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00:00What film or series lit your fuse as a young man and made you have to tell stories on screen?
00:21I think growing up in the sort of in the proximity of the business my whole life,
00:29my dad, my mom, and all the people who were always around, there was sort of a,
00:35you know, it was sort of in the bloodstream, as it were, and it kind of in the atmosphere
00:42that this is what people did. And the people were creators, and people were artists, and people were,
00:48you know, they pretended for a living, and they made stuff up, and they kind of performed.
00:53You know, even people in my sort of extended family life, people like Sue Mangers, for instance,
01:01the legendary Hollywood agent who was one of my dad's closest friends, like, she was never not
01:06on, right? So it's like you had this sort of, when you're part of a showbiz family,
01:14the people around tend to be showbiz people who don't turn that off, do you know what I mean?
01:22There's no pause button, really. So I was always around it. And so I think that
01:27it was only a matter of time before something kind of gave me a deeper understanding of that,
01:33or kind of helped me connect to what it means to make something, or what it is to actually
01:41be involved in the creation of something. And I think, really, the memory that always sticks
01:47with me the most is watching Beetlejuice. I watched Beetlejuice over and over and over again.
01:51We had it on VHS, and I watched it, I feel like I watched it every day after school for weeks,
01:59when I was probably about, I guess about 14 or 15. And there's a bit at the beginning where,
02:08it's the title sequence, where it sort of starts with the town. It's this kind of helicopter shot
02:14over the town, and then it gradually dissolves into an overhead of the model that they're
02:20building in the attic, that Gina Davis and Alec Baldwin are building up the town.
02:25And it sort of seamlessly dissolves, and then it comes to their house,
02:29and it stops on the house, and I think it says directed by Tim Burton, and then the spider comes
02:34over the top of the house. And it's this wonderful sort of playful moment, and then the hand, and
02:39then Alec Baldwin's hand, or maybe it's her hand, comes and takes the spider off. And for whatever
02:45reason, that moment, it really is literally the deus ex machina of the creator, right? Like, oh,
02:52the hand of the artist reaching in and positioning something on a model of the town that the movie
02:59takes place in had this sort of multi-layered texturalism that was kind of like, it was an
03:07epiphany for me. It was like, I understood in that moment, oh, there's someone who's mastering all of
03:12this. There's someone, I didn't even necessarily know to call it the director yet, but there's
03:17someone who's making decisions. There are no decisions until someone makes them. And I think
03:23that was really the first thing that really blew my mind like that. And then, you know, then kind
03:27of you happen on to things like, oh, what's A Clockwork Orange? And then you watch A Clockwork
03:31Orange when you're 15, you're like, Jesus Christ, you can really, wow, talk about mastering something,
03:36talk about having a point of view and a style and a kind of pure invention. There's so much
03:42invention in Kubrick and especially in his science fiction ones, which are so bold,
03:482001 and Clockwork Orange being the science fiction ones to my mind. So it was really those,
03:55it was really those pictures that at that time in my life, Twin Peaks, right? I was of a certain age
04:01when Twin Peaks came out. I think I was probably in 10th or 11th grade when Twin Peaks came out. And that was
04:06still when TV was once a week and you got a dose of it and then you kind of had to deal with that
04:11dose for seven days. And especially, I think it's the third episode of the first season when it goes
04:16into the Black Lodge and it goes into the backwards stuff and the little person and the speaking
04:21backwards in the red room and all that. And again, just feeling sort of the limitlessness
04:27of what was permitted. No one was doing anything remotely like that at the time. And it really was
04:34a light bulb. Yeah, I felt that way. What you just said about Twin Peaks and not really again until I
04:42saw the first season of True Detective and it was the same thing. It was like, wow, it really is.
04:49It really is exceptional when you have the opportunity to feel like you're right there
04:56and something that's being done. And I mean, wow. And I have to say, when I saw long legs,
05:05I thought to myself, wow, here's the son of really the actor who birthed this genre, really.
05:16And now with Nicolas Cage, his performance is so profound and compelling and daring. And you know,
05:25this is another villain, another iteration that sneaks up on you as unexpected as Norman Bates.
05:34And it's being done by the son of Anthony Perkins. And I just thought to myself,
05:40I was first thinking it must have been daunting for you to not feel like you're in the shadow
05:50of the father, your father and in his most famous role. But then I saw you actually played
05:57the young version of that character in the in the sequel. How in your mind,
06:03how did you wrestle with that? I think that growing up there was the
06:11there was the understanding that what my dad had done in that movie was was so indelible.
06:18And that that was that that was a distinctly positive thing that that that that he wasn't
06:23doing what everyone else was doing. And it's one of those movies like when you watch on the
06:27waterfront or something like that, and you see Brando's kind of like in another movie or like
06:32everyone's kind of like in an old fashioned movie. And they're all kind of going through
06:35the paces of being in an old fashioned movie. It's all very kind of stately and classical.
06:39And then he's kind of doing his own thing. And all of the energy, like a vacuum is just going
06:46to him every time he's he's there. Hackman has the same impact when I'm watching movies. When
06:53you watch the French Connection, and there's there's scenes with Hackman,
06:57I was watching it recently, there's scenes with Hackman where he's looking away from the camera.
07:02And he's more interesting than the person looking who the camera is facing. And it's a really
07:08outrageous thing. And Hackman in the conversation, I was just thinking about yesterday to the same
07:13kind of thing, a very muted performance that brings so much energy towards him. It's such a
07:18magical thing. And I don't even know how it's how it's done. It's part of the reason why I don't
07:24why acting has never been a thing for me, really. It's like, I don't know how to do that. I don't
07:27know what I don't know what that I don't know what that is. So in growing up with my with my dad,
07:34and knowing that he had he had made that impact, and that what he had done was so kind of modern,
07:41right, that it was like, it was like, it was it was so it was so almost abstract in terms of every
07:49what everybody else was was doing, there was there was this, there was this new kind of color that
07:53you could use, there was this new sort of application that you could apply to your performance
07:58that was, that was that was going to shake everybody else around you really up. And so,
08:04I think, I think, on the one hand, for a lot of my life, I felt overawed by that,
08:11which is a thing, I think a typical response. And then, you know, for me, and I say it in a
08:17lot of interviews, like, Long Live was hardly the first script I wrote. It wasn't the first
08:22movie I made. But it was the first time that I think I felt fully playful, right, fully,
08:31fully invested in the quality of like, you can really do what you want, you can really push it
08:36the way you want it to be pushed, you can really, you can really have a good time with what you're
08:42doing. For me, Long Live is a great time. And it's a really, it's a fun picture. It's a funny picture.
08:48And it's a weird one. It's very kind of punk and rock and roll, obviously, but it's meant to be
08:53strangely, it's meant to be joyous, which is why Nicolas Cage, when his energy came onto the
08:58project, it made so much sense for me, because Nick is pure joy. And Nick is someone who and I
09:04said this in a lot of interviews, too. I don't know anybody who loves movies, the movies more
09:11than Nicolas Cage does. Anyone who knows more about it has a more encyclopedic memory of everything,
09:17more of a reverence for it. He just wants the thing that he's doing to be great. And it's not
09:24about he wants himself to be great. That comes with. But he wants the thing to be as cool and
09:32poppy and popping and electrified and jumping off the screen as it can be. And that's why he is the
09:39way he is. And he does it for the love of the art. And early on, he said to me, he said, you know,
09:46I just I guess I got to tell you, he said, in Cage's sort of constellation of actors who had
09:52formed his impression of what the art was, it was Brando. It was Dean. It was Montgomery Clift
10:00and Tony Perkins. And when he said that to me and Cage does not bullshit, there's zero bullshit on
10:06Cage. When he said that to me, I had this it was it was like, oh, this is meant this is meant to be
10:14because it's it's it's all it's all of a piece now at all at all. It's all organically coming
10:18together as a thing. And in the writing of the character of Longlegs, I really just went for
10:24like what's what's the fun, modern, weird, wild, punky kind of self-referential pop version of
10:32the serial killer that we could that we could do. And when Cage came on it, the first thing I said
10:37to him was, dude, you can change anything you want. You can you can do whatever dialogue you
10:42want to do. You can change it. You can throw everything out. You can improvise. I don't.
10:46You're Nicolas Cage and I'm not. And his first response was, no, no, no, man, I want to do
10:50everything that you wrote just the way you wrote it. And at the end of the day, everything that's
10:54in the movie was written when he got the script. We didn't we didn't add anything. We didn't take
11:00away anything. It was just as I had written it. And that was just another again, proof positive
11:05that Cage just serves the text and he serves the material and he serves the project and he fills it
11:12magical. You know, it's so interesting when when you were mentioning when you were mentioning some
11:19of those outsized performances like Hackman, I thought of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter,
11:29where it was like you couldn't take your eyes off the guy. And what's interesting. And so he won
11:35the Oscar for for that portrayal. And I thought to myself when I left Longlegs, when I left the
11:43theater, you know, I don't know how they do it because you have to get people to see the movie.
11:48But Nicolas Cage should be an awards contender. And yet Longlegs is almost the exact opposite.
11:56Like you don't even know it's Nicolas Cage. I mean, you know, what do you think of that?
12:02I think, you know, we sort of all kind of talked about it. I've talked about it. Neon's talked
12:06about it. Nick has talked about it. And for the way we look at it is wouldn't it be nice if the
12:14horror genre was appreciated for what it is and not sort of relegated to something like, oh, well,
12:21you can't nominate a horror movie because that's like, you know, that's sort of like that stuff.
12:26Because even recently, Paul Schrader kind of had a weird quote. He posted on his Facebook or
12:34something about calling the horror genre a ghetto. And it's like, oh, no, I really feel like it's the
12:41opposite. It's like it's the genre that contains the entirety of everything, because it's both
12:48what's ultra real, the fact that we all die, and what it's what everything that's hidden from us,
12:53the supernatural, the beyond, the shadow behind the curtain, whatever you want to call it.
12:58And so it's wild that horror movies are still sort of thought of as kind of like the bastard child
13:04of the industry, when at the end of the day, it's the only genre you can count on. Besides the
13:10comic book movie, right? It's the only genre that's that's systematically attractive to an
13:16audience. And if that's not what we're doing, I don't know what it is. So the idea that that Nick
13:20would be recognized for this movie is awesome. I hope something like that happens. He certainly
13:26deserves it. Nothing about me. Well, now, did you have a North Star when you wrote this movie and
13:37made it the way that you did? Was there a film or something that you would say was kind of the
13:43North Star that showed you the path? Well, the obvious the obvious Silence of the Lambs thing
13:50is was was was I deployed my love of that movie as as an invitation to the audience to get
13:58comfortable, right as an invitation to the viewer to say, you know, this thing, it's the thing that
14:03you know, where it's a serial killer, they can't figure it out. So they get the most unlikely
14:08person to figure it out. And then she figures it out. You know, it's that. And so by by sort of
14:13rolling the carpet out of that narrative, and kind of really, in some cases, really aping that
14:19narrative, beat for beat. I mean, we have the scene where she goes into the office and the older cop
14:24says, there's the evidence board. What do you think? Yeah, that's just lifted out of Scott Glenn
14:30and Jodie Foster. And so once once we had that, we, but I only wanted that for that much of it,
14:38I wanted my hands off of it at that point. Beyond that, you know, the only way I can see it is,
14:46it's like the the analogy of the 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters eventually will come up with the
14:54collected works of Joan Didion or whatever. And for me, it was like the 100 monkeys that's in my
14:59brain are representative of everything I've ever seen, especially painting, poetry, music,
15:09more so than movies, probably more so than movies probably become these 100 monkeys that are just
15:17sort of making a mess until it comes together. And so, you know, my DP and I we we never talked
15:25about horror movies, we never referenced, oh, it should it should be like, Rosemary's Baby,
15:30or what if it was like The Shining? We it was it was what what it you know, it was like, gosh,
15:36don't you love Gus Van Zandt's movies? You know, it's like, you find these commonalities, these
15:43tastes, the places where your taste intersect with other people's. It's just the stuff that
15:48turns you on, you know, and that's, it's funny, you think about, I was thinking about recently,
15:52like, when it turned, you hear people say, like, oh, what turns me on sexually, changes over the
15:59course of a lifetime, people change, like things, you're attracted to different things over different
16:04or different aspects, as life goes on. And I think that, that it's kind of like that with artwork,
16:11too. It's like, different things are penetrating you and influencing you and sparking you. And
16:20you kind of collect those things. And in this movie, weirdly, it was Gus Van Zandt, like Gus
16:25Van Zandt was the if there was a North Star director for this movie was Gus Van Zandt, as
16:30odd as that may sound. Huh? And any particular any film in particular? Yeah, I know, especially
16:37Gus Van Zandt's Last Days, the one that sort of Kurt Cobain ish one with Michael Pitt. So yeah,
16:44fabulous. And My Own Private Idaho, of course, just these kind of really soulful art pictures
16:51that take their time, don't acknowledge the rules as it is, as you know, as they're put forth,
17:00and become very kind of form of sort of weirdly naturalistic, really soulful things that go slow,
17:12and, and don't rush. And, you know, we, the DP and I, we, you know, it's like, when you're
17:19turned on by something, you get so much out of that. There's a bit in Last Days, when I think
17:25he's, I think he's playing the guitar, as there's a shot of the window, and it's outside. And the
17:30camera pulls back and it says, it's Harry Civides, Harris Civides was the DP. And they did this thing
17:37where they pull back from the window into the woods. And it's like, a minute or more of this
17:44long dolly shot going all the way back to the woods, and the house is just getting smaller and
17:48smaller and smaller. And we were so obsessed with that. And we discovered that it turned out that
17:54what they had done was they had done, it was a dolly thing, and that they were picking up dolly
17:58track as they would go. So they had a whole crew of guys picking up dolly track, so that you would
18:03never see the dolly. And just something like that, like, what a beautiful thing to do on a
18:11movie, why not? That became our North Star that that that kind of like, the beauty of creation
18:18and of inspiration just became where we were coming from. The rest of it, you know, you can't
18:21go straight at anything, right?
18:24No, I think you cannot. You know, I wonder, as you're making your way, as a filmmaker, was there
18:31a moment where you did something, and maybe you got maybe it was a success? Maybe it was the
18:37approval of the from someone whose opinion really mattered to you that made you feel like, you know
18:43what? Yeah, I can do this. I know I've got a famous dad. And I realized that I have to deal with with
18:51all this, but I belong here.
18:54Yeah, there, there's there's a few of those when I wrote my first script, which was it was called
19:00February, when we made the movie, it ended up being called Black Coats Daughter. And it was one
19:05of those, you know, like, it makes your manager sends it around, and you kind of do the rounds of
19:09the water bottle meetings, and everybody likes your script. And I went to a certain executive at
19:14a certain production company in a studio. And he kind of in the middle of it, in the middle, my
19:23memory of it, and I'm sure I've stylized, this is he got up from his desk, and he kind of came and
19:27sat down next to me and kind of looked at me in the eyes. He was like, you're really good at this.
19:32Don't do this arty shit. Like do do do me a favor, do yourself a favor, do some real mainstream shit
19:40starting right now. And I took that as boy, here's what I'm never gonna do, bro. mainstream shit.
19:46Here's what I'm there. Thank you. Thank you for telling me that I can do it. Because they had on
19:50their floor, they had laid out all this material from a movie that I knew was going to be bad.
19:54It was a remake. And I could, you could just tell, oh, man, fuck, they should never have done that.
19:58And he came and sat right next to me. He's like, do yourself a favor. You're really good at this.
20:03Just stop writing art pictures. And when that happened, it was like, I'm going to double down,
20:10I'm going to quadruple down on doing what I do, because I do think I'm pretty good at it.
20:15And then, and then, you know, you have experiences with actors, again, Nick Cage saying, I'm going
20:19to do the script like the way you wrote it on Gretel and Hansel, which I'm not credited as
20:25writing, but I did write the dialogue. The great Alice Craig, a really venerable actor,
20:34she came to me one day, she's like, just do me a favor, don't let me fall in love with the language
20:39as I'm doing this, please. And it was like, she was so serious about it, too. She's like, this is
20:44there's like a real risk that I'm going to fall in love with the language, and it's going to just
20:48sneeze. And I was like, Oh, cool. She's going to fall in love with my language. Like,
20:52she's she does Shakespeare and stuff, but she knows what that is. You get these little bread
20:59comes along the way and you get these little encouragements and you keep trying. And that's
21:03and that's I stress that with everybody I ever meet who's like, how do you do the thing? You
21:07just keep doing it. Like it sounds it sounds sort of simple and kind of whatever, but that's what
21:12it is. You keep trying. Well, now, what would you say was the biggest obstacle that you had to
21:20overcome to allow you to take these films that influenced you and distill them and create your
21:28own language as a writer and director? For me, I sort of I started with Black Coats Daughter and
21:35then I started writing things that I felt were were were I was like, I just want to write whatever
21:40I want to write. It's going to I don't care if it has a plot. I don't care if it connects. I don't
21:44care if it if it if it's sort of accessible or if it feels like something that's already been done
21:50before. I don't want to do any of those things. I want to do all this really far out stuff and
21:54this poetry. And like, I want to be really oblique about things and the audience will understand me.
22:00And I think that to slip out of the black and white of it's either an art movie or it's
22:09Transformers. And I think that when the challenge is saying it's both of those things and all of the
22:17great movies are are both of those things. They're they're they're populous in in their
22:23accessibility. That's the that's the art form. The art form is not it's not a one man show projected
22:30for one seat in a one seat theater. It's a it's a it's an art form that's for the public and there's
22:37no judgment around that. That's a good thing. And I think that with Long Lines what ended up
22:43happening was I ended up really embracing that and being like it's fine to write something that
22:49people will kind of understand. It's fine to hand feed a little bit. It's fine to kind of go down
22:56the middle at times. There's no there's no shame in that. And so I think the challenge was kind of
23:01getting over myself a little bit and knowing that you don't need to be so esoteric to be cool.
23:08You know you don't like there's no better movie than Vertigo right. Which is you know you you
23:14look at Vertigo now if you look at stills from Vertigo now you look at portions of Vertigo
23:18insanely modern. Insanely sort of risque almost in some of the way that it looks and the
23:26colorization of stuff and the monochromatic nature of some of it the dream stuff. A lot of
23:31the way that that movie is put forward is very avant-garde. Very. And that's a Hollywood movie.
23:39And down the middle but at the same time extremely psychedelic almost. So when you
23:47see something like that that really that really works in it that's both old-fashioned and accessible
23:54but also distinctly modern. That's kind of the that's the gold ring. This movie did a it became
24:02Neon's biggest grossing film ever. A hundred million dollars. I mean it you know it is it
24:08is hit levels that you just don't see that often. The impulse with these kind with these sort of
24:15genre films is to get ready for the one that has the the number on the end of it you know.
24:22How do you feel about that? Does it burn in you to tell more of this story and flesh out this
24:29kind of startling mythology that you you know that it almost you almost don't get it until
24:35you get into your car and you're driving home and thinking about it? What what I think something that
24:42I think really struck people about the movie was the was sort of the detail and how how
24:52textured and detailed the world our world was. And that's in that's in the script because that's how I
25:01see it. The scripts that I write are are very detail rich and when you you look at a lot of
25:09movies that are generic movies that have numbers after them it's astonishing the sort of lack of
25:17detail. The genericism is really really permeates all the elements. It's just it doesn't look good.
25:26It doesn't have little things in it that you that you want to see more closely. And I think a big
25:32part of the success around Long Legs was that people returned went back to it multiple times
25:38like I don't know how many people saw it but I know the people who saw it saw it more than once.
25:43And they saw it more than once because they they felt like there was a there was a richness to
25:49the the fabric of it to the tapestry of it that required another go. And that was both in the
25:56storytelling in the performances in the sound in the picture in our in our use of kind of
26:04aspect ratio and and and I got to hand it to Neon of course in a big way for really
26:13foregrounding that aspect of the picture from the get-go. Like when they they really they really
26:18built their ad campaign out of the detail and and and sort of zoomed out as it were. The first thing
26:26that anybody saw from this movie were was the Polaroid of the family which is a Polaroid that
26:31we took before production. We had a day at a house where we took a bunch of Polaroids and crime scene
26:37photographs. We had disposable cameras and Polaroid cameras and digital cameras and we just spent a day
26:43of getting stuff. We had actors come in to play families. We had kids. We had you know everything.
26:48And when Neon engaged the audience on a detail level from the from the very first teaser trailer
26:57um I knew we were in great hands because they were saying we've it's it's like hey audience
27:02you found this thing that kaleidoscopes outward and they started with the smallest element a
27:10Polaroid of people not even in the movie they've done even actors in the movie a Polaroid of a
27:15sample of a crime scene thing and they they built it from there. So I think that was that was such a
27:22huge part of it people and people just you know it's kind of like contrary to public to it's kind
27:29of contrary to the opinion of the industry a lot of times people really want something that feels
27:33fresh you know it has to be good and they have to know that they want it but they want it.
27:40So J&A on a sequel. So hard to say you know like it's you know it's so hard to say because I think
27:49there's there's so many different ways of kind of doing that and thinking about that and approaching
27:57that for me the best one of those is probably still the way M. Night did um sort of did
28:06Unbreakable which is such a fabulous movie and then however many years later however many
28:13dozens of movies later he circled back to it and split which you didn't know was a sequel
28:18to Unbreakable until the last minute or two of the picture and it was so satisfying it was so
28:24brilliant and so man though and split was such a terrific movie too that I think that that if
28:31if there's going to be more long legs I think it has to sort of feel like there's a universe that
28:37this stuff happens in and again that grows out of the attention to detail and the the atmosphere
28:43that we built the the world that we made the feeling of the world um so would I return to the
28:49feeling of the world absolutely do I do I need to know where Lee Harker goes next that's not that's
28:55not really the way that I think I that it's also become very kind of popular through um TV
29:02unfortunately to kind of like keep going with it and keep coming up with new things and I don't
29:09know I don't I don't think that I don't personally think that way so yeah could there be a sequel or
29:15a prequel or an adjacent kind of um extension absolutely why not people like it people like
29:23it who who am I to deny people what they want and like