Louise Weard on Castration Movie, Computer Hearts, and the Legacy of the Third Cinema

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Here's what is going on today: Louise Weard is, to me, one of the most exciting North American filmmakers currently working. I loved her provocative no-budget body-horror short Computer Hearts from 2015, and I've been transfixed and completely thrilled by her ongoing Castration Movie anthology, the third installment of which—deep breath: Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage—is set to screen at BAM here in NYC this coming weekend. (I've got my tickets for Sunday already, of course.) Ever since I watched the first two installments (which can be seen for purchase right here) I've wanted to talk to Louise about everything regarding her craft and process, and she was extremely generous with her time a month or so ago by spending a full hour-plus walking me through her creative mind. (I'd also like to take this moment to thank friend-of-the-newsletter Lex Walton, who starred in Castration Movie's second installment, for connecting Louise and I for this chat.) If you're at all interested in the ins and outs of what it takes to make underground art, you will doubtlessly find this interview to be an engrossing read. Check it out:

Let's start by talking me through your origin story as a filmmaker and artist.
I've always wanted to make movies since I was a kid. More than anything, I wanted to tell stories. At a certain point, I wanted to be a novelist. Then I got into Stanley Kubrick, who was the first filmmaker I really recognized the authorship of. I was like, "Oh wait, in the same way that an author writes a book, there's a director who makes." I realized that was the direction to go in.

I was a big horror movie buff. I love the feeling of being scared, even though I'm a bit of a scaredy cat. So I was always pushing to find the craziest, most deranged, scariest, and most disturbing movies. That landed me in Vancouver, where a lot of the really crazy underground horror stuff in the late 2000s and early 2010s was getting made. Out of that scene, I ended up making Computer Hearts, which is a very obviously Cronenberg-inspired body-horror-type film. It took us a year to shoot it, and then we must've edited it for another six months to a year. We finally had it done and released in 2014, and we didn't get into any film festivals with it. What are we supposed to do? There was this new platform, Letterboxd, where I'd been posting all these reviews, so I said, "I'm going to put it online for a dollar and try to get people on Letterboxd to engage with it." And it was an early cult film specifically on Letterboxd—but it wasn't very well-received anywhere. It was very divisive—mostly negative, I would say—so I wasn't really sure what to keep doing with directing.

I ended up moving into producing and working as a cinematographer—just genuinely being a cheerleader for a bunch of my friends in the industry and people I wanted to support. I worked as a production assistant—like the lead character in my first movie—for a decade. I was working on set, working at movie theaters, and I ran a film festival here in Vancouver. All movies, all the time. After having produced a few of my friends' movies, I directed a friend's music video and realized, "Oh, I'm actually enjoying directing again."

In 2022, I had this really crazy big year. All of a sudden, people cared about all this work I was doing. Computer Hearts came back on the scene as now-respected and beloved cult film that people wanted to screen and think more about. I ended up being asked to host Fantastic Fest's 100 Best Kills in Austin in its last year. I think we killed it, because we went a little too hard with it. [Laughs] It was always a clip show centered on a theme that's curated by the programmers, and the theme that year was dick mutilation, which I had a running list on Letterboxd about, because I'd written some college papers on castration in film and a chapter in a book on trans film scholarship that was also about castration on film. So my name popped up, and I'd already been doing stuff as a screener looking at submissions for Fantastic Fest, so they were like, "Whoa, Louise is on the team, and she knows all about these castrations." They basically asked me if I'd put together that show, and I said, "Yeah, 100%." I got full creative control to show whatever clips I wanted to.

It was while building the mixtape that Castration Movie started to come into focus in my brain. The story started coming to me, and I wanted to return to this world of low-budget underground DIY filmmaking. Then it all got unlocked over the remainder of 2022 and the start of 2023, where I started shooting stuff with my friends and had a lot of stuff happen to me that ended up informing the politics of the movie—all one big long journey that's got me to this point.

Do you remember the first horror movie you ever watched?
Growing up in the '90s, there was a lot of horror TV, so I was really into Goosebumps. I always begrudge the fact that there's so few movies for adults now, whereas there used to be such a monoculture in the late '90s, where with even a good horror film, my parents, who do not like horror movies, would still go out of their way to rent at Blockbuster. So I have very vivid memories of The Sixth Sense as my first horror movie that I remember my parents had rented it, and I think I snuck out of my bedroom to watch it from the corner of the room. Which, in hindsight, if I was my parents, that would have been so terrifying if they had spawned me just hiding in the dark while watching The Sixth Sense.

That was an early one for me too. I was very genuinely scared by it then, but every time I've rewatched it since, I've still found it a very effectively scary movie.
It's one of the best movies of the '90s for sure. The one that I've revisited since I remembered really scaring me when I was a kid was What Lies Beneath. That movie scared the hell out of me when I was a kid, but I revisited it as an adult and I was like, "Oh God, how was I so scared by this?" Around the same year I saw The Sixth Sense, I remember driving to visit cousins, and they were watching Poltergeist on VHS in their scary-ass house in the middle of rural British Columbia. It was the first time we went to visit them, and they had a house on an orchard, so I was with my cousins watching Poltergeist on VHS in the basement during a thunderstorm. That was where I got the bug. I was like, "Holy crap, horror movies are so important to me."

It was so funny how it worked out, because the reason I discovered that I wanted to actually make movies was when I asked my dad, "What's the scariest movie you've ever seen?"—because I wanted that high of like seeing scary movies. My dad told me The Shining—which, in hindsight, my alcoholic dad told me The Shining is the scariest movie. [Laughs] I was like, "Oh geez, Dad, what scares you about that movie?" From there, he gave me that first Stanley Kubrick box set that came out, because I wanted to watch the other movies and that box set looked so cool. It was like, "Oh my God, I've got to see all of these."

A Clockwork Orange was the one that really woke me up to what movies can do. There's one specific moment I attribute to when I decided I wanted to make movies, because it took my breath away. It's when the lead character Alex picks up this stone phallus statue that's next to him, and he goes to hit the woman in the head with it. Instead of showing the violence, the movie cuts to this painting on the wall of a woman screaming. I could feel the violence so much more viscerally because of that editing choice. I was like, "Holy shit, I'm going to devote my life to this. This is pure magic." That was what got me making movies.

Computer Hearts feels quite prescient in several ways in the rearview. The first section of Castration Movie also feels like an extension of some of what it was exploring.
I always joke that the reason why Computer Hearts and the first part of Castration Movie might feel similar is that I've only had so many relationships, so you're going to see some patterns. [Laughs] But to get less cheeky about it, I think it's because for both of them, I wanted a do-over on a lot of the themes that I was looking at in my college short films.

I had this realization that I wanted to make something that feels like a very contemporary horror film, but there's nothing I could show on screen that was going to feel shocking in a way that feels contemporary. I know fucking 20-year-olds who are on Reddit looking at gore videos all day. I can't compete with that. The thing that genuinely does horrify me about the internet is the way that people talk to each other. I could wrap my head around the early internet. We were pretty anonymous, and you're on a forum and you call someone like a fucking idiot or whatever—I could understand that layer of anonymity allowing you to maybe be a worse person.

But the modern internet, there's such a smaller distinction between your private life and your online life, and it's so much crazier to me when someone's on the internet and they're telling people the most horrifying things or sharing these terrible opinions. That's what's scary—how mean people are to each other, the violence of language. I thought that I'd try to capture the feeling of mumblecore horror I was doing at the start of my career, but put it fully within the bounds of language: Can I get people to say these terrible intrusive thoughts that you'd hope no one would say in real life? And we're just going to dwell on them for these long stretches of time and trap the audience in these conversations that they want to leave. Can I make that more disturbing than using blood and guts?

That was the goal [with Castration Movie] and Computer Hearts came from the same thing. My movies are always a response to whatever's going on in contemporary film, and I was watching a lot of mumblecore movies. I thought, "God, it'd be so cool to make a mumblecore movie where a big crazy event happens at the end." What if, at the end, it was actually an insane horror Cronenberg set piece? I wanted to make it feel like a bad student film, and then we're going to have these insane special effects at the end and people are not going to see it coming. It was like an interesting experiment at the time.

Obviously, my work's really in conversation with the internet. It's very inspirational to me, because I spend too much time on the internet throughout my life—but I don't know how to do it any other way.

What are some of your earliest memories of being online?
As a little kid, home internet was just having a computer room in your house. At a certain point, because of what my parents did for work, I could use a computer from a very young age—playing little flash games and stuff like that. It was the first time where the internet could really support hosting games and video, and you could see people like doing their art online in a way that wasn't just text or pictures. You'd be showing friends crazy videos on different website aggregators, before YouTube took over everything. You'd just be hunting for crazy videos to freak each other out with or laugh at together.

I had very unrestricted internet access as a child, so I was finding weird websites. I was really big on the IMDb forums, because I was always looking for film recommendations and learning how to pirate movies. One of my core memories was being at a friend's birthday party sleepover, and the computer was hooked up to a [larger screen] in his basement. It started as, "Let's look at funny stuff online," and then it turned into, "Let's go on 4Chan and all of the knockoffs." This was in 2007. It was one of the first times I ever felt the emotion of being in a secret club—some degree of, "This feels cool, edgy, and weird in a way that I want to be part of this." Now, unfortunately, I'm only really on Twitter. A lot of the time, it doesn't feel like there's much internet left outside of there.

The other thing I'll say is that online community was always an important thing for me. Looking back, having friends on the internet was never a thing that was weird or foreign. Throughout my life, I've always had an internet life and an offline life.

Reflect more for me on your current relationship with the internet and social media. It is dismaying, the way people talk to each other—this cavalier aspect that makes me think, "Was it this bad when I was younger, even 10 years ago?"
Well, the difference is that—and this could also just be like a "me" thing [in terms of] growing up and being more aware—I didn't really think about the internet as having any sort of political reality dimension to it until, like, 2015. Where I left a lot of communities online was in the run-up to Trump's first election, because I could see the writing on the wall. I knew what was going to happen. A lot of people did who were very online at the time. That was a slipping point in terms of internet becoming real life, because that was the internet meme campaign in a way—and now that's making policy. Everyone got a little bit too high on the victory of that, and now people just post whatever the hell they want. There's also probably a lot more people on the internet now than when we were younger—that doesn't help either.

You talked earlier about the origins of Castration Movie, which is shaping up to be an era-defining work. It's also extremely ambitious, both from a point of creation and as a viewing endeavor. Talk to me about the mapping out of this project and what that's entailed for you.
It started with a very clear goal in mind. Narratively, we had a story, and three months into production—March of 2023—we shot the ending. It was always planned as just one movie, and my ambitions quickly got the best of me when I realized that I'd written down several hundred scenes that we were going to shoot. Basically, I was two or three scenes in, and we were already at an hour. I was like, "Oh my, this is gonna be a long movie." We ended up leaning into that after my friend Will Morris told me that he'd still make sure it screened somewhere. He was the guy who screened Computer Hearts for the first time, 10 years after we made He was like, "I'll make sure that, no matter how long Castration Movie is, you'll have a home to put it."

I went fully into what I wanted to see in a movie, and Castration Movie is everything I want to watch and engage with in a movie. It's very specific to my tastes, but I'm always trying to challenge myself too. That's where a lot of the growth and change comes from. If I start feeling stale, I'll just switch up what we're doing and follow an impulse, or a spark of inspiration. I don't like to close myself off to the universe. If things present themselves—I meet someone who I feel needs to be in the film, or something that I thought I was really excited about, all of a sudden my excitement deflates—I'll chase a new idea. A lot of Castration Movie is about pursuing joy in this way that I wasn't really seeing that on a lot of the other movies I was working on. I want to make a film where everyone's having a good time, everyone feels safe, and we can trust each other to go to some crazy places.

The best example of that is what we ended up releasing as Part II. We were in the middle of shooting a different chapter, and I felt that I needed something to renew my shooting style. I needed to do things totally different, because the movie was feeling too much the same. I couldn't just let what was going on in the first chapter be the movie the whole way through. So we went and shot that segment in Bushwick, and it was rejuvenating, because I got to do something crazy—a few things that were in my head for a long time, like the split-screen. Now that Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage is touring, it feels really good, because it added a lot of life into some of the scenes and brought more comedy that I think was lacking in the initial period of shooting.

Counting all of Castration Movie as one thing—as I do in my head—we're coming up on four years in a couple months here, and it looks like it'll probably be another four. We're going to hit the halfway point of making this movie in November, probably.

Talk to me about pulling in the wide cast of collaborators across these films. As somebody who both keeps tabs on underground art and is very online, I end up recognizing a lot of people in them.
I always want something to work on two levels, no matter what the choice is. I like to think of who a person is and then find a way where, not only are they good for the character, but the character is in some way in conversation with what their public persona is. That way, when I'm directing them, we can really dive in to some things and it can be a much more fulfilling conversation for me and the actor.

In the new one, Jane Schoenbrun is in it with me, and we have a scene together where Jane's character berating me about the responsibility of representation. My character is running a trans support group, and it's her boss at the community center telling Michaela that she's doing a bad job helping the girls in the right way. You could cast anyone in that role, but for me, it has this amazing extra layer that is this other amazing, talented, trans filmmaker who has a much different approach to filmmaking than I do, telling me that I'm doing it wrong.

With Castration Movie II, once Circle leaves the cult, New York becomes this facsimile for the internet itself. You turn a corner and you're seeing this person you recognize from Twitter. "Oh my God, Ivy Wolk is there. Oh my God, Chapo Trap House is making fun of me." Obviously, we're working on this level where it's no longer just this literal thing. It's also this fantasy place where we can make the internet real life in this scary way, terrible way, because that's what Castration Movie is—the internet in real life. What if we all talked the way we talked online? What if all the people you recognize from the internet are there? To me, that's a horror movie, and the scariest thing I could possibly come up with.

You mentioned the split-screen segment in chapter II. Let's talk more about the technical aspect of your filmmaking approach.
I like to have a loose approach. The thing is, we try to keep the days short. I want people to be in good spirits. The longest shoot day that we've ever had was six hours. No one has to wake up early, no one has to stay up too late. We try to balance the amount of time we're actually filming with the amount of time that everyone gets to be friends. That allows us to make sure the dynamics feel really real on set, especially when it's people who don't hang out in their non-filmmaking life and we need to get the chemistry going with people.

The secret sauce of the project is I have a very fully-formed idea in my head of what the movie looks like and what each scene needs to do. Then, I surround myself with all the most talented people I've ever met, which is a big step. Everyone else involved in this is so insanely talented that they just make me look good. But the actual directing process is, I go around and I tell everyone exactly the information they need to know and nothing more. People only know their lines, when they have to respond, and their blocking—only the information they need to know to get through the scene. Sometimes I can play in a space of creating spontaneity, where I can tell two actors conflicting things and they have to solve a problem they're actually experiencing, which really allows for the movie to have this very unique aura. The conversations are just as awkward and weird as they are in real life.

With that split-screen sequence, I told every individual person what their job was at that party. Anyone who wasn't featured, I was like, "Hey, just have a normal party." We had two cameras running at the same time, and I'm telling my other camera operator.Liz Purchell, "Stay focused here, do whatever you need to do to make it look cool—and at some point, I'm going to tap you on the foot. When that happens, pan from there to there." That's the only note I gave her, and the magic trick I wanted to pull off worked. So I felt really good about that.

When I interviewed Lex Walton earlier this year, she told me that you went off hormones for a spell while making chapter II.
Yeah, I was on four months that whole year. I mean, there's multiple levels, right? The movie is coming out of this feeling of political and personal anger. When we were making it movie, Ivy Wolk used the term "method director," which I'd never heard—but that really resonated with me, Me and Lex making that movie, we had to be right there with that character, feeling those same doubts, in order to make it work.

With each of the Castration Movies, I'm trying so hard to capture these archetypes of white, downwardly mobile ennui, especially among queer people and incels—people at the margins of what that identity looks like. I'm trying to get closer to it in some way where I need to not just empathize as an intellectual exercise, but actually try to feel it's important and really embody it. My work is trying to take a very material approach to transness on screen, which is a very different approach to a lot of my peers right now, because everyone else has an interest in making films that are more abstract and play in surrealism—this joy for cinema. They love the cinema. You compare Jane Schoenbrun's or Vera Drew's movies to what I'm doing, it's a vastly different thing, even though we're trying to talk around similar themes and ideas. All of my work has to be attached to the material world in some way.

For the second movie, the Roxy Cinema in New York had screened it so many times, and we shot a scene in the Roxy right before the intermission. So if you're one of the lucky audience members who can see that movie there, you literally get up from the intermission and you walk right to where the character just walked past. It's like you're in the movie, and I want you to feel that close to it. I want it to feel like this is happening behind the door, across the street, somewhere in the world right now—and you feel a material connection to it. It's important to my artistic process to really embody it and understand it. A lot of my work comes from the fact that I will follow into any room and visit any place. I have no limits or fears around participating in the world, meeting people, and trying to understand. I have such a curiosity about life and other people. I've definitely gleaned a lot of inspiration from a lot of crazy nights, I'll say that.

Music plays a fairly substantial role through these films. Even the music in Computer Hearts is pretty notable to me, as somebody who writes about music as much as I write about film. I'm curious to hear you talk about your implementation of music as well as your relationship to the art form in general.
Unfortunately, I don't play music. I have no musical talents in my whole body. I've tried many times, it's just not there. For me, it really comes down to my relationship with my dad, because my dad likes music. He took me to my first concert as a kid, and he was the movie buff in my family. He'd buy a lot of VHS tapes and watch them, which was great in the '90s because that's the most cool dad-core era for movies—stuff like Reservoir Dogs, The Shawshank Redemption, and Goodfellas. My dad's taste primarily went towards stuff with good soundtracks. so he was always putting movies on the TV that he could be doing work around the house during. He could be hammering in one room, but if it was like a movie like Reservoir Dogs—which has an excellent soundtrack—on the TV, he'd be listening to it. Of course, as a little kid, I'd go sit down in front of the TV and watch whatever was on, getting exposed to all these crazy, cool movies as a very young child, probably two or three years old.

There was such a huge connection between what constitutes a good movie and it having a good soundtrack, so for Castration Movie, I knew music was going to play a big part. I was very close with [Magda Baker and Aoife Josie Clements] and their band Froggy Worm had just started playing shows when they moved out to Vancouver. So I was thinking, "I'm going to go shoot one of your shows on this Hi-8 camera and see how it looks." That first performance, which is the first scene of the second chapter, was the first thing I ever shot for Castration Movie. The way I could move the camera, all of a sudden I couldn't imagine the movie—the style of it—unlinked from their performances, capturing the landscape of their faces and hands. I was like, "This is what Castration Movie is going to feel like—capturing these human moments."

I'm a subscriber to the Lloyd Kaufman or Roger Corman school of filmmaking, where you add production value however you can. If you follow around your your good friends who are in a band getting some modest DIY success with your little camcorder, you can get access to a lot of really cool spots. I wanted to make this little band a narrative within the film, where we see them getting more little opportunities throughout. It also creates this great foil with Michaela, who's much more isolated and alone. She's not creative, she doesn't have a partner or bandmate—so those became very important aspects.

You mentioned the alignment of political and personal anger that goes into Castration Movie. Unpack that a little more for me.
You want, in a lot of ways, the work to exist in a pure state so that people can still talk about it. There's definitely a level by which all the pieces are in the works that I want people to think about what these movies are saying politically. Back when I was in film school, I got really into this concept of the "third cinema," which was these filmmakers' manifesto that outlines a different way of making movies. There's cinema that is the commercial cinema—we all know that's the first cinema. Then there's a more European or international arthouse cinema, which is the second cinema. It's much more auteur-driven and about artistic intent. Then there's this idea of a third cinema, which is basically more political and revolutionary—this idea of making movies in a less structured way. The writers made a film called The Hour of the Furnaces that I really quite love, which is a very long, very political film that was meant to be shown in a way where you would have intermissions and breaks to talk about the politics of it. It's a way of bringing community together in a way which they can organize and have the film objects as a way to direct that organization and conversation.

The Castration Movies have really pulled that off in a way where, when we screen them, they're very long movies, so people get very comfortable with each other over the amount of time screening it. It's definitely a movie that I encourage people to watch with other friends, or go make some friends and watch it. Watch it on Discord server. Watch it however you need to. But try to watch it with other people, it's much more entertaining. I've seen people who have made friends and found community [through them], which is so funny because these are such bleak movies—scare films that are saying, "Love yourself, go fix your life, take some agency, don't be one of these miserable characters who keep fucking up, who can't reach out to or empathize with other people." I'll get messages from people saying, "Oh my God, I made like a bunch of friends at this screening," or, "I was out of hormones and someone else at the screening hooked me up," or, "Me and some people started doing some political organizing or started a band."

There's so much community-building happening around these screenings. They're a jumping-off point, where people start doing more trans or queer film screenings. That's the beautiful politics of it: It's a movie that demands to be talked about with other people, and it's also a movie that feels so much better to watch with other people, because then you can laugh in a group where it's very much suffering alone otherwise. You end up with this great experience where the people who get to see it really form community with each other.

The other aspect of the "third cinema" that is so important to me in terms of my political project is, like, I never expected Castration Movie to take off. I didn't expect people to watch it. But now that it's happening, it's really beautiful. When I first made this movie, a lot of it came from the sense of I was not seeing a lot of movies about trans people, made by trans people, that were for trans people. A lot of people complain, "Well, no one's going to give us money to make this stuff." So I thought, "Well, I'm sure that we're a big enough demographic that we could support like a movie made for, like, $10,000." We could definitely each pitch in five bucks and have a movie for us. So that was the original test, and it was sustainable. I was able to say, "Okay, if I make a trans movie for this much money, then I can pay everyone who works on it 200 bucks a day, and we can keep doing that." That was where we started, but now it's gotten to be this bigger thing.

What's been so beautiful, and factors into that "third cinema" manifesto, is that if your movie becomes a hit, the whole idea is you're extracting wealth from the higher classes, so you can put it throughout your marginalized or revolutionary community. We're extracting wealth into our community. It's still not a huge success financially or anything, but like the fact that it's bringing in more than 10 grand means that I get to put that money back into the community by making sure people's rent is paid and people have the resources they need. That's a really beautiful thing that I can do as an artist. I was never great at organizing, in terms of sitting in a circle with people and coming up with actual plans and all that shit. I mean, Castration Movie Part ii is very much a reflection of a lot of my time spent in community organizing spaces. But this is something I am good at. I can make a movie, I can get it out there, and this is what I can use to give back to my community and really do something.

And there's still more work to do. The next big thing is I really want to solve is looking for solutions to whatever barriers are keeping the current trans film scene so homogenous. It's very white-dominated, and I'm seeing a lot of really talented young filmmakers who should be getting more. I don't know if it's an access thing, but I want to direct more resources into solving those perceived issues, because I make a very specific type of movie and I want to make sure that there's different perspectives. Trans films should be as diverse as our community actually is, so I want to make sure that everyone has their cinema in that regard. That's one of my long-term goals.

One thing I was thinking about more recently is, having a lot of other trans filmmakers talking about making these movies at higher budget levels and whatever, I was thinking, "Geez, I should be really trying to go out of my way to pitch, like, really normal movies now that I have some degree of a name." If I can go make a normal studio movie, that's a great way to bring a lot more money back down to our level. I'll try to make a Star Wars, then I can put money into everyone's GoFundMe or whatever. That's my goal.

What have you seen recently that you've kind of liked or disliked in terms of movies?
Oh, that's a great question—I'll do indie and studio. I saw a movie a month ago called Crocodile Dose, which I know they've been screening at the Roxy in New York. It was made by some 18-year-old boys from Colorado doing a Gen-Zoomer-Alpha take on Superbad with Snapchat. It's honestly one of the best comedies I've seen in quite some time. It's very articulate in a way that's so online-literate with its comedy. It falls into some pitfalls in the third act, but it's such a strong debut from this group of filmmakers that are doing something so off-the-grid and figuring out how to make a movie on first principles. It's beautiful to see the way that the internet is now inspiring a younger generation of filmmakers.

In terms of studio stuff, you know what? I went and saw The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm last night. I can often be a skeptic about big Hollywood films, but I was really taken aback at the sheer scope of what a movie made by a filmmaker with a strong sense of authorship can do with this huge budget. There's a lot of very resonant themes for the current era within that film—a very interesting movie about conservative regrets in this way that I found very telling, interesting, and apropos for the current era. It feels like this insane thing of, "I wanted to burn it all down, and now I have to deal with the consequences of that." It's one of the most politically interesting movies I've seen so far this year, especially coming from a huge studio blockbuster. I was shocked at the sorts of readings you can really put into a work like that.

I'm a huge Joseph Campbell head, so I love the idea of like monomyths and finding patterns throughout different cultures, and throughout the history of the way we tell stories. It's such a beautiful thing that the most contemporary of contemporary filmmakers—who really is the progenitor of so much of modern cinema—is adapting something like The Odyssey, and it's still feeling so relevant just because the nature of how we tell stories. That's just so beautiful to me. So I was skeptical going in, and I came out just really, oving it.

The Odyssey left me a little cold in general, but it's been more interesting to hear other people's opinions about it than it was to actually watch it. It's always really enjoyable when we get something like that in mass culture. It doesn't happen that often!
Yeah, it's so crazy. I was sitting front row, because every screening of it sold out for two months straight here at the IMAX, and then a group of four teenage boys come in and sit next to me. They're asking, "Why is there no pre-show?" These kids are coming to this experience, and they're still excited even though they don't have the language to like know why to be excited. When the movie ended, they were chatty. It's cool when a movie breaks through in a way where everyone's going to see it and have an opinion and talk about it. That is, to me, the major goal with making art—to get people are interested enough to engage with it. The success of something like The Odyssey is so great, because we've had this era of films that are meant to appeal to everybody and, in doing so, appeal to nobody. If you have to make a film that has to make a billion dollars internationally, you kind of have to stand off anything specific. So seeing stuff like The Odyssey do so well, when it's so much so a film made by a filmmaker is just a really beautiful thing.