Tangential to a Bad Story — Ep. 40 of Intentionally Blank

[Music] so so i don't have a bad story for you oh but i kind of have something tangential to it okay because recently we had groundhog day so we did we watched groundhog day because last year we watched groundhog day in space and so it was back to regular groundhog day um and um i've told you before that one of the things i do is sometimes when i'm going to bed i'm like i'm gonna just tell myself a story that's where most of the bad story ideas come from okay uh i in my head did a whole sequel to grand dragon hog day whole sequel to groundhog yep that was it was a lot of fun let me ask i assume i know the answer because i consider groundhog day to be arguably the greatest fantasy movie of all time okay uh when you watched it did it hold up for you absolutely loved every minute of it there we go um great performances great like the screenplay is fantastic yeah absolutely hold up it's one of those movies that i could watch i can't watch a lot of movies over and over again but if i can be watching technical details and just how they did the narrative in interesting ways um i i really like uh groundhog day do you think that you like groundhog day in part because it is a roguelike uh maybe maybe oh a nice callback to a previous episode yeah it is basically life the roguelike um but uh i went through a whole and i did it my way this isn't how i would actually do a sequel to groundhog day i wouldn't because groundhog day doesn't need a sequel right like that's the actual answer um but i am uh as a as a person i always like it when the magic doesn't go away i don't want the world to become a less magical place so in my version of it he realizes that he has to get every day perfect and he can't move on from each day until he moves it gets every day perfect and i you know kind of was going on what are the mechanics of this what's his life like that if each day he has to repeat uh until and what is perfect mean and all of that stuff and it was a lot of fun okay um but it got me thinking about adaptation and realized we haven't talked about adaptations we haven't really talked about adaptation but before we leave the topic i want to ask you about other groundhog day style stories okay which are rare but they're around like did you watch palm springs i have not seen any of the others i haven't seen happy death day i haven't seen palm springs i've only seen the the two that i mentioned groundhog day and groundhog dang space i haven't read any of the precursor stories because apparently in space uh edge of tomorrow edge tomorrow that's right okay uh it's not actually in space but it is future very clearly a roguelike yes with with no question um well the one that i'm gonna just pitch to you and then not talk about because i want you to watch it un spoiled or untrammeled is a netflix series called russian doll okay i've heard it's about eight or ten episodes long i know you in general are not really a tv guy but i do like things with eight or ten episodes that yeah that i do eight or ten episodes very clear story uh it doesn't do the thing where it resets the status quo at the beginning which is kind of you know most tv doesn't do that anymore but uh genuinely one of the greatest tv shows that i've seen in years great uh really loved it and in particular the the very specific twist that they put on the groundhog day style thing yeah i i adore it anyway let's move on talk about adaptation yeah i would like to write one of these someday but i don't know if i ever could just because groundhog day is one of those such a defining part of the genre and unfairly so perhaps because i know like i said there are tons of precursors and things like that but it's so good um i mean it's harold ramey at his absolute best and i don't know that i could ever do something that would that i would feel comfortable releasing as just oh brandon's doing a groundhog day you know yeah but well that's why you know if you think of it not as a groundhog day pasty but as a roguelike yes that you are going to fictionalize maybe that's maybe that would be the mental hurdle to clear let's talk about adaptations though okay guys this is kind of a sideways look at it um but we uh we want to talk about the best books to film the best book to film adaptations yes okay but i want to uh start our discussion by saying what mean what does best mean well this context yes because um i think an argument could be made for a number of different things is a good adaptation one that is so good it is literally better than the book yes uh or is a good adaptation one that recreates the experience you had while watching the book or reading the book yes i watch a lot of books they're on my nightstand i'm never going to get to them um what's on your nightstand right now that you're never getting to do actually anything on there i've got uh bone crier's moon by katie purdy and i've got um i've got a star trek novel by john jackson miller and i've got two or three other fantasies that i can't remember the names of i've got a big stack of fantasy that i'm trying to read i've got a leather bound to the martian chronicles that i keep meaning to read but i'm like there's always something that i need to read instead of going back to ray bradbury yeah so it's been there for quite a while um but best so i would say that there is there is a nuance to this also that you're not getting at which is the movie inspired by the book that goes a completely different direction yeah right well we kind of talked about that discussion uh when we had a whole talk about you know what's a what's a bad adaptation yes and so let's not repeat ourselves too much but that has got to be part of this right um but let's just kind of focus okay so so let's start our discussion with a which what what's actually kind of a weird corner case fight club fight club yes um which is a brilliant movie that is based on a brilliant book yes um it does change the ending and very notably uh the chinese version of this is awesome thing that censors the ending is actually much closer to the book is it yes they reverse that you know did they did they take it out and they reversed their their if you if you didn't know uh it's so hilarious they censored the end of fight club in china with just a black screen that says and they were all caught by the police the end yeah they've got what's basically like a an old haze code kind of thing that's still in place where law enforcement has to win and you know badness must be punished and so at the end of fight club instead of blowing up all the buildings and everything goes crazy it is it cuts to a you know silent movie style title card that says don't worry they were all caught and they're very they feel very bad about their crimes or whatever yeah have you ever seen the um ooh tangent have you ever seen the uh i think they're victorian but i could be wrong uh somewhere uh late 1700's up to early 1900's uh england uh adaptations of uh shakespeare's plays where they decided the tragedies were too tragic and they rewrote the endings i got shown one in my shakespeare class at byu uh an actual stage a modern redoing of this just so that they could capture it for everyone and it was romeo and juliet and at the end they sat up and monologued about everything they'd learned and everything was happily ever after and the families agreed to let them get married oh man it was great that's see we can laugh about those because out of historical context that's hilarious right inside of historical context if you are in modern china or if you are in haze code america or if you are in victorian england where there is a specific morality so prevalent that it starts suffocating art yes that's not as funny you are correct but wait it's still very funny uh down well house down's the wrong term sorry way to bring the room down i know uh so yeah but in uh fight club yeah in the book which is also wonderful uh in the end they don't blow everything up and it's basically he you know is in therapy he's in a mental hospital being treated for his schizophrenia okay um and it is a powerful ending in a very different kind of way yeah and this chinese version about that goes back to it what do i think yeah i think that you know and a lot of my ideas about adaptation are colored by the fact that i have had a book adapted and going through that process and realizing the end of the serial killer book would not work on film and the end of the serial killer movie would not work in a book um and i can kind of see that same thing going on with fight club um if you get to the end of that big bombastic movie and he just ends up getting caught and going into therapy right you you have a monty python the holy grail ending yeah but played straight and and there's a you know the book makes it work and the book makes it work well but i can absolutely understand why the screenwriter and the director said no you know what we need to just go big or go home on this and i have stated before that i am okay with changes to source material even sweeping big ones uh in adaptation uh in service of this new story that's being told yeah because i don't think you changed the story uh but i am more persuaded than i used to be um along the more orthodox lines looking at things like uh game of thrones and saying you know there is something to be said for the author knew what they were doing they wrote a book that people love let's actually make that let's do that thing um so let's hear an example what's something that for you walks that line between being a really good adaptation for a new medium and a new audience that is also very true to the original i mean the princess bride is the classic example but you can't get better than the screenwriter book being adapted by the screenwriter to film by someone who obviously is working very close with them to make it work yeah the princess bride is like the er example of hey this is the book only in a different medium so doing slightly different things and equally lovable uh in fact fix is the biggest problem with the book which is we've talked about the frame story in the book is kind of doubtful well and am i incorrect i have always thought and maybe this is just an urban legend uh that the book was kind of written as a film treatment i mean the intention of being adapted i wouldn't be surprised if that were the case i don't know for sure i do know that um that michael crichton famously started writing books because he wanted to get into film and no one was giving his screenplays any uh credibility so he wrote books because authors have more credibility novelists have more credibility and then use that to get them adapted yeah i do know that um cormac mccarthy wrote no country for old men specifically as this is going to be made into a movie i'm i'm writing a film treatment and that one i mean that's we is that your number one last time no it's your number two right because jaws is based on a book jaws is also uh uh for me the ur example of a movie that is a million times better than the book it's based on i haven't actually read jaws i read beast um i'm not missing out i mean peter benchley is he clearly is a good storyteller um and he did a good job and he came up with a really cool story um it is over bloated it has all kinds of weird stuff it has an entire subplot where the sheriff's wife is cheating on him with somebody and like yeah right but you know it is absolutely the kind of story that benefits from being greatly paired down into movie form not everything does if you're going to pick most like the most agreed upon number one example of this it's going to be the godfather series i would think almost certainly right yeah uh because of i have not read those books but a lot of people are say the books are fine and the movies are these absolute cinematic masterpieces right which i would agree with they're just you know one and two you know um one and a half of two yeah okay um are really really fantastic interesting movies and they're that same era right they're that era of we're gonna take the pulp story and we're going to elevate them and we're going to put one part blockbuster one part um pulp one part some really great filmmaking prowess and it's you know it's what gave rise to jaws and to that and to star wars with it didn't have explicit source material but is basically the same sort of thing we're going to take pulp and turn it into art i mean wiser men than either of us have have done entire you know academic treatises on the freedom of cinema in the 70s and all the awesomeness that it gave rise to yes um how about now michael crichton yes is a good example he is uh what about jurassic park so i prefer the movie yeah um agreed i really like michael craig um i have not read a book by him that i didn't enjoy uh thoroughly but um there is not the heart in jurassic park the book jurassic park the book uh granted now i've read it a couple times but it's it's i'm a distance from it so uh commenters if i get some things wrong i apologize but um it lacks the heart that's more brutal more deaths uh more um more chaos theory sort of we have opened pandora's box and we deserve to be punished yeah um and spielberg is just able to add heart to it uh in just this magnificent way it's it's unfair to compare any source material to spielberg right um because he is so good he is the greatest living filmmaker in my opinion and um that that is arguably the most controversial statement we've ever made on this show because a lot of people really don't like him because they perceive him to be very schlocky you know and adding in heart instead of sticking to the brutal original um you know i i don't know if it's the prevailing opinion but it's a very common opinion that okay he's kind of a hack i disagree okay um i think uh some of my very favorite movies of all time are spielberg um a lot of this is i think cause we were all kids in the 80s and we grew up on e.t and stuff like that that's true but i mean i love his modern films as much right lincoln's one of my top 10 films of all time um and granted that's uh not as modern anymore um since it's uh probably over a decade old now but um i think spielberg is amazing and um so comparing anything to that is very difficult i think jurassic park is a very good book yeah it is a good book but you can see a lot of i think a lot of the changes that spielberg made to it are very uh clear i don't want to say obvious because i don't know if anybody else would have made them but for example having grant in the book he loves kids because kids love dinosaurs and that's cool and that's a nice cuddly thing but it doesn't give him any room to grow yeah and so spielberg taking that away and saying no he hates kids and his character arc is that he's gonna come to care for them yep that is what suddenly injects heart into an otherwise very technical story the carbon elevator sorry star trek reference there um um but uh yeah i mean so i love jurassic park i do not like jurassic world very much no uh i haven't like i haven't enjoyed any of the sequels to jurassic park um it's just jurassic world is fine um but it's what happens when you take spielberg out of the movie right you end up with monster movie yeah which is fine it's a competent monster movie with a bunch of weird decisions that bother me but uh this is not a jurassic world uh conversation but um yeah okay uh let me ask a another potentially controversial one yes blade runner blade runner i see blade runners i think an excellent example of the filmmaker goes a different direction changes some fundamental things and makes a great film i don't think blade runner the book like most philip k dick would make a very good straight adaptation uh depending on your enjoyment of through uh scanner darkly or through a glass dart yeah scanner darkly is my favorite philip k dick book and my favorite philip k dick movie i think they did a brilliant job of it um it is also in my opinion the only faithful adaptation he's ever got absolutely i mean that that's why i bring it up because like if you're gonna adapt philip k dick here you go it's a fever dream real weird artsy um and granted not all philip kadek stories were that way but a lot of them were and the ones that aren't are jokes right like we can remember it for you wholesale is two pages of a really great punchline um and yeah i think actually his most filmable cinematic right off the shelf uh story is paycheck and that movie is awful yeah i know the screen reader on that one um then i will not say anything about that person he has things to say about uh what about studio interference yes uh i'm not surprised but regardless um what about minority report which is a spielberg yeah i think it's a good movie it's a very good movie is it better than minority report the short story i cannot remember i did go read it i can't remember what i thought of it um but i mean i i love blade runner the movie it is a real weird movie so i understand there are people who do not like it and i'm totally totally cool with you not liking blade runner right it is slow but um it's my favorite uh philip k dick adaptation okay um um for all its flaws if there is an author i'm sure that there's data on this somewhere but in my opinion philip k dick uh gets adapted into screen uh a ton maybe maybe more than anybody else if anybody rivals him maybe stephen king even ian fleming okay fine does he count does he count agatha christie oh boy okay have you seen any of the new uh poirot movies it's great i have not yet i mean i'm really looking forward to the new one that's coming out but the classic murderer on the rn express is a classic for a reason it's really good yeah um i happen to really like the way bronna makes some of his movies i was going to say how he makes movies but there are some that i mean a few weird ones i i like him as a director um and his much ado about nothing is fantastic so i came out of that one preferring it to the old one really um and just really liking his puerto rican just how he put it together and uh and i enjoyed it a lot okay so now let's compare it to the original book though yes uh original what do you think um [Music] i mean this is gonna be a case where i read the book first and the book is going to be it's one of those landmark books right um it's difficult to separate your cultural received knowledge of the book from your experience of reading so i'm going to pick book in these cases because i these are films where the film struggles to add anything new it does a really good job of that of adapting and i really like them but um if you look at princess bride where i actually prefer the movie the book has one glaring flaw and that is that the frame story is really hard to read in places yeah and um beyond that the whimsical fun of it being on screen uh are both things that i think are slightly better than the same thing in book form yeah i think a mystery novel just works better and before but well it it doesn't benefit from the visual medium as well as a cool adventure story exactly and i mean let's i mean agatha christie taught me twists right and murder on your express is one of her best um it's one of the things where it's like i can't give it away because if you haven't seen it we have a new movie adaptation you should go see it yeah she did all three classic mystery twists really well um and um that's what taught me kind of the three classic mis uh mystery twists and yeah express is one of them um and it's perhaps the most uh the most powerful of the three classic um i mean by the way don't go look at me like what are the three i'm defining these as three i don't know that there's like a magicka can you tell us the three well at the risk of spoiling it will give you a big spoilers uh for three of her most famous stories right um and so um let's just all right spoilers for murder on the express agatha christie for the next minute or so right so the three big ques twists are nobody did it everybody did it and the protagonist did it right yeah um those are your your three kind of if you want to go outside the box of which of these people did it if you want to have a it's not the normal crew right and so um and so you've got murder on the express which is everybody did it right this is the kind of the classic uh clue the movies like everybody has motivation they all did it she's the one that did that first for me yeah um that everybody killed him well and murder on the orient express i think stands as one of the absolute landmarks of mystery fiction in general and will for hundreds of years as far as i'm concerned right because of the way it handles that specific twist right um of note i won't say which two but knives out uses two of the three at the same time it does and it's wonderful yes uh so if you like those okay so let's talk about stephen king though yes because i don't think we can talk about adaptations without getting into him yeah because he's almost everything he's ever written has been adapted at some point yes um what do you consider and we've talked i know about shining before and the mist um something you know each of them changed the thing drastically one of them he loves and one of them he hates yes uh what about the other ones what about something like shawshank redemption i mean shawshank would be my favorite like i would guess that's not a controversial opinion probably not um my favorite stephen king adaptation um i think it's great i think it's better than the short story but that's because there's more time right yeah the short story is it even though like it just can't have the weight that the film can in that specific instance so um i would i would pick shawshank the movie short stories are an interesting one to look at because you get into situations uh you know like we can remember it for you wholesale where the brevity is what makes it work and then you get something like shawshank which is a cool story that absolutely benefits from being deepened and broadened did you see new it i have not seen the new it okay i haven't either so i don't know if we can i don't love it the book here's is the thing i i i like portions of it there you go i like half maybe of it the book um but i mean it's one big glaring horrific thing that should in my opinion almost get it never you know put out a print yes it's never included in adaptations yes they leave out the sewer scene rightly so stephen king someone should have taken away his cocaine for that day and said no or just said i'm an editor i'm going to uh reign you in a little bit yes um but beyond that like it has this cool has lots of cool non-linear storytelling aspects going on that i really like and other parts just don't work for me yeah uh so uh i did like the the old tv show um quite a bit but i think that's just tim curry being tim curry yeah was that a tv show that was a mini series television mini series okay did you watch uh the stand mini series i did watch the stand mini i loved that and i good that's one that i actually liked better than the book okay uh and the book again it's from the same kind of period of of king's career right where he was writing big huge things and no one was was telling him when to trim it and so it did benefit from adaptation because a mini-series gives it room to breathe and gives you time to get into all the complexity while still cutting out the fat i'll agree with you on that one um i am very fond of the stand the book and i maybe shouldn't be because it has the same problems as it as you're talking about but i just enjoyed that book um for for just reasons that i'm not sure i can completely uh identify articulate and that's fine have you watched any of and i assume the answer is no the modern stand tv series i have not it is not great okay it does not hold up okay um i think that the mini series did a really good job uh of fun note the house that they move into uh that that mini series was mostly filmed in salt lake city oh and the house that they move into where ruby lives that's around the corner two doors down from my grandparents house okay and they set up craft services on my grandpa's front village um yeah isn't that supposed to be nebraska i think so yeah because i mean nebraska right i grew up in nebraska so i'm identifying yeah nebraska but uh yeah they like there's all kinds of really recognizable landmarks if you go back and uh anyone out there who wants to watch it like they hold their town hall meetings in the rio grande train station that's downtown salt lake city okay um and a lot of the houses are up in the avenues the one where there's a big explosion that blows out the windows in like episode six or seven uh that was two doors down from my best friend in high school where he lived uh so yeah okay they uh asked that family hey can we set off a bunch of explosives in your house it might ruin the carpet and the curtains and he's like well will you replace them they said sure so they remodeled their house on uh the stan's operating budget okay very cool um the thing about stephen king is i feel like you've got you've got a bunch of different arrows of king but two of them are the big bloated king which works well as miniseries as we've talked about yeah uh the another era is one cool idea taken to just creepy enough a level and then cutting right then this is this is your children of the corn in your pet cemetery and these sorts of things i put thinner in that category too which had a really bad like made for tv movie that i still creeped me the heck out and i feel like these are about the experience to the point that the short stories work better for me children of the corn is a great example i just chill in the corn i don't think can work as a movie you have to put too much plot into children of the corn in order to make it work as a film and that's not the point the point is oh and then you're done yeah um and i just don't think that works in movie form pet cemetery obviously has an escalation so it's different um and so um that's really cool but still i feel like they had too much plot to some of these now pet cemetery is an interesting one to point out because uh and again i have no actual data to back this up right but uh i would suspect uh that pet cemetery might be uh his most adapted book okay it's come into so many different versions and it's been adapted into different um you know they're things that are clearly based on it while just kind of paying lip service to it i don't know if that's true or not but it feels feels true to me which in the modern era is all that matters what about carrie i am fine with carrie both book and film i have not read carrie so i can't really speak to its adaptation but really early king era i love the book yeah i mean the the movie yeah yeah doesn't speak to me um the way some others do but i enjoy it uh it is obviously iconic right yeah it was it carrier cujo that he sold first that that famous story comes about i want to say that it was carrie yeah yeah um it's it's carrie cujo or the car one chris christie those one of those that like maybe there's a story about him throwing it in the garbage and his wife getting it out and um something like that throwing it in the garbage one i think was christine okay um but i think carrie was his first sale and you know there's stories about his first sale where i i'm paraphrasing and probably getting this really wrong where he's on the phone with his agent um and the agent's like um you know we got we got you know an offer it's 400 and king's like 400 bucks wow it's like no 400 grand stephen he's like oh oh okay uh that kind of uh conversation but that might be apocryphal so i don't know okay while we're talking about uh creepy horror thriller novels okay uh have you read any thomas harris have you read silence of the lamb not read any thomas harris um i have only seen the movie i have not seen e also i haven't seen hannibal or read any of the sequels or anything okay so uh i'm not a good silence of the lambs is the only one of his books that i've read okay uh i think i have seen all of the movies okay all of the clary starling and all of the hannibal lecter movies um but silence of the lambs this isn't necessarily fair because that is again one of my top five movies um but that is one that i will also say is not only a brilliant adaptation but actually surpasses the book okay what about the lord of the rings lord of the rings oh man we talked about this a little bit already so let's not dwell on it too much this this is tricky to say um i think that the movie trilogy will stand as one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time um i very bold i think that's i'm joking it's not yeah it's um i am actually very torn because part of me wants to say that it's better than the books because the books are full of a lot of unnecessary filler controversial it is controversial because everyone loves those books i love those books i at the time reading them did not think any of it was unnecessary filler yeah and so i think where i'm going to land eventually is uh you know like i said with serial killer the book version of lord of the rings would not work as a movie and the movie version of lord of the rings would not work as a book okay they are really wonderful versions of the same story well that's a very political way to dodge that question well done i will give a thumbs up to that yeah i want to take us down the rabbit hold of tragedy adaptations okay um but i feel like we've talked about this a lot right like they're really bad at it the things that should have been good that weren't stations of othello or no not obtain but like the things that you really wish would have worked like golden compass right golden compass is one of the greatest tragedies in my mind because um it should have worked the casting was really good casting was great uh the visual design book is so good the golden compass yeah that is one of the greatest young adult fantasies um i actually prefer it to the narnia books uh and they were kind of written in direct response to yes um well yeah let's not go there but let's just say um that movie was heartbreaking to watch because i was bored out of my skull despite them being incredibly faithful it's one of the things that formed a pillar of how i view adaptation is well you can't obviously just be faithful because otherwise you have the danger of the golden compass yeah um and maybe it's less faithful and i'm remembering but i read the book and then the movie came out like two years later or a year later and i seem to recall that i had a pretty good handle on that and was like wow this is a scene from the book this is a scene from the book this is a scene from the book why is this not working yeah it just didn't have any of the the personality i don't even think it's that the magic so my my belief and i again this is just basing it off one thing my belief is that um the pacing and method of doing methods of doing dialogue the methods of building chapters and things in a book are just so fundamentally different from the cinematic form for most people some people obviously it's different um you know we've talked about michael creighton i think michael crichton uh he writes incredibly filmable books um but in a lot of cases it's just you have to be able to break the thing down to its core and rebuild it to something that is capturing the essence and they instead tried to adapt straight across and you ended up with book pacing in a movie which was boring and because they don't have enough time in a film to get these things across like in the book you can take a lot of time to show don't tell right because you have pages and pages um showing instead of telling is almost always going to take more time not every time but a lot of the time yeah and telling is fast and so if they just lift the dialogue and some of the monologues and things from the books and put them on screen and then quickly have to go from scene to scene because they just have to get this all in it is just a series of monologues and dialogues that don't that are boring because they're paced like what's in a book it's hard to explain no no that i think i think that is a good explanation um so now what about lightning thief uh so i've read lightning thief i did not see the adaptation because a lot of people don't like it yeah um and so i did i okay so you can't really i can't really talk about that okay because that's another way a fantasy that just absolutely didn't land in any way and that's one where i've seen the movie and not read the book oh okay uh so between the two of us we can not talk about this in any effectual way artemis fowl i enjoyed the book didn't see the movie because the ratings were so bad it sounds like it might be so bad that it's good but i didn't want to go see it okay um cool well uh do you have any others uh well um we were gonna talk about uh bringing it back to the beginning if you were gonna pick one movie to write a book sequel to okay what would you write a book sequel to as a film right okay so let's pick something that's not like star wars it's like i'm going to write a star wars book write a story okay no i got a something a movie yeah and then i've got to do a book yeah follow up to it and it can be one that did have a follow-up like if you want to pick jaws i think there is a jaws sequel that eventually wrote yeah uh you could you could you could go ahead and write your own no honestly my mind goes immediately to thrillers which is kind of the same thing as you can't just pick star wars right like if i pick uh french connection or the conversation okay or something like that that's basically i'm gonna do a crime thriller or a spy thriller with the same characters yeah that feels like cheating to me maybe maybe i mean yeah maybe you can do one of those and something else because i the thing i would most like to write probably would be in indiana jones but by my own rules that's not allowed right um so i think we can allow it if you can tell us what you would do oh i i have no idea i'd have to think about it a lot okay um i haven't actually given that thought maybe that'll maybe that'll be i mean they're working on a 15 indiana jones right now which is weird because there was never a fourth one yeah why would they do fifth um the the puzzle of taking indiana jones and figuring out what to do with it now that he's old yeah is one that i'm very interested to see how they solve and that's that that is a compelling storytelling problem for me okay i kind of i'm very tempted to lean toward like a batman beyond model where indiana jones is so old and so broken by running away from boulders and nazis and who knows what else for decades on end that now he's just the guy in the chair for some new guy that would be a very hard sell in a movie because nobody wants to see pulling an example out of the air shia labeouf as the new indiana jones right nobody wants to see somebody wear that hat who isn't harrison ford but i think in a book you could do it i disagree a little bit i think what went wrong potentially shia labeouf which he's actually good in that film he is um that's not the problem with that film uh the problem is we don't want a indiana jones legacy but i think we would be totally fine at least i would be totally fine with another person wearing the hat and being indiana jones i don't think okay harrison ford was so iconic and maybe this is just because as soon as i saw the um the screen trials uh for mustache man what's his name uh magnum pi in that role i immediately like oh yeah i could totally see spielberg directing this guy and making a different take on him but a good one i totally can see somebody else as indiana jones um but if you're gonna have harrison ford in it he needs to be telling a story and it needs to be him for five minutes i'll uh the beginning of um the young indiana jones chronicles and then a new adventure of indiana jones um in the past and you can then leave him with somebody else his happy ending with uh marion if you want to from from movie four um and it can just be he's telling his story and then you flashback and we get a whole indiana jones adventure i don't love that style of storytelling but if you're gonna put harrison ford in it that is that's mine solution to it i don't think harrison ford wants to be an action hero anymore i don't think he works really well as an action hero anymore um yeah i think the idea of trying to adapt that character and that style of storytelling to a different era is interesting that is uh there's there's a big part of me that agrees with you and what i want to see is a different actor take on the role you know in the same way and and i one thing that always delights and puzzles me is how we are so protective of movies yes in a way that we are not protective of plays now plays are intended to be made over and over again with different sets and different casts but the same words and you know we've seen a bunch of people play hamlet and the idea of anyone other than him playing indiana jones feels anathema to us and that's interesting to me but i would love for example the example i always used to use was knight writer i want to see somebody take all the old knight rider scripts treat them as plays and just remake them new characters i mean new actors new effects new everything but the exact same scripts that's what i want to see how's that ben

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 41,922

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Id: fJlHwZMSGaw

Length: 42min 49sec (2569 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022