MovieMaker

Climate of the Hunter director Mickey Reece never considered a move to Hollywood. A musician-turned-indie filmmaker, he started making at least two low-budget films a year, on average, with a cadre of friends from around Oklahoma City.

"I'm just hanging out with people who are into the same things as me," he says. "It's like playing in a band."

Reece has a wonderful way with understatement. His hangouts have produced a catalogue of films now gaining attention from revered film festivals like Fantasia Fest, Fantastic Fest, and Nashville — as well as TIFF Midnight Madness.

ce has done everything outside of the Hollywood system since starting as a filmmaker in 2008, he hasn't encountered anyone along the way to reject him. Family responsibilities kept him in Oklahoma City, so he never considered a move to Los Angeles or New York. Instead, he relies on a loyal, talented cadre of actors, none of them big names, who gather together to make movies on a shoestring. They showed their movies at music venues, then at the Oklahoma Contemporary.

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Charlie Kaufman's new film I'm Thinking of Ending Things returns to two of his most familiar subjects: the struggle to communicate clearly, and the failures of memory.

"Obviously, we live in memory, and it's essential to our sense of self — to our understanding of the world and our understanding of ourselves — and it is elusive and it is inaccurate," he says.

But Kaufman explains how inaccuracies in memory can help us create new ideas.

The writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who wrote and directed Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, also explains why he doesn't have a writing routine, and discusses his directorial decisions on I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

He also talks, at length, about the value of long walks, while carrying a notebook, and walking in Los Angeles vs. New York.

Charlie Kaufman and managing editor Caleb Hammond also discuss the last time they fell down.

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Fugitive Dreams, the new film from Jason Neulander, is an allegorical road movie that follows two homeless people across a timeless American landscape. It touches on mental health, addiction — and love.

Primarily black and white, the film is intended as a kind of Waiting for Godot. A large section of it takes place on board a train, and we talked with Neulander about all the challenges that that entailed.

The film, which stars April Matthis, Robbie Tann, Scott Shepherd, O-Lan Jones and David Patrick Kelly, just premiered at Montreal's Fantasia Fest.

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Chemical Hearts star and executive producer Lili Reinhart and writer-director Richard Tanne set out to make a quiet, meaningful high school film that isn't bubbly or past for short attention spans. The result is a teenage love story for introverts.

In the film, based on a novel by Krystal Sutherland, a high school senior named Henry (played by Austin Abrams) is assigned to edit the school paper with a new student named Grace (Reinhart), who walks with a cane, dresses in typically male clothing, and doesn't like to talk about her past. They gain each other's trust slowly, in silences as much as through words.

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Spree director and co-writer Eugene Kotlyarenko says there's thing we all have in common: "We wake up in the morning, and we kind of look at our phones first thing to see if we got any notifications, any sort of news that could be pertinent to how much people care about us, right? It’s the perfect sort of like narcissism-like reflection machine. And it gives us dopamine hits we need to make us feel loved.”

Spree examines the extreme lengths some of us will go to in search of that love — while mocking lead character Kurt (Joe Keery) for his attempts to impose his narrative on everyone around him, especially a successful comedian named Jessie (Sasheer Zamata.)

We also talk about critics getting it wrong, Paul Verhoeven, and lone-wolf shooters with dumb manifestos.

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Before the Fire director Charlie Buhler and writer-star Jenna Lyng Adams didn't have millions of dollars for their sci-fi drama, but they did have access to a few things they knew could be very cinematic — planes, Humvees, a farm, and a house that needed burning down.

In the purest DIY, indie filmmaking fashion, they reverse-engineered Adams' script, using what they had.

And ended up predicting COVID-19.

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Daryl Davis is a Black musician who befriends white supremacists to try to get them to give up their old ways. He's led more than 200 to renounce racism, and more than 50 Klansmen have surrendered their robes to him.

Years ago, he was playing piano in a Maryland truck stop when a man who turned out to be a Klansman said Davis was the first Black man he'd ever heard who could play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Davis corrected him, asking:

"Where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned to play?"

He's been educating racist ever since.

Davis has gotten criticism for engaging with racists. but in this podcast, he explains to writer Greg Gilman that one of his goals is to prevent lone-wolf attacks, like the one carried out by Dylan Roof in a South Carolina church in 2015.

Davis is the focus of Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America, a documentary by Matthew Orenstein now playing on Amazon Prime. You can read Greg's profile of him here.

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The Rental, the directorial debut from actor Dave Franco, is about two couples who find a beautiful vacation rental that isn't as idyllic as it seems. There's a very engrossing build in the script, when things get almost impossibly suspenseful, and one of the reasons it's so effective is because of Dan Stevens and Sheila Vand, our guests today. They bring a grounded, can't-look-away dynamic to the film.

Vand (Argo, A Girl Walks Home at Night, Triple Frontier) and Stevens (Downton Abbey, Beauty and the Beast, Eurovision Song Contest) also talk about the racial dynamics of The Rental, surveillance, and bro culture, among other subjects. And they talk about their interest in becoming directors themselves,

The Rental also stars Alison Brie and Jeremy Allen White, and it's now in select theaters and drive-ins, and on demand.

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Gina Prince-Bythewood broke through as a director 20 years ago with Love & Basketball, which us returning to drive-ins this summer. But she'd always wanted to make an action movie, and finally did it with Netflix's The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron as the leader of a band of warriors trying to do good in the modern world. Spoiler alert: They're hundreds of years old.

We talk about how Hollywood is all about overcoming no, and how working with one Marvel team — Cloak & Dagger — may lead her to another — the Black Cat and Silver Sable.

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Joe and Anthony Russo are the hosts of Russo Brothers Pizza Fillm School — and the directors of Avengers: Endgame, the biggest movie ever.

The Russo Brothers talk to us this episode about how the 1980 cult film Flash Gordon helped inspire them through a tough time for their hometown, Cleveland,. They also talk about how the film's very unconventional middle section made an impression that informed the cliffhanger ending of Avengers: Infinity War.

The Russos also discuss their new ABGO production, Relic, and their efforts to helped underrepresented people break into film.

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