Transcript of Dune Pod’s Interstellar (2014) Episode.
[Dune pod theme music plays]
HAITCH Hey everybody. It’s Haitch and welcome to the latest installment of Dune Pod, your one-stop shop to get ready for the new Dune movie. This week, I’m joined as always by my co-host Jason.
JASON It’s a pretty aggressive interpretation of the ‘cry-it-out’ philosophy about sleep training. [MG & Haitch laugh] ‘Well I put her down in the bed and now I’m going to drive my truck into a spaceship. [Jason laughs]
HAITCH And by internet thought leader and investor, M.G. Siegler.
M.G. Alright! I’ve caused a rift! Ah, I like this.
HAITCH We tackle Paul Muad’Dib, himself, Timothée’s Chalamet’s very first film, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. We discussed the dangers and responsibilities of being a parent. Jason gives a four-part symposium on the physics of Interstellar, and we consider just how a light Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve truly are. If you’re enjoying the show, leave us a five star rating and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, as it really helps new listeners find the show. And now without further a-Dune, Interstellar.
HAITCH Guys, I’m like, freaking out.
JASON I’m very excited. [Haitch laughs] I’m very excited about this one. Some weeks, some weeks we had to fake it. This one, we don’t have to fake it. [Haitch & M.G. laugh]
HAITCH I’ve been excited on every movie we’ve done, but this is like, this is, this was a special level for sure.
JASON I’ve been excited about every movie we’ve done until I watched them.
And then some of them just like, like sometimes the movie can actually be a decent movie, but I’m just like, I don’t really have anything unique to add to this discourse.
HAITCH Sure.
JASON But this one, I have some things to add to the discourse! I’m ready to discourse on this fucking Interstellar!
M.G. I was so hardcore that I took 14 pages worth of notes on my —
JASON That’s great. [Haitch laughs] On your reMarkable?
M.G. reMarkable tablet thing, yeah.
HAITCH Single spaced or double spaced?
JASON Handwritten.
M.G. You can see it. Yeah. It’s handwritten. Just like plot points.
JASON That’s great. I got a reMarkable as well for taking notes on movies for Dune Pod.
HAITCH Does it work?!
JASON And it’s a great device actually, but, uh —
M.G. It is a good device.
JASON It just works better for me to do it on my phone because I like add links from the Internet.
HAITCH Got it. I’m doing this on on my, uh, you know, I was supposed to go to the convention, but the convention got canceled. So, you know, I at least got a Joe Biden 46 notebook.
JASON Did you get, did you get the bomber jacket?
HAITCH I did not get the bomber jacket. Should have gotten one!
JASON You need to give more money! [Jason & Haitch laugh]
HAITCH National, you know, National Finance Chair, but you know, whatever.
So, I just want to start with a quick special announcement, because we’ve had a number of new listeners, especially coming off The Big Lebowski episode that we had. Um, and we’re going to get a bunch more, because you know, we’ve got, you know, internet legend, M.G. Siegler.
JASON This is it! This is pushing us over the top, baby!
M.G. Alright, you guys should retire after this.
HAITCH We’re going to get the M.G. bump. I just want to make a special announcement and say, you do not need to like Dune to listen to Dune Pod. [M.G. & Jason laugh]
JASON We maybe should have titled the podcast something else. If we were really going to have to insist on that point.
HAITCH Exactly!
M.G. I did listen to the Sacca Lebowski one where he discloses that he’s never seen Dune. It’s pretty, pretty fun.
JASON I think he failed at watching the trailer. I think he attempted and failed to watch the trailer for the Lynch Dune. [M.G. laughs]
M.G. He’s like something like, ‘I couldn’t believe so-and-so was in this!’
JASON Sting! He didn’t think Sting was in it or Kyle Kyle MacLachlan.
M.G. Right. Right.
HAITCH I just want to be clear. We don’t care if you like Dune, if you’ve never seen Dune, if you have no experience with it. We talk about a bunch of movies that you probably have seen and that you probably like. And so we just want you to know, we want you to come check it out. We’re going to have a good time and you can have a good time, even if you don’t care about Dune.
JASON Yeah. And I would go even further and say, if you hate Dune this is a good podcast for you because I like, I like haters. I want people with strong opinions. And if that opinion is that Dune sucks, you’re more than welcome here.
HAITCH Nice, nice, well, M.G., welcome to the pod.
JASON Yeah! M.G. Siegler! It’s great to see you.
M.G. Thank you guys. Thank you for having me.
HAITCH We booked this a long time ago.
M.G. I know we did. You had me picked, like, a date that was so far in the future where it felt a little like Interstellar. [Haitch laughs] I was like, okay, I’ll commit to this.
I really need to set a reminder that to make sure that like I’m in the country, I’m somewhere that I can do this. So yes, I’m glad it worked.
HAITCH We are so happy to have you. And we are talking Christopher Nolan’s 2014, sci-fi epic, Interstellar. And we have a lot to say about this movie. So just some quick housekeeping, next week on Dune Pod, it got delayed, when we put Lebowski in the lineup, but we are finally getting back around to John Boorman’s Excalibur.
JASON Oh God. We’ve got to find something else to delay it then, you have to find some other reason to delay the movie.
HAITCH It’s two hours and 20 minutes.
JASON Is it really?
HAITCH It has a real intermission.
JASON Ughhh.
HAITCH But Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Helen Mirren!
JASON What is it streaming on?
HAITCH It’s streaming for free on Tubi and it’s available for rental on all major platforms.
So really excited. It’s a great movie from 1982, I believe, or 81. And joining us is Brian Mosley, CEO and Founder of Warhorn, the online gaming, scheduling platform and my former dungeon master.
JASON Wow.
HAITCH That’s a lot.
JASON That’s a lot. For what game?
HAITCH DnD. Yeah. And various other, various other things. So, so stay tuned next week, it’s going to be an epic one. That is a truly epic film. The soundtracks incredible. And John Boorman is a, as a great director — the director of Zardoz, this was his follow-up.
JASON Yes. The director of Zardoze is not our guest next week, but, yeah, after his rousing success at Zardoz, he went and made a movie with the tagline ‘Forged by God, foretold by a wizard, found by a King, Excalibur.
HAITCH Yes. And, and again, we talked about it briefly last time after Zardoz, he attempted to do an adult version of Lord of the Rings. He tried to get the rights to that. He wanted Frodo to sleep with Galadriel, like that was the kind of thing that he was going for. [M.G. laughs]
JASON He tried to do a soft core version of Lord of the Rings.
HAITCH Exactly. And that didn’t work. And so he rolled that straight into Excalibur. So, that is next week on Dune Pod. Now let’s get into Dune News.
[soundbite plays] Would you like to know more?
JASON Dune News.
HAITCH There’s no news. [M.G. laughs]
JASON Okay, great. We don’t, we gotta, we gotta take as much time possible for Interstellar.
HAITCH No time!
JASON The movie’s coming. It’s going to be great.
HAITCH It’ll be great. Moving on. M.G. Do you have a history with Dune?
M.G. So I have a funny history with Dune that I think you guys will appreciate. Cause I was trying to think back to it. So it’s from my childhood. It’s from all of our childhoods, but I was very young. So I was born in 81. So Dune came out in 84, right.
So I was it’s three. So I was obviously too young to see it in theaters or anything like that.
JASON Your parents brought you to the theater at age three? [Haitch laughs]
M.G. No it’s even, it’s even better than that. My first memory of Dune and really the way that I get introed, my grandparents bought a coloring book of Dune.
HAITCH Yes! Yes!
JASON Ohhhhh yeah.
M.G. And I found it on the internet as you could do for many things these days, apparently. And it’s like, it’s going for 260 dollars on some ABE Books, I found it on. A-B-E Books.
JASON Yeah. That’s where you get all that good stuff.
M.G. And it’s an orange coloring book. I can send it to you so you can put it in the show notes or whatnot.
HAITCH Please, yeah! [Haitch laughs]
M.G. Like this was my memory and my grandparents got this. So when I would go and stay at my grandparents house in Cleveland, Ohio, uh, I would sleep over and I would have this Dune coloring book, which I would look at. And I had no idea, obviously what dune was about. I just remember this like guy wearing like this face thing. And it was just like, what, what on earth is this? They clearly thought, I think they thought it was like Star Wars, basically. And you know, that it was, you know, sort of like a, a thing kids might like and, and whatnot. It reminds me of — sort of aside, and we don’t want to go down a rabbit hole — but when I was very young also, when my parents would rent videotapes back in the day at the local video store, my mom wants, brought home a movie called Critters. I don’t know if —
HAITCH Noo!
JASON Oh yeah, that’s a terrible thing to bring to a child. [Haitch laughs]
M.G. That is a very terrible thing to bring home to a child! It looks like from the cover, it could be a cute thing. It has like sort of a funny —
HAITCH Like Gremlins type vibe.
M.G. Yeah, it’s like a Gremlins type thing. And it was not like that at all. And it has still scarred a memory in my head, but so did this Dune coloring book. Yeah, once I found out what the situation was with Dune, so that was my entry into this, into this world.
JASON That’s a great story.
[interim music plays]
HAITCH Shall we get into this?
JASON Please.
[music from Interstellar fades in]
HAITCH Alright, let’s do it. Interstellar is a journey across the deepest reaches of space between the stars and between a father and his daughter. in a not too distant future Earth’s ecology is in collapse and all life will be extinguished within just a few generations. Coop, a widower and former astronaut who dreamt of leaving Earth struggles as a farmer, raising his kids, Tom, and the precocious Murph. When an unexplained phenomena leads coop and Murph to a military base, Coop is given the opportunity to leave his children behind, to pursue a desperate quest, to find a new home for humanity. Battling the hostile environments of deep space, his own teammates, and above all, the desperate passage of time he can never get back. Coop risks everything. Can he reach out through space and time, heal his daughter, and help humanity embrace a destiny that is Interstellar.
JASON That’s great. That’s great. Good synopsis of this movie.
HAITCH Boom. Boom.
M.G. That was good.
HAITCH Oooooh. I had to write that in 10 minutes. I forgot to write it until just before we went on the air. So that was —
M.G. You write all of those yourself? You don’t pull them from a —
JASON No, those are, that’s original. That’s original. Matt does a lot of work. I don’t, I don’t do very much. [Haitch laughs] Matt does a lot. Yeah, that’s great. I saw, I realized when we were prepping for this, that I saw this movie in the theaters, for sure. I believe I liked it. And then like, for some reason I just like quickly forgot it. Like I didn’t forget it. Like, I remember what happened in the movie and I remember like some of the iconic scenes and stuff, but it didn’t leave like a lasting impression on me. And, I was very excited to revisit it and be reminded of how excellent a movie it really is. Cause it’s like, it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty good one in like the sci-fi cannon. It’s definitely Christopher Nolan’s like shot at making 2001, which is my favorite movie. And I was, I was definitely watching it on as like with that sort of like, okay, he’s going for it, this dude for, because he got to make a bunch of really successful Batman movies gets to make super expensive, ridiculously, like just over, over the top effects, uh, super nerdy fucking movies. And thank God for that. So, yeah.
M.G. And Matt, I’m curious like, cause I think if I have a right, cause we picked this so long ago, but you didn’t love Interstellar. Is that right? When you first saw it, is that correct?
HAITCHYeah, so I thought it was, it was really cool and, and moving. And there were aspects of it that I thought were really fantastic, but for some reason the overall connection of it, I sort of had an idea of what was happening as it was going. And I don’t know, it just didn’t quite click for me. Going back and watching the whole thing from the top, knowing everything that was going on definitely helped me to pick up more things that were laid in a, in a really effective way. And then just the emotional core on it. So it was definitely rising in stars as the rewatches were going through over the last couple of days.
M.G. Yeah. That’s the thing that resonated with me sort of watching. I don’t think I had seen it, so I had bought it when it came out, like on digital, on iTunes, you know, whenever that was, cause it came out in 2014, right. So it probably came out in 2015 at some point on digital. And so I bought it, purchased it immediately pretty much when it came out.
Um, but I don’t think I’d rewatched it in maybe since then. So it’s been a number of years and the things that stuck out to me well at the very highest level were one, I do think it ages very well, but it’s also, it’s sort of like ages personally for me in a weird way.
HAITCH Right!
M.G. Because like, obviously I did not have kids when the movie came out and like the father daughter relationship is core to this movie and that really sort of has a whole new meaning that it did not when I saw it.
HAITCH M.G. like driving to work every day, he’s doing the McConaughey tears in the truck. [Haitch laughs]
M.G. Exactly! Like ahhh! So and I also, I saw it in theaters twice, so I did like it when it when it first came out, but more so because like I both liked space movies and love Christopher Nolan. And I also just thought it was a great sort of one of the you know, tent pole IMAX movies at the time. He had shot a little bit of in IMAX. And so I saw it one of those times in the IMAX theater with a, I think in San Francisco at the Metreon with, um, I forget how much footage he actually shot for IMAX for this particular movie.
HAITCH A decent amount.
M.G. Yeah. It’s a pretty good amount. And it was a great experience. You know, it’s one of those things that when you point to like movie theaters going away and stuff, like you point to this as like one of the great counter examples of why they can never go away.
And certainly Nolan’s obviously the preeminent person of that, but, uh, yeah, I just loved that movie and I saw it again and I don’t do that all that often these days anymore. Uh, even back in 2014, but I did for this one, cause that’s how much I, I liked it a ton, but again, now I like it for almost different reasons. It’s weird.
HAITCH Totally. Alright. So let’s get into this. Right out of the gate, you have the incredible Ellen Burstyn playing a really old woman and she says —
[clip of Interstellar plays]
OLD WOMAN Well my dad that was farmer. Um, like everybody else back then. Of course he didn’t start that way.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And I went into this movie completely blind. Like I knew it was a space thing. I knew that it was going to be some astronauts stuff and foreign business. To be talking about farming and to be on the farm and then to have this documentary style with the different people talking and telling the stories. I was so just like, struck.
JASON Yeah. And it’s funny too, because like that looks like, you know, one of the things about like shot IMAX and it looks really good. And as loyal Dune Pod viewers will know, I recently upgraded my TV, so I could watch the 4k DVDs. And this looks real fucking good and ultra high definition Blu-ray. And like, so it was kind of a like, but, but the first scene does not like the love, the light grainy video documentary stuff. I was like, what is this shit?
Do I need to like, turn off motion smoothing or something?
HAITCH You turned off motion smoothing right? You’ve already done all that?
JASON Yeah. I already, I already turned off motion smoothing. But like then I remembered that like, it was for effect.
M.G. Yeah I wasn’t sure what was going on in the beginning, like, you know, is it like a Saving Private Ryan thing where it’s in the future and you know, we’re, we’re looking back and, and it’s a very interesting way to kick off a movie like this when everyone, like you said, it assumes that it’s a giant space, you know, cinematic masterpiece, and then we’re back on the farm, you know, all of a sudden.
JASON We’re farming baby.
HAITCH Yeah. And the farm was, the farm was beautiful. And we’ll talk about that more as we go. I do want to say the, the first hook that we had for putting Interstellar on the list for Dune Pod is that this is baby Timmy’s first movie!
JASON Baby Timmy Chalamet.
HAITCH And I think he both stood on his own and also was doing a hell of a Casey Affleck, you know, kind of —
JASON Younger Casey Affleck.
M.G. Wait, it’s his actual first movie? I didn’t realize that.
HAITCH First movie.
JASON It’s like his first real movie, yeah.
M.G. Wow. Wow. I didn’t know that. Wow.
JASON Yeah, he’s great in it.
M.G. I mean, I had forgotten that he was, you know, cause obviously no one knew who he was at the time when we watched it then. So, so it’s like, yeah, but obviously it’s him and uh, yeah, he does a good, good Casey Affleck young impersonation, I guess.
JASON And he’s, he’s not been canceled like a Casey Affleck, Timothée Chalamet remains unblemished.
M.G. I was going to bring that up. Yeah. It’s sort of a, sort of a weird topic. Yeah, yeah.
HAITCH No, it’s true. I struggle with that as well though. I thought Casey Affleck was amazing in this, but um —
JASON He’s fine! Like it could have been someone else, like it didn’t matter. Like Casey Affleck was fine. [Haitch laughs]
M.G. One of the few movies where I thought he actually looked like Ben Affleck when he has the beard. Like I rarely sort of think that they look like one another for some reason. But I think that he did when he had the beard. And I don’t know if it was like sad Ben Affleck with the lattes or whatever, as you see the pictures.
JASON Oh, the tattoos and everything. Yeah.
HAITCH Yeah, same, same. So he’s, but he does have, Timothée has great presence. I thought, you know, he has some intensity. He is not like a troubled youth. He is not making problems or anything. You know, he seems very much onboard.
JASON Just wants the farm man. [M.G. laughs]
M.G. He does.
HAITCH Yeah. Although he, so he is giving Murph shit about her ghost.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
YOUNG MURPH Dad, can you fix this?
COOP What the heck did you do to my lander?
YOUNG MURPH It wasn’t me!
YOUNG TOM Let me guess. Was it your ghost?
YOUNG MURPH It knocked it off my shelf. It keeps on knocking books off.
YOUNG TOM No such thing as ghosts dumbass.
COOP Hey!
YOUNG MURPH I looked it up. It’s called a Poltergeist.
YOUNG TOM Dad, tell her.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And this is the first introduction that something’s Going on there. And when she says that she has a ghost, Coop then pushes her on science. And this was the first push of like this notion of science versus your feeling and emotion and trying to balance those two things, which is the other central theme of the film, I think.
JASON Yeah. Good call.
M.G. And the other thing that obviously I think has to resonate with all of us beyond the child thing. Cause I think we all had children since it came out. So it was sort of a interesting angle since from that. But the other part is of course. The, this they’re going through a world changing event. It’s sort of, you know, it’s, it’s not exactly clear what’s going on. Like they sort of explain it. It seems like the, you know, a drought, a famine of some sorts, and they explain it a little bit more.
HAITCH The blight.
M.G. As time goes on, but it’s also like they start putting on face masks and it, and it’s sort of —
JASON The face mask things stood out. Yeah. The face, I was like, oh yeah, like, it’s time to mask up. I get you. I feel it. I feel what you’re doing farmers in your truck.
M.G. And in California, too, right. With like the, the shitty air.
JASON The fires, yeah.the fires
M.G. And everything that we’ve had over the past few years. It’s like both of those things, I’m watching this and I’m like, yeah, this is a, this is a little more haunting than it, than it may have been.
JASON That’s right. I totally felt that way too.
HAITCH No doubt. No doubt. So we do kick into there’s a, he has a discussion with Murph about Murphy’s Law and you know, her kind of feeling bad about that. Um, and him saying that it’s not that something bad will happen. It’s that anything can happen. But we transitioned from that straight into the drone capture scene.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
[drone flying sound]
COOP Get in, let’s go.
[clip of Interstellar fades out]
HAITCH Chasing the drone through the cornfield. So this is the first one. This is out of all of the facts that came out of the behind the scenes that I watched today that raised the movie, another star for me, they planted all of that corn, what they grew, all of that corn. They grew all of that corn!
JASON That’s just a boondoggle, again. It’s like, money laundering, corn laundering. [M.G. laughs]
HAITCH They chose the location in Canada, where they were filming.
M.G. And it didn’t have corn.
HAITCH And it didn’t have corn because it’s too far North. So they planted corn. They got a farmer. There’s one farmer nearby who does corn. They planted it all.
M.G. They got the corn guy.
HAITCH They, they waited for it to grow up.
JASON They got the top corn guy in Canada. [Jason & M.G. laugh] He was on a retainer of $18,000 an hour.
HAITCH Yeah. They’re able to shoot the scenes of chasing through with a helicopter and a real drone that was flying. Not, not a CG drone. It’s a real drone. At the end of the movie, after it was over, they harvested the corn, and they sold it and they made money. [fact bell rings]
JASON C’monnn.
HAITCH That was [Haitch makes mind blow sound]
JASON That’s great. Yeah, that’s great. That’s good corn facts. [Haitch laughs] The thing that I liked about this is that it establishes one of the, one of my favorite themes or one of my favorite tropes in science fiction, which is like shitty tech of the future. Like things, things work like there’s cooler stuff. Like there’s solar panels that last 10 years, but it’s all beat up and shitty. And like, you get this in like, you get this in like the Firefly universe and you get this in like —
HAITCH Cowboy Bebop.
JASON Yeah. And it’s like, it’s just like, they have cool stuff. Like the robots in this are super cool, but they’re super fucked up. I just really liked that lived in like, not perceived — Aliens was like kind of one of the first movies that ever did this. Like the Nostromo was like a cool ship, but it’s like all fucked up and dirty, because they’ve been living in it.
M.G. And I took a note of that too, because I think if I, if I sort of free freezed it right in the right place, I think it’s a Dell Latitude laptop that they’re using.
HAITCH Oh yeah.
JASON Yeah exactly. Yeah, their laptops were like trash.
M.G. Like a big black laptop.
JASON Yeah, it’s a honker.
HAITCH Hundo. Yeah. Speaking of Nostromo, RIP Yaphet Kotto.
JASON Yeah, Yaphet Kotto, rest in power.
HAITCH One of the all time performances on film, that one changed my life. Him and Harry Dean Stanton down in the bowels of the ship of the Nostromo.
[clip of Alien plays]
PARKER Before we dock maybe we’d better go over the bonus situation.
BRETT Yeah.
PARKER Brett and I think we deserve a full shares.
BRETT Right. You see, Mr. Parker and I feel that the bonus situation has never been on an equitable leve.
DALLAS Well, you get what you’re contracted for. Just like everybody else.
[clip of Alien ends]
HAITCH So they get the drone and, and to your point, Jason, they do such great world-building again, super efficiently. Tom asked how long the drone has been up there and he says —
[clip of Interstellar plays]
COOP Delhi mission control went down same as ours, ten years ago.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
JASON Yeah. It’s a fun detail we don’t need anymore.
HAITCH Yeah, we don’t know what crashed the systems, what was going on. We just know that there’s a lot of scarcity. We go to the next scene, which is, him going to parent teacher conferences and learning that Tom didn’t score high enough to go to college.
He’s going to become a farmer. And Murph is getting in fights over whether Apollo was real or not. And so you have the teacher, basically, this is like some MAGA shit going on here. What is the deal? [M.G. laughs]
JASON I love that. This is again, I think, the movie does really well on the world building stuff, and they don’t like, they don’t explain very much, they just give you enough.
So you get the vibe, you know what it is. And like, it keeps it, it keeps it moving. And like, again, like I think the 2001 is important. Like, like there’s a conversation somewhere where Kip Thorne, the astrophysicist who was a producer and major consultant on the film, talks about how, like both of their favorite movies was like 2001. And they wanted things to be like unexplained in the movie. And I think they do a really good job with that on like the science fiction world building side, the place where I think they like kind of tripped the line a little bit for me is on the thematic stuff. Like they really fucking beat you over the head with the Dylan Thomas poem and they beat you over the head with the the love is the fifth dimension stuff. [Haitch laughs] But like the love is The Fifth Element multipass. [Haitch laughs]
[clip from The Fifth Element plays]
LEELOO Leeloo Dallas mul-ti-pass.
[clip from The Fifth Element ends]
JASON But like the world building stuff is really, is really well done and super economical. Like, they’re not going to give you too much. Like if you want to go figure out more, you’re going to have to go look for answers off the film.
M.G. I mean, and this plot point is a fascinating idea. Right. And it’s sort of, it’s maybe top of mind too, because we happen to be watching For All Mankind. I don’t know if you guys have watched that at all. Oh Apple TV+.
HAITCH Season one, episode six.
M.G. Oh really?
HAITCH Yeah. I am digging it.
M.G. It’s good. And it gets better in season two. So it’s at the, we’re at the penultimate episode last week. And now we’re at the last one, this week. It’s better in season two. It’s it’s good. I was surprised. I didn’t think, I mean, I’m a Ronald Moore fan from Battlestar Galactica, but like, I thought, uh, I dunno, I thought it would be Apple-ized and sort of hokey and it ended up being really good and I think he gets better, better with time, but I, I also bring it up because it sort of reminds me of this scene where it’s like, what, what would actually happen if you were trying to do sort of the inverse of that, where you’re trying to not inspire people to want to go to space because we just don’t have the resources to do it. And it’s like, yeah, if you say that, you know, the, the whole moon landing was a hoax, like, you know, maybe in your mind, like to your point, Matt, of the, the MAGA disinformation stuff, like, you know, you could see a world in which that, that something like that could happen.
HAITCH Could work. Yeah. So, so we have, you know, he got this drone, it was from India and he took it apart to help drive some of the combines that they have. And this, this was the one plot point that didn’t really kind of connect for me. All of these combines that they rebuilt are converging on the house, but it’s not quite clear what’s going on or why that’s happening. Like I’m assuming that’s something to do with the anomaly. Is that right?
JASON Yeah. So there’s a gravitational anomaly at the house.
And so that’s causing all kinds of weird stuff.
HAITCH Gravity is different than magnetism, right?
JASON Is it though Matt? Is it? [M.G. laughs] Like, you know, I mean like the like, one of the things that’s going on. So I will say that the combine, like all the other anomalies, they actually do explain what happened, uh, in the Tesseract sequence at the end.
Like, you know, whether it’s him getting the coordinates to where NASA is, or the books falling off the shelf or the ticking of the watch. Like all of those things are explained. Uh, the combines are not. But I think it’s just meant to like, sort of presage the…
HAITCH Something’s going on.
JASON Something’s going on. And like, yeah. It’s like meant to be, I think it’s meant to be, that’s like messing with their GPS.
M.G. Right. Something brought it out of the sky after 10 or 20 years or whatever it was.
HAITCH It was looking for something, right. That was something that somebody — and actually that, that helped me this time to be like, okay, there is a reason why that drone is here. There is, there is more, more reason.
JASON It was funky shit happen at the house.
HAITCH So they go to the baseball game and they, you know, in the middle of the game, everybody turns and sees the sandstorm wall, just coming at them. And it’s just a massive, you know, super storm. To me, you guys were talking about this a little bit earlier, being haunting. The thing that I took away from this film is we spend a lot of time talking about climate change as this existential threat, but we always think about it as a future threat that, you know, hopefully we can avert. This is like, this passed through so well, the concept of it’s literally too late, like we have destroyed the earth and there’s not, there’s literally nothing that we can do to stop it from happening. And I thought that was incredibly powerful.
JASON It was tough. Like to M.G.’s point about like the California, like forest fires. Like we know it’s going to be a bad fire season this year as well, because it’s been so dry. And so it’s just like, we know, like, there’s just nothing, you just know it’s going to be bad.
Like you just know, like, the only thing you can do is like go buy air filters now before like they sell out in three months,
M.G. RYeah. And at one point they’d literally say — I took the note of it — like mask up, like it, like, it’s a known thing, you know, like that they go through this on a regular thing. And it feels, you know, a little bit close to home because it feels like that’s what California is going to be like. Basically we have the N-95s both from smoke and now from the pandemic. And it’s like, we’re going to have those with us forever, you know, going forward.
JASON So that’s a bummer. [Jason & M.G. laugh]
HAITCH Well, Biden announced today, 50% reduction by 2035. Those are good targets if we can hit them. Great, great. Jason, come on. You’re supposed to be like giving me some hope here.
JASON It’s going to be great. It’s going to be great. We just need a bootstrap paradox to get us out of this.
HAITCH So, so there’s a sand storm. She left her, Murph left a window open. And so there’s a lot of dust that’s coming in and they go up there. So this shot was absolutely gorgeous of the dust, kind of just falling into the room and seeing the light and the presage of the Tesseract. But basically, you know, there’s this question of books have been falling and things are happening and Murph’s actually been tracking it. And she seen that there’s some sort of Morse code. And he says, ‘it’s not a ghost, it’s gravity.’ And he flips a coin and it falls in a kind of weird way. And then over the next scene says it’s not Morse, it’s binary and it’s coordinates.
JASON Right. They got the coordinates to NASA 2.0.
HAITCH Exactly. So they had to the military base and we have our first introduction of TARS.
JASON Oh yeah. Right, right. Because TARS shocks him
M.G. Right. It wasn’t clear. It’s like, did he tase him, like what, what does he actually do? It’s is sort of off camera.
JASON He tased his ass man. Yeah, he got him. TARS, should we talk about TARS now or cause like, I mean, like it might take a minute.
HAITCH We can save tires if we want for a few minutes, we just see that the initial introduction of him as a military robot.
M.G. In rewatching it, I had not remembered like what exactly TARS was other than just, you know, sort of like a helper robot, but he was ex-military like, so that’s what, that’s what presumably the United States was using as their sort of military grunt work was, was these types of robots.
JASON He’s like described in one of the featurettes is like being like sort of a grizzled veteran Marine who’s like kind of got like a rye sense of humor and is kind of seeing a whole bunch of shit. And like nothing’s really gonna bother him too much at this point in his career. Fucking love TARS. Can we talk about TARS now? I don’t want to wait. I want to talk about it.
HAITCH Let’s do it. Let’s do it. So first of all, he was played by Bill Erwin.
JASON BIll Irwin who will be well-known to all parents as —
[soundbite of Elmo’s World plays] ELMO Mr. Noodle what’s going on?!
JASON Mr. Noodle.
HAITCH From Elmo’s world, yup. [Haitch laughs]
M.G. Yeah, I was like, how do I know that voice?
JASON [In Elmo voice] Mr. Noodle! Yeah, he’s great. So he’s like an he’s, you know, one of the world’s most well-trained like clowns and mimes and he’s a incredibly physically gifted actor.
HAITCH But I thought it was just a voice. Right. So I was like, I was thinking, this has got to all be all CG, this whole thing. And his performance is amazing.
JASON False!
HAITCH It’s almost all practical!
JASON Yeah. They made a crazy 80 pounds steel TARS that Bill Erwin had to push around fucking Iceland for awhile. [Jason & M.G. laughs]
HAITCH With his feet and lifting it up. That was insane.
M.G. And he did the other one too, right?
JASON Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get out there Mr. Noodle, push this fucking giant ass steal shit around. Yeah. They had figure out like how he can move. Now, I will say it like, like if you watch Bill Erwin do like his like vaudeville count clown stuff, like he’s tremendously gifted. Like his mime stuff is ridiculous. I don’t know if you really got the full Bill Erwin experience from like the two legs of like 80 pounds steals TARS, but the voice acting is awesome.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
TARS There’s no customization. Humor.
COOP Seventy-five percent.
TARS Confirmed. Auto self-destruct T-minus 10, 9 —
COOP Let’s make that 60%
TARS 60% confirmed. Knock knock.
COOP You want 55?
[clip of Interstellar ends]
JASON Like the, the personality he used TARS with is amazing.
M.G. Yeah. His timing is so good. Was there any, so I didn’t see the background on the TARS robot. Like what, what is the notion though of like how it moves?
JASON And so there’s a featurette, on the, on the Blu-ray DVDs.
HAITCH Really good.
JASON That’s really good about TARS and like the, and the theory about it was that he’s like, well, we don’t want it, we don’t think of them as robots. We think of them as automated machines. Like it’s supposed to be some, this, this machine that is not, you know, anthropomorphic, that does these tasks. And they came up with this, like the initial sketches were kind of, you know, pretty directionally where it ended up, it was like kind of two legs and a centerpiece. Uh, and they ended up kind of like making it more monolith, like from there.
M.G. That’s what I thought it was at first. Yeah. Right.
JASON Yeah.
HAITCH Well, and if you look at, if you start with a monolith and then you divide it into four pillars and then each of those pillars divides into four sections and in those four sections, subset. Yeah, exactly.
JASON And each one of the subsections, they age preserve the proportionality of the original, which is another, that’s another 2001, like callback, for sure. So like in the, in 2001, like there’s the monolith on the moon and then there’s the monolith, like floating around, you know, Saturn slash Jupiter. And they are proportionately related and like, it’s like this it’s, it’s like each side, it’s like one to four to nine. So it’s got the proportionality of the squares. And the theory is that they, it extends into higher dimensions as well. Which is also relevant to Interstellar science shit.
M.G. But also speaking to you’re the retro check tech point earlier, Jason, it’s his screen is like, you know, old school.
JASON It looks like shit.
M.G. DOS interface or whatever. [Haitch laughs]
JASON Yeah. He’s got some shitty command line. Yeah. He’s running logo. Yeah. It looks, it looks really, it looks really good. And he’s got like, braille, has got like braille buttons on the front. His name’s like written braille, also.
HAITCH TARS in case, I was looking at on both of them. Yeah. It’s in brail.
JASON Also TARS is just such a good name. Like it’s particularly for Matthew McConaughey’s accent, they picked a word that he could say that really has some, is as a power word for sure.
HAITCH Very good. TARS was an incredible performance.
JASON Come on TARS!
HAITCH TARS plus plus, much love. We also get our introduction to Dr. Brand. We have Anne Hathaway. This is their second team up after 2013’s The Dark Knight Rises again or something, which we won’t talk about now.
JASON Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
HAITCH But, um, what’s your take M.G. on Anne?
M.G. I don’t have a strong opinion, honestly. I feel like she could have been played by a number of other actresses as well.
HAITCH Name five. [M.G. laughs]
M.G. I think she’s good. I don’t think again, I don’t think it’s like super memorable. I think Jessica Chasteen was much better sort of in, in her role and more memorable in it. But I think Anne Hathaway is good. And I think, I think the parts where she’s trying to, and we can talk about it a little bit, where she’s trying to you know, do misdirection around her
intentions are interesting. But otherwise, like, I don’t know, I didn’t fully buy into her relationship with her dad. And so, yeah. That’s sort of how I feel about it.
JASON What about Amy Adams? What if we, what if we just pulled some forward some Arrival energy.
M.G. That could work. I could see that for sure.
HAITCH She wouldn’t have been available for Arrival then though.
JASON Well, look, I mean, I don’t want to, like, we can’t read redo history, but I’m just saying like, if we’re choosing folks —
HAITCH To send through the wormhole?
JASON From the world. Um, Kerry, Washington, I think could have been interesting in that role, yeah, I don’t know. I would, uh, I think, I think Anne Hathaway was fine. She was fine.
HAITCH I’m picking up a theme from you so far on the casting on this film.
JASON No, Matthew McConaughey and Matt Damon are like some of the like truly inspired choices.
HAITCH Yes.
M.G. Yeah. I think this is one of Matthew McConaughey’s better roles.
JASON One of his best roles, for sure.
HAITCH Definitely. Definitely. Just behind Rust Cohle.
JASON Jessica Chastain’s great in it too.
HAITCH So we, we do get introduced there, you know, Dr. Brand, she brings him in to meet the rest of the crew. So basically they lay out the story and Dr. Brand who Coop knew from the last time he was at NASA that 50 years ago, someone placed a wormhole outside Saturn and that leads to 12 stars. And NASA has sent out missions, but those were one way missions, the Lazarus missions. And essentially they want Coop to pilot the last ship to head out there. And this is where they introduced the ideas of Plan A and Plan B.
M.G. And this was a little bit confusing too, and I’m glad you bring up the 12 stars thing, because at first I thought they were saying 12 planets, but then they sort of like, correct it that it’s 12 stars, but it’s also, when we later get one of them has a wormhole, right. One of them is like two planets around the same —
HAITCH Three.
M.G. Three planets around the, yeah, same.
JASON Three around the black hole.
M.G. Yeah. I was confused by it.
JASON So it’s a little confusing. Yeah. That part’s a little confusing and the other nine, I guess they just can’t, they’re just fucked. [Jason laughs]
M.G. Right, not sending signals or doing something.
HAITCH I guess maybe this is, I mean, the concept here, like they couldn’t just send us to one planet, because if you just went to one planet, you wouldn’t get the ability to pass the information through that you need to be able to do. So this is a sort of cyclical nature of what’s happening.
JASON It’s fine. They had to send a bunch of people out. It’s fine. And like, it introduces the concept of like, you know, we don’t know what’s going on out there. We’re hoping one of these, one of these bullets works out.
M.G. To take it back, go around the table. When he walks in there. I had not, I don’t think I’d seen the West Bentley guy since like American Beauty. Right? Like that was his thing.
HAITCH Hunger Games!
M.G. I know he’s in that new show that people like, um, the Montana based one.
HAITCH Oh, Yellowstone.
M.G. Yellowstone, yeah, yeah. But I don’t think I had seen him,
JASON Cause he’s in, he’s in the Hunger Games. He was Seneca Crane in the Hunger Games.
M.G. That’s right. I do remember that.
HAITCH But also he was awesome in Mission Impossible Fallout.
JASON Oh yeah.
HAITCH He is the new husband of Ethan’s, ex-wife, Michelle Moynahan.
JASON He has a big part of the end with the crazy eyebrows at the end.
HAITCH But he’s great. And it is a super small part.
JASON We talked about him that that podcast, yeah.
HAITCH The eyebrows!
JASON My ex lady’s got a guy with craaazy eyebrows now. [Haitch laughs] Yeah. He also, he also played Antigen Scientists (uncredited) in Underworld Awakening. So you know, he’s been busy.
M.G. Right. That’s a big one. Yep. [Haitch & Jason laugh] But he does, he is like a meaningful role in this movie for a bit of time
HAITCH ery good. So we have, so we have these two plans that are
JASON Crazy eyebrows this guy. I’m looking at his eyebrows right now. And they’re just, I mean, I’ve got pretty big eyebrows myself, but this guy is like, they’re very romantic eyebrows. Anyway, let’s go.
HAITCH So we have Plan A and Plan B that are laid out by Sir Michael and Plan A as they’re building a giant space station and they’re going to try and rescue people off Earth if they can crack this gravity equation so that they can lift stuff up and get people off the earth, um, and Plan B, if they can’t do that, they at least have 5,000 embryos frozen on the ship that there’ll be able to take into space and repopulate. And, basically Coop doesn’t need that much talking. He wants to go. He’s excited at the prospect of going, he has to, you know, this great scene with John Lithgow who is his wife’s, his dead wife’s father.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
COOP This world’s a treasure, Donald. But she’s been telling us to leave for a while now. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And the fact that he wants to go into space, doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do, which is the same logic that he turns around on Brand later. Which I thought was a nice call in the script.
M.G. Did you guys, it wasn’t exactly clear to me what Matthew kind of, he did other than, so he was a part of NASA and he was like, sort of like a test pilot type character that like flew close to space, but didn’t quite go to space and they sort of allude to this thing later and they never talk about it again, but that the NASA, and I think it’s actually in that scene, maybe that NASA was being tasked with dropping bombs on people, to whipe people out so that they didn’t have to feed as much as the population, something along those lines like that they sort of hints at, right?
HAITCH They do say later, so if you go back and watch, which was again, it was helpful doing a second watch this week, he’s actually flying a ranger. So he’s flying the exact same ship that he’s flying later. And so this was one of the missions and actually Dr. Brand says you were training for this mission. So I don’t know why he left. Maybe it was because his wife died sometime after the crash. And he had to go home and take care of the family.
M.G. Right. And the crash was caused by the anomalies, you know, which we learned like right.
JASON The crash was caused by the anomalies too.
HAITCH Yeah. And maybe it was centered on him for some reason.
JASON It was him. It was, yeah. I’m sure he did it.
M.G. He caused himself to crash or something to set all this in motion.
JASON Yeah he caused himself to crash.
HAITCH Daaaamn. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good point. So, so Murph is not happy about the fact that he is leaving. She is quite upset and she even talked awesome. She has the notebook she’s been tracking in the message from the ghost STAY. But he says he has to go and he gives her a watch and says that, you know, he’s got, he’s got to leave. So how was that, you know, as a parent, you know, what does that feel like to think about leaving under those circumstances?
JASON Crystal actually asked me she’s like, what would you like, how would you do this with Griffin? [M.G. laughs] Like if you were the one who was like having to go out, how would you have this conversation. And I was like, no one’s going to want me for this mission. [M.G. laughs] Like, this is not like, this is not something like, I’m not, I’m not a desirable —
M.G. Yeah let me call up NASA and just tell them like, guys, what are you doing?
JASON Do you need someone to need someone to tweet from space? Is that what you need? Send some tweets back from the another side of the wormhole? But yeah, but no, I think, I think to M.G.’s point, like it is true. Like, I didn’t have kids the first time I saw this movie and like, it is kind of a cliche to be like, ‘Well, as a father…’ but like, it does hit differently like sort of imagining yourself, like never seeing your kid again for like, you know, the rest of their life or something like that in order to go do this thing.
HAITCH God I hate that the GOP has ruined the ability to say ‘as the father of daughters.’ It’s fucking annoying. [M.G. laughs] So I do want to call out a review from friend of the show, technical producer, Pod Father, Slim in his Letterboxd review, he called out this scene in particular. ‘How do you not give your daughter one more minute to come running down the stairs to say goodbye?’
JASON Yeah, I agree. I agree. Right?
HAITCH ‘How do you not go back upstairs and give the goodbye one more chance. You’re leaving the fucking planet, dude. Go back upstairs.’
M.G. I think that is a really good point.
JASON It’s a pretty aggressive interpretation of the ‘cry-it-out’ philosophy about sleep training. [M.G. & Haitch laugh] To just be like well I put her down in the bed and now I’m going to drive my truck into a spaceship. [Jason laughs]
HAITCH I’ll see you in 23 years, yeah good luck!
M.G. Yeah. That’s so funny. Cause that’s exactly what I was thinking of. It’s like, we’ve all been in that situation with much lower stakes. Of course. We’re not hopefully leading to leaving the planet, but it’s just like, yeah, we’ll walk away and close the door, whatever. And then, you know, the little ones still crying and then five minutes later, it’s totally fine. And you know, everything is yeah. And nope, not for Matthew McConaughey.
HAITCH Well, what’s incredible as he’s driving away and you know, he’s gone. Murph comes out. She’s screaming, crying.
[clip from Interstellar plays]
YOUNG MURPH Dad! Dad!
[clip from Interstellar fades out]
HAITCH The music is just swelling. And you have the shot of him crying as he’s driving the truck, but as that’s happening, you have the sound come in from the countdown on the launch through the rocket taking off, like it was unbelievably good!
M.G. Yeah. I remember that in theater specifically, seeing that and thinking like, wow, this is a great transition what they’re doing right now.
JASON Yeah. It is really, I mean, and it like, it’s very, again, very economical. It’s hard to call a movie that’s three hours long economical, but they do get you to where you’re like, okay, well let’s get to fucking space already It’s a movie called Interstellar.
M.G. Right. Cause it’s like 45 minutes in. We are in farmland for 45 minutes.
JASON Yeah, it’s for awhile. This is also, I think I saw like some like YouTube video or TikTok or something about this movie where, I think that’s like where they start sort of introducing the orgon theme, like Hans Zimmer scores starts introducing the organ theme, which becomes like obviously a big part of the movie as the movie goes on.
And like, it kind of becomes this, you know, anchor of like, oh, it’s about their, like their dynamic as well, as much as anything else.
HAITCH They launch and we have the scene of them getting there and locking with endurance, which is great. All of the shots of in space. So they built a ranger, an almost like 0.8 scale ranger, 50 feet long. And for the scenes that they were going to be on set. And then they brought it home and used it for shooting all of the space stuff so that they could mount cameras to the side of it. And Hoyte van Hoytema, who is the cinematographer for this, and, um, a bunch of the Tenet and a bunch of other Nolan things. He specifically described it as like a GoPro. That was the sense that they wanted. And I loved the shots of the front of the ranger flying through space, going through atmosphere. It just, the effects were absolutely insane.
M.G. The other thing I would say about this once they get into spaces and, you know, it’s like a cliche at this point and everyone knows, obviously everyone knows this, but it’s like very few space movies obviously adhere to the silence of space thing. And this movie does that a hundred percent at least, you know, I’m 99% sure they do a hundred percent of the time.
HAITCH They do. They do.
M.G. And it’s very, he does it in a very smart way. Right. Cause he’s like specifically going from noisy and or music, you know, environments to outside and then it’s just, yeah, absolutely silent.
HAITCH Very effective. So as they go, they start to get their video messages. And this is the first time we have, I guess this is as they’re making their burn towards Saturn.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
PROFESSOR BRAND We’ll be waiting for you when you get back. A little older, a little wiser, but happy to see you. Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The wise men at their end know dark is right because their words had full-blown lighting. They do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH Is this your favorite Dylan Thomas? I mean, we just had some Tennyson and yeah, we’re really classing up the joint.
JASON No, I like, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ is my favorite Dylan Thomas poem. Put that in show notes. It’s a good one.
M.G. What is the back story? I didn’t actually look it up. What is the backstory behind the Dylan Thomas poem here, including it? Is it just thematic or what’s —
JASON Yeah, it’s just thematic.
HAITCH Don’t give up.
JASON I mean, he’s like, Dylan Thomas most like well-known poem. I think it’s like he wrote fairly close to the end of his life, which was like, uh, spotted with you know, bouts of extreme alcoholism and like falling into like a coma with like, you know, drinking too much.
And yeah, he lived, he lived a rough one. But the good thing is about this poem and Dylan Thomas in general is that he was also one of the things he did for money. Was he read poetry for the BBC radio. [fact bell rings] And so you can like you listen to like an amazingly good quality recording of him reading the poem.
[clip of Dylan Thomas plays]
DYLAN THOMAS The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees. Is my destroyer.
JASON Dylan Thomas has like, I mean, the reason he was reading poems for the BBC is that he has a really good voice.
M.G. Better than Michael Caine? It’s good.
JASON Yeah. Yeah. It’s really good. It’s really good. So yeah, check that one out.
HAITCH Alright. So now we have the wormhole, the approach. So Jason, now this is the part where you describe the design of the wormhole and all that.
JASON So the wormhole, the thing is that, so, right. So I think we mentioned this before, but just to be explicit. So Kip Thorne is a Caltech astrophysicist, who subsequent to this movie won the Nobel prize for the design of the Lido gravity waves detector.
So he’s like, you know, as legit —
HAITCH He’s into gravity.
JASON He’s into gravity. He knows everything there is to know about cosmology and black holes and stuff. So this isn’t like they got, like, they didn’t get a fly by night, like cosmologists they got like a legit dude. And he also, Kip Thorne is also famous for having won a bet against Stephen Hawking about the existence of naked singularities, more about, more about later in this episode. So anyway, so he’s, an interesting thing about this movie is that in his telling about it, he went on a date in the early two thousands with a woman named Lynda Obst, who’s a Hollywood producer, um, and who produced Contact. Yeah. And Kip Thorne is like, was like a, uh, like a, you know, colleague slash friend of Carl Sagan.
HAITCH I’m putting it on the list. It’s on the list right now. It’s now on the list.
JASON So they wrote a treatment for this movie that was basically about like, in the prologue of their treatment scientists discover a wormhole around Saturn because of gravity waves being caused by a pulsar orbiting, a black hole on the far side of the universe and the waves transverse the wormhole. And we detect them here and they figure out there’s a wormhole. And then like Christopher Nolan took the movie and he wrote a whole other thing and took out the prologue and whole bunch of other stuff.
M.G. And, but I, I had just read this tonight because it wasn’t doing research for this.
I didn’t realize that either. And that’s how it actually caught the eye of Spielberg before that. Because he was attached to it ahead of Nolan. Because Jonathan Nolan was going to write the screenplay and then Christopher Nolan came in.
HAITCH Oh so Jonathan Nolan came in after the fact? So she already had it going on?
JASON Yeah. There was a treatment that Kip Thorne and Lynda Obst had worked on before Johnathan, before Jonathan Nolan, before Spielberg, before Christopher Nolan.
HAITCH I didn’t know any of that. That’s amazing!
JASON So Christopher, so they changed the story, but like Kip Thorne was like this, you know, has a producer credit on the movie and like, you know, put all the equations on the blackboard that, you know, are in Michael Caine’s study and like worked with the visual effects studios called, um, was double negative. And they did like the black hole effect and the wormhole effect, and like, you know, all the visual effects in the movie. Or most of the visual effects in the movie. And he worked on them on like the visualization, most notably the visualization of the black hole of Gargantua, which they wrote scientific papers about afterwards, because it like revealed all these features about black holes.
M.G. It revealed new things. Right. That was a crazy part of it.
JASON Yeah. Right. And they did the wormhole thing. Now the wormhole thing, Kip Thorne has said is the most kind of — is the least scientifically accurate part of the movie. Both, both because like wormholes are fairly conjectural in terms of them existing. They’re completely, it’s completely, it’s very difficult to believe them existing at that, to being stable and existing at that size. But then like for the purpose of the movie too, when they did the visualization, based on Kip Thorne’s equations for the wormhole, it looked pretty boring because it’s just like, you kind of like, it, it looks like a sphere, the hole looks like a sphere in space, and then you just kind of go through the sphere and you’re on the other side.
And so they did all of this other kind of rejiggering of the effects where they put in stuff of it, like, you know, looking like different shapes of wormholes and putting in like, you know, they extended the sequence and made it more dramatic.
HAITCH The light bending around.
JASON Yeah. All this other stuff that isn’t strictly, that like, isn’t really supported by the science. But looks super dope.
M.G. And when they say people, someone put the wormhole there, right. Cause they keep alluding to this, like there’s a whole day thing and we can, we’ll go into that later. But like when they say that, do they just mean that someone opened, their theory theories that someone opened it from the other side and this is the exit point of it?
JASON Well there’s really not, there’s really not like an entrance and an exit. Like it’s, it’s equally — you go, you can like, you know, either side is equal.
HAITCH But it’s actually 12 sides leading to one location. Right? In this instance?
JASON What that?
HAITCH It’s 12 others locations all leading to this one.
M.G. Oh, cause of the 12 star locations?
JASON I guess so. I don’t know if that’s fully explained.
M.G. Yeah, that’s not, I don’t know. It could be 12 different wormholes or that we just only see one of them. I don’t know.
JASON It’s a good point because like my interpretation was that like it’s point to point, like it’s one point from around Saturn to another point in another galaxy. On that other side, on the other galaxy, there are multiple accessible star systems, like somehow?
HAITCH Yeah, I think it’s, I think that the way they described it with the periscope of coming around and being able to see in. The way I looked at it as depending on where you entered into it, which, which side you came through, you would go to one of the 12 locations. Because they specifically, before they went in, they chose that star system because it had three planets versus the other nine. And then they lined up and the flew in with that trajectory.
M.G. At the right directions to go to that one.
HAITCH To go to that one. Yeah, exactly.
M.G. So it’s the same wormhole, but if you enter it from a different direction, then you’d go to a different star system.
JASON I think that’s even less well supported by the science. [Haitch laughs]
M.G. It seems a little crazy.
JASON The idea that there’s like multiple off-ramps is, is a little goofier.
HAITCH Well you’re a what? Level four civilization, if you can generate a stable, wormhole?
JASON Yeah. It’s level three. Like if, if you can take advantage of the energy of your whole galaxy, like, I mean, that’s the point is like the, is that like the only way you could keep the wormhole open is if you could somehow like thread it with negative energy. Which, you know, sure, why not.
HAITCH Seem reasonable.
M.G. Yeah, why not?
HAITCH Okay. I just want to have just a quick sidebar, unrelated to this. Just a quick physics moment. So when the first time we ever discovered pulsars, that was like how long ago? Like 40 years ago?
JASON I don’t know, in the first pulsar was first discovered.
HAITCH And wasn’t it, wasn’t it like the LGM where they wrote it down because they had never heard something that was so naturally, it was like, so perfectly rhythm they’re like, this is definitely an artificial source?
JASON You mean like the OMG signal thing?
HAITCH Yes.
JASON I think you’re conflating two different things.
HAITCH Is it quasars? I thought it was pulsars, pulsars spin, right?
JASON Pulsars spin. There’s also quasars. I like, so I think like the — and then there’s also the OMG signal, which like, yeah, like, which kind of goes into some of the stuff that’s happening in the movie in terms of — but like pulsar can just be, a quasar is a very distant object. Like are some of the most distant, fast receding objects in the, in the universe. Whereas like pulsars are usually more like white dwarf stars that are rotating and emitting signal.
HAITCH Okay. But they are emitting a very specific regular pattern.
JASON Sure.
HAITCH And they don’t change. Right? Each one is very specific as if it is most definitely a mechanical device, that is set up, that is transmitting. And you have all these different pulsars, right. That transmit with different rates?
M.G. So they sound intelligent. But it’s a naturally occurring thing.
JASON It’s naturally occurring. Yeah. And you can use the, basically you can use the frequency of the pulsars to determine distance and luminosity. And so it’s like one of the things that you can do to like help gauge the distance of other stars.
HAITCH Correct!
JASON There are these objects that are so known, like these like standard candles, where you can use these objects that have these very like, these very regular repeating, like Stephie variable stars, like one class of these pulsars and like, based on the frequency that we observe, we can know certain things about their distance luminosity.
HAITCH We can, and the people who put them there also can, that is my, that’s my question. Like, why wouldn’t — isn’t a pulsar, if you have a concept of pulsars as these beacons that are all over the universe that you can use to navigate different locations to —
JASON We don’t need like any extra terrestrial, like explanation for why the pulsars pulse.
HAITCH You don’t need it. I’m just making the, I’m asking the question. Obviously the bar, the higher, the concept, the higher the bar would have to be, but wouldn’t this be exactly what we would expect to see if —
M.G. Like the, what’s the, what’s the, is it the flames of Gondour?
HAITCH The beacons? Well I’m thinking of in Contact, you have the scene of like the Interstellar, somebody built the wormholes in Contact, and they’re like, we don’t even know who built it. It was another race before us, but like. Aren’t pulsars — I just wonder why —
M.G. It was Jodie Foster’s father I thought.
JASON Yeah. Jodie Foster’s father built the pulsars. [Haitch laughs]
HAITCH Alright. That’s the end of my, that’s the end of my pulsar. We’ll take this offline.
JASON Great. They go through the wormhole.
M.G. Hold on, hold on. You guys said you were going to, you didn’t do Contact yet, but you’re adding to the list? Yeah. I mean, cause obviously the Matthew McConaughey thing here with is also a good parallel to that.
HAITCH He’s incredible in that movie.
M.G. Contact is a great movie! I love Contact.
JASON Oh yeah. Matthew McConaughey is in Contact. That’s right.
M.G. Yeah. He’s Palmer Joss.
JASON Palmer Joss. That’s a great name.
HAITCH Yeah, God, I can’t wait. Alright. So the scene of them flying in front of the wormhole, skimming into it, being inside the wormhole, her seeing that one of the beings is reaching through and putting her hand to touch.
JASON There was like big, like big vibes from like, The Abyss in the, like the tentacle coming out to touch her.
HAITCH And Contact.
JASON I guess that’s true.
HAITCH Alright. So they get to the other side, it’s sort of like the wormhole reopens up in the other galaxy. And now they have to decide what to do. So they have three planets to check out. One of them is Miller’s planet and that is the astronaut Miller. And they haven’t gotten any beacon, any points from her, but it looks like there’s water.
M.G. And that is the closest one I think is the —
HAITCH That’s the closest one. Exactly. But there’s a problem.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
ROMILLY The planet is much closer to Gargantua than we thought.
COOPER Gargantua?
DOYLE It’s what we’re calling them. A black hole. Miller’s and Dr Mann’s planets orbit it.
BRAND And Miller’s is on the horizon?
ROMILLY A basketball around the hoop. Landing there takes us dangerously close. A black hole that big has a huge gravitational pull.
COOPER Look, I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate -
BRAND It’s not that, it’s time. That gravity will slow our clock compared to Earth’s. Drastically.
COOPER How bad?
ROMILLY Every hour we spend on that planet will be maybe … seven years back on Earth.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH So they have to figure out how to do it as quickly and safely as possible and to be really effective.
M.G. And nothing could possibly go wrong when they set it up like that.
JASON No and also it’s like, it’s worth noting. Like they do all, they do all the math and like kinda set up the audience, to be like, okay, here’s the thing, right? Because Gargantua is in this gravity well, it’s close to the black hole, we’re going to lose all this time, back on earth by going there. And so like, you know, things that happen there will seem like, you know, it just happened, but it will be years back on the spaceship or back on earth. They like set that up like very careful because it’s key to the whole concept. But like at no point, does it occur to anyone that like, well, if that’s true, then Miller going there would also have just happened for her, but could be like years for us.
HAITCH They actually said that.
JASON They said it after the face. [Jason laughs]
M.G. Like, she just died.
HAITCH Exactly. Yeah. So, alright. So I do want to say the, the score as we’re going down to Miller’s world is so amazing. And it’s one of the effects that he uses many times where he just has this kind of like a clock beat that is your starting point. And then it builds from that. And in watching the documentary today, the discussion of him, he had like the violin players hit their violin strings with pencils.
M.G. Ohhhh really?
HAITCH And he had though the horn players hit their mouthpieces with their hands and the cello players just slapped the side of their cellos with their hands, all recorded in this giant cathedral to create this otherworldly clock effect. And then you have Roger on this guy or Richard, whatever on the organ. And it’s just so intense.
[music from Interstellar plays]
JASON Super intense. And like, there’s also this fact that like the ticking is like every tick is an hour back on Earh.
M.G. Oh really? Is that true?
HAITCH Shit.
M.G. Oh I didn’t know that, that’s cool.
HAITCH Alright, I figured out how to deal with my number one nit with this movie after watching it for the second time the other night, and that is, I have decided that the Rangers, their spaceships were designed to be in water, right? They were designed to be able to land in water if they had to and then to be able to take off again, because the crux of the problem is they get down on the, on the planet. It’s all water, as far as the eye can see and they end up having a wave coming and they get caught up in the wave.
They surf it and Brand loses time. So they basically get stuck for an hour and lose whatever.
JASON And they lose, they lose Seneca Crane, they lose, they lose you know, mutant, antigen scientists (uncredited) from underworld as well.
HAITCH He stood there for like way too long. He’s like —
JASON Yeah, he deserved to get whiped out.
M.G. Like, get in, get in, get in. I’m gonna wait here, standing right here, get in, come on. The robot’s got you, but get in.
JASON Yeah. Bummer for him.
HAITCH That is amazing. So when CASE starts running like the legs transitioning into the whirling dervish of getting there. I do want to call out Nathan Crawley, who is the production designer working on all the robots, the ships, everything. The production design in this film in every way is completely just as good as it gets.
JASON Fun, fun facts about this sequence of which there are many, this is dope. This whole thing is great. Giant wave looks great.
M.G. What are those mountains in the background?
JASON Yeah, looks great. It was shot on location. They shot this whole thing on location. Obviously the waves are not real, but the, they shot this in Iceland. I don’t know why that’s necessary to be perfectly honest. It, it feels like they could have found —
M.G. The ocean’s the ocean.
HAITCH No, no.
JASON I mean also they needed something that was shallow.
HAITCH It’s shallow and so it’s as far as you can see, but it’s only three feet deep.
JASON I know. I know. So. It would be easier to do that, like in a soundstage then you know, then like to go to Iceland. So there’s an amazing, there’s an amazing thing about like shooting in Iceland feature out of the 25 featurettes that are on the DVD. And my favorite thing about it is like, so they had to like film this in the water in Iceland, even though it was like only like two feet deep, like they still had to like be in water with two feet deep. And like, so the whole crew is standing around. They’re like setting up the shot and the whole crew is wearing like, you know, Gators, like up to the, up to the hip, you know, Gators because they’re standing in freezing cold water.
HAITCH Are you talking about his jacket? Chris Nolan is wearing his jacket in the waiters?
JASON Yeah! Chris Noland is wearing his sports jacket. Everyone else is wearing like Arctic parkas.
M.G. He will not take it off. That’s amazing.
JASON He will not take off that fucking jacket. He’s so committed to the bit!
HAITCH I wrote that down! I wrote that down too. [Hatich laughs]
M.G. I hope it’s at least like, if you guys remember from the 49ers, yesteryear, when Mike Nolan was the coach, right. He used to wear the Nike suit [fact bell rings] because he also wanted to adhere to the suit on the sideline thing to class it up. So he had like a special Nike suit made cause you had to wear Nike apparel. So hopefully Chris Nolan got the Mike Nolan —
JASON So fucking dedicated. [Haitch laughs]
HAITCH That was, that was amazing. They are also like, they’re very casually,
the producers are like we had to build a 50 kilometer highway in order to get to the location.
JASON Yeah.To get the stuff there. They had to pave a road to the, to the Lake that they filmed this thing that.
HAITCH Including driving the ship, which is 20 feet wide and 50 feet long. That would take up the whole thing. It’s absolutely stunning. And let’s just go ahead and take a moment right now to say my whole impression of this film is that Nolan is like a blood brother to Denis. Everything has to be real. Everything has to be practical. No green screens, no like fanciful, you know, bullshit CG, just everything real and grounded and emotional.
M.G. Aside from black holes.
JASON Yeah. I mean, like, I think Todd or like, you know, would jump in to say like, well, like it’s all, they’re all effect shots. Like none of it is real, right? Like, I mean, like they have to, there’s a ton of, there’s a ton of CG in terms of just making the TARS stuff work. I mean, there’s a giant, there’s the 4,000 foot wave is also not real. [Jason laughs]
HAITCH Of course there’s CG, there’s appropriate use of CG, but the point is everything that could be done physically is done physically. Huge difference.
JASON I love the 4,000 foot wave. One fun fact about the 4,000 foot wave. So this again is like — so Kip Thorne like came up with a whole physical theory for how this would work.
So there’s like a couple, there’s a couple of things to say about Miller’s planet. One is, is that they had to come up with a way to justify the time dilation of, you know, like it would be 23 years that they were down there. And it turns out you have to be pretty fucking close to the black hole in order for that to be true, such that like you wouldn’t like Kip Thorne was like, there’s no stable orbit for this planet.
M.G. Because you have to be almost traveling at the speed of light or the orbit would have to be.
JASON You have to be like really, really close to that, really, really close to the event horizon. And so, Christopher Nolan was like, you know, make it work, go get your markers out. And come up with something and make it work. [Haitch laughs] And so what Kip Thorne came up with was that the planet would be that close, but the black hole would be spinning very, very fast. And the spinning of the black hole would like help it maintain its orbit. Additionally, the planet would have just been captured recently in like the, you know, like cosmologically recent past, and as a result, it’s wobbling in its orbit. And that wobble is what produces, is what produces the waves, the massive waves.
HAITCH Huh. Cause I was like, how do you have a wave if it’s all shallow?
JASON Yeah. So it’s, it’s like the same kind of wave that you get in a, there’s a type of wave, like called a bore, a title bore, that you get in a river, where you have shallow water leading to a deeper body of water. And like it’s, it’s the type of way that you get here. One of the things you notice is like, it doesn’t crest, it’s a soliton wave. And so, yeah, that’s like, that’s one of the features of the, of the type of orbit that the planet is in. And so it’s also one of the things where it’s like, they should have observed all this and been like “this planet fucking sucks!” Like it’s not gonna make it. [M.G. laughs]
M.G. You can see that from afar maybe. It’s all water, what’s going on here?! [Haitch laughs]
HAITCH Doesn’t look good. So on the ship after, you know, they are, you know, getting the ship back to where they can, they can take off, you have this discussion about relativity and he’s saying there’s gotta be a way for us to get back this time. And Brand feels terrible because she has, you know, she feels like she blew this and, you know, costs them all this time.
M.G. What did she want to get? The beacon?
HAITCH Yeah she was trying to get the data. She was trying to get the data.
M.G. Right. The black box, basically.
HAITCH You should have had enough data, Brand.
JASON Yeah, the data is this planet sucks. [Jason & Haitch & M.G. laugh]
HAITCH But she says to him that time is relative, but it can’t go backwards.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
BRAND They are beings of five dimensions. To them, time might be another physical dimension. To them, the past might be a canyon that they can climb into. The future a mountain they can climb up. But to us, it’s not okay.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And Jason to meet us was a direct Herbert call, right?
JASON I felt that too. Yeah. Herbert, for M.G, for your, perhaps for your benefit, or certainly for our listeners who do not have to listen to Dune as we’ve reiterated the top of this podcast. Herbert talks about his theory of pressions or seeing the future as being like being either in a canyon or on a mountain and sometimes, or being in a sea in which like the wave crest. And you can sometimes see farther or sometimes you’re in the trough and you can’t see as far. And that’s how our oracular vision works.
HAITCH I’d be interested to see what Nolan’s, what Nola’s take is to Herbert. So they head backup and they get to Endurance, they dock, and that the door opens in the theater. [Jason laughs] My jaw dropped open when it was revealed that it had been 23 years for Rom.
M.G. This is one of the coolest scenes. Yeah.
JASON 23 years for Rom. Tough for him. He kind of takes it on the chin though. He’s fine. He’s just like —
M.G. I thought he was going to go insane.
JASON “You guys were gone for a while!” [Jason laughs]
M.G. They sort of set it up, right, that he’s going to just like, he’s going to be the Looney Tunes guy who is, you know, all of a sudden off the, off the rails, because he’s been just waiting for them for 20 plus years and been doing these equations. Then it goes to the long sleeper, whatever, for some of the time. But instead he, he pulls it together and yeah, he rallies.
JASON He rallies. He does fine. He took some naps. He was up there with his robot friend. It was fine.
M.G. He did some equations, got some, crunched some numbers.
HAITCH I just thought that was great. I thought that that moment was really, really powerful.
M.G. “You’ve been gone so long!” 23 years. Four months. Eight days.
HAITCH Yeah. So we have years of messages that are there and this is where we get him sitting down. We have Timothée checking in.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
YOUNG TOM Oh, I met another girl, Dad. I really think this is the one. Her name’s Lois. That’s her right there.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And then the switch to Casey and him describing his baby Jesse being born.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
ADULT TOM Hi Dad. Look at this! You’re a grandpa. His name’s Jesse. I kinda wanted to call him Coop but Lois says maybe next time.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And then Jess dies.
M.G. Right. That is, that is a brutal, subtle reveal.
JASON You’re a grandfather! Oh, he died.
M.G. You were a grandfather for five minutes or whatever it was in the messages. That’s crazy.
HAITCH Yeah. Yeah. And then him saying —
[clip of Interstellar plays]
ADULT TOM I’m letting you go. I don’t know where you are, Dad. I hope that you’re at peace and… bye.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH And we finally have arrived at interstellarcrying.GIF.
JASON Yeah. It’s good. It’s I mean, Matthew McConaughey is a great crier. He really does. I mean, he’s, it is GIF worthy. He does great. And the lighting is beautiful. That is one of the things I, again, like the, not to just hype all ultra high definition Blu-ray as a technology, but the lighting looks fucking amazing in this, in this shit, like where it’s just like, you get so much shadow in so much light and like, it’s just the perfect movie for it.
It really, I was very excited about it.
M.G. The other thing I would say is on the flip side, uh, the sound and particularly the vocals, obviously everyone complains about the Nolan, you know, situation.
HAITCH With Tenet.
M.G. Right here. It wasn’t an issue. I don’t think it was even when I saw it in theaters. I don’t remember it being an issue at all. And it certainly didn’t didn’t seem that way when I watched it again recently.
HAITCH But you were wearing your AirPods Studio Max. So you’re probably —
M.G. That’s true. That’s true. With these, maybe I could hear, I could hear very crystal clear, but I don’t remember it being bitched about like, it is on the other Nolan films.
JASON I don’t think it was. I always subtitle. That’s another thing about at home, always subtitle.
HAITCH Always record.
M.G. Very millennial of you. Yeah.
JASON Yeah. Well, it’s like, you know, there’s always babies around, you never know what these babies hear. You know, they’re always talking.
HAITCH So we do have, at the end, after the discussions with Tom, we have Jessica, Jessica Chastain is the adult Murph.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
ADULT MURPH You once told me that when you came back, we might be the same age. And today on the age you were, when you left. This might be a real good time for you to come back.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
JASON She’s pissed.
HAITCH Yeah. She’s very upset. I did, like point of reference that would make him like 33 or something. I didn’t think McConaughey was 33. He wasn’t 33 in 2014 I think.
JASON No, no. But he looks good for 33.
HAITCH But they did this really cool thing. She does her message. And then you flip out to her perspective back on Earth.
M.G. Yes. It’s great. It’s a great transition. A hundred percent. Yeah. I thought, I wrote that down too, because that’s so, that’s so good to do. Yeah.
JASON Super efficient. Yeah.
HAITCH Alright, sorry, let me make one more point really quick. Going back to Slim’s review. Speaking of the video messages, ‘if I were John Lithgow and Murph was my granddaughter, mad alive, I would read her the riot act.’
JASON Talk to your father!
HAITCH ‘I know you’re going through some shit Murph, but your dad is in literal space and may never see you again, get your ass in front of that camera right now. So help me!’
JASON Good point. That’s a fair point. But he died. John Lithgow died. He got buried in the back 40. [Haitch laughs] With mom.
M.G. Where Coop would have been buried if he hadn’t gone to space and gotten lost.
HAITCH Right. So now we get to, there’s not enough fuel. And so they have to make the choice between Mann’s world and Edmund’s world. And Brand makes the case that Edmund’s world is better. But there was like the subtle moment where he had asked her about Edmond and he like looks at her response and immediately knows that she’s in love with him.
JASON Yeah.
M.G. Earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HAITCH And she cops to it. But she says that they need to trust that.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
BRAND Love is the one thing or capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can’t understand it yet.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
HAITCH And this is important because this helps to lay the foundation for the climax of the film I thought.
JASON This is again, like to my earlier point where like the thematics get a little heavy where she’s like, you know, like love, isn’t a bad thing. Like, you know, we gotta love, love matters. And he’s like no, cold hard reason or whatever. It’s like, yeah, whatever, you know. You know, it seems like, I think they would’ve made their actual decision based on a little bit more of the actual data or whatever, but it’s fine. Whatever. It’s fine.
HAITCH I love the fact — well, I think Edmund’s world was the farthest away. Right? That was the other thing. That was the other challenge. I think Mann’s was closer.
M.G. I think that’s right. Yeah.
HAITCH He’s like, well, we can vote on it. And then he’s like, nah, just go make the call. [M.G. & Haitch laugh]
JASON We’re not voting, this isn’t democracy. I’m Matthew McConaughey, we’re going where I want.
HAITCH So they’re, they’re heading for Mann’s planet and we cut back to Dr. Brand is dying. And he confesses to Murph that there, there was no Plan A, you know, for Plan A, it was all a fake, um, and that he had solved the equation or at least half the equation 40 years ago. And so that was never a thing. So that that’s a pretty intense deal.
JASON Yeah. That’s a pretty, that’s a pretty rough, I mean, I guess it’s sort of like if there’s no Plan A then like, they were just, why send people to the planets at all, then?
HAITCH To choose the planet. If there’s no, if there’s no Plan A, why spend all of that effort building a space station when you could be building more seeding missions?
JASON I don’t know if there’s no Plan A really makes a lot of sense to me, to be honest.
M.G. I agree with that. And I almost feel like — so I felt differently. I guess the first few times I watched it, then I did this most recent time, but it felt like I’m not sure that Michael Caine, wasn’t just sort of being, you know, old man spouting off like that he felt regret about, you know, put putting people down the, down this path when he did actually think, like, there was a possibility that Plan A could have worked or something like that. He just didn’t, he couldn’t solve the equation. He just didn’t do it. Though obviously they get into it that like Matt Damon also knew that, that he couldn’t solve the equation. Right. And so that’s sort of like goes against that theory.
HAITCH But he had solved the equation.
M.G. Right. He had solved it, but he didn’t have the data required.
HAITCH So we cut back from there to Dr. Mann. And so this was another, for me, a jaw dropping moment. They, they kept setting up the Dr. Mann was the best of us and this amazing guy.
JASON You knew he was going to be a problem when they set it up a little bit too, they put a little too much mustard on the hot dog, like a little too much ‘He’s the best, what a hero, what a legend’ You’re like uh oh.
HAITCH But I also freeze framed when they showed the astronauts, like you cannot see that it’s Damon and that reveal of him and his crying. I mean, it’s like straight back to Good Will Hunting. Like it was really, really great. That initial introduction to him.
JASON Yeah.
M.G. So it’s, it’s funny this past weekend, Megan and I, my wife and I were staying at, a hotel for the first time in forever. Because we’re about luckily vaccinated and now feeling okay about the world. And one of the actual Blu-rays that they had in this place that we, that we could play was The Martian. And so The Martian obviously came out a little bit later. Right? I think. But it’s like, it’s fascinating to watch. It’s like, what is, what is both Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain, like, why, why are they drawn to these sort of space, you know, type situations. And also like, very close to one another in the relative time of their release.
JASON Yeah. It’s true.
HAITCH You like that movie?
M.G. I saw The Martian, I hadn’t seen it.
HAITCH And did you read the book?
M.G. I did not read the book, so, but I saw the movie with, it was a screening with the author of the book there who spoke afterwards about, so I’ve never read the book.
And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a good movie. It’s entertaining. It’s very different than, than this movie.
HAITCH Oh Jessica Chastain is in that too? I didn’t realize that. Yeah. 2015. Wow. Hmm.
JASON That’s weird.
HAITCHL Oh, Ridley Scott. Holy shit. I didn’t realize he directed that.
M.G. It’s a totally different vibe, of course, but it’s a marooned astronaut who happens to be Matt Damon.
JASON But not evil.
M.G. But not evil. Right, the nice guy.
JASON Not evil, not evil in this one.
HAITCH Jason, did you read the book?
JASON I did read the book.
HAITCH Yeah. Did you like it?
JASON Yeah, I liked the book. I think I liked the book better than the movie. Yeah. I liked the movie fine. I think I’d watch it again though.
HAITCH I just remember CJ Craig is in it. So that, that makes me happy.
JASON Oh yeah. That’s cool.
HAITCH So Dr. Mann has been on the planet for a long time. He’s given sketchy vibes. Like you don’t want to hook up the robot. I had to decommission him. Let’s not mess around with that. I’ve been doing some missions.
M.G. Lots of misdirection.
HAITCH Yeah. So we can just cut to, he takes Coop for a long walk and he attacks him and the shot of them, like the way that unfolds, there’s a shot where they’re wrestling and it’s just a pullback and it’s again like a silent shot of them struggling in the distance.
That was just gorgeous.
JASON I forgot one fact though, about Mann’s planet, you know, so, this is also that they shot in Iceland.
M.G. I was gonna say, it must’ve been Iceland. Beautiful.
JASON And they were basically reusing locations that they had used for Batman, like, cause they went to, they went to Iceland for the Himalayas stuff in Batman Begins.
So they’re very familiar with where they’re going. They’re like, oh, it’s great. You can just drive up on the glacier. We know the glacier guy, like no problem. And there had been like an eruption since they shot Batman. So it looked like grittier, which is great. So there’s all like dust in the ice. So that was good for them for like the feel of the movie. Anyway, fun fact about this was, you know, going to my money laundering theory of movies is they, uh, were up on the glacier and occasionally on the glacier, you get these really high winds, like, you know, a hundred mile an hour winds. And so they had a whole like 25 person glacier crew that would advise them when the winds were too high. And they had to like, you know, retreat cause they just couldn’t shoot safely in those conditions. And what they did when they couldn’t shoot on the glacier was they went to the hotel and they shot in the parking lot. [Jason & Haitch laugh] And so a lot of like the, and they show this on this featurette, at a lot of like the, a lot of like the fight and stuff like that is just like in the parking lot of this, like, you know, Reykjavík hotel or whatever. [Haitch & M.G. laugh] And, and they have like an interview with like, one of the producers who is just like, “Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, I don’t think there’s ever been a movie where like, you go on location to a glacier in Iceland, you ended up shooting in the parking lot. But I’m proud that we did!” I’m like, you’re an idiot. Like we have, we have parking lots in Los Angeles. [Jason & Haitch laugh] You know what I mean? That’s one thing they have a lot of, and Hollywood is parking lots. You don’t need to go to an Icelandic parking lot!
HAITCH But you can though!
JASON But you can. And they did.
HAITCH Yeah. That’s amazing. Alright. So Mann has attacked him, his cracked helmet, and he’s watching him suffocate.
JASON What is, what is his plan besides saving himself?
M.G. I thought about this a lot, actually watching this again, but I do think that he had some sort of idea that he would commandeer all this ships and all the equipment that they took and then —
HAITCH Go to another planet.
M.G. Still carry out the mission.
JASON Like go to a different planet.
M.G. Plan B. Yeah. Basically go to a different planet, find one that’s inhabitable and still carry out the mission. So it’s sort of like while he is, it’s almost like, I feel like he’s maybe portrayed a little bit more evil in the way that they, they sort of do the whole story. Then he actually was meaning to be. Like he still had the idea that he would save humanity potentially by doing it. But I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know that that’s a hundred percent the right read, but that’s how I sort of read it.
HAITCH I mean, he’s willing to kill all of them. Right. Like he is, he’s willing to sacrifice every single one of them —
M.G. Only because, because he thinks that they’re going to get in his way of, he thinks they’re, yeah, they’re, they’re too emotional and all this other stuff, but I will say the one thing that goes against that theory is the stuff that he does with his own robot. Which, that’s the KIPP robot, right?
HAITCH Ohhh, nice, nice.
M.G. Allusion there. Um, and he basically booby traps it. He destroys it, but then he also booby traps it right. To be able to blow up. So it’s, it’s almost like he recognized that whoever would save him might not be on board with whatever his ulterior motive was, would be.
HAITCH Totally. Totally. And so now we have, now we have this, you know, this, this sort of great parallel climax here. As he’s trying to maroon them. And then also back on Earth, you have Murph who is trying to get Tom’s kids out, because they, or Tom’s son and wife, because they’re sick. But she’s also trying to figure out how to get back into her room and see what’s happening. So you’re sort of cutting back and forth between those two things. And this is where we have Mann attempting the manual docking scene. And the score, it goes on, the scene goes on for like eight or nine minutes. It’s absolutely unstoppable. Ait is so intense when he gets us imperfect contact.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
SHIP VOICE Imperfect contact.
MANN Override.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH Then the shot of like the clamps grabbing and then letting go. And then grabbing.
M.G. In silence right?
HAITCH Yeah. And then imperfect contact and just bussshhh the fragmentation.
M.G. And they’re screaming at him from the ship and they can’t hear, he can’t hear them until they break, she realizes that they can break through thethe PA system on the, on the ship or whatever. [M.G. laughs]
JASON The Sonos. [Haitch & M.G. laugh] The Endurance Sonos.
HAITCH You know, the, the ship spinning and the fragments flying off. And Coop bringing in the Lander to be able to come in and dock at 68 RPMs.
M.G. This is my favorite scene.
JASON This is the best.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
COOP C’mon TARS! C’mon TARS!
[clip of Interstellar ends]
JASON This is where we have to put in all the ‘C’mon TARS’ memes.
HAITCH It’s happening. It’s happening right now. Amazing shit. Just absolutely amazing!
JASON Best shit. It’s great. I love it. I’m putting my favorite one in the chat. You gotta have the Lego one. That’s the most important one to me.
HAITCH Oh, is it? Okay.
M.G. And cut to a scene of tars with the joystick, right. Of like he’s like holding on because McConaughey, Coop is worried that he’s going to pass out and Anne Hathaway is passed out. Right. And like TARS is like, he’s got his little, uh —
HAITCH Docking.
M.G. Hook on the thing. Yeah.
JASON Their shit looks fucked up though. Like, it doesn’t look like a great, it doesn’t look like it’s going to go very well for them. Like having been like, I mean, they achieve the docking, but I don’t think you can just blow a giant hole in your spaceship and like…
M.G. No, and all this debris, they don’t seem worried about the debris at all.
HAITCH There’s some shots. I mean, you don’t, I don’t think you have any options.
M.G. yeah, yeah. That’s what he says, yeah. We got to do this.
HAITCH Exactly. It’s not, may not be possible, but it’s necessary.
M.G. Right. Right. Exactly.
HAITCH So they decide they’re going to use Gargantua because they’re almost out of fuel. They’re going to use Gargantua to be able to Slingshot to Edmund’s world. And meanwhile, as part of their doing that, TARS is going to get inserted into Gargantua. And that will help them to drop weight and to be able to do things. And so they go through, they execute the burn going through there. And this is the moment where coop confesses, that he is also going to go into Gargantua because he is going to go figure out how to get back time or, or do something.
JASON Well and also that there’s not enough supplies to keep both him and Anne Hathaway alive. Like it’s not just like his, like, weight, like, you know, the 170 pounds of Matthew McConaughey. It’s like they don’t have enough food and stuff for, for both of them.
M.G. And I only realized that part of it when I actually turned on the captions, because part of this is like loud. So this is going against my earlier point. Like, it was hard to hear what they’re saying, because I actually missed one of the sort of money lines in this when I’d watched it, the first couple of times.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
BRAND You told me we had enough resources for both of us.
COOP We agreed, ninety percent.
[clip of Interstellar ends]
M.G. As he’s, as he makes the call to say, you know, that they were always gonna be truthful or whatever with one another. Um, so I totally missed that. Yeah. Until I turned on the captions.
JASON So good. Can we, can we talk about Gargantua a little bit? You alluded to it earlier. So like, like this, where like the, the visual effects stuff is very accurate. Like, so they do, there’s just like, you know, there’s all this gravitational lensing that happens because Gargantua is very, uh, massive. It’s like the massive, like several million suns. And so what you see is this, you know, Gargantua has this disc, which is like the rings of Saturn. You can think of it as like the rings of Saturn or this disc of like dusk and matter orbiting —
HAITCH An accretion disk?
JASON An accretion disk.
HAITCH Yes!
JASON And it’s like, all this dust, that’s like circling Gargantua, falling into the black hole. Now it’s important to note like that is the source of light and heat for the planets in this system. Right. Like, so there’s —
M.G. Right, cause it’s their sun.
JASON Yeah. It’s their son. So there’s this like fine tuning that like they had to do to figure out a way that like Gargantua would be big enough and spinning at the right speed.
And like, the dust would be like, you know, enough of it, but not too much such like the, the light coming off Gargantua, wasn’t just like cosmic rays and x-rays, that would just like fucking fry, everything that was living around it. So there’s like some, some, you know, parameter setting they had to figure for that. But then the big thing is that there’s the disc going around it. And so you see this a fact where you see like a loop coming up above, and what you’re seeing is like the disc on the other side of the black hole, as the light from that side is bending —
HAITCH Oh it’s bending around?
JASON It’s bending, bending up over the side. Yeah. Because of the gravity and like the light, that’s the, that’s the light that’s on top.
M.G. It took me a while to figure that out. I had to read something about it. Yeah.
JASON Yeah. And the loop that’s on the bottom is the light from the bottom side of the disk. That’s on the far side of the, on the far side of the black hole
M.G. Right. So it’s not two rings.
JASON No, it’s not two rings. It’s one ring. You’re just seeing the bottom and the top side of the other side of the ring.
HAITCH You also don’t need to read — I mean, you’re, you’re the kind of guy that will go read that Wiki. You don’t need to read the Wiki to enjoy this scene. Like it just looks fucking bad-ass.
JASON It just looks good. But like the rendering of this was like, like, as we said earlier, it was so like, they did a really good job, like building this engine with like, you know, to like come up with the rendering of Gargantua’s accretion disk. And that they did learn about like some features of like gravitational lensing from, from doing that. And moreover, like there’s been, there’s been observational proof that that’s like actually, what, what happens with accretion disks now. So it’s kind of cool.
HAITCH I guess, but the question is like, how would a, how would a ship actually be able to maintain structural integrity, getting into the black hole? So I’m going to assert that they were like creating a field because they can control wormholes. They can, they can control black holes. So they were able to create a channel for TARS and for him to be able to get in there.
JASON So there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot. So first of all, there’s a book Kip Thorne wrote called the Science of Interstellar, which came out after the movie was released and it’s, it’s very approachable. And it’s worth — so Kip Thorne talked to Sagan when he was writing Arrival and Sagan was like —
HAITCH Contact.
JASON Contact. Right, sorry. I think I’m gonna have her go through a black hole and Kip Thorne was like, no, no, no, no, you can’t have it be a black hole because a black hole will be deadly. There’s no way to survive black hole. Because like in general, when you fall into a black hole, like you’re, there’s the, spaghettification like, that happens where you get, like, you know, there’s both forces squeezing you in and pulling you out.
HAITCH That graph that they showed in the behind the scenes where it’s like squeezing and then it kind of just kind of goes crazy.
JASON Right. Well, but what Kip Thorne says is like, what we’ve discovered since Contact, is that there’s actually this version of a gentle singularity that we believe exists.
M.G. Which they say specifically in the movie.
JASON Yeah. They say that in the movie. And so this is, there is this theory now that there’s a gentle singularity that exists before this more chaotic, what would be completely destructive singularity, you know, elsewhere, you know, in the black hole and that perhaps in this region, like it would be, it would be survivable. I mean, the other thing to know about black holes, right, is that the event horizon, from the perspective of someone going into the black hole, you don’t, it’s not like you feel the event horizon, the event horizon is like, just like a, is just a transition that’s observable from the outside, but not to the person going in.
HAITCH I’m steering down. It’s getting black. [Haitch & M.G. laugh]
JASON And, and so like, there is some, there is in theory, some point that would be survivable. And then yeah, he gets rescued by the Tesseract.
HAITCH So obviously this is a direct parallel spiritually to 2001. And the idea of my God is full of stars. Right. So what, Jason, like watching this, you know, how does this stack up, you know, for you?
JASON So I mean, I think, I think again, like the thing, so what they wanted, like, they talk about this where it’s like, they wanted certain answers to only be kind of, to not be in the screen, not be literal on the screen. Like, like to not have them explain it to you on the screen. I think they do a decent job with that, with like the what’s going on with the Tesseract stuff. I think they make it a little more literal. Like 2001, there’s essentially no dialogue and the last third of the movie. And so you really have to do some like, you know, sleuthing to figure out what’s going on there. And so I think 2001 is a, is a more artistic movie. But you know, I, they do a fun job in this one as well.
M.G. It’s so funny you say that I was literally thinking about this and thinking about how this conversation would go tonight. I was like, thinking like, so if you consider it like a spectrum of space movies, like 2001 is like the ultimate artistic, explain nothing, leave it all to the camera and your imagination to decide what’s going on. This one to me is in the middle. I think there’s, there’s other movies that do, you know, like do stupid explanations of like, assuming that you’re stupid. And saying like, oh, well, you know, here’s literally why we have to do this. And it often makes no sense of course, but like, this is right in the middle. Like they explained some things, but they don’t, but they leave a lot of stuff sort of up to your imagination. I, and we’ll get to it in a second. Cause I feel like some of that starts to go off the rail when they go into the Tesseract a little bit. Because then it becomes very esoteric.
HAITCH But I love, I looove, the manifold space time, five dimensions displayed as three, being able to have like all the bookshelves and just going to infinity. I thought that just looked spectacular!
JASON It looked cool. I think it looks cool.
M.G. They explain it a little too much.
JASON They explain it too much. I think that’s right. I think they like, they hand hold you through like, sort of like, okay, we’re going to explore like this. I mean, it does explain like every anomaly that happened. It was like, oh yeah, this is how he sent STAY. And this is how he like sent the coordinates and like, you know, it, it does make it a little literal in this part of the movies.
HAITCH It does. That’s, so the scene is a little bit long. So again, when I saw it the first time in theaters, I was like, yes, I knew he was the ghost. I got it. Like, that was, that was pretty obvious the first time through. And I think what you’re doing here is getting still that emotional concept, right? Like him saying ‘stay’ and wanting him to stay before he realizes it. Theoretically, you could have skipped that, you could have not had ‘stay’ and instead just have him say, let me figure out how to get you the message.
M.G. I totally agree. I’m okay with them doing it. I think honestly, I think it would have been a little bit better and it would have made for a more succinct movie if they just cut it.
It’s almost like they cut to the star child, right, scene where he’s just floating in space after having gone into the black hole and what the hell just happened?! Rather than yeah, being in the, in the library for so long and, and trying to explain Tesseract concept and all this other sort of stuff. And they, they as us and, you know, all that, all that stuff.
HAITCH That is important though!
M.G. It is important! It is important.
JASON I think they could have just done it, they could have done it like less literally. Like I mean, it’s literally, they have them say ‘they is us’. Like, they really sort of just like do everything, but like flash giant, like ‘it was a bootstrap paradox sign’, like, you know, on screen, like they really make it super explicit.
HAITCH So to me, a heart of the story is the fact that love, sorry, is the fifth dimension. [M.G. laughs]
JASON Yeah. That part just doesn’t work for me.
HAITCH But it, but it’s the emotional heart of what they’re trying to do. Right?
JASON Thematically I think that’s fine. I think they could have done that without literally saying ‘love is the fifth dimension’ [Jason laughs]
M.G. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree with Jason.
JASON It’s very fine. It’s like, it’s not, like it doesn’t ruin the movie. It’s just a little, the dial is just kind of —
HAITCH Too much mustard.
M.G. One thing they do here. And Jason, I would love your thoughts on this. Cause I actually, I don’t know nearly enough as, as you clearly do about sort of the science of it, but like the idea of gravity being the force that can transcend the other dimensions.
Like, is there any sort of science to that? Like what is that actually?
JASON Well, I mean, so like, this is actually like, so Kip Thorne won Nobel prize.
HAITCH Tachyons?
JASON No, you’re just saying Star Trek things. [Jason & M.G. & Haitch laugh]
HAITCH They go backwards in time! Don’t think of backwards in time?
JASON Kip Thorne won the Nobel prize for his work on gravitational waves. Which is like, sort of like one of the, like, which is basically what they’re trying to do here now. So this is, I guess, like where you have to get into like what the equation is and why they had to go into the singularity to get to get the data.
M.G. ’Cause of all the things, they don’t really explain that at all. They just say, we have to get an equation, like this one equation, they make it seem like it’s literally a piece of paper that they have to go get out of the black hole.
HAITCH Fetch quest
JASON And, and importantly, like, what is the result? What did they do with that data that allows them to fulfill Plan B? Like what —
HAITCH Plan A.
JASON Right. And then what did they do?
M.G. Right, right. They send it over Morse code, like, what did he send? 10,000 little beeps and boops like what? Yeah.
HAITCH Come on now. Don’t don’t like, don’t, don’t pluck too hard. I mean, Murph was sitting there for a long time writing out on that notebook.
M.G. Weeks. Yeah.
JASON When Kip Thorne and Chris Nolan were talking about their love of 2001 and like how they wanted there to be things that weren’t answered, like according to Kip Thorne. anyway, in this lecture, he gives like, this was the bit that Christopher Nolan said, like, I’m not going to explain any of that. You can do that in your book. And that will be the place where we sort of answer those questions. So Kip Thorne does it in his book because it’s also like sort of his, it’s his work. So basically what’s going on with the equation and what’s going on in the Tesseract stuff, what’s going on in the science, is there’s in current science, there’s this fundamental disconnect between Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which explains, you know, sort of, uh, what happens for very massive things and how time warps around massive objects. And quantum dynamics, like what happens at the smallest scale, right?
M.G. And they say this in the movie too.
JASON Right. And so there’s, there’s this theory that like within the singularity of a black hole, it’s like one of the analogies that Kip Thorne uses is that it’s like the cresting of a wave. There’s this point at which like, if you could observe what was going on there, like you’d be able to come up with a theory that would unify those two disparate schools of physics thought. And specifically the theory that Kip Thorne, like in his own work advocates for is that we live in this three plus one dimensional universe, three spatial dimensions plus time. But that there must be an extra dimensional, An extra dimensional extension of the universe in a fifth or even higher dimensions. And that if there were, we know about the rules of physics that govern our three plus one dimensions, but there maybe are some equations just like, you know, Maxwell’s equations govern, you know, electromechanics here. And, uh, you know, Newton’s laws govern regular mechanics under most conditions here, there must be some additional field equations which exist in this fifth dimension, which is called ‘the bulk’, which he refers to in his work as the bulk. And if we knew those field equations, we would be able to kind of synthesize the two different schools and like kind of have like a theory of everything. And we would specifically in the context of the movie, know how to explain the gravitational anomalies that exists within the house.
HAITCH And how to pick things up off the Earth and lift them up into space.
JASON And specifically, so specifically the part that’s not in the movie, but it’s in the book, is that by doing this observation on the black hole, they solve the equation. You know, she says Eureka.
[clip of Interstellar plays]
ADULT MURPH EUREKA! It’s traditional. EUREKA!
[clip of Interstellar ends]
HAITCH It’s traditional.
JASON Yeah. The results of that applied the applied science version of that theoretical finding is that they’re able to change the fundamental gravitational constant of the universe locally on earth, such that they can send into orbit a much heavier object than we would otherwise be able to.
M.G. Right. It’s a future colony thing.
JASON Fun fact! Kip Thorne also posits in his book that like by changing the gravitational constant in the universe on Earth locally to launch the generation ship into space, it would have the effect of destroying the planet because it would create like these giant tidal effects of like all of a sudden, like gravity is totally different.
M.G. Planet’s dying anyway.
JASON Yeah, so no big deal. Everyone’s just got to get off at the same time. Don’t miss your flight. [Haitch laughs]
HAITCH Wow!
M.G. Well, and that, and that sort of leads to the point that we hit on a little bit earlier that the idea that it’s not a they, they is us. Right. And so it’s like basically that, that we get this knowledge in the future as a result of Matthew McConaughey passing it via Morse Code going back to his daughter. And then all of a sudden we have this information. And so we’re able to pass it along to our, to our past selves in the future.
JASON Right.
HAITCH You had the moment where he says ‘they didn’t choose me, they choose her’. Right. They chose her. And actually TARS says they’re not here to change history. They’re not here to change the past. And so again, this is my favorite kind of time travel movie. This is a closed loop system where the message is coming from the future to where he is, and then going back to where they are, but nothing’s been changed. It’s all, everything that was ever happening.
M.G. So I have a question for, for you both having watched it along with me recently. I did not get the point at which she realized that it’s her father passing the messages. Like I know that they have it in the movie, like, you know, and she says it and she’s in the room. And like she has her, before her literal Eureka moment. Like, I don’t understand why, what it, like all of a sudden she understands it? Do do either of you?
JASON I think it’s just because it’s the watch, like the, I think she somehow divines from like, oh, like he gave me the watch and it’s using the watch. And like, that’s like my, it must be him doing it.
M.G. It’s just like a new set of eyes after 20 years of not being in that room or something.
JASON You’re right though. Like, I don’t, I don’t think there’s any way. I don’t think there’s anything on the screen that sort of definitively leads her to believe that.
HAITCH That is a part of the movie that drags a little bit right. Where she’s trying to figure it out. She actually gets frustrated. She’s trying to flip the coins.
M.G. She’s in the room for a long time.
HAITCH She’s in there for awhile. Topher Grace is outside, freaking out. [M.G. laughs]
JASON Casey Affleck’s coming back!!
M.G. They set the thing on fire!
JASON I can’t beat him up!
M.G. He is taking people’s temperatures and you know, making sure that everyone’s okay.
JASON Maybe it’s in the, maybe it’s in the header of the Morse code message that it gets sent back on the watch. Maybe it’s like, you know, ‘to Murph, from dad’ [Haitch & M.G. laugh] Subject: sup?
M.G. I honestly thought that was, and, and again, that’s why I asked you, you both, since you watch it, I thought that was a bit of a, like, it’s sort of the one part that doesn’t quite come around or it’s like, what is it about that?
HAITCH She gets it. Even though it’s not clear why. Maybe it’s just a feelings, maybe that’s, maybe that’s the, that’s the message. So, so TARS says that they are closing the Tesseract and, um, you know, as he’s making his way out of the wormhole, he sees Brand and reaches out. So now we’re on the other side of that scene. And he’s the one who shook hands with her and then he is sort of floating in space and wakes up on Cooper’s station, currently orbiting Saturn. And I just love this scene where he’s like, oh, it’s nice of you guys to name the station after me. Yeah. And they’re like, no, it’s named after your daughter. And the fact of going, they have a replica of their farmhouse. And so bringing it back around the circle with a documentary.
M.G. At the beginning. It makes a lot more sense. They did that very well I thought, cause like, it’s like, why are they doing this sort of weird retrospective? And then it’s like, oh, it’s a part of a historical, yeah, thing that they have set up.
HAITCH How’d you like the, just the, the like things seem to be going real well on the space station.
JASON It seems super chill.
M.G. They play baseball, they can crash windows on top of them.
JASON It’s fun.
HAITCH This is like a Discworld, or not Discworld but, uh, whatever.
JASON Cylinder world? It didn’t seem quite big enough. Like, I don’t know if they had more than one of them, but like they only, it didn’t seem like it was super large. And they say like she was in transit from somewhere else. So I don’t know.
HAITCH There are multiple stations.
M.G. Yes. Cause she has to, she’s going to be here in two weeks, they say, and then she was asleep. Right. Cause they said that later that, that she had been in sort of her hibernation state.
JASON Where’s she coming from?
HAITCH In another station.
JASON In another station. Okay. Because they had multiple stations. Okay.
M.G. The other weird thing that I don’t understand about this is, or it doesn’t sort of ring true the moment with him and her is very touching. It’s very good. Like, I, I liked that a lot. Like I think that that’s very good. Like, you know, coming back. Yes. It’s, it’s great. Like, especially, you know, with, with children now it’s like, it’s especially poignant. But I did feel like they didn’t quite square the circle of this guy, who is your father, who has 120 plus years old who looks like he’s 40 years old has come back. And clearly some people know that because the doctor who first sort of inspected him, knew who he was. And then they showed off the house and everything, but then her entire family who’s around her doesn’t seem to know who he is or care or whatever it is.
JASON Or care. And she’s also like, just like, it was good to see you.
But like, I got my people here, like family here. [Haitch laughs]
M.G. I appreciate it that on some hand, because it’s like, she’s old now, she knows she’s on death’s door. And like, she’s like you know what, it’s a good line. Right? Like no parent wants to see their child die.
JASON I know, like, at least we could spend like more than like three minutes together.
M.G. We could spend more than 5 minutes. And I feel like he should be celebrated more! The fact that he set this whole thing in motion!
JASON I had that question. I had that question too. It was like, oh, it’s named after her. And it’s like, okay, fair enough. I mean, she solved the equation.
M.G. Yeah. But I sort of helped a little bit.
JASON Yeah. It’s like, what is my, what is my version?
M.G. I went have the back hole and got the, got the tablets. [M.G. laughs]
JASON Literally went into a black hole. Like also I’m 120 years old, like no interest in me whatsoever? Like there’s not even like, and we’re related.
M.G. And again, I think, I think they try to explain it that no one knows who he is.
And I would totally get that if like, you’re trying to say like, oh, people would just want to understand it. Like, this is some 120 year old guy who went through a black hole and like, it’s fine. So like, let’s just not even talk about that. But again, I feel like the doctor who first woke them up was like, ‘Yeah. And you’ll know this is your house.;
JASON I don’t know. It was weird.
HAITCH I’m sure there were pictures. I’m sure there were lots of pictures of Coop in the history books.
JASON I just don’t know how he wouldn’t be one of the most famous people in the world. Like, I mean, he literally went into a black hole.
HAITCH I agree. I think that’s it, it’s almost like a filmmaking technique of like, he is so focused. Even if they had reacted, it wouldn’t have mattered. Right? His family. He was a hundred percent focused on her. Like the gravity between the two of them was so powerful that nothing was going to block that.
JASON He would have a great podcast. 120 year old guy podcast. That’d be real must listen. Good, good substack. [Jason laughs]
HAITCH I do love the fact that the big change now is the Rangers and the space suits are black now. They’re like, fuck this white shit. Like now we’re like edgy.
JASON Now we’re cool.
M.G. Yep. We’ve upgraded. Yep.
HAITCH And so he boards a ship. He basically steals a Ranger.
M.G. And TARS helps him. TARS commandeers him, right?
JASON Yeah. I don’t understand this point either though. Like isn’t everyone going to Edmund’s planet?
HAITCH No, because they just, because he just got there. Right. So they didn’t know. They wouldn’t have known, like, she’s like from the time he gets back, she’s not even at Edmonds yet.
JASON Right. Okay. So they were just going to go through there — but they’re going somewhere, right? I mean, like in the ship?
HAITCH They’re going to go somewhere. Yeah, for sure.
M.G. So the idea is that he came through the black hole, which led to the wormhole or a new wormhole that led him back to Jupiter or Saturn orbit. And that the space Rangers who are out there picked him up and found them out there. It’s unclear, were they there? Were they looking?
HAITCH They had a station there at Saturn.
M.G. They had the station there. So they’re just like patrolling, randomly and found found a guy laying on his face with two minutes of oxygen or whatever they said left. Uh, very fortuitous.
JASON But like, but like wait, so they must know Edmond’s plan is a thing, because like someone says to him, like she’s out there. Right?
HAITCH She says it!
M.G. To him, yeah. She’s out there waiting for you. So does she have secret knowledge because she’s like the highest clearance or something like, what’s the, what’s the deal?
HAITCH No, like he, he probably told her. They probably didn’t show, it probably wasn’t literally two minutes and she’s like, get the fuck out and go into space. They probably had conversations over time.
M.G. So then what they should have done. And I hate to, to, you know, direct this for Christopher Nolan here, but what they should have done is cut the Tesseract scene in half at the very least, and then do more of that scene. Like, because that was actually very powerful, like reuniting with his daughter, which again is the whole heart of the movie. And instead it feels very rushed and very, you know.
JASON I like that. Release the Siegler cut! I like it. [Haitch & M.G. laugh]
HAITCH It’s four and a half though.
JASON That’s fine. I’d watch a little more.
HAITCH So the final scene that we have is back on Edmunds world. And we have, you know, she is brand is there and she’s getting stuff set and he’s on his way.
JASON Now, this doesn’t quite work either because…
HAITCH They’ll be right behind him like that the Cooper station is going to be sending plenty of Rangers to come after. Now that they know I’m sure he’s debriefed and he just decided to be the first one to go. It’s fine.
JASON It’s not clear why time wouldn’t have passed for her though, too, because she didn’t go into the black hole and Edmund’s world isn’t in the black hole.
M.G. Right. It’s outside of that.
HAITCH It is. But so imagine they left at the same point, right? So she’s heading off to Edmonds. It’s going to take like a year or two for her to get to Edmonds on the other side, he instantaneously is back. Where he was on the other side of the wormhole. And so she’s going there.
JASON But he’s, it’s not instantaneous because a huge amount of time will have passed for him because he went into a black hole. Like that’s, I mean, like it’s 90 years. That’s how he ends up. That’s how he ends up in the future. That’s how he ends up with old Murph.
M.G. However much time diluted when he was on the planet, orbiting the black hole. He spent as much time, if not more inside the black hole.
HAITCH No, no, but she had that too.
JASON She, she didn’t go in!
HAITCH No, but she had the whole thing where she went.
JASON She had some of it, but she didn’t go in!
HAITCH Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, it’s like that doesn’t work the same way inside. It’s a freebie inside.
JASON I don’t know man.
HAITCH It’s a freebie inside because he’s got —
JASON It’s a freebie inside. [Jason laughs]
HAITCH In the Tesseract, like maybe whatever they have something to control it via the Tesseract.
M.G. The love dimension actually counteracts the time dimension.
JASON It gets a little sloppy at the end, I think is what we’re getting at. But yeah. [M.G. laughs] Tesseract! Tachyons, Matt! Just say Tachyons again! That was so hot.
HAITCH Jason, what did we learn about Dune 2021 here?
JASON I mean, not a lot to be perfectly honest.
HAITCH Hans Zimmer?
JASON Hans Zimmer, super great with the keyboards and the music, making music scores.
HAITCH I was just listening to the Team Deakins podcast and they had Carter Burwell, who is the composer of every Coens brothers film ever. Including Miller’s Crossing, which is my favorite. And he told his whole story of working with Coens. And one of the things he talked about is how every director and editor, when they’re cutting a film, they use a temp score. They take music from other movies and they use that temporarily, when they’re doing it because you usually don’t hire the composer until after the film is done.
M.G. Interesting, do they use the same composers work?
HAITCH They use whatever they want. Like they’ll use Jurassic Park, they’ll use whatever, whatever the particular thing is that meets — famously Kubrick went all the way down editing 2001 with all Also sprach Zarathustra and the Blue Danube or whatever.
And when he went to get a composer, he just decided he’s like, fuck it.
M.G. I’m just going to use this.
HAITCH I’m gonna use what I have. This is perfect.
M.G. It works. Ended up working.
HAITCH Nolan. When he goes to do Interstellar, he goes to Hans, and he’s like, I’m working on a movie. I’m not going to tell you anything about it. Except it’s a father and his son, it turns out he lied. Cause it was daughter. He’s like, write me as a central theme for that, which Hans does. And then when he gives him the theme, which Nolan loves, he says, okay, now we’re making a massive scale science fiction movie. And he hires Hans way early so that they have an actual score from Hans to cut the temp track of the movie.
JASON Well, that’s cool.
HAITCH Very cool!
JASON That’s great. Yeah. And that, soundtrack’s amazing.
HAITCH So how is Denis doing it?
JASON Um, it was obviously done, he’s doing the, he must be using a temp soundtrack. Cause he, it seems like it was being worked on.
HAITCH I guess.
JASON Like we knew the soundtrack was happening late because there was all that stuff about Zimmer working on this, like this Zimmer, still finishing the soundtrack.
HAITCH Hans didn’t have the final, final thing when they were doing cutting the editing, but they had like significant portions laid out so that they could, they could have that. That’s just a wild thing. That’s a crazy thing.
M.G. I know you guys were talking about this on previous podcasts, but I I’m actually not even sure. How long has the new Dune been in the can? Like how long has it actually been done for?
JASON Uh probably, like for, I mean like probably four months at this point, like I think like, I think they stopped doing reshoots. Like, um, they did a couple like pickups, like three months ago, six months?
HAITCH Summer or late summer.
M.G. And is there any, the possibility given that Warner is now on the record of saying that they’re going back to theatrical next year, that they push Dune to try to hit that instead of being on the HBO Max and theatrical thing?
JASON It’s possible, it’s also possible they actually just don’t actually do the HBO Max.
M.G. And they just go theatrical? Like as the first back to theatrical thing for the holidays or whatever?
JASON Yeah. Here at Dune Pod, we are strongly advocating that Legendary and Warner Brothers get together and just release it theatrically in October.
HAITCH I am not advocating that. [M.G. laughs]
M.G. Alright! I’ve cause a rift! Ah, I like this. Good.
JASON This is it. I’m out.
HAITCH Jason. I want to meet at the Alamo Drafthouse and we will watch it live and then we will go home and we will record, and then we will watch it again. And then we will record a second follow-up episode after watching it at home once or twice.
JASON I just want it to make a bunch of money. That’s my big takeaway. That’s my big takeaway from…
M.G. Yeah, but you have to feel good like that Kong and Godzilla made a ton of money. Right? Like, and this’ll be that to the nth degree.
JASON It made okay money. But like, I mean, by like —
M.G. But still so many theaters are still restricted.
HAITCH We’re still in COVID.
JASON I know, but that’s my point is that like, I think, I don’t think the streaming is really going to help it make the money that it needs to make. And like, Interstellar was like, there was this concern that Interstellar was going to be, like an Interstellar only made 188 million domestically. And like, it was a $200 million movie.
M.G. It made like 800 or 700 something right? Overall?
JASON It made 700 worldwide. Yeah. So it ended up being saved by the international. But like, you know, I don’t know what the international box office looks like in October. It was definitely parts of the world that don’t look good right now. And so like, you know, I don’t know. I dunno, man. I want it to make that money.
HAITCH Godzilla vs. Kong had the highest number of new signups for HBO Max. I think we’re at a new world. Streaming is fine. As long as everybody agrees.
JASON Talk to me about these new signup stats. It’s like some fucking Web 2.0 bullshit, like, ohhh, we had so many people sign up! And people cancelled! [M.G. laughs]
HAITCH M.G., who would Tilda Swinton play in your recast for Interstellar? You can choose one roll.
M.G. Oh. I think she would be good in the Anne Hathaway role. I think, I think Amelia would be an interesting one. She’s obviously old, a little bit older than Anne Hathaway is. Um, but maybe that’s more age appropriate for Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, I dunno.
HAITCH She would be great as Brand. I think she would have a lot of heart.
JASON I like it.
HAITCH Jason?
JASON TARS.
HAITCH Yes!
JASON 100%. [Haitch & M.G. laugh]
M.G. Matt Damon. Yeah.
HAITCH Ooh! Oh yeah. That would be, that would be really meaty.
JASON Yeah. That’d be good too.
[interim sound bite plays]
HAITCH Alright. Let’s see. We have a couple of letters and then a couple of voicemails before we go off into this good night.
JASON God, this movie just looks good. I think, I think like the reason I liked this movie so much is that it just like —
M.G. How long, how long do you guys think it will hold up looking good? Right? Cause like we all watch movies in the eighties now that look like shit. And like how long will this actually look good?
JASON It looks as good as, it looks, it looks better than now.
M.G. Jurassic Park still looks great. Right? Like I watched that in theaters when it was released. Whenever that was a few years ago. And, but even the rerelease look good.
JASON So much of, it’s not effects, right? I mean, it’s like, like to Matt’s point, which I sort of like shit on, like so much of it is like, it isn’t like CG, like the, like the stuff that looks good is like the, like the lighting of the stuff in the cockpit and things like that, which incidentally, they did a whole crazy thing to make that work. Like there’s a whole bunch of stuff where they, the way that worked was they were taking the computer generated, generated images of space, projecting them on screens, outside the spaceship set and then projecting simultaneously, yeah, exactly. And then projecting them back onto the faces of the actors so that it like matched what they were seeing. So like, none of that, I mean, like, you know, it’s like that, that stuff just looks fucking great. Like, and like, it’s not like a CG effect. It’s not like a, it’s not like, you know, I mean like the images themselves are computer-generated, but it’s not like that is the big point of it. I liked the interiors.
HAITCH It’s like, when you watch, when you watch A New Hope and everything looks spectacular because it’s so physical, except for the bullshit that he added in the 90s. Which looks completely dated.
JASON Yeah like Jabba. Fucking Jabba. Travesty.
HAITCH Yeah, get the hell outta here!
JASON Yeah. It’s a tough one.
HAITCH Alright. Let me get some letters here. First one is from our dear friend, Patrick Lusk. Patrick, thank you for re for writing into us again. Subject line: Lebowski. “Hey guys, nothing you need to read on the show here. We’re reading it anyways. Just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know, I’m continuing to enjoy the show. Dune Pod has become a highlight of my Monday morning. By the way, apologize for the overly long note last week on Tenet, I’ve been spoiled on the ASA shows that sometimes do three hour listener feedback episodes.” Jason, what do you think? Three hour feedback?
JASON I appreciate it people were writing in, and it means a lot to me that anyone would listen to this and then say like, you know what? I got to write these folks. So I appreciate people just taking the time to do it. And Matt, Matt is a vicious editor and will cut out what doesn’t work.
M.G. And I know we’re running long hair. Can I just tell you guys how I watched Tenet? So I have only seen Tenet because obviously we’re in COVID —
HAITCH On a smart toilet? [Jason laughs]
M.G. Almost as bad. I watched it in a, it was actually during the last sort of a lull in COVID. We did stay at a hotel one other time, then it’s only other time we stayed at a hotel. I mentioned earlier we did. And we watched it on maybe an 18 inch screen. And it was…
HAITCH Incomprehensible?
M.G. I wish I wouldn’t have watched it that way. Let’s just say it, put it that way. And so I appreciated listening to your guys’ pod on Tenet, because like, it actually illuminated a bunch of things. I’ve been waiting to watch it, to see if I can watch it actually on the big screen again. I have it here. I can watch it like on, on the home screen, but I do want to see it actually in theaters because it does seem like a visually stunning movie.
JASON It would benefit. It would benefit. Yeah it would benefit from actually going somewhere.
HAITCH I saw it on theater. I saw it on theaters, it was really good.
JASON Whatever movie I first see in theaters ever, having not been to the theater in over a year, I think I’m just going to like lose my mind. I think I’ll probably just like disassociate because I wouldn’t have seen anything that large.
M.G. What do you think the first one’s going to be? What is it?
JASON I don’t know.
HAITCH I predict you fall asleep. No baby.
JASON I mean, it’s also predicated on the — I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll have a baby with us, probably, so.
M.G. Like Black Widow? Because that’s going to be something current.
HAITCH No, I think I’m going to be watching Black Widow at home.
JASON I don’t even know what’s coming out. I don’t even know what movies are, I don’t even know where movies are anymore.
M.G. Bond is in November now, right? Like I definitely want to see that.
JASON That might be Dune. I might save myself for Dune.
HAITCH Can’t wait. We’re going to the Dune premiere.
JASON Yeah. We’re going to the Dune premiere.
M.G. I think you guys have to.
JASON We have to, we have to be invited.
HAITCH We’re working on it. Small details. Alright. Pat says “I enjoyed Lebowski the one time I watched it, but it has never made it into my personal canon of cult classics. Some of the fan theories you talked about were fascinating. So I’m inspired to watch it again sometime. Thanks for the show. Cheers, Pat.”
JASON Thanks Pat.
HAITCH Pat. Thank you so much, man. Really appreciate the, uh, the, the messages. Keep them coming. Second one is from Bryce Kelly.
JASON Bryce Kelly, Lion City!
HAITCH Let’s see… don’t read this S foul feel in the below text. Sorry. I sent this from my phone. Okay. I don’t know what that means, but “Hello, Dune Podiatrists. I think my take on interstellar was unfortunately influenced by its pre-release billing as some realistic depiction of cosmology, et cetera. For example, with Kip Thorne consulting and the much vaunted accretion disk, the actual movie then fell a little flat for me.” [Jason laughs]
JASON The much vaunted accretion disk? I love that. I don’t know what, I don’t know what marketing Bryce Kelly got about this movie where it was just like Interstellar: there’s an accretion disk.
M.G. Is there a Scientific American ads for this? [M.G. laughs]
JASON Accretion Disk Monthly. [Jason laughs]
HAITCH Oh, you mean ADM?
JASON I mean, I read it for the articles. [Haitch laughs]
HAITCH “So quick question for you all. Which science fiction work do you feel handles space and such the best?”
JASON Uh, I mean, this one is pretty legit. Like I like just to be, I mean, like there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of backing material here. So I, I like having read the Science of Interstellar book and like watch like somebody thorn. Yeah. Read the book. I mean, I skimmed the book.
HAITCH You read the book?
JASON Yeah I read the book. I mean, I skimmed the book. There’s a lot in the book I already knew Matt. So I read the parts of the book I didn’t know.
HAITCH Were pulsars covered?
JASON Pulsars aren’t really covered.
HAITCH Tachyons?
JASON Tachyons didn’t come up either that I remember.
M.G. Accretion disks? [Haitch laughs]
JASON Accretion disks, there’s a lot on, you can get a lot of your accretion disk fixed. Um, so I don’t know what would compete with this in terms of like, I mean, Gravity seemed pretty good in terms of like a movie that was like, meant to be like, okay, well, what would it be if you were in disaster?
HAITCH What a cool movie. Holy cow.
JASON Yeah. I liked that one. I don’t know if I’ve ever desired to go see it again.
M.G. No, it’s one of those one and done. You see it and then —
JASON But I liked it. Yeah.
HAITCH I need to watch the Children of Men.
M.G. You talked about 2001 obviously is the pinnacle of like the art form of it. Contact is, I love contact.
JASON Contact is really good.
M.G. It’s different vibe from this movie, but it’s, uh, I dunno, there’s similarities like with the Carl Sagan uniting Kip Thorne, and whatever else we talked about earlier down.
HAITCH That’s such a great call.
JASON “Good to go!”
[clip from Contact plays]
ELLIE I am okay to go!
[clip from Contact ends]
HAITCH Okay to go. Okay to go. It has the whole thing of, when I saw Contact, I was a militant atheist. I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian, but I’d become a serious atheist. And then I saw Contact and I was like, well, shit. Okay. Now I have to be agnostic.
JASON Now what do I believe? Well, that’s pretty profound.
M.G. Do you follow Gary Busey son or isn’t that who it is?
JASON Yeah, that was the militant vibe that he was going for. [M.G. laughs]
M.G. Jake Busey.
JASON Also in Starship Troopers.
HAITCH It did stop me in my tracks actually. So that was, that was kind of an interesting experience.
JASON I mean, that’s a pretty profound experience for a movie with Jake Busey.
HAITCH It was, I mean, I fell back to hardcore atheism again, eventually. I read Dawkins. But it at least stopped me in my tracks. Bryce says “You were all wrong. The only good answer is Spaceballs.”
JASON That’s funny. Bryce Kelly was the product manager on a software package called EGIS at one point in time, every time Bryce Kelly writes in, I’m going to give new biographical data about him.
HAITCH Nice. All right, here we go. Here’s our voicemails, first voicemail.
[voicemail plays]
VOICEMAIL Dune pod. It’s Cory from Austin, Texas. I have to admit I’ve been, uh, I’ve been unfaithful to Dune Pod. I’ve been spending a lot of time with another pod recently. It’s an old pod called Pod of Thunder, and it’s a podcast that started in 2013 where these three guys go through every Kiss song ever recorded. So I have still been nerding out, but just in a different way. Also, I’ve been watching a lot of like old Kiss interviews and old Hair Metal videos. So I’ve been eating up a lot of time doing that and not watching like Christopher Nolan films or, you know, anything else in the, uh, Dune Pod universe.
HAITCH Excalibur will bring him home.
VOICEMAIL I’m not going to apologize because I am a man of my convictions and I’m standing by. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I just believe in pleasures and I’m gonna leave it at that.
M.G. Wow. You guys get amazing messages.
JASON Yeah. Cory’s the best.
M.G. What, what is the intention?
VOICEMAIL And I will say that Dune Pod is one of my pleasures. So I still listen to the show, even though I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gene and Paul and Peter, Eric and Eric and Bruce, and all the other fools that have played in that band. Alright. Sorry to waste y’alls time, but you know, I always have to check in. Later.
[voicemail ends]
M.G. Is he implying that you guys need to focus more on Dune then or what’s the situation?
HAITCH No, no, Cory’s down for whatever that is for sure. [Jason laughs]
JASON I like how M.G. said it’s like the library scene. Corey’s pushing on our book world tubes, trying to get, trying to send us a message.
HAITCH So M.G., Cory sends us a voicemail every single week. He is our, he is our number one friend of the show.
JASON Cory is the only reason the pod exists. So whatever he wants, we should do. We’re going to just start covering Kiss now. There’s a, there’s an amazing interview. There’s this famous interview between Terry Gross and Gene Simmons. We should, we should talk about next week. So let’s do that. Let’s cover that.
HAITCH Alright, reminder. Alright, here’s our second voicemail.
[voicemail plays]
VOICEMAIL Hello! It’s Boom. Again. Did you miss me? I know it’s only been a week, but I guess I already have FOMO and Interstellar is one of my favorite movies. So I know you guys are obviously like heavy sci-fi people. For me, I like my sci-fi sappy, which is why I love Interstellar so much. I love the idea of love being a quantifiable thing that will save us. I think it’s so fun, it’s just a fun thing to indulge in and then it’s like wrapped up in this epic sci-fi that looks stunning. The music’s amazing. I think it might be my favorite Zimmer ever. I know that’s a big statement, but it’s true. Um, and I’d say my only qualm, the only thing I would change about it is I wasn’t the biggest fan of Anne Hathaway’s performance. I think she camped it up a little bit too much. I think I would have liked to see someone a little bit more subtle in that role. Maybe a Lupita, maybe a Tilda, even potentially switching out Jessica Chastain’s character and Anne Hathaway, like switching those characters, I think would be a little bit more fitting. I don’t know how you guys felt about it. Either way, I hope you had fun doing this episode no matter what you think, and I’m excited to hear it. Ciao!
[voicemail ends]
HAITCH Boooom!
JASON Boom has a great, great podcasting voice.
M.G. Wow. That was good. Yeah. That hit on a lot of our points.
HAITCH Lupita! Holy cow!
JASON I love that. That’s good casting. I agree. There’s another fun fact from the featurettes of Anne Hathaway, like sort of subtly bagging on having to do this movie a lot. Where she’s just like, she’s like, yeah, like, you know, so we did the, we did the thing in the water and like, um, you know, I was told my suit was going to be waterproof.
And um, it wasn’t, someone left the zipper down. And so I froze for most of the day, which, you know, legitimately sucks, but like most of her stories are like that, which was just like, it was such a pleasure to work on this movie. I almost died!
HAITCH M.G. we had Boom last week on the pod to discuss Malcolm & Marie.
M.G. I did. I listened to it.
JASON Oh, thank you.
HAITCH Did you watch it? Did you watch that movie?
M.G. I have not watched it. No, I haven’t watched the movie yet, but I did listen to the pod.
JASON That’s even, that’s even more important. You don’t need to watch the movie if you listen to the podcast.
HAITCH It’s covered. Alright. Final voicemail. We haven’t heard this voice in a while.
[voicemail plays]
VOICEMAIL [sings] Tilda! Swinton! Who would Tilda Swinton play? Hey guys, it’s Ctcher. I just created a new theme music. Hopefully you don’t ever use it again. Um, I was thinking who would Tilda Swinton play? And then I was thinking maybe TARS or whatever the other robot’s called. And then I was like, no, duh, it’s Matt Damon’s character. How much more shocking would Interstellar have been? I remember the first time watching it and Matt Damon showed up. I was genuinely shook. It was such a great surprise. Um, but how much greater would that surprise have been? If you open up the life pod and inside was Tilda Swinton! Just thinking about it. Okay. I’ll talk to you guys later. See you soon, bye!
[voicemail ends]
HAITCH Ctcher! We love you. Thank you so much.
M.G. Matt, do you listen to these ahead of time so you know that we were going to say —
HAITCH No!
JASON That’s like a religious thing that Matt does. He doesn’t listen to them.
HAITCH No, no. That’s a big. We gotta, we gotta be live. M.G. what do you have to plug?
M.G. Oh… nothing. [Haitch & M.G. laugh]
HAITCH What are you excited about? What’s going on? Like, what are you, what are you looking forward to?
M.G. I’m excited about the world opening up again. I’m excited about potentially traveling or maybe traveling.
HAITCH Where do you wanna go? Any areas?
M.G. London. I think, you know, you know, we go, we go there all the time. My wife and I, and then the little one’s been there a couple, three times actually, but not obviously in the past year. So hoping for that sometime this summer. I think we’re actually going to do our first trip coming up this week to LA now that we’re vaccinated. So that’ll be good to see some of Megan’s family. Yeah, I’m honestly just looking forward to travel and looking forward to going back to a fucking movie theater. I was trying to think of the last movie I’ve seen in a theater, both because of obviously the pandemic, but also because of child, you know, having, having a little one. I definitely recall very well seeing, Once upon a Time in Hollywood at the Alamo, but I mean, that was a long time ago already. I’m trying to think if there’s been anything more recently that stands out and it’s, it’s like, it’s sad, right? That it’s been so long. And so I am very much looking forward.
HAITCH Alright. Jason, anything else? Final thoughts?
JASON This was a great movie. I was excited to talk about it and I hope people don’t, you can fast forward through my, um, half remembered physics ramblings. If that’s not your cup of tea.
HAITCH Yeah, we’ll be back next week with pulsar talk from Pulsar Monthly.
JASON Big pulsar talk, yeah. [Haitch & M.G. laugh]
[Dune pod theme music plays]
HAITCH And that’s it for this episode of Dune Pod. I want to thank Jason an M.G. for an amazing and enlightening conversation. Next week, John Boorman’s 1981 epic sword and sorcery film Excalibur. This is a truly ambitious film with an insane cast score and special and practical effects. It’s streaming for free on Tubi or available for rent on all the major platforms. If you’re enjoying this podcast, follow us @dunepod on Instagram and Twitter and share our social media posts as it really helps new listeners find the show. Dune Pod is a production of Haitch Industries. Our artwork is by ctcher and our theme music was composed by Toby Forsman of Whipsong music. The episode was produced and edited by me, Haitch. Thanks for listening. See everybody next week. [theme music plays alone, ends]
