MovieMaker

Extraction is the best action movie of the year.

Granted, it's a weird year. But even in a normal one, it's hard to imagine a more impressive sequence that the 12-minute, seemingly continuous shot in Extraction in which Chris Hemsworth leads a young boy through unbelievable carnage, unbelievably quickly, doing stunts that would be impressive even with lots of editing and fixes in post.

The reason that sequence is possible is our guest today, Sam Hargrave, who makes his directorial debut with Extraction. He came to directing by way of being a stuntman, working his way through the Marvel Universe, where he doubled for Chris Evans as Captain America, created some of the MCU's best fight sequences, and impressed the Russo Brothers enough that they offered him Extraction.

I also ask him some things I've always wondered, like: How do you become a stuntman? And can Chris Hemsworth, Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron fight in real life?

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When Rachel Mason was growing up in West Hollywood in the 1980s, her parents, Karen and Barry Mason, went to work each day at a bookstore — but not any bookstore. It was Circus of Books, which became an iconic LGBTQ location by selling erotica, magazines and sex toys at a time when homophobia ran rampant. At one point, her parents became targets of a Reagan Administration hellbent on locking people up over porn. They're the subject of her fascinating new documentary, Circus of Books.

In this episode, she talks about her nice, normal parents, meeting Larry Flynt, and how Ryan Murphy became an executive producer of Circus of Books, which is now streaming on Netflix.

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We Summon the Darkness and My Friend Dahmer, two of prolific director Marc Meyers latest films, unfurl almost opposite takes on serial killers. Dahmer is a sober, anti-sensationalist exploration of how a confused teen became a reviled cannibal. Darkness turns a Satanic Panic-era killing spree into a headbangers' ball of dark comedy.

Meyers, as you can probably guess, has a lot of range.

We Summon the Darkness opens with three young women (Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson and Amy Forsyth) road-tripping to a metal show in Indiana in the 1980s. The radio mentions a string of Satanic murders, they meet three boys in the metal show parking lot, and things happen. Johnny Knoxville turns up as the voice of the religious right.

We're keeping things deliberately vague, and this episode contains no significant spoilers.

You're probably wondering if we also talk about Jeffrey Dahmer, the Midwestern murderer who kept victims' body parts in his freezer. We sure do.

Here are highlight of the interview, with timestamps:

3:00: Interview with Marc Meyers begins

5:20: We talk about the short documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," one of the influences on We Summon the Darkness.

10:00: The Satanic Panic "did feel really real at the time."

10:45: Guns N Roses are to Slayer as alcohol is to heroin?

13:00: Writing and directing vs. writing.

15:00: Marc Meyers on proving My Friend Dahmer wasn't just another serial killer movie: "We had to almost make the movie to prove it as a concept."

16:30: Are kids less mean than they were in the 1970s and '80s?

22:00: How teenage Jeffrey Dahmer went wrong.

23:20: A very subtle spoiler about We Summon the Darkness.

23:50: Very subtle spoiler ends.

24:45: How things are going with our big, not-by-choice video-on-demand experiment.

28:00: Will COVID-19 recalibrate what we consider dramatic?

30:00: Shout out to Richard Linklater.

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If you're getting through our global quarantine by playing video games, you're in good company: Alexandre Amancio, the former Ubisoft artistic director who headed up on Assassin's Creed: Revealations and Assassin's Creed: Unity, has been playing with fans online.

Amancio spoke to us for the latest MovieMaker Interviews podcast, where he talked about his new company, Reflector Entertainment, and telling stories across platforms. He also told us that fans have hit him up on Twitter to play Assassin's Creed, and that he's obliged. He's also engaged with a few about their Assassin's Creed fan theories.

Here's a breakdown of the episode, with timestamps:

3:15: Interview with Alexandre Amancio begins

4:15: How video games help people get out of their heads during lockdown. "It's a way to travel outside of your home even if you are confined."

5:24: How Assassin's Creed fans have contacted him to play.

9:30: Rethinking the idea of storytelling.

13:50: Let's talk about Kodak.

21:00: Let's talk about Dr. Mario vs. Assassin's Creed

29:00: How his company, Reflector, is building a "new, realistic world."

31:30: What we can all learn from John Wick.

33:00: How to build a world: "You can't decide to do something because you've done market research. ... That always yields something that lacks soul."

40:00: How Alexandre Amancio partnered with the founder of Cirque de Soleil.

42:30: How bilingualism fuels creative thinking.

You can read Alexandre Amancio discussing his Storyworld concept in the latest issue of MovieMaker Magazine, available this month. You can subscribe here.

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Paul Scheer is one of the best people on screen (Black Monday! The Disaster Artist!) and in podcasting (Unspooled! How Did This Get Made?)

This week, he talks us through this crazy situation we're all in — and about how talking and a sense of humor will keep us sane. He's hosting a live episode of Unspooled with Amy Nicholson on Monday night at 8:30 p.m. PT/11:30 ET on Earwolf's YouTube channel, and also a group watch of Showtime's Black Monday on Sunday at 10/9c. Follow him for details at @paulscheer.

He's also texting (this not to a paid thing) a nightly watch list with people who send “picks” to 917-877-0657.

I'm @timamolloy. I'm the editor of MovieMaker.com. Visit us!

Finally: This is the trailer for the amazing Flooded With Love for the Kid by Zack Oberzan. Thank you Juan Carlos Montoya for showing it to me.

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Sonic the Hedgehog director Jeff Fowler says when he first released images of Sonic — and fans savaged them online — he wallowed through “a good hour of feeling sorry for myself.”

But only one hour. Then he got back to work, and made changes that led to a massive hit.

He says in the latest MovieMaker Interviews podcast that Sony and Paramount, the film’s distributor, quickly agreed that they needed to make the fans happy.

“The fact that the message was so clear really made our job kind of easy. There almost was no debate: We need to fix this. We need fans to love this and be in our corner. So it actually ended up being really simple, if a little challenging at the time,” Fowler said.

Fowler also talked to us about his openness to a Sonic the Hedgehog sequel, potentially expanding Sonic into a cinematic Segaverse, and what he learned from Deadpool director Tim Miller, who was Fowler’s boss at Blur Studio before Fowler spun off into making Sonic.

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"Horse Girl," now in theaters and on Netflix, stars Alison Brie as a young woman who loves horses.That's as much as we can tell you without ruining the film, which Brie and director Jeff Baena co-wrote. Spoilers follow.

The film, which premiered at Sundance last week, isn't what it at first appears to be. Baena doesn't care about genre or classification. What he and Brie do care about is committing completely to the perspective of their main character, Sarah, as she begins to question her perception of reality — and wonders if she's severely mentally ill, or one of the only people on earth who understands a dark truth.

Here are highlights of the episode, with time stamps:

2:00: Alison Brie and Jeff Baena interview begins.

2:45: How the film suffered from skepticism and misunderstandings, and how the Duplass brothers helped make it a reality.

3:40: How much did Jeff Baena and Alison Brie want the film to be open to interpretation?

4:20: Alison Brie: "We certainly designed it so that upon multiple viewings people might pick up a little bit more of what we feel like is the through-line to the story."

5:30: "A major crux of the film is how terrible it can be to not be able to trust your own mind."

7:10: A tech issue arises and is handled in a humorous fashion.

10:30: "I feel like genre's kind of like the bumpers at a bowling alley..."

12:28: What is a horse girl, exactly?

14:50: Your host is scared of horses.

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Christina Hodson, writer of Birds of Prey and Bumblebee, talks to us about what makes the Clockwork Orange-influenced girl gang movie tick. She also talks about the Lucky Exports Pitch Program (LEPP) in which she and Margot Robbie's Lucky Chap Entertainment helped six female writers break into the action genre.

She also talks about mapping out fight scenes with some help from YouTube and True Romance, and says absolutely nothing about the possibility of a Wonder Woman-Harley Quinn crossover.

Here are some highlights, with timestamps:

2:00: Interview begins with fond memories of carsickness.

2:34: How Hodson and Robbie set out to tell a different kind of comic-book story.

3:45: Let's compare Harley Quinn and Heath Ledger's Joker.

5:45: The benefits of collaboration.

7:00: How the Lucky Exports Pitch Program works.

9:50: The charms of Bumblebee.

12:00: How much does Birds of Prey fit into the DC Universe?

14:30: "No comment"

16:10: Why are female directors better represented in comic-book movies — this year — than in movies overall?

19:00: "I love writing action and I love writing specificity in action. To me, you can tell so much about a character by the way they fight."

26:00: Callbacks!

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Promising Young Woman stars Carey Mulligan as a young woman who goes to nightclubs and acts too drunk to stand. When nice guys take her home, they realize she isn't as helpless as she seems — and that they aren't very nice. That's just scratching the surface of the wickedly funny, brilliant Sundance debut for writer-director Emerald Fennell, who tells us she designed the film to feel like a great first date gone terrible awry.

Fennell is an actress and novelist as well as a screenwriter-director -- she plays Camilla on The Crown -- and you know Mulligan from films like Never Let Me Go, Shame, The Great Gatsby and Suffragette. They talk with us about the confectionary look of the film, how they first met, and why films directed by women overcome a level of quality control that films directed by men sometimes don't.

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Three Christs director Jon Avnet has one of the most impressive IMDb pages in Hollywood: He produced films from Risky Business to Black Swan, and has worked with everyone from Tom Cruise to Joan Didion. He's also faced a lot of rejection — and figured out how to get past it.

Three Christs, which Avnet co-wrote as well as directed, stars Richard Gere as a psychologist in the 1950s trying to treat three schizophrenic men who all believe themselves to be Jesus Christ. They’re played by Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford.

In the new MovieMaker Interviews podcast, Avnet talks about why he wanted to get the mostly true story to the screen, and what he learned in the process. He also gives an amazing crash course on Hollywood perseverance, and gives inside accounts of projects from Risky Business to FX's Justified to Up Close and Personal, the film he directed that starred Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer and was written by John Gregory Dunne and Didion.

And he tells us about his gift for getting people who shut him down professionally to change their minds.

As we spoke Avnet was hard at work on Four Good Days, a film he’s producing that is directed by Rodrigo Garcia. It stars Mila Kunis as a woman dealing with addiction, and Glenn Close as her mother, who is trying to help her. It premieres this Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.

Here are highlights of the episode, with timestamps:

2:00: Interview begins, with a discussion of Three Christs.

5:20: Here's how much Jon Avnet likes research.

13:30: Working with Joan Didion and John Griffin Dunne on Up Close and Personal.

23:30: Let's talk about Tom Cruise's Risky Business underwear slide.

26:55: A few words about perseverance: "Most people who do what I do deal with rejection all the time."

28:00: "Don't say no — say maybe."

31:55: Dealing with critics: "You got to make the movie. They didn't."

36:30: "Jump in the steam of life and maybe you'll go down the river a little bit."

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