HOW TO: Find Your Fear (w/ Nolan Lampson)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: When you're a kid trying to make horror movies, zombie movies always work, everybody. Because everyone wants to be running around treating their own neighborhood, cul de sac, whatever, like a little wasteland, squirting ketchup all over themselves. And guess what? They're not lying there dead. They're lying there dead for a shot. And then they get up because they're zombies. [00:00:21] Speaker B: I'm Luke Steinfeld. [00:00:22] Speaker C: And I'm Wyatt Sarkisian. [00:00:24] Speaker B: We made the 5050 podcast to support you on your filmmaking journey. [00:00:27] Speaker C: 50% business. 50%. 50% creative. [00:00:30] Speaker B: Every Tuesday, a new how to. [00:00:32] Speaker C: That was the voice of our resident horror connoisseur, Nolan Lamson. It's long overdue that the writer, director, producer comes onto the pod to talk about everything horror. And with our new fall festival coming just around the bend, we thought no other person would be better to come on and dig deep into what makes us fear. As you can probably guess, it's not all playground jump scares and recess zombies with this guy. He is as driven as. As he is introspective. Nolan has shot up the ranks in the industry while maintaining a deep connection to his artistic instincts. Enjoy the episode. [00:01:11] Speaker A: As Luke probably briefed you, I'm a horror person first, so the idea that if you say a word five times and there's, you know, really bad consequences, I think that's something that I could get into. But we won't do it. We're not going to test to fate. I'm not Arthur and Andrew. This isn't my eighth time on this podcast. I don't know what I can. I don't know what I can get away with, what I can't. So, yeah, we're not gonna. Dude, you're bringing other softwares into this. [00:01:35] Speaker B: You're on a tightrope band already. [00:01:37] Speaker C: There's a. Yeah, there's a very high bar this episode. You know, Eli's been on the pod. Arthur and Andrew have been on. They beg every single weekend. They text us constantly asking to come back on and say, unbelievable. [00:01:49] Speaker A: Would you believe I told them I was going on today? And they were, like, trying to. They were trying to figure out a situation where, like, the three of us. It was like, I don't understand why. [00:01:57] Speaker C: Be honest. Are they. Are they under your desk right now? Just trying to. [00:02:01] Speaker A: They're. No, they're not. Okay. They're not. They're not under here right now. Okay. [00:02:08] Speaker C: There was kind of a pause. Okay. All right. [00:02:11] Speaker A: It was just me checking out, like, you. You said, like, what's under my desk? I'M like, I am looking under there. I don't see them there at this moment. Andrew's down there. He looks so cute. No, he always does. They heard that I was going to be on this podcast. They warned me. They converted me. They recruited me. They like, they just. Every adjective in the book. They had things to say. [00:02:34] Speaker B: Yeah. It happened quick, man. Like, it. That. I feel like that's kind of what happens is, like, you. There's like a meeting that happens and then, you know, you get invited to, like, this event and like, you show up and it's like the festival and then. Yeah, like a week or two later, like, you're. You show up to your venue podcast. Yeah. [00:02:55] Speaker A: And it's Brain Dead Studios. Yeah, it's. I mean, it's a very LA thing. It's like you walk into an event at Braindead Studios and then a week later you're on a podcast and you. You don't really know how to parse through, like, what happened to get you to that step. But it's a really important step to. To achieve. So I'm happy that I'm here. [00:03:12] Speaker C: I. I would. I would like to. So Luke. Luke did brief me a little bit before, and as you said, I know you're a horror guy. I know you write with Eli Staub. Right. Who is a former guest of this podcast. And I've, like, seen your name floated around literally everywhere. I mean, you know, John Lee, who is in your place of work. I think we've probably been on email chains together in the past. Just whatever being, you know, being in. In the sort of within the studio system to some extent. [00:03:44] Speaker A: Sure. [00:03:45] Speaker C: And yeah, it's great. Like, this episode is gonna be me getting to know you. Cause I know Luke already knows you, and Luke comes in with a specific perspective. But I. I am very much looking forward to this because, you know, we've floated you as a guest so many times and it's, you know, it's been, you know, it's been a long time coming, I think. So. Awesome. Genuinely happy to meet you formally and have you on the podcast. [00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah, 100% same to you. I mean, I love the idea of being floated. You know, my name's floating around. [00:04:16] Speaker C: Doesn't that feel good? [00:04:17] Speaker A: We've met or maybe not met in the studio system. It's like there's. There's such a shadowy vibe to. To all of these things. Right. When you first move here. And. And that's typically how these connections are formed. Right. It's like, my friend, this Friend this. I mean, and to know that I'm, like, probably the eighth person of my, like, kind of close friend group to be a 5050 alum is. [00:04:39] Speaker C: It's. [00:04:40] Speaker A: It's feeling like that SNL Five Timers Club. It's feeling like I gotta put, like, a jacket on. [00:04:45] Speaker B: Dude, we're actually. We're gonna probably gonna ask you to host soon. [00:04:49] Speaker A: Oh, great. [00:04:50] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:04:52] Speaker B: Depending on how this goes. [00:04:53] Speaker C: Very long vacation. So if you wouldn't mind just subbing in for a couple. [00:04:57] Speaker A: You get to episode 100 of this podcast. It becomes season two. [00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:02] Speaker A: And everyone has that. Everyone has that shogun thing of, like, we thought it was just gonna be one, but it was so incredibly successful. [00:05:10] Speaker C: I mean. Yeah, everybody knows it as that shogun thing, you know, of, like. [00:05:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, 50, 50. [00:05:15] Speaker A: It could be the next. It could be the next shogun. [00:05:17] Speaker B: The next shogun. [00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:05:21] Speaker B: We've actually. What's crazy, man, is we. We get that a lot. Yeah. The budget. I mean, a lot of comps, for sure. [00:05:27] Speaker A: The budget, the international. Give us all of that. [00:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you give us kind of the, like, the one sentence of who Nolan is for our listeners? Oh, you know, like, how do you pitch yourself in the general meeting? You're sitting down. What do you. What do you say? [00:05:47] Speaker A: You know, in one sentence? I think what. What I would want to leave with somebody is that I. I mean, I'm totally out here in every way, shape and form and went to the school that I went to and. And. And the friends that I am friends with now because I made a decision at a very young age that I wanted to plunge myself into making horror movies that were, like, just deeply dreadful and deeply upsetting. And to say that in one sentence, you also want to give the caveat of, I try not to take myself too seriously. Try to be. I try to be enjoyable and fun and, you know, I try to be as. As not leading with. I'm someone who sits inside all day and watches horror movies type of vibe, but always with the knowledge that the series of decisions that I made as a kid that brought me here and to living here and to being on this podcast and to missing the last 10 minutes of the World cup, and I still don't know who won all of those decisions were, you know, I was just from such an early age, so captivated by fear as an emotion on screen, and it's such a strange kind of specific, visceral feeling. And so I guess in one rambling, long sentence that's Sort of how I. I view it with a long lens of how I got here. [00:07:07] Speaker B: I think it's a beautiful way to put it, man. [00:07:09] Speaker C: You know, it's so funny to frame it from such a young age, you know, because horror to me is, like, something that I know my parents were, like, not wanting me to watch at a very young age. So, like, what was your. What was your experience with horror? You know, what was your first experiences with the genre and the feeling of genre even? I don't know. [00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's. Well, it's interesting. Luke and I have talked about this before, but I think the comedy kids have it easier in some way, right, that you can, because it's a very similar type of arc. Right. The visceral emotion of this on screen, the excitable cliches and forms and stereotypes and all of the conventions that are a part of this genre and a part of this feeling, you know, are so powerful and such a powder keg for me that it brought me into this life in so many people. You hear about that with. With comedy growing up and just like, laughing as, you know, deep into the night with so many friends around them as possible. It was harder for me. For sure. There was some subterfuge going on. I think my parents both kind of directly fed into this love and also couldn't really be. They couldn't know how deep it went. Like, for movies when I was really growing up first, like Jaws, you know, I heard about that from my dad. My dad, who was 12 years old and was in line, was in that first line that was wrapping around the mall. And you didn't really understand what was going on and why a movie could be so, you know, kind of rapturous for an entire community. My dad seeing the Ben Gardner scene in the water, jumping out at Richard Dreyfuss and him spilling his popcorn on somebody. My mom going to see The Shining in 1980, she's 13 years old. She goes with her father, who is, you know, the most like, American macho, 1950s, 60s idea of masculinity. And him walking out of the theater because he just couldn't stand the fear, the terror of the idea of, you know, a man who wants to kill his family. You go back and watch the Shining, it's actually pretty hilarious. But, like, you absolutely could also take it that way of, like, this is. For a man who's just trying to be a good father to a family unit, this is the most terrifying thing that could be shown to me right now. [00:09:21] Speaker C: It totally could be a comedy. Is the thing, like, just, like, done in a different way? [00:09:24] Speaker A: It kind of is, yeah. Well, do you remember the scene they're first going up there to the Overlook and, you know, the kids in the back, Danny's in the back and he's like, you know, when are we going to eat? I'm tired. It's kind of the primordial version of Are we there Yet? And. And he's talking about cannibalism and the Donner Party. And, you know, you can just. You can tell that Jack, who's driving the car, already wants to kill both his wife and his son. It is already like. It's like this title cards in the movie that are like the interview, opening day. And then all the days are just like, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday. And it feels like, you know, this guy's almost just kind of looking for a reason to kill his family. Which, you know, I don't think is a comedic concept. But just the way that Jack Nicholson performs it, it's so gravely, like, obviously that he's not going to be, like, seduced by this hotel. He already has it in him. But just to go back to, like, the parents, like Jaws and the Shining, those are two examples of my parents, the stories of their fear. The stories of their fathers, their sisters, their brothers themselves being sort of enraptured by this feeling of fear, I think was really important to me as I was starting to realize watching the wizard of Oz, watching Cinderella, watching movies for kids, that I was gravitating to the Wicked Witch, that I was gravitating to, you know, Maleficent. I was. I was gravitating to the dark stuff, like the cut to the dark castle on the hill. And so my parents, you know, telling me these stories were very influential. And then at a certain point, you drop off of telling your parents, like, of anything that you're watching, you know, once. It's like the movies, when they're not Jaws and the Shining anymore, they're not movies they grew up with. It's the movies that they don't really know about. You know, it's movies like Dead Silence that James Wan made right before Insidious. That's just like a Donnie Wahlberg doll, like murder mystery Odyssey. I don't think that they would love to know that that was something that I was watching. Right, right. And I had two older siblings that were both playing sports and just both always. You know, you play sports as a kid and you do it in a way now where you. You really want to be involved and really want to be good at it. It becomes its own little industrial complex of like all of these camps and clinics and like things you can do in the off season. Pretty much it's a year long grind. And that just meant for me, like, okay, great, I'm going to be at home. I'm not going to every game, I'm not going to every soccer game, every football game. I'm like staying at home in the [00:11:59] Speaker B: middle of the day. [00:12:00] Speaker A: I'm like, hey, what can my parents not like, what do my parents not really want me to see that I'm going to watch, you know, today? And that, that feeling, obviously when you're feeling like you're both getting away with something and you're kind of falling in love with something, those two combinations as a kid, it's as if, it's as if someone had told you that was a really impressionable adult or like older sibling, like, you really can't eat chocolate because it's really not good for you, but it's, it's so like the best thing in the world. And then they dropped you off at a candy store. Yeah. And the impression was like, hey, remember what we told you? Like, don't go crazy. The candy store was just the availability and the wide access that we grew up with. And really like, I feel like we, the three of us and our peers, we're the first generation, we're the first group where you think of something you want to watch at age 8, age 9, age 10 is right there. It doesn't take really any level of hesitation. And so that was the candy store, the availability of all of these things, the availability to go on the Internet and look up Entertainment Weekly's top 500 horror movies and pick one and watch it that afternoon. You know, it's, it's a terrifying concept for my parents. [00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm sure and I. That's a conversation on it and in itself. But like when you started to make your own work and you were so driven to like you, you had taste at a very young age, clearly. But like when you were making stuff, was there a gap for a certain amount of time? There might still be a gap, but of like achieving that fear that you were striving for or did it come quickly and naturally? [00:13:39] Speaker A: I think there's always going to be a gap. But I think, I mean, I'm curious, you know, how my friends who are in the comedy scene and in the sketch comedy scene and sort of how you two view this. But Again, I compare it to that. I imagine you don't really start with the kitchen sink. You start with the one joke. I think about this all the time. [00:14:00] Speaker C: A really small portion of whatever it is. Like doing your favorite joke from whatever movie over and over. [00:14:05] Speaker A: I think about this a lot. I think about the south park joke of fishsticks and how they built the whole episode around it. Because after what, I don't know, but what I assume was one shower thought that you bring to the room the next day, that becomes. It doesn't start as an episode, but it envelops into an episode because it's just so funny to a group of people. I think you'd start there in proper terms. You're eight, nine, you're making your first sketch. You would start with the fish sticks. You would start with the joke that just is so funny that you're going to try to build something around it you don't really know. And for me it was the same thing with scares. I think the first stuff that I was doing was like, you know, especially with one or two friends is like, you know, the closet scare, the bathroom mirror scare, literal like gifs of scary moments of jump scares, you know, the kind of most primal version of like one, two packaged up. And so it would be years before I would make something. Like in middle school I made something where it was like, you know, the guy is being the guy being me, this 12 year old who somehow just lives alone and has a house and like nobody is in his life is being mailed VHS tapes of himself. So it was like, then that becomes more of like a what am I even doing? I'm in middle school, I'm doing like Hanukkah. I'm doing something weirder and European and not outright scary, but unnerving and like so ideas of like surveillance and being watched and it's just like, who's watching this 12 year old kid that lives in this normal suburban house and isn't fucking doing anything. But you know, I guess I quote unquote graduated to that. Whereas definitely the first stuff that I was doing was just like, how. What's the scariest thing that could possibly be? You know, from that weird angle on my stairs where I can see into like three rooms downstairs. But if I, if I, you know, turn my head a little bit, I can't see any of it. Just like, what does that blind turn reveal? Yeah, I can't believe that I brought fish sticks from south park into it. [00:16:14] Speaker B: But you know, it makes sense, man. [00:16:16] Speaker A: It's an apt summary. It's like, what's. When we talk about comedy and horror as the timing, the build up, the scare, the visceral moment, I think you're trying to find the purest versions of that. [00:16:28] Speaker C: Absolutely. [00:16:29] Speaker A: But I would never say that I've got it. I would never claim that I'm holding onto that lightning bolt because I just think that that's a lifelong pursuit. And you look back at the bridge after you've crossed it and see how many times you were able to do it and then just hope. And then just hope, man, that you've done it a couple of times, probably. [00:16:51] Speaker C: I'm curious what. Because horror is so based on the relationship with the movie and the audience, what are your first memories of being able to, like, impact audiences? Is it the middle school thing? Like, were your teachers, like, we're worried about you? Like, was your family like, you know, this is crazy what you're doing, or were your friends like, this is awesome. Like, I was terrified. Like, I think, yeah. What are your early audience experiences? [00:17:17] Speaker A: My early audience at that time, my audience really is like, whichever kids I can desperately try to rope into doing this thing. So, like, it's like, hey, come here. [00:17:26] Speaker B: Come here for a second. Come here. [00:17:27] Speaker A: 100%. It's the. Hey, come here. Hot tip for the. Hey, come here. When you're a kid trying to make horror movies, zombie movies always work, everybody. Because everyone wants to be running around treating their own neighborhood. Cul de sac, whatever. Like a little wasteland. [00:17:41] Speaker C: So fun. [00:17:42] Speaker A: Squirting ketchup all over themselves. And guess what? They're not lying there dead. They're lying there dead for a shot. And then they get up because they're zombies. So I never had a problem making, you know, zombie movies that were just running rampant. We're all getting each other sick, we're all giving each other diseases and zombifying each other. [00:17:59] Speaker C: So fun. [00:18:00] Speaker A: I tried to make one at school. I think I was in fourth or fifth grade. And the concept was more or less like, kids are playing. You know, you gotta write to your location sometimes when you're being scrappy and when you're young. And essentially it was kids are playing on the playground. And I just, like, am a fellow kid who is like, bringing each of them out. I'm like, I'm basically like, coming and bringing each of them out from the playground. Like, stop playing kickball, stop playing foursquare. Come over here. And then I would just, like, burn some odd, like, parasitic idea into their minds that would make them go Back to the playground and, like, kill everybody else. So in a weird way. And then I would watch, like, the movie Cure, the Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie years later, and be like, okay, so I was ripping off a movie that I had not yet seen. But, like, I don't think it was easy to recruit kids to be in my movie where I was pitching it and I was like, so you go away from the playground. [00:19:02] Speaker C: Right, Right. [00:19:03] Speaker A: To me, we're like, playing our own game on the playground. [00:19:05] Speaker C: It's a little more nuanced. [00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Really what it is, is I'm just, like, feeding some telepathic idea to you that is gonna make you, like, a murderous person. Okay, go right. The hardest part of that recruiting process, as you can imagine, is the availability of the actors. [00:19:21] Speaker C: Absolutely. [00:19:23] Speaker A: You have them for the 30 minutes of recess, and they don't want to play with you. They want to play Foursquare, they want to play kickball. They don't want to be pulled away from whatever game is they're playing like that. Those 30 minutes are kind of all that matter to those kids. So there's another early lesson in indie filmmaking is, like, you got to make things interesting for the fourth graders that you're recruiting to be in your movie. Zombie movies always work, you know, little more slow burn. Telepathic, murderous stories are harder to pitch, for sure. During recession. Yeah, absolutely. Harder to pitch. [00:19:58] Speaker B: I mean, you. You clearly have that sense of humor, man. You know, And I think it actually works really nicely with the fact of, like, you want to be making stuff that's terrifying to the core. [00:20:11] Speaker C: You gotta lighten the. Like, if you were saying with a straight face or no, like, you know, self awareness, it would be actually terrifying. But I think a little bit, yeah. In horror, you gotta lighten the load. Like, what? In order to, like, just make the medicine go down easy, you know? [00:20:25] Speaker A: Yeah. I really remember a conversation that. That I had. We were casting the last short that I had made about two years ago, we shot it, and I was having a conversation early on with one of the actors who ended up being in the movie. And it was similar to this. It was like, I want to. The actor was. I wouldn't say concerned, but the actor was interested. Like, I want to have this candor with you to go here in this movie emotionally, like, go to a certain type of depth. And it feels like we're talking about the subject matter with a little bit of lightness, with a little bit of not comedy, but with a little bit of a tonal ambiguity. And I Think the way that I was trying to express it was, for me, this feeling and for the audiences that love these type of movies. It feels like falling in love. It feels like laughing at the best joke. It feels like being upset by the most perfect scare. It feels like. It feels like falling in love. It feels like an experience that you wish you could express and you can't. And so the only way really for me to treat that feeling and trying to give that feeling to other people and trying to make up situations in which that can even, you know, I can scare myself is you want to have a. You want to have a lightness to it. You want to have an appreciation for. It feels good to fall in love. It feels good to laugh at a joke that's perfect. And it feels good to be scared at something that really riles you up. You know, my first, like. I wouldn't even say it's a job. It kind of feels pathetic to say it was a job. But my first, like, paid gig was as a Scare actor in one of these. Like, it was the Haunted trail is what they called it. But basically, you're in Oregon. It's a Giant State Park. October 27, 2829. We're just going to host, like, a big kind of haunted experience. You know, people can, like, pay as if they're going to weird corn maze. And my job was just, like, you know, all night, as you can imagine, sitting. You're sitting in a tree and you're covered with mud and it's raining on you. This is Oregon in October. This is Oregon and literally every other time except for late July. So it's raining on you, and you're going up and scaring people, coming back down, hear the next group coming. You're going up and coming back down. And I remember being so pissed that it was just essentially a bunch of teenagers that you come up and you scare them. And they're laughing and they're laughing at each other, and they're laughing to their friends, and they're laughing to their girlfriends and boyfriends. And I just remember feeling, like, deep, like, oh, man. Like, I did not bring it. Like, I did not. I did not come to work today with, like, the real Scare attitude. [00:23:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:03] Speaker A: And the Scare aptitude that I wanted. And then I think you grow up a little bit, and it's. You realize what we're talking about, which is it's the same level of release. It's the same level of release. [00:23:13] Speaker C: It's the same exact. [00:23:13] Speaker A: Every other euphoric experience that you and [00:23:16] Speaker C: also, people have to laugh at a place like that. If you're not laughing, you're just terrified. You're terrified, and that's the way you connect with. Laughter's so contagious. And I wanted to go back for a second because you said earlier the idea of, I wrote getting away with something is the same as falling in love with something. You know, it seems like your relationship to, to horror is that. Or like getting to scare someone. It's the same as getting to do a good joke. You know, like you're saying something kind of bad, maybe that you're not allowed to say day to day. But it's really well done and well crafted and you're able to pull it off. Therefore you're like that. That's kind of your way into it, I sense. [00:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think getting away with it, you know, you want to be careful. Like, I, I don't want to be a misanthrope. I don't think getting away with it means pushing it, maybe pulling limits. [00:24:12] Speaker C: Yeah, right. [00:24:13] Speaker A: But yeah, it is, it does feel like pulling it off. It feels like it's the same level of tightrope act as like being the eighth friend and a friend group that's been on the 5050 podcast and just trying to make sure politically that you're kind of respecting everyone who's been on and saying, well, of course, all my friends equally did well on the 5050 podcast. You know, like, you want to, you want to play these things at a very high level. [00:24:36] Speaker C: We're not going to be ranking the people below in the description. [00:24:39] Speaker B: We're not going to be definitely not [00:24:40] Speaker A: people below the description. And we're also not going to do like a bonus section for people who are asking for it that we do that. [00:24:47] Speaker C: Like, no. [00:24:47] Speaker A: And if we do, by the way, that's in the bonus. So, like, you got to pay up if you want that information. [00:24:52] Speaker B: Yep. [00:24:52] Speaker C: Unfortunately, paywall. [00:24:54] Speaker B: So now you're, you're writing scripts, man. And I know we just hopped over USC here, but like, I, I am interested and, and curious to know where your head's at after you're our age. Like 20 year, let's say 20 plus years of like watching horror movies. What is your process like today? And I know Wyatt mentioned with, with Eli Staub and, and collaborating with him. Can you talk a bit just about your day to day creatively? And then I know we can hop into the, the day to day work wise as well. [00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah, oh, sure. Yeah. I, I think, you know, it's interesting Eli and I, of course, write together and also write apart and do so many different kind of creative endeavors. But I think writing together, and we've spoken about this a little bit before, but it's a similar feeling to writing alone. Just in that apropos of having someone to bounce off the idea from or not, you're really just sitting there trying to challenge yourself in terms of, like, well, what is actually scary about this concept? You know, when Eli and I wrote a kind of our take on a space movie, a contained alien movie, it was really, there was excitement about that idea, excitement about that concept, excitement in the way of, once again, like, how do we get away with it? How do we pull it off? How do you make it new? And the entirety of that conversation, it doesn't really end up being about how are we different from the ones that we love? How are we the same as the ones that we aren't trying to be like? The conversations really are just about, well, what is scary about that? Is it the isolation? Is it the. You know, we talked about so many things. We talked about the distrust inherently of space. Who goes to space? People who are approved by the government. What is corrupt. The government who. Who would send you. Who would send you somewhere incredibly dangerous, incredibly remote, with very little chance of survival or recourse if you don't know what to do in an emergency situation, who would do that and then have kind of very little real reckoning of your survival or your individual, you know, life? The government, like a big group that's trying to go there for research or for other reasons that are much bigger than you. So, like, those conversations, they start to sort of thread what the movie ends up being. And I think day to day, that's my process on. I want to write so many different types of things. I have the home invasion movie that I'm doing. I have the basketball monster movie that I wrote for my thesis in school that I'm revisiting. And everything about those stories and those concepts, you really start to thread them through. And you obviously are working on plot and you're working on structure and you're trying to build this thing, but as you're building it, really the through line feels like constantly reminding and constantly like, well, what is actually scary about the idea you can't fall asleep? What's actually scary about the idea that you're going to a summer camp with your friends? That's the sort of primal thing you have to keep going back to get [00:28:03] Speaker B: in the weeds here for a second. But, yeah, I Watch a lot of short films. Right. Like, a lot of horror shorts. Specifically right now, like, I'm. The horror festival's coming up. Like, I'm watching all these submissions and, like, so much of horror is sound, camera moves, you know. How much of that are you implementing into your scripts? [00:28:24] Speaker A: All of it. All of it. Hopefully. I mean, the hardest thing for me as a. And I just loved my program, man, honestly, like, coming out here for, you know, whatever idea that was nebulous and vague of what la quote unquote was going to be like. And then being in a program for four years that was just writing and writing and writing. And essentially, if you are not writing or if you're not writing with a lot of attention, you're going to come to class for four hours where we talk only about the writing and you're going to get flamed. And sometimes you're going to come in thinking you did really, really good, great work. And it's that same thing of like, oh, I really brought it this time. And, like, I really, you know, I convinced. I convinced my friends to make the zombie movie this time with my pages. Like, I really feel like I pulled it off. And you would still get eviscerated because people didn't. [00:29:12] Speaker C: You're still that kid on the playground, you know, 100%. [00:29:14] Speaker A: You're always. Especially as a writer. Especially as a writer. And I have much more experience in writing than I do in directing. Writing is the kid on the playground. [00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:24] Speaker A: In all senses. In the. In the selling or the attempted selling of the work of the attempted, you know, monetary elements of the work, of just continuing that, trying to convince people this is the one, you know, and maybe, like, I bring one person from the foursquare, I bring one person from kickball, I bring one person, you know, it shows you how little I know about traditional recess. I just keep naming foursquare and kickball. I'm like, there's nothing else that you can do? [00:29:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you're like. You're, like, stuck in the 80s, dude. I don't know what. [00:29:51] Speaker A: I'm stuck in the 80s and stuck in the 80s and still trying to recruit kids to be in these horror movies with me as a fourth grader. But, yeah, I think really, that program, one of the great lessons of that is you're coming in every week and you either have pulled it off or you haven't. And sort of that dividing line, it's a tightrope that seems kind of gray, but it's really black and white. It's like, you've showed up. And either people are moved by it or they're not. And I just think that conceptually, with horror and thriller, which is. Was not all that I was writing in school, but really with the horror and thriller ideas that I kept coming back to, the only real way to know if you're pulling it off is you're trying to bring in sound, you're trying to bring in image. You're trying to, as much as possible, you know, whether you're the type of person that announces on the page insert, or you're the type of person that announces the detail of what we're seeing, which sort of keys you into the fact that this must be an insert if this is how it's eventually depicted. And I really tend to be more of that I try to dance on in the description how might. If you were to shoot this, might it sound and look, without trying to be the guy that's. [00:31:10] Speaker B: I'm not directing. [00:31:12] Speaker A: I'm not directing on the page. I'm not gonna do it. But if you don't do it, if you don't do it in a medium shot, like, it's just, what are we seeing? I think you try to get away with that as much as possible because that's really a trial by fire, weekly class period way. It seems so juvenile, and of course it is. It's a class. But you had to know every week whether you were pulling it off or not. The easiest way for me to feel that in horror was, are people, when they're reading it, feel like they're watching it? And when they feel like they're watching it, are they scared? Do they feel vulnerable? Do they feel alone? [00:31:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:31:44] Speaker A: You know, the fun questions that you want to ask other people. And it's so funny, you know, we're taking smoke breaks halfway through the class on the balcony. You know, we're going down to the Coffee Bean and, like, whatever, you know, And I'm just trying to see, like, whether this worked on these people, and they're trying to do the same thing. We're all trying to suss each other out. [00:32:03] Speaker B: How many cigarettes are they smoking after this? [00:32:05] Speaker A: 100%. Yeah. Are they, like, really trying to huff their way through, period? How many do they need or. [00:32:10] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:32:11] Speaker A: Like, it's. It's. And of course, everyone's doing that to each other in this program. We're all trying to figure out whether our whatever emotions we were building up for the last week are working on other people. [00:32:22] Speaker C: It's. It's all you care about. Like if you're in the kids, but [00:32:24] Speaker A: you're the kid on the playground, like [00:32:25] Speaker C: you can't ask people. [00:32:27] Speaker A: Yeah, you're the kid on the playground. You're just trying to suss out whether people are enjoying being on the monkey bars with you and just asking. Feels like you got a job. [00:32:37] Speaker B: No. And you got to chill with the playground references, dude. But let's. [00:32:40] Speaker A: I'm done. I'm done. I'm done being the former fifth grader trying to get people in my zombie movie. [00:32:46] Speaker B: You, as you've said, you came up watching a bunch of horror movies. Did you spend time reading horror scripts? And if you did, were there some that were instrumental or certain writers for you that you returned to that have like, oh, I like how he cut or she kind of alludes to this. And I implemented that in my own writing. [00:33:04] Speaker A: I think the. I wasn't reading a lot of horror scripts. Occasionally something like Alien or Halloween, you know, kind of like the big marquee classics, just because the scripts were so available. I was just trying to see how especially Halloween, it gets so non verbal for like, you know, an hour section of just watching the Shape or watching Michael Myers that you're, you know, you're at least interested in how that looked on the page. No, a writer that I really keyed in on growing up was Shirley Jackson. And I just really, and I still do. I really, really found myself in these descriptions of social deprecation, isolation of different types. Whether it's the lottery where everything goes really well in this village all the time, except for one single thing, one single ritual that they have that's destructive and terrible. The summer house, right, which is, you know, a couple moves into a place and it's a pretty quaint village and everyone's kind of nice, but they're all kind of holding something back, like these very simple domestic situations, you know, I found myself in love with the way that Shirley Jackson could describe how little by little by little these entire situations would just tear people asunder. And those definitely those horror movies, hereditary being, I think the most modern recent example of like the little. I mean, obviously there's a giant operatic melodramatic sequences of people getting their heads twisted off. But in the beginning, the very little details and the small life circumstances that build you to this just giant kind of emotional glaciation is really beautiful. And you see it, I mean, you go to Cannes Film Festival, like you'll see half the movies at Cannes are basically that. It's like European families. They're all on A farm. Oh, fuck. Like there's no harvest this year. How is everyone going to react to the situation? And everyone's going to be dead by the end. You don't know. But that's the, that's the joy of the Europeans best of all. Movie. [00:35:07] Speaker B: Do you watch short films? And I'm asking this because the state that horror seems to be in as a genre, and I was just talking about this. Yeah, girlfriend. But like, yeah, short films are so seem to be very, very important for more filmmakers, like writer directors. Do you watch short films? And if you do, what about certain shorts stand out to you that like, separate them from the rest? [00:35:34] Speaker A: You know, it's, it's. I don't watch as many as I should be or like, used to when I was a kid, part of it was, you know, you're, you're just like scariest horror shorts. It's amazing what YouTube can bring you right when you look up scariest horror shorts. And obviously that's still true today and was very true when we were growing up. The ones that affect me, I always felt like, and it's hard because I'm making them and I'm not even sure that I'm making them in the way that I personally would be affected the most, just because I think I'm still learning and I'm still growing. But, you know, you go to David F. Sandberg, who for me is the patron saint of YouTube Horror with lights out and cam closer and you know, coffer, which is about a table. I mean, this guy is making three and a half minute shorts about haunted tables in your living room. Like the ones that end closet space. What do you think closet space is about? Like, she, she, you know, he casts his wife in all of these shorts. She's either going down the hallway and turning off a light switch or, you know, she's discovering that like, oh, did someone leave something down there in the hall? And now I have to go down and figure out the. Like, they are the most simple domestic situations that you can ask for. And I don't know really, truly what the alchemy is to making those the scariest other than to say that they stand closest to, I think, like our idea of that pure fear. You know, lights out as a concept, right? The light is off and somebody's there. It's back on. There's not. I don't even know how to start processing that. I almost want to go into like a invisibility, like academic sort of idea of the, the double or whatever. But like we Just know that there is something unnerving in it. And it's so simple and it plays on such obvious primal grounds. It's that itch you can't scratch. It's that pop song you hear that, you're like, well, I know nothing about music, but I just feel like I, I feel like I should have come up with that hook. It's so clear. That's still the stuff that, that gets me. I think most people now, of course, in the wake of what's happening in the horror sphere, have probably caught on to the other side of the box. That horror short, I think that's very similar. You know, that's a filmmaker that has time and time again, particularly with other side of the box. It's a face coming out of the box. It's just like the creepiest single image you could think of in a YouTube thumbnail. And, and I don't think that's how it starts. I don't think people are thinking thumbnail outward. But certainly you're trying to distill and distill and simplify and simplify and I think that's always going to be what wins out, you know, Curious how that leads to the commercial viability of how many people try to then make feature length films from those simple ideas. Some of them remarkably work because of their simplicity. Some of them flame out, aren't enough because of their simplicity, because they don't work for 95 minutes. And it's so interesting then. And I think we're going to spend our whole lives trying to, you know, isolate and assert and prove why some work and some don't in that, you know, in that jump, in that transition. But it's, it's part of that strange alchemy of what is scary and for how long. And you know, it's, it's the exciting thing that we basically are bumbling idiots who don't know what we're talking about. [00:39:02] Speaker B: Right? [00:39:02] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:39:03] Speaker A: Like that makes you kind of want to keep guessing and keep watching and keep creating to just try to figure it out. If you could ever figure it out, [00:39:09] Speaker C: that would be a struggle. You can't. There's no, there's no formula to it, you know, it's all feeling. Yeah, yeah. [00:39:17] Speaker A: It's wonderful. It's the same thing as falling in love. I keep trying to come back to that. [00:39:21] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:39:21] Speaker A: Falling in love with comedy, falling in love with horror. You're never actually going to be able to sit there and describe it. [00:39:29] Speaker C: Totally, totally. [00:39:30] Speaker A: I mean, what's the closest someone's gotten to describing comedy probably like a Mel Brooks memoir. And he's just funny. He's just funnier and smarter than you and funnier and smarter than all of us. And so even he could not try to come up with whatever it is that makes it tick or makes it work [00:39:50] Speaker B: well. [00:39:50] Speaker C: Very, very well put. I love thinking about the simplicity of it all. And Luke and I, I think, come from comedy a little bit more. And we. We think about it in the same way, I would say, especially coming, you know, 5050 started as a sketch festival. Like, you know, really coming from that simplicity of, like, here's a joke and how many times can we do the joke in different ways and then flip it on its head in the end? [00:40:13] Speaker A: Right. [00:40:14] Speaker C: I'm. I'm curious if we can sort of bring it back to you as a writer and as a professional. I want to talk about after that program. You find your people, you find your playground audience, you find your collaborators. [00:40:31] Speaker A: Now you're blaming the playground back in. [00:40:33] Speaker C: I know. [00:40:34] Speaker A: Well, Luke's shaking his head. He can't believe it had to call it back. [00:40:37] Speaker C: Luke's freaked out about that. We found Luke's fear, by the way. Something dramatic happened there. [00:40:43] Speaker A: Luke was also the kid on the playground, now that we think about it. [00:40:46] Speaker C: I was on the playground with him. [00:40:48] Speaker B: Hey, man, we all were. [00:40:49] Speaker A: Yeah, we all were. But that's why we're here on the 5050 pod. On the playground. Yes. 100%. [00:40:57] Speaker C: The 5050 playground. That's not a bad. [00:40:59] Speaker B: I honestly love that. I do love that. I am already ready. [00:41:02] Speaker C: That's what we call training the kids. We start training the kids early to, you know, we. We bring film equipment on. It's like a film camp. I love that we talk about that. [00:41:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:13] Speaker C: But I, you know, bringing it back to you, Nolan. I want to talk about, like, the post grad years because a lot of our audience are people who are just starting in film and currently in film school, are currently in school school and, like, want to get a film education somehow. So I'm curious, what did it look like for you, you know, specifically, like, getting into the performance professional world. Luke has tipped me off that you have, you know, you do have a specific, like, writing routine and you try to stick to things. So I want to, you know, talk about it in a sort of tangible sense. What do the post grad years look like for you? [00:41:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, my college experience, you know, in addition to the writing program, was really that first sun hits you in LA and it's beautiful. It's 7:30 in the morning, when you first wake up and your first morning after having lived there, it's like, oh, I really don't know anybody. I really don't know anything. Which I already sort of knew that I didn't know anything. And now I know that I don't know anybody. And so I think from the moment I started the program, you're just meeting fascinating and brilliant people day after day. And I really tried to supercharge that with kind of outside work experience and internships. And I was definitely one of those kids where it's like, okay, the internship is two months. What's going to come the next? You know, it's a bit of like, I'm just trying to see how much in four years. You know, stacking is one way to put it. And it's a little bit like in four years of being here, I want to stack everything as much as possible. I want to stack experiences. I want to, you know, you don't want to stack people. You don't want to stack relationships. You don't want to stack things that are sacred to you, obviously. But the idea of, you know, working at two different places that are completely separate in how they view the projects that they're making and how they produce them, how they go about actually tangibly making them while being in my program, while trying to also go to football games or improv shows or whatever, these other collegiate things that you're doing, like, you get in a period where it's just a frenzy and you're trying to try and discover so many new things. And so, you know, in that way, I graduated in 2024. I've, for kind of three, four, five semesters, probably two years or so, have gotten used to a sort of cadence and routine of like, I'm writing and I'm working. I'm, like, developing professional relationships. I'm going back to school, I'm commuting to different places every day, whether that's like the place that I'm interning at or it's like going to school. So, you know, I had at least some idea when I graduated of the balance and the time commitment difference between your creative work, your professional work, and, you know, I think really what I thought my conception of graduating and of entering the professional world was hold on tight, because every alum that I've talked to, not every alum, but many of the alums that I've talked to, many of the people that are talking to me that are in, you know, position three, four or five years out for me are warning, they're proselytizing. You know, you're going to lose your writing time. You're going to lose your writing time. This is going to eat away at it. This is going to eat away at it. You're going to lose the time that was, you know, previously sort of mandated as a college student in a writing program, you know, you're going to lose the impetus of people telling you this was the biggest thing, the people telling you you've got to turn in work, the actual deadlines. You know, however, however you took those in college, some people never cared. Some people treated them as the doctrine, like, as the only thing that, you know, was close to the same level of, you know, strict achievement in high school. Carrying that over to film school, it's like, well, you can turn your work on time and it can be good. And that's kind of, you know, you're going to get an A either way if you try. So anyway. But I think that was my conception was all this time is going to be taken away from me, so I'm going to have to really fight for it and really try to secure what my idea of writing time is like in a professional postgraduate landscape. And I think that that is. It's true and it isn't. It is literally, you have less people around you telling you to work on these projects, less than you had in film school. Always going to be less than you had in film school because there were professors who were hired to tell you to just keep moving, keep working on the thing. But I think my having to fight for the time wasn't necessarily true. It's more that I've, you know, you philosophically set out to write a certain amount in a certain amount of time. I find that you get there. It's so. It's similar to college in that way. I was not writing five pages a day every day, and coming to class once a week with the 25 pages or 35 pages, I guess that would be the math of. Of what I'd been writing, you know, leading up to that week. It was a lot more of stop start. It was one page here, one paragraph here, one line here. Okay, wait, that sounded like I'm trying to direct on the page. I got to take that back four pages here. This is getting really misanthropic. This is not what I want to do. This is too dark, actually. I want people to have fun while they're reading this. You kind of go on and on and on. But the important thing was Every day I'm going to be there. Every day I'm going to show up and try, and every day I'm going to attempt to write whatever it is I think I can get done that day. And for the most part, that's still true. And I've never been dogged or hard on myself about. It's got to be every day. It's got to be three pages. It's got to be at this time of the day. But the routine that I have is that I just get guilty after two or three days. I just, like, I find that I'm getting. And it's a little bit for me, like, how some people feel, I guess, about, like, working out or being athletic or things that I have no idea about. But like, when people get that, like, dude, I haven't, like lifted in three days, like, it's like starting to affect me. [00:47:15] Speaker C: It is that I would say you're starting to. [00:47:17] Speaker A: And you would know. You would know because, like, you're working out all the time. But for someone like me, for someone like me who's like, never been to a gym, the only way that I experience that is the weird shame and guilt that comes from nowhere other than, I guess you're kind of bearing it out yourself. Of like, I just want to sit down and just try it. And so inevitably, I don't know what my page count looks like per week. I don't know what the metrics kind of eke out as. But it's that same chase that I had in college of like, I know that I'm working, I know that I'm going to class. I know that I have all these different things if I can at least shame, guilt, joy, cycle of getting myself there every day and just trying and seeing. Some days you're going to have the one line that's just too editorial and just doesn't work. Some days you're going to have the four and a half, five pages that you feel like really work. You really feel like you're pulling it off. And I think that in the aggregate, once again, it's hope. It's hope that after a month or two of doing that, you've got a draft and. And then after two weeks you can put it away and work on something else, come back after it. A month and a half later, there's another draft. And piece by piece, you're just again trying to build these things with as much of. Is it still hitting the same nerve that I thought was scary or funny or interesting or romantic about this idea in the first place. Is it still doing that? And that's just a daily process. [00:48:51] Speaker C: We'll be right back. [00:48:58] Speaker B: I want to play like a scary song from like a horror movie before this, but all the copyright stuff, so I can't but imagine there's like a scary song playing right now and it's like, oh, the 5050 horror festival is coming up. You need to submit your short film soon, by August 7th. August 7th is the deadline. You have two months to submit your short film. You have two months and then after that there's another deadline. Read it here first. Submit now. Submit now if you dare. No, but for real, we have our horror festival coming up in October. October 18th is the actual day. Get your short in by August 7th if you want to be a part of it. We look forward to viewing your submission on Film Freeway 5050 horror. Those are the numbers. 5050 horror. [00:49:59] Speaker C: So then on the other end, you know, you got, you're still living in la, you got a. Somehow pay for things and like, you know, work in some way. Like are you doing the thing where you're taking hours to write every day and working at a coffee shop or are you looking to get a job in the industry, which is how you progress professionally in a lot of ways, but also can be way time consuming and exhausting and all the things that make it and you know, give a lot of creative energy over to that. So I'm curious, like where what your mindset was like heading into that, that part of the industry. [00:50:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean my. I had a dual mindset when I graduated, which was immediately I want to get a job and make money and be able to pay for my rent, et cetera, you know, and so very, very, very much. I don't want to downplay that like you for me, at least, like I wanted to as I had been in the previous years working in a development production film industry capacity. And it's just through internships, right through internships in college. It's such a. As you guys know, it's a. It's a. And everyone listening and anyone who could ever associate this podcast understands it is a hard wall to climb. It is a wall that they make it really hard to climb. It is a wall that they make you email and email and call and call and push and push and you know, you have to be a Luke and Wyatt of the world and be able to send 500 cold emails. And truly, when you go to sleep at night, expect 20 responses from 500 emails. That's the Sort of understanding you have to have. So as I'm graduating, I understand. And I remember from trying to scramble and obtain these internships in this work experience, I remember what that is like. It's a hard wall to climb. So I have that instinct. And then the other feeling I'm having as I'm graduating is, you know, what? I was in the writing program, and so I never made, like, my short. Like, I just watched all of my, you know, I live with still, you know, many of the people that I lived with in college, and they're all incredibly talented filmmakers, and they were just shooting and shooting and making films and making films. And I was over here writing and loving it, but I was like, I never made my USC short. That's maybe a little bit too long and, like, maybe a little bit too expensive for, like, what we have. And, like, I made people, like, sit around E. Chipotle every day. Like, I never did that. So I need to do that before everyone goes off and gets their own, you know, before we all go off and live our lives. And it's really hard to do this again. It's really hard to. I'm going to bring it up one more time. Get other people who are playing foursquare on the playground to join you in making something. I'm going to try that as soon as we graduate. So that's actually what I did. The first thing really, that I did after graduating was we shot the film. Your presence is requested. And we had two weekends, and it was about, you know, five, six weeks of the prep and casting of that. Really straight after graduation, you're also moving out of your. Of your house or your dorm, Norm. You're going to the graduation ceremonies. Your parents are like, okay, now that we've been scared that you're not going to do anything with your life, now we're really scared that you're not going to do it. You know, there's a lot. [00:53:04] Speaker C: You're like, good, yeah. [00:53:06] Speaker A: 100. Yeah. 100. Yeah. My parents are like, we're concerned. We're worried. We're in agony over your future. And I'm like, oh, yeah, like, that's. Yeah, that's good. Chase that. [00:53:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. Say that again. Say that again. [00:53:18] Speaker A: Powder cake. It's a powder cake. Like, it's just isn't. It doesn't feel like falling in. I was scared, like, being scared 100%. Like, how I would talk to them about that. But no, it's a lot going on at that time. And so working on the short was sort of its own distraction. And then certainly the quote unquote come down like you have on any post production scenario right after you've shot. And our crew and our cast just became so tight knit. And our cast is still, I love them, they're still a tight knit group that talk to each other two years after we've shot it. And that for me, emotionally having finished this movie, being exhausted is mixed in with just remembering, just remembering how hard it was to land an industry job and get your footing and you know, start anywhere and get any foot through any door. I was like, my feet are tired after four days of shooting and just, you know, not being able to sit down. Like I don't know how I can kick those doors down again. So that was a long process through the summer after graduating of kind of getting back into that professional mojo. And at that time, the writing is just, you know, the writing is 100% secondary to landing the job. I think I want to be clear that as I am writing and that's kind of my creative life and then I have my professional life. I was never taking for granted the idea that I could live here and have a professional life that paid my rent and was able to keep me here. Right. And so in the scenarios in which I was looking for work, writing has been secondary. And I'm proud to, you know, say that and espouse that and to give that advice or to just say that as a blanket. Like that is what I did. Like I 100% treated being back in that professional world and getting that job as the most important thing at the time. Because it's what pays, you know, for the things that you want to do in your life. It's what keeps you here. It's what making going to a coffee shop on a weekend or waking up before work or getting home after work or spending, you know, some time not really watching the World cup final, but kind of watching it. But it's like 00, so it doesn't really matter. So I'm just here writing. Like all of those experiences come from being able to stay here and be kept afloat. And so that's, I want to emphasize that as, like as I was looking for work, I was not going off and writing every day or going off and making films every day and just like hoping and seeing and maybe there's a job out there somewhere. Like it was a full time climb and it was an exhausting climb. And it is every time when you're young and you're trying to get A job in the industry. And so I treat that with the, you know, respect that, that it deserves. And really, you know, knew that if I land XYZ job, then I'll be able to get back into the flow and be, you know, be able to edit the movie that I just shot and be able to write. And I, you know, those things I did do and have done and are still doing, but I think the priority of if you want one of these jobs, you really have to fight and really put everything aside to get one of them 100%. My philosophy and, you know, I don't see how if you continue to want to work in this industry in these capacities, I think that's just still going to be true. [00:56:38] Speaker C: I agree. You gotta, you gotta. There are times and I. This isn't a piece of advice I give to people who are like, in that process of looking for a job. Like, you can do a bunch of interviews, get the first round, second round, all of that. And there are times in those processes when you really want something where you kind of have to just put all your eggs in one basket. You have to call on every single person to swarm the person you want to work for with, you know, why it's the best, why it's the best. You got to work with what, like, you need every. And you can only use those favors and those resources so much. Like, it's such a delicate balance. But I always am just like, you're going to know it when it's that job, you know, when, when it's a job you're a finalist for that you just have to, like, push. And, and even if you don't get that you're pushing helps you in so many other ways because it gets you back in touch with everybody who you rely, like, there's just, oh, yeah, and that person's going to remember you, like, 100%. [00:57:34] Speaker A: Well, the best thing to ever for, especially for the kind of interning or still in college, the best thing you can do. I always felt, you know, you're in college, you're writing 500 cold emails, you're expecting 30, you're not sleeping, you're drinking up, you know, all night. You're crazy. When you're in college, you're feral. You're just trying to see once again what you can kind of get away with. [00:57:54] Speaker C: You're pushing the limits, how far you [00:57:56] Speaker A: can go in this industry. And so I think, like you said, the best thing or one of the best things you can do, you get that first internship rejection, you get that, like, hey, we know that you applied online to the, you know, the Fox Entertainment internship. And eight months later, here is a kind of automated robotic response saying, you didn't make it. I always responded to this, whether it was like a human HR person or whether it was an actual automated bot. That was never going to see my response. Just because that habit of like actually saying, you know what? Thank you, you know what? [00:58:29] Speaker C: Thank you. Always going to help. It's always going to help. And then two years later, when you're an assistant emailing someone from that place, they'll be like, oh my God, like I remember, you know, there's always going to be points of connection, just like simply educating yourself on all these companies, going through an interview process. Like, then you kind of know the ins and outs of what a company is about to some extent. And then eventually when you're working at a new place, you know, you'll run into that, like everybody is working with each other, so. [00:58:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I would say to your point earlier, it is always, it's always going to be factor, like how, how deep are your resources, quote, unquote, and then how far can you, you know, play your cards? I always felt like, and, and people, rightfully so, can feel strange or a little bit weird about like, my friends versus my connections. I don't want to feel like I'm ever using people. I always felt like, man, it really comes down to like 8 to 12 people. This is really what I realized with the internships, right? I, I was working constantly for two years and realizing, oh, every really, like, internship experience I've had, I've loved the people I've worked with. I think they're all brilliant teams in different ways and doing so much different work. But I'm coming out of these experiences with really like two to three people at every place that I've worked that are just like, you know, and these two or three people, it's like they're not even just the two or three. [00:59:53] Speaker C: Sometimes they're assistants, right? [00:59:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the two or three people that we can just talk about kind of anything. We could go on a hike this weekend. It'd be fine. It actually probably be even good. Like, it'd be great, you know, and so you, you do that for a while, whether that's the internships or whether it's other outreach programs or whether it's clubs at your school that correspond to films and filmmaking and tv. And tv, like, whatever it is. I always found if it feels strange and it kind of does, and it always will, to send 500 cold emails. These are. These are 500 people you do not know. You know, there's always the other side, which is there's, like, after a little bit of not trying too hard, 12 to 15 people that anytime, anywhere, you can call upon them. So it's like, while resources are thought of as precious and the amount of times that you can ask for favors seems very dire, and people have this whole, like, almost like, smell of desperation that they're trying to avoid from themselves, from others, there's always, for each of us, I think, a dozen or so people. And if you have more, like many, many, many, congrats. But if there's 10 to 12 to 15 people somewhere in that range, somewhere in that perfect baker's dozen range of people that you just feel like, anytime, anywhere, about anything, about any doubts, about any opportunities, about any job prospects, about anything, I can call and ask you. I can text and ask you. Like, that is what makes the walls that are hard to climb, easy to knock on, still hard to climb, but easy to get to the wall and knock on it. You know, it's really like, there are deep relationships that you make that early on, you know, are you. Are they mentors? Are they just really good friends? You know, all of that can be sort of sussed out and figured out later. But what matters now is that you're early in your career. You're looking for champions. You have them. You may not have many. They might not even be powerful. Like you said, they might be mostly the people your age that you just got along with. Yeah, but that's. You have people who champion you. You have people that are, for some reason, on this world, you know, floating your name around the 50, 50 podcast verse, like, these people are your champions. They're your friends. And I think that that is what makes this whole, you know, not only the whole industry wrong, but it makes you, in your early career, trying to define yourself also and how you were getting these certain types of jobs, like, having that community as, you know, up in front for you is really, you know, the biggest, I think, defining factor. [01:02:24] Speaker B: Well said, man. You're. You're very good at talking, Nolan. [01:02:30] Speaker A: Man on a podcast. Luke, we're better talking. [01:02:35] Speaker C: I really. I really brought it. [01:02:38] Speaker A: I'm going to have to talk. [01:02:40] Speaker C: He's not. He's not too scary? [01:02:42] Speaker B: No. [01:02:43] Speaker A: Oh, no. [01:02:43] Speaker C: Never? [01:02:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:02:44] Speaker A: Never. Never. Well, that's the other thing is, like, if I wanted to be like, a horror figure in the, like, mercurial way, like, I'd have to be really, really good. [01:02:55] Speaker C: Right. [01:02:55] Speaker A: The risk of being, like, dark and stormy all the time is that you better bring it every time. And I've experienced enough weeks in the writing. [01:03:03] Speaker B: That's exhausting. It's exhausting. Yeah, yeah. [01:03:07] Speaker A: To just be great all the time. [01:03:09] Speaker B: And again, it's the same in comedy. It's like the, you know, like the. The biggest comedians are usually not. [01:03:15] Speaker C: Who want. [01:03:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:15] Speaker C: Who wants to be funny all the time? Clowns. [01:03:17] Speaker B: 24. [01:03:17] Speaker A: 7, you know, 100%. You got to go up there. You got to be willing to know that it's in your capability. In fact, it's within your rights to bomb and like that. I think that freedom is what allows you to be good. But I. I mean, I don't know anything about being funny, but like that. That's what I imagine is you go up there, you're like, this could go really wrong. And that's when things can start to go right for you, is when you have that acknowledgement. [01:03:42] Speaker C: So then what is the dream for you? [01:03:46] Speaker A: Writing and directing and producing horror movies, in no particular order, making movies that are scary to me and that I hope can be scary to other people and that can move them in the way that they feel like they're falling in love, in the way that they feel like they're laughing at the funniest joke, in the way that they feel like they found the perfect scare. And chief among that for me is writing. Just because that was kind of the first love. And that was, you know, where I found myself really being directed at school in the writing program. You know, everything, quote, unquote, starts with the script. Of course, we know that that's not true, especially in horror. Now you can start with a short. You can start with the concept. But still, I think that beauty of whatever you want to call it, the unwritten page, the blank page, the empty page, you can get more existential with it. As you describe it, you know, the page half full is what you can also say. But I think that the dream is staring at that blank page and writing something really scary. Being able to do that for a very long time is definitely the goal. [01:04:56] Speaker C: And now it's 50, 50 after hours. There. It's so funny you say that because when you were talking about, like, the jump scare, I think you were even talking about your parents or something. Jaws or the Shining or something like that. Yeah, but, yeah, I saw the Odyssey yesterday, and I start. I got. And I'm gonna get into the nitty gritty here in this story. I got Sour Patch. [01:05:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:31] Speaker C: A Coke Zero for my girlfriend and a bottle of water. I did this because I was going on a run after the movie. It was a daytime showing, so I was like, if I have, like, candy and water, that's, like, fine to have before a run, you know, a little, you know, like. [01:05:43] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, it is. Carbs. Like, that's good before the race. [01:05:46] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. [01:05:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:48] Speaker C: But. And. But I was like. Because of the imax, sometimes, like, gives me a headache. And I was just like, Yeah, I am getting a migraine right now because I'm, like, wolfing down sugar and staring at the screen. So I left the movie about an hour and a half in to go get coffee because I know I have black coffee at amc. [01:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:07] Speaker C: And I get up to the thing. A list. Of course. Hold for applause. Thank you. [01:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:06:12] Speaker C: I go into the A list line and the guy is like, yeah, I think we still. Like, clearly nobody orders black coffee at amc. [01:06:20] Speaker B: Right? [01:06:21] Speaker C: And I. And he goes, okay, like, do you want to use your award? Five dollar award? Sure. And he says, that'll be 499. I'm like, are you charging me 999 for a black coffee? I didn't ask them that. I just paid for it because I'm like, you know, you knew by the [01:06:37] Speaker A: mathematics of the situation. Yeah. [01:06:39] Speaker C: I'm trying to get back to the movie, so. [01:06:41] Speaker A: Yeah, you don't have to. This is literally the like, biggest story ever told in all of humanity. You gotta get back and you can't be thinking about this coffee price. [01:06:48] Speaker C: Exactly. I go. I go to the pickup line. He's like, wait, Wait for the pickup line. I'll make it for you. He literally, like, a 2010 Keurig. He, like, puts a little pod into the thing. Like, I watch coffee get made, then it's, like, steaming. I wait for five minutes for him to get it. He gives it to me. I get back into the movie, I sit down. And there's something in the Odyssey. I can't remember what it was, but there was a jump scare. And my girlfriend goes like this to me. And I spill the hot coffee all over myself. [01:07:20] Speaker A: There's a nice big jump scare in there. I'm glad to hear that you got. As we talk about the timing and the buildup, I'm glad to hear that you experienced pretty much none of the buildup that led to the jump scare. [01:07:30] Speaker C: That's the worst part of the jump scare, everybody. [01:07:33] Speaker B: That it still works. [01:07:33] Speaker C: Just, like, flailing. And I spill hot coffee all over my it was fucked up. Yeah, that's my story. [01:07:39] Speaker A: I'm going to bring up a movie now that is the last horror movie to really viscerally upset me. That I think when I saw it two years ago, about two years ago, I was like coming out of the theater, like, this is the scariest movie I've seen since Hereditary. Like, it's been six years. I think I'm ready to say this is the one. You know, you're coming back to your parents and your family and Thanksgiving and they're like, well, what's been going on in your life? And you're like, well, I think I really found the one this time. I really found the horror movie that's scarier or as scary as Hereditary. Like, you know, and everyone's like, so happy for you all around the table. It like becomes the biggest thing of a holiday that year. And they're like, when do we get to meet this movie? You know, like, are you going to bring this movie to the family gathering for Thanksgiving? [01:08:20] Speaker C: It's a big deal. You're going to. [01:08:21] Speaker A: Yeah, you're going to love the movie. Like, they're great. The movie is Smile too. And I love that we're talking about jump scares because of all of the kind of conventions and things that we talk about, like, you know, the. Even the rule of thirds, right? Like the joke is best on the third punchline. All these things that after a hundred years of seeing them on film or so, like, we start to develop our own little guidelines. Conventions around horror fans, as you can imagine, like, are very, very suspicious and leery and worried when it comes to jump scares, right? Because we've seen it done enough in a way that has, you know, so little respect and so little buildup and so little, you know. You know, I guess like lame excuses for jump scares. The timing should you botch it makes a jump scare, you know, the least effective and sort of like, you know, it's the joke that instantly goes sour. It's just like the pathetic thing you feel like you have to wash off. And yet on the flip side of that, when you have south park fish sticks, when you have the jump scare that was treated with respect and treated with fun, I actually don't think there is anything like it in moviegoing. And I think the Smile 2 is a great example of that as a movie that is essentially. And I don't want to conceptually turn anyone off from it. I'm telling people it's so scary. It is conceptually basically one long nightmare sequence full of Jump scares. So for us horror fans who have become accustomed to. We hate when the movie's scare sequences are only dream sequences because there's no real, you know, outside of Nightmare on Elm street, where it's coming into the real, there's no real stakes or affectation that comes from a dream sequence. And we don't like jump scares because they're always, you know, being laden with really cheap tricks and whatever. For a movie to come out in 2024, a big studio horror sequel, and be a jump scare laden every single scene. Nightmare, dream logic. Are you in the real world? Are you not? And it's about a pop star. It's about a pop star's comeback and it turns into this kaleidoscopic, nightmarish, dreadful, but still really fun. And because it's a pop star, poppy modern horror experience, and I think we can go long on hereditary and the kind of depths of dread that it pulls you in and how vulnerable and naked it's willing to get with you. And just saying, like, look how ugly and terrible this whole situation is. This is the really, the worst thing that can happen to an actual family that actually exists is to lose, you know, the matriarch and then to lose the daughter in this horrific like. But Smile 2, its secret for me at least, was we're just going to create a series of haunted house sequences. It's the carnival funhouse that for some reason just keeps working and just keeps getting onto your skin and just keeps surprising you. And, you know the mirror is there and, you know the owl that's going to come out from the corner is there. You've been to this funhouse before. Matter of fact, you recently went to this funhouse and it was called Smile one. Like, you kind of know what's going to happen here. But the way in which Parker Finn, the writer director, subverts the conventions of a dream sequence jump scare to consistently deliver you new ways of doing was inspiring. Of course it was inspiring. It's inspiring anytime that you watch a movie that's funny and you're a comedian, it's fun. You know, it's amazing anytime a movie can make you scared and you're interested in being scared, but just the way, particularly that he decided to make a movie that for horror fans just feels like one long. Don't do this based off of the conventions that we as a horror community espouse and love and swear to and, you know, to just every scene, kind of rewrite the rules of what can be scary to this audience. It was Immensely fulfilling. And it's just another lesson of like you really don't, you really don't know. You'd be sitting there writing a two hour long dream sequence with jump scares and think that you're cooked. And it ends up being one of the great horror films this side of the Ring or this side of Saw. It's, you know, this side of the conjuring. Whatever you want to say. It's, it's an amazing experience. And I think that you guys should both watch Smile 2 tonight. I've decided that's the movie that you're gonna watch together. And fantastic. Don't worry about going to the bathroom or going to get a coffee and coming back. There will be a jump scare as soon as you sit down and smile. [01:12:46] Speaker C: Okay, perfect. [01:12:47] Speaker A: That's the whole point. [01:12:49] Speaker B: No one's been pushing Smile too for literally since I think the day it came out. [01:12:54] Speaker A: I mean, talk to Eli as well. [01:12:55] Speaker B: How much are they paying Eli back to it? But how much is Smile2 paying you? Just be real. [01:13:01] Speaker A: Zero. I have no relationship with Paramount, although I wish I did. That was a cool Paramount sweater in my closet. That's the only real association of Paramount. [01:13:09] Speaker B: Did they make, did they make Smile 2 merch? Is there, is there merch that we can get you or anything? Or is that. [01:13:14] Speaker A: Boy, did they. I mean, you could I honestly, the pop star of the movie, Sky, Riley, like she probably has her own merch. [01:13:21] Speaker B: That's great. [01:13:21] Speaker A: Like, you know, in world with the film and in conversation with the film, I don't have any because I think me having merch would just further kind of, you know, there's some weird like, is Nolan being paid? Are Nolan Eli being sponsored by Paramount Pictures? I think if we had merch it would definitely blow our cover. [01:13:40] Speaker B: I get. [01:13:40] Speaker A: For now we're just fans. Yeah, we're just smile to it. [01:13:45] Speaker B: On a serious note, I do really appreciate it and, and the way you speak about film and have spoken about it throughout this episode, but also just in our conversations that, that we've had. And I always am very grateful and inspired just in talking to you. And it's always refreshing in a sense to speak to someone who like truly passionately cares to the core about this stuff. [01:14:08] Speaker A: So I appreciate, of course, it was my pleasure. You know, if I can do one last thing to plug, you know, something that isn't Smile 2, it's go out and go to the 5050 horror festival. If you're listening to this, like we've got people here that I'm talking To live that are sitting there and actually, I couldn't believe this. This is the cynical part of me. When Luke told me that he sits there himself as the bigwig who helps run the festival and watches every single short. Like. I just couldn't believe that when I first heard it. You have hand picked curated scary experiences in short form coming to you. I suggest you go see it. I suggest you go be scared. Have people pop out at you all night on the haunted trail and laugh and be scared and be with your friends and bring a date. Even if you want to. Horror always works. [01:14:58] Speaker C: We might have couples. Couples have met at 50. [01:15:01] Speaker B: Yeah, they have. I. I think, Nolan, we could do. We could dress you up as the tree this year. Maybe put you in the corner. [01:15:07] Speaker A: Would love that. Whatever. Turn that. [01:15:09] Speaker B: I appreciate you, man. Thank you. Of course. [01:15:11] Speaker A: Couples are meeting from 50. 50. [01:15:13] Speaker B: I know. [01:15:14] Speaker A: That's what a relationship is. It's 50. 50. Yeah. [01:15:16] Speaker B: Yes, it is. [01:15:17] Speaker C: Are. Are Arthur and Andrew doing okay down there? Can we just get a quick temp check? [01:15:22] Speaker A: No, they're a little. I think they're a little hot. I think I should get them out from under the desk. At this point. You guys have been. [01:15:26] Speaker C: Andrew overheats pretty quickly. Quickly. So we should probably. [01:15:29] Speaker A: He does. Oh, doesn't he? What? You're telling me I'm seeing him right now. He is sweating. [01:15:32] Speaker C: Yeah. Damn. [01:15:33] Speaker A: But yeah, thank you, guys. [01:15:34] Speaker C: I'll let you take care of that. [01:15:35] Speaker A: This conversation. [01:15:37] Speaker C: Yeah, really fun. [01:15:38] Speaker B: Thank you. Nolan, go. Go watch the recap of the World Cup. I've been watching this whole time. [01:15:44] Speaker A: Okay, great. Well, don't tell me who wins and I won't tell you smile too. That's our deal. [01:15:48] Speaker C: We're never gonna tell you who wins. [01:15:49] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. [01:15:50] Speaker A: Fantastic. [01:15:51] Speaker C: Okay, guys. All right, Man, I see you making. [01:15:53] Speaker B: Nolan, Did you learn something? I'm like your mom. Did you learn something in this episode? I hope so. Or not. That's okay. Thanks for hanging. Make sure you follow us at the 5050fest on Instagram and give us five stars because. Why not? Why not subscribe? Why not? You know why not. Okay, bye.