Matt Walsh takes you behind the scenes of the emotional support group scene in his movie "Am I Racist?" Today's Sponsor: ExpressVPN: Go to https://expressvpn.com/walshYT and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free!
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| ♪♪ Okay, we're here at the movies. | |
| We're gonna watch a scene from my new film, Am I Racist? | |
| And I'll give a little commentary as we go along, walk you through it. | |
| Before we play this, quick setup if you haven't seen the movie yet. | |
| This is the first support group that I go to as I'm just beginning the journey to decenter my whiteness, and I'm really confronting my internalized racism, and so it's very important that I go to this group. | |
| It's a support group for people that are dealing with their own whiteness. | |
| At this point where it picks up, I've already been at the group for a while, and I've been participating. | |
| I feel really good about it. | |
| I don't know how the other people in the group feel. | |
| I get emotional at one point. | |
| I leave to the cry room. | |
| Which they have set up specifically for white people who cry because you don't want to cry in front of a black woman, we're told. | |
| While I'm in the cry room getting very emotional, that's when the people in the group realize who I am. | |
| They realize that I'm a dastardly conservative commentator. | |
| And I come back in and the tone is very much shifted. | |
| And that's where it picks up. | |
| So let's watch. The white participants in the group feel that there's something in themselves that they have to overcome. | |
| When all that's being requested... | |
| I have no idea why she stands. | |
| I've watched this scene a million times. | |
| I don't know why that woman stands. | |
| How are you? Sign of respect, maybe. | |
| Sorry about that. Oh, no problem. You good? | |
| Yeah. Remind me of your name again. | |
| Uh, uh, Steven. | |
| Steven? Yeah? Okay. | |
| Um... Dude, do you want to come up? | |
| Come up? Yeah, do you want to come up and... | |
| Okay, so pause it there for a second. | |
| Sure, what do you want? So this is interesting because, you know, when you're making a movie like this and it's all real, we're talking to real people and we want to get authentic reactions. | |
| There's no script or anything. | |
| You go into any scene or any interview, you don't know exactly what anybody's going to say. | |
| You know what you want to get out of the scene because we're telling a story. | |
| We're trying to expose something. | |
| We're doing all that. So in my head, going into any of these situations, there's like a It's a tree with different branches of possibilities of what they could say and how I should react to it. | |
| But sometimes they hit you with something you weren't expecting. | |
| And so when I came in and I sat down and I knew they were not going to be happy, that they'd want to kick me out, I did not expect that Brescia, who's leading the group, would ask me if I want to come up and lead the group. | |
| That was a total... That was an unexpected thing. | |
| And so in my head, right now, there's a little bit of... | |
| It's a quandary because I'm like, well, this is a... | |
| Maybe I should come get up and start leading the group. | |
| I didn't expect to have that opportunity, but at the same time, we need them to kick me out because we also need that for the story. | |
| This is our inciting incident, the reason why I end up wearing a costume. | |
| So I had to decline. | |
| I declined the opportunity to get up and lead the group. | |
| I think ultimately that was the right choice, but I still wrestle with that. | |
| My physical safety and yours and everybody else's here is okay. | |
| Why would your physical safety not be okay? | |
| Did I miss something? I don't feel comfortable. | |
| What? Can you guys catch me up to speed on what's going on here? | |
| You don't need to be caught up. We're gonna be silent. | |
| The woman next to me looks like she's gonna start laughing. | |
| It depends on how you count them. | |
| Let's pause it for a second. Let's pause it. | |
| Right there. Yeah, right there. So this woman, the blonde woman next to me, I feel like she's a... | |
| And I've also been trying to figure this out ever since the movie. | |
| I think she's a secret fan because she almost broke multiple times. | |
| The guy on the other side of me is not a fan at all. | |
| That guy is definitely not a fan. | |
| You know, the other interesting detail about that dude is that he's a professional cuddler. | |
| A cuddlist. Is what they call him in the business. | |
| That didn't come up during the scene, but we just knew that about him. | |
| Because, you know, we do our background research. | |
| He's a professional cuddlist. He cuddles people for a living. | |
| I didn't get a very cuddly vibe from this guy, I've got to be honest with you. | |
| The whole time I was there, it didn't feel very welcoming from him. | |
| Let's continue. I would really appreciate it if you left, so that the people who actually want to be here and deserve to be here can get what they need. | |
| I do want to be here. Can you please leave? | |
| I would like it if you left. | |
| I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey. | |
| Come with me. Well, I didn't consent to be touched. | |
| I'm not offering to touch you. | |
| I'm proud of that line. | |
| I gotta say I'm proud of that. | |
| Okay, I'll admit it. | |
| I'll admit it. My name's not Steven. | |
| Maybe you already knew that. | |
| My name is Matt Walsh. | |
| We know. I just was here on this journey that I'm just starting, but I see that I'm not wanted. | |
| If you were on your journey, then you would have told us who you were, your real name, but you didn't. | |
| Are you saying I needed a better disguise? | |
| Is that what you... I don't know, maybe. | |
| But you can figure that out as you walk out the door. | |
| Maybe. | |
| Yeah. | |
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| Thank you so much. | |
| I really had the transformative experience myself. | |
| And my pronouns are he, him, You can see. | |
| Wait, can we go back? | |
| Yeah, right there. That's a little Easter egg in the movie, some people have noticed. | |
| That's one of my black friends, Ben, who appears multiple times in the film. | |
| He has quite a prominent role. | |
| You see him in the background there. Only in this scene, he's not my friend. | |
| He's pretending. You can see he's pretending to be upset that I have infiltrated and crashed this seminar. | |
| So there's a lot of, you know, there's like the movie within the movie within the movie. | |
| And one of the ways that you can make a movie like this is that there has to be a whole other kind of narrative playing out in the background that is not on camera except for only brief glimpses. | |
| And there it is Eddie. I think he's playing the role really, really brilliantly. | |
| You can see he's got his hand on the hip. | |
| He's like, who is this guy? | |
| Get this guy out of here. Really well done. | |
| Well done. Well done. Performance. | |
| And my pronouns are he, him. | |
| Yeah. I'll walk. | |
| ♪♪ ...2514 can transmit on tag-2. What's your message? | |
| The cops did come. They did show up in real life. | |
| I was long gone. | |
| I fled the state. | |
| I was in New Jersey by the time they showed up. | |
| And they called the police. My mere presence in the room caused them pain. | |
| I'll never be accepted. Now look at the acting. | |
| Look at the acting in this scene here. | |
| If they know that I'm Matt Walsh, I'll always be an outsider. | |
| This scene here, because this is a scene that we shot in the bathroom, actually, in the bathroom here at DW Studios. | |
| We had this all, and normally that would be, it's frowned upon to set up cameras and lighting inside a bathroom, especially at work, at your workplace. | |
| That's an HR violation. It's like in the handbook. | |
| You don't do that. But in this case, it was okay because nobody else was using the bathroom at the time. | |
| And anyway, this little scene here, this little moment, I consider to be my finest acting moment in the film and in my professional career. | |
| And it doesn't seem like much. | |
| Because on the surface, all I'm doing is just staring expressionless in a mirror. | |
| But there's all these... | |
| It's subtle. It's very subtle. | |
| The acting here... | |
| It's Oscar-worthy, if we're being honest. | |
| This is Daniel Day-Lewis-level acting. | |
| It looks like I'm just staring, but it's in my eyes. | |
| You can see... | |
| You see that I have one button unbuttoned on the shirt? | |
| That's another... It's a little subtle move, which expresses... | |
| That I forgot to button the top button, I guess. | |
| But anyway, that's what you want to look for in this scene. | |
| The acting is all in the eyes here. | |
| I need to look like one. | |
| Like someone who is progressive, tolerant, enlightened. | |
| Let me think. Have I ever met anyone like that? | |
| Ah, yes. Yes, I have. | |
| What is a woman? | |
| Why do you ask that question? | |
| Here it is. The superhero origin story. The big reveal. | |
| ♪♪♪ There we go. Yeah, that's the scene. | |
| You know, something else I could tell. | |
| I don't think I've... I think this is a behind-the-scenes note that I haven't told anybody yet. | |
| I don't think it's come up or I haven't revealed it, but... | |
| Well, I get asked a lot about deleted scenes. | |
| Are there deleted scenes? Of course, there are a lot of deleted scenes. | |
| Anytime you're making a movie, you're going to have deleted scenes. | |
| If you're making a movie like this, you're going to have a lot of deleted scenes because we have, like, I don't know, 10 hours of raw footage, probably more. | |
| But... Actually, this little reveal here of me wearing the professor, you know, the callback, as you can see, we're not very subtle about it, modeled my look after the professor from What is a Woman, who, by the way, I'm sure is thrilled that he made an appearance in a second Matt Walsh film. | |
| Anyway, this reveals, actually, this is part of a longer, this is actually, what you see right there is part of a 12-hour, I'm not exaggerating, part of a 12-hour shoot that we did. | |
| We had a whole wardrobe. | |
| You know the classic from every movie ever made where they've got the wardrobe change scene, the wardrobe montage, where you're trying on different crazy costumes before you land on the right one. | |
| And we had a whole scene like that that we did. | |
| It took 12 hours to film. | |
| They had me in all these different costumes. | |
| And it was torture. | |
| The worst thing I've ever done in my career is a torturous... | |
| Not only is it 12 hours of filming, but you're putting me in wardrobe and makeup over and over and over again. | |
| Which is my least favorite thing. | |
| And making me wear silly costumes, which is even less of my favorite thing. | |
| And so we had that scene. | |
| But we ultimately decided that it was too long. | |
| And we didn't need all of it. | |
| All we needed was this shot. | |
| And so that hit the cutting room floor. | |
| And you'll never see it. | |
| It'll never see the light of day. | |
| Don't ask me if we're going to release it. | |
| We're not. You will never, ever see that scene. | |
| I think what we left with is even better. | |
| I don't know how to end this. | |
| Is that good? |