Roger Avary reveals billionaire-linked operators—possibly including "Mikey"—used unconventional assassinations, like caffeine injections or staged car runs, and ties them to exploitative insurance practices in California, where homes cost $125K/year for fire coverage. He and Quentin Tarantino contrast modern TV’s repetitive violence with Kubrick’s M, praising niche films like Demonoid for sincere practical effects, while Avary critiques Eyes Wide Shut’s alleged unauthorized recutting. Their shared jailhouse writing and cinematic immersion—from Tarantino’s Vista micro-cinema to Avary’s prison scripts—underscore how creative resilience and community shape art, proving that even failure and incarceration can refine vision. [Automatically generated summary]
And well, you know, and so he, you know, we got to know each other because of our mutual friend.
And I think what happened was he and a couple of the other guys, you know, they were placed on me as like for surveillance purposes, like, you know.
Find out what this Avery guy's about, maybe.
Or just keep an eye on him or whatever.
And they told me right up front, like, be nice to your surveillance.
You know, like, don't try to lose us or anything like that.
Because I heard stories about how, you know, they're surveilling somebody in wherever.
Bolivia.
And suddenly some gang attacks their surveillance and they step in, kick the shit out of the gang.
And so I got to know these guys.
And naturally, you know, I'm a writer and filmmaker.
And so I, of course, want to talk to them about stuff.
And they immediately start volunteering.
Oh, yeah, we've learned all these different ways when I became an operator, blah, blah, blah.
I learned how to kill people without...
And I was just making a list now of the 10 ways to kill someone without leaving a trace.
And I was like, well...
Just like when I told Quentin about this, he's like, well, what are those?
I'd like to hear those.
Everybody wants to hear those.
And so one of the ones that I think is the best one is you inject someone with coffee, caffeine, like just inject coffee into their bloodstream, gives them a heart attack, and it's untraceable.
Later on, they do an autopsy and they just discover caffeine in your system.
And he was a medic, and so he, you know, was kind of identified as somebody who knew how to kill somebody very easily, because you know what will work, because you're a medic.
And so, you know, I would hear every now and then, oh, yeah, I'd kill some guy and some diplomat or something in the Philippines, and I'd hit him with my car, and...
And I'd look in my rearview mirror and make a determination, a medical determination of, you know, is the guy still alive?
Or is he, I better finish him off and put him in reverse and drive him over again a couple of times and then take off.
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Yeah, but it's a cool place to live.
You're not going to stop people from developing in Malibu, you know?
I drove home once, we were filming Fear Factor, we had to stop the set early because the fire was so bad.
This was like 2003 or something, 94. And driving home, it took me 55 minutes on the 5 to get home, and the entire time, the right side of the highway was on fire.
You know, it's like, you know, when you live in the Hollywood Hills, you're paying actually, you know, you...
Pretty decent property taxes.
There's a little vig that comes with it.
There's a reason.
You don't have to wait two hours during election.
You just go to the local elementary school.
You're in and out in five minutes when it comes to election day.
It's one of those stupid things that you do, like, what was the fucking idiot, where you turn on the burner and then you leave the room for a while, and then you come back and all of a sudden your kitchen is flaming.
Death keel to video stores that no one ever – when they're talking mom and pop, when they're talking old people to like, hey, you've retired from your business.
You've got a nice little nest egg.
If you want to invest in a nice little business where you get to work with your neighborhood and be in a nice little store with your family, video stores, that's a good business.
I don't know anything about movies.
Well, people help you, you know, help you choose the titles and everything.
So there's a lot of people that, like, invested in this stuff.
And it seemed like a good idea.
The reason that it seemed like a profitable idea was the idea, like, well, you know, I sell you this videocassette.
And you pay for the videocassette.
But the minute you rent it past the point where you paid for the videocassette yourself, then everything else is you.
All that other money that you make from here on in is just all profit once you pay for the actual cassette.
Of course, you'll have some cassettes that don't rent as well, but that's the way it works out.
But it should work out great.
Well, again, that sounds like a pretty good business model.
Well, if I spend this money and then five years from now, boom, everything is a profit.
Where it all fell apart is the idea that you always have to get new shit.
Because it's not a bookstore.
Well, bookstores need to get new stuff too, but it's not a library.
Life doesn't stand still.
Every month there's new titles coming out and you have to be competitive and you have to get the new titles.
And so...
Even if that were the issue, that wouldn't be that big of a deal.
But if you're a mom and pop star, you only have so much room.
And then there was another problem when companies that were massively funded like Blockbuster came onto the scene, they would go in and they would kind of do this sort of gray market purchasing where they would buy, you know, 50 diehards.
And a mom and pop store can't afford to buy more than one or two diehards or three, maybe, to satisfy your clientele.
When it comes to a big title, yeah, the thing is you spend the money, like, okay, like, you know, one of our big titles in the early days of video was Top Gun.
And so, consequently, because you can only get three or 12 Top Guns, whatever it is, it's not as many as Blockbuster is getting, you end up having to focus on, like, how am I going to convince my clientele to watch something other than Top Gun this weekend?
And so...
Landed on us to basically say, oh, you can't get Top Gun.
It's the difference between being a cool coffee place and being Starbucks.
Or a franchise bar and a cool little Joe's bar.
And the bartender knows you.
So it's like, look, if you just absolutely positively need Top Gun that weekend, then go across the streets of the warehouse and get it.
We have what we have.
But we had customers that, like, came in every fucking day.
And part of their day, or every other day, you know, when their camps were due.
And they were people of the neighborhood.
And they came in, and not only did they rent stuff, they dropped stuff off, and then they rented new stuff out, but, like, they came in to talk to us for 20 minutes or 45 minutes, like, every other day.
And I knew this making my first film, and I know, Quentin, you were talking about it.
This was a conversation we were actively having of, we have to make sure that we make a movie people want to see, like a genre film.
And I was calling them exploitation movies at the time, like, I want to keep one foot in exploitation.
But at the same time, I'm like, well, I kind of also want to make, like, you know, I want to elevate it as much as possible.
And so when the time came for me to make my first film, Killing Zoe...
You know, it was like I knew it was going to be a bank robbery because I wrote it around a location.
You know, we found this while they were scouting for Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence Bender.
Or maybe you also had scouted that location.
You found this bank location.
And Lawrence called me up.
He's like, hey, I'm calling all the writers I know.
I found this bank location.
And if you can, if you have a script that takes place in a bank, we can kick together a couple hundred thousand dollars and make a movie there.
It's like this complete, solid, amazing location.
And I said, oh my god, Lawrence, this is your lucky day.
I happen to have a script that takes place in a bank.
And then I just quickly wrote one based on the location.
And as I was writing it, I was thinking, okay, you know, I know that it's going to be a bank robbery.
It's a bank.
And so I know it's going to be a bank robbery.
And that's my solid bankable genre that I'm going to stick with.
But I knew I wanted to do something more with it, and I had just traveled through Europe, and I had been telling Quentin the stories of traveling through Europe.
He's like, oh, you should do a movie called Roger Takes a Trip!
Yeah, and his friends are like, oh, doing it to the nose doesn't even affect me anymore.
And I'm writing these lines down like, this is great shit.
And so I get back and I tell Quentin about this whole story and about these guys and driving around the Champs-Élysées and, oh, this is where the fags sell themselves!
Now we go into the nightclub down below and we do more heroin.
So the idea was, okay, I'm going to make a French film out of it.
Because I'm like in LA, I'm making a film.
What can I do that would be different?
Like that would make this more than just a bank robbery movie.
And because of the experience I had just had, I was like, well, I'm going to make a French film.
Okay, I had no business making a French movie.
I didn't even really speak French.
I just thought it would be kind of cool.
I like, you know, a cool French girl and like greasy, dirty French guys, French criminals.
And I always loved, you know, Alain Delon and Le Samurai.
You know, the way he wears a suit and the way he carries a gun and the way he walks around.
I just like, I, you know, just adored all of that.
And so it was like, well, let's put all of that kind of...
Space that's in my brain into the movie.
And then the movies tend to take on a life of their own.
They tend to be like children.
You know, it starts off as a concept, as a conception, has a conception, and then it has an infancy.
And then you're raising that child to become the movie.
And along the way, you're really just kind of protecting it and trying to allow it to grow into what it's going to grow into without forcing it to become something that it's not.
And it's a little bit of a balance.
You have to be a good parent, which means you have to give it a little bit of freedom to grow into something that you don't know what it's going to be.
But at the same time, you have to be willing to, you know, be strong with it as well.
What I replaced it with was, and I had to fight for it, was a single shot.
Because originally he goes downstairs and he sees a bunch of guys coming in through the sewer.
So he starts machine gunning people in the sewer.
Because there was like a little sewer manhole in the bottom of the bank.
I was like, well, let's use that.
And so I had this whole thing.
And the bond company showed up and you're behind schedule and you've got to cut pages and...
I couldn't cut anything, and I'm shooting upstairs-downstairs stuff, and so it's like I had to have something because he leaves the scene and then comes back angry.
And so I knew I needed to have something, and originally I had this whole scene where the cops are coming in, and he reacts to that.
And so I said, well, okay, I just need one shot because it's all I had time to do because of the fucking Bond Company.
And so I set up, which were actually really cool to me.
They were actually, film finances was great.
LAUGHTER I just set up a single camera.
I asked for a kind of a Kubrickian lens, a nice wide, like maybe a 14 millimeter lens.
And I just had John Hug walk up into a close-up and I just had him do...
I said, just walk into a close-up and just start looking around and just start seeing things coming out of the walls.
And is that the shot you're talking about?
And he does like a little magic trick beforehand, like...
Well, I had Tom Savini on the set, and I couldn't afford Tom Savini, but I found his number before I shot, and I called him up in Pittsburgh, and I said, Tom Savini's a makeup effects artist who did Dawn of the Dead.
And every time I'm talking to him about stuff, he's like, oh yeah, well, you know, if you're bleeding from back here, there's only two small veins, because when your head gets knocked off, he's seen all this stuff, and so this is his way of processing it.
But Tom came in, and I couldn't afford him.
I called him up on the phone.
I was like, hey, do you think I'm a young filmmaker?
I'm your biggest fan?
I like the makeup effects, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, he flew himself out.
We had no money to pay him.
I think we paid him like some tiny amount.
He flew himself to L.A., put himself up, worked on the film, and he made that burn makeup on that burned guard in the vault out of Vaseline paint and tissue paper.
And I watched him make, it was the most unbelievable thing how he made blisters and burn effects and it was like watching one of the great artists work.
And when I got the fire, when I eventually got the fire back again, and it was a life-changing thing.
It was a life-changing day.
It was...
We had a buddy of ours named Steve-O. We had different living arrangements and at one point in time, me and Steve-O were living in the same house together, towards the back of the store.
I mean, he was, like, one of the funniest guys I ever knew, and he was this really, really funny stoner dude and really cool.
And all of a sudden, he's, like, angry about things, and now he's not quite as funny, and now he's got this issue.
And so we're roommates, and there's this one night that he's kind of, like, all...
He's kind of disgusted with his life.
And he starts ranting.
And he's describing a situation that was very common if you were a kid growing up without a degree or anything in the 80s, especially in California, where it's like you can't get any really good jobs.
But like you can work at Licorice Pizza.
And if you're an okay employee, you could like work at Lincoln Street for a couple of years and maybe you could even become assistant manager or a manager and maybe they send you to another store.
And maybe you worked there for three years and that's really great.
But then, you know, all of a sudden, the district manager doesn't like you.
You run a file of somebody higher up in corporate.
And all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're fired and you're out in the street.
And so now you've just spent three years at Licorice Pizza.
Now you could get a job at TRW or some place that's like a real job job.
Or, well, those are kind of hard to get, but you can work at Warehouse Records and Tapes tomorrow, because you just had three years at Licorice Pizza.
Same thing with Wild West Clothier, same thing with Miller's Outpost, same thing with any of these kind of stores.
Next thing you know, you're 28, and the only jobs you've ever had are minimum wage jobs behind a counter that were designed for kids to pay for their gas.
But he was not just bitter about the job aspect of it.
But I knew – oh my god, he's telling me the truth.
I'm learning something here.
Because he goes, you know, Quentin, you think that we're this really great team.
We're this really great crew.
Well, we are.
I mean, you know, that time of your 20s were like your group of friends or your family, you know?
And like, well, we are.
Quentin, at 20, I worked at South Bay Cinemas and I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you and some girls there, too.
But it was a bunch of guys just like you.
And then I stopped working at South Bay Cinema.
Then I worked at Miller's Outpost.
I hung out with a bunch of guys just like you and we did everything just like we do.
We went to movies together, we went out and we dated amongst the girls there, everything.
Then I worked at Alicia Pizza for four years with a bunch of guys just like you.
I've wasted my life hanging out with a bunch of guys just like you and they all go away at a certain point.
And I realized this guy's kind of telling the truth.
He's showing me a truth about him.
This is coming from somewhere.
And then all of a sudden, he still hung around us.
He still liked us.
But then he started making it a point to touch base with some of his high school friends that were still around.
So he's not just hanging out with guys four years younger or five years younger than him.
Anyway, I'm turning 25 around this time.
So I'm having my own little, okay, well, what have I done with my life so far?
So far, fucking nothing.
So I'm having my own little anxiety hitting 25, but I'm seeing what it's like five years from now when you turn 30. A window to the future.
When you're in this situation.
And there was like one night.
That I had what I used to call – I would do it every once in a while.
I haven't done it in a long time, thankfully.
I would have a Quentin Detest Fest where I would stay up all night long and rather than give myself excuses, I would look at everything that I'm fucking up in my life or everything I'm not doing or whatever and just not give myself any fucking excuses out.
Just like nail it.
And I would spend like all night laying out everything I'm doing that's wrong and then I would spend the last two hours figuring out how I can change it.
And as opposed to just doing it and then going to get some sleep and then you forget about it and fall back into your routine, I decided to change my life.
I was like, look, the problem is that I'm living in the South Bay, and even though I drive to Los Angeles, one, I got to not worry about this job anymore.
I got to just move to Hollywood.
I got to get involved there.
I got to meet other people that are in the business.
And if I have to work manpower jobs, you know, where you just work like four days at this place and four days at that place, well, then that's fine.
And by the way, I shouldn't be making money until I'm making money doing what I want to do.
Not that that was ever a danger.
But then the next thing I knew, I moved out of the South Bay.
And then I couldn't move into Hollywood.
I couldn't afford Hollywood, but I could afford Koreatown.
And I was close enough.
And literally the minute I kind of moved out there, I met a guy who wrote – I met low-budget horror movies and then through him I met other guys that wrote low-budget horror movies and this guy who directs a few low-budget horror movies and this guy who produces a couple.
But yeah, you meet one person and that introduces you to three other people.
Now all of a sudden I actually knew people who were actually making movies.
And the thing about it was it was like – Also, well, if these guys can do what I can do, because they weren't too special.
Yeah, and then literally, it wasn't like everything changed, but within a year and a half from moving out of the South Bay, moving into the Hollywood area, within a year and a half, I was finally able to make a living as a writer.
You know, getting like $7,000 for this rewrite on this script over here.
$4,000 for this polish over here.
Another $10,000 for this rewrite over here.
Well, shit.
I mean, I would make $10,000 a year through all my 20s before that point.
So if I can make $15,000 from writing, oh my god, that was the greatest thing in the world.
Well, it's the realizing it's possible but it's also a situation where it's like as opposed to talking to your buddies about comedy in Minnesota – You're buddies who like comedy.
No, you're at the comedy store and you're dealing with comedians every fucking night.
And you're in the place where the shit happens and you're hearing how the laughs work.
But also, you know what's going on.
Oh, Caroline's Comedy Hour is doing the tryouts for this.
And, you know, Chuckles is doing this thing or that thing.
The mythology of the plays is you go down there and open mic night and if you have something to offer, then you work your way up and then you're the doorman and then you work your way up.
But it seems like that was then.
That was a long time ago.
Now it seems like people are almost spending 10 years or 8 years before they actually are getting up and getting paid.
I think these conversations are so important for young people to hear.
Because there's a lot of people out there that do have ideas, and sometimes they have a little bit of a fire, and then maybe they have a job that's kind of cool, like yours was, and they get sedated.
I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the movie about Zephyr surfboards and skateboarding and polyurethane wheels and surfing.
And I'm not like a surfer or anything, but my entry point into that movie was Zephyr surfboards was exactly like Video Archives.
And I imagine that this is like this in a lot of places where, you know, you have a shop, they do skateboards, and they've got a shaper guy there, Skip Englum, who's a surfboard shaper, and he was sort of like Lance, the guy who owned Video Archives.
And he started a shop and he's selling to all the kids locally and all the kids who like love surfing, you know, like Stacey Peralta or Tony Alva or guys like that, they would just go hang out there just like we would go hang out at the video store.
And so I looked at that and I was like, okay, I don't really know anything about these guys other than growing up in the beach community.
But my real entry point was I understand gravitating towards what you love and wanting to be close to it.
And that if a video store is the closest thing to Hollywood in your town, that's where you go.
Well, you know, it was funny because when I first started – when I started at the video store, I was like – it was great because, you know, like I said, I got to hang out in this place that I enjoyed and I'm surrounded by movies and talking about movies.
But one of the things that – I forgot I was going to go somewhere with that and I forgot.
I lost my train of thought.
But one of the things that ended up happening – I hope I didn't say it the last time I was here – that ended up happening is we became really famous in the neighborhood.
We were the video guys.
And our store was a little different than most of the businesses that were in Manhattan Beach.
And so everyone kind of knew us.
We were the video guys.
So in a strange way, it was a precursor to what it would be like to be famous where the whole world kind of knows about you like that.
In Manhattan Beach, I'm like walking down the street and people are like, hey, Quentin!
Because I think that's one of the things you did with your films is you did shit that was very risky.
Like, we're talking about executives and all these different management people that are going to come in and fuck with your thing and don't do that and cut that out.
But you had a sensibility, not of a person in management, but of a person that, I know what I like.
I know what I like.
And I think I can think differently than these people do.
You know, when I was young, one of my first jobs was actually given to me by one of our customers, this guy John Langley, who did that show, Cops.
And so, like, he was, you know, getting his power turned off and stuff like, you know, We were picking up dog shit in Venice Beach with our hands so that Dolph could do aerobics on that little grassy knoll.
Hilarious.
And so, you know, I'm like the first, I'm a PA working for him, a driver.
I'm running around town.
My car is like the transmission is going out.
I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do.
This is not what I want to do.
I don't want to work on cops, but like I need the job.
And so I go in and I meet with John, and he's been a customer of ours, and he's fatherly-like to me.
I asked him, I said, John, you've worked in this business a long time.
He was an AD for a long time.
What kind of advice can you give to a guy like me who's trying to work my way up?
He's like, well, what do you want to do ultimately?
I said, well, I want to direct films.
Well, then be a director.
Don't work your way up the ladder.
Don't try to be a grip and work your way in.
Just be a director.
And I heard that.
And he's like, start at the top.
It's the best way to go.
Just start at the top.
And, you know, just tell people you're a director.
Put yourself in that.
Otherwise, people will just pigeonhole you.
They'll just say that's who he is.
He's a grip or he's a PA or he's you'll you'll have to work your way up.
Just tell people who you are.
So I thought about it.
It's like, OK. I quit.
He's like, what?
I said, I quit.
I'm a director.
And I left.
I walked out.
I mean, I gave him notice.
And I walked out.
And he sat there and he later told me, years later, told me, man, I thought that was the most audacious, ballsy thing.
I gave you advice and you took it.
Right away!
Never mind the fact that it took me years of just telling people I'm a director.
I directed Super 8 movies.
I was not a director.
I was a poser.
I was faking it until I made it.
But I told people what I was and what I was doing, and eventually it stuck.
Eventually enough people hear it, and all those people who you end up going into a room and pitching your idea and they say no, eventually they see you at Cannes running around trying to do foreign sales.
They're like, hey, Maybe that kid is a director.
It was just believing in yourself when no one else believes what you believe.
And I heard the story came back to me later that When I got the deal to make Reservoir Dogs, just little by little, through the Manhattan Beach community, they started hearing, oh, hey, Quentin's making his movie.
Quentin got his movie off the ground.
He's actually making his movie.
He's not at the video store anymore.
He's actually making a movie.
Good for him.
And who knows what's going to happen to it, but it's happening.
And I think they were having a little dinner party at their house.
And then Maggie mentions to John about what happened.
Really?
That's actually happening?
It's actually happening?
Yeah, no, they've got production offices and everything.
I kept a really detailed, super detailed journal about like everything that's going on around me.
And, you know, it became a really I mean, that was an It was a very intense experience being placed into a room, having the doors closed, and you're just left with yourself.
And everything, all your things which define you get stripped away.
Everything gets kind of dropped and you lose who you are and you're just left with your remorse and regret for why you're there.
And you have a lot of time to think about things.
But having said that, as a writer, there was a concrete bench that I could sit on.
I had golf pencils.
I could buy sheets of paper.
And I've never in my life been more productive.
I've never wanted to write more than when everything was taken away.
And I've never felt more about the world.
And I've never...
It was a very monastic...
I was telling Quentin at one point, it was kind of monastic-like.
Well, there's a book cart, and so every now and then you go through the book cart, and mostly it's like Tom Clancy novels.
They love Tom Clancy and stuff like that.
And Clive Barker novels and things like that.
Lo and behold, I found this old Penguin paperback of, you know, an old, old version of Robin Hood written by E. Charles Vivian.
And I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great.
And I start reading it.
And it's like, they get into Evil Hold, which is like this castle where, you know, Marion's father is being kept.
And nobody knows it, and he's there.
And he's not away at Crusades, he's in this prison.
And Robin Hood goes into the prison, and in the moment when he's in the prison, how he sees the wretches that he has to leave behind.
Because they're too wretched to even come out.
Like, how bad the prison is and what he's seeing inside and his observations.
I was shaking after reading it.
I'm shaking thinking about, I mean, the entire experience now, but, you know, it was such a vivid depiction.
I'm like, well, I'm adapting this because I'm feeling it right now.
I'm feeling like what it's like.
I'm feeling what...
It's like to have the boot on your neck.
I mean, rightfully so, but nevertheless.
And so I started writing my version of Robin Hood on pencil and paper.
And as I'm writing it, I was crying as I wrote it.
I was looking at the pages the other day, and there's teardrops all over it.
On every page, it's like, holy crap!
It's like...
When you're writing like that and you're feeling that much, it's not a bad thing to cry when you're writing.
It's like, thank God, I'm feeling.
Like, I'm feeling something and it's traveling into the page.
And also, because I had been a working writer in Hollywood for a long time, just by speed, I had fallen into the very bad habit of composing at my computer, at my laptop.
Like one of those assholes who goes to Starbucks.
And I was that guy.
And so I'm sitting...
I had kind of become used to that.
Well, writing by hand while incarcerated, it reconnected me with pen to paper or pencil to paper.
And it reminded me that when you write something down, you have a different relationship with the word.
Is it you on either typing or whatever, is it you doing that Is it an eight-page thing on transportation, or is it more likely that you're just pacing around, doing a running monologue on public transportation?
Like, you know, if I am in the right place and the right environment and the right food is there, like if there's a, like, if I'm on an island in Greece and the guy comes up from the boat with a basket of fish, which one would you like?
And so about once a week, like when I was in Population, about once a week, the middle of the night or, you know, the lights are down and suddenly the lights come on bright.
Lights are always on, but lights come on bright.
And suddenly a bunch of guards come rushing in through the doors.
know they just storm into the the tank into the uh the section and uh they pull everybody out of their cells and they strip everybody naked and they put you up against a wall so you're up there with like you know sancho and you know leroy and like everybody's suddenly you're all you know one moment you're being kept separate and next thing you know you're all naked together standing up against the wall and they're going through everybody's cell and they're just ripping your cell apart looking for anything and you're going to be able to do that
And usually they're looking for tar heroin or a shank or a weapon of some kind or cell phones, anything.
Like they're looking for anything that's considered contraband.
Okay, for me, they were looking at my writing because when I was in solitary at that time, like literally on kites, a kite is like a requisition form that you send out to the guards.
You're not allowed to talk to the guards.
They don't want to talk to you.
You tell them what you want on a kite and then you give them the kite and then they take it off and maybe it gets answered.
I never had one answered in my life.
And so they come in, they strip everybody naked, they take all your clothes, and they're under the guise of where, you know, we're doing a laundry exchange.
And so everybody gets new clothes and you end up with like these big baggy pants or something too small for you.
And they would...
Look for contraband for everybody.
Well, with me, they would look for whatever I was writing because when I was in solitary, I was writing, you know, like maps.
I would map the place like a fucking idiot.
Like I still was, you know, I'm writing about, oh, Eisenhard, the guard.
I saw him watching, you know, literally saw him watching on a little TV, Nazi propaganda, like Triumph of the Will is playing on his TV and he's watching it.
I'm going to write that down.
So they didn't want me writing all my stuff.
They were like, that guy's a fucking threat.
You get whatever he's written.
And so I noticed that whenever I was taken out of my cell to shower, to go to yard, to do whatever, that they would come in and just take whatever I had written.
So I learned that they couldn't take or open letters to my attorney because it's privileged.
And so what I would do is I would just write, and then whenever I had to leave my cell, like to go to yard, or if they were raiding the cells and taking everybody out and looking for contraband, I would just quickly seal the envelope.
My writing would go in, you know, I always left it when I was working, in the letter to my attorney.
And then as soon as they would rate it, I would just seal the envelope and then that would go out.
And then he would send that letter to my daughter who would then type up the pages that I was writing.
And so that's how I wrote several scripts was like that.
But it gets attributed to it, you know, sort of like when, you know, anything happens to anyone four years after the vaccine, they attribute it to the vaccine.
Could have been the guy just had a fucking heart attack.
But this guy who is a cop, he did not die.
He was not killed by the protesters.
And you watch the video of the shaman dude with the fucking buffalo hat.
They're walking him around.
The cops are guiding him.
How would you ever think that that is going to let you wind up in jail?
How would you ever think that if you're an unsophisticated guy who was wearing fucking face paint, And you're kind of a kook, and you think you're part of a movement, which is really scary, you know?
People get a part of a movement, and they, yeah, we're all doing it!
And then you've got literal government agents encouraging you to do it, moving barriers, letting you in.
They were playing chess, and these idiots were playing checkers, and they all got locked up.
It's also, as soon as you find out that there were government agents that may or may not have incited people to go in, the whole thing fucking changes.
Like, what are you trying to do?
Are you there to serve and protect, or is there some other weird shit going on?
Because it seems like there is, and no one wants to talk about it because you don't want to be that guy.
But at a certain point in time, you should be that guy.
And, you know, there's all this pushback about Trump getting into office because he said one of the first things he said was he was going to release all the January 6th prisoners.
How long do you think they should be in there for?
There's the main movie, then there's that second movie that's kind of like the main movie, but probably you don't know that much about some wild exploitation thing.
What the fuck is this?
Let's watch it and find out.
One of the things that's about our show is...
I don't say, hey, Roger, so find these movies and you watch them and I'll watch them and we'll get together and we'll do it on the phone, too.
Well, no, no, no, we don't do that shit.
All right, you know, we get together to watch the movies together.
You know, so me and Roger will get together and we'll watch three movies and sometimes even four.
And then we'll get together.
Then we have a day off and then we get together on another day and then we record and we're always in the room when we do it.
But the thing is when Roger comes over to watch the films, I've kind of learned that it's like, Roger, I'm starting It's three movies we're going to watch.
I am starting the first movie 20 minutes after you get here.
Because Roger will just get off on some archaic piece of thing.
Even the idea – I mean one, the fact – the idea that – This has replaced the talk show, the talk shows that we grew up watching, and those guys were the kings.
The fact that podcasting, and you're the king of it, but the fact that podcasting has replaced that, but also the fact that...
Anybody that's got something intelligent, has got a cool little setup, has got an interesting personality, and can sell an interesting conversation, theoretically can start a podcast.
But we hadn't really – we had had a little bit of a – We had a falling out.
We had a falling out.
And I call it a sort of a business-related falling out.
And maybe if I had been a little more mature – I was young as a filmmaker and probably unprepared to deal with the complexities of agents and attorneys and Hollywood and money and fame and – The press and the press's agenda and all of that.
I was just approaching it like I'm a SoCal, Gen X, punk filmmaker.
That was how I approached it.
I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.
I'm going to make the movie that I want to make and with that attitude of, you know, I know what I want and I know what's right and nobody can tell me I'm wrong.
Because you have to be a little bit of a megalomaniac to be a director.
You have to be willing to say, no, I'm right, even when everyone is telling you you're wrong.
But when he was on your thing talking about the election, and when he described Tim Waltz as like, well, that guy's a goofball who just should be at a county fair eating hot dogs.
I laughed for 15 minutes and played it back about three different times because I thought that was such a funny comment.
He said it sounds like Kamala Harris is doing voodoo curses.
She's doing gypsy curses, he said.
She speaks in gypsy curses.
And he always does his show with these fucking crazy glasses on.
Like, that's his new thing.
If you ever watch his show, it's the best.
Because it's literally just him ranting and a producer.
And the ability to rant as a singleton operator, as a fucking...
Lone person out there without anybody to bounce ideas off of is a rare talent, and he's the best at it I've ever seen.
Bill Burr is really good at it as well, but Tim Dillon is the best at it I've ever seen.
He's so fucking good at it, and he's just basically performing to one person who's his producer, and he's just ranting.
And so because of that, he's got this crazy muscle that he's developed from years of doing that, where he just rants about all these different things, but it's fucking brilliant.
Maybe this will be a thing now that, like, you know, one or three or four porno movies will come out every year that'll be, like, kind of considered, like, real movies, you know, that couples will go see.
And that was a whole thing, was promoting the idea of couples going to see – A porn film.
And I started to recognize this during Walking Dead, but really Game of Thrones, though.
You mentioned Game of Thrones.
I loved Game of Thrones at first, and then I started realizing, wait a minute, they're getting off on me falling in love with characters, and then the moment I've fallen in love with a character, suddenly they're vivisecting their genitals.
It's like...
And then the cycle begins again.
You fall in love with a different character.
And then they're killing them.
And they're just doing it sadistically because there's nowhere to go other than that.
They're just pushing the ceiling higher and higher.
I didn't really get around to watching Yellowstone the first three years or so.
And then I watched, like, the first season.
I go, wow, this is fucking great.
I've always been a big Kevin Costner fan.
He's fucking wonderful in this, all right?
And I got really caught up in the show and everything, and all of a sudden I'm having a good time, and, you know, I've got a couple seasons I haven't seen, so I'm watching it.
And in the first season, I'm kind of talking about, oh, this is like a movie.
This is like a big movie.
It's like a big movie.
And the guy who writes that is a good writer.
There's good, like, punchy monologues and stuff.
So then I end up watching, like, three seasons of it.
And then I even watched that, like, 1883. Oh, this is a good Western show.
I like Westerns.
But then...
After I've watched like two or three seasons or one season of 1883, look, while I'm watching it, I am compelled.
I'm caught up in it.
But at the end of the day, it's all just a soap opera.
They've introduced you to a bunch of characters.
You actually kind of know all their backstories.
You know everybody's connection with everybody else.
And they spend some time selling that out.
And then everything is just the compellingness of the soap opera.
When it gets to that final episode of the first season, and he's got the suicide vest on, and he's in the room, he can kill the guys that he's been waiting for to do it for the whole movie.
And you don't want him to die, but you're kind of into him, and you kind of want him to pull it off.
And then his daughter calls him on the phone.
Before he does it, she doesn't know what he's going to do, but she gets that little sense from him that something's weird.
Daddy, you need to tell me that you're going to come home right now.
You need to tell me right now that I will see you later tonight.
And the entire series has been built to this scene.
And it's one of the most emotional scenes I've ever seen in a movie, in a TV show, I've ever seen Dramatized.
I don't expect you to do that every week, but at the end of the arc, if you're telling a continuing story, at the end of that fucking season, you need to, bam, drop the mic.
You need to tell me a fucking story, not just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Part of the thing that makes it different is the fact that everyone's watching these continuing stories, continuing stories, continuing stories.
If it were Bonanza, where it's just a set-up story, Charles Bronson shows up, he's a half-breed Indian, and he's working at the Ponderosa for a while, and he gets involved in an adventure, and then at the end, it's done.
Well, on that show, you have the episodes that are maybe not so good, or the episodes that are whatever, they're treading water.
Literally, the tape that we used to rent and handle and shuffle and put back and forth into the drawers and then rent to customers that has been sitting on the shelves with the number on it and everything for the computer.
Well, I told Roger that when we finished the first season, I go, you know, Roger, if we do this the right way, in three or four years' time, we could be considered like Siskel and Eva.
They paid us a lot of money to do it, and we actually did pretty good for our little archaic little movie show that goes on about two hours and everything.
So we actually had about like 2 million listeners, which was like, hey, that was pretty good for us doing our little stupid movie show about VHS. And it's all about VHS. It's about the VHS. We're talking about the box art of VHS tapes.
We talk about the trailers that are in front of the movie.
But one of the things that was interesting when we did it...
Okay, so...
When we made our deal, we're thinking, okay, well, maybe we'll do it here for two years, and we own the show, and then we want to take it to Patreon so we don't have to do commercials.
I like solo stoves, they're great, but I found myself doing stainless steel ads, basically, and talking about solo stoves, and suddenly people on Twitter were saying, Roger Avery will sell you sour milk from a sick cow!
I was like, well, I don't know if I want to be shilling stuff like that anymore.
The thing about it, I thought that would be kind of cool, is if we go to Patreon, we'll lose a whole bunch of listeners, but We'll put a 40-minute version of the show out there for free.
But if you want to get the whole show, then you've got to subscribe.
But the thing is, though, is what I like, and some people are sort of like, hey, fuck those guys.
And I think, well, okay, fine.
And look, I get it.
I'm the guy that, I'm the guy in my 20s would go to happy hour at the bar, all right, and nurse a beer while I ate all the pizza and the chicken wings.
And that was my dinner.
So I get that.
And by the way, if you want to wait until the end of our season and then join for a month and listen to all of our shows that way, you can!
That's an easy way to do it.
You can get everything for free for a month.
You can get everything you want in a month.
We're doing it for the people who care about the show and are subscribing to it.
My daughter Gala is one of our producers on the show and she's on the show with us.
And one of her things is like we get together and we watch the movies at Video Archives and then we know the films and then she doesn't have that access.
well the thing is one of the things that like and there's a lot of movie there's a lot of movie shows out there on podcasts and they talk about stuff and the idea isn't for me to just say oh we're better than all those guys from that place.
But I'll tell you what bugs me about a lot of the other shows is the fact that the people are sincere.
They're completely sincere, but their film knowledge is fucking abysmal.
They really don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
And especially when they're trying to talk about movies from the 70s or something, Well, they were usually born in the 80s.
So they don't know what something was like when it opened up and they don't really have any context.
They definitely don't have context.
That's what they don't have.
They don't have context.
They just know whatever they've learned along the way.
And so they just yank stuff out of their ass and say stuff that's just wrong a lot.
They're just misinformation a lot.
We actually fact check our shit.
All right, you know, we re-record it, all right, to make sure that we just don't yank shit out of it.
And there is a little bit of yanking stuff out of your ass, but when I'm not sure about it, we look it up, and then if I'm wrong, then we change it.
You can count on what we're saying that we're telling you the true fucking shit.
I consider it as a film expert that my show wouldn't be worth listening to if I don't tell you the truth, if I don't give you factual information that you can count on.
And the thing is, you know, it's like, you know, my writing guru as far as, like, film writing, but I think writing in general, was the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael.
And she had one...
One rule for film criticism, and I think this could apply to all writing.
You have to give the reader a compelling reason to read your writing.
It's that fucking simple.
There has to be a compelling reason for you to engage in reading analysis.
As a matter of fact, I have so many, but when I was younger particularly, I was the champion of the movie that all the critics put down and said was the fiasco.
Well, the problem with Ishtar, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, the problem with Ishtar is that it suddenly became not about the movie, but about the production.
And so people had formed an opinion about whether they liked it or not.
Yes, the sex scene in the pool is a little ridiculous, but actually, the fact that it's going for a Hollywood movie that it's going there was actually interesting to me.
But what I really liked, what I really liked her in it, When she beats the shit out of that guy, that's so fucking cool.
When she beats the shit out of the guy at the end, the guy who fucked over her girlfriend and beat up his girlfriend, and then she does these spinning roundhouse kicks and beats the fucking shit out of the guy.
What I love about Showgirls is normally a movie like Showgirls would be made for under a million, go straight to video, star Robert Davi, and just be this little exploitation movie.
And here was an example of that being made for $60 million with Paul Verhoeven directing.
I love it when Elizabeth Berley pushes Gina Gerson down the stairs.
Is it Gina Gerson she pushes down the stairs?
Everything about that movie is awesome.
I think it's great.
I love the film.
I love the film.
I brought it up to all the—I had a dinner once with Verhoeven and a bunch of the producers that filmed it.
I started going off on it, and they all sat there at the dinner watching me go crazy over their film.
And then at the end of it, one of the producers said, well, yeah, that's all nice to hear, but really that movie was just about us doing a lot of cocaine.
Brandos Kurtz tells the story of going into the village and inoculating all the children in the village, shooting their arms with flu shots or something like that, inoculating them.
And then the soldiers came in and then hacked off all the kids' arms.
And then there's like a little pile of arms.
And Kurt says, you know, so we did all that.
Then we came back in the village.
The next time we saw the little pile of all the little arms in there where they hacked them off.
Yeah, that I worked on with him to help turn it into a series.
My daughter and I helped him with it after he had a stroke.
And, you know, you look at his Genghis Khan script and he's, you know, he's realistically talking about these horrific atrocities that just, you know, sewing people up in felt and lighting it on fire and throwing them in river.
Just however you can kill somebody, he figured out a way to do it better.
Right.
But at the same time, he invented paper money, and he invented the Silk Road, and he pulled that whole region of the world together under one empire.
And over the course of it, you start out as...
Almost like Conan, Conan the warrior, Conan the conqueror, Conan the king.
It does feel a little like we're in kind of neo-feudalistic times where there's highwaymen that you have to contend with when you go out and everything's a little more fragile.
Okay, so I go on a show and I said that I like Joker 2. Well, I say I like Joker 2, and now there's 150 articles that come out, all these cannibalized articles.
One person listens to the thing and writes an article about it, and then there's 150 rip-off articles.
On that.
And then you read the comments, it's like, man, Quinn's a fucking asshole.
You could hear a pin drop, and then it was over, and everyone was still kind of in this collective emotional state, and they just all kind of left the theater, and they'd just seen something emotional.
And they all kind of just moved out into the lobby, and in this emotional state, and it was like, That sounds like fucking fantastic.
I mean, I think one of the most magical things about movies is that it can speak to you at different times of your life, you know, at the different windows of opportunity in your life.
So you might see a movie and not like it.
And then, you know, people might see Joker 2 today and not really care for it.
And then five years from now, revisit it and watch it again.
And you're in a different place.
Culture is in a different place.
Everything's in a different place.
And you have a different perspective on the movie and maybe you like the movie.
I mean, having been a filmmaker and knowing the struggle that goes into getting something on screen, I know how hard it is sometimes to get what you have up here onto screen and it doesn't always work and sometimes you're faking it by the time it gets to the cut.
But, you know, it's not an easy thing to...
So when I watch a movie now...
I'm applying my life experience to it.
And I'm like, okay, this movie may not be the greatest movie, but this is somebody's, you know, vision.
What's happened with our show that I think is really cool, again, for the fans that follow it and everything, is...
In our first season, we ended up covering about 70 movies all together.
We mentioned a zillion movies in the course of a show, but we covered about 70 movies all together between the three movies that we did over the course of 26 episodes.
And we kind of created new classics, at least amongst the people who followed the show.
Because they followed it, and they liked it, and they watched some old Mexican horror movie like Demonoid.
Best thing about the horror genre and science fiction is that they're the best vehicles to kind of study culture and sociological issues because you have that abstraction layer that makes people think, oh, I'm just watching a science fiction film or I'm just watching a horror movie.
Like you watch Dawn of the Dead and, yeah, you're watching a movie about zombies in a shopping mall.
Or are you watching a movie about the vanishing middle class being drawn to the consumer temple because it's what they remembered from their lives that was an important place to them?
Like a film that you aspire to create something like like when you first did you say I got you know like a Composite be like I want to be the next Eddie Murphy.
It was a composite I have like a kind of a top three filmmaker, you know When you're a young filmmaker And when you're a young child you look to your parents to learn how to behave and You know, you're a child, and you look to them, and you're like, they teach you how to be.
And so, at the beginning of your life, you're copying your parents.
Because that's who you love, and that's what you're copying.
When you're a young filmmaker, Very frequently, you kind of copy your parents, your cinematic parents.
And, you know, so in my case, you know, in many filmmakers, like, for instance, Stanley Kubrick, who is one of my favorite filmmakers, who I'm always thinking about his zero-point perspective, his reverse tracking shots.
I just love the intention of his shots and how he assembles his movies.
Metropolis is a super, super powerful and kind of important movie that's exactly talking about everything that's going on today that people should see.
The movie I was thinking about was M, which is his movie with Peter Lorre about the pedophile who's...
And the movie's made just before the Nazis took power.
And so he's making a movie that's really about the rise of...
Hitlerian fascism in Europe, but he's doing it through this movie about a pedophile.
And Peter Lorre is fantastic, and it's actually his first sound movie.
Like, Fritz Lang hadn't made a sound movie, and so every single shot in the film is based on sound.
So he'll have shadows talking and the backs of people's heads talking, or even the device of the movie is Peter Lorre whistling Peter Giant, you know, That becomes like the device by which they find the killer.
So the whole movie is about sound.
So as a young filmmaker, if you want to learn how to use sound in a movie, that's the movie to see.
Because every single shot, like it used to be you would show an empty frame and it would just be a shot of nothing.
But, you know, now Fritz Lang is able to juxtapose like a woman has lost her daughter.
She's calling for her daughter.
And so she's looking for her daughter and she's looking for her and Elsa!
Elsa!
And they cut to an empty shot of a stairwell and you hear her.
Elsa!
And they cut to like, you know, an empty playground.
And that's the two men that are throughout the movie that are constantly in the background of the film who eventually in the final shots of the film, you see like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in that final scene in the toy store when she's looking at the Rosemary's baby bassinet, which is totally Kubrick saying something, and they never take their eyes off their daughter until the moment they take their eyes off and the final line of the movie is coming up.
You see those two guys walking off with the daughter.
They're taking her away.
They've given their daughter to the pedo cult.
That's what's happened at the end of the movie.
And there's an incident where when they first screened the movie in England, people who were outside apparently...
This is all second-hand, by the way.
There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it's my movie, you can't cut it!
How bizarre that something that would have cost like hundreds of millions of dollars, like if you wanted to do a film, like a pixel type, you know, one of those crazy movies where you have all this like insane animation.
Yeah, my original plan for that movie, because I was going to direct it myself, was to make it, like, you know, in Iceland, you know, under $10 million, you know, just...
Really dirty.
I wanted it to be like an early Terry Gilliam film, like Jabberwocky.
That was actually the one Neil and I were thinking about when...
And Steve Bing, and I said, if another agent calls me, I'm firing the agency.
And they're like, will you at least meet with the producer?
And so I went ahead and I meet with them.
And he says, listen, if I don't make this film with Zemeckis, with Bob, I'm going to miss the moment.
I'm going to lose the movie.
It's going to be over.
Just what's your price?
Just tell me what's your price.
And I said, I don't have a price.
I don't work like that.
He said, listen, everybody's got a price.
I said, well, I may have one, but I'm not going to tell you.
And he's like, look, why don't you just tell me?
Just discourage me.
So I said, okay.
You want me to discourage you?
And so I started, like, making shit up.
I need this.
I want that.
I want this.
I want this.
I tried to come up with how much money had anybody ever made on a script, and let's add some money to that.
I went over the top.
He's like...
Well, Roger, that is...
And I had grown a beard to make the movie and, like, grew my hair long like a Viking to learn about, you know, why Vikings had beards, etc.
All that kind of stuff.
I'm making the movie!
I'm a Viking!
He said, well, Roger, that is really discouraging, but we have a deal!
And I was like, well...
I'd never done something for money before.
I'd always done it for passion, and then the money came.
This was the first time in my life that I'd ever made a choice based on money.
This titanic amount of money, and I understand broke.
And I went home and I cried.
And then the check came and nothing dries tears like money.
And then Zemeckis invited me into the process, which was really great of him.
He really wanted me and Neil to be at his side and collaborate with him.
And it was a fabulous experience.
But to be honest, I was like, who am I now?
What does it all mean?
I just gave away something I'd wanted to do my entire life.
I've always been chasing this John Borman film, Excalibur.
I think it's one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the Arthurian legends.
And if you watch Beowulf and Excalibur, they're very similar, actually, thematically.
And so I was like, who am I now?
What does it all mean?
I don't even know if I want to make a movie anymore.
What do I have to tell now, now that I've just completely sold out?
And then I was at a dinner, a big dinner, and I was driving home that night, and I was giving somebody who was at the dinner a lift.
My wife was in the backseat of the car, and I told my daughter I was going to be home by midnight.
We lived in Ojai, and it was dark.
And I... So I was speeding.
I have a lead foot.
And I was speeding to get there.
Without getting into the details of what happened, I lost control of the car.
There was another vehicle, but they fled the scene.
I lost control of the vehicle.
I think my tire blew, but I was going into a ditch and I knew I was going into this deep ditch because it was right near my house full of rocks and stuff.
And I knew if I go in there, we'll die.
And so I turned into the thing and then I turned away from it to try to – the car spun out.
And I ended up on the other side of the street where I knew there was like a cow pasture.
And I was like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen there?
Well, it was pretty bad.
There was a telephone pole and I hit the telephone pole.
My passenger took the impact and my wife was thrown from the car.
When I came to, all I could hear was the horn.
My hearing is going to have glass in my mouth and I'm injured as well.
I climb out of the car and it's dark.
It's really dark.
But somebody's already arrived, the XDA from Ventura County, who did all the drunk driving laws and put those on the books.
And he was the first person on the scene.
I was right near the fire department.
They showed up shortly afterwards.
But when I jumped out of the car, I came running around to see what happened, and I saw my wife on the asphalt.
She'd been thrown from the vehicle.
And I threw myself onto my knees on the pavement, and I found myself in that moment Asking for the one thing that mattered, which was just life.
She looked dead.
And I just, in that moment, I dug down, I begged her to come back to life.
And I just, I said, I will give anything for life.
Just in any form, I'll take it.
And in that moment, she came back to life.
It was like...
The life came back into her.
Okay, it was a completely fucked up scene.
My other passenger is dying in the car or dead.
The police are suddenly there.
And next thing I know, I'm in jail.
And suddenly, you're like...
Suddenly I found myself in jail.
I found myself guilty of manslaughter.
And something that is absolutely irreversible happening, which is, you know, someone lost their life at my hand.
And so after that, I, you know, I ended up, I found myself in jail and doing time.
I didn't even have time to register that it was there.
And it was gone.
Because it was like it was not real.
And then you find yourself in jail.
And suddenly everything is gone.
Career is gone.
Everybody stops calling.
It's over.
Two hit films?
Doesn't matter.
It's all over.
In fact, it was right in the middle of the publicity on Beowulf.
It was just toward the end of it.
And it was...
It's the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me.
And I... And I found myself then alone in jail, incarcerated, alone with my remorse and regret and really getting existential about things.
Really like coming to appreciate...
You know, simple existence is the best thing there is.
People don't appreciate what we have.
You don't appreciate it until it's gone.
First of all, we live in bodies of glass.
My wife was horribly injured, and it has been a decade to not just rebuild our lives, but to For her to come back to health, even.
What it did, though, because I would do anything to reverse that, to reverse what happened.
I would give anything to do it.
And I don't say this lightly, but having said that, I'm kind of grateful as well.
Because I was...
Like, asleep walking through life.
And it wasn't until that happened that I completely, like, it changed how I see everything.
It was like my third eye opened up.
I don't view anything the same way.
I, you know, once you've been incarcerated and And you've been deprived of everything and you have a lot of time to think and be existential.
You come out of that, at least I came out of that experience, and, you know, I looked at a tree and I was like, okay, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.
I hope I never not feel this way, this appreciation for a cloud.
You know, to be able, like, when you're imprisoned, to be able to pet a cat, for example.
It's so simple.
It's such a nothing thing, you think.
Okay, to be able to pet an animal is, like, a gift.
The simplest things are gifts.
When I was in jail, it was also a little bit like a comedy.
You have people walking in circles, and everybody's trying to control the outside.
So you start really seeing human behavior up front.
I mean, when I was in jail, there...
Literally, during the Academy Awards, it's on the TV in the tank.
And not only that, but Greg Shapiro, who produced the Rules of Attraction for me, my producer, who came and visited me with Robin Wright in the days that followed, he won for Zero Dark Thirty.
And so I'm like, they're like...
To be taken from one point where you feel like you're at the top and you're like, oh, you think you understand things.
No.
I'm going to take you and put you at the bottom.
But let me tell you something.
In that moment, I was sitting on the asphalt and my wife came back to life.
I immediately knew what I had to say as a filmmaker after that.
It was like, whatever cynicism I had had about the movie and not making it, it just went away.
And the ecstatic experiences, and they were ecstatic that I had in jail, were like, I mean, you see things kind of for real.
When you see somebody get hanged by their celly in a cell, or when you know that You know, oh, that El Salvadorian MS-13 hitman guy, he's going to kill that gay dude.
He's going to kill him in the yard.
I'll go lock myself in my cell.
Literally, I'll go lock myself in.
Shut the door because you know shit is going to go down.
And also, you really know who stands with you after something horrible happens.
And like John Langley, our customer from Video Archives, ended up being like, like I said, when I was in jail, he loaned me money and he gave me my first job when I got out.
That was our customer who did that.
And so...
Like, I value our customers.
And especially John and his family.
And Maggie, who I... It really is...
I talk about John a lot, but really Maggie.
She was really my big champion, I think.
And so, anyhow, I... You know, what it taught me, actually...
Because I was a filmmaker and I was up my own ass most of the time.
But what it kind of taught me was, you know...
Be compassionate to other people because you might not know it, but they might be going through shit in their lives.
You know, and God forbid it be something health-related, which is almost out of your control.
But, you know, people are suffering and people are struggling.
And I used to be a lot more cavalier about people and kind of fuck with people and be forceful with people and not really care as much.
Now I'm acutely aware of people and, you know, what they may be going through.