The Projection Booth

Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way.

Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable interview with Haynes, finally landing one at a traumatic site in Dallas that unlocks the film’s whole throughline. Puppeteer Drew Massey built latex caricatures of the band to stage their own stories — Paul Leary secretly taping the riff that became “Graveyard,” Haynes charging a Nick Cave show naked — and the production’s own disaster became footage in the film’s climax, after Stern’s house, and the puppet studio inside it, burned down mid-shoot.

Premiering at South by Southwest and now rolling out through Alamo Drafthouse’s new Alamo Exclusives label, the film asks a band built on “no regrets” what regret actually means.

Visit the film’s official website for playdates and news on the upcoming Blu-ray.


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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into a one-airing-only collage that, Pellington argues, predicted how media actually works now. Mike talks with Pellington about licensing the surviving PAL masters back from MTV decades later, the pre-Avid tape editing that gave Buzz its frantic rhythm, how the show’s DNA resurfaces in U2’s Zoo TV Tour, and why — after Arlington Road (1999) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) — he went looking for old footage instead of a script. The film is currently touring art-house screens, some with the multi-projector immersive setups Pellington built himself.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, it’s director Markus Lehmusruusu’s deadpan follow-up to Ricky Rapper and the Strongman (2019), Finland’s most-watched film that year. Mike talks with Lehmusruusu and lead actress Mimosa Willamo — who plays the government minder whose rigid world starts to crack — about shooting with four real, untrainable rescue squirrels on a sealed set, building the film’s antiseptic world with Berlin production designer Michael Randel, and a Japanese-speaking dog that wouldn’t take direction in any other language.

Visit the film’s official website.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural Spanish winery, with the apocalypse folded in after the fact. Fresh off its world premiere at the Downtown Festival in New York (Roxy Cinema, Oct. 13), ahead of a slot at the Santa Fe International Film Festival (Oct. 16), the film follows Maguire and Greenberg, plus new friends Maximiliano Betancourt, Paula Sartier Arán, and Sergio Freijo, through grape-stomping, lost luggage, and an unscripted shoot. Mike talks with the pair about building a “spiritual trilogy” out of real friendships, letting editor Saffron Weaver — once their teenage assistant-editing hire — shape raw footage into something stranger than a vacation video, and why they had to give the borrowed camera back.

Follow Galicia! on Instagram and visit the film’s official website.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New Zealand summer in 2006. Mike talks with Schneideman and her two leads, Ani Palmer and Rain Spencer, about building that world: the MSN plotline that arrived a year into writing (the ending never changed), how Spencer landed Freya almost instantly off Good Girl Jane (2022) while Palmer’s audition tape stopped Schneideman cold ten seconds in, the grocery-store exercises that forged Sid and Freya’s onscreen bond, shooting a summer film through an actual tropical cyclone, and working with Noah Taylor, who kept improvising in character well off the clock as Sid’s hapless father.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.

Piccinino details the chaos of filming inside a live, working casino — sound so loud from slot machines and chatter that nobody expected to salvage any production audio, until the sound team proved them wrong — and the night 4,000 football fans unexpectedly descended on the casino floor mid-shoot for the climactic lobby fight, which his longtime cinematographer Brad Rushing called the hardest shoot day of his career. Add the limited hours mandated for the film's underage leads, and Double Trouble becomes a case study in improvising around a city that never actually sleeps.


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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD warps everything the audience sees through his eyes — and the novella's hidden debt to the Book of Job, which is why he showed up to set in Slovakia with a real, unscripted beard he and Van Dusen eventually agreed on.

Flynn also gets into what drew him to working with a first-time feature director, tracing it back to his experience on Michael Pearce's Beast and explaining why a director who's spent a decade fighting to get a passion project made brings an urgency he finds irresistible. He talks about Van Dusen's path through Poland's famed Łódź Film School (where she met cinematographer Kate McCullough), her decade-long effort to secure the rights to O'Nan's book, and the film's long road from its 2024 shoot to premiering at the Berlin Film Festival.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.

León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fueled process of splitting one overstuffed script into two films, Donkey Princess and its companion piece The Hyperboreans, written during Chile's 2019 social uprising and the pandemic that followed. They talk about the year and a half they spent animating a sequence for Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, their resistance to letting the film's politics dictate its story even as an editor read it as being about patriarchy and dictatorship, and how Francisco Melo's own experience as a father reshaped the king's arc.

The directors also get into fairy tales as a shared cultural language, the six-stars-that-used-to-be-seven storytelling parable that keeps them hooked, and what's next — including a stop-motion adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. Donkey Princess, also starring Andrew Bargsted as Lalo, is awaiting North American distribution from KimStim, which previously released the duo's The Wolf House.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR, and discovering — only while writing the final log line — that he'd accidentally told his own story. Richardson tells Mike White how the project began as a distraction during a year-long hospitalization for a twelve-inch, six-inch-deep leg wound that wouldn't heal (doctors twice recommended

amputation), and how the film's pyromancer heroine — burned in a firefight, fitted with an artificial "nanoskin" graft, and left afraid of the very fire that once made her exceptional — turned out to mirror his own ordeal without his realizing it until the film was done. He also breaks down directing a movie from the picture outward: writing dialogue to match lip movements already on screen, voice actors in Scotland, LA, and the Philippines who never met in person, and the four years it took to get from the first assembled scene to release.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and showrunner Jason Sudeikis worked to make the Kansas scenes feel distinct from the series' established English look without resorting to an overtly "American" filter — dusky light, a three-filter stack, and a deliberate Wizard of Oz reference when the characters first step off the plane.

Gonzales traces her path to the show through her years on Fargo (seasons 4 and 5) and Alien: Earth, where she worked alongside DPs Colin Watkinson and Dave Franco, and talks about the prep process behind Ted Lasso — full shot lists, overheads, and photo boards built with Lowney and longtime series DP David Rom and Vanessa Whyte. She also gets into her approach to blocking (including the deceptively simple staging of Nate's Backyard Barbecue), the influence of her father's decades on film crews, and what she's working on next for Apple TV+.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.