Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, critics have called Hereditary the scariest movie of the year — perhaps even the scariest movie since The Exorcist. It’s a supernatural film starring Toni Collette about a family dealing with horrifying, unspeakable trauma.

It’s the first feature film by writer and director Ari Aster. “It was very important to me that [Hereditary] functioned first as a vivid family drama,” he tells Kurt Andersen. “And then all the horror elements grow out of their situation, as opposed to the people serving as devices for the horror.”

Aster also talks about the movies that influenced the making of Hereditary and working with Milly Shapiro, who plays Toni Collette’s creepy young daughter, Charlie. “While we were shooting, [Millie] was asking, ‘Is it creepy? You think I’m gonna creep people out?’”

This podcast was produced by Studio 360's Sam Kim.

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An American Icons special segment about “Fahrenheit 451,” the cautionary tale about authoritarianism and free speech that has seen a sales surge since the 2016 election. How Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer, captured the artist's career in a 15-minute remix for the exhibit “David Bowie is.” And why filmmaker Bart Layton included documentary elements in his feature “American Animals.”

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Columbia University astrophysicist Janna Levin talks to Kurt Andersen about gravitational waves, the book she wrote about the breakthrough called “Black Hole Blues,” and the arduous, 50-year journey to finally hearing the sound that proves a 100 year old theory of Einstein’s to be true.

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James Gleick tries to imagine what Einstein would have thought about time travel.  “For a while, I was hoping I could find a letter from Einstein,” he says. “My dream was that he'd read the 'Time Machine' and said 'Ah ha!' But of course, there's nothing like that. There's no evidence that I could find that Einstein was a sci-fi buff.”

And John Wray’s novel, The Lost Time Accidents is about an eastern European family in the early 1900s that believes that they have discovered the secret to time travel. And they see Einstein as their arch-enemy.

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When he was growing up in Germany in the 1880s and 90s, nobody had pegged Einstein as a genius. He dropped out of high school and had to apply twice to a university in Switzerland that accepted students without high school diplomas. He did well at college, but didn’t apply himself and struggled to complete assignments and pass tests.He ended up working at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland and knew, if he wanted to be a physicist, he had to do research and get published. He was looking at these patent applications and wondering: is it really true, as Isaac Newton had said, that time is the same for everyone, everywhere? So, he came up with a thought experiment which became the idea known as “special relativity.” And it rocked the foundations of physics. 

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How do you build a monument to a war that was more tragic than triumphant? Maya Lin was practically a kid when she got the commission to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. “The veterans were asking me, ‘What do you think people are going to do when they first come here?’” she remembers. “And I wanted to say, ‘They’re going to cry.’" 

Her minimalistic granite wall was derided by one vet as a “black gash of shame.” But inscribed with the name of every fallen soldier, it became a sacred place for veterans and their families, and it influenced later designs like the National September 11 Memorial.

We’ll visit a replica of the wall that travels to veterans’ parades around the country, and hear from former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel how this singular work of architecture has influenced how we think about war.  

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In 2012, Bart Layton made his directorial debut with The Imposter — an ambitious true crime story that mixes documentary and narrative filmmaking. His latest movie further blurs the lines between fiction and reality: American Animals depicts a 2004 book heist by interspersing interviews with real people and the fictionalized version of the events. “I found myself thinking maybe there’s a new way to tell a true story,” Bart Layton tells Kurt Andersen. “Where you kind of get to have your cake and eat it.”

Layton breaks down how he made one of the inventive, meta moments of the film, and discusses the possible motivations behind the senseless crime. “We’re all inhabiting a culture where we’re told that we have to be special,” he says. “It came from a place of wanting to leave a mark on the world.”

American Animals opens in theaters on June 1, 2018.

This podcast was produced by Studio 360's Sam Kim.

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The latest installment in Studio 360’s American Icons series: The Muppets — how the world fell for Jim Henson’s troupe of puppets. Plus, teleprompters were supposed to make cue cards obsolete, but not on “Saturday Night Live,” where “Cue Card Wally” Feresten is indispensable. And singer Angélique Kidjo talks about her new album “Remain in Light,” a track-by-track cover of the 1980 Talking Heads album.

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For a long time, mainstream scientists were deeply skeptical about the theory of multiple universes — but comic-book writers immediately saw the creative possibilities. University of Minnesota physics professor (and author of the book "The Physics of Superheroes") James Kakalios pays a visit to Source Comics & Games in St. Paul.Plus, the series finale of the show “St. Elsewhere,” where we learn that the entire show had been a fantasy of a boy with autism named Tommy Westphall.

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“The Crawick Multiverse” is a sprawling piece of landscape art tucked into Dumfries and Galloway in the Scottish countryside, on the site of what used to be a coal mine. The artist Charles Jenks took the BBC’s Anna Magnusson on a tour of the site.The landscape is a series of connected paths and landforms, studded with large boulders that make the site feel like a modern Stonehenge. The rocks appear ageless, but the mounds formed in the soil appear contemporary — even futuristic —  with clean, geometric lines and a green carpet of grass. “Everything about this site shouts ‘cosmic,’” says Jenks. “What I’ve tried to do here is unpack that idea bit by bit. Landscape is the art form where we’re using nature to represent nature.” Two large mounds at the site represent the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy, with other landforms that represent a Supercluster and comet path. A corkscrew walkway of mudstone represents the whole ensemble of universes — the multiverse.

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