Unconscious Archetypes Exposed In Film | Rob Ager Richard Grannon

ladies and gentlemen welcome to Richard Brown and friends today I have the pleasure of being joined by Mr Rob Ager who runs a YouTube channel doing film analyzes and has been running it since the entire time that I've been on YouTube it's one of the the first people to get on YouTube that's right isn't it 2007 2006 as far as I know it was a red letter media started the month before me yeah and it was my stuff and I think most of the other film study channels came after that yeah including all the modern big corporate ones yeah they've got a full building full of people so I wanted to the way I do these uh podcasts usually is um I'm usually speaking to people from from Liverpool in the area so I'm going to start with um where you're from if that's okay where about are you from uh Liverpool yeah um but um loads of people Liverpool because my accent's not very strong yeah they're like you're from the Widow lad yeah and I'm not it's because when I was a kid that went to live in Canada when I was seven lived there for five years uh I had the twin accent while I was there I'd go to school I'd have a Canadian accent and when I came home to my mum and dad I'd have a Liverpool accent and that went on for five years that's interesting because it is it is soft as a scours accent girl yeah I think I've also toned it down for YouTube as well you have to don't you people I did a meet-up group uh the other last week at Liverpool uni and they're like where are you from oh so I'm from from the world they said to me why did you talk like that I'm like I can't do psychoanalytic theory in like a really thick Scout accent nobody's gonna enjoy it they'll be like what is this Scottish guy saying do you mean you know it's it's not easy for people to hear it sometimes yeah I mean I remember coming back um from Canada as a kid for a holiday to see the family and on the train up from London to Liverpool there was some scousers on the train and their accents to me sounded absolutely horrendous yeah I couldn't believe it I was like is this what people talk like in Liverpool so I've never forgotten that's what it sounds like yeah so as you were growing up um in Liverpool obviously Liverpool's gone through quite a few changes over over the last few years um is this is this a city that you're fond of or do you feel a strong emotional attachment to the city uh I could easily move elsewhere and just get on with my life and be fine but I do have a big fondness for this city I love the raw openness and honesty uh you get all the a lot of the dark side of people comes with that yeah um you know I mean we could all move down south to I know London or somewhere and yeah everyone could act a lot more nice but a lot of stuff would remain hidden I'd rather have the truth out in the open yeah what's and all you know yeah so I kind of view the city in that way yeah I I feel I feel the same way I like I like Liverpool and um it's like having a mate who you think could be doing a bit better so whenever I have these conversations with people I'm always like well where is it because what I don't like is that facile scous and Liverpool's [ __ ] great yeah and that's all you need to know and it's like well we do have a few problems here I mean statistically if you just look especially with the psychology the research that indicates like there's a lot of PTSD here there's a lot of boat there's a high prevalence for borderline personality disorder narcissistic personality disorder and we have a Teensy bit of a criminal culture oh yeah just just a little little dash of shark yeah I've got no experience with that have you no well that's the other thing that's weird with this place is it's a city everybody thinks it's Liverpool and they know about it but it's small so you can't really Escape it can you I mean everybody's like two or three degrees of separation away from probably somebody who had a book written about them or filmed on about them or yeah so that's that kind of a place what what was that like for you growing up because obviously you are uh you're a thinker yeah um being in that kind of environment what was that like for you it was um it was difficult because when I lived in Canada people were a lot nicer and then I came back to Liverpool age 11 12 and it was just rough as hell I'd never seen anything like it and I had to adapt you know I had to change my personality and become a lot more aggressive just to get by schools like concentration camps you know survival of the the toughest you know and um but I'm not really an aggressive person you know it takes a lot to get me to want to actually physically fight someone if they do get me to that point I can [ __ ] have a go yeah but it takes a hell of a lot because all the psychological stuff I've always studied you know that part of that is to have an understanding for other people's positions so someone comes along and starts being abusive to you I'm not likely to take it personally yeah and I'm more likely to try and suss out what's going on for them that's a problem and try and deal with that and of course that became my job years later you know working in mental health right um but yeah moving back to Liverpool at first we I went to several schools like three or four across the city over a period of about two or three years and ended up in Gaston so each school that I went to I had to re-adapt to a new set of kids yeah and that was fascinating because you know each school had its own unique rules of behavior and its own complex hierarchies of kids so I got to watch it and that that was teaching me about social systems yeah as I was going from school to school you know um so it was very educational and I wouldn't uh go back and change it to be honest I think I've learned too many valuable things from it it seems to me like if if a kid is taken out of their Hometown their home City environment put into because I would imagine Canada is quite foreign the cultural coordinates from from here to Canada would be quite foreign and then you go back in and then you move to a lot of different places you're forced to adapt and that adaptation requires you to become Analytical in a way doesn't it you have to watch and be like oh okay here's the rules here's is whatever yeah you said that um you ended up at school in Gaston was that where you met Billy Moore it is yeah yeah uh I went into that school in the second year so all the kids already knew each other from the first year and I started in the second year and the very first person I sat next to was Billy Moore oh okay yeah um I mean I've I've been on Billy's podcast and we've talked about things that went on at school and stuff and and I mean one of the things and I've I've brought this up with Billy was that he was kind of an outcast in that skill because he was from speak and everyone else there most of them were from Gaston and so how far is for people who do who don't know how far I speak from God speaks a few miles away and so he's basically a total Foreigner because he's different he's like two miles you know what the weird thing is in school he got um Outcast a bit and attacked a bit but he [ __ ] fought back big time he had tons of fights and what what age was this when you met him I was about I would say 12 maybe 13 and uh and then the last time I saw him up until I went on his podcast and we must have both been about 16 but leaving school age yeah yeah um but yeah um I always felt for Billy because I sat next to him on the first day and he was the first person that got to know in the school yeah and then I saw how people were with him and I thought this isn't right you know um and I saw all the fights he was getting into so I always had like a certain respect for the fact that he thought back all the time you know um I guess I kind of identified with being the odd one out as well because I'd experienced it so many times yes um so yeah that was a so you felt empathy for him being targeted in this way yeah yeah um yeah so that that was that was what's that does it there's a good movie about Billy Moore's time in Thailand what's what's that called just so people can have a prayer before prayer before Dawn um at least a couple of years ago wasn't it a fairly new film his book's a lot better the book's better than the film yeah okay uh it's very interesting that there's some aspects of the film that it's a good film overall but there's some access aspects of it that I uh quite disapprove of okay um where they changed the history okay regarding what happened with them but for one thing uh his character in the film hardly ever speaks right but Billy's not like that in real life he's chatty guy and I think they they just probably just thought well the scouse accent doesn't sell in the movie it might have been hard for that guy for the lad to do they still had from peaky blinders isn't it and it's not it's not an easy accent to no to take I mean he's he's good he does his job like you know for me he doesn't he doesn't have Billy's personality Edge you know right um but when I read his book the book was it had a lot of really funny stuff in it okay interactions with other people he was in the cells with and stuff yeah and some of it was absolutely hysterical I was laughing my head off and I thought well I wished all of this had gone into the movie and it didn't and then the other one and I spoke to Billy himself and we confirmed this um was that he didn't have a relationship with the Trans person in the prison right when I saw that in the movie I thought that's that's not like Billy never asked him about it and he was giving me a lift when we were doing podcast and then it didn't really add anything to the story either I think it was just a tech box thing for funding I think a lot of the film studios have this kind if they have to do it if you're going to submit a movie and get it made you have to take a certain number of boxes yeah um because it was I remember watching the movie it's a good movie I I like I liked it I'll I'll have a go of the book as well and then all of a sudden there's uh as the Thai would refers to them a katoi and then and then this relationship starts up and I'm going so you've got a White English guy trying to survive getting stabbed in a Thai jail and then just in a position where he's like oh I know I'll have a little romantic it just didn't I don't know didn't didn't make didn't make sense to me but as a it's interesting saying like there's a fish out of water story that's um that's very sort of symbolic isn't it you know being in a not just in Thailand but being in a tight prison as well yeah I mean for me um I mean when I went on Billy's podcast I was going on he wanted to question me about my stuff and it's funny now now you've got me on and we're talking about Billy's stuff but I want to get this in there I think this is quite important for me when I before I even saw that movie I saw Billy's podcast interviews he did with the Geordie cars I think it was and he told the story and that hit me quite hard because it for me it was like a mirror of what happened in school it was like the Foreigner in school right and I was like what what he's just gone through in Thailand is like a bigger more intense version yeah of what I saw going on in school yeah and I was almost like an imprint I found that really sad you know I've really felt for him on there but he's come through so the other thing that I saw you uh as I was looking through the videos today is your analysis of uh Midnight Express which is another sort of prison story Guy Fish Out of Water story yeah um that kind of a scenario is that something that interests you based on your experience as well people being stuck in scenarios where they don't belong and they have to figure it out oh that's a good question um I don't actually know maybe I probably have to go back and look at my own list of videos and find that out yeah question yeah and I know I've had a bit of an interest in prison films lately because my daughter who's nine a favorite genre of movies is prison escape movies that's interesting it's really weird I hope she doesn't view my house my Parenthood has been a prison yeah um but yeah I mean her favorite movie is the Warriors right well kids love the Warriors even girls and um and a second favorite movie is escape from Alcatraz and she loves Clint Eastwood and I thought that's a slow movie yeah it's very adults there's not much in there for kids actually so she's like have you got any more prison movies and I would go okay let's check them first yeah I was like don't worry I did not there's American me but she's probably not ready for that I did not show a Midnight Express yeah I told her about it and I said when you're older yeah um but because I'd been watching things like Cool Hand Luke she loved that one good prison movie and um you're trying to show the mild F prison films yeah and she loves them so it got me interested and I started to take more of an interest in Midnight Express like a lot of people I'd come to view the film as being a distortion of history and maybe a bit racist against the Turkish people and stuff like that and I was in but at the same time there's no denying it's a powerful film to watch it's very intently consistent yeah so I went back and watched it again I thought let's let's re-examine this and then looked at all of the Stone's history and as if you've seen the video he injected his own us prison experience into the film and that's why the story is different he wasn't changing it to demonize the Turkish people yeah he was trying to basically demonize the prison systems across the world and him and the director Alan Parker talked about it on that level it's not just about Billy Hayes's story it's it just represents prisons across the world so they made it more extreme didn't you also say there was echoes in there of um his experience Oliver Stone's experience in Vietnam yeah was then reflected in that movie as well yeah yeah I had that suspicion yeah and then what I found there was um a deleted portion of the script that was Oliver Stone had written in Alan Parker the director was like what the [ __ ] is this I'm filming this um and it was basically the the the the character escapes at the end of Billy Hayes escapes and he's seen running across basically a battlefield into Greece I think Greece and Turkey with a war yes and he was going to have to be running the tanks and people shooting at him and stuff I was like there's your Vietnam thing right there yeah yeah you know I don't even know if Oliver Stone realized that's why he put that in there I think it was you know yeah yeah so some of these things I I do I do wonder how much of it is um the director's internal effort to sort of process process trauma and process that yeah these things but I know from your own experience of directive films I've often looked back and gone oh yeah that's why I did that but you don't realize until afterwards I it felt right at the time but I didn't know why and then I'm like yeah okay now it makes sense to me you can go back and analyze your own movies yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah do film that film analysis on yourself so so back to uh school so you go through school at 16 you leave and then uh I think when I was reading today you eventually got into social work eventually could you talk a little bit about that yeah uh I mean what the the first uh proper job I got was in video games doing graphic art stuff I was always torn a little bit between psychology stuff and the Arts okay and um so I'd gone into uh video games and directly designing Graphics within video games yeah yeah this this was just before the big 3D PlayStation Revolution so it was all 2D Sprites jumping around I was doing the backgrounds and I was animating Sprites and things like that and uh I very quickly got bored of that line of work I realized I don't want to sit at a computer just animating forever I want to get out and do stuff with people so I went in the total opposite direction it's like okay let's go and work on all these crazy places with [ __ ] up people and um interact with them and land land land you know and try and do some good and uh yeah 17 years uh doing that in various um capacities you're you're a social worker 17 years I wasn't a social worker because social work is more there's a hell of a lot more paperwork involved in social work they're making a lot of the on paper decisions I was working um in the actual locations homeless hostels mental health hostels uh worked with abused kids um all that kind of stuff so it was Hands-On with the people yeah and interacting with them on a daily basis and that's totally different if like the psychiatrists a lot of the time they don't even come to the places to see the people the people get taken by the support staff to see the psychiatrist in their office and the psychiatrist doesn't get to see the home environment uh what goes on there so they're missing out I think I mean maybe it's changed these days but when I was in it I always thought the psychiatrists need to go to the environment that the person is in and observe it there instead of having the client's clientele come and observe their office then it was a few years ago I was talking to a newly uh a newly hatched psychiatrist interest and she was doing that kind of work on location and she basically had PTSD from it she'd only been doing it for two months and she was like there's nothing in the degree that prepared me for this absolutely yeah so this is you were there for 17 years I don't think I could I'm probably too sensitive for it do you think it had an impact on you did it affect you anyway loads of impacts yeah um I mean there were some areas where I worked in a certain area for a while and then left at the beginning I did about uh two or three years with their learning disabilities and I cared about the clientele but I felt like I couldn't do anything for them all you were doing was just making sure they were fed and reasonably happy I was interested in doing stuff that would help people become independent and you couldn't really do it with them a lot of the time you could a little bit but not to the degree I wanted to yeah so then it was out of that and a lot of mental health stuff and uh well the one that I enjoyed the most was doing youth work for a western Spirit do you remember Western Spirit as the rings a bell like yeah Simon Weston band facing the Falklands and he said oh yeah yeah and so I went and got involved with them as a volunteer um and they would run personal development groups with about 40 kids um well kids teenagers you know and they'd start off by taking them away for a I think it was a week on a like a sort of a survival week where you know you've all got a kook and take responsibility and and then after that they get a one year membership I think it was with the that the organization and they'd have weekly meetings that's where I came and I was one of the people who went to the weekly meetings and run some of the groups and they were really good Western spirit because as a volunteer they threw you in at the deep end and because I had the job and I was doing that as voluntary because I loved it and he threw it into deep end it's like I'd only been there a week or two you know been to a couple of meetings oh you're running next week's meeting when I'm running around you'll think of something because they just wanted you for that job and yeah um well it wasn't me personally did this to loads of people they just throw you into deep end yeah and you had to learn so it was really good and um you know you get all the as you know the teenagers they'll take the piss out of you if you're messing up in them and but the thing is I already knew that mentality from all the schools in Liverpool anyway so the kids related to me well in it because you know I'd been in the same type of position as them I could have done with Western Spirit when I was in the teens actually yeah so yeah I did a few years doing that uh running these various groups and very experimental you know and me and some of the other volunteers there we used to come up with these personal development sessions we just make them up on the day sometimes like half an hour before we did it all the times we plan it in more detail and you discovered things that worked and things that didn't work and uh for me that was a big uh sort of area of experimentation yeah um in group psychology and in running groups myself um and you know developing your confidence um because I always think one of the best way to the develop uh confidence within um you know public speaking type Arenas is to actually fail in that context to go and [ __ ] up yeah and have to say to people oh sorry yeah I messed up or I'm nervous okay let me just catch me breath you know that type of thing yeah and and they all laugh at you and you realize that wasn't that bad yeah it's okay they didn't all jump on me and kicked me yeah yeah they're not merging you it's all right so yeah I've really enjoyed that and then it was all the mental health stuff working with people with their various delusions and uh hallucinations and things like that and then there was the the probation hostels you say you were working with their delusions and hallucinations they would report their hallucinations to you and you would question them sometimes they would talk about it yeah okay um were you were you trained how to do that or were they just they do it anyway because you were with them you didn't have anyone else to talk to okay so you had to be I mean that wasn't your official role was to do counseling yeah but on a daily basis you are doing yeah you like it or not yeah I mean we all do counseling you sit with your mate in a pub and the mate tells you about the problems you counseling them you know so this this idea that only certain people with a certificate of approval can help someone in a conversation it's [ __ ] so yeah um so yeah I mean a lot of experience with that and a lot of people kicking off and stuff you know and finding ways to chill them out and there's a reason why I was asking about the hallucinations and the delusion thing when instinctively when somebody said to you like oh I can see something over there right I think I think this and you knew it wasn't real what would you usually say to them would you be like no Gary there's no little green man in the corner or would you what would you do with them would you would you negate it or would you just no I wouldn't usually negate her I'd usually try and ask them to describe it in more detail yeah um it's a funny example this one um and not not funny for this poor fella like you know he was on all these drugs he was so drugged up that he was basically sleeping about 22 hours a day wow because his hallucinations was so strong yeah they just had to drug him up well no they didn't have to it was easier for them yeah I I don't know exactly how that decision was made but anyway he came into the office to me looking absolutely exhausted he just got out of bed and um he's chatting to me and he said I'm hearing voices again and all this and I was like what are the voices what are they telling you this time and he said oh they keep telling me to overwork and I laughed yeah you know and he giggled as well yeah I think that's okay like you know yeah so yeah and I said well if you tried just having a wine could see if the voice goes away I'm there well but I mean that that sounds stupid and crass yeah but it is kind of the point when you've got these voices in your head because you treat it as an other yes you know you you'd ignore them the peps of the voice yeah yeah um but at the same time um it's not that I think these people just ignored their internal voices I mean I think a lot of them there was something cognitively severely wrong yes um I mean one experience I had with that that showed me what it was like was um um many years ago I was having some a bit of insomnia myself and my partner she asked me um do you want to try taking this melatonin stuff and help you sleep apparently it works for a lot of people I was on that for two days and I kept having like weird hallucination type things right I knew that what I was hallucinating wasn't real but it felt real and I was like okay that's what it's like and I kept having visions of someone running in the room with a knife and coming at me like a dark figure you know like psycho the movie yeah yeah um and I couldn't switch it off and I had to stop the melatonin and that made me sort of think about yeah okay you can talk all you want logically to some of the people with the hallucinations but if that's what it's like if even knowing that it's fake still feels real it's still distressing isn't it even if you're like I am cognitively aware that this is artificial and fake you're still going to be it's it's not nice yeah not a nice feeling so uh that that gave me a lot of uh empathy with them um and at the same time come across various situations where it was the medications that they were given that were causing the hallucinations and what the medications were supposedly there to stop the hallucinations um I mean it was um one of the the homeless hostels are working that this guy he just sat there watching the TV all day and hardly said the word to anyone can we get his dinner tokens and stuff and uh we all do we all just thought you know this guy's just really introvert and some new doctor took over and said the medsy's on here is like way higher than they should be and he dropped it by something like 60 70 percent the guy sprung to life in the following weeks suddenly he's walking down the street Hawaiian shirts coat over the shoulder hey all right everyone you know we were like what the [ __ ] he's coming in the office joking and laughing yeah but he also had a brutal side to him as well very violent and then I was thinking well maybe they should probably it's like a chemical straight jacket yeah the the reason why I was asking about that is because I can see like a recurring theme for um Virtual Worlds virtual reality you know the video games the films and then talking to people who've who've got like serious uh psychotic delusion and then also that exploration between uh fantasy and reality is a theme that comes up a lot in your film analysis the film studies yeah yeah victim did you did you uh form form formally study I can speak English formally study psychology at any point formally or formally formally or formally in either sense yeah yeah both senses uh I never ever went down an academic route and I never ever wanted to and nobody pushed you no nobody asked me to okay um uh well actually some of the the companies I works for and the agencies I was working for they would say to me well look you got all this experience on your CV which looks fantastic he is doing this he is doing that but you haven't bothered doing any qualifications I'm like I don't want them and they're like they're like you could fly in this field if you do that but I already knew I wanted out by then uh because as you were asking before about how the field affected me and the way times when working in that field made me feel incredibly cynical and not about people are bad what made me feel like the world is [ __ ] and people are [ __ ] institutions and bureaucracies possibly well to individuals as well just seeing so many messed up people at the bottom of the battle on a daily basis and it wears you down and I went through periods of mild depression with that and I actually became very insensitive for a long time as well started to cut myself off with the empathy yeah um and I would go to like the pub after work and friends would be moaning about stuff that had gone on in their lives and it wasn't stuff that for me to laugh at but because I'd seen way worse all day and work I would I just wouldn't be like yeah oh is that it yeah okay and then yeah some some of my friends started being like [ __ ] you've gone a bit hard and cold haven't you and I did go like that for years it was defense mechanism against seeing all this human suffering you know I know that they they say um for therapists who who are dealing with a lot of PTSD and then borderline personality disorder I think it's called compassion exhaustion yeah you only have so much that's a term for it yeah yeah and then it's just gone and obviously because you weren't formally or formally a therapist nobody would have said to you oh you have to do supervision so you weren't in therapy during this period right no no and I I mean I know that like tons and tons of the other people who worked in the same job that I did yeah they were having all those kinds of experiences too this isn't unique to me yeah yeah there's a whole field of people working in that who have these these issues but they are locked upon by the bureaucracy as just being people who hold a set of keys yes on the building and who just call the police if there's a problem but they don't realize how much actual interactive work these people are doing in the job yeah and it's way more intense than having someone come to your office for an hour while you're doing assassins yes um that's that's not to throw disrespect or anything upon the people who who've done all the training with all that stuff often who who give out the medications and things you know I'm sure there's tons of stuff what they know that I don't know yeah yeah maybe book book knowledge versus Street knowledge is that there could be two very different things can't they what um the academic thing you never you were never attracted to to doing anything in that way uh well when I was a kid my dad was psychiatric nurse anyway so he was always talking about psychology all the time and telling me things and telling me all about Freud and things like that you know and he probably sparked me film analysis stuff as well because he was tended to give a lot of psychological interpretations of movies not really in depth but just enough to get me interested in it yeah um but you know I would um he has you know psychology books on the shelves and and personal development books and all that so from a very young age I was occasionally I'd be like I think I'll have a look at that psychology book and I'd have a glance through the text build that up over many years hundreds of different books I hadn't read them all cover to cover but I'd read enough to give me way more knowledge of that area than most people would ever have at that age you know you know like age 14 how many kids you know I've read all that stuff yeah so that got me along and all that but well part of the reason I didn't go academic is um well like I said it was torn between the Arts and psychology stuff and but also because I was here in Liverpool at that time I didn't know anyone who went to University that's what rich people did I didn't even think it was an option and so I didn't even put any effort in in school to get any basic GCSE you know that type of thing and I think I probably got ease in most of them if they even bothered sit in the tests right I got an A and art and that was it um so I was just like well okay I didn't get all the gcses in school because didn't put the efforts in because I was too busy hanging around with all the scallies so um I'm not going to do another two years of college just to repeat the gcses just so I can go to college yeah uh decided I'm gonna just go the experience route so I did tons of voluntary work from Western spirit and places like that and that led me into getting actual jobs in the field because they're like oh you've got tons of voluntary work experience we'll bring it on board and then you're in the field then yeah so once I was in the field I was like well I'm doing the job now um what do I need to go and do qualifications for why do we need to go and study Theory when I've got the real thing every day in front of me in the job yes yeah so was that was there any elements of psychology that you're particularly attracted to or were particularly attracted to back back when you were a kid oh [Music] um I would say there was always an interest in the darker aspects of the human mind definitely um like you know I remember seeing like movies like taxi driver when I was like 10 years old and and being okay this is psychological um learning about all the dark aspects that go on within people and um one thing that I was always very interested in and this is again based upon moving around to different living in different environments and adapt into different environments is group psychology yeah and I was very interested in why people follow the group um rules why the group rules are the way they are in this context and why they're different in that context um and what happens if you just go [ __ ] this I'm not going to follow those rules yeah because that's what I was starting to do more and more you know because the more different sets of rules I've seen in different environments the more I was realizing these sets of rules are [ __ ] yeah and people are just doing it to fit in even the people I knew who thought they were really on the edge and tough you know tough scally is really tough Lads they probably knock me out for saying this but they were just conforming yeah you know yeah so I was always very interested in that and um I didn't really phrase it this way to myself but I do nowadays I'm I'm really interested in the concept of individuality right um and how hard it is for people to be an individual because so many of us we conform conform conform in order to feel safe in a group yes and we sacrifice so much of ourselves in order to do that and my experience in life is that it's not worth doing it um the payoff isn't worth it no um so I always had the thing where I didn't completely ignore all these groups I would have one foot in that group another foot in there and I'd have a third foot over in that group and uh you know I was always like I was like that in in the schools as I got in from more schools I realized as I went from school to school when I go to a new school I'm not going to join one click of kids and just ignore the rest I'm going to bounce around all these different groups and I'll be with them I'll be with that group one day and with that group the next and that would make me a little bit of an outcast but not a lot Caster yes and I think I carried that on through life yeah um so I mean I'm even more like that now um it's like with a lot of the the big sort of um controversial issues that everybody fights and argues over today all the big um controversial things it's all camps and tribes and when I see these debates going on um between different groups and I see the tribal Behavior where they're not really interested in the truth people are more interested in it's like a football match just want to score goals they don't care how they do it if you can get away with the odd cheat as long as you get those goals in and get the final full tally score yeah in your favor then most people are happy with that yeah I want out of that as much as I can right um and so I've stepped out of any kind of identification as much as I can with any of these different groups that are fighting with each other and uh it's funny I was thinking about that the last few days I thought this would probably come up in the podcast and you've sort of raised it by asking about that aspect of uh I didn't realize that linked back to the childhood thing we've gone from different school to school definitely it's out of an effect on that I think so because you you end up having to become a code breaker you're talking about group psychology you sit there you're in different groups you're plunged into different groups as a child and the rules are clearly different but it's still just people and then you have to figure it out to survive and it's like a code breaking exercise and in a way I think I can see that in the film analysis yeah um I I don't I don't do I can't do what you do to that level but I like to do it when I'm watching movies I like to think there's something here there's always it's never Justice this this is not just the war movie this is not just a prison movie this is a re like a symbolic retelling of something yeah because we can't avoid it as humans and that that fascinates me I think everyone's got a little bit of that with movies you know yeah um I don't think of it as something that I'll just eye and a few select others do yeah we all do it I think that's why we watch movies we feel all that stuff going on right all I'm doing is just basically verbalizing it a lot more than most people would yeah um I I think you're right I think the people that said the tenet was a good movie might not be doing it though I haven't even bothered watching it was that uh Nolan I haven't actually liked any Nolan films I'm not a single one no no uh what was the one with the dreams uh Inception that was okay for one watch uh watching the second time and it all fell apart I I loved Inception watched it four times and then I watched uh a couple of Nolan movies there was a the war movie with Kenneth banner and tennis and I I felt like it was like watching a mate do something awful and then you go back and you review everything that had done up there and I was like actually inceptions yeah he had some basic good ideas in there but if you're going to be dealing with dreams I'd definitely go a hell of a lot more surreal than he did right you know the the narratives within the dreams were too too conventional for me yes um I mean I was watching a few nights ago I was telling me watch for my girlfriend who watched the Mulholland Drive about six months ago and she was like Wow never seen anything like this is that a lunch one yeah yeah because he does with dream stuff though amazing amazing I mean he's got the balls to put dreams on on film and they actually they actually come across as being Dreams yeah yeah with all the surrealness and there's bits where you just cannot fathom what the [ __ ] he's gonna well anyway I said to her if you think mobile Holland drives [ __ ] up like do you want to see a racer head because I'd only ever watched it once and I've never gone back to it so we sat and watched the race ahead and we're like whoa this is have you seen it I haven't watched that now no is it dreams nightmares absolutely messed up but fascinating yes um and to me something like that blows the likes of inception of the water yes you know because it really is like uh just the utter surrealness breakdown of reality in your dreams it is much more courageous than Nolan much more the the thing with Inception I think the the conventionality of it that that feeling is because each level of the dream is basically just a film genre he's just picked this is the spine this is the James Bond that this is the this is the heist bit this is you know and uh yeah watching it back this is not as brilliant as I thought obviously you age as well don't you so you go back 10 years and you think oh actually no this is no it's weird it's like I'll probably give the impression that I don't like Christopher Nolan I'm sure he's a lovely fella you know I haven't got anything personally I don't know and I do think there is some intelligence at work there and what he does uh I mean he's been very successful but um I feel like uh he could do a lot better but he'd have to drop a lot of stuff uh that he's he's got like this fetish for moodiness like fake moodiness yes um just like there's basic cinematography um language aspects of Nolan's films but what I think that no that's that's not uh how you do it not not that you have to do it a certain way but um and I think I think all of us have seen this in movies and would identify with this and understand it where it's a lot of movies you get a key scene where something important is happening some character to say in something that is crucial and you need to remember what they said and think about it and often the way they do that is you have the cameras slowly zoom in or move in toward them physically move um and that somehow that lets us know that this is an important moment you know um well I noticed the Christopher Nolan will use that uh like about 10 or 20 times more in one film than other film so you're gonna find tenet very very irritating if you'll watch it he does it every flipping of the scene yeah I mean I think I was watching some of the Dark Knight Rises and I was like will you stop [ __ ] moving the camera forward save it for once save it until there's something important going on you know and if there's nothing dramatic happening in the scene yeah then you don't need everyone to talk in Whispers and stuff like that it needs to drop all of that but I think it's too late he's he's been set in that form of filmmaking for a long time and I've I don't even bother watching this new stuff anymore to be honest yeah it's got as he's become more successful oh uh Memento was a good movie I didn't see all of it that was the first one he had the successful one yeah the guy pierced one that's that's that's good it's almost like sometimes I see this with authors when you when they start out and they're young and lean and hungry everything tight and then it becomes a little more indulgent with every five years it goes by and they they do all have their fetishes and their obsessions yeah that they they just really want to put that in a film and once you're that wealthy and that's successful no one's telling you no anymore nobody's saying to you Chris this stinks this just is corny nowadays I'm sure that is a factor yeah yeah I mean um last night um because I've been a little bit ill lately um I sat down I thought I just want to watch something that's going to cheer me up and be fun you know the original Star Wars oh yeah I haven't watched that for ages you put it on you're like oh my God this is so entertaining yeah it's and something I realized about about that film last night that it never really hit me before is just how funny it is yeah it's hilarious that Han Solo and Princess Leia are not the banter between them is just laugh out loud stuff yeah and I was actually watching it as a comedy and I was this is so good as a comedy I mean even just like um the famous Cantina Bar with all the aliens I was laughing my head off in all the different shaped alien heads yeah and um I think that sense of fun is missing these days oh God you know I mean I I don't like the new James Bond films they're too serious I like Sean Connery Roger Moore Timothy Dalton all that area where they had a laugh and they just wink to the audience to let you know like we know how stupid this is but go along with it for the fun because this is Kitty stuff you know now they try and make it uh convincing and it's done with superhero movies and all that and all of that has sort of put me onto this this sort of thing what um I've become a bit um a bit frustrated with with the world these days and uh for a while I was calling a fashionable anger where people think it's cool to be angry and it shows in the movies now James Bond has to be angry um but I'm now giving it a more broader term which is fashionable negativity okay uh people have got fashionable cynicism fashionable anger fashionable moodiness and they take pride in these negative States I'm seeing so much of this stuff going on and I'm like where's the fun you know and it showed in how movies have changed you know I I want I want the fun and the joy and the happiness to come back in in society and in movies you know I try to be on board for Daniel Craig with him being from uh I think was born in Chester but raised in Hawaii Lake I was like come on you've got to support Daniel Craig and I was really hopeful but you're right it was it was a crushing experience because it's like one Joker movie yeah and and I think you compare that to the Roger Moore campy performances hilarious Roger Moore was a comedian basically really funny and um yes it got everything became very sincere and very worthy and a bit you know I was like I don't I don't really know what we're doing not even real sincerity though folks not fakes and terrorists it is the type of sincerity where a bunch of uh corporate writers have got together in a room around the table and all agreed collectively that oh we'll do this because it looks sincere that's not what it comes across as like to me and I don't there's uh I was going to leave the film stuff but I had to have to say this um I was gonna leave the film stuff to the last quarter but this thing of um uh sort of where you feel you feel I I feel like I can hear the writers I can feel the writers I don't want to because if you're a master storyteller I shouldn't be aware of when you're thinking of what to say next it should be slick and I really am sat there I'm going uh there's about five different voices trying to tell me something I don't know which ends up being no voice really no voice no no voice yeah um I mean dialogue is terribly written these days I find um someone sent me a clip of a movie that's been raved on um for the acting I can't remember what the movie's called it's a fairly recent one and the guy who played Han Solo's son in the new Star Wars films what's his name Adam Driver is it yes it is yeah him and some blonde babe actress modern I can't even remember her name but they had these scenes in this film where they were having relationship arguments and they're all very intense facial expressions and tears and stuff and it's intense you know it's it's you can see the actors have really put the effort in but what utterly ruined it for me is like why is there dialogue So Clean Cut and carefully thought out yeah when people are in that emotional state yeah the dialogue is frenzied and wild and it's not intellectual like that yeah so that utterly ruined that for me yes um it just seems that like with scriptwriting these days at least with the movies that end up getting made it's like the writers are not actually stopping asking would the character really say this in that situation yes what would they say instead of that you know um it's such a fundamental dialogue mistake and I've seen it everywhere well the the thing that um so we're here now so I won't stop us from being here the thing that annoys me Rob I'm sure you can work it back around to whatever yeah um I've I've written before and when I started writing uh there's a ton of books on how to write it's not like it's a mystery the rules for writing and you don't have to follow them you can do it your way absolutely but there are things you just really really shouldn't do and I'm thinking okay this is this multi-million dollar budgets here how do you not find the writer who knows the basic rules of writing because you're breaking them all the time speaking of of dialogue there's a horror movie psychological horror movie called smile oh yeah a week or two ago oh okay it's uh one of the films that I nearly walked out nearly walked out I didn't like it it was dialogue it was yeah awful brutal and I'm looking at this and I'm going okay I'm getting old and I'm whinging all right I'm the goal I was with she was like oh it's okay you know it's the idea that trauma transmits and I'm like yeah there's something here there's something you know I'm traumatized I hand that over to you it's like the curse and the ring the Japanese Ring movies without giving too much away it did seem like a Pastiche of ideas from those movies and badly thrown together and you shouldn't be sat there thinking that should you shouldn't be sat there going there's a bit of ring in this because there's so much dead air in a film where people this is this is my whinge I don't want to see good looking former models in a room saying lines to each other I really don't you've got a cop who walks in and it's 2022 and this carpool looks about 38 years old is saying oh so this Looney just topped herself did she and I'm thinking where in America would a cop walk up to a psychiatrist and say you that she's had a client who's hurt herself oh there's Looney Tune as come on yeah nobody talks like this yeah but the screenwriter wants him to talk like that so that he creates opposition to the protagonist's feelings about this I'm like oh please don't do it yeah it's like they're trying to uh yeah I mean I know exactly what I remember that scene that was definitely one of the the triangle wasn't it yeah um yeah I mean I've kind of got the impression that with that stuff um sometimes well a lot of the time the writers they just want to instead of making complex characters like you get in the real world yeah they want to make these very simple characters who represent one basic opinion and so like this is the ignorant stupid cup yeah and all the dialogue will be written from that point of view yeah and it won't take into account that this cop is supposed to be a full human being right so everything they say will just convey the one concept yeah uh seeing a lot of that in one in one tone this is the cop that doesn't believe her story I'm like really is he gonna be anything else no because he's the cop who doesn't believe her story and and this in this film watching her be believed by literally no one for two hours I was rocking in the seat and the girl I was like no no it's good it's good just give it another five minutes and we eventually got through to the end and thing is appalling as well but the pain of just what literally nobody's into interested in our story are truly unlikely thing is without ruining an event has happened to this woman and she actually has a story that any half intelligent person would be like that's an unusual chain of coincidences and everybody in the film is like oh shut up Sarah you're fantasizing so that we watch her go through The Angst of because the writers want us to see a woman who's in a situation where nobody believes her and I'm like come on now I remember um James Cameron I mean he's got on the script right and well yeah in the early days anyway and he was saying um we were like I was around about when he'd done the Terminator and aliens and stuff like that and he there was an interview where he said something along the lines of don't have your characters repeat the same message again and again you might think that your audience need to hear the same message two or three times to get the message but nobody on the internet needs to hear it once and they usually remember it yeah and yeah I would smile I got the impression that it's a it's insulting by the writer because the writer is assuming that we can't get the message so they have the Beatles on the head with the same message two hours yeah so we go oh don't worry it's about you know I'm like yeah I'm watching it I'm thinking how [ __ ] stupid do you think I am do you see that sorry to bang on about this the boyfriend halfway through abandons it because he can't take what she's saying anymore so he leaves I'm looking at the screen I'm looking at the girl and with I'm like are you having that he's just what it he loves this girl two weeks ago he's ready to marry her yeah and because she's in this episode right now and she seems to be having hallucinations he's like oh Mary Sue I just can't take it anymore and he packs up and leaves I'm thinking yeah it was it was it was hard look so the question I was going to ask you before we get into the specifics because there's a few films on actually the specifics of was film is important to you it's important why is it important okay so uh why are films important to me or to everyone or just to me to you to you um I would say because uh two two major reasons I would say um and this one I know from my childhood and my teens um we all carry with us certain anxieties about the world certain desires fears and so on and we repress things you know there's a lot of things that we carry with those especially early in life that are too painful to bring into Consciousness especially like kids um and so with children that you know they have to learn to be aware of death and um how nasty people can be and you can't give a kid too much awareness of that because it's too stressful for them so their way of learning about it is through fiction you know fairy tales and when they play with the toys they're playing out these scenarios and they're actually encoding in their own head how the world works and they're doing it through the play um and you know playing with the friends playing roles you know learning how the world works and learning how to interact and stuff like that and I know for me as a kid watching movies was a big part of that too watching movies was a way of me learning about the world without realizing that I was learning about it yeah and finding out about the darkness and the horrors that go on in the world uh through fantasy things like science fiction and uh horror and things like that consciously I could just pass it off and say oh that's just a movie but deep down I'd learned something about people that I could take away with me right I think that has always gone on I think that goes on for most people definitely happen for me and the other one coming more from like the kind of discussion we're having um about General psychology and wanting to understand psychology is that movies are soon seem to be the closest thing we've got to putting the camera inside someone's head and recording their thoughts yeah and their dreams uh we don't really have the capacity to do that do we in fact we really don't um but with movies we kind of create that and I I'm very interested in the the art form of editing I remember Stanley Kubrick saying that the one art form that movies have created that was totally unique was film editing never existed elsewhere and um I'm you know I'm really interested in does the way that we edit movies when we do it well does that reflect how we naturally edit our thoughts and our minds interesting um because in in our daily Waking Life experience we've only got one point of view that's through our own eyes we cannot switch to another part of the room um and yet in our thoughts we can we can switch positions see ourselves from outside we can look at memories from different camera angles and stuff like that and simulate it and change it and stuff um and so that makes me wonder is there like some sort of cut and paste editing process that naturally goes on in the mind yeah and we put that in movies I suspect that is the case because if that wasn't the case then watching a movie with all these changing camera angles would feel schizophrenic and odd and we'd be like what the hell is this yeah but it feels natural to us so I'm like our movies actually sort of a portal into what really goes on in the mind you know um and definitely with dream logic and stuff in movies characters and situations usually represent something because you know Midnight Express at the actual story of Midnight Express most of us are never ever going to go to prison and so therefore we don't need to know what goes on in a Turkish prison or whatever um so why the hell do we watch it it's because it's symbolic yeah you know so I mean that's um a little sort of insight into prison movies that I've got recently from watching a lot of them with my daughter and watching the more violent ones myself I've come to realize that um well it's a theory anyway um that the reason people love prison movies because although most of us never actually go to a real prison we've all got plenty of experiences in life where we felt like we were imprisoned right imprisoned in a neighborhood imprisoned in a job we don't want to do or you feel like a slave um we've all got experience of that and I think prison movies are like a sort of a prison escape movies which people love it's a fantasy people want to know how to escape difficult situations I think that's what the what people relate to in that so yeah basically answer the two short answers what would be um that does does do films reflect how we really think deep down inside and is that the only portal that we've got to really look at that and what was the other one I said uh or the the metaphors where the the stories relate to our lives and it often relates in a way where we don't want it to be conscious yeah that's interesting yeah the the prison escape movie you're making me think now maybe there's something archetypal there that we recognize that almost like a not agnostic uh sense like the the world the material world is kind of like a prison and there's an instinct to escape I always feel like because I have like friends usually my female friends will say to me why'd you get so upset about bad films and why do you get so excited about good films and it's one of the few areas of life where I have real optimism I think like good story really can do real good in the world yeah and when it's bad it's not that I think it creates evil in the world though some films create even um it's just it's just a fart it's just a wasted opportunity it's like a damn scrib yeah it's like you could you had the budget you had the actors you had the lighting I'm not because you won't hear me whinge about cinematography I don't think cinematography has gotten worse and I wouldn't say Nolan's a bad cinematographer bugs me that we can't write that's free that's just skill there's no you don't need no you can you can have a bunch of people in the room just talking it can be amazing 12 Angry Men yeah I've seen that yeah I don't think 1957 oh you gotta see it is it good it's one room 12 guys on a jury I mean back then it was all men on the jury and they're all debating whether this kid the teenager should get executed for the crime that he supposedly did it's fantastic one of the reasons for calling you in for this interview was to get recommendations from school movies that I've not seen yet so that'll be that'll be one of them yeah it's been made about six times or something 12 Angry Men but that's the best I haven't seen them all I just watched the one and I didn't need to see the others yeah yeah you're done um so that was that I I kind of feel like it's a similar thing with you there must be um in your own narrative in your own story a sort of a hope or an objective through film so do you see film as being like a transformative or is it just for you it's just entertainment I'll definitely transformative educational tons of things I learned about life I learned through movies uh I mean again go back to Midnight Express when I saw that I was probably about my daughter's age which is nine and although I haven't let her watch it I saw that film at that age and that was a an eye-opener as to how brutal the world can be right um you know I mean you know I'm looking at the film and I know that these are just actors and stuff but it's like yeah yeah things can get this bad you know it's um it's important to know that these the world can be like this so that you've got some preparation in in the real world you know yeah um and I I think the the the power of how movies affect people in that way is massively underestimated like think about a subject like War if you didn't have movies then anyone who's never been to war they'd only have newspaper articles where it's an occasional photo to look at or maybe a bit of TV news footage but when you see TV news footage of War it's hardly ever there in the thicker the action because the cameramen are like oh [ __ ] this I'm getting out of here yeah and so I think most of us are our conception of the actual battlefield of War mostly comes from what we've seen in movies interestingly say that I watched the German war movie recently called All Quiet on the Western Front of Syria my dad is a big fan of that yeah when they see the tanks and they've never seen a tank before because they've never seen movies before because this is World War one they scream in Terror yeah when they ride over the trenches there's just this huge mechanical Beast that seems to be running over them because there's no prep there's no way for them to have known what that would have been like even with the film that they had in that day because then it's the sound that's terrifying them yeah and uh I was watching that and I was thinking oh that's interesting because that almost is like a meta commentary on the lack of movies that would have prepared them for for the situation did you like it All Quiet on the Western Front I haven't seen it since I was a kid I remember I did watch it with my dad and I there's not much of it that I can remember but I remember it felt like a very truthful film oh there's maybe I'm getting the name of it wrong it's um it's it's a it's a new one it's only like oh it's a new film I think yeah yeah does It remake by any chance I'm sure they're all quiet the Western Front has been remade yeah you know that was an old 1970-ish film I think I'm using the wrong name for this film I think I'm using the the old name for a new movie it's a German made movie but really really still great concept though came out in 2022 or something and is it what's it called I think there's just a remake here they've recycled they've recycled it what would you say is this is going to be a tough question for you go go for it favorite film of all time uh for originality 2001 Space Odyssey I'm glad we got here I watched that four or five times and I didn't [ __ ] get it I was like I don't get Kubrick I don't get the fascination with this movie I don't know what's going on I'm gonna watch that again to about 18 months ago I was blown away yes absolutely I was like how did he make this movie then is he a time traveler the first few times I watched that I was like it was right over my head and I kept I kept I was on the phone like I'm watching it and I'm on the phone I'm checking today when you first saw it I must have been I was a kid I would have been 10 and people told me it's amazing and I went back it's very slow for that age isn't it it's too slow I think I was about 14 15 when I first saw it I was already a big fan of all the Kubrick films yeah uh Shannon and Clockwork Orange yeah and football jacket Full Metal Jacket entertaining as well yeah um but yeah I saw 2001 and I was frustrated with the slowness of it but I felt there was something powerful going on I didn't have a clue what it was yeah I just felt like this movie is just like a depth of meaning going on I don't know what the meaning is but there's some sort of deep meaning going on with this film or many layers of deep meaning and I'm just gonna sit and absorb The Madness of it and let it do its thing to me and I loved it the first time [Music] I still hated the slowness of it but I ended up watching this several more times if I'd have seen at age 10 I probably would have hated it yeah yeah and the um like not not to go on about it but what what he could do with the attack he had at the time is is mind-blowing yeah what do you think that film is about in a nutshell there's there's two narratives one which is what was used to get the investors in um Kubrick had you have to look at the context of it um Kubrick had just done Dr Strangelove four or five years before uh um 2001 came out doctor Strangelove upset a lot of people it was so emptiest it was probably the most anti-establishment movie the most effectively anti-establishment movie I've ever seen and that I include all of Kubrick's other films on that level really uh yeah because he just went for the throats of the people who he viewed as being a problem at the top of society he went after Pentagon top people he had characters in Dr Strangelove who basically blatantly represented specific people who did actually operate through the Pentagon and these Think Tank groups even mocked operation paper clip within it didn't even oh yeah the Germans big time yeah he was on to that uh he mocked the Rand Corporation they got called the Bland Corporation in the film and he he'd read all of their stuff that was publicly available that these Think Tank groups and stuff it's you know a lot of people think of this stuff as being really secretive and I always thought how the hell the Kubrick know this stuff but when I started studying Dr Strangelove um I I realized that hang on all the information he needed was actually out there publicly it just took him to gather it all together and cross-reference it and he worked more openly with the other writers on that film he wasn't hired in his agendas like he did with 2001. so anyway uh doctor Strangelove came out Kubrick got attacked and the press as being a Comey and his career I think probably would have been finished after doctor Strangelove because he'd upset too many people uh powerful people so what do you do next in that position as a filmmaker how do you get the funds in and how do you make sure that you don't get attacked again right well you go and make a movie which on Surface appearances gives the establishment what it wants uh he knew that the moon landing stuff was coming up uh that you know that had been talked about by Kennedy oh yes we're going to put a man on the moon and Kubrick's like okay so they want a pro space race propaganda movie that's going to sell the moon landings and it's going to sell space research and and it's going to sell technology so he started developing it from there and he was approaching different famous sci-fi writers um and he ended up with Arthur C Clarke and as far as I can tell what he was basically doing there was he needed somebody to be a front a convincing front who could go to Industry and sell them this [ __ ] movie this ultimate Pro Space Race evolution of man to becoming Garden you know transhumanist you know always 2001 he needed to sell that [ __ ] story and rather than do it himself I don't think he would have had the heart to go and stand up in these rooms of these corporate bosses and say all this stuff gets Arthur C Clarke to go and do it and then Clark actually believed in all those messages anyway so that made a coincidence like and then all these corporate bosses and um people at Nasa and places like that they all loved Arthur C Clarke anyway because he was very much into the idea of maintaining into machine and traveling to the stars and contacting alien races and when we when we contact these alien races they're going to be nice to us yeah they're gonna they're gonna come to us and help us become Gods which is [ __ ] because if you look at human history whenever one the civilization goes to another yeah they steal all the resources and enslave them yeah why would it be any difference of an alien race Superior came to Earth you know but you know this was all the stuff that Clark was into and it matched up with the establishment um opinions on that stuff I'm not giving you a very short answer here anyway no but this is this is this is this is good okay this is good okay so so he gets Clark he develops the story with Clark and he has clocks and boxed within that narrative meanwhile as far as I can tell Kubrick's like how can I make it appear that I'm making this particular narrative that Clark believes in and which all the investors are going to believe in how can I make the film look like it's going to be that when it's released and I will covertly turn the film slowly into what I want it to be which is basically the opposite message right and so the film has two conflicting narratives and what it's very complex how Kubrick did this it's amazing the skill and the chess moves of how he did it keep clocks unboxed keep the investors thinking within that sandbox keep Clark talking to them meanwhile develop a visual code for the film that communicates the story that he really wants to tell so yeah right okay so you were you're a psychologist but what stopped you from studying psychology is the Arts and what I see here is he's using psychology to fulfill his intention but he's to to ex not exploit people but keep people where he wants them but then he's actually going to fulfill his intentions through ART yeah because the art is how he has the real subversive side the psychology we'll just sandbox these people get the investors on board but then the art because you can hide behind it you go well that's your interpretation maybe that's what it means and Kubrick of course haven't made lots of movies and he was always studying psychology and Science and everything else he was always reading tons of material fill in his head Mr guy must have been a walk in the library you know um but he um so having uh that that situation with the sandbox he's sort of with it with his knowledge of how metaphors worked in films um he he sort of had taken a lot of the stuff that already existed in movies about how to convey things non-verbally it's not like he was the first one to do visual storytelling and that was already done in the silence era anyway but he took all of that stuff and he turned that into a much more precise science and he did something which I think is a first in film history he made a movie which actually carries two narratives at once okay one is what the investors wanted that got all the money in to make the movie and the second is the the visually conveyed narrative which is the art side that he wanted to tell which he couldn't let them know about he couldn't let um the crew um Arthur C Clarke he couldn't let them know about because Wade got back investors would all pull out so on the one hand you've got to store story of the Space Race because we hadn't done the moon landings yet it's going to be good it's optimistic it's positive there's going to be a positive end result and what was what's his real narrative then what's his real story as far as I can tell the real narrative is that I'll try I think there's a lot of things communicated but I'll say I'll tell some of the basics one is that this whole notion of uh Interstellar space travel is almost a ridiculous fantasy the distances to travel and that the hostility of empty space to The Human Condition is unbelievable it's like it's scary and so at the start of the movie you get the boat the bone is thrown up becomes a spaceship and then you get all this fancy music oh isn't it wonderful the early spaceships flying around and then you go to the moon and you've got a huge moon base in the year 2001 which we haven't even got a tiny moon base now right and um so so that that part of the movie shows the fantasy of space research oh isn't it wonderful we're all going to the Stars aliens are helping us get there and all this kind of stuff later on in the film after um Bowman is defeated Hal which is like a defeating transhumanism basically um then you get like the the whole crazy end sequence with Jupiter and so and suddenly the music becomes terrifyingly scary yeah towards the end of the movie when you see Jupiter and all its moons and I mean Jupiter's a Jupiter's a [ __ ] colossal Beast isn't it I think it's a tenth of the size of the sun or something like that and um I think with all that scary stuff he was showing look space isn't this wonderful pretty music type this is terrifying um and I think his is still one of the very very few movies and it was probably the first one ever that actually had space as being completely silent yeah you know um and so he was trying to show people that look this is a [ __ ] fantasy the void the void of space is terrifying it's not built for us and the chances of us traveling through it I mean 18 months just to get to Jupiter you haven't even come near the edge of the solar system yeah so all that came across and then all the stuff about uh defeating Hal intellectually in battle um I I view that as being basically instead of celebrating artificial intelligence which because IBM invested in the film oh they thought they were getting a pro AI movie and Clark had sold it to them on that basis and then the movie that they got had Hal going crazy killing people being very manipulative and then organic humans or one of them defeating Hal and season back control of his life from the machine right that's not the message that they wanted yeah yeah and it in the cubic archives you I've found there's letters there IBM were pissed when they saw the movie right they were like take our logos off the movie because they were all over the place in the movie Get the movie you know they were not annoyed but and actually a lot of the investors were very annoyed um and what one of the things Kubrick did that was incredibly sneaky one of his many chess tactics and making the film as uh when when the first sort of executive quarter of the film was shown not the cinema release it was framed so that it would look more like what they wanted it had a voice over narration occasionally in the film that gave some waffle that fitted in the communicated Arthur C Clarke's narrative right and at the beginning of the film there was 10 minutes worth of interviews with real scientists about how plausible space travel is um and about how artificial intelligence is the future of humanity and all that all the messages that the executives and stuff wanted to hear then when he releases the movie and he must have had Final Cut to do this he must have convinced them so much that they gave him Final Cut he must have thought wow we've got the brilliant Stanley Kubrick on our side yeah we'll give him Final Cut but they did they had no idea he was going to use a visual and current thing so when the movie got released the narration was removed and the 10 minutes worth of interviews with Scientists were removed and it's like it's suddenly the movie ceased to be that narrative and it became a visually encoded experience and Kubrick was doing interviews and he's saying uh there was one I'll paraphrase it he said something along the lines of people watch this movie uh well people don't watch this movie they listen to it they they expect to be told they they listen to this movie expecting things to be explained they shouldn't be listening you don't get much from this movie from that you have to look at what's going on in the movie he was talking about visual encoding yeah the whole operation he did there it was it was like a [ __ ] military style operations it's a massive psyop yeah um it's like an individual personal style because as far as I know we didn't [ __ ] tell anybody on the crew and he couldn't yeah yeah and I know like I've I've talked about some elements of this and that the videos I've done and some people are like oh come on how can one man be that clever well people can be they can be that clever yeah um and it's kind of um it's it's how can I put it you can almost take it as almost like an insult to yourself you think well I'm really stupid because I don't know how to do all this stuff yeah yeah you know it's a narcissistic injury oh yeah yeah it is it's an ego blow to think that somebody else could be that smart and you've probably been a fan of their film and seen it 20 times and you had no [ __ ] clue yeah that there was this other side to it because he never ever told you that's I think that's a massive ego blow some people when they go back to a favorite movie and they learn that there's something else there or somebody else shows them it some people are like wow I love it now my favorite movie is even better yeah and some people just take that ego blow and like no no no the way I perceived it is the way it is and no I didn't get fooled I hate that when people start saying no the uh it's kind of like a post-modern stance no everything is open to perception and the way that I perceived it is the way and it's like well there is an author there is a director they also have an intention like I mean you're free to do whatever you want in your own mind but don't tell me what the author's intention was I I read something I don't know if you saw this the opening Shot the movie where the bone is thrown up that satellite and was supposed to look like it was armed with nuclear weapons but it doesn't and he said he said in an interview it was one of the mistakes of the movie um because it was supposed to be a little bit more it was another anti-nuclear war movie but I only I only saw a satellite I didn't get the impression of a military thing there which was which was interesting they got various national flags on the different satellites ah yeah okay okay so maybe that was a bit like a space race I think he said in one one interview that he did talk about that was an intention but he said well I just done Dr Strange Love I didn't want to make that um but if I remember rightly in the novel uh the novelization and this is another interesting little aspect of it is um the original Short Story by Arthur C Clarke was nothing like the movie at all it didn't even have Hal or anything like that so when they were making the movie Kubrick had Clark write a novelization to go with the movie and it's very different to the movie um but um Kubrick had authorization rights he was able to tell Clark you will remove this from the book you will put this in the book oh yeah so Clark Clark was his [ __ ] basically oh wow you know um he really had him under the thumb I've always felt felt like that was a bit of a disservice to Clark I felt like he he was kind of manipulated there yeah um what was it going to say oh yeah the um the nuclear thing if remember rightly in the novel um the star child at the end comes back to Earth sees all these nuclear satellites floating in the the atmosphere not in the atmosphere but above the Earth and recognizes the threat to humanity that they represent and sets them all off okay clears the the Earth Sky of all these nuclear weapons okay and it's like okay now we can move forward in the movie at the end um I found the uh the the scene before Bowman becomes it is Bowman who becomes a star child isn't it yeah really Sinister and I don't know why is is he imprisoned is he there against his will do you think or am I reading too much into it no you're not that's um that's the safest narrative the safest narrative is that and Kubrick's when he gets asked by interviewers about this he'd always describe it as basically as Clark would describe it yeah um and basically the idea is that you know the Bowman had gone through the uh the Stargate and uh which was a portal that the aliens had created and he'd gone through and then the aliens create this room for him for him to feel comfortable in and look very comfortable stuff doesn't look very welcoming um create this room for him to be comfortable in uh while they evolve him into the next it is a star child they basically evolve him and then he comes back to Earth reborn as a star child and that's the big fantasy of the transhumanists right um so I think of transhumanism as a religion it's got a lot of Hallmarks of religion the big Ultimate Prize what the transhumanists are after is immortality and they believe that if we can turn people into machines will live forever which is [ __ ] because how many computers live forever they all like erode don't they just like people do a lot of them don't even last as long as people that's true um but as the way I view the the the ending of the film is that um there's some some mention earlier in the film about dreams uh when the astronauts are being interviewed uh for some [ __ ] BBC documentary thing about their mission to Jupiter um and they're asked about hibernation and one of them Frank poorly says uh it's exactly like being asleep except you don't dream yeah and um the way I view it is Bowman defeats Hal and that basically represents organic man overcoming AI overcoming technology technocracy technological oppression and then the end of the movie I view that as being a dream sequence the entire end and basically now that Bowman is free of the technological constraints of Hal he can now dream he can now sleep and actually dream right in the hibernation they weren't even allowed to dream before right and then he has a dream that is basically a representation of how he defeated Hal and he's process and all that and the thing for me that really sells that is in that room at the end well for one thing he's on a bed yeah and he's reborn as a star child you dream in bed yeah um when he arrives in that room he's in the Pod he's got a suit these are his technological dependencies as The Scene goes on those Technologies disappear and he just becomes a guy in a robe a natural guy who can breathe normally and um he's eaten real food they were eaten mush earlier in the film uh fake synthetic food yeah and at the end he's eating the dinner with proper food and an actual glass of wine and it is recovered from technocracy he's become like that so that that for me that kind of sells it to me that the ending is basically a stream like representation of uh letting go of technological control that's interesting are you are you interested in gnosticism at all you don't really know much about it I wouldn't even know what the definition of it is it's like the idea that this this world is the creation of uh of an evil of an evil God not a good God and the gnostics believed that you escaped the world through gnosis which is actually called naush okay which is I think that's a scout stem yeah you know yeah because we're all gnostics here interesting um I love the etymology of words by the way fascinating and uh one of the other elements is uh if you believe the Gnostic worldview is that the the demiurge has archons that police the world but the archons can copy what we do but they they lack originality so when you talk about transhumanism before I'll say oh there's this weird our contact element to it because we were saying when people right now it's crap there's a sort of in our contact element this dead sheep imitation an imitation of humanity and and you sort of say What's missing in film now the human element CGI Iron Man flies and punches at space demon in the face and it's loud and Manhattan crumbles again and it's numbing yeah loads of it's just repetition of previous movies it's almost like they don't want to make movies they they want movies to operate exactly the way uh a manufacturing Factory does where you've just got the same product and you just run those copies of it over and over and just sell that and uh that's not what art is meant to be about it Arts is supposed to be individual and personal isn't it yes in each case yeah if it's a copy it's not art so do you think that um Kubrick was recruited to fake the moon landings ah no I don't have it but you've heard this this Theory I've heard it a lot yeah yeah um no I don't think he was uh I think he may have thought that the moon landings were fake you get the oh okay he may have yeah and there's some things in some of his movies that really have made me go oh did he actually think that because me I'm I'm 50 50. I don't know there's tons of conspiracy theories where I've basically ended up in a 50 50 position because there's so much information yeah I'm open to it either way and the moon landings is one of them because I do find myself asking well where's the progress since then you know they they lost the um they lost the technology well yeah I mean I saw that and I think NASA's own website is like where we've lost we taped over the footage or something but anyway it's over the VHS yeah yeah Wimbledon I don't know I mean it's not a subject I really go into because everyone's got already got their own opinions trying to persuade anyone that it's one way or the other um but you don't believe the next movie The Shining all works I don't think The Shining was about the moon landings okay but there is one aspect the 2001 A Space so let's see what made me really stop and think whoa and that is um I don't know if you remember there was a scene where Haywood Floyd uh the executive who basically is in charge of setting up the whole Jupiter Mission and stuff and um he is given a laksha in a room to a bunch of other corporate people right um we see Floyd's part or ship land on the moon just before that right and then he's walking around this room in full gravity in the meeting room and there's a photographer in there who looks is a dead ringer for a young Stanley Kubrick and he's walking around photographing everyone in the room and he's literally running around the tables if this was on the moon they should be and remembering that Kubrick was a lunatic for detail yeah and especially doesn't Overlook they wouldn't put it in there for no reason if it's there it's for a reason I I don't I'll watch it again so you're saying we see them landing on the moon they're on the moon and then they're in a room that seems to be Earth full gravity full gravity and the old I will I will give one interpretation that goes against uh the idea that Kubrick was saying them oh there's a fake Moon landed it's possible that um you know there's a scene earlier where Hayward Floyd is talking to some other people and they're on that ring-shaped space station which has got full gravity yeah um it's possible that the scene of the meeting was originally shot to occur on that ring station okay and then Kubrick might have disliked the way of where it fitted in the narrative and he said we'll just shift it forward so after they land on the moon and no one will notice that the gravity is wrong so that's a devil's advocate yeah take on that yeah um and another one that made me ask questions about that is uh the movie AI artificial intelligence you've seen it yeah and even though even though it's Spielberg doing it it is like a Kubrick film and Spielberg's a good director I I I'm a bit dismissive of him but I watched The Bridge of spies against some deep stuff ET is highly symbolic yeah and there's tons of set design stuff going on in that film okay and he was um he was close with Kubrick they were communicating over the years and he throws in references to Kubrick in his own films Poltergeist which um Spielberg directed but officially didn't direct um no idea had anything to do with Poltergeist Poltergeist is like his name off um no there was there was some technicality where he wasn't allowed to direct two or three movies at once so basically Toby Hooper was hired to direct Poltergeist but on set Spielberg was doing it just photos of him directly does cast and crew have said yeah he was basically their director and Toby Hooper was just getting stoned well anyway Poltergeist shows the um Spielberg could do horror and do it brilliantly it was a great film and there's tons of depths to that film as well as field Peg's underestimated at times he can be really deep and I don't know why I've fallen into this trap of sort I think maybe it's kind of snobby what were the films that he did that would make his Mage multi movies yeah like the uh Peter Pan I think you read the Peter Pan yeah some of his later ones I don't really like very much okay but when he did AI yeah um he was handed I think it was an 80-page treatment you know which is like a shortened version of a script which doesn't have the dialogue it's just a story written out 80 Pages he was handed that and he was handed tons of visual storyboards that Kubrick had developed with um an artist known as fangon can't remember his actual name um all of that was given to Spielberg and uh Kubrick was trying to persuade Spielberg to direct the film in the first place because it's it's got a lot of childhood themes in it Kubrick was like well you're more suited to direct than this than I am so after Kubrick died Spielberg went and made that movie and as far as I can tell he followed to a t the storyboards right and everything that were put together and uh it's deep it's really deep and it absolutely fits in with uh Kubrick's filmography I don't know how much Spielberg understood the the visuals of what he was doing with the storyboards I don't know if he understood the meanings of them I suspect he understood a lot of it yeah um but anyway that's that goes back to the Moon thing uh at one point in that story uh there are AI robot characters who were on the run from humans the slaves and the you know the the running away and they've escaped in a forest and they get chased by what's called Moon balloons and you see them you see what looks like the real moon come up over the landscape and it looks like the moon in E.T and then when it comes up it's not the moon it's got wires coming down and it's a it's an air balloon but the the actual balloon part is it glows and it looks exactly like the moon and so it floats around and there's there's several of these the chase the robots and catch them what the [ __ ] says Moon balloon [ __ ] about you don't just randomly throw that I know it's bizarre and it's in all the storyboards and stuff and then I thought I thought well hang on when this Moon balloon lands what is it it's a fake moon landing yeah yeah I was like oh come on I just wondered maybe maybe I mean that that's that's funny isn't it you know um you're obviously you're you're open to conspiracy theory stuff would you say that he was a cubic was more was he further along than you was he more paranoid than you more suspicious than you'd think or do you think he was a 50 50 guy as well go and buy Dr Strangelove um I would say he probably was pretty balanced on that stuff because Strangelove shows a conspiracy to start a nuclear war hmm and to me it showed how real conspiracies really work it's not that everybody in the room gets together and understands the plan it's that you've got a few manipulative idiots in the room which would be the Strange Love German character the Nazi type guy and possibly foreign Jack D Ripper the guy who gives the code to send the nukes to you're familiar with the film yeah I get the impression with that film that the strangel of German guy and the guy who's paranoid the fluoridation in the water that was who gives the code to attack uh that those two would may have worked together or they may have just been acting on their own and they of their own accord decided that they wanted to start a nuclear war and then when everybody else gets all everybody else in the War Room gets the uh the news of what's just happened which they were not involved in that plan but since it's happening anyway they go well well since it's happening anyway we might as well use it and so you get them all jumping on board and going oh yeah let's do this let's do that I tend to think conspiratorial things work more in that way yeah and I don't think that most of the time criminal groups of people um really specifically plan everything out or even agree on what their aims are I think the aims are usually unconsciously agreed between them so the point where they don't even think of what they're doing as being a conspiracy yeah um I call it conspiracy by convenience uh a certain narrative gets kick-started by some idiots and then other people who happen to be in related positions of power they unconsciously recognize that there's a benefit for them and going along with that and then they all do it and then you get that crossing over into the news media as well right and then you get certain political parties jumping on board with it and the end result is that it looks like a grand conspiracy but I think it's just an unconscious and jumping on board that everyone does I don't even know if you call that a conspiracy uh corruption I call it corruption maybe yeah when I when I have I I I'm I'm pretty paranoid and I'm I'm further along the spectrum of conspiracy theory probably but uh I do always when I'm talking to conspiracy theory friends I'm like we have to balance this between you have a sliding scale of intentionality that's what I would call it some of these things are intentional they've had a chat and there's been a dark room with no doubt about it yeah and then things do just as you go for it like at the other end things just happen and there are coincidences there has to be coincidence it has to like it's insane to think there's no coincidence yeah you'll go mad if you keep thinking that way but somewhere along here yeah there's just like um I know that you have a certain set of objectives I have a certain set of objectives my corporations point in this direction your thing is putting it yeah we're going to do a thing and then it's conspiratory but it's not even said only it just happens just happens yeah yeah um it's ideological I I mean I suppose looking actual real life situations I've been in where people act in a criminal manner I definitely see this going on it's like say we've talked about hanging around with it you know all the criminal culture that we either Liverpool it was still here to an extent but um and you would get all of these different you know what we call scalies all engaging in these violence and criminal acts they either all get together in a room and plan it all out no um they they sort of feed off each other and go oh yeah we've all got benefits in this for us and it's interesting to say like obviously one of the things I focus on is narcissism and psychopathy yeah and it does sometimes seem to function like a hive mind you said before about gangsters you know these criminals they're the the rebels they see themselves as Robin Hood what a bunch of conformists yeah they all talk look and act exactly the same way yeah their obsessions are the same thing super super ultra conformist well the last question I had for you I saw her on the website um specifically mentioned that you you use the word thuggishness and you do you clearly do not like it why what what's what's your problem with thuggishness what's what's why is that a problem for you um I'm not aware that it was where did it it's on the about page of the website you said you were raised in an environment where you found the culture to be thuggish and I think it's sort of written like you had a a contrarian response yes you were being pulled into a culture that you felt was sluggish and you didn't want to be yeah yeah but basically uh I suppose by thuggish I would say um the deciding factor in how um on and how Society organizes itself in that context where it was in is violence just you know yeah um it's just like caveman stuff you know you don't like crudity you don't like brutality do you um not for its own sake yeah um I prefer non-violent Solutions if I can have them yeah I have I mean I have been in physical fights in my life thankful enough for a long time um and I've had to physically threaten people at times to stop them from attacking me so you know I'm aware that you know the the capacity for violence is something that we need to have and that that's especially as males uh we're all aware of that and you know like even my daughter she's not even male but she wants to play fight all the time and basically she wants to know how to defend herself yeah against physical attacks yes and my girlfriend's son he's the same age obsessed with play fighting and again it's just like there's an instinctive awareness that violence plays its role yeah yeah um and so I'm the same I I mean it's I would never ever just completely step away and say oh in no situation will I ever become violent uh there are some situations where I've become violent but I generally prefer not to and I don't like it to be the deciding factor in how Society is organized it's not it's not an easy the culture that we have in the city is not easy for more introverted sensitive creative types is it I think for people who don't they don't know the city they don't know the culture here if you're American probably it's the closest you'd have is like Boston maybe yeah it's Irish immigrants and they were brought over to work and yeah a bit of a tip on the shoulder and it goes that you must have seen the film The Town I haven't seen it oh what's the what's the handsome fellow's name who made that not Matt Damon his mate oh well I know Ben Affleck did he write and directed did he throws and directed so so he finally interacted something good since oh yeah yeah really related to Goodwill yeah I love that movie yeah I love it the town really good you're like you'll you'll respect Ben Affleck a lot it's tight you said before a phrase I'm gonna steal I'm gonna use it internally consistent yeah I love internal consistency in a movie but it's the criminality of it that's uh the town is Charlestown in Boston but they have more armed robberies than anywhere else and there's a certain point in the movie The Boston they're American the certain point in the movie there's Lads jumping in and out of cars and swapping guns and going here and going there they've all got dodgy haircuts and they're wearing track suits even though they're not going to go and play tennis and they're down by the docks all the time yeah and I was thinking hang on a second I've seen this before it's really similar really yeah I mean I don't know I thought about impression it gave you on the website but um I mean I'm I'm a massive fan of the Warriors yeah I mean even though the violence is like very fantasy yeah um I think there's a lot of Truth in that film about the street street wise mentality and I think a lot of people who haven't lived in the ghettos and stuff would look at a movie like The Warriors and think oh this is stupid immature childish but if you've actually been in that kind of environment you know how important it is to have the capacity for violence because if you haven't got it you will get beaten yes you know yeah um yeah yeah so I don't know if that answers you your question but yeah I mean I love you know things like I really relate to movies like Goodfellas you know good Fellas um I mean it's like I love it even though you can look at the guys in that moving sale they're all just thugs the guy gives a pretty good uh speech at the start where where he sort of explain and it likes to us other people were nuts all those goody good people who and he he's talking about people with regular jobs who got no money he's like I'm not gonna [ __ ] live like that we're going to do something make our lives better yeah and you can really understand from that point of view why that being a criminal would would appeal more I think there's a probably going to be a lot of crossover between Italian-American gangster culture and Scouts gangster gangster culture they probably send them all out on a night out and they'd probably get on quite well or they'd [ __ ] murder each other I don't know yeah yeah yeah where can where can people find your stuff when they're looking for you rob well uh the there's three YouTube channels uh the main one is collative learning the second one is just called rabaga and the third one is called Ager bytes b-y-t-e-s that's just shorter Clips on that one the reason I've got three channels is because uh I did have a point years ago where my main Channel got taken down for a couple of weeks because there was some copyright dispute over Starship Troopers uh got that resolved and then I thought I'll have three channels so that if one gets taken down got them all going anyway that's the long version of that there's also the website collativelearning.com tons of Articles and videos and stuff on there it's fantastic listen thank you very much for coming in thanks Richard it's a real pleasure I'd love to have you on again if you're up for it because there's a bunch of other films we've been chatting for two hours a bunch of other films we wanted to ask you about and so if you come in again I appreciate it brilliant yeah I'll be up for that ladies and gents thank you very much for your time and for your attention and look forward to speaking to you again next time cheers

Channel: Richard Grannon & Friends

Views: 19,558

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Id: 36b-AvAevXw

Length: 101min 50sec (6110 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023