Neill Blomkamp and Joe Rogan debate Bob Lazar’s Area 54 claims, weighing military deception against extraterrestrial origins while exploring advanced human tech like gene therapy or cybernetics. Blomkamp’s dystopian films—Elysium, District 9—stem from South Africa’s wealth inequality and border contrasts, mirroring his belief in reality as a predetermined construct. They pivot to AI risks, citing Ted Chiang’s Beyond and Peter Watts’ Blindsight, imagining hyper-intelligent entities spiraling beyond control, questioning whether unchecked power—human or machine—inevitably leads to catastrophe. [Automatically generated summary]
We're assuming that we have an accurate understanding of what's currently possible with technology.
I don't necessarily know if that's correct, and it is possible that they were experimenting with some really wild shit So you think it could be human-made?
If it's real at all, it's a physical thing, right?
If it's real and it isn't a hangar, it's a physical thing.
Let's assume that they would tell this guy who has a questionable education background, who obviously is brilliant, and obviously has a deep understanding of propulsion systems.
He strapped a rocket engine to the back of his Honda.
Clearly a super, super intelligent guy, but doesn't have the best credentials in terms of his education background, his accomplishments, published papers.
Why would they pick him?
Well, he thinks they picked him because they were just banging their heads off the wall trying to figure out how to back-engineer these things or what these things were.
And they said, let's think outside the box and let's get this genius guy who worked at Los Alamos Labs.
Maybe they fabricate this horseshit narrative to him.
You know, we found this in an archaeological dig.
But maybe what this is, is there's some understanding of propulsion systems or of some sort of- Antigravity.
Gravity, yeah.
Some gravity system that supposedly operates on this element, element 115. The thing about his story that's fascinating to me is that it's never changed.
It's remarkably consistent.
unidentified
If you go all the way back to like 1989. There's that interview with him.
But doesn't he go into a lot of detail about, maybe I read it somewhere else, but the height of the occupants of it, right?
They're all sort of like four foot or less.
So, I mean, the level of sort of US military deception to start building miniaturized seats and stuff and like lower ceilings, it's like, how far does the conspiracy go?
But what I'm saying is, if you had, look, the possibility of it being from another galaxy is so crazy that the idea of them pretending it's from another galaxy is not that crazy.
Like if they say, oh, little tiny green guys and they live inside this little ship and it's real easy for them to fly around...
Like, that's easier than it actually being from another galaxy and actually being designed for these little tiny creatures that live in this other galaxy.
It would be cool to push that further where they also build some kind of, like, get into real sort of gene therapy or something and make humanoid aliens to continue that on.
I always felt like the aliens that you see in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that iconic shape, it's almost like we have an understanding of where we're going.
Some innate, sort of shedding hair, everything becomes cerebral.
There would be a Neuralink heavy brain-computer interface system where everything would allow you to go somewhere else.
One of the things that Peter Watts, I'm working with him on a sci-fi idea at the moment, and one of the things that he It's more like dial-up rather than high broadband.
So, if you were to increase the volume of data of information being sent between the two brains, what would happen at a certain point is the two versions of self would dissolve into one united self.
And you would have one superorganism that would be the consciousness of both.
And if you were to somehow remove that, if you were to limit the bandwidth again, those two souls would never return.
Because the way the neural system has been aligned at the point that you poured more, you allowed the consciousness to expand, it never reverts back.
So you can imagine a world where, like, Neuralink talks about, you know, if you fuse hundreds of brains together in some kind of hive mind and everyone can think together, What may happen is you may actually get a situation where you create a superintelligence that thinks of itself as I, and you are unable to undo that.
It's sort of not clear exactly what would happen to each individual node of consciousness if you ever try to reverse it again.
Well, I think the sort of science fiction version of thinking about the topic is that you create a hive mind of where you can imagine your brain interfacing with hundreds of other humans and you can share ideas quicker than you can speak.
There's no more individual—you could—I mean, hypothetically, it could be some sort of, like, newly linked, you know, superorganism that would just never return to individual humans.
Well, yeah, like at a certain point in time, what do we lose that we love about being human?
And like how much of the chaos and the negative aspects of human beings and human nature is necessary for art and creativity and all the things like your movies?
Like no one's gonna make a cool movie if we can all read each other's minds.
Well, I think art—I think everything humans do is as a result of taking a primordial brain that is—because, I mean, we're all slaves to just biological programming.
That's all we really are.
And then you're coupling a supercomputer to it.
You're coupling the first self-aware— Logic and rationality supercomputer to a bunch of ancient biological needs and programs.
And I think that tug of war yields everything that we understand.
It yields creativity.
It yields...
Territorial disputes, you know, love, passion, anxiety, fear.
It's all a result of that.
So to take that away, I mean, it's an understandable thing.
If you think about what we need, the biological needs to reproduce are responsible for So much negativity, but also so much positivity, so much chaos, so much entropy, so much momentum.
Yeah, and they may be, like maybe one day we go, you know, we've realized that all this war and chaos and stealing and murder, what this is about is biological needs that we can bypass with technology, and we could reproduce through some sort of genetic engineering instead of...
I mean, that's what's so fascinating about any discussion, like the negativity around people building rockets, like Elon and Bezos going up into space, and being along the lines of Elysium in some ways.
It's like, so are we not supposed to move forward at all?
So if we can't agree on what the end goal is that we're striving for, Then there's going to be many disputes about the sort of road between here and there.
So I'm all for exploration and for us trying to better ourselves.
And I think part of that is about leaving the planet.
I'd rather put money into that than have it squandered in what clearly we seem to squander it on.
Well, not only that, in the case of Bezos and Elon Musk, now you're dealing with private companies that are involved in this, which is really fascinating.
Because instead of it all being like NASA and the argument was like, why is NASA spending all this money on this when we have people starving here on Earth?
Like, doesn't SpaceX have a contract with NASA? Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely subsidized, but it's less than a NASA budget of hundreds of billions of dollars.
And it's a very different scenario, where, you know, you have these super genius billionaire characters who are essentially living out a sci-fi movie, right?
It's a fusion reactor for U.S. energy independence.
The physicist appears to have bona fide credentials, including a Ph.D. from Case Western, and published some of his work While much of it is presumably classified.
And so the idea is that there's some sort of novel propulsion system.
And a lot of people were going over this stuff going, well, what the fuck is this?
UFO patent.
Like, what does this mean?
And what does this propulsion system consist of?
And what I get from people that are talking about it is that it's at least similar to what these people are describing in terms of this device.
There's that thing right there, actually, that little object right there that supposedly Bob Bazar worked on.
That it worked on this device.
Gravitational field created by this element 115 which we talked about was only theoretical up until the early 2000s when they actually used a particle collider and managed to prove its existence.
Bob Lazar claims they had a stable version of this element 115 and that was the propulsion I'm not exactly sure how it worked.
They used a piece of this element 115 and through some method...
And then he also said someone cut into it and caused some kind of nuclear explosion in the desert.
I mean, yeah, the thing I think that the whole discussion comes back to is I wish that it was built by some other super intelligent species on some other planet just because that would be cool.
Yeah.
That would be awesome.
And which is tied to...
The discussion about, you know, where do we think we're going and what do we think the outcome is from sort of being human and going through an evolutionary process?
Because that's the other thing with the common conception is that, well, we're here, like we're human.
It's like, no, we're maybe one-fifth or one-millionth or one-hundred-millionth of the journey of evolution of what we will become.
We're somewhere along the timeline that you've hit pause and we look kind of like this.
It's why I have lower back plane from playing squash.
Because I shouldn't have a shitty single column spine.
I should have like eight spines.
But it's because I used to be quadrupedal and then I became bipedal and now I have structural issues.
So where are we going is a question that I think if humans could come to some kind of – if it was discussed more, like what are we actually aiming for?
What are we trying to make?
The whole rockets leaving Earth discussion gets framed in a different way.
It starts becoming like, what are we preserving?
Are we trying to preserve consciousness?
Is that important?
Because I think it is.
And so in a million years, what would you like to see happen?
So those kind of discussions are really interesting and they're at the backbone of things to do with either religion or finding UFOs that are in Area S4 in Nevada, in my mind.
I think we have some weird biological coding to constantly and consistently improve upon everything that we've created and to innovate and to constantly come up with new ideas.
And when a new, completely transcendent idea like the internet, for example, comes along, you see how it has this massive shift in global culture, in every single aspect of human life.
And these things can happen in these big explosions, like an internet, you know, like a combustion engine, like the printing press, like so many different things that happen, and it causes this huge wave of innovation to be spread off from that.
And I've said multiple times that what I think we're doing is we are in some ways like an electronic caterpillar that's making a cocoon, and we're going to give birth to this butterfly.
And this butterfly is probably going to be a form of artificial life.
Like some kind of, in a sense, that we're a stepping stone biologically to something else.
It's like we're the first sentient, self-aware species that's able to use our hands to build tools to go further down the line and carry the ball a certain amount of distance.
Until through what we do, we give birth to something that, you know, is just far outstrips us and goes off to do other things.
So it's like, I'm not that version of science fiction with the space god, but I am the version where all matter and everything that I know blew out of like one 100 trillionth of, you know, of a grain of rice and came into existence.
And it's like, sure, that could have happened, but it also means that there is some unbelievably complicated shit going on that maybe you should be a little bit more open-minded about some of the other things that are out there, right?
The craziest thing that you could come up with would be to sit at a typewriter like Asimov and write, first there was nothing, and then everything exploded out of a grain of rice into being...
It's like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds like, let me just knock down any discussions about God, but that sticks.
I also think that everything that is going to happen has already happened.
And there's a paradox where free will also exists.
I think I have the ability to go around and act with free will.
I don't think that things are completely deterministic.
But I think the free will is informed by the biological programming we were talking about before.
But I'm still choosing within a given set of what I'm allowed to choose from.
But the paradox is also that I think that I'm probably on my deathbed If you collapse time down and look at it as like a linear thing, if you just observe it, it's like Neil's death is here, his birth is here, these are these other events.
Theoretically, with free will, as you move through that three-dimensional map, these other events should change, right?
Each day with choices you make, all of these other outcomes should move.
And somehow I don't think they do.
I think that they're kind of locked in place.
And Nietzsche speaks about that.
He calls it eternal recurrence.
And it's like eternal recurrence was something that I got quite interested in because it felt true to me.
Well, he says that what happens is that your life is set and all of the events within your life not only are set, but they will also recur infinitely through time.
So instead of the idea of reincarnation, it's almost like the idea of reincarnation into your own life eternally.
And so someone else from a different point of view would be able to see this event of like Joe Rogan's life and see you make these choices.
And then they would see you begin and make these choices again.
And he kind of used it as a thought experiment where he said that if I went to most people out in the world and I said to them that your life is going to repeat exactly like this forever, he said it was a burden that would be too heavy for most people to be able to deal with.
Yeah.
That they don't want to live their life over the way that they've lived it enough that it would be literally the worst burden that they could be given.
One of the things that I've always thought of when it comes to UFOs, this is like a side pondering, is that The preposterous nature of them, the things like what Commander David Fravor saw, the things like what Bob Lazar saw, it's almost like the universe is trying to let you know that you don't know shit.
Like that this weird little possibility that is not outside of the realm of what's Potentially available if you think about the idea that there's hundreds of billions of stars Just in this galaxy and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe and right here on this planet where we walk There's two super billionaires that are currently shooting rockets into space.
You know NASA has a rover right now on Mars That's roaming around taking photos sending them back to us We know that all that's possible.
Why wouldn't it be possible for something from some other place to come and visit us?
But yet the fact that it does, it seems so crazy.
It seems so fake.
In many ways, it makes me really ponder simulation theory.
Because it seems so weird that this thing can go from 60,000 plus feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second and then take off...
Like it's behaving with different laws of physics.
The Drake equation is that equation, right?
The number of planets that could potentially house life.
And then this is what I think is happening.
What I think is happening is that the concept of the Great Filter where...
If the Drake equation has X number of exoplanets that have liquid water and the ability to harbor life, and there's however many hundred million of them, and we see dark night skies with no aliens, then the idea of the Great Barrier being a filter for something happening to all of these things, like they reach a certain level of civilization and then they snuff themselves out somehow.
So the idea that the only way you get intelligence is bipedal hominids.
Seems kind of silly.
There could very well be some super intelligent thing that instead of manipulating its environment in the way we do, it figured out a way through evolution to join minds in some strange way.
Yeah, it would be some sort of evolutionary mutation that is sort of anti, you know, it's counterintuitive and surprising in the way that it took form.
Like, oh shit, all of these starfish linked together and they built a nuke.
If you looked at us from above, if you were an outside life form that was completely objective, not human at all, and you came to this planet and you go, what is going on with this number one species that seems to be on every single continent like rats on a sinking ship?
What are they doing?
They're making things.
They're making better things.
A lot of them all over the world are consistently making things.
And I wonder if those things getting away from it, the pollution, the overfishing, the changing of the environment, the CO2 levels, almost motivates this acceptance of the symbiotic relationship with man and electronics, because that's the only way out of it.
Well, when you make films like Elysium, you know, these dystopian films about potential futures, it's got to sort of spark these thoughts in your mind, like how many of these possibilities could we encounter in our lifetime?
I mean, Elysium and District 9 are both kind of cut from the same cloth in the sense that I do think a lot of that had to do with growing up in South Africa and just being affected by...
I'm very naturally interested in how society seemed to stratify and how wealth inequality...
You know, again, this is biological programming, right?
Like, I think that people hang on to resources that they have.
As much as they can.
And so you end up with billionaires because it's an understandable thing.
It makes total sense.
You're just hoarding food in your cave to live through the winter and keep your family safe.
But Elysium really, if District 9 was the sort of racial part of growing up in South Africa and just Being very aware of the environment that I was in.
Then Elysium is the kind of wealth discrepancy part of it.
You know, where South Africa and Brazil and India would be in first place when it comes to that.
And you just see very...
You see imagery that's extremely striking in that country that leaves an indelible mark on you, I think.
Actually, you know, the inspiration for Elysium entire...
The whole thing, actually, for me was...
I was shooting commercials in—it was 2005, and I had started directing commercials, and I was doing a commercial for Nike.
And I was in San Diego, and the line producer that I was working with really wanted to go to Tijuana.
And I was, like, sick.
I didn't want to go.
And he's like, we've got to get in the car, and we've got to go to Tijuana, like, now.
We've got to go down there and get a beer or something.
And I was like, I really don't want to do this.
And he's like, let's just go.
It'll be fine.
So we went through the border into Mexico as the sun was going down and we got there and we were on some street corner and we bought beers and then we were walking around in Tijuana with the beers and these federales saw us doing it.
And we got arrested, like, kind of relatively violently, where we were, you know, it was a shakedown for money, obviously, but it was like we got cuffed and thrown in the back of a police car.
And then they started driving out of Tijuana in the darkness.
And the producer that I was with kept putting, like, $100 bills through the graded thing to the front seats.
And then once there was enough money that had gone through, they just kind of opened the doors and let us out.
It felt like 40 or like an hour maybe, 40 minutes, somewhere in there.
But the thing that was crazy about it was...
Was I could see US Blackhawks flying the border with like lights on them and floodlights on the far on the US side.
And we were walking through basically favelas with dogs barking and like they had dropped us in places that like tourists from the US would never go.
So we were walking in basically what felt like a South African shantytown in Mexico with feral animals and just like this.
But to see this country that, you know, was this sort of global hyperpower that everyone from Mexico was moving into, was trying to get into, was incredibly striking.
Like it was just crazy.
I mean, it is crazy if you think about that level of poverty up against the U.S. border and then...
And I think Elysium really was the sort of subconscious part of it was South Africa, but the conscious part was that.
In that moment, I was like, I really want to find a way to turn that experience into visuals that represent these two worlds that live on one another's doorstep like this.
And you get to imagine these people living in this environment, literally visually seeing this place where the world is completely different right there.
I mean, it seems like it's Jacob Zuma as the ousted president moving to try to, you know, create calamity for the current president and its divisions within the ANC. So I think, I guess what I'm saying is I think it was political in the way that some of those riots potentially happened and not as simple as what it appears to be.
And growing up in South Africa and creating these movies like District 9, do you feel like you have an obligation to sort of illuminate a perspective through these movies?
Like what do you – did it just sort of motivate your creativity?
I mean I'm always really weary when filmmakers say that they – you know, I think at the end of the day you're just making films.
And what I think I'm trying to do as an artist is reflect the world that I see back to the audience.
Like, this is the world through Neil's eyes, right?
That's the kind of creativity that I'm interested in.
And that's why walking through that area in Mexico, looking at the U.S. border, the feeling was I wanted people to I'm not sure if someone from Beverly Hills knows what that feels like.
And it's like it would be interesting to create a film that attempted to create what this feeling is like.
And so I think a lot of what I'm trying to do as a filmmaker is just show the world through my eyes.
But I would never be so presumptuous as to say that there's some level of importance to what I'm doing.
I don't know if that's the right way for me to think about it.
It was similar with District 9. The original idea with District 9 was, I mean, one part of it was growing up in South Africa in that period of time, but the other part was a huge influx of, you know, people from Mozambique and Zimbabwe and stuff were going into South Africa in the 2000s.
And local South Africans were getting frustrated with how many were coming into the country and effectively taking jobs from them in their mind.
And so District 9, the aliens, was a representation of the idea of illegal aliens.
And I made a short film before I actually made the film where I was interviewing real South Africans about how they felt about Mozambicans or Nigerians or Malawians.
And they would answer very honestly.
And so it could create a science fiction way where you could switch out the honest answer with more of a science fiction answer.
But a friend that I have who's the most obsessed with UFOs, a South African, who moved to Canada when he was relatively young, he thinks he saw a UFO right before moving to Canada.
And every time I go out with him, he talks about it.
The footage, when you're looking at, they have an image of this thing taking off from a dead standstill, like instantaneously taking off at what they believe is thousands of miles an hour.
And apparently, Jackie Gleason and Nixon were drinking.
And Nixon goes, you want to see a UFO? And he takes them, I don't remember what base it was supposedly at, but the aftermath was Jackie Gleason designs his house in, was it upstate New York?
Because if Jackie Gleason really did party with Nixon and he really did take him to see a UFO and then Gleason apparently was obsessed with UFOs after that.
So in 2015, I created this small experimental studio called Oats Studios with my brother, which was designed for me to kind of create experimental small films.
And I wanted to turn it into something later.
But one of the films that I wanted to make, and I still want to make, is heavily UFO-based, which is what got me into all of this stuff.
Well, if you get attacked by a black bear, most of the time it's trying to eat you.
If you get attacked by a brown bear, most of the time it is defending either its cache, like it has a dead animal that it's killed and it's buried nearby and you've stumbled upon it.
The bear just walks by this guy and it's fucking enormous.
Where was that that took place?
Is that Alaska?
Yeah, an Alaskan seaplane pilot demonstrated nerves of steel early this week as he calmly convincing a massive grizzly bear not to attack him and his group of tourists.
When I moved to Canada, I mean, you know, I remember people that I was hanging out with asking me about South Africa and if we had wild animals roaming around.
Like when we were in West Vancouver, you know, in the...
In the sort of suburban areas of West Vancouver, which touch on the North Shore mountains.
And it's like, what are you talking about?
Like, you're the people that have frickin' bears coming down at the back of your house every day.
There's cougars all over the place.
You know, it's like, it's much more wild than South Africa ever felt.
It's hilarious.
You need to go out of Johannesburg to go see that kind of thing.
Does that inspire, like, when you see wild predators and things like that, does that inspire, like, you write a lot of, like, the new film is horrific.
I mean, the main, you know, it was during COVID, it was like we could either not...
Not work while everything was paused or make something.
And so I always wanted to shoot a low-budget horror film.
And so I kind of looked at all of the elements that I had available and got the same team that did our experimental stuff for Oat Studios on YouTube together to make basically a bigger version of what we were making for our experimental stuff.
And shot it in the same region.
We used all of the stuff that we had access to.
So it did inspire that.
It was inspired by the fact that I was living out there.
So the way that that was captured was just very...
It's an unusual process to be used in that way in a film.
So, like, there's a process in computer graphics called photogrammetry where if you take a hundred photos of, like, an object like this, hundreds of different angles, and you give it to a computer, it can extrapolate a three-dimensional object, kind of like a CAD file.
But the cool thing with photogrammetry is it also brings all of the image data with it as well.
So you'd get the different colors and the surfaces and stuff.
So volumetric capture is the idea of doing that 24 times a second.
So if you were to capture an actress 24 times a second, she would be fully three-dimensional in the way that this is.
So it's like 3D video.
And then once you have the performances from the actors, you can put them in synthetic computer-generated environments and then begin to light them and select your cameras.
That was part of the reverse engineering of how the movie came about was Oh, if everything is paused for now, let's use this time to make something else.
What are the things I want to do?
And one of the ideas was I want to use volumetric capture at some point.
It's not clear how to use that in a movie, but I want to use it somehow.
And then another idea was this idea of the Vatican kind of buying up corporations with all of the capital that they have and playing on the trope of exorcist priests, you know, but acting a slightly more 21st century way.
And I sort of combined those two and that was the basis for what the movie became.
Like if someone was demonically possessed that you knew...
Like, if you could go visit him, you know, in a clinic where he was demonically possessed and just sort of look through the bulletproof gloss and see how he was doing, it would be interesting.
I mean, the thing that I would have really enjoyed about it was Sigourney Weaver was really down for what I'd written.
And the main thing to me was, even though I like Alien 3 and I love Fincher as a director, I just wanted a version of the continuation of what happened after Aliens.
And for Newt to be alive and for Ripley to continue that story.
I accidentally watched the Blu-ray version of Aliens, and it's kind of hilarious.
Because in the Blu-ray version, things that were not meant to be HD are now HD. So there's a scene where the spaceships are lined up, and there's clearly a mural of spaceships in the background.
Yeah, matte paintings pre-computer graphics were done on panes of glass.
And so, I mean, in a way, Aliens is like using the technology that they had at the time is actually like totally incredible.
But I do know what you're saying, though.
I mean, for audiences now weaned on the stuff that we have access to, you know, these techniques are so dated.
But it would be a large pane of glass, like a shower piece of glass, and then they would paint what they want the set to look like and shoot through it with your other real environments as well.
That's why the shots are always locked off, right?
No, I mean, I can imagine in 1979 seeing that in a theater where I think the studio executives, there's one famous quote where they thought they had gone too far.
There was like a test screening with the audience where they're like, this may have gone too far.
You could do something really terrifying in VR. This one in particular, people that I know that have played it or have done the experience said it's horrific.
It's really scary because you really do feel like you're trapped inside these tunnels in this ship.
That's to me the future of just of entertainment in general.
My kids would come to the studio in LA and they would literally have a race to see who could get to the Oculus first because they just wanted to play the VR games constantly.
And they'd be, like, walking the plank, screaming, and, like, walking around and playing the, you know, the one with the drums where you're slicing the boxes apart.
Yeah, it started going back a bit towards the horror elements, I think, and the xenomorph, right?
Because the creature was missing in Prometheus.
I mean, yeah, that was...
I agree.
He started to introduce some of that in Covenant.
Ridley's one of my favorite filmmakers.
He's an amazing filmmaker.
And everything he does has such a textural feel to it.
So those films, just the scenes, if you just watch independent moments within it, they feel so specific and so Ridley.
But the VR thing is interesting because, you know, I think people often talk about the idea of narrative.
They talk about the future of games and they talk about, like, how films and games are going to kind of merge.
And it's interesting because I think what your kids are responding to is where I think games truly are going, which is just some kind of pure immersion.
If you want a story, if it's like the age old sort of sitting around a campfire and being told a story, the point of that is that you're passive.
The whole point is that someone has learned something in life or gone through some event or has some point of view on something that they're passing down to you in the form of a story.
And as an audience member, you can almost simulate what may have happened to you if you had done that or if you had lived through it or what choices would I have made, right?
There's a sort of a meme of cultural data that's kind of given to you or personal information that's given to you in a way that's sort of beyond words.
And I think games are the exact opposite, what they hold.
They hold the ability for you to be the player inside of the world that makes your own decisions and makes your own mistakes.
So there's this misconception where it's like some cases of narrative could work, but for the most part it feels like doubling down on photoreal immersion, which is basically some kind of like wish fulfillment, right?
You're dropping an audience into – it's like Strange Days with the bank robbery.
And then you wear the neural link and you can feel what it's like to rob a bank.
It's like that's where games, I think, are going.
And that's where VR and everything is sort of moving in that direction.
I think it's like if you look at the progression of technology, go from Pong to where we have today with Oculus, like, oh, I see where this is going to go.
I mean, that's the one place the human technology really just has its foot flat on the gas is microprocessor increases, like million-fold increases in speed.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, coming also from visual effects and computer graphics, I'm super interested in the realm of games as much as film, just for what it holds.
I just joined a company now, actually, that's based in Kiev in Frankfurt called Godzilla, that I'm part of the design team working on a new game.
Like whether it's Halo or Assassin's Creed or whatever it is.
And with the level of photorealistic immersion that we're talking about in VR, it would be really fascinating for that to swing the other way now, where you could be in a photorealistic immersion of The Shining.
But what I mean is where it's as mainstay as the way that when you go to multiplexes now, there's a very high possibility that you could see a big game adaptation.
So speaking about demonic and volumetric capture, we used Unity, which is a game engine, to render the scenes that are in the virtual reality parts of the movie.
So what that means is they're live scenes.
So the audience, when they're watching the movie, it looks like you're just watching a VR scene.
But we could, like Alien Isolation, we could port those out to VR. So you could sit and watch those scenes in total virtual reality because...
Of what I was saying about volumetric capture, capturing the actors in 3D. So it's not like the gimmick that people do with films into VR where it's a 360 degree camera and it's fake.
It's actual immersive, real three-dimensional footage running in a game engine.
But, I mean, it goes back to the narrative versus, you know, the passive versus active experience discussion.
I think the way to do it, like if you imagine a Tarantino coffee table discussion, like the amazing beginning of Inglourious Bostads, right?
If you were sitting at that table like we are now, and it was immersive three-dimensional VR... The experience would be really pretty great.
So you can still be a passive audience member and watch it in VR like that.
And I think that's coming.
But it's still different to merging narrative with a game structure where I think audiences will be very particular about they want to either be in control of everything or they want to be given a story and be taken on a ride.
It says he just slept, afterwards he slept for 14 hours and 40 minutes the one day, and then the next day he slept for like 10 and a half hours, and after that he was fine.
Actually, I split open this year where I had to have plastic surgery on the cartilage, shooting a commercial for Halo, for the film that I would have done for Halo.
We built a physical one of those at Weta, and we would have used it for the movie, but we ended up doing these kind of short film commercials for Halo.
And I was in the back on one side, and my friend-slash-director of photography was on the other side, and the stunt team strapped us down.
And it was all handheld.
The whole thing was cinema verite, so it was loose cameras.
And I had one camera and he had one camera.
And we hit, you know, you remember if you play the game, the turret gun in the back, it's like a.50 cal that's on a swivel.
So Weta had built one of those.
And it was, it had a pin that you could pull to swivel it or lock it with a pin.
And so we were driving, it was locked.
that launched me up to the limit of my straps, but just enough to shear my ear off on the edge of that metal gun, on the handle.
So my sort of, I just cut it in half basically.
And then all this blood shot across my jacket And it was interesting because I realized I hadn't really – it kind of reminds me of my shoulder in rugby or just anything in high school.
In high school, you're always getting beaten up.
And I realized I hadn't felt that feeling for like 10 years.
You would have been in martial arts.
But that feeling of like a shock and a bunch of blood where it's like, oh, I remember this.
And then the medic like patched me up and like, you know, I went back to shooting for six hours.
There's hilarious photos of me on that set with this massive like strapped up ear and like, you know, like the forming of like a black eye kind of style where I just looked like death essentially after that.
And then at the end of the shoot, I went and had plastic surgery outside of Wellington in New Zealand where we were living.
And I got all of the cartilage put back together because that's what had fractured.
And then the skin.
So it just hurts now in cold weather.
And it feels like a broken biscuit or something that's like lined with skin.
Like, they try to stitch them up together and hope it heals, but a lot of times it doesn't because the blood supply there and the blood flow there is not very good.
I mean, I'm obviously completely comfortable putting, you know, excessive amounts of violence in cinema or, you know, silicone puppetry and prosthetics and blood, but...
In real life, man, it's just, I don't know what happens, but it's like, when I moved to Canada, there was a bunch of stuff on TV, because obviously, you know, in 1997, there's sort of mainstream media is the only way you could really get stuff.
And it was like in South Africa, there were limited channels.
In Canada, there were far more channels.
And one of the channels was basically 24-hour surgery.
I don't know what the hell that was.
Like, I don't know what it was, but it would be like, here, we're going to do this surgery for the next six hours on TV. It's so fascinating, though.
We're doing stand-up together, and he shows me these pictures on his phone of the surgery that he had.
The doctor took these photos.
He's had to have nerve surgery because his nerves weren't regenerating quick enough, so they had to relocate one of the nerves to a new area, attach it, and then the way the doctor described it is literally sewn together with doll hair.
That's how small the threads are, and he now is slowly going to be able to move These the the last two fingers of his hand right the first two fingers of his hand worked perfectly But the last two just weren't moving it wasn't getting the signal, right?
So they had to do the surgery now because they waited too long Then it wouldn't it wouldn't work the nerve would probably die or yeah something on those lines.
Here we go Prepare yourself, please But this kind of thing I think I'm okay with I mean we'll see So here he goes he jumps up Oh yeah, you can just see.
So, last night he's showing us these images of his arm completely opened up and the doctor filmed it because he's kind of teaching other people how this is done and he wanted to film it because it's a very unusual surgery.
And so Tom has all these videos on his phone of his own arm and it's splayed open.
It is a common position in Jiu Jitsu where a guy has his knee on your neck.
It happens all the time.
Because if someone's going for particular moves, Like, when you're controlling people, oftentimes you'll wind up in a position where someone has their knee on your neck.
It's a terrible place to be.
But to be handcuffed on the concrete with a guy with his knee on your neck, where you can't tap out, and the guy's not listening to you...
I mean, it's just a bunch of mechanical, understandable components that can be laid out on a lab table, and each one of them just makes complete mechanical sense.
It's kind of disturbing to reduce a human to that.
Obviously I don't know what it feels like for him, but when you see him walk, He looks like a guy, like if he just had pants on, you would never know that he has an artificial leg.
And I think as they get more and more advanced, it's going to be more and more interesting because they're going to be able to develop feel.
They're going to actually be able to send signals to the nerves that do remain the rest of your arm, and you're going to have a realistic interpretation of what it feels like to touch delicate things, the amount of pressure, like if you're holding a wine glass.
I mean, the whole, going back to the game immersion thing, the whole brain-computer interface part of that allows for, like how Peter Watts was saying that consciousness will spread to the available neurons it has at hand.
There's something, I think, there's a neural plasticity element to do with limbs and articulating limbs that can be explored in future, far future games with brain-computer interfaces where you could give people more than two arms, for example, right?
If you suddenly had two extra arms right now that were being simulated but driven by the same motor control that you have that you use your real arms with, they would be like a toddler.
And your brain would begin to be able to train those third and fourth arms to work.
Yeah, and over time you would get good at it, right?
But imagine, it's like your brain isn't locked into having two arms and two legs, is what I'm saying.
It's open to whatever you plug it into.
So if you plug it into something that's a simulation with eight arms and five legs, theoretically, you could begin to use that other version of yourself.
What's really fascinating to me is if they can map out, when you're talking about neuroplasticity and think of fine motor skills, like the ability to play piano at a very high level.
I would love to see if there's a way to map out what's going on in the human mind.
Watching The Matrix in a theater, I was 19 when I saw that film in 99, and that was my favorite theatrical thing event that I've ever been in in my life.
Oh, it was incredible.
Yeah, it was my favorite viewing experience of a movie.
And one of the reasons his brother was so fucked up was Ted Kaczynski at an early age had some sort of a disease and they took him away from his parents for a prolonged period of time and had him in a hospital where he had no touch, no contact with the outside world when he was a baby.
Where he lived like this, where they could only visit him one day a week, and he didn't have anybody touching him and cradling him and caring for him.
And he became a sociopath, perhaps because of that, and then compounded by these Harvard LSD studies that he was a part of in the 1960s.
And so he leaves there.
They cook his brain.
He goes to Berkeley, teaches, just to develop enough money so that he could buy a cabin and implement this plan to kill all the people that were involved in the future propagation of technology.
I mean, the thing that's so crazy about MKUltra, because I think, I don't know if it was part of MKUltra, but it may have been, but they also experimented on this Canadian town as well.
Canada was part of that test scenario, too.
And then there was the Tuskegee experiments on black males in America with, I think, syphilis, right?
That was the only way they felt like they could find out what happens when people take too much acid, or what happens when people think they're getting medication for syphilis, but they're not.
But still, the fact that they're allowed to do those kinds of experiments, where the people caught in the crossfire, the people that are being experimented on, will never...
I think it's a thing, again, where there's little to no oversight.
And it's also, they have this ultimate ability to just make everybody disappear.
Like in the 60s, when they were doing MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax, where they would dose up Johns and brothels, they ran brothels.
In San Francisco and one other place, I forget where it was, but they would get these prostitutes and they were in on the deal and the prostitutes would deliver these drinks to these guys before they would, you know, have sex and inside the drink was a large dose of acid.
And so these guys would take the drink and then they would just freak the fuck out while they were being observed through a two-way mirror.
And as he was studying it, he realized that he was uncovering layers upon layers and that what this is really all about, the reason why Manson kept getting out of jail and kept committing crimes and they would release him, was because he was a part of this study.
And that they had dosed up Manson when he was in jail, they had taught him how to essentially run a cult, and they had provided him with acid.
And there was an actual clinic in Haight-Ashbury, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, that was hilariously named because it was run by the CIA.
After Tom's book comes out, they closed this place down.
It had been open for decades.
In fact, my wife's mom, who lived in Haight-Ashbury, she was a hippie there in the 60s, she used to go to that clinic.
And that clinic was Jolly West ran it.
That was the very guy who was dosing people up, the very guy who dosed Jack Ruby.
After Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, they went to visit him in prison, and Jack Ruby went nuts, was hiding under tables.
He was giving people acid and experimenting on them, and one of the people he experimented on was Charles Manson.
They're in the process of potentially converting the book into a series.
It is one of the best books I've ever read.
It is so wild.
And it's so hard to believe this guy was hired to write a short story for a magazine.
So as he's investigating the story, he goes deeper and deeper, and he's like, ah!
And he realizes the prosecution was flawed, and they had something on the prosecutor, so they had the whole thing set up, and they made it look like this was...
They were trying to make the anti-war movement, and the flower children, the hippies, they were trying to make it seem like this was this evil, nefarious thing.
His brother in the documentary talked about how troubled his brother was.
If someone had rejected his advances like a girl, he would be really vicious and mean and write them horrible letters.
There was something really wrong with him.
Yeah, some developmental problems.
But his thought about technology, as evil as he was, and as brilliant as he was, his thought about technology one day being the doom of human race, there's some wisdom to that.
And it's so obvious that up until now, I mean, if you go back through human history, there's a development of tools and weapons and all these different things which really help people overcome predators and enemies and their environment and all these different things happen, but they're all kind of scalable.
And electronics and anything digital and anything involving electricity and anything involving machines and anything involving things that biologically we can't possibly evolve fast enough to compete with anything that's connected to the internet.
Anything that's connected to artificial intelligence.
Anything that's connected to silicon chips and the infrastructure that we've developed.
I think there was also a Darwinistic thing that was happening earlier.
Like when you bring up paleolithic tools and living in caves, like there was...
There was a balance where we had never conquered nature.
There was this balance.
So to me, it's not just electronics.
It's like the moment that the balance tipped where we were just the absolute alpha control of the environment that we live in, then that's when everything got completely out of balance.
And it's like that's the dangerous phase that we're in now.
And that could be part of the great barrier that ends up snuffing out all these other hypothetical civilizations.
It feels like Nukes, overpopulation, limited resources, you know, runaway.
I mean, when you start introducing things like just the volume of stuff that is in the system right now, there's too much chaos.
There's too much chaos.
So you either have to come out on the other side of it with some other new way of living or it's going to wipe us out.
The real great moment is the Manhattan Project, right?
The great moment where everything changed forever was Oppenheimer when he reads from the Bhagavad Gita when he talked about- I am become death.
Destroyer of worlds.
When he says it, and this guy worked with Einstein and he's this incredible genius and made this thing, and then here he is aware of the consequences of this thing that he helped create.
It's like you have the ancient mammalian brain that is doing its biological programming bidding by building weapons to beat the other tribe.
Except...
Because you've coupled it with a supercomputer, it's now building nuclear weapons.
So the result is out of whack.
It's like genes, what the genes are asking for are only thinking 15 minutes in advance, right?
There's no long-term thinking to the human race.
So the result of doing what is being told on a biological programming level immediately, which is I need a better weapon, results in these massive long-term catastrophes that are not thought through.
To me, the only thing that I wonder is, I mean, obviously from a writing perspective, you need some sort of anthropomorphic human to visualize the AI. And she takes that form.
And all of that within the context of the movie makes a lot of sense.
And I know that she's also, or the AI, is cut off from the web.
So it needs a way to get out of the building.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I just wonder if, like, should it be virtual?
In terms of realism, because everything else feels very realistic.
It's just, I wonder about if there was a way for her to leave at the end in a way that felt like non-physical, something that represents AI or where the future may take that direction.
Wouldn't it just sort of engineer our demise slowly through manipulation?
If AI decided that the human race is a mess, maybe what AI would do is create bots online and have people argue with people to the point where they nuke each other.
It's not going to be coming from that perspective.
It's just...
Usually, I think the thing that's destructive about AI is you give an artificial intelligence a task you want it to do.
And it goes about doing it in a way that you would never have ever thought of.
And the result of that is detrimental to the human race.
I think that's more, you know, like the idea of ex machina or an AI sitting on a server somewhere that is actually sentient in the way that we are self-aware.
I don't necessarily think it plays out that way.
I think it plays out more like it's not actually sentient and it's executing a task that was required of it, but it's doing it in a way that is so far outside the boundaries of how we think that there was no war game we could play where we could imagine this outcome.
It just went so polar opposite to any way we could have imagined.
But the example that they give is, I think it's a paper stationery company that has an AI. And they make the error of plugging it into the rest of the web, right?
So now it's like it's able to access everything.
And its task is please make this paper stationary company more profitable.
And the result, a few generations later, is, like, every planet in the known universe is coated in, like, stationary equipment, and there's no life form anywhere.
And it's...
That feels like an accurate...
That's what I'm kind of getting at, right?
You see what I mean?
It's doing something coming from such a different point of view, right?
That the result is highly unexpected and unforeseen, and it wipes us out.
When they're in the meat phase, the meat phase is going to be based on genes and a propagation of genes.
So you could definitely argue that whatever form of multicellular, highly intelligent life out there would initially start from a paradigm that we would understand.
Because it definitely would start there.
But it could merge with technology where you'd have alien-AI hybrid, or it could just be pure alien silicon-based computer technology that is sentient.
At which point then it's the same scenario.
You could have, you know, an alien AI wipe us all out.
Maybe they understand that the natural course of progression for the bipedal hominid that's fascinated by innovation is that one day it's going to achieve that thing that you were talking about earlier where the minds all do combine and achieve one huge super organism consciousness and that they just want to make sure we don't blow ourselves up before we do it.
So they're just sort of like cultivating the garden like, oh, we got a snake in the garden.
That daddy space alien is going to come down and make sure we don't blow ourselves up.
And, you know, that's also one of the things that's interesting about the increase in sightings that corresponds with the dropping of the nuclear bombs.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Like, right after that was when all these sightings started happening.
You know, there's the Kenneth Arnold story where this is the original flying saucer imagery came from Kenneth Arnold's spotting of a bunch of different disks in formation that's in the movie Phenomena.
It's very confusing because you got eyewitness encounters which are absolutely the worst kind of evidence you could ever get.
People's memories are terrible.
Their ability to extrapolate from small images and create these large things in their mind and they repeat the story over and over again and they seem like it's true.
It's so hard.
When someone talks about the past and they talk about a thing that they saw that doesn't exist in our modern point of reference, there's no Triangular, silent craft that just zips across the sky.
It doesn't exist.
So when he describes it and he's telling you about it, you're like...
And then people just start talking about the thing.
They saw it too.
I saw it too.
And this is, you know, I want to say it was 97. So it was not a lot of internet activity back then.
It was...
It was a more naive time.
It's hard, but the thing that gets me is those things that were hovering, the lights that were hovering around the city, and then the government's explanation for it was that these were flares that were dropped out of the sky.
Well, that's horseshit, for sure, because they're hovering there.
Well, when the government comes out, the Pentagon comes out and starts talking to you about, you know, off-world ships that are not made on Earth, you're like, what?
See if you can find the clip of the guy getting out of the UFO, though, because, like, as the UFO lands, like, the door opens up out of nowhere and it sort of dissolves.
Well, remember Peter Watts that I was talking about?
He's the first person that that really happens to me with.
I was working with Richard Morgan, who is the writer of Alted Carbon, who's awesome.
And he's involved in the game company that we're all working together now.
And he said, have you read Peter Watts?
And I was like, no.
And I went and read his book called Blindsight, which is hard sci-fi.
It's set 60 years from now.
And there's one character in it which is absolutely amazing.
And I just emailed him and contacted him and started speaking to him.
And I want to create something out of one of the characters that's in there.
And that's kind of one of the first times that I can think of that that's really happened.
Usually, I mean, if you, you know, like my Elysium thing about being on the other side of the U.S. border, it often seems to be stuff that's generated through observing the world and observing life, generally, for me.
But I think because I've taken a bunch of years off from Hollywood when we were working on our own stuff, I've kind of, there's, I've sort of accumulated a number of projects just by being away from Hollywood for a bit that are gathered from a whole bunch of different places.
So there's a few different avenues now, I think.
But you, Peter Watts, man, this character is pretty incredible.
It's like, the idea is he applied evolutionary biology to how you could viably justify a vampire.
It's this one character that I zeroed in on, which now he and I are working on, which is this idea where basically he thinks that if you look at something like lions in the wild, right?
Lions would – they're outnumbered by their prey like whether it's 10 to 1 or 100 to 1.
There's far fewer lions than there are gazelles, right?
So the lions also have a disproportionate amount of sort of intelligence and logic compared to a gazelle because they're the predator that hunts this predated – this predated animal.
So, he took that philosophy and created a branch off of sort of hominid upper primates that would be 10 times more intelligent than a human, that would keep the human numbers in check.
And it only needs a certain enzyme that humans have in their blood.
So it's not like the classic thing of vampires drinking tons of blood.
It's just going off to one enzyme.
So it could actually just drink a little bit of blood and get what it needs that's only created by human beings.
And then the rest of its diet could be like a normal diet, right?
But the thing that he wrote that is the most incredible part of it is he's got this thing called The Crucifix Glitch, which is it's so intelligent and it can hold like the way that you're conscious or I'm conscious now.
It can hold two or three or four versions of consciousnesses like that in its head at any given moment.
So it can look at topics from multiple real points of view.
And what it does is it basically goes into hibernation like a vampire.
It lets the human population build up.
And then when it comes out of hibernation, over a few generations, its existence may have been turned into myth or something.
And then it hunts the population down again, right?
So this is the thing he came up with.
Because its brain structure is so different and because it's such an excellent predator and it's totally, completely sociopathic, Because as you would need to be if you're chewing on something, right?
It's just a total...
It's basically like a serial killer on steroids that we've never seen.
It's like mixing a serial killer with a particle physicist like Einstein.
But he came up with this thing where its visual cortex is different to a human and it calculates horizontal and vertical simultaneously.
It's like a pattern recognition system for hunting.
And up until...
Only a few thousand years ago, there were no right angles in nature.
Nature was nature.
But humans started building, you know, Euclidean geometry buildings, the Greek Parthenons and stuff.
And that caused an overlap in its visual cortex that looks like a right angle.
And it sent the vampires into grand mole epileptic seizures.
So the idea is basically that some pharmaceutical company would will them back out of, like Neanderthal DNA. They're doing gene therapy to basically bring this out of humans again.
But it's similar to AI where once it crosses a certain threshold, it's way smarter than the people that are willing it out through gene therapy.
And all of a sudden, you have a real problem on your hands, right?
Where, I mean, it's sort of like describing it like a bunch of cows went and genetically willed a wolf into being, right?
The wolf doesn't want to be caged in by the cows.
And it's also a fascinating concept that we're a pest species that's grown like a mold around the planet because our natural predator has been absent for a few hundred thousand years.
It's basically like you're mixing something like the approach to serial killers like Silence of the Lambs with vampires.
Because he comes from evolutionary biology, everything is about...
It sort of looks like an NBA basketball player where its limbs are elongated because it's all about venting heat.
And when vampires have that pallor kind of white color, it's because it keeps all of its blood around its central organs.
So he kind of, he explains on a biological level why every single thing is happening with it, right?
So if you're sitting here with it, it has reflective cat eyes for night vision with a 900 IQ. It's totally sociopathic.
And it's out-thought everything that you're possibly thinking in here.
And it also kind of ties into a deeper part, I mean, within the mythology that he's written of human psyche, where we haven't been around one for hundreds of generations.
But when you're around them, you feel like you're being preyed on in a way that none of us are used to.
So in his book, in Blindsight, it's a first alien encounter book about aliens on the far...
Basically, they take a snapshot of planet Earth where 65,000 flashes go off around the globe simultaneously, and they take a flash moment of the human race.
And it just happens, like, all of a sudden.
So our response is to completely freak out, not knowing what did this.
And then...
They see a ship that they think is way out on the edge of the Kuiper belt, like far, far out.
And so they build a ship and send it out there.
So every person on the ship is highly specialized, genetically modified humans.
And the captain of the ship is a vampire.
Because it's the only one smart enough to sort of assimilate all of the data, right?
And it takes anti-Euclidean drugs so it's not having grand mal seizures from all of the right angles in the ship.
And it wears a visor to not freak out the crew members that are on the ship because it's a hunter.
It's such a compelling horror theme, the idea that there's a person that pretends to be like us but just wants to drink our blood, just wants to get a hold of you and pray upon you.
In American Werewolf in London, one of the best scenes is the businessman who's running through the subway station trying to get away from the werewolf, and then he's falling apart, he's exhausted, and he's on the escalator, and then you see it slowly come into frame.
Like, say, District 9. A normal film would be about two years.
Yeah.
I mean, Demonic was like one year, but it was a pandemic film.
It was a different kind of thing.
But no, normally it would be about two years.
Yeah, I have a sci-fi film that I'm working on now that I hope is the next one that I make that would be, it's been, I don't know, a year of thinking and writing.
And then, so maybe 2.5 years maybe for that, if there's 1.5 left to go.
You know, maybe four to six months of sort of light and then proper pre-production.
Yeah.
And then, you know, at least four months of production.
And then at least a year of post.
And you still have a year of writing at the beginning of it.
I mean, if you look at Dion Phuot in Chappie, that's a case of I don't think any sane studio executive would allow that to happen.
So that definitely is a result of me.
Or, I mean, the incredible chance of District 9 happening, which is really all down to Peter Jackson and Fran for letting that film happen.
If you think about a first-time director with...
With a film set in South Africa, with a person who is my friend as the actor, who doesn't have an acting background, at $30 million.
Makes no, like, logical sense that that film exists, but I'm super thankful that it does.
So, no, you would have control over cost.
I mean, Shalto in that case was just, he kind of reminds me of Sachin Baron Cohen, where he's very, he can take on personalities and stuff, and he's always done that since I've known him.
So I described this Afrikaans character to him as a test to show Peter what I was thinking.
And he just did it so well that it's like we should put this guy in the lead of the film.
Well, we also didn't test it with anyone, which is uncommon for movies, right?
So it was watched for the first time at Comic-Con in San Diego.
And Sholto and I genuinely were concerned that the audience wouldn't understand the accent.
Because we hadn't shown it to anyone except the people that we worked with, like Peter and Fran, and then Terry, my wife, and like a handful of people in New Zealand had seen it.
And they're New Zealanders, which means their accent's more in a line with South Africa.
So suddenly show a bunch of Americans this thing.
It was only on like the premiere night that it's like, wait, is anyone going to understand what he's saying?
You know, which they ended up, thank God, understanding him.
But unusual, very unusual way that that came into being.
I mean, if you look at Avatar with James Cameron, it's like Cameron is such a well-respected filmmaker that Sam Worthington wasn't really known in the lead of the most expensive film ever made.
You know what I mean?
Because people were signing up for what Cameron would be bringing.
But the typical process is you would need enough of a star to carry the sort of financial weight of the film, merged with however interesting the IP may appear to be.
A lot of what the studios are doing is dictated by what the audience wants.
It's not like you could make something and the audience, especially depending on the budget level, Could not go if you didn't have the right star in there.
It's not always the case.
It depends exactly on what you're making.
Often it's not the case, but in certain instances it really is defined by who's at.
What is it like now because of COVID and people don't necessarily want to go to a screen in a theater with a bunch of people that they don't know all breathing around them and films are simultaneously being released and I know that there was this Scarlett Johansson lawsuit because of Black Widow because it wasn't supposed to be released the way it was and What is it like to try to get a budget for a film,
and how much different is the whole process now because of COVID? Well, I mean, that's an interesting question.
I think what's going to happen is people are obviously going to gravitate towards streaming more and more, right?
And I think movie theaters may be thinned out, unfortunately, a little bit.
Like, there could be a few fewer theaters.
But I think what'll happen is the movies that will be in theaters will become bigger and bigger.
Because you'll want to draw...
It's almost like a theme park ride.
You want enough of a reason to go to a movie theater.
To draw people out of their living rooms.
Yeah.
Experiences.
That the studios will probably pay more to create events.
It has to be an event of some kind.
So I think you could see this stratification between larger event stuff that feels more comic book-y and huge.
In movie theaters as events against longer format Game of Thrones style, more complex character pieces that can also be epic that are occurring over much longer timelines that are happening at home.
So I think that's probably what it will look like going forward.
So the budgeting process now, it's like the budgets are relatively high in either direction there.
And then it just comes down to whether what you're trying to make is viable or not.
Because some stuff I want to make is commercial and other stuff is not commercial, which is what Oates was for.
I wanted to make stuff that...
I have an idea of how to try to monetize that going forward over time.
But at the moment, it just looks like a bunch of YouTube videos.
And it may stay that way.
I mean, maybe we can't figure it out.
But I think with the internet, there's a way for filmmakers and creators in general.
I mean, it's already being proven true with YouTube creators, right?
It's just that their budget levels are lower than what I need.
But could you apply sort of a YouTube creator approach to high-budget filmmaking?
Could that work?
It's an interesting thing where the audience is the only thing telling you whether they want something or not with their dollars.
Well, I always loved the ability to watch a film at home, and sometimes I would wait until a film was released on, like, Apple Movies or whatever it is.
What is it?
Apple TV? I would wait for that because I knew I wasn't going to be in a theater with people on their phone, where people are talking.
It is a weird one also because the amount of content that's being created is so extreme, you know, that there's so much, especially on the streaming side, that's being produced.
So maybe you don't see that scale in a filmic sense, but I think things like Game of Thrones or things like Westworld and high-budget TV shows, I think those could presumably get bigger and bigger and bigger.