She is actually, she actually gives Ryan the choice.

Mm-hmm.

Give me, give up your friend.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

Because you know I'm, at this point, Ryan knows what she has done.

So, when he says, when she's like, I can go after your friend or I can go after you, who do you choose?

Of course, he throws his friend.

So, it's interesting that she's actually given him the choice.

I'm not saying he's making the heroic decision here.

No.

It's entirely self-preservation.

Oh, yeah.

What I mean is like the hero's choice or the decisive act or the crisis point.

Whatever you want to do it in a way is interestingly kind of in his point of view at this moment.

not that he's involved in the back half of the story.

But it is pretty clever filmmaking in terms of manipulating our point of view.

And it definitely has frigologic problems, like we've talked about, because you get to that moment and go, wait, did she plan to die?

What happens if she didn't die?

And that's why I was like, oh, the letter's saying in the event of my disappearance, right?

And I personally possibly would have liked a little bit more hinting that this was, she accepted that it was a possibility but didn't think it wasn't her plan to go and die you know but whatever whatever that's the kind of the logic the climactic logic of of pushing through.

Yeah i mean if you do a timing thing the odds of the police actually showing up to arrest al at the wedding is just as she's sending the scheduled text messages she would have no control over when the cops would actually show up to arrest Al on which day or what time of day.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Like, Jared, the lawyer, having to get that signature to the police.

The police have to look at it, find her body, determine that Al is the person that they're going to have, a person of interest.

Like, that whole timeline, they just kind of push, use the power of cinema.

Yeah.

for emotional and wonderful emotional effect.

But again, like, it should be so obvious to everyone listening, but they managed to successfully pull off a powerful hero's choice after the character is dead.

And yes, it's done through scheduling and flashbacks, but it is powerful.

It feels from Nina.

Like, it would have felt very different if Nina hadn't scheduled those text messages, right?

If Al is just, sorry, if we're in Ryan's point of view, he's at the wedding and suddenly the cops show up with the lawyer waving the package that...

That Cassie has sent, right?

That is much less powerful and gives Cassie much less agency than her talking directly to Ryan through scheduled text messages.

Yes.

Yeah.

So they've set all this up to be a character choice, a hero's choice, a final choice.

All of those things.

And here's a crisis decisions.

I mean, she had something to lose and something to gain.

I mean, she gained justice, like hours, possibly going to jail for murder, but she feels that he's responsible for killing for Nina, but all it cost her was her life.

I do think what the film sets up and what leaves your question open as to whether she chose to die or not is that she certainly had nothing else in her life that she cared about.

She didn't care about a job, a relationship, her parents.

there was nothing else in her life other than getting revenge on Al Monroe.

Yep.

All right.

Well, now that we've done two very juicy examples, slash four, if we include Dungeons and Dragons and Finding Nemo, shall we end with Talk To Me?

Huh?

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Who's up?

I'll do it.

Cannot go for more than 90 seconds.

Am I clear?

What happens after 90 seconds?

Don't want to stay.

Look, I think both of you, we don't often do...

Uh examples that don't work for us in this podcast so i think we both want to be very clear that, we greatly admire talk to me it was an incredible low budget australian horror feature that i would recommend anyone watch i think it's great it was in fact one of my picks for uh i'm a patron of the contrarians podcast and i got to make them watch the babadook and talk to me i.

Was working I haven't ever published on it.

I was working on a Shot Zero post about the physical intimacy between the characters.

And one of the things it so beautifully does as an ensemble is kind of the casualness of touch.

Yeah.

The power of touching this film.

I mean, the whole idea is about touching this hand and being able to speak to the dead.

Touch is this very powerful idea.

I'm not sure whether the brothers were conscious of it when they were writing it and making the film.

It doesn't really fucking matter because it still works, right?

Touches it like there's a lot of films that can feel really dead because physical intimacy isn't part of it.

And this is, they use all the time.

Um, there's lots of really amazing things.

This film does, which I guess was why the ending stood out as something that didn't work for us.

And we wanted to unpack it because we're like, there's so much here that we had like fucking admire.

Yeah.

Right.

We, I have mentioned referenced this in a, in, in director's notes for a project about how amazing I think that ensemble is.

Yeah.

And just to be clear up front, we came out of this film wondering what the film was about because the film withholds the final choice.

So, I'm just setting that as groundwork before we explain how the film is structured and then how that final choice is or is not presented on screen.

Yes.

We came out of it.

We both, you and I, we saw it with a bunch of our writers group and you and I were kind of like, yeah, it didn't work for us.

Yeah, blah, blah, blah.

What was it trying to say?

And we kind of quickly reversed engineered it.

It's not like we both- I mean, maybe we came to a conclusion in the cinema, but I think it was more like just quick discussion kind of narrowed it to this particular moment, which is the absence of the decisive act, right?

For the audience.

Yes.

Because it happens in the film.

We just- it's just withheld from us as to what the act is.

And unlike Michael Clayton and unlike Promising Young Woman, we never, never learn what it is.

Explain to us afterwards.

So, as a broad summary, I think Talk To Me is really a horror film, but there's a hand, like a supernatural hand, that if you hold and you say, talk to me, you can invite either dead spirits or demons, depending on your interpretation, to possess your body temporarily.

That's where you get it from anyway.

I'll tell you what it is right it's the hand of a psychic got cut off and embalmed legit it's a medium joss not a psychic yeah this isn't an embalmed hand yes it is danny boy see look the ceramic shit is put over it but if you smash it there's an actual a hand in there you're full of shit i'm serious apparently it was the hand of someone who could connect with the dead right so everyone around him thought let's just cut his hand off white people shit man i tell you.

What is so incredible about the first half of this movie is it's like a perfect parable for like, teenage risk-taking right uh the when the contrarians were discussing it i thought it was an interesting thought experiment is would this film have worked because they're filming this group of teenagers they're all doing it in like a basement like uh and it's like a drug or alcohol or something like that and they're all filming it and posting these that themselves getting possessed and it's just so delightfully real and you wonder if would this film have worked like the contrarians asked the question would this film have worked before social media where there's this kind of feedback incentive to uh publishing your risk-taking behavior but i i i was just thinking um yes it would work because people used to do seances and ouija boards and all that kind of stuff and drugs in placements.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm looking at your office pot at the moment with the Frosthaven board in the back.

One of your kids is going to be smoking bongs in there when they're a teenager.

Yeah.

And Chaz is just going to be bringing out a platter of munchies for them.

Sure.

You'll be like, I just happen to slow cook this six-hour brisket if you want some.

I am a feeder.

I'm just going to say it because I still think it's cool.

One of my friends, Kush, his mom used to make, I mean, she was born in India, made amazing curries.

Her, and her name was Nina.

She would always keep food on the stove, like his amazing curries.

And her whole thing was like, I just wanted to meet my son's friends.

And by having food on the stove that just can be kept on the stove, they would always come over.

And it was great i love it.

Oh that's awesome good.

Reason to learn how to cook curry stew uh anyway.

But the the midpoint of the film uh so the the leads are this group of teenagers like you say it's a true ensemble but the main character and possibly protagonist is mia played by sophie wilde who has her mother's died by suicide she has a strained almost estranged relationship with her father and kind of seeks intimacy and familiarity with a neighboring family where a mother, a single mother, a daughter her age called Jade and her younger brother Riley.

It was mom's two years.

That was today?

Yeah.

I just want to forget about it.

And I need Daniel to come give my Gucci some attention.

Daniel's not touching your Gucci.

Why?

It was my boyfriend before he was yours.

Oh my god, you guys held hands once three years ago.

That doesn't mean anything.

Jade!

It's my mom's remembrance day.

Daniel can come too, yeah?

If he's touching my Gucci, yes.

And the midpoint of the film is Riley being possessed by a spirit or demon so violent that he...

It's a really spectacular scene, but just injures himself so badly that he gets put into a hospital.

Oh my God.

Okay.

I finally...

Ah!

My lips!

Ah!

I'm fucking out, man!

I can't help you!

I can't help you!

They stop using the hand temporarily, but every time he regains consciousness, he once again keeps trying to kill himself by, and because he's restrained by usually, uh banging his head into things in spectacular fashion.

I would say concurrently mia is getting more and more interested in the imbound and as a way to contact her mom yes i.

Can't believe i spoke to her i think that was your mom mia no it was at first she used to call me me all the time i mean how would the spirits know that i feel like they read what we think you know i mean, they were in us they could know everything about us, maybe mum was there because she was trying to reach out.

So you've got these parallel storylines that are definitely not parallel they're intertwined which is Riley's in hospital, absolutely possessed with this demon and then Mia's contacting her mother through the hand and then says, it wasn't a suicide, and you need to go and help Riley.

Yeah.

Right?

And you need to do these things to help Riley.

Yeah.

And part of it is that- Part of the law is that you can't trust the people that you're seeing through these visions that they may be demons, right?

And so, you don't know- So, you fear that Mia may be- And this is classic possession movie trope.

Yeah.

Right?

You can't trust the possessive demon.

I mean, she is seeing stuff without using the hand, right?

So, Riley is like- They've taken the hand away.

Riley is still possessed he exceeded the 90 seconds safe time right so Riley is still possessed and she's also still seeing things and sort of gradually she becomes a very clear unreliable narrator and one of the things that I do like about the film early early on is that Mia is clearly not popular and it's the popular crowd have the hand and we don't know what she wants but she really desperately wants to get into this party with the cool kids and she's prepared to humiliate herself to get into that party and so it is seated quite early on that she really wants to like the reason she wants the hand is and keeps using it and going again and again and again is she wants to find her mother as the spirit so there is this sort of underlying story like you said an intertwined storyline about mia being unable to accept that her mother killed herself and wanting to talk to her mother and.

So we're leading up to the climax of the film which is mia breaking into the hospital to take riley.

Right.

Because she well she she's kind of listening to the spirit of her mother.

She has already killed her father by this point Just to be clear as a plot development.

Yeah.

And her mother has told her that Riley needs to die in order to be set free from his possession.

And so the climax is Mia kidnapping Riley and then basically going towards a highway.

If you've seen the film, I want you to just remember, because I've used this test before.

When you think of the moment when they come to the highway, what do you think happened?

We see a close-up of Rhea speaking to Mia.

What do you think happened?

So, just to be clear, Riley is in a wheelchair and she's wheeled him up to the edge of a highway with the understanding that she's thinking about tipping him over in front of oncoming traffic.

Right.

So, are you using the test on me?

Because I have seen it just about, you know, 20 minutes ago.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I will tell you when I've asked people this, they're all like, oh, Mia jumps into the on-carving traffic.

Yeah.

Right?

So, you see her mother whisper in her ear and then she jumps.

But if you actually look at what.

We see in the film- His- Riley's sister Jade is running after them to try and stop them.

Yeah.

And then we see the very kind of grossy, great prosthetics of the mother whispering into Mia's ear, Mia's hands clasped.

This is all real ECU, very close up, right?

Kind of very decompressed filmmaking with Riley.

We see, we do see her let go, right?

Of the wheelchair.

And then we cut to the inside of a car driving along the highway and out of focus, we see something hit the car, right?

So they're keeping it as a surprise, right?

We actually spend some time with the kind of stunt of the car and then we cut to wide overhead shot showing that it was Mare.

So this is what the very nitty gritty of the text is showing.

And I think it's important.

The nitty gritty here is important because I've actually sat there and slot motioned through it because people, I think a few people are saying, oh, it's like even the Wikipedia summary saying Mia jumps, right?

Because there's two different, the film is positing to my mind, two different things that could have happened in that moment.

Yeah.

One is that Mia jumps and the other is that Jade pushes her.

Is there any other potential scenarios that- could have resulted in mia being on the.

I mean her sister not sister her mother somehow coming in and possessing her yes okay yeah right not not possessing her like pushing her and that's how we're going to dramatize it or fucking riley pushes her yeah okay but i think the most common things because i will say if you stop motion if you stop through it you actually see jade reaching Mia before Mia's in front of the vehicle, right?

It's out of focus.

I'm just saying like, it feels like that, I'm using that not to be like, here's the gotcha, but it feels like that may have been an intention of this film, that it was actually Jade pushing Mia in front of the car, right?

And they've decided to not cut to anything that suggests that because they went, no, that's not what we want to make the film about.

But the difficulty for me, right, is that otherwise what they're saying is Mia has chosen to die by suicide, then confront her problems.

So is to save Riley.

But no, Riley's not going anywhere if she doesn't push him.

I think when I say to save Riley, to save Riley from herself.

Yes.

Or from the spirits that are possessing her.

Yeah.

And I guess the thing that annoys me about the film is I still think that it's a very problematic idea when dealing with mental health and teenagers to say, I have to kill Sacrifice myself to save people from the danger that I am putting them in.

Very problematic idea.

And I think, I don't know.

I have to say this is all speculation, but I think if you saw a close-up of Mia going, I'm going to jump in front of a car, people would have been like, that's a fucking bad thing to put in a movie.

Right?

And that Jade pushing there is a more complex idea, but also confronting, which is I am going to kill you or hurt you in order to save my brother.

Yeah.

I, but we- don't know most people like as i said in wikipedia people say it's mia a few people say it's mia, and then i'm like don't you think that's a really bad idea to say that mia's solution to her depression and running away from her is to die by suicide and people like yeah so.

That's so let's let's play this out right like this is why we were frustrated because we came out going what is this film about a film that initially starts out being kind of a a parable about the risk-taking of teenagers, then in the second half becomes very much about Mia being unable to come to terms with her mother's suicide.

So are we saying that, you know, like you've said, Mia's inability, the only way Mia could come to terms with her mother's suicide is to kill herself.

Is that what we're, is that what the film is saying thematically?

And this is where we get to is because we are taken we don't have access to either jade's agency or mia's agency to your point we don't even know if it's mia let's say mia's body is hulls itself we don't even know is that mia making the decision or is it the spirits or the demons making the decision we are not given agency and so by that we're not given the choice we know what the options presented to her word, but we don't know what choice Mia may or may not have made.

What would have been fascinating is if, to me, is if Mia let go of the wheelchair and managed to cast off, the possession, right?

Manage to say no to the spirits and then Jade comes along and pushes her into the traffic, right?

Like that would have been a depressing, terrifying, powerful.

Cathartic thing, right?

But we're not given to any access to that.

We don't know what the moment is.

Right?

And I'm curious to why they've chosen, the filmmakers have chosen the ambiguity, right?

They have chosen to play the moment from inside this car right knowing that they've hit someone and then it's played as a reveal right is it mia is it you know is it riley i guess maybe is it jade is the third thing right and then it's played as the shock but to me what is interesting about this moment is the as as we've explored is these choices and as you say it makes us get in the way and maybe we're over intellectualizing it well right you.

Could say we're over intellectualizing it but emotionally we came out of that film going what was it about because, and we've managed to pinpoint that if we had seen that choice, we would have had a firmer grip of what the film was trying to tell us.

Maybe the sequel that comes out very soon will tell us what happened in that moment and their idea was to make it more ambiguous because there are people that see it as her sacrificing her life to save Riley, right?

But I think, then why not show us that?

Yeah.

like if it was about if it was self-sacrifice i mean the the one thing that i think leads a lot of people to that is as she's hearing the spirit version of her mother whispering in her ear, she said the mother says character says uh we will have him forever and i think that's supposed to be a moment of realization for mia that killing riley is not saving his soul from eternal torment it is condemning him to eternal torment.

So it feels like it's given her that realization.

I mean, what we're missing is the aftermath.

We do come in the consequences of that decision and it's really awesome consequences, which is basically we see Mia going through- Experiencing the afterlife to the point where she sees a candle and sees the hand and goes and touches the hand and then suddenly some greek guy is saying talk to me right so it is awesome it's like the the actual end end sequence of the film i think is really cool it's just i don't have anything other than coolness to hold on to i don't have a theme to hold on to i don't know what was the film exploring or saying about either teenage risk-taking is it like drugs are bad okay or what is it saying about grief or youth suicide or any of the myriad of other things that it's raised it hasn't told us what its position as a piece of art is on those things.

Well and and look daily who's one of the kind of had the idea was like this was for him was a metaphor about addiction and that even to me doesn't quite work and look this maybe because i'm old unfortunately there are a few people in my life like you know i've known people who have died by suicide i have known people who have died from the self-destruction of their addiction and i've known people who have overcome these addiction and all of that i look at this and go i don't and this may just be a personal reaction because i don't want maybe maybe i'm completely wrong about the filmmakers here but i this feels like they've chosen cool over wise yeah for lack of a better word and it's frustrating because there's so much of this film that is beautifully observed yeah it actually feels like teenagers hanging out with teenagers right like there is so much of this that actually feels really youthful and and emotionally intelligent i guess that's why it's so confronting, the film for like particularly the first half seems really emotionally intelligent and then that kind of unravels in this moment oh.

I i feel like a lot of films do that like pick a genre and a lot of films the setup is really great and then the rollout the consequences might not be as powerful or as mind-blowing or as good.

But to me this is not a like i guess what i'm just bumping on, and I know we've been talking about it, is why didn't they show us?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think you possibly, like you said, they couldn't think of a way to show us that resonated with them or they may have felt that they could pull off.

I mean, I'm purely speculating here because this is, to be clear, an incredible debut film by- Two very experienced filmmakers who hadn't made a narrative feature before.

And we say that our feeling is they chose cool over clarity, I guess, or theme or potentially resonance.

But they pulled off cool, right?

Yeah.

And look, other people might go, no, it's very obvious.

These are the things that you are missing.

and I would love to hear that evidence.

And I'm saying evidence because I'm talking about in the combination of the text.

When we talk about techniques, I'm looking at the tools that they're using.

And what is interesting compared to the other films that we're getting at is that the decisions in Michael Clayton and Promising Young Woman were also made by characters off screen and we learned what their decisions were after the fact.

But this is a decision that is played off screen.

So it's not that it's off screen, right?

It's that I've given no further information about what that decision was.

We're meant to be filling in the blank.

And as you.

Say- We're presented with the options, not the choice, and then the consequences.

And I actually have to say, I don't think it's me watching the shot in slow motion.

Maybe it's just my editor's eye.

I just look at it and go, Jade reached her before there's an impact on the car.

Jade pushed her.

And then everyone else was like, what do you mean Jade pushed her?

I can't remember the exact moment.

It was 2022, right?

But they could have done visual effects or cut around that particular moment if they're worried about that misinterpretation.

So, to me here, it is a question of what interpretation do they want us to have?

Because that impacts, it's the ending of the film.

Yeah.

It's going to interpret my whole meaning.

Because we don't have an anchor to hold on to as to what the character resolution was, was Mia self-sacrificing?

Was she free of the spirits or not?

Was she a victim just like Riley, right?

Because we don't have answers to those questions, we are flailing around for what is the meaning of the film.

That said, I was surprised that neither, on the contrary, neither Julio or Alex had even heard of the film.

Like, it's so huge here in Australia.

I just assumed it was huge everywhere.

I mean, it took $50 million at the US box office.

It was pretty freaking big, Julio.

It's on Netflix here in Australia.

I presume it's on Netflix fairly worldwide.

So, what have you, what has been your key learnings from this exercise?

Okay, I'm going to separate this into two things.

There's the kind of confirmation and bias of like, we were right.

We came into this with a very clear sort of thesis and understanding and lens that I don't think their homework dissuaded us from.

Yeah, we haven't had any kind of car bombs that have changed our understanding of that thesis, right?

Right.

If anything, it's just like, it is really interesting on a, like, we haven't deep dive in the emotional experience of it.

Other than, I guess the talk to me thing is like choices, decision, consequence, the audience understanding all three has the emotional impact for us.

That's what's important to us.

And missing one of those things possibly will affect the impact of the ending.

I guess maybe because our work tends to be more thematic that the more distancing of Michael Clayton and Promising Young Woman where the audience catches up to the character is kind of an interesting thing to explore.

I don't think we can retroactively apply it to anything, we've worked on but maybe on something we're future developed that we can kind of look at and go if you want an ending that's kind of more uh intellectual intellectual is the wrong word more thinky than feely uh then then playing around with his point of view stuff maybe the way to do that versus like the finding the immediacy and that's what it really is the emotional immediacy of like Dungeons and Dragons and and Finding Nemo.

I'm.

Going to palm it to you to see if there's any kind of like unforeseen little insights.

I think it really did reaffirm the power of of that interaction with narrative pov like think about when are the options presented to the character when does the character make the choice and when are the consequences of that and deciding what you're going to choose to reveal to the audience when uh we've seen the power of that um i think in all three of these examples like there there is power in that in the ending of of talk to me you know we are talking about it still we did come out of the the cinema thinking about it but the setup is what i've noticed in doing this exercise like those final choices are such clear so easy to dramatize as a to to describe as a binary for those character arcs and part of that is about all the groundwork that have been done before like it's no accident that there were in dungeons and dragons that it was the exact same red blade that killed his wife and killed holger that we've got the talisman of the blue dragonfly coming back like they do they're putting in so much work earlier in the film so that when we're in that decision it gains more power like michael We saw the Snowpiercer moment at the low point and we're.

Misled into thinking that that decision had been resolved by the by the filmmakers yeah i i think.

Oh fuck if if every learning i'm just like oh it's actually the the stuff they pulled off is earlier in the film but that that seems to be my learning with almost every craft tool is uh is the the power of setup and.

Look maybe that's why people are thinking that mia sacrificed herself.

Because.

You know, we've seen her kill her dad because she listened to the spirit and she's realizing that the spirit has lied to her.

I just, you know, I just would have liked to see that moment with the character having her moment of agnoresis.

Yeah.

Of her saying no to her mother.

And I think the film is fairly clear that it's not her mother, that it is some trickster ghost or demon.

Yeah.

And why did we not get the moment where Mia can actually see that?

Yeah.

I don't know.

And that Mia realizes that the cost of her grief is potentially Riley and Jade.

Like that dynamic, one of the things that Contrarians observed is in the second half of the movie, Jade really gets lost as a character and they were a bit sad that that happened.

I mean, we literally don't spend any time with her in the second half, whereas in the first half of the movie that relationship between Mia and Jade is almost as sisters yeah so yeah those are those are my my main learnings I mean taking this into the context of a piece of work that I did so I've just recently written a beat outline that I brought to our writers group and the main piece of feedback is I've set up all these juicy confrontations and then I'm not actually having them play out in the, in the climax of the movie.

It's like, why haven't they had an argument about this that you've set up before?

Why aren't they then these other two characters arguing about that?

That is the key thing.

You know, you're telling us that this is what your film is about, but you're not showing those scenes that are so easily there.

And I don't know what my instinct was in, in the structuring of the film that I was avoiding that stuff.

I mean, And maybe it was, yeah, avoiding digging into the emotions of it or trying to play it more grounded.

Look, sometimes you're also dealing with characters- I mean, obviously, I've read that.

This is something for people that are like, Chaz is talking about this project in the abstract, and now what the fuck?

But I think you're also talking about characters who are conflict avoidant.

They're so diplomatic.

They're so politically astute that they don't do direct conflict.

Yeah.

And so then you have to find, create circumstances in which direct conflict is the only tactic that they have.

Or they run out of tactics, but yeah.

Or that they run out of, I mean, direct conflict, I mean, retreat is always, so you have to just, as you say, run out, but you kind of have to, there is no retreat.

There is no this.

The only way to get what you want is direct confrontation.

Yeah.

And I know I'm talking in the abstract, but applying it to this is what I'm realizing is those two powerful scenes that I've avoided bringing out are decisive acts in the climax.

Yeah.

I mean, and we've talked about it before, but I think plotting what your final decision is at the outline stage or knowing what that kind of is, is really useful.

I mean, we're going to talk about in character arcs, but I wouldn't be surprised if George Lucas kind of knew that Luke, particularly Luke, was going to trust the Force from blowing up the Death Star.

Maybe we can find that very versed version of Star Wars where it's like the Bogan side of the Force or whatever the fuck it was, all the crazy stuff with Starkiller and all that.

And I reckon there's a version of that because it's such a clear crystallization of what that character's journey is meant to be.

And that's why it's going to connect character arcs because articulating your character decisions, how they change the context of a story or don't is going to be how you're going to build a sense of journey.

Cool.

Thank you, Stu, for making this.

Episode happen and uh sue was actually suggesting like i've got this tagline that i trot out if you want more draft zero more often uh you too can become uh amazing patreons uh and she was like maybe that's a disincentive people might not be signing up to the patreon because they don't want more draft zero more often but what our patreons do get is personalized channel to to talk to us and one of the things that I feel our patrons seem to get most out of it is their ability to choose our homework.

So what we often do when we're brainstorming ideas is we go, we've got this lens and this one example and then we're trying to think of what the other two examples should be and we end up with lists of like 20 or 30 amazing films that our patrons vote from.

And then much like the Australian election, you'll have a bunch of voting that you will ignore.

Preferential system, baby.

But jokes aside, particular thanks to our top tier patrons, Alexandra, Jen, Jesse, Krob, Lily, Malay, Paolo, Randy, Sandra, Thies, and Thomas.

It's nice that that list is getting so long to say, but really means a lot to us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Stay tuned.

We got episodes coming up on subtext being overrated, character arcs, but we're going to do an arc, Per episode, or an episode per arc, we're looking at hopefully doing something on monologues.

A one-shot on Sinners?

Oh, no, I don't want it to be a one-shot.

I want it to be other horror films.

It's just an excuse for me to claim buying the RPG Mothership Against Tax, because the RPG of Mothership has a thing they call the tomb system, which is transgression, omens, manifestations, banishment, slumber, as a way of structuring horror.

And I'm like, that's just a five-act hero film.

What the fuck?

And, you know, also Sinners.

Also, we can debate the, you know, speaking of final choices, debate the wonders of that final, that post-credit scene in Sinners.

It's slumber.

That's why it needed to be there.

It's the S in tombs.

It's not tomb.

It's tombs.

And thank you, dear listeners.

Any feedback?

Always welcome.

Tell us why we're wrong and talk to me.

Talk to us.

Go and watch Talk To Me if you haven't.

We're just assuming that you've watched Michael Clayton and Promising Young Woman.

I hope you all feel like arguing with either Stu or myself about anything on this episode or anything in general.

And you can find many ways of getting in touch with us at our website at draft-zero.com.

At the website, you'll also find the show notes for this and all our other episodes, as well as links to support us and spread the word for free via a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Very important for spreading the word.

Or if you think that what we do here is worth a dollar or preferably more than a dollar, then you can also find links to our Patreon page to support us getting these episodes to you quicker.

Thanks.

And thanks for listening.