Bridge of Spies (w/ Elijah Davidson)

Eli (00:01.76)
Hello and welcome to the Establishing Shot podcast where we do deep dives into directors and their filmographies. I am your host Eli Price and we are here on episode 105 of the podcast. It is exciting to be just rolling along in this Spielberg series a couple of, I guess like, or really like a few like historical

dramas in a row of sorts. So three kind of different, but also like in the same vein. So yeah, we're getting into Bridge of Spies today. So excited about that. But before we do that, I have to introduce a returning guest. Elijah Davidson is returning. He is a real stoic-y music, I would say.

Elijah Davidson (00:58.606)
You

Eli (01:00.552)
And as as old Rudolph Abel in the film says, I probably butchered the pronunciation of that, but that's okay. I'm not Russian, so you can't hold it against me. Yeah, how are you doing, Elijah? Yeah, I'm not a Tony-winning, Tony and Oscar-winning actor.

Elijah Davidson (01:12.654)
This how we know you're not a commie. Yeah. I'm doing great. Actor either. Yeah. That's all right. Not many better than Mark Rylance. yeah. yeah. Doing just great. Enjoying the summer, doing extra time with the kids, my wife, all that. So yeah, good times.

Eli (01:25.762)
Yeah. Yeah. How are you doing? Doing good?

Eli (01:37.609)
yeah.

Yeah, great. Elijah, he has been on a couple of episodes before, and you may or may not remember that he is a, is it, is, is the, your title like co-director, is that what it is at, the, at Brimfilm at Fuller Seminary in, California, Blanken on the city. What city is Fuller in? Okay. Pasadena. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:55.243)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, co-director.

Elijah Davidson (02:04.951)
It's in Pasadena, here in Los Angeles.

Eli (02:08.8)
Yep. and so, yeah, they, they have a lot of stuff going on all the time over there. but you also have personal projects that you work on with your writing. Do you have anything that's come out recently or coming out soon or that you're just like, having have rattling around in your brain.

Elijah Davidson (02:29.39)
Oh, there's always things rattling around in my brain. I get the doctor to check that out and they said I'm okay. no, I don't have any projects, large projects that I'm working on right now. I've been doing a lot of kind of prep work for a project that I don't really want to talk about yet. But it's been fun to start to get my head around that. I don't know if you know what this is like, but it...

Eli (02:51.84)
Mmm, okay.

Elijah Davidson (02:59.406)
There's times where I like, I know the next thing I'm gonna ride, but I don't know exactly what it's gonna look like. But I have kind of a big view of what it is. And I tend to be more of a forest first in the trees kind of person, like in every circumstance. I'm also kind of like bad at bird watching and things like that because I'm more of a

Eli (03:11.095)
Sure.

Elijah Davidson (03:27.31)
see the forest, not the trees, not the details kind of person. So I get like a feel for the forest and then I try to figure out what trees are there, what trails I gotta do, all that kind of stuff. So I'm currently in the forest is taking shape and I'm trying to figure out what goes where. So it's kind of a fun process. I've learned over the years to just trust that process and know that eventually I'll figure it all out. So it's fun though. Yeah.

Eli (03:35.062)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (03:51.36)
Yeah, no that's cool. I definitely can relate to that. I'm kind of like the, you know, get home wife says how was your day. Pretty, it was good, it was fine. That's the forest was fine, you know. Have to dig in for those details. But no, that's cool.

Elijah Davidson (04:03.181)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Other than that, I don't know. I've started, I'm always writing and exercising. I've had some fun. I've started doing a little review writing, but not for Fuller. So there's some Fuller stuff, but a little extra different on the side kind of review writing.

Eli (04:16.321)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (04:33.101)
kind of feel something out like a way of writing about movies that I'm interested in doing. So I've been doing that in my newsletter. When a movie really connects with me, I've been trying to figure out a way to write about it little bit differently. A little more personally, for the longest time I've been very particular about keeping myself out of...

Eli (04:41.142)
Yeah.

Eli (04:50.529)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (04:59.777)
like review writing and writing about films and put the focus in the movie. it was just a practice for a long time. And I'm now trying to work like how do I, how do I include myself in this experience in a way that's helpful for a reader and helpful to like, you know, because when you're writing a review, you're always just communicating your experience of the film in a way that hopefully opens the film up, I think, to somebody else. And so.

Eli (05:02.871)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (05:28.919)
Trying to work myself into that a little bit differently. It's been fun. But anyway, I've been doing that writing for my newsletter. I have an email newsletter.

Eli (05:34.912)
Yeah. Yeah. And I am subscribed to that. I did, I meant to bring it up before we started recording and forgot, but I did see that you had a very lengthy exploration of the new Mission Impossible movie. So that was fun. Full disclosure, I don't think I finished it. I think I got like halfway through and then something came up and then I forgot to go back and finish it. So I'll have to do that. But

Elijah Davidson (05:51.307)
I did, yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (06:00.213)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (06:04.566)
But I was little mixed on it. To me, the lows were low and the highs were very high. And it comes out as one of those really fun seven out of 10 movies for me. But I really enjoyed your enthusiasm for it as just a super fan of the franchise. yeah, that kind of personal element can be fun. Even if you're like...

Elijah Davidson (06:11.115)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (06:18.508)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (06:27.255)
Yeah, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (06:32.023)
Yeah.

Eli (06:34.122)
I don't necessarily agree on the take, but I love how much you love it. Like, I love reading reviews like that.

Elijah Davidson (06:38.337)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Me too, you know. And it's, I think if someone can like communicate their enthusiasm or their distaste, I suppose that could be fun to read too, or their indifference. That's kind of a hard review to write, is indifference. But I don't know. I'm kind of inclined to think if the writing is fun to read, you can write whatever you want.

Eli (07:05.078)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (07:05.101)
And then, you know, there's ethical considerations with staying true to the film and all that. But if the writing is fun to read, you can do it if you want. So I'm trying to work some of that in. So, anyway, it's been fun. Thanks for reading even half of it. I'll take that.

Eli (07:08.822)
Yeah, yeah.

Eli (07:13.696)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need it now. I need to go back and read the full thing. But yeah, so what just before we like get into the weeds of the movie and forget what if you want to like plug where you can sign up for that, what's the best place to do that?

Elijah Davidson (07:20.373)
You

Elijah Davidson (07:35.181)
Yeah, you can just go to my website. It's just my name, elijadavidson.com, and it's pretty easy to on there. Yeah.

Eli (07:38.946)
Cool. Yeah, yeah, I've done that once upon a time, but it's been a while, so.

Elijah Davidson (07:44.33)
You can even get a free little ebook when you do that too. So, kind of fun.

Eli (07:47.744)
Yeah, And you have a few of those. The Miyazaki was the most recent one. Yeah, cool.

Elijah Davidson (07:54.508)
Miyazaki was the most recent one. Yeah. There's also one on Christopher Nolan and One on Guillermo del Toro as well. So yeah

Eli (08:02.08)
Yeah, very cool. And I think the other thing that I always love to plug is the the Common See book, which you can also get an email form. I have the book, but I rarely I rarely open the book, but I read the emails every Sunday. So I think I'm at I think the last one was Umbrellas of Scherberg, which

Elijah Davidson (08:10.421)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (08:20.981)
Yeah, great.

Elijah Davidson (08:27.027)
fun, yeah, I like that one.

Eli (08:29.568)
Which I showed to my wife, she was not a huge fan, but I love it. It was a bit like, I think it was a bit too melodramatic for her. Yeah. And, but yeah, I love that one. We did musicals March, so we watched some musicals with the kids, but we also like watched some just us two back in March.

Elijah Davidson (08:34.338)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (08:39.964)
Yeah, it's a bit of a melancholy film for sure.

Elijah Davidson (08:48.876)
neat.

Elijah Davidson (08:56.493)
That's real fun.

Eli (08:58.678)
That was one of my picks that she didn't love, she appreciated it, I guess.

Elijah Davidson (09:03.895)
Yeah. Yeah. Even a bad movie is over pretty soon. So not that that's a bad movie. I mean, the movie you don't like, even movie you don't like is over pretty soon.

Eli (09:08.47)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely not a bad movie. It's actually a great movie. But yeah, go check out ElijahDavidson.com to see everything that Elijah's doing.

Elijah Davidson (09:14.879)
No, no, far from bad. Pretty amazing, Cool.

Elijah Davidson (09:25.773)
Yeah, come and see. I should say a little bit more about that actually. Yeah, I wrote this book and it's the 250 Greatest Films of All Time. And I wrote very concise devotions, devotional interactions with each of those films. So all 250. And there's a little written piece and then a little model prayer at the end.

Eli (09:28.8)
Okay, do it. Yeah.

Eli (09:36.833)
Yes.

Eli (09:46.518)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (09:53.165)
It does, it just takes you through film history and other ways to go through the material too, but just takes you through film history and you kind of learn about all the great movies and not the movies I think are great necessarily. I mean, I do think a lot of them great, but it's the movies that film scholars and filmmakers and film critics have kind of consistently as the greatest films of all time. So you learn a lot. I don't spoil the movies.

Eli (10:00.375)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (10:20.812)
It's like one movie in there that I spoil, but I warn you first. Everything else about spoil, so it's a fun way to learn about film history and learn about what I see God doing throughout film history. And then it's a book, but it's also a completely free email that you can sign up for. And like Eli was saying, can get, every Sunday morning, you'll get a new one in your inbox, and they just take you all the way through. it is a five-year email list. It's a long time of.

Eli (10:42.498)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (10:49.898)
getting emails from me every Sunday morning.

Eli (10:51.862)
Yeah, I don't know how long I've been in it to be at Umbrella's, but it's been a while. In the 60s.

Elijah Davidson (10:56.874)
Yeah, if you're Scherberg, you're more than halfway through and there's a lot of movies in the 60s in there. So yeah, you're moving along. I will say, just because, like whenever you sign up, you start at the beginning of film history. So even though Eli's at Umbrella's or Scherberg, if you sign up, you'll start right with the very first films ever made, and your way through. So yeah.

Eli (11:03.69)
Yeah.

Eli (11:11.382)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (11:19.084)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a running... So when I get the email every Sunday, I add it to a letterbox list. It's a private list because I don't want other people to be spoiled on what the movies are without signing up or getting the book. So it's just for me. But, you know, letterbox lists show you how many you've seen. And I've been hovering around 52 %...

Elijah Davidson (11:29.676)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (11:47.274)
Yeah, nice. That's good.

Eli (11:48.341)
51-52 and I think Umbrella's bumped me up to 53%. I was like, yes!

Elijah Davidson (11:51.757)
Nice. That's good. Yeah, when I started that project, I had seen about 55 % of the films that were on the list. So had a lot of watching to do, which was great. And then I had a lot of re-watching to do, because I re-watched everything that I wrote about too. But it was cool. I'm certainly a completionist now. Otherwise, I would be a liar. I don't know if you do that. I have another private list. I think it's still private. I don't think I ever made it public.

Eli (12:01.066)
Hmm. Yeah.

Eli (12:13.088)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (12:21.504)
the films as I watched them wrote about them. Like in my own private kind of like what's the best, what's not the best, what's better than whatever. So when I was all done with the writing project, I had like the 250 films, greatest films ranked as well, just privately, which was pretty fun.

Eli (12:23.531)
Okay.

Eli (12:27.062)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (12:34.464)
Yeah. Yeah. I don't have them ranked. I've just been like keeping them like a chronological running list. but, it would be quite the task to, to rank them. yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (12:41.919)
That's good. Yeah

Elijah Davidson (12:47.276)
Yeah, I had to just do it movie by movie as I added them in. That was kind of like my reward for having watched and researched and wrote about each film was I could add it to that list and rank it. Then I was done with that movie, I could move on to the next one.

Eli (12:58.881)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love, I love, I love like arguing about rank lists that actually like mean nothing, but it's really fun to just like argue with people about what's the best of whatever list you're making, you know? yeah, and we'll, we'll do that a little bit with a movie draft we're doing next week to go along with this, but, but, but the movie, we, should jump in.

Elijah Davidson (13:17.012)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (13:25.846)
Yeah, cool. It'll be fun.

Eli (13:31.266)
I'm glad you explained come and see because I just like mentioned it and didn't explain at all what it was. So that's But But yeah, go go check out again Elijah Davidson comm but now we're gonna jump right in to to bridge of spies Elijah mentioned that he was gonna try to get some sniffles Ready for this podcast in a email, but I haven't heard any sniffles yet. So

Elijah Davidson (13:37.556)
Yeah, no, happy to. It's fun. Thanks for mentioning it. I appreciate that.

Elijah Davidson (13:59.226)
Pretty healthy, pretty healthy.

Eli (14:00.29)
That's good. But we should start at the beginning like I always like to do. And actually a little bit before the beginning, we were talking a little bit before the podcast about this kind of run of films that Spielberg is in. And it's funny because I actually kind of wanted to like start off the conversation with that a little bit. So Spielberg has been

really since the kind of Jurassic Park Schindler's List, really like hook Jurassic Park Schindler's List, he's been on this run of like three films within like two years and then like a three-year break. And so this movie is actually coming off of a break after like a frenzy of projects. So he had 1010, War Horse, and Lincoln were the the projects that

actually came out, but he actually had some other projects that went through a lot of the process but just never came out. One, I had never really heard of either of these just because I wasn't plugged in back around this time to all this stuff, all these unrealized projects that might come out or might not. But one of them was

this based on this Daniel H. Wilson novel Robo-pocalypse, which I had never heard of. Have you ever heard of this Robo-pocalypse? Yeah, so there was this screenplay that Spielberg was working with from Drew Goddard, who just to name a few stuff that you might be familiar with, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias and Lost for TV, but he also wrote World War Z and The Martian adaptation. So

Elijah Davidson (15:33.994)
No, I haven't, no.

Elijah Davidson (15:53.718)
Hmm. Yeah.

Eli (15:55.202)
had a little bit of sci-fi adaptation experience there. But it was set for release in July 2013. At one point it was postponed to April 2014. They had Chris Hemsworth on board, I think as the lead, Anne Hathaway was signed on, Ben Wishall. some, honestly some actors that I would love to see work with Spielberg.

Elijah Davidson (16:21.141)
Yeah.

Eli (16:22.882)
They had a guy Hendrix Dias on board for production design, who, who had worked with Spielberg on King of the crystal school, but it's probably most famous for his work on inception. Um, which we did, you know, a little bit of, uh, callback. did an episode together for that. Um, yeah, this huge, it was supposed to be this huge month, like $200 million project.

and just it was just one of those things where Spielberg just never felt right about it and ended up just shelving it. So we'll never see the Spielberg robo-apocalypse movie, I think. I think at one point it got moved over to Michael Bay, which I would have been way less interested in seeing to be honest. But yeah, yeah, Transformers.

Elijah Davidson (17:10.101)
Yeah, you know they're friends. know they're friends. Yeah, they're friends. Spielberg produced Transformers and stuff. I can see, I've always found that curious that they're friends, that there's affinity there because there's so much about them that seems so different. And I remember reading one time about Spielberg telling Michael Bay, like, you shouldn't do any Transformers sequels, you'll get stuck doing these forever.

Eli (17:17.708)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (17:28.587)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (17:37.803)
And Michael Bay is like, I didn't really listen, I should have. That's funny. I can see it at that time too. That was like high Michael Bay working with Seamus Boberg time. So I can see how that would make it pass over. Interesting.

Eli (17:40.876)
Yeah.

Eli (17:52.8)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I do, Michael Bay, I do want to see that movie Ambulance that came out a few years ago. I've heard decent things about that, so, but never seen it. Another unrealized project was called It's What I Do. It was supposed to be an adaptation of a Lindsay Adario memoir, and it was supposed to be starring Jennifer Lawrence. So Adario was, I don't know anything about

Elijah Davidson (18:00.467)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Very good things. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (18:22.87)
this person or this project, other than she was a photojournalist. It was going to be a women-focused film, which we kind of talked about, you know, this run of political movies with the post kind of culminating in the post, which was a woman-focused film. So I guess he did eventually do his woman journalist film. It just wasn't this one. But yeah, interesting to see that he

Elijah Davidson (18:34.581)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (18:42.763)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (18:48.639)
Yeah.

Eli (18:52.15)
He had something like the post in the works before the post got picked up, but...

Elijah Davidson (18:55.307)
Yeah, I saw this too in doing research about this movie that this was one... I read a... I don't remember who it was in, but they mentioned that he was working on this. And I didn't look any more into it really, but it sounded a bit like... like Alex Garland's Civil War. Like, that's about, you know, a woman who's a photojournalist. And it's a fictional story, obviously. But I like it had some of the same DNA.

Eli (19:09.281)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (19:13.526)
Eli (19:17.11)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (19:24.239)
And it made me want to look up like how long Alice Garland had been working on that and if there just happened to be any crossover. know, there's always like, it seems there are always like similar projects floating around all the time. Yeah.

Eli (19:32.001)
Yeah, yeah.

Eli (19:36.738)
Yeah, Civil War is another one that I'd like to revisit sometime, but it was interesting, I think. I didn't know fully what to do with that one. So I think Spielberg would have...

Elijah Davidson (19:51.285)
Yeah.

Eli (19:55.778)
The Spielberg version of that would have been a little bit, I mean probably a lot different. But at the same time, know, it...

Elijah Davidson (20:04.04)
Yeah, I wonder. You know, I wonder, you know, he's...

There was a lot of full metal jacket in that movie. You know how much Spielberg loves Kubrick and worked with him. People always look at Spielberg as the sentimentalist, but he has that mean streak. It's kind fun to think about what his Civil War would look like. I don't know.

Eli (20:16.417)
Mm.

Eli (20:26.966)
Yeah, for sure.

Eli (20:30.859)
I mean he directed the opening of Saving Private Ryan. He's yeah, he's not always sentimental.

Elijah Davidson (20:33.926)
Yeah, yeah, so I didn't... That's right. So like I wonder like... It may have been something similar, you know? I don't know. Interesting. Interesting to imagine.

Eli (20:41.986)
Yeah.

Yep. Yeah, for sure. yeah. he, so Spielberg kind of talks about this time. He was, he kind of said, you know, obviously he's, he's had many like films that he's dropped during this time. he, he says there are no rules or set patterns. There are times when a project keeps me awake enough nights in a row that I ended up making it just to get some sleep. so, so some projects.

Elijah Davidson (21:10.314)
You

Eli (21:13.162)
I guess keep him awake long enough where he drops him and some where he just makes them. But he's also been, what I thought was cool was just realizing like, or just sometimes we forget that directors, like directors and actors are like actual people with families at home and stuff. And when you think of it in that light, it makes total sense that he was taking these like.

Obviously he's working as a producer and stuff still in those those off years, but that's that's way less intensive work than being on a movie set And so getting a lot of years with his family In there so but at this point he mentioned that his youngest Child which they had seven Both biological and adopted children

Elijah Davidson (21:50.538)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (22:08.546)
His youngest was starting college. So now he's like empty nest. I'm getting back to work. So that's kind of what he's he's coming out of that season of having the family at home and it's I think that we maybe that might come up a little bit with just kind of the content of this movie and There's a little bit of there's definitely the dad stuff in there

Elijah Davidson (22:34.634)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (22:36.066)
that might come up as we dig into it a bit more, but That's where Spielberg is But as as we know like Spielberg a lot of times Gets he's I mean he's a he's a movie mogul now So a lot of projects that he ends up doing at this point are projects that come to him Not always projects that

he like thinks of himself. So this movie actually started with a young English playwright named Matt Sharman. He pitched the idea to DreamWorks, which he had found, he had kind of found after this like bunny trail of research he did. He discovered this Donovan guy that was a lawyer in this footnote of a JFK biography he was reading.

where it talked about, you know, JFK sending him to negotiate with the Bay of Pigs situation and coming away with not, it's kind of that, that ending title card at the end where he goes in to try to get a thousand people and ends up getting 9,000. So he's like, well, that's interesting. Let me, let me read more about this guy. Then he finds out that Donovan was connected in the movie industry. He had worked with John Ford and George Stevens on this one hour.

documentary about the death camps in Germany and Poland. He was credited as the legal supervision on those.

Elijah Davidson (24:10.44)
Yeah, I've heard, you Spielberg said that was like the most graphic Holocaust footage that anyone's ever shown and that it was only shown at the trials and then not shown after that. Yeah.

Eli (24:18.636)
Hmm. Right. Yeah.

Eli (24:24.97)
Yeah, yeah, and so he did, but he also, I think, did some legal work at the trials as well. Uh-huh. And so, yeah, so he's digging into this guy, and eventually he comes across this kind of Abel's Abel Powers exchange story connected to Donovan, and that's what he ends up latching onto and starting to build this story out. So

Elijah Davidson (24:33.82)
Right, yeah, he's a lawyer. He's part of that.

Eli (24:53.898)
It's interesting that he went through all that other stuff and finally came down to this one, and that's the one where he was like, this is the story. This is the story.

Elijah Davidson (24:57.631)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (25:01.928)
Yeah.

Yeah it is. it's funny because you would think like, negotiating big pigs and getting all the people. There's a movie, you know? Yeah.

Eli (25:10.198)
Yeah. Or even like testifying at the Nuremburg trials and, you know, working with John Ford, you know, there's a movie. But no, goes down to this one. And of course, this story, when it comes across the DreamWorks desk, it appeals to Spielberg. Anytime something that like connects to his childhood in some way comes across his desk, he's like, ooh, this is mine. And this is...

Elijah Davidson (25:15.238)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Huh.

Elijah Davidson (25:29.31)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (25:35.433)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Eli (25:39.842)
I mean his dad was... his dad went to the Soviet Union as a part of an engineer exchange that they did. And so his dad was over there and like saw the YouTube plane and the pilot suit of powers displayed as kind of like this is what they're doing. He was like harassed by some German

soldiers at one point when because he he had an American passport and They were like look what your country's doing to us and stuff. And so his dad came back telling him those stories But also Steven Spielberg just grew up in that Cold War era So he was near a military base in Phoenix when they moved there in 57 Like the height of the Cold War, you know paranoia

Elijah Davidson (26:17.747)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (26:25.619)
Yeah.

Eli (26:39.97)
He even said that, like, I read that he, as a kid, had looked at, like, how the blast radius was and determined that his house would get blown up if they bombed that military base near Phoenix. Just like, he was a very anxious kid, Spielberg, which he talks about a lot. And so that, the whole, like, filling the bathtub with water, he did that.

Elijah Davidson (26:54.057)
Mm.

Eli (27:08.714)
a kid at one point his dad came home and the the tub was filled with otter and he was you know telling him you know we've got to be ready or whatever so all of that like all of those Spielberg childhood anxieties Matt Charman ends up like working into the script as we see and yeah

Elijah Davidson (27:24.881)
Mm-hmm. It's fun to see him like it's fun to see him tackling like that Cold War thing like very directly and to to center it so much on like a normal guy and Like a pretty normal family because I feel like like the Cold War like hangs over a lot of his movies Going back. I mean going back so far. I mean like you could you could say like there's there's like Cold War

Eli (27:33.43)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (27:42.338)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (27:55.22)
kind of anxiety stuff like built into close encounters, you know, like it's definitely in there or ET, you know, the way the way the government operates in ET feels very Cold War-ish. And then it, you know, it can be a little bit more explicit in things like, in something like, like Munich or Kingdom of the Crystals, Crystal Skull, you know, has explicit Cold War stuff in it, but it...

Eli (27:58.402)
Sure. Mm-hmm.

Eli (28:04.544)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (28:18.498)
Sure. Yep.

Elijah Davidson (28:22.439)
But this is very much like, we're gonna make a spy movie. We're gonna make a good old spy movie and do it straight forward. I think that's cool to do explicitly. I think there's an aspect of all of these, I call them social conscience movies that he makes here in a row here with Lincoln Bridge of Spies and The Post, where they are a bit more on the nose and explicit about what they're about.

Eli (28:39.084)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (28:51.244)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (28:52.585)
They're almost preachy, but it kind of feels like you're your uncle telling you what matters. Sitting you down over a holiday and telling you what matters in the world. And so think it's okay that it's a little bit more like directly Cold War, we're doing this thing kind of thing. Yeah.

Eli (28:59.5)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (29:10.592)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And Munich was that too. And I would, I would say war horse is equally like along the same line. Like it's not as, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, it's still political. It's a war. It's, it's lighthearted in moments, but also very serious in moments and, and, definitely has like a very direct message about what we should take away from.

Elijah Davidson (29:17.629)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (29:32.201)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (29:36.841)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (29:39.726)
historical event through the eyes of that horse. So yeah, I mean he's really on a roll with with this sort of stuff. It's interesting to see him using his cache with society, the pull he has to really lean into messages he thinks are important.

Elijah Davidson (29:43.763)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (29:48.105)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Elijah Davidson (30:05.703)
Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about this when you were talking about this stage of his career where he's... things are coming across his desk and he's trying to decide what he wants to do. There's a lot more projects where he talks about doing them or there's rumours that he's going to do them but he didn't do them. That's kind more common in this part of his career. It feels like to me there was an early part of his career where there were movies he wanted to make.

Eli (30:17.57)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (30:34.473)
He wouldn't make any movie he could. Like he was just like happy to just do a lot of stuff. And then there becomes a point in the middle of his career where it feels like he's making them. Now he has like all the cachet to do it every once. Now he's going to make the moves that really matter to him. You know, like really, really matter. And then, and then we get like, I was trying to decide where I think the line is. I think it's somewhere, somewhere around like AI, like saving private Ryan and AI. And kind of after that.

Eli (30:35.874)
Yeah.

Eli (31:00.384)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (31:04.485)
It feels like he's being a little bit more like responsive, a little more searching, a little more like, yeah, let's try this now. let's try this now. Let's do this now. And there's a little more apt to experiment a bit. But all these movies, I I would say really from like Minority Report on through, they have a moral weight to them where it's like he's trying to do something.

Eli (31:18.134)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (31:33.699)
useful and good for the world. Yeah, it feels like a bit like like The Lost World was the last one where he was like, okay, I'm just doing it because I have to do it. And then after that, like all these movies have a purpose. Yeah, it's cool.

Eli (31:35.689)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (31:45.408)
Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. Well, well, I think, I think like all the way up until Schindler's List, he just like, he was, he was taken seriously as a filmmaker, but not as serious, not seriously as like, like an artist with a capital A, I guess, you know, which, you know, I think me and you would both say is like a little bit like

ridiculous that he had to like that he had to endure that criticism but I mean criticism is criticism and you know he's

Elijah Davidson (32:19.3)
No way. mean, yeah, when you break Hollywood by making Raiders and Jaws and yeah, Jurassic Park eventually, but there's some self-criticism going on there. when you break new Hollywood and create the blockbuster, you're going to get a lot of people who aren't going look at you as anything other than someone who makes theme park rides and sells toys. Yeah.

Eli (32:26.658)
Yeah, Jurassic Park. Well, yeah.

Eli (32:36.364)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (32:44.098)
Mm-hmm. Yeah Yeah, and so I think when when he made Schindler's List and proved like no no I can do this too I think proved proved to like the world, but I think especially like proved to himself Because you know as much as like we would we would like to say like Artists like Spielberg like just make it for the art like he like he puts a lot of

weight in what people think of his work. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think a lot of the great Spielberg movies we get are because he does have his audience so heavily on his mind. And so, you know, there's space for those sorts of artists too.

Elijah Davidson (33:16.783)
It really does, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (33:27.784)
Yeah, yeah, it's been kind of fun to figure out like, because he obviously cares and he'll like, he's one of those directors who will say like, yeah, I screwed that up. Like he'll talk about Hook and say that Hook's not very good. He's kind of responding to like audience, like feedback on that, you know, or he'll say like, yeah, I shouldn't have changed the guns in ET and he'll fix it back, you know, because people are upset about it. But I've noticed that he doesn't really listen to

Eli (33:37.92)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (33:46.882)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (33:53.378)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (33:57.777)
like critics or whatever, he listens to people, like actual fans of the movies and like has a, it seems to be very good at figuring out what people really think about his films. No filmmakers are like that, they can't separate the things. It's cool.

Eli (34:01.676)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (34:15.574)
Yeah, yeah, I think it is cool. And I think, I think with that Schindler's List kind of like proving himself to, you know, the critics and to himself. I think at that point, like you said, he, did, he did do like the Lost World is kind of like, you could probably say is the last like one, but I mean, all the ones after that have some sort of like, even the fun ones.

Elijah Davidson (34:25.938)
How about to himself? Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (34:43.654)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (34:44.098)
like War of the Worlds, I mean, it's very much like a 9-11 coded movie, you know, and so even like the fun ones like War of the Worlds still have that.

Elijah Davidson (34:50.018)
Absolutely, Yeah.

Ready ready player one. There's one that's like you could say it's like light and nothing, you know But there's like a whole self-criticism thing going on throughout that movie or maybe even a I mean you haven't gotten there to that one yet Yeah

Eli (34:59.403)
Yeah, sure.

Eli (35:03.873)
Mm-hmm.

The BFG is maybe the only one. Tintin, think has no message. It's just a fun movie.

Elijah Davidson (35:15.176)
It's so complicated, 1010 is so complicated though, right? Because on one level he was never supposed to direct it. And it was just kind of a complicated production. I feel like Ready Player One is the same way. He ended up doing it because he was like, well, I don't want anyone else to do it. And if like, Bob Zemeckis can't do it, I guess I'll do it. Because I don't want anyone else to mess this up. Because the other version of this that somebody else does is really crap. So I might as well be the one.

Eli (35:20.204)
Sure, yeah.

Eli (35:27.084)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (35:36.61)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (35:43.958)
Yeah, for sure.

Elijah Davidson (35:45.128)
And he fixes things that are wrong with the book and stuff like that. anyway, every once in a while there feels like one where he's like, OK, fine. I think with 1010, he wanted to play with the technology as much as anything else. Anyway.

Eli (35:52.81)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (35:57.376)
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and rightly so we, you know, we talked about that a lot on that episode and it was one of those, if you haven't listened to that one, it was a, it was a good one because I had some like, I didn't go for 10 10 all in. it was a bit, it was part of that is maybe because I'm doing the series where I'm like so focused in on Spielberg and like 10 10 to me was just like watching Spielberg like

Elijah Davidson (36:14.833)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (36:23.399)
Yeah.

Eli (36:27.486)
play with a new thing, is fun, but it ends up being very distracting for me. But my guest, Daniel Howitt, really loved it. He was like, yeah, I loved watching Spielberg play. That's a fun one to listen to because we have the same take, but totally different perspectives on it.

Elijah Davidson (36:29.703)
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Yeah, it is. It's very distracting. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (36:46.491)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (36:55.473)
Yeah. It's a weird movie. I enjoy watching him play, for sure. But that's one where you're like, whew. I mean, it's kind of like if Superman just decided to let loose and do whatever the heck he wanted, you know? It's like, whoa, dude, you got to check your powers because you're Superman and that's not good. That's kind of what watching 1010 feels like to me. It's like, Spielberg, you could do a little too much.

Eli (36:57.504)
and

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Eli (37:10.176)
Yeah. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Eli (37:19.106)
Sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (37:22.791)
Why don't you just check yourself a little bit? But he does play. He does play though. And I feel like a lot of these movies are him playing in different ways or just trying stuff out. It almost feels like he takes some of these projects because it would be fun to figure out how to do them. And yeah, we'll talk about more of that with Bridges of Spies because there's a big part of why I like Bridges of Spies is I feel like you can feel him figuring it out.

Eli (37:26.555)
man, but yeah, I mean.

Eli (37:39.138)
Mm-hmm.

And I think...

Elijah Davidson (37:51.656)
as he goes along. a kind of a, there's a like a wet clay aspect to Bridge of Spies that I don't feel with a lot of his movies that are a whole lot more, you can tell they're much more planned out. And anyway, we'll get to that, but yeah.

Eli (38:03.468)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, and I think this one is, this one, it feels, it's been a while since I've seen Lincoln, and that episode will have already been out at this point, but I'm actually recording it after this, so I'll be revisiting it soon. So I don't, you know, I'll, this opinion might be like reversed after I revisit that, but this feels like one of his just most

Elijah Davidson (38:16.505)
Love Lincoln. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (38:22.085)
Lovely.

Elijah Davidson (38:30.481)
Yeah.

Eli (38:36.406)
And this is just how it turns out, like the end product, you know, setting aside what he does along the way. But it feels like one of his most just like a classical straightforward story. You know, you go straight through, there's not anything like super flashy. Like even the Kaminsky cinematography is just like just right on the line. Like it doesn't cross the over-stylized line.

Elijah Davidson (38:47.578)
yeah.

Elijah Davidson (38:55.91)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (39:01.489)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eli (39:04.876)
They're really, they're really like, he's really like holding the reins in on this one, it feels like.

Elijah Davidson (39:09.157)
Yeah, yeah, he's very I mean he's working in that like That like John Huston mode, know, like he's definitely trying to do the he's trying to make the kind of movie He would have loved watching when he was a kid And there's only like one the one the only sequence that kind of deviates in that is the actual YouTube crash Which is full of all the things you can do now, you know And but even though and but that it's okay to have one sequence like that, especially when the rest is so it's great Yeah

Eli (39:13.856)
Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah.

Eli (39:20.288)
Yes.

Eli (39:35.062)
Yeah, I enjoyed that sequence. I thought it was well made. But yeah, this is like, yeah, I like that you say that this is like a movie he would love to watch as a kid. I think this is like the great version of Always, which is the other movie he made that he would have loved to watch as a kid. And Always just doesn't work for me. Yeah, yeah, I even watched

Elijah Davidson (39:53.403)
Hmm. Yeah. Uh-huh.

It's weird, it's a weird movie. Yeah, it's amazing how unlikable Richard Dreyfuss can be.

Eli (40:04.93)
Yes, I even watched like the original one and that didn't help at all and yeah

Elijah Davidson (40:11.339)
Yeah. What a strange movie that one is. I like his weird movie though. I mean, it was funny, know, my wife and I, I just, I don't know, I get these like, itches, intuitions, I don't know, where I just have to watch a movie and I really know why. And it was a few months ago and I, I just like, I don't know, I to watch Bridge of Spies. First time watched Bridge Spies tonight, I turned Bridge Spies on. I had no idea why. And I,

Eli (40:28.727)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (40:40.419)
As I was watching, was like, I wonder if Eli's done that. I gotta find out. And the message was like, if you do this, I want to do this movie. Which is so weird, because it's not like my favorite of his movies. even as this has been coming up, I'm like, part of me is like, I should have said Lincoln, because I love Lincoln. Like, I love Lincoln so much. Like, it's like top tier Spielberg for me. And I've done like tons of research on Lincoln and written like lots of things on Lincoln and all this stuff.

Eli (40:57.42)
Yeah.

Eli (41:03.201)
Yeah, okay.

Eli (41:08.93)
Mmm.

Elijah Davidson (41:09.767)
whole presentations on Lincoln and all this, whatever. I don't know, Bridgespice is a little bit more fun to talk about for me, kinda for the same reason that I feel like it was fun for Spielberg to make, because it just is, it just is more...

Eli (41:12.002)
Very cool.

Eli (41:19.532)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (41:29.509)
It's not a rough draft. There's nothing rough draft about this movie at all. But it's more just kind of off the cuff and looser in a way than what I feel like a lot of his movies are.

Eli (41:31.636)
No, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Eli (41:39.392)
Yeah, I'm skipping way ahead in the notes, but I think this is relevant. I wrote down this quote. This is, it's not a quote. it's more of like a summarization, of, so Molly Haskell is one of the, has one of the books that I've been like reading through as, and this is actually the last movie covered in that book. so I won't have that going forward, unfortunately, cause she has some very like interesting perspectives from like,

Elijah Davidson (41:56.625)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (42:00.804)
In the book, yeah.

Eli (42:09.206)
kind of a feminist worldview on Spielberg, but she had noted a Manola Dargis review at the time that found, she said in her review that this movie was less weighted down by a creeded history or a sense of duty to its significance than Lincoln or Munich. And I think that matches totally what you're saying.

Elijah Davidson (42:25.254)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (42:29.477)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean even Spielberg says doesn't say it's a true story like they don't put that on on it like they just kind of like because they he said because we Take as many liberties as we do that. don't consider a true story even though it's I'm pretty accurate to like yeah, what happened?

Eli (42:40.17)
Yeah, they took so many liberties.

Eli (42:47.84)
It is. Like the example he gave in, there's like a, I think it's actually the first episode of the director's cut, which is like the DGA podcasts where they record filmmakers having conversations about their films. I don't know if you've ever listened to that, but I think it was the first episode of that podcast feed was Bridges Spies, but it was Scorsese and Spielberg talking about this movie.

Elijah Davidson (43:05.008)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (43:12.378)
Hmm. Huh.

I have watched that video. Yeah, it's an amazing conversation. It's so much fun to watch those guys talk. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (43:18.56)
Yeah, it is. It's great. But I think in that he was talking about like, you know, we didn't put true story, like most of it is like true with just like, I tweaked it for dramatic effect, you know, and the example he gave was the shooting, the house scene. Yeah. Like at that point in Donovan's real life, they had actually moved into an apartment when the house was shot at.

Elijah Davidson (43:30.0)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (43:34.147)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (43:38.528)
Shoot through the window.

Eli (43:47.904)
He wasn't even living there at the time. Yeah, they weren't in it. And then there was only like one bullet that went through the window and Spielberg was like, you know, I had, I put it up to like five bullets to the window and Scorsese was like, well, I would have done way more than that. so it's like liberties like that, like for dramatic effect, he felt like it was important to show, you know, it was, think this too, like shows like.

Elijah Davidson (43:48.314)
Yeah, so they weren't in it. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (43:58.629)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (44:16.842)
just the importance of Spielberg and his like collaborative crew at the time because originally there was a lot more family scenes in the movie that ended up having to get cut out. Spielberg, you know, he just talks about, you you kind of learn even all these great scenes that we filmed with the family, like they just don't push the story forward in the way that you want it to. But this is like the one...

Elijah Davidson (44:22.822)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (44:46.08)
the one like big family scene along with like the little dinner table one that that does enough like in that in that short quick moment to to build that family relationship the way it needed to be built. So yeah, it's just it's just kind of like the the wisdom at this point of his career of knowing like how to work with work with Michael Kahn to edit edit out what needs to be there and what what doesn't.

Elijah Davidson (44:51.067)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (44:56.464)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (45:11.824)
Yeah.

Eli (45:16.009)
And yeah.

Elijah Davidson (45:17.552)
So I've got, I wonder if this is the time for this or not. I'm gonna tell you, there's something I do wanna talk about with this movie, and it maybe should come up later. I'm gonna tell you what it is, and you tell me to hold it, okay, if it should come up later with the production history. So I have a theory of what exactly it was about this story that drew Spielberg to it, beyond the fact that his dad saw the U2 play. Like I...

Eli (45:26.644)
Okay, okay, let's do it.

Eli (45:41.419)
Okay.

Elijah Davidson (45:42.375)
I have a little theory. I have no, it's just my own little theory. As far as I know, he's never said this thing that I'm going to say or commented on this aspect of the story. So, wait for that? I'll hold that a little bit. Okay, yeah, I will.

Eli (45:54.644)
Mm-hmm. Let's let's hold it. Let's hold it Yeah, let's hold it because I think that'll be interesting As we dig into like our thoughts on the movie Let's let's along with talking about Michael Kahn. Let's like talk through the crew real quick So we you know Spielberg produced it with a couple

Elijah Davidson (46:02.822)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (46:07.076)
Okay.

Elijah Davidson (46:12.485)
Yeah.

Eli (46:22.89)
I think I can't remember if he's produced with Mark Platt before, I recognize that name. Chrisky, Christy McCosco-Kreiger didn't recognize her name, but she was all up in the special features.

Elijah Davidson (46:34.618)
I she's the German producer because this was a co-production and they filmed a lot in Germany. really? Huh. interesting. And they hired a bunch of German crew and they shot over there, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean, who knows? There had to be somebody though.

Eli (46:41.002)
She didn't have a German accent though in the... yeah, not at all. Yeah, they did. Yeah. Yeah, I... yeah, I didn't... I just... I forgot to click on her little letterbox profile to see what else she's produced. But she might be important. I just... I didn't recognize her name at all. Screenplay is where it gets...

Elijah Davidson (47:00.731)
Yeah.

Eli (47:09.054)
interesting. You have Matt Charman, who we talked about already, found the story, wrote the script, pitched it to DreamWorks, but once the script was completed, it must have been Mark Platt's kind of like idea, because he's the one that talks about it in the special features. They sent it to the Coen brothers, so Joe and Ethan Coen have a pass at the script, and

I think, you know, I think it's one of those things where like they are like what people talk about with the script. I think it's Matt Sharman's script. so from what I can tell just from like what's what I've heard in Spielberg interviews and just from like the reading I've done, the Coen's really like, just like tweaked up and tailored and like perfected the dialogue sequences. So especially like the negotiations.

Elijah Davidson (47:48.622)
Yeah, I think so too. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (47:56.1)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (48:04.697)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (48:08.066)
Anytime like the anytime there's like those those quick exchanges with hanks and someone that's like That's where you feel the Coen's come through And so like the whole like your guy my guy like Spielberg explicitly said that was coat the Coen's It does and then the whole like the whole like a little bit

Elijah Davidson (48:15.118)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (48:19.543)
Yeah,

Elijah Davidson (48:28.203)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it feels like the Coen's. Yeah, it does. It almost stands out a little bit, quite honestly. Yeah.

Eli (48:35.936)
The thing that stood out to me that I was like, this is 100 % Coens is when he gets to East Germany and you have like the fake family there. I was like, this is Coens all the way for sure.

Elijah Davidson (48:43.393)
huh. Yeah. huh. Yeah. Yeah. It is kind of funny. I started feeling bad for Matt Sherman when I was reading about the movie because I was like, this is really his thing. Like really his thing. And everyone just talks about the Coens all the time. And they kind of stand out and I'm not sure. Like I think Tom Hanks, who's worked with them before, kind of knows their thing. And then Mark Rilett seems that he can do anything.

Eli (48:55.266)
Yeah, me too. It is.

Yeah.

Eli (49:09.9)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (49:13.189)
It just kind of like, it ends up working because they can do it.

Eli (49:17.536)
Yeah, and I don't even know that they really wrote. I don't it seemed from what I can tell like we'll never know exactly what what they did, but it seems to me that they weren't really doing any a whole lot with the able scenes. I think they were doing Yeah Yeah and and the other thing that like they That you that you'll read and hear hear spillberg say is that they kind of like took the

Elijah Davidson (49:32.109)
Right. Yeah. Just trying to help the negotiation thing. Yeah. Makes sense.

Eli (49:47.348)
Donovan character and infused it with more of Tom Hanks personality Which if that's something they did I think that is a really big part of the movie because at one point I was watching this movie and I told my wife after it because she's a huge huge You've got male fan. I was like, this is Joe Fox like just just a little older And as a lawyer, know as a lawyer, but it's totally like you I felt Joe Fox

Elijah Davidson (49:52.527)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (49:57.967)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (50:04.645)
Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah.

Uh-huh. Joe Fox is probably a lawyer. be real, he's probably a lawyer.

Eli (50:16.35)
He could be, yeah. But yeah, I felt that character all through this and that character also feels like infused with Tom Hanks's personality, you know.

Elijah Davidson (50:29.069)
Yeah, yeah, I think it was like that when I got like, when I had that itch where I had to watch the movie, I think what I kind of figured out was that it was that thing that I wanted to spend some time with. Like his lawyeriness and the way that he negotiated and the way that he like, the particular way he was able to like...

Eli (50:44.364)
Hmm. Yeah.

Eli (50:51.158)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (50:58.199)
It's not just that he's trying to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. He's trying to let them accomplish what they want to accomplish as well. And trying to convince them that the best way for them to accomplish what they want to accomplish is to let him accomplish what he wants to accomplish. And trying to keep all the egos down throughout all of that and keep the focus on the thing that they're doing and not on any way that they might feel about what's going on. And the particular way that he kind of

Eli (51:05.154)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (51:24.834)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (51:29.109)
negotiates all of that. I that's the thing that I needed when I needed to watch this movie more than anything else. I don't know if there's stuff going on in my life where I found myself in some negotiating positions or just trying to learn how to be involved in a situation in an ethical, broadly speaking, ethical way to stay true to yourself throughout it.

Eli (51:49.098)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (51:58.863)
but then to also have that little bit of distance that he has in those moments of like, we're trying to accomplish something here. If I can step back a little bit from this and kind of work the room, work the situation more than the person, maybe we can get this done. I think that's the thing I like that I felt like I needed in that moment. And it's all there. mean, it's all in the way that he interacts, the way that he talks.

Eli (52:15.394)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (52:22.486)
Yeah. Well, we're definitely jumping around in the notes, but like one of the things that I had noted was when you pair this character with Lincoln, which I'm sure you'll, being a huge fan of that, will be able to speak to, you really see like some of like Spielberg's obsession at this time. And one of the big ones is like,

Elijah Davidson (52:37.806)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (52:52.246)
these men like kind of standing up against all odds and you know, justifying their actions with their moral values, but doing it in a way where they're like adapting the rules of the game because they know the system is rigged. So like you kind of see that with Donovan in this. He kind of like adapts, like he kind of figures out, okay, like they're not gonna let me

Elijah Davidson (52:56.846)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (53:01.218)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (53:08.078)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (53:21.674)
go through due process in a legitimate way. So, like, how can I keep my moral values and do what I feel like I need to do, but play it on their terms? Which is interesting. And I think... I don't know, it's... I heard recently someone talking about, like, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and how, like, when she passed away, like...

Elijah Davidson (53:34.937)
Yeah.

Eli (53:51.7)
all of the justices that you would think like would have hated her, like loved her, and it's because she operated in this way where she kind of adapted and she stood on her morals and what she thought was right and fought for those things, but did it in a way where she was able to like come alongside people and befriend them and play and even like do things the way she wanted, but on their terms.

but still get done what she wanted to get done. Very interesting for sure. And you see that with Lincoln too. I just got done listening to the abridged version of Team of Rivals. Super, super. I want to eventually listen to the whole thing, but it's like 41 hours on the audiobook and I didn't have time for that. Fascinating the way

Elijah Davidson (54:26.008)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (54:34.754)
Yeah, love that book.

Elijah Davidson (54:40.504)
Yeah, it's a great book. Yeah, it's a big one.

Eli (54:50.966)
that Lincoln operated in that same kind of way.

Elijah Davidson (54:54.594)
Well, yeah, it's funny, know, I said I love Lincoln. And there are definitely some similarities between, I mean, I would say all three of these movies, I would include The Post as this other like conscience movie in here. And in all three of these movies, you have someone who's trying to do what they see is the right thing with a lot of people around them trying to get them to not do that. And they're having to be people of moral conviction.

Eli (55:04.032)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (55:24.228)
see that through. What is very different about all three of these movies though is how much power the person has who is at the center of the story. Because Abraham Lincoln is the of the United States. I mean, it's heavily contested, but he is the President of the United States. He is willing to turn every dial, use every lever, anything he can do. Some of it may be questionably legal by his own admission.

Eli (55:33.292)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (55:39.646)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (55:54.049)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (55:54.277)
Because the question is the legality of it all anyway, so he has to do it to find out if he can do it or not. That's part of being president in his case. But he's not sure exactly what the rules say he can do, so he's going to try to do anything he can. He's a man of great power, but Donovan's not a man of great power. That's kind of the whole deal with him. Like, you know, when they send him over to Germany, he is...

Eli (56:00.097)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (56:23.446)
explicitly not a representative of the United States government. He's just a guy. He's just a guy. No one's going to save him. He's just going to do this thing. He's just a man. He's just an American who believes in America and the things that it stands for. And he is someone who can't bend the rules. It's very important that he not bend the rules in the way that Lincoln does. He has to know and believe what the rules are.

Eli (56:25.974)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (56:46.677)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (56:52.832)
and live for them. Absolutely. He's going to find every way he can to make the rules work for him, but he exists in many ways to remind people of the goodness of the rules themselves. Very different, and that way very different than Lincoln, think. And very interesting. With Lincoln, think you have a movie where Spielberg is like...

Eli (56:56.066)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (57:14.903)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (57:21.024)
looking at what's going on during the Obama administration and the kind of divisions that were exacerbated throughout that time and the way that people and leaders in our country, people in power, were not working together. And it's only gotten worse since then. But could see then just how their unwillingness to compromise, their unwillingness to work together was just a non-starter. Like you don't have a country when you're not doing that anymore.

Eli (57:29.078)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (57:35.562)
Right. Yeah.

Eli (57:45.922)
Hmm.

Elijah Davidson (57:49.342)
And he made a movie that showed a time that was arguably even more divided and how people of courage, Tommy Lee Jones' character, for instance, in that movie, like how they were willing to find the conviction to reach across aisles and to work together to accomplish something greater than them. But now here we have, in this movie, we have a man who is no one special. He ends up doing special things.

Eli (57:59.714)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (58:17.667)
He's a gifted negotiator, but he's just a man with a family. And he has to believe and hold up. It's kind of like Spielberg saying like, yeah, your leaders got to do what they're supposed to do. But the people have to believe in this thing as well. The people have to hold this if it's ever going to survive. Because the people are the one who hold the people and hold the leaders to hold them accountable. We have to be better than them. Normal people have to do it.

Eli (58:32.375)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (58:47.523)
which you'll get to, bit of a messier film, I think. it's about business leaders, it's about captains of industry, it has to be journalism in this case, but there are others who are running that, who are on the board of that newspaper. And it's like, what do they owe society in that kind of power? So different positions of power in how that works out, but yeah.

Eli (58:58.188)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (59:11.99)
Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's like, I think that's it. That is a big thing in the script is this kind of like, you know, this persona that Tom Hanks is like leaning into in this, at this point of career, his career of the every man that I think that I think. Right. And he's not trying to be cool either in this movie. Like he's way beyond that and is in his career. and it, yeah. And I think.

Elijah Davidson (59:27.425)
Yeah, every man, yeah. It had to be Tom Hanks. It couldn't be anybody else because Tom Hanks is every man. No, no.

Yeah.

Eli (59:41.282)
think that's what drew maybe Charmin to this part of Donovan's story in particular is because at this point he really like... I think there's a degree to which like, this guy wasn't just a nobody. He went to Fordham and Harvard. He was

Elijah Davidson (59:47.618)
Yeah.

Eli (01:00:10.866)
He did some stuff with the Nuremberg trial. like he's He's an attorney like that's very well respected apparently But the way that I think what? Attracted Sharman and then eventually Spielberg to this is just that thing like the okay. What is it about? This guy where he can get way more than he's ever supposed to in a million years, you know, like, you know that footnote that Sharman

found him in, where like he gets 9,000 people when he was sent to get a thousand, is just like fascinating. Like who is this guy? I've never even heard of him. You know, this kind of like blip in American history that did something so big, and then this is where it all starts, kind of. And so I think that really, and I think that's like, you know, the Coens did

Elijah Davidson (01:00:41.784)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:00:46.488)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:00:51.16)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:01:03.725)
Yeah.

Eli (01:01:10.572)
did I think great with the character personality and the dialogue sequence they did, but I think Sharman's script really does like, is where all that is found in his, you know, his script. So shout out to Sharman. He got the short end of the stick with the screenplay credits on this one, but I think he did a great job. Yeah. I mean, so our...

Elijah Davidson (01:01:25.698)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:01:32.472)
Yeah. Yep. Me too. Did you did you hear that? Did you read the thing about he had been pitching the story around and then he he got he got he got told that Spielberg wanted to be pitched directly. He wanted Spielberg to pitch him directly. And yeah. And so like he he was like expect a phone call. And so like the phone rang. It was Steven Spielberg. And he was like, I want to I love your I love your

Eli (01:01:50.987)
no, I didn't hear that.

Elijah Davidson (01:02:02.947)
I love your pitch. Like I want to hear it. Pitch me." And so like he just like, he was, he said he was like so nervous. He like, he like, he said like stripped down to like t-shirts and boxers because he was like sweating so much and like was like so nervous about it all. And he just like started talking and like telling the story and like, you know, pitching it to Spielberg and he like went on for a long time and there was like no sound. And he like paused, there was like no sound on the phone and like paused for a second. And then Spielberg was like, I'm loving every word of this. Don't stop talking.

Eli (01:02:05.794)
You

Eli (01:02:14.717)
Hahaha.

Eli (01:02:32.994)
Yeah Yeah, that's so cool. Spielberg thrives on like people excited about stories Because he's the same way like when he's excited about a story it seems like Especially when you like look at behind-the-scenes stuff in his younger days, and he's just like he's so excited and and like not that he's not when he's older But just that young energy, you know

Elijah Davidson (01:02:33.059)
It's like he kept going again or whatever and said he wanted to make the movie.

Elijah Davidson (01:02:42.913)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:02:47.927)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:02:53.623)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:02:57.091)
Yep.

Elijah Davidson (01:03:00.951)
Yeah, he just has that, he always, kind of like Squarcese, like there's a little bit of, that conversation between both of them is so good, because they both have this thing where like, they're like some of the most famous and accomplished filmmakers of all time, right? And yet there's still an aspect of them that you can feel the kid that's like, I can't believe I get to make movies, you know? Like every movie I get to make, I can't believe I get to make movies. And I can't believe I get to work with these great people, but I can't believe I get to make movies. Yeah. So fun.

Eli (01:03:06.783)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:03:16.844)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah. man. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, just to run through the rest of the crew. A lot of these are like, so some of these are like new, you know, kind of the typical Michael Kahn editor, Janusz Kaminski, DP. You got Adam Somner, assistant director, has been working with Spielberg forever. Same with Mitch Dubin with the camera.

You have Gary Reidstrom doing sound. But you also get some new names. Thomas Newman doing the music. I think John Williams, I think he said was dealing with some sort of illness. I think also working on Star Wars.

Elijah Davidson (01:04:14.368)
Yeah, this was, this is, yeah, this was fascinating. So I read him, I heard Spielberg talking about this. He said that he has a deal with John Williams that he will always do Spielberg's films. And whenever he signs on to do something else, that whenever Williams signed on to do something else, there's a thing in his contract that says, I can pause doing this to go work on something for Spielberg if he has a movie coming out. And so he had the same deal on Star Wars.

Eli (01:04:39.69)
wow.

Elijah Davidson (01:04:42.858)
He worked on The Force Awakens, what he was working on at the time. And so it was all lined up to do. He was going to stop doing that and spend two months doing Bridge of Spies. Because there's only about 30 or 40 minutes of music in the movie. It's not a square heavy film. And he was going to just step aside, do that, and then go back to working on Star Wars. But he had heart problems, and he had to have a stint put in. And his doctor told him, like, you're fine. You're going to be fine, but you can't.

Eli (01:04:45.066)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:05:04.418)
Yeah. Oh, wow. OK.

Elijah Davidson (01:05:12.64)
do any, you can't do any of conducting work, anything like that for like seven weeks. And it just knocked out the time he was gonna use to work on this. And so Spielberg, said, Spielberg said it was the worst phone call he's ever received. Was both finding out that he was, that John Williams was having heart surgery and that he wasn't gonna be able to the score for Bridges Spies. Yeah.

Eli (01:05:16.225)
Wow.

Eli (01:05:20.45)
Yeah, that stinks.

Eli (01:05:25.127)
man.

Eli (01:05:30.945)
Right.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Thomas Newman, good composer. mean, he's done some Pixar work, Shawshank, I think. But yeah, and there's a degree to where it was kind of like a breath of fresh air. I've been listening, I've been just like hearing John Williams scores nonstop through this series.

Elijah Davidson (01:05:40.169)
yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:05:43.508)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:05:58.211)
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Eli (01:06:00.322)
And I've shared a few times that there's a degree to which like they all start to like blend together and sound the same at some point That's why that's why I like catch me if you can has become like my favorite John Williams score Because it's so different but But yeah Thomas Newman. He did a good job. There's not a whole lot like you said in this movie And it it's not it's kind of like the rest of the movie. It's not really overbearing

Elijah Davidson (01:06:06.902)
Always doing that John Williams thing.

Elijah Davidson (01:06:13.194)
It's fun. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:06:21.868)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:06:28.588)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:06:29.418)
which I think is strong.

Elijah Davidson (01:06:31.97)
That's how movies were in the 50s though. I mean, that's what these movies were like. They used to have like a theme. You'd have music come in in moments to really punch up something. for a lot of the time in those old movies, they're scoreless for the most part. Yeah.

Eli (01:06:45.056)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think maybe it was good for this movie that Thomas Newman did it, because Williams has a tendency to really amp up the emotion for better and for worse, I think, in some instances. I would say mostly for better, but sometimes for worse. And I think in this movie, we'll never know. But Thomas Newman did a good job, I think.

Elijah Davidson (01:06:58.999)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:07:05.27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:07:14.536)
yeah, he did a great job.

Eli (01:07:15.426)
Another newcomer was Adam Stockhausen who even Spielberg in that little interview with Scorsese was like, yeah, that's the guy that does all of Wes Anderson's movies. Because anytime I see Adam Stockhausen, was like, that's the Wes guy. And so it felt good to like think in the same way as Spielberg for that half a second. yeah, Stockhausen.

Elijah Davidson (01:07:28.076)
Yep.

Elijah Davidson (01:07:32.544)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:07:38.092)
Yeah. That's fun.

Eli (01:07:43.394)
He's a great production designer obviously To to put together all those Wes Anderson's sets. This is way different than that But looks great. I Mean yeah Yeah Yeah, and this does feel very real like this like between his work and Kaminsky's which you know, it's funny because Kaminsky sometimes can

Elijah Davidson (01:07:50.561)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:07:57.046)
I mean he enjoyed it working in a real world and not a Anderson world.

Eli (01:08:13.282)
His like the haziness of his movies can become like over stylized in in good ways but sometimes in like distracting ways Like that's to me like Minority Report I think I would love even more if like I wasn't blinded by backlighting like every five seconds and that's just like a stylistic choice that doesn't work for me, maybe it works for others, but

Elijah Davidson (01:08:20.768)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:08:25.505)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:08:35.999)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:08:42.112)
I still really love Minority Report, but that was like one of the weaker things, but he's really toned down. And Adam Stockhausen, I guess, is toned down too from his typical Westfair. And this one looks great. I think the locations are doing a lot of work too. Usually production designers are all up in the location scouting.

Elijah Davidson (01:08:42.251)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:08:54.283)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:09:04.171)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:09:11.382)
So I'm sure he had a lot of decisions on that, but he wasn't in the special features, so I don't know. Probably. Ellen Lewis does the casting, she's done, yeah, a bunch of Spielberg stuff. And then, yeah, costume, so here's where you definitely get some, you get some Germans with the set decoration, Bernard Henrich, that's gotta be a German guy.

Elijah Davidson (01:09:17.121)
Hmm, probably busy working on a Wes Anderson movie.

Elijah Davidson (01:09:28.683)
greats.

Elijah Davidson (01:09:39.969)
Yeah.

Eli (01:09:41.408)
Marina D'Angelo probably not but costumes Casilla will become my mom my mom who knows how to say that name she does but I don't Good costumes in this movie. It's just when you don't notice the costumes. I think that's a good thing I Guess not always it's good to notice them. But yeah They do the coat man

Elijah Davidson (01:09:50.671)
You

Elijah Davidson (01:09:55.08)
yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:09:59.916)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:10:05.525)
Costumes play a big part in this movie. It gets his coat taken away. It's a huge thing. Gotta have that coat.

Eli (01:10:11.386)
Saks Fifth Avenue. Is that what he says it is? Yeah, yeah, Saks. it's Tom Hanks, fourth collaboration with Spielberg. This is a good like decade-ish after The Terminal, so it's been a while. I guess would their TV work have come out in between there maybe?

Elijah Davidson (01:10:13.941)
huh. Sex.

Elijah Davidson (01:10:29.343)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:10:38.441)
Yeah, they did the miniseries between there, right? Yeah.

Eli (01:10:40.424)
Yeah, it seems like it. Band of Brothers, I think, was around that time. So it's not like they haven't been working together, but just not on feature films.

Elijah Davidson (01:10:47.552)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:10:52.309)
Yeah, Band of Breeders and what's the Pacific. Yeah.

Eli (01:10:54.56)
Pacific yeah But yeah, this is not not the last collab he comes back for the post but But yeah close to last and you know of course Spielberg didn't really have anybody else in mind for this part and if Tom Hanks gets a call from Spielberg, then he's probably gonna say yes, so

Elijah Davidson (01:11:18.401)
Yeah. Yeah, you needed Gary Cooper. See, you needed our Gary Cooper. That's Tom Hanks.

Eli (01:11:23.958)
Yeah. Yeah, Hanks, he's ready to go, loves history, loves military history, like dude just likes history, so he's all on board. Mark Rylance is a little bit of a different story. He's somebody that Spielberg had kind of circled what I read was like for 30 years. He had been kind of aware of Rylance.

Elijah Davidson (01:11:39.157)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:11:47.179)
Yeah.

Eli (01:11:52.256)
He saw him in a performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in London and was like, I've got to get this guy.

Elijah Davidson (01:11:59.104)
Yeah, because he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for like 25 years or something like that. He was the first director of the Royal Shakespeare Company as well, think. I read that. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:12:04.085)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:12:09.218)
something like that and from what I can tell he did a lot of also just a lot of like reimagining of stuff and just a lot of creative work with those with those productions

Elijah Davidson (01:12:22.753)
It's kind of fun to read about someone like that where people like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg know about this guy because he's like a legendary stage actor. I've heard of him before because I don't follow stage acting. For them to be geeking out over the fact that they get to work with Mark Rylans is pretty fun. It's fun to think of Tom Hanks geeking out about getting to work with somebody. It's cool.

Eli (01:12:31.563)
Right.

Eli (01:12:35.819)
Exactly,

Eli (01:12:41.92)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:12:46.912)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, Spielberg, I guess like when you're a movie producer, you just like have to be tuned in to playwrights and stage productions like Warhorse, obviously they made because they loved the play. The Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall saw it and then they were like told Spielberg, you've got to go see it. So he went and saw it. But yeah, mean, yeah, he's he goes to

Elijah Davidson (01:12:58.115)
yeah.

for sure.

Elijah Davidson (01:13:10.986)
Yeah.

Eli (01:13:16.63)
to plays and it's like, sees Rylance and he's like, I've got to get this guy. Obviously like idea, ideal for this particular character too, cause it's a Soviet spy, but born and raised in Scotland. So ideal for that. It doesn't have to do a Russian accent. but yeah, I wrote down this Spielberg quote about Rylance. He said, Mark played it with inscrutable ease, which I think is

Elijah Davidson (01:13:30.539)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:13:35.489)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:13:46.272)
great description. He goes on to say, invites you to look deeply into him to try to discover his secrets, and we get inexorably drawn into his character. Then we're left with a decision on our own moral values. Do we want to like him, or will we prevent ourselves from liking him too much? And I wrote that down because I think it just comments very well on what Rylance is doing with that character, which is just enough to like...

Elijah Davidson (01:13:47.989)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:14:15.86)
make you wonder more about this guy.

Elijah Davidson (01:14:19.292)
Yeah, yeah, I love, I love spy movies forever. But you know, most of the time, spy movies are, you know, there's someone like James Bond, you know, or like it's someone that like, when that guy walks in the room, everybody in the room looks at that guy, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hunt, Jason Bourne, you know, it's like, these people are not invisible. But like when you read about like,

Eli (01:14:24.706)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:14:32.448)
Right, yeah.

Eli (01:14:39.614)
Ethan Hunt, you know?

Eli (01:14:46.946)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:14:49.264)
actual spies. Being invisible, being not noticed is everything. And to be like a just a small, unassuming, forgettable human being, that's a spy, you know? Nothing interesting about you at all, if you can manage it. And he plays that so well, you know?

Eli (01:14:50.519)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:15:03.458)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Eli (01:15:10.806)
Yes. Yeah, Rylance is... So one of the things that I loved was hearing Spielberg talk about Hank's talk about Rylance. Spielberg shares a story about how after their... the first thing they shoot together is that first meeting and after a few takes Hank's like...

pull Spielberg aside and he's like, first of all, this guy is incredible. And second of all, he's like, I've got my work cut out for me because I've got to keep my guy in his talkative, energetic character. And Spielberg talked about as an actor, sometimes it's tempting to match stillness or quietness with stillness and quietness.

Elijah Davidson (01:15:57.824)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:16:06.848)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:16:08.962)
which can be a mistake, and in this case it would have been because the Donovan character is not a still quiet character. And so, but it just it was cool to see like Spielberg recognize that, but also like Hanks immediately just as an actor recognize, okay, like I've got to work really hard to not fall into that temptation as an actor and

Elijah Davidson (01:16:12.532)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:16:18.56)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:16:34.912)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:16:37.064)
just speaks to also it speaks to like the the acting acumen i guess of hanks but also like just the black hole gravity of that rylance brought to that part yeah yeah

Elijah Davidson (01:16:43.945)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:16:52.672)
of a great actor doing a great job, you know? Yeah, totally, totally.

Eli (01:16:58.272)
Yeah, just like, I mean even just micro, you know, expressions that he makes that you can tell like something's turning around in that mind, but you just don't know what it is. And I love characters like that, you know.

Elijah Davidson (01:17:10.783)
Yeah.

I think it's pretty, mean had, Ryan's had done like a few little roles before, just a couple of small roles. Nothing, nothing that's in the middle of things. I think it's pretty amazing that he was good enough to know being a stage actor and doing Shakespeare, you know, and stuff like that, which is very, which is much bigger. It has to be much bigger. Like to know how to be so small.

Eli (01:17:18.57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:17:31.756)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:17:41.792)
and so still and to give just these small looks that do everything. Because that's film acting compared to stage acting, you know, to make that switch so good. Yeah.

Eli (01:17:45.302)
Yes.

Yeah, and the pauses too. Like pregnant pauses like he like kills in this movie. You know, there's moments where like he looks at You know as as able like glances at at Donovan for like, you know, it feels like longer but it's probably like one and a half seconds or so before he makes his remark or whatever it is and that like

Elijah Davidson (01:17:54.644)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:18:15.956)
Yeah.

Eli (01:18:17.886)
one and a half seconds is like so full of something, you know, you have to you have to kind of like figure out what you think that something is, but

Elijah Davidson (01:18:21.332)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Elijah Davidson (01:18:27.328)
And it does, it's kind like in that quote, like, you have to decide what you're going to do with him. And like Donovan has to decide what he's going to do with him, like in those moments, right? Like it's almost like Kuleshov effect of a human being, you know, where like, he's giving you nothing. He's giving you nothing, but like a very blank kind of thing that invites you to project upon it. And like, so everybody else in the world is looking at...

Eli (01:18:39.458)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:18:55.936)
is looking at Abel, Abel, Abel, right? Yeah, yeah. And seeing, everyone in America look at him and seeing a evil Soviet spy train a horrible person. And they're just projecting that onto him. And Donovan has to go through the work of not doing that. Of thinking, well, he may be those things. He may have done great harm to this country, who knows. But he is still owed

Eli (01:18:58.902)
Yeah, Rudolph Abel, yeah.

Eli (01:19:13.42)
Right.

Elijah Davidson (01:19:23.85)
He's owed our justice. If our justice means anything, he's owed it. And having to like not project that stuff on him. How hard that must have been to do. As for a human being, just for Donovan to do that in the real world, in the real life, to not do that. So hard.

Eli (01:19:33.632)
Yeah, I mean...

Eli (01:19:38.304)
Yeah, Yeah, I agree. It's one of those things that like, I would love to think I would be the same in the same situation, but there's just, there's just so, it's so hard when you're actually in those situations to, because it's like, it's the epitome of like loving your enemy in a way, that whole idea.

Elijah Davidson (01:19:53.312)
It's hard. It's hard.

It's scary.

Elijah Davidson (01:20:07.148)
huh. Yeah. It gets you...

Eli (01:20:08.13)
And loving them and not in the sense of like, you're like loving them like you love your family It's it's a love your enemy in the sense of like you're going to do your best to Help them be treated as a human And that's

Elijah Davidson (01:20:23.271)
Yeah. It gets at like why that is such a daring thing to do. Because the reason that we want to like project suspicions or to decide about who a person is, is that then we can deal with that thing that we decide that they are. We can protect ourselves from the harm that they might otherwise do to us. But letting someone be ambiguous,

Eli (01:20:43.938)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:20:53.119)
Taking that step away and like Letting like letting them be whoever they are and still doing the right thing you put yourself at risk in that situation And Donnie puts himself at risk. I mean quite like quite literally Yeah, the whole time and it it's that's that moral courage thing, you know that Amazing. Yeah, and it's great that it's like right there in the performances You know as much as it is any in the story itself is right in the performances and the way they interact with each other

Eli (01:21:06.252)
himself, his family.

Mm-hmm. For sure.

Eli (01:21:17.537)
It is.

It is.

Elijah Davidson (01:21:22.345)
Yeah, so cool.

Eli (01:21:24.052)
Yeah, yeah, were there any other like characters or actors that stood out stood out to you in this? Because there's a lot there's a lot of them. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:21:32.384)
There's a whole bunch of people, I know. It's tough though, right? Because those two actors and those two characters are so... They're not big, but they're kind of big. They have a lot of gravity. They're dense. Everybody else can kind of get lost a little bit, but they don't really get lost. But it kind of can almost feel that way sometimes. They don't matter as much. Francis Gary Powers, I think that...

Eli (01:21:46.966)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:21:55.264)
Right. Yeah.

Eli (01:22:02.199)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:22:02.76)
Austin Stowell does a terrific job in that role. It's also a hard role.

Eli (01:22:07.756)
Mm-hmm.

It is, there's not much to work with.

Elijah Davidson (01:22:12.745)
There's really not, but it's really important for us to understand the way that the rest of the world felt, the rest of America felt about that guy. And there's almost like, this parts of me when I watch that, every time I watch this movie where I feel like, I wish there was like an extra half hour that just gave us more about powers and like helped us to, like, we're already asking these moral questions about Abel and about Donovan and whatever.

Eli (01:22:15.03)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:22:22.55)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:22:41.363)
Let's, and the movie does ask them about powers, but like, let's just do a little bit more, you know, cause there's, there's a whole extra like layer of that going on here as well.

Eli (01:22:43.65)
Yeah.

Eli (01:22:51.318)
Yeah, I almost wonder though if that's like, choice was like, okay, for to do that with powers would be like preaching to the choir and that's not as interesting as like, let's do it with the guy that we're not supposed to like, you know, I think, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:23:04.916)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:23:10.015)
Yeah, oh for sure, yeah. and I mean, Donovan doesn't really interact with powers, so it kind of would take it away from his story a little bit too. It already feels like you're a little bit away from his story when you're with the stuff with powers.

Eli (01:23:16.555)
Right, right.

Eli (01:23:20.416)
Yeah.

Eli (01:23:24.95)
Yeah, that's one of my only quibbles with, if I have any. It's hardly a quibble, but just all of those powers, sequences, it's not anything to do with Stowell as the actor or even the writing. It's just within the structure, you feel like you're being pulled away from the real story a bit in those moments. But it is necessary.

Elijah Davidson (01:23:30.943)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:23:49.631)
Well, it is an

Eli (01:23:53.226)
So it's a catch 22 really.

Elijah Davidson (01:23:56.479)
I think it's two things. think it's probably something that Spielberg really wanted to shoot and a story he wanted to tell. He didn't want to cut that out because one of reasons he wanted to do this was because of the YouTube plane and his dad seeing it all that kind of stuff. So there's a personal aspect to it. And I think he just wanted to fly a YouTube bomber around and film it. And he wanted to make it explode. All that stuff was fun to do.

Eli (01:24:10.454)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:24:16.663)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:24:24.222)
The guy who was making war movies with his Boy Scout troop wants to make the YouTube play going down, you know. And so there's that. But it's also, it is narratively important. But it's more than important, I think more though, it's thematically related. Because it gets back at that thing about how we look at someone and judge them for what they've done, what we think they've done or haven't done. Because everyone was doing that to, know, Francis Gary Powers, people.

Eli (01:24:26.725)
huh. Yeah.

Eli (01:24:35.819)
It is, yeah.

Eli (01:24:46.988)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:24:54.302)
talk about they think he should have died with the plane. If he hadn't died, then this would have a problem. So that is thematically related too. So it's fine.

Eli (01:25:01.056)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think I think too like maybe to a lesser degree, but it's still there. I think with the Frederick Pryor Even that's sort of there. Like what does that do doing over there? Like what what was this dude thinking? Like he maybe he deserves to be you know in the German prison, know, he's he's not worth our time. Yeah Yeah, uh-huh which I you know, I think powers does I think

Elijah Davidson (01:25:17.969)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:25:21.444)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, the student. I know. Yeah, he's funny. He's almost like a bonus, right? Yeah

Eli (01:25:33.366)
Both of those actors do a good job of kind of projecting this. It's a similar blank slate to Abel, maybe a little less blank. You still have to like project onto them what you think of them because you don't see, you don't see enough, I guess with Prior you see him like trying to save the girl and stuff. So you get a little bit with him, but you don't see a lot of

who they are, other than maybe that, other than maybe like the scene, the interrogation scene. But even then you're like, you don't know if he said anything or not. So there's a big bit of like, like you said, parallel there with the blank slate. You have to project onto them what you think.

Elijah Davidson (01:26:04.391)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:26:13.608)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:26:22.898)
Yeah. I mean, you also have, I mean, you have to have Pryor as well because he is part of what Donovan does. He gets him out. He uses that as part of his negotiation. And if they cut that hole out, like you would have missed one of the points on your triangle that he's trying to work out. So, a little lost tension.

Eli (01:26:30.401)
Right.

Yeah. The whole, it's one thing.

Eli (01:26:40.001)
Right.

Yep. I think those actors do good. I think the few moments you get with Amy Ryan are good as his wife. A little, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:26:52.478)
Oh yeah, uh huh. Spielberg's mom stand in. Now, now, now it's like every time I see someone like that in the Spielberg movie, like, oh, that's just his mom. That's Spielberg's mom. I love Amy Ryan. Not much to do.

Eli (01:26:59.81)
I mean, yeah, she's good. Yeah, I mean the Vogel character I think is good. Sebastian Koch. I don't know how to say that name. He's solid. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:27:11.528)
Yeah. Yep.

real quick on Mary Donovan, I'll say, like Spielberg talks about when his dad said he was gonna go do this engineer exchange thing or whatever, like goodwill exchange, that his mom was so angry at his dad. they had to like, they had to like, they had a big fight with the kids present and then had to like make up and figure it out later or whatever. But like she was very upset about it. I think.

Eli (01:27:23.874)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:27:40.684)
Yep. You feel that resentment in the movie, I think. The looks.

Elijah Davidson (01:27:44.755)
you too. whether it was like whether whether Mary Donovan really felt that way about what Ray was doing. Like I think like Spielberg had to have that in there because that was what he experienced, you know.

Eli (01:27:54.552)
yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, you definitely feel the... I think I even wrote in my notes scribbled like, resentment from the wife at one point, like you really feel it. I mean, at the dinner table sequence, it's there, but it's especially there like after the... and rightly so after the shooting. The other...

Elijah Davidson (01:28:08.207)
huh. Yeah. Yep.

you

Elijah Davidson (01:28:20.264)
Yeah.

Eli (01:28:24.57)
I'm trying to find in my... the other character that I thought was really good was... where is the guy? Mikhail Gorvoi? Yeah, yeah, the guy that he first meets when he gets there that's like... the character I think is Ivan Shishkin? Shishkin? Yeah, he's great.

Elijah Davidson (01:28:38.395)
huh. Yeah, the Russian guy? Or German guy, guess? Or whatever. Yeah. He's great.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:28:50.311)
Uh-huh.

Eli (01:28:53.75)
That one was very like co- again, that whole like sequence was like very Coen's brother- Coen brother feels and that character definitely had that feel to him. So maybe that's why I liked him. Yeah. That kind of like sly, like smooth talk- talkingness to him for sure is there. Yeah, I mean a lot of the other characters are like, they like-

Elijah Davidson (01:29:00.509)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:29:04.542)
A little bit of a quirk to him.

Eli (01:29:23.38)
So it's it's one of those spillberg things where he can build a character very efficiently when he wants to and so it's one those things where all the other characters kind of like Fall into the background of donovan and abel, but they still feel fully formed in a way it's this like magic. I think that spillberg is able to do with with the way he I mean it's it's got to be

Elijah Davidson (01:29:38.61)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:29:47.634)
Yeah.

Eli (01:29:51.85)
It's got to be there in the script for him to work with, but I do think it is just how good Spielberg is at like, I mean, just think about like the, the scene with the daughter, you know, being stood up and his like junior lawyer assistant guy, like coming in, it's like, you get everything you need to know about his daughter, even though that's the only time you hear her or see her really. all you need to know about her, all you need to know about his

Elijah Davidson (01:30:18.525)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:30:21.79)
assistant all from that one like thing. And you know, you forget about them, they just kind of fade into the background, but in that moment they feel like fully formed characters. And I just love that thing that Spielberg does with that. I guess we should also mention there was a Jesse Plemons sighting in this movie.

Elijah Davidson (01:30:33.533)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:30:46.973)
There is, Jesse Plymouth's jump scare. There's a bunch of those back in the teens before we knew who he was.

Eli (01:30:54.164)
Yeah.

man. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely, you definitely don't know who he is in this movie. He is not, he is not the, he's not the Jesse Plemons we know and are frightened of now. I think my favorite Jesse Plemons character is still Game Night, though. But yeah, I mean, he's fine in the movie. He's just...

Elijah Davidson (01:31:03.143)
Yeah, he's not really there.

Elijah Davidson (01:31:10.289)
No.

Elijah Davidson (01:31:18.149)
yeah, he's so good.

Elijah Davidson (01:31:25.745)
Yeah, tie a little roll.

Eli (01:31:26.038)
kind of only there for yeah two minutes maybe. I also really liked Max Malf who plays the Harold Otz secretary for that one scene. I think because it's a very good scene but I think he kind of has that like anxious assistant energy really well so figured I'd shout that guy out too.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the production before we... and then we... I think out of the production we'll jump into your theory, because I'm excited to hear that. So yeah, this was made between September and December 2014. They started in New York City. I think Spielberg mentioned this is the most he had ever shot in New York, because I mean you do get a good

Elijah Davidson (01:32:05.819)
Okay, cool. Yeah.

Eli (01:32:25.534)
guess half the movie in New York. They were in Brooklyn, they were in Astoria, Queens, lower Manhattan. So they really just spent a lot of time shooting in New York, which he said was a great time. Other locations, they went to Bill Air Force Base out in your neck of the woods in California for the YouTube plane stuff.

Elijah Davidson (01:32:26.108)
yeah, half the movie.

Elijah Davidson (01:32:51.197)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:32:55.746)
I think they... so I'm pretty sure the U2 plane was like a... built in like 1980.

Elijah Davidson (01:33:05.489)
But they said the program was still in operation, they still do YouTube's fine stuff.

Eli (01:33:07.862)
Yeah, they're still used. Yeah. I kind of doubt they have gigantic cameras coming out of the bottom of them anymore. That kind of cracked me up. They might. I don't know.

Elijah Davidson (01:33:16.601)
Right. Maybe they do though. Yeah, maybe they do though, you know? We wouldn't really know. got IMAX cameras sticking off from the bottom of the sticks. They gotta get... They gotta get...

Eli (01:33:25.058)
But even even IMAX cameras are like a portion of the size of the ones you see in the movie. Those things are huge.

Elijah Davidson (01:33:31.907)
Yeah, I mean they probably do. I they got to get like really high resolution like pictures from really really far up. You you would need a really large aperture to be able to do that. Yeah.

Eli (01:33:40.032)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:33:45.504)
Yeah, I guess so. That's true. it's just, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, this is real, but like the size of it is just kind of comical. cause you just, you're not used to seeing lenses that big. but yeah, they, those things. So I think they were hitting like, I think they say 70,000 feet in the movie, but I think that at the time, I think I read that that was like the

Elijah Davidson (01:33:55.663)
Right, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:34:00.153)
huh, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:34:10.887)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:34:15.246)
altitude record at that point in time. But they couldn't brag about that because they didn't want anybody to know. But yeah, nothing digital in the plane takeoff stuff. They just were driving vehicles along the U2 plane really taking off. But really the only thing digital in the whole movie is

Elijah Davidson (01:34:17.159)
Hmm.

Wow.

Elijah Davidson (01:34:23.421)
Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, that's whole point.

Elijah Davidson (01:34:36.529)
Yeah.

Eli (01:34:44.182)
the crash sequence. You've got the actor in a cockpit on a mechanical arm in front of a blue screen for that sequence, but it looks really good. They did a really, really great job with that. The digital effects movie magic worked for that one. I think they had just enough practical stuff with the like...

Elijah Davidson (01:34:46.331)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:34:57.712)
It does, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:35:06.385)
Yep.

Eli (01:35:13.258)
real cockpit that he was working with, you know, for it to work. yeah, love that stuff. It's kind of a throwaway part of the movie, but really exciting to watch. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:35:17.297)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:35:29.157)
yeah. It's almost like, I I thought it one of those days, like, well, if I'm going to do this movie, I'm going to do this thing. You know, let's put this on film. Best we can. Yeah.

Eli (01:35:34.592)
Yeah, might as well. Yeah, I mean, then they go to Berlin. After about a month in New York, they go fly to Berlin. They already have like a second team working there. Hank's, Tom Hank said it feels like a city of ghosts, which I thought was an interesting observation. Definitely see that being the case with the history of the city.

Elijah Davidson (01:35:55.463)
Mm.

Eli (01:36:03.97)
But yeah, they shot at Templehorf Airport, which had been converted into a park in 2010. And so they did a lot of the shooting and building of sets there. One of the only things they didn't do there in Berlin was the Friedrichstrasse station, which is where they have the checkpoint line that he cuts in line at.

They weren't able to shoot that at like the actual station because it looked too modern. They found like another one nearby that worked better sort of thing. But then they to get all the wall sequences, so like the the kind of border with the wall building and all that, that was all in Roklau, I think it's how you pronounce it,

Elijah Davidson (01:36:33.83)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:36:51.387)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:36:57.948)
Hmm.

Eli (01:37:02.06)
Kaminski and other people talked about like this was like on the border. So it used to be a part of Germany So it had like very German architecture, but then also like in Berlin Everything's kind of been rebuilt And so you don't really have anything that looks like early 60s Berlin anymore, whereas they found in this town in Poland. There were still some

you know, a good bit of streets that had very like 60s Berlin feel to them, even like, you know, bombed out street kind of stuff going on. And so yeah, they, I mean, they built a wall. I think, think Spielberg said a good like 300 yards of wall there along one of those streets. They even had like advisors of people that were there.

when it went up and were there when it was up that kind of like advised them on what to do for that, what it was like. So yeah, I mean they really went for it for that, for the wall, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:38:05.915)
Huh.

That's cool. That's cool. I have this weird life thing that I do. I like to see pieces of the Berlin Wall. They're like in museums and presidential libraries and stuff like all over the place now. They're just all over the place. They're usually set up somewhere where you can touch them and get real close to them and stuff. I've never been to a piece that's a walled off wall. It's always something you can interact with.

Eli (01:38:20.951)
Yeah.

Eli (01:38:25.228)
Huh, okay.

Eli (01:38:37.217)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:38:39.074)
And I don't know why, the first one I ever saw was at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. And it just like really struck me. I mean, because that's like the wall. It's like a huge deal, right? Like it's a huge thing. And like it's a symbolic, hugely symbolic, but like the actual literal thing too. And it's always neat to see. I've seen.

Eli (01:38:47.756)
Okay.

Eli (01:38:53.002)
Yeah, it is.

Eli (01:39:01.302)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:39:05.53)
half dozen pieces of it standing up in various museums and stuff now and I don't know it's a thrill. I'm trying to put the whole wall back together in my mind what I'm trying to do so one day I'll all the pieces. Yeah.

Eli (01:39:10.434)
gonna have to keep an eye out for that now. Yeah, you gotta experience all the pieces that are still in existence. It is cool though, like there's not very many like important pieces of history like that that you can just go up and touch. There's something very like tactile about that that I'm sure is interesting.

Elijah Davidson (01:39:30.426)
Yeah, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I've never asked, one of these days I'm gonna ask one of the museum curators at one of these museums where I see this thing. I'm like, why can you always touch this? Like I can't touch anything else here, but like I can always touch the concrete wall, you know?

Eli (01:39:42.624)
Yeah, I guess you can't mess it up. It's a cement wall. Yeah.

Man yeah, I mean They did so, you know, I guess that's where stock housing comes in. They did a really good job with that the

The only other location that I really noted was the Gleneke Bridge, which is...they even have now a sign up that says Bridge of Spies, kind of commemorating this moment. But yeah, they were there for like six nights. So this bridge is like...it connects

Berlin to Potsdam, it's like the East-West connection, and so that's why it was so important. And it was closed all during this time, it was closed to civilian traffic. It wasn't opened up again for traffic until after reunification. So yeah, what you see in the movie, it was just like that, that whole time. I'm assuming they had,

the towers with people with rifles up in them just constantly and

Elijah Davidson (01:41:05.613)
Yeah. Yeah, like the DMZ in Korea, you know? Yeah.

Eli (01:41:09.664)
Yeah. Yeah. So just wild. It's just wild to me to think about a city. You know, I was, I was born after this all, you know, kind of was resolved. And so it's just, you know, I guess Korea just feels so, so distant and I don't really think about like that in Korea much, but so it's just wild to me to think about there's here's this city.

Elijah Davidson (01:41:35.471)
Yeah, an actual thing,

Eli (01:41:38.636)
that's like split in half. It's literally like, I mean, you can have aunts and uncles on the other side that it's just, yeah, just mind blowing to think about that that was going on. Yeah, I mean, and then you have like, they talked about one day they're celebrating the 25th anniversary of the wall coming down and the next day they're shooting Tom Hanks on that bridge. So I mean, yeah, just.

Elijah Davidson (01:42:05.349)
Huh, yeah, wow.

Eli (01:42:07.938)
So, I mean they had high emotions on set with all that going on too. I mean, freezing cold. And then the other cool thing about The Bridge was Spielberg and I guess some others of the probably Tom Hanks, I'm sure, and other people got invited to meet the German Chancellor Merkel, who was

Elijah Davidson (01:42:11.15)
Yeah, I'm sure.

Elijah Davidson (01:42:21.307)
Yeah.

Eli (01:42:37.898)
I had to look it up. didn't I don't really know a lot about German politics, but basically the Chancellor of Germany is like the president and so Yeah, I mean not exactly but it for all intents and purposes. It's yeah right Sure, right, right So they got to meet her but and then she actually came out to the bridge for to the set one day and you know shaking hands and stuff so

Elijah Davidson (01:42:45.305)
Yeah, yeah, that's kind of, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:42:51.971)
Yeah, she's like the administrative leader. I think it's kind of more like the prime minister in England.

Elijah Davidson (01:43:03.087)
Huh. Neat.

Eli (01:43:06.902)
I thought that was cool. Yeah. yeah. as far as the, way the movie looks, I think it looks really good. think Kaminsky did a good job. We, we've talked a little bit about that, but, I guess like the most like, I guess interesting thing that's like a, a strong choice is to the

Elijah Davidson (01:43:07.461)
Yeah, I'll go meet Tom Hanks, sure, absolutely. That's why I became chancellor in the first place, just in case this happened.

Eli (01:43:36.022)
to kind of split with a fade to black fade back in in the middle of the film from like a colorful vibrant New York to like the blue gray the classic Kaminsky blue gray cold haziness of Berlin.

Elijah Davidson (01:43:44.901)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:43:49.924)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:43:54.564)
Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot about this every time I watch it, like how much I like the look of the film or not.

Eli (01:44:02.37)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:44:07.919)
I don't know, Spielberg kind of goes through a, I he's in middle of it, right? He's in the middle of it with this movie. But his, he likes a lot of blue and gray. There's a lot of blue and gray in a lot of these movies. And if he's not blue and gray, he's deeply saturated colors. And there's kind of nothing, like in the 90s, the movies felt a little bit more real. And he's like moved far from real.

I feel like in all these movies in the 2000s and on.

Eli (01:44:35.97)
It's almost like going back to the 80s, the way movies felt in the 80s. This very hazy fantasy feel.

Elijah Davidson (01:44:40.635)
It kinda is.

very hazy fantasy, even when the story is very realistic. And I don't know, there's part of me that would like him to work with someone other than Jonas Kaminsky. Because they start to feel a little samey. And it's one reason I love, I think it works really well in Lincoln.

Eli (01:44:46.337)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:45:02.466)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:45:02.683)
Because you can everything's muddy and smoky and that just kind of works a little it makes more sense But in but that's why West Side Story. I love watching West Side Story so much because West Side Story feels different It looks kind of different. It's much sharper less less magic haze everywhere and I don't know I just

I like that a lot. Fable Mints too. Fable Mints is not magic, not magic, glowy lights in the same way. Super realistic. I'm hoping, I'm optimistic that maybe Spielberg and Joonas have moved out of their, have moved out of their, this era. Yeah, I don't know. I love the movie and I understand why they did what they did, but I'm a little bit like, okay, fine.

Eli (01:45:34.178)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:45:50.752)
Yeah Yeah, I mean it's it's like it's the way I feel about it so, you know I've just I've been watching these like So the last one I've I've kind of like watched and covered I haven't done Lincoln yet but you just spoke to that but warhorse is is it it has that feel of like the color purple Empire of the Sun where it's like it's almost like

There's this like fantasy haze of like this is like this is a story, but it's also like a fable and To be honest like I didn't feel that as much in this coming off of like some movies where that's definitely there and in this one it feels Yeah, this this feels like toned down from that so

Elijah Davidson (01:46:38.747)
Well yeah, and if you just did War Horse, like you would definitely, this would definitely feel much more grounded. Yeah.

Eli (01:46:46.174)
It could just be because I've been watching all these Spielberg movies that to me this was kind of like more of a breath of fresh air, but I could see if you just like jump into this once you get to Berlin, it's there. I guess to be fair, it sort of makes sense to have like haziness in Berlin in the winter, but.

Elijah Davidson (01:46:50.681)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:46:55.065)
Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:47:07.963)
Sure. Yeah, I mean everyone smokes like chimneys and you know the United States too so like it's you know, can understand why that's kind of stuff would be there but Did you did you read that? Did you hear the thing about the the way they did that speaking of cold? the breath Did you did you see this? This is so cool and it has to One particular scene in the in the offices there. Yeah in in East Germany and

Eli (01:47:25.302)
Yeah.

Yeah, it was in one particular scene.

Elijah Davidson (01:47:37.551)
The way he came up to do that because they would lose the breath when they the lights on because it would dry the air out. Yeah. And so they said what he did is he turned the lights back off, put people in black masks so you couldn't see their face and had them say the lines. And then they digitally put that breath onto the actors. So cool. Yeah. But a way to get that haze, that real haze back in there, even though you're drying everything out with your

Eli (01:47:42.422)
Right.

Eli (01:47:57.174)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:48:07.012)
Hollywood lights, you know?

Eli (01:48:07.596)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think he shared that in the, in that DGA thing. Yeah. With Scorsese. I had, I had forgot to note it down, but yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Cause it is very cool.

Elijah Davidson (01:48:14.19)
DGA thing, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so smart.

Elijah Davidson (01:48:23.096)
And it reminds me that you know, that Kaminsky hazy light thing has become such a Spielberg like cliche almost. But there are usually, almost always, there are diegetic reasons for it in the films, you know? So it's not just like a lazy cheat. Like there's reasons for what they do and they take them in there. Even if it does feel a bit rote at some point in here. Yeah.

Eli (01:48:32.47)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:48:39.35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:48:46.518)
Yeah, for sure.

Eli (01:48:50.752)
Right. Yeah, and I think, I think like it's at its height on the bridge, probably the haziness and the blues with the, filming at Twilight, you get that deep blue sky and the reflection on the water and yeah, they love that stuff. And so they're probably at their most like Spielberg Kaminsky collab with the bridge stuff.

Elijah Davidson (01:48:59.193)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:49:07.268)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:49:18.724)
Mm-hmm. yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:49:26.308)
You know what I really think about this movie when I watch it? Is I feel like this is a black and white movie shot in color. It's kind of how it feels to me. And it kind of follows a lot of those kind of classic ways of lighting things and staging things and framing things and all that kind of stuff. And so when you get to the, when you get to the stuff in Germany, I mean, it's so blue and gray, it might as well be black and white, you know? And...

Eli (01:49:32.236)
Hmm.

I can see that,

Eli (01:49:52.684)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:49:55.482)
But even the American stuff feels like, yeah, it like a black and white movie.

Eli (01:50:00.118)
Yeah. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to talk about with the structure of the movie, which is, you this is, put it in the, in our like editing and post-production stuff, even though like really the way Spielberg and Michael Kahn work, the post-production is kind of happening during the production. It's kind of how they, how they make their movies so quickly because they're doing less like, they're

Elijah Davidson (01:50:19.61)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:50:30.05)
they know what takes they need to do before they like strike a set because they're editing as they go. So there's not a whole, they don't have to go back and do a whole lot of reshooting because they're kind of getting what they need as they go. But one of the things that came out of that was the original opening was gonna be the Donovan scene that we get as his introduction. But then, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:50:36.344)
Hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:50:56.866)
Yeah, that's not my guy. Not my guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (01:50:59.528)
Exactly. had that that whole that whole scene with like the the traffic accident, which is great. Yeah. And so they that was that was what they had planned. But then they they shot the whole like able sequence with them, with them, you know, him painting, going out to to paint with the getting the nickel and the whole like.

Elijah Davidson (01:51:04.29)
Yeah, yeah. Quit calling him my guy.

Eli (01:51:27.81)
chase scene which i think is incredible. Yeah, it is the one spy scene. It reminded me of, funnily enough, it reminded me of the taking of Pelham 123 sort of. Just like in the subway people chasing each other and getting lost in crowds and it just reminded me of that. I watched that movie not terribly long ago for

Elijah Davidson (01:51:28.046)
Yeah. The spy stuff. Yeah, so fun. The spy scene. The one spy scene we get in the movie. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:51:45.85)
Uh huh, yeah, uh huh.

Elijah Davidson (01:51:52.516)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:51:58.426)
for a draft of... I think it was like we did a hostage's draft and so I had watched it for that. Yeah, so it reminded me of that. Not exactly a spy movie, but a hostage movie is in a similar vein, I guess. And so I thought that was so good. It was like a little like silent movie opening. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:52:03.616)
yeah, what a great movie. The movie's perfect.

Elijah Davidson (01:52:15.137)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:52:23.065)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (01:52:24.77)
not really anything being said, just like communicating everything with the camera work, the editing, the glances. It was very, very good.

Elijah Davidson (01:52:34.617)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's really fun. It really puts you in the moment, like in the time frame moment and then let you know what kind of movie it's going to be too. And it shows you that he's really a spy. It's important to you to know that he's really a spy. That's important. I know. That's like the kind of thing I would have read about when I was a kid reading about like true spycraft stuff, whatever. And I want a little nickel like that. And I can just like open up and take stuff out of.

Eli (01:52:44.286)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. He really is. I love the little nickel. Yeah.

Eli (01:53:01.59)
Yeah Yeah, well they they like handmade all of the the spycraft stuff and they kind of talked about how like the like all the spycraft stuff and James Bond was wasn't based off of like real stuff like this that they really had in you know in the 50s and In early 60s for for stuff like this Yeah, but yeah the

Elijah Davidson (01:53:09.879)
how cool. Yeah, it would have been.

Elijah Davidson (01:53:16.078)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:53:22.745)
Yeah.

Eli (01:53:30.838)
the really like, I guess like shooting that sequence, Spielberg kind of like had the wise idea of like, no, this, I think this is our opening. Like, and yeah, very smart. Scorsese in that interview, like he went on and on about loving this opening and like the visual brilliance. And he was really like, it was really some like, you know,

Elijah Davidson (01:53:53.273)
Yeah, I he did.

Eli (01:54:00.118)
You're my buddy and I'm gonna like kind of lift you up above the rest kind of talk. But it was all true. He was talking about like some directors will get a script like this and get great dialogue actors like Tom Hanks and they'll say, okay, my movie is a dialogue movie because it's so well written, it's so well acted. That's what my movie is, is the dialogue. But it takes people like Spielberg to...

Elijah Davidson (01:54:03.795)
Right. Yeah, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:54:19.513)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:54:24.355)
Yeah.

Eli (01:54:29.43)
To have that, yes, but like that's not the whole movie. So you start off with this visual sequence where there's nothing being said, but you're communicating everything you need to visually. Even just that opening image, the Norman Rockwell reference. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:54:39.523)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:54:45.163)
It also, yeah. I know. Yep. The mirrors. Yeah, for sure. mean, Spielberg loves Rockwell. Loves Rockwell. Yeah, he is. There's a good book where Lucas and Spielberg both write about the importance of Rockwell in their own work and talk about the different like...

Eli (01:54:54.902)
Yeah, he's a collector I think.

Elijah Davidson (01:55:12.761)
paintings that they own and why and like how it's like influenced them and stuff. It's a cool book about them and Rockwell. But I was gonna say the other thing about that opening sequence, reason I enjoy it, because it is a very talky movie. And you know, if you start the movie with that not my guy scene, what you're telling the audience is this is a movie where you're going to enjoy watching people talk to each other.

Eli (01:55:37.73)
Alright, an Aaron Sorkin movie.

Elijah Davidson (01:55:38.425)
And so key into that. But that's really not how the movie works. I mean there's great dialogue scenes and it's fun to watch and negotiate. But most of the movie is the story is told through the edits. And that's what becomes more fun to watch. The more times I've watched the movie, the more what I really enjoy is how one scene will set something up.

and then the next scene will answer that thing that's set up in the previous scene. It's like question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, but the question that is asked in the one scene is not answered in that scene. And it like is constantly like shifting your focus back on what the, what does this take morally or civically? I would say civically. What does this take civically in each scene? So like in the courtroom you get like all rise.

Eli (01:56:10.145)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:56:31.298)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:56:36.12)
And then you don't actually see like then you cut to the classroom and the kids rising for the pledge of allegiance You know and so like it takes like here. We're having this very important court case, but what's at stake here is the soul of the nation It's like what we're teaching kids in school You know like that's that's what this is really it's a civics lesson, but it's like the best kind of civics lesson This is what we're fighting for is the future of this country

Eli (01:56:43.01)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:56:59.095)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:57:04.786)
And so it does that throughout the entire movie and by starting the movie with a scene that is mostly silent, that is edited together, like you train the audience, you're gonna be watching edits. That's what this film is, not just conversations. And I mean, I think it's why the movie is one that you can, that I can keep coming back to and watching and enjoying again and again and again, is because it is, it's that kind of movie. Like it's a movie movie.

Eli (01:57:14.668)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:57:31.136)
It's not something I could read and get just as much out of or watch a Black Box theater production of and get just as much out of. It's a movie. It's only thing a movie can do.

Eli (01:57:37.034)
Right, right exactly. Yeah, and I think so one of the things I've kind of like learned I think especially in this Spielberg series and it you know, it's something that you know, maybe Very well could have learned in the Wes or Nolan series if I would have done them like later on in this endeavor but just like being so far into this with two full directors and then

one, you know, director that feels like could be two more full directors so far, is that I think the Spielberg-Michael Kahn collaboration is probably more important than the John Williams collab, the Kaminsky collaboration. That Spielberg-Michael Kahn collaboration is the most important.

Elijah Davidson (01:58:13.378)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:58:22.999)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:58:27.81)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:58:31.266)
Yeah.

Eli (01:58:35.682)
collab of his whole career. And it's just, I've learned so much more about editing and the importance of the edit going through this series. not to say, I mean, it's there in Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan. Absolutely. Like, obviously. But I guess just like for me in this series and seeing Spielberg and Michael Kahn talk about

Elijah Davidson (01:58:37.59)
Yeah. for sure. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:58:50.968)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:59:05.474)
the way they edit and their choices. I've just learned a lot about the importance of that. And I've heard people say, the story is in the edit. That's where the story is told. And this series, I think, in particular, has just been like...

Elijah Davidson (01:59:18.154)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (01:59:26.466)
a great lesson in that, I guess, a great course in how the story is told through the edit. And yeah, this movie is like, you you mentioned the cut to the classroom, I mean, even just like, even just the negotiations don't end and resolve. You cut out of those scenes. There's no decisions made. There's no.

Elijah Davidson (01:59:30.669)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (01:59:41.132)
Yeah. And it's all throughout the movie. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (01:59:47.522)
Right.

Elijah Davidson (01:59:53.346)
Yep, that's right.

Eli (01:59:54.754)
There's not even like really like, there's nothing sure at all until it happens. Yeah. Right.

Elijah Davidson (01:59:59.257)
Right, because it's not resolved until they show up at the bridge, right? Yeah, until it happens, and it can't be. All it is is he gets the question asked in the scene, he takes that question to the next conversation, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next. Hopefully, that's right. Yeah, we'll get our answer when we all show up at the bridge. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eli (02:00:11.936)
Yeah, he tells the CIA that he asked the question and they say, did you get an answer? And he says, no.

Yeah. but yeah, and it, but it's not just like a trick to keep you like on edge. That's just how it happened. Yeah. and so like, I mean, it is a trick to keep you like on edge, like there's definitely like intention there, but it's also like, it just is how it happened. And so it, yeah, it's like the perfect, the perfect movie for that.

Elijah Davidson (02:00:31.0)
Just the way it is. Yeah, just what it is. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:00:45.88)
That's how it worked.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Go Michael Cahn. More love for Michael Cahn. The editors don't get enough attention, especially with these great... I mean, think about like Scorsese and Thelma Shoemaker, know, or Sally Minkie and Quentin Tarantino for the first part of Tarantino's career. Like, how important those collaborations are. Just different movies. Different careers without those collaborations.

Eli (02:00:51.724)
Perfect story.

Eli (02:00:55.606)
Yeah, he's phenomenal.

Eli (02:01:03.008)
man,

Eli (02:01:07.99)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:01:19.168)
Yeah, yeah, I have I've become a huge advocate for editors. I'm shouting out editors in this podcast I guess like a wrapping up that sort of stuff I kept hearing when I was like listening to other people talk like reviews of the time Talk about how like the trailers like really did this movie wrong? They made it seem like it was gonna be like a more intense spy thriller

Elijah Davidson (02:01:25.548)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:01:44.769)
Hmm.

Eli (02:01:48.822)
And it's just not that, that sort of movie. But yeah, also this is really like the last proper DreamWorks movie, which doesn't get talked about a lot. Cause really at this point, DreamWorks was being restructured. mean, have like DreamWorks animation has branched off and they're kind of their own thing now. And at this point, DreamWorks is really...

Elijah Davidson (02:01:49.804)
Huh. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:01:59.447)
Huh.

Elijah Davidson (02:02:11.469)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:02:18.038)
just kind of like a face. Like you still get the Dreamworks intros and stuff after this, but they're not really Dreamworks. They're really financed by the Indian company Reliance and distributed by Disney's Touchstone. And then you just have the Dreamworks intros and stuff on there because people recognize it. And so really this is like,

Elijah Davidson (02:02:42.562)
Yeah. Huh.

Eli (02:02:45.89)
I'm pretty sure this is like the last like proper Dreamworks movie Spielberg stuff after this is just is Amblin. It just goes back to being Amblin really So kind of kind of just interesting I guess like it I mean Dreamworks was kind of like a failed project that you know, people don't really know that because

Elijah Davidson (02:02:55.478)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:03:10.155)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:03:13.61)
You still see Dreamworks and you think like, Dreamworks is still successful, but really like just the animation is and everything else kind of unfortunately failed with it. yeah, but this is, yeah, this is the last one. Yeah. Released October, 2015, almost three years to the day after Lincoln pulled in a hundred and sixty five million dollar

Elijah Davidson (02:03:19.298)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:03:25.858)
Yeah.

Eli (02:03:42.898)
guess worldwide box office on a 40 million dollar budget. Not bad. Yeah. It opened number three at 15 millions. Number one was of course Goosebumps that weekend. Jack Black.

Elijah Davidson (02:03:47.821)
Hey, that'll do.

Elijah Davidson (02:03:57.592)
release right yeah kind of a halfway scary movie and take your kids to with Jack Black in it that's gonna win yep

Eli (02:04:02.58)
Yeah. yeah. Jack Black. Jack Black is, man, he's sticking around. He's not going away anytime soon. That's fine with me.

Elijah Davidson (02:04:12.163)
Jack Black is the best. No way. Jack Black is my dream casting for the eventual Adam McKay movie about Donald Trump. I want Jack Black to play Donald Trump. That'd be great. Yeah. Go all over that.

Eli (02:04:21.632)
Ooh, okay. That'd be fun. Yeah, that does feel like an inevitable movie.

Elijah Davidson (02:04:30.199)
It does. Jack Black needs to EGOT. That's the other thing. Jack Black needs to EGOT. He does. He needs an Oscar. He has a Grammy for his work, Tenacious D. He has, I think he has an Emmy. He has a daytime Emmy for voice work on something. He doesn't yet have a...

Eli (02:04:31.33)
For better or worse.

He does. What does he have?

Eli (02:04:42.752)
huh. Tenacious D, yeah.

Eli (02:04:51.394)
That makes sense.

Eli (02:04:56.45)
Is he half a Tony?

Elijah Davidson (02:04:58.731)
I don't think he has a Tony or an Oscar yet, but come on y'all. I mean, he should have won an Oscar for the Princess Pete song in the Mario Brothers movie. I mean, come on, it was right there. One day, one day.

Eli (02:05:05.844)
Yeah, yeah, he should have Yeah, I I agree with that that was the best part of the whole movie Yeah, it it did it did well Critically did well commercially Bridgespies critic I guess critically is kind of mixed At the time I think it's become a little bit more like people

Elijah Davidson (02:05:13.857)
Bye for now.

Elijah Davidson (02:05:21.687)
Ha

Eli (02:05:35.798)
have come around on it a little bit over time, but it's just nobody really talks about it. It is, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:05:38.551)
It's a weird movie. It's two movies. It's two movies cut right in half. It's a strange movie. It's two movies. That's weird for anybody. You're never going to have that get cheered the same way a more conventional film would be.

Eli (02:05:54.306)
Yeah, yeah for sure. But yeah, just, in my research, I really just didn't see a whole lot of like what people were saying about it at the time. It seems like people were like, yeah, it was pretty good Spielberg movie. And that was kind of it. I mean, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:06:04.129)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:06:10.902)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:06:18.305)
Yeah, we take him for granted.

Eli (02:06:20.45)
Yeah, we really do. It did get the Oscar nominations. It got, let's see, six with sound mixing, production design, music, screenplay, and it got a Best Picture nomination. And that was the five nominations. It did win for Best Supporting Actor for Mark Rylance. yeah. I didn't remember this, but

Elijah Davidson (02:06:45.547)
Well deserved.

Eli (02:06:49.494)
But it makes sense, thinking back, but apparently like for a long time he was like the front runner. But then by the time the Oscars rolled around, everyone was like, this is a shoe in for Stallone and Creed. and so this, so when Rylance won, almost felt like an upset. even though like for forever, he was like, yeah. So, you know, it.

Elijah Davidson (02:07:10.859)
How funny.

It's great. Yeah.

Eli (02:07:17.57)
I guess in true, seems, guess Stallone kind of got rockied in a way, you know? So, I do too.

Elijah Davidson (02:07:24.255)
Yeah. Good. I love Rocky, but I think the worst part of Creed is everything was Stallone.

Eli (02:07:33.096)
That's honestly fair. The best parts of Creed are not still on. The best parts of Creed are the parts that you can tell Coogler was really loving, infusing his culture into the rocky universe. Those are the best parts of Creed.

Elijah Davidson (02:07:36.695)
Right. Everything else. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything else is just like Rocky Balboa as like a heavy bag on the back of an otherwise great movie. Anyway. Gilmark Rylance, you deserve it.

Eli (02:08:00.596)
Yeah, he did. He really did. Yeah, okay.

Elijah Davidson (02:08:04.438)
It's a quintessential supporting actor role as well. It's exactly what you want a supporting actor nomination in role to be.

Eli (02:08:07.956)
It really is. Mm-hmm. Yeah. To like have a lot of gravity to it, to enhance like the performance of the lead actor and like, I mean, they really are enhancing each other with their interactions. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, I think this is the time where you tell me your theory. Let's...

Elijah Davidson (02:08:25.298)
yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:08:37.289)
Okay.

Eli (02:08:37.45)
your theory of why Spielberg made this movie.

Elijah Davidson (02:08:40.416)
Why this film? Okay, so here's the wonderful thing. We are living in a AF world is what we're living in. It's an after-Fey-Wilman's world is the world we live in. And it is wonderful to live in an after-Fey-Wilman's Spielberg world, I think. As a film nerd, it's a great time.

Eli (02:08:54.944)
Yeah. Okay. Yes, that's true. huh.

Eli (02:09:03.211)
It is.

It's a lens, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:09:09.774)
And I'm so glad that movie is as good as it is and is all the things that it is because otherwise it would be a sad a sad world to be in a after a fabled in this world, but it's a good world and I mean, I do you have this like I cannot watch this Boebring movie now without thinking about that movie and like how it connects to some aspect of whatever I'm watching and yeah, and My favorite part of that of the fabled men's probably

Eli (02:09:30.018)
You can't, you can't not now.

Elijah Davidson (02:09:38.332)
is the film he makes for his senior ditch day at the beach. what the effect that that film has on the bully, and the way he shows him as like a golden child, how it like a golden boy or something like that he says, how it makes him angry and it makes him feel sad and it makes him, it convicts him basically, he's convicted that he is not that thing.

Eli (02:09:57.079)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:10:04.16)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:10:06.678)
And by Spielberg showing him, showing that boy what he should be, what he has the ability to be, if he would only live up to it, it convicts him that he's not that thing. And for me, that is exactly what Spielberg does in his, these conscience movies, these civics movies, conscience movies. He wants to show, because I think Spielberg being a

Eli (02:10:16.535)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:10:36.542)
Jewish-American, like he feels like an outsider looking at this country of wasps, you know, who are in charge of everything. These golden boys like that bully or whatever or like Donovan, you know, like this is a wasp family at the middle of this thing. And he's holding him up and saying, this is who you should be. You know, to make this movie, this is my theory.

Making this movie is an opportunity to do that. It's to make his senior ditch day movie all over again and to show someone, but who actually was a kind of a paragon of civic duty and responsibility. The kind of people we actually should aspire to be. I think that's what this is. think that's what, for the most part, all his conscious movies are, are just making that senior ditch day movie all over again. And it...

Eli (02:11:20.193)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:11:36.82)
I love that. I don't like preachy movies. And it's part of growing up in Christian subculture and being exposed to too many preachy things and being old enough and wise enough and mature enough and learned enough now to know that that is not effective, that all you're really doing is preaching to the choir and they're not even really listening. That isn't really good. And so I...

Eli (02:11:40.887)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:11:55.862)
Right.

Elijah Davidson (02:12:04.423)
I tend to be very allergic to preaching movies, but I like Spielberg preaching movies for the most part. And I like for a long time, like couldn't figure out why that was, you know, I would like, I can watch a movie like this and see very clear that it is preaching to me and trying to get me to be a certain way. And, but what I, what I figured out, thanks to the fable myths and you know, rewatching Lincoln a ton of times, I love Lincoln and watching this movie a lot of times too.

Eli (02:12:18.582)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:12:34.117)
is like, that's why this works. This works because it works when Spielberg does it. One, because he's Spielberg and he can he could tell me a story about a gum wrapper blowing down the street and it'd probably be great. But it works because he's there is a there is an aspect to it where it's not simply like it's not saying this is who you are.

yay you. It's saying this is who you should be. There's like an inherent criticism kind of built in that says you're not this. And I think like the fact that he made this movie in Lincoln and the Post during the era of American politics and those years in there where the things that like separate us and divide us and the the rancor, political rancor and all that kind of stuff is like so high pitched, you know.

It's like this is Spielberg's way. Spielberg who loves Norman Rockwell, Spielberg who liked to drench everything in light, Spielberg who has been accused of being overly sentimental, like all this. This is his way of criticizing American society, criticizing his audience and saying like, be better than you are, you know? And like, know, and the story's told in a way that like, he challenges you throughout to like, will you judge?

Eli (02:13:41.644)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:14:04.117)
this man or not, how will you do that? How will you, can you be like Donovan and continue to, I wouldn't go as far as to say love him, but to like respect him enough to give him the fullness of the law and the way that it should be practiced on his side, you know? Do you love your country enough? Do you love America enough to like make America be the thing it says it wants to be, you know? It's like that James Baldwin.

Eli (02:14:05.932)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:14:19.799)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:14:33.637)
about like James Baldwin says something like, I'm still waiting for America to be the thing that says this. And I believe it can be that, you know? And I Spielberg believes it can be that and says like, okay, now be, dude, be this, do this. Stop being the thing you are, be this thing. And so that's my theory. That's why I think Spielberg reads this script and it's like, hey, I can do the YouTube thing. That's fun. I remember that from my childhood. I can recreate this part of my life.

And also, and you know, he was born in New Jersey, by the way. So he's like from New York as a kid, basically. Nobody in Jersey was either from New York and vice versa, but still, for people who aren't from there, it's all the same. And so he gets to recreate his childhood, but it comes right down to it. It's also a way to like do senior ditch day all over again. So that's my theory on the movie. Yeah.

Eli (02:15:07.276)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (02:15:26.262)
Yeah, no, I love that. and the fabled men's has kind of become a like lens through which to watch all Spielberg movies. and like answers a lot of questions that you might have about why he made certain movies the way he did. for sure. yeah, I mean, it's, it's all there, in the fabled men's. but yeah, I, I think it's a great theory.

Elijah Davidson (02:15:35.605)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:15:44.723)
Yeah.

Eli (02:15:56.738)
I one of the things that I think this movie, certain parts of War Horse for sure. then like, again, like I will be revisiting Lincoln soon and I'm sure it's there in Lincoln. It was definitely there in Munich for me. Munich was like a surprising like.

Absolutely went for it totally movie for me Like it might be like my favorite surprise of the the series so far because it was a blind spot and One of the things that I've that I've found is all those movies War Horse is a little bit more like hit-and-miss but it has some moments like better it's like Spielberg finds this like

Elijah Davidson (02:16:28.184)
Mew's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, Mew's incredible.

Elijah Davidson (02:16:36.137)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:16:39.701)
Hmm.

Eli (02:16:54.408)
line to ride where something where he makes these either entire films or at least moments in films that are genuinely inspirational. They don't feel forced somehow even though like this definitely there in the writing and the acting and the camera work and like I mean it is forced but it doesn't feel forced somehow it's like this magic

Elijah Davidson (02:17:04.511)
Yeah.

Eli (02:17:23.496)
like genuine inspiration. And I think it just comes from like there's a sense in which like the mature Spielberg isn't like fully devoid of like his childlikeness. And there's a you know we both have young children and there's a sense in which sometimes like

Elijah Davidson (02:17:23.613)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:17:42.463)
Yeah.

Eli (02:17:51.574)
the simpleness of the way a child can see things, like... That simplicity is maybe sometimes even more inspiring or convicting than something deeply philosophical or overly preachy or theological or whatever you want to say.

Elijah Davidson (02:18:19.881)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:18:20.404)
And I think that's there in Spielberg still. And maybe that's how he pulls this off is like, yes, he's the mature Spielberg and he can examine like the problems with the world and explore those themes. But there's like this, there's this still this like childlike simplicity in the way he sees it. Like this man just wants to do his job well and like,

Elijah Davidson (02:18:46.773)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:18:48.46)
follow the rules and try to respect people in a civilized way. And it's very simple, when you, I mean, yes, you're adding Tom Hanks into the mix, which helps a lot, but it's so simple. It should be maybe in a lot of other directors' hands, cheesy or, like you said, way too preachy, but I think it's that

Elijah Davidson (02:18:51.125)
You

Elijah Davidson (02:18:56.735)
Yeah.

Eli (02:19:19.23)
maturity mixed with the childlike perspective that I think make it just work.

Elijah Davidson (02:19:28.179)
Yeah. Yeah, there is that. He's having fun making a spy movie, right? Yeah, like that's definitely part of it. He's just having fun making a spy movie, too. This happens to be a spy movie. Has to be this spy movie, but he's making a spy movie. Pretty a real spy movie like a spy movie like a John LaCarr kind of spy story. You know, it's just it's it's fun. It's just fun. Yeah.

Eli (02:19:32.938)
Yeah, yeah, it's there.

Eli (02:19:50.402)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:19:55.254)
Yeah, I mean, and I mean, too, like you also have, I think the other like, fabled men's lens you can look at this through is like the fatherhood and family and manhood lens. This it's almost like this movie is like making up for all the other Spielberg dads that have abandoned their family because this is the one it's the one Spielberg dad that like really just wants to get back home to his family in his bed.

Elijah Davidson (02:20:09.916)
sure. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:20:18.226)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:20:25.042)
That's right. Yeah. I mean, it's notable that it's made after whatever this point is in Spielberg's life when he finally understood what really happened when he was a kid. Because for years and years he blamed his dad for the divorce, which is what they said, told the kids at the time. And then later on he learned the truth.

Eli (02:20:25.122)
Eli (02:20:42.952)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:20:45.62)
About what really happened and you can kind of see a change in his filmography, right? Where dads certainly start being it's sad often that dads are gone. Like I I love Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I really love that movie and I really love it because it's a very sad movie It's a very sad movie that all this time that that they've wasted When they when he could have had if we could have been a father and he could have been living having a loving relationship with Marion and he wasted all this time because of other stuff, so it's a very it's a movie that lies like

Eli (02:20:49.879)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:21:01.143)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:21:15.915)
Spielberg becomes kind of forgiving and graceful towards fathers in the latter part of his career which is really really it's really cool. It's amazing.

Eli (02:21:20.044)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Eli (02:21:25.538)
Yeah, yeah I Along those lines. I I had to write down this Another quote from molly haskell because I thought this was really good. I'm just talking about like the ending and how some you know He makes it home, but sometimes like family reunions like aren't quite living. They don't quite live up to your expectations I mean we get a little bit of that in this film like you know

Another filmmaker would have ended with him standing there and the kids looking back and he's there and he gives a little knowing nod and then goes up the stairs. This ends with him just passed out on the bed. They look back and he's not there. He's passed out. He's tired. But also, get a foreshadow of this idea with the phone call that he makes in the phone booth in Berlin. He's asking for the kids and they're...

Elijah Davidson (02:22:00.936)
Yeah. Uh-huh.

Elijah Davidson (02:22:07.38)
He's just tired. He's tired. Yep, he's just doing his job, right?

Eli (02:22:23.516)
None of them are, they all are doing other stuff. They have their own preoccupations. And you know, there's a sense in which they can never understand what he did. so, so along those lines, this Haskell quote, she says, quote, a weary Donovan ascends the steps like Jamie and Empire of the Sun or Elliot and ET. He is alone with a lingering sense of loss.

Elijah Davidson (02:22:27.048)
Yeah. Yep.

Eli (02:22:50.23)
the deeper bond lies elsewhere with an alien and soulmate who has returned to the mothership." End quote. I was like, that was so, I was like, man, those are like the things you like read that are like, this is what film criticism is all about, like finding those connections and yeah, I loved that.

Elijah Davidson (02:22:56.34)
I like that.

Good.

Elijah Davidson (02:23:08.498)
Yeah, yeah. It's funny to think about the shift in perspective here. you go back to something, like one of, I mean, maybe Spielberg's most personal film, but like Close Encounters, the third kind, and how that movie, you know, I watch that now and you know, Spielberg has said he would make it differently if he made it.

Eli (02:23:23.084)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:23:32.538)
later in his life that he made it then. But what's so great about that is it's a movie that like, it's almost like the best possible scenario for why your dad left, you know? And there's like a...

Eli (02:23:33.345)
Right.

Eli (02:23:44.566)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:23:48.8)
mystery and mystery in that movie I give it from the kids perspective like later you're like where did that go why did dad go I don't understand any of this I don't understand I don't know my dad I don't understand my dad I never did you know and so like here's this wish fulfillment movie about well it was aliens of course you know and now you switch here to the end toward the not the end of his career hopefully but much later in his career much later in his life and you have like the movie about the dad and how the kids they don't understand the dad but it's like from the

Eli (02:24:11.074)
All

Eli (02:24:15.894)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm.

Elijah Davidson (02:24:18.663)
dad's perspective, right? That like, it's not that they don't understand their dad, they're just not aware of what's going on because their kids live with their own life, And isn't that great actually that they don't have to be worried about what's going on? Yeah.

Eli (02:24:25.334)
Yeah, they're not aware. They're not aware. then, yeah. And then like, yeah, they don't. And like, and you, you know, there's a sense in which like, yes, like I love the Haskell quote. Like there's this lingering sense of loss he has, but also like he's there. Like at the end, he's there. Like it's passed out on the bed. He's, you know, he's going to take some Nyquil.

Elijah Davidson (02:24:47.377)
Yeah, he's home. He finally got home. Yeah.

Eli (02:24:54.004)
and get over his sniffles. But he's there at home.

Elijah Davidson (02:25:00.251)
The kids are ensconced in a freedom and a security that they don't even see or understand. And it's all because of work that people like him, they do.

Eli (02:25:05.366)
Right.

Yeah, and I guess the parallel is, it's the same thing for the country and yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:25:14.427)
Yeah, exactly. It's that shot on the train of the kids climbing the fence, which is a call back to the people getting shot. It's like, yeah, they don't even know. And the work that he did made it possible for those kids to be climbing a fence and having fun and playing instead of climbing a fence and getting shot. That's what it's for. It's so that they can be unaware of the peace in which they live.

Eli (02:25:18.54)
Right.

right? They don't even know, you know.

Eli (02:25:33.6)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (02:25:40.96)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And, fun fact about that, that was actually Hank's idea to have that shot. he, cause he was, he was asking, this was like one of the last things they shot, back in New York. And, he was asking Spielberg, like, what am I looking at out the window? I guess, trying to get some direction and Spielberg's like, it's, it's freedom. Like you're back home, you know? and Hank's just had this idea.

Elijah Davidson (02:25:48.337)
Hmm. cool.

Elijah Davidson (02:25:54.419)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:26:05.555)
Hmm.

Eli (02:26:09.09)
as they were going, guess of like, what if we have like some kids climbing over a fence to kind of like call back to that shot of me seeing, cause I'm looking, I guess he was thinking like, I was looking out of a train window then. And so Spielberg was like, yeah, perfect. We'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. So really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

Elijah Davidson (02:26:16.807)
Yeah.

They've been in the same motion. It's the same image. Yeah.

That's cool.

Elijah Davidson (02:26:32.691)
It's a good collaborator. still works. Cool.

Eli (02:26:38.366)
This movie, I think, I mean, it definitely like reverberates with with like contemporary anxieties too, because I mean, at the time, there was a lot of Guantanamo Bay questions. And, you know, I mean, now we're dealing with we have ice raids going on. You know, it's

Elijah Davidson (02:26:50.013)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:26:54.439)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:27:05.159)
Mm-hmm.

No due process, all that stuff. Yeah. This is really about due process. know, it's seeing things that move about due process. And how important that is. If you believe it, it's a right that should be afforded to every man, woman and child in the world. Not only the ones that were born in this country. That's what we used to say that we believe. That we still, some people still say that we believe. And there's a whole bunch of people who don't believe that. Who think that the...

Eli (02:27:09.886)
It's, yeah, it is. It's about, it's about.

Elijah Davidson (02:27:36.615)
the rights that we say are inalienable, inalienable, are inalienable for all people. Yeah, not just the ones that Americans, yeah.

Eli (02:27:43.052)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I think in that way, it's one of Spielberg's most like humanist movies, just like humans deserve to be treated like humans. And where you're born is where you're born or where you're from should be inconsequential to that, that, that ethical foundation. and yeah, you know, I,

Elijah Davidson (02:27:56.338)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:28:04.166)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:28:11.648)
I personally want to ask people like what like you you get more human rights because you were born in a particular place other than over someone now I don't know that's that's a whole nother bunny trail we could we could go down but it is

Elijah Davidson (02:28:26.13)
Well, I mean, it's what this movie is about, Like, what this movie is about is like, it's the, it's the, there's lot, there's a lot of bad things about the kind of triumphant American colonialist thing of the 1950s and 60s, 70s, there's a lot of bad, there's a lot of bad. But one of the good parts of it, and so I think is what Spielberg is getting at here, is that

Eli (02:28:46.038)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:28:56.444)
These American values are things that should be shared. The good of them are things that should be shared and should be spread. Like we should believe that the whole world should be this way, these good things. And when we say, when we like build walls, know, Berlin Walls in this case, when we build walls and say, no, these rights are only for people on the inside, not people on the outside. What you've done is you've made America smaller.

You've made the values not more precious. You've made them less precious. You've shrunk us, is what you've done. And what Spielberg is saying here that no, a man like Donovan or a woman like Donovan, couldn't, if it was a woman, anywhere someone goes who believes in these inalienable rights, anywhere they go, they are America. And so when he goes into East Germany,

Eli (02:29:28.45)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:29:54.97)
America is there because he is there and the values and the rights and the things that he believes are important are there then and established there. mean it's the Christian thing. mean if you want it, we can make that leap and say that like Jesus said, we're two and more gathered in my name, there I am too. Because we take this thing that we believe wherever we go. There is no border. There is no border. There's nowhere to put a wall up. There is no border to what these things are. Or at least there shouldn't be.

Eli (02:30:23.414)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's just, you know, there's no, there's no wall you can build up that can, that can stop goodness, you know, with a capital G. I think that's what this movie is like really ultimately like trying to get across, you know, in that, in that like trying to give you like, an ideal

Elijah Davidson (02:30:25.052)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:30:36.272)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (02:30:50.498)
reflect back to you like you were saying the the whole like convict you by a way of showing you the ideal and you know was Donovan really like this angel of a guy like who like yeah definitely not I mean who knows what he was really like other than the people that were around him but but like the point of the movie isn't like to portray this real guy in a real way it's to portray this like you said this ideal

Elijah Davidson (02:31:05.07)
Of course not. Yeah. Nobody's perfect. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:31:17.638)
Right.

Eli (02:31:20.578)
this kind of humanist ideal that we should be trying to live up to. It's, I mean, it's, you know, what what Christians should be doing with with Jesus is not using him as like a hammer of sorts, but using him as an image to which like you try to like be like.

Elijah Davidson (02:31:21.074)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:31:45.489)
Yeah, which you talked about last week, or you will talk about soon, but because Spielberg's Jesus movie is Lincoln. So you'll get a lot more of the Jesus stuff coming up soon. And you're watching and discussing.

Eli (02:31:53.164)
Sure.

Eli (02:31:58.308)
man, yeah. Yeah, for sure. I guess a few other points to hit on before we wrap up the discussion. Some Spielberg distinctives, we've touched on these kind of all through, but I wanted to mention these, the classical focused storytelling.

Is like all you know, you get it spurts of it throughout his career, but it's definitely here the efficient character building fun one thing we haven't talked we've like we've mentioned in passing like there's some really fun transitions in this movie, really good ones, though one of the ones that stood out to me is like the there's this cross fade where From abel's face is on one side of the screen to powers on the other side of the screen showing, you know

Yeah, the two spies. But I liked that little crossfade. And then like, you know, the other Spielberg distinctives are going to be like the way the camera work, you know, the low angle close ups that he loves and silhouettes and, you know, all that stuff. But yeah, the other. So a fun fact.

Elijah Davidson (02:33:07.27)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:33:13.971)
yeah.

Eli (02:33:20.876)
Fun fact section, Gary Powers Jr. was in the movie. I forgot to mention that in the cast. He was like a CIA agent, just kind of like an extra walking along with them. Yeah, so he was in there. He was in the extra features, one of the extra features a good bit, talking about his dad and stuff. Yeah. Just kind of talking about how like, kind of what you were mentioning earlier, how his dad was seen as like,

Elijah Davidson (02:33:32.614)
Hmm. it's fun.

Elijah Davidson (02:33:40.796)
That's neat.

Elijah Davidson (02:33:49.628)
Yeah.

Eli (02:33:51.042)
Just like a problem and really like it wasn't until after his death when all the classified stuff came out that showed like no like he was he was like held his integrity and didn't give up anything that he posthumously got like four or five awards. The other fun fact is that this is also something that Spielberg and Scorsese talk about is

Elijah Davidson (02:33:54.034)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:34:10.396)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:34:20.322)
the background of one of the scenes there's this Berlin cinema and it has I'm gonna read out the movies that are that say are showing at this Berlin cinema one is a village of the damned of a wolf Rilla movie from 1960 which was a sci-fi movie with strong anti-communist slant One was Billy Wilder's comedy one two three and sixty one which is set in the German capital

Elijah Davidson (02:34:25.084)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:34:49.538)
One was a German movie, The Secret of the Black Suitcase by Werner Klingler from 1960, which is a West German thriller. And the last one is Spartacus, the Kubrick movie, which I guess if we're going to keep making the connections, the script of that was Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted in the Hollywood Communist witch hunt. So some fun, some fun stuff going on there in the background. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:35:02.072)
Of course.

Elijah Davidson (02:35:10.29)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:35:17.542)
How fun. I don't like, you like Spartacus? I don't like Spartacus. Have you seen Spartacus? yeah. It's like maybe my least favorite of all Kubrick's films. Yeah.

Eli (02:35:22.012)
It's a blind spot. Haven't seen it.

Eli (02:35:26.806)
I've been slowly filling in my Kubrick blind spots, so I'll get to it eventually, but yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:35:30.214)
Yeah.

I used to do like one Kubrick a year and I feel like I needed that moscender to recover like between them. But I've since worked through all of them and so I don't feel that way as much anymore. But yeah, Spartacus is okay. It's still Kubrick, you know.

Eli (02:35:34.978)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eli (02:35:41.846)
Yeah.

Eli (02:35:45.184)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Elijah Davidson (02:35:51.442)
I think Spielberg really likes Spartacus. He has a great affinity for Spartacus. It shows up a lot of times in a lot of his movies. But it's also a movie about moral conviction. So it kind of makes sense that that would be a good one to call out in movie like this. I am Donovan, everybody.

Eli (02:35:54.562)
Yeah, I can see that.

Eli (02:36:02.743)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:36:07.574)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm Donovan. Yeah. And I guess like the, were there, so before we wrap up with some final thoughts, were there any like other just like moments or quotes or like things that we haven't touched on that like really stand out to you?

Elijah Davidson (02:36:33.809)
No, I'll just kind of say it again and it was kind of fun to do a little more research in the movie and find out that this thing that I felt in the movie where it feels like that wet clay thing that like Spielberg is like his hands are in it he's kind of figured out as he goes along and it's a little bit more alive in a way that some of his movies none of his movies don't feel unalive but some of them feel much more planned out than this one does and

Eli (02:36:45.27)
Yeah.

Eli (02:36:58.06)
Yeah, right.

Elijah Davidson (02:37:03.857)
It's I think that's fun to watch and I did I did hear him he said in something that like a Lot of days he would show him be like, I don't know what we're gonna do today exactly I mean, I know what we're shooting I don't know how I'm gonna do it and he would like figure it out on on the day and he enjoyed doing that After coming from a lot of movies where that were much more Storyboarded out and planned out. So I just like that. You can just I is it a thing I enjoy to still aligned from

Eli (02:37:12.918)
Yep. Yep.

Elijah Davidson (02:37:32.443)
Hamilton is a mind at work and I like when you can feel someone working and figuring it out as they go along. And you can feel that in this movie and it's fun.

Eli (02:37:40.94)
Yeah. Yeah. And, I think that's something too, like as he, he goes along in his career, you start to see like him more and more like in, you know, you know, I'll watch all the special features of all these movies and more and more. He talks about like, yeah, I didn't really storyboard for this one as much for this one. And it's like more and more of that and more of him talking about, yeah, I like to just show up on set and like fill out the space.

Elijah Davidson (02:38:02.075)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:38:09.649)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:38:09.894)
and see what the space feels like. And then we kind of go from there on like, like they have a general like, okay, we're shooting these scenes today, but like the details of like where exactly you're putting the camera and the actors and like the composition of the shots, like he's kind of like feeling out on the day on the set. So yeah, you can definitely feel some of that in this movie.

Elijah Davidson (02:38:19.259)
Sure. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:38:31.566)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:38:36.271)
I think it contributes to what some people might call like a less urgency in his films, in his later films of his career. It's kind of more of a slackness to some of them. And I'm okay with it because I don't need every movie to feel like Rage of the Lost Ark or Jurassic Park. I like that he gets to do this. He's Spielberg. Go for it. And then he can come along and can put something out like West Side Story.

Eli (02:38:46.006)
Hmm. Yeah.

Eli (02:38:59.414)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Elijah Davidson (02:39:06.287)
that is every bit as crisp and sharp and urgent as anything he's ever done. And so you know he's still got it if he wants to. He doesn't have to.

Eli (02:39:12.49)
Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the ways it plays out in this one is just like that Donovan-Able relationship because I know at one point he had talked about, you know, wanting to have way more scenes of them together, but realizing at some point in the movie as they were like approaching the bridge scene,

Realizing like this absence is actually gonna make this scene more powerful And so like ended up not adding in any more extra scenes with them together in between And so like and you really feel that too like the you the the character Able is able is able in that scene But you can see he's really like assessing

Elijah Davidson (02:39:44.454)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:40:02.842)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:40:08.48)
where Donovan has come at that point from their standing man conversation, you know, and like assessing, you know, he has, it's one of those pregnant pause moments where he looks at him before he says, can wait. That's really powerful and kind of comes out of that like absence that you've been missing from them two together up to that point.

Elijah Davidson (02:40:18.98)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:40:27.012)
Yeah.

Eli (02:40:38.594)
That was one of my favorite moments was that just that simple like I can wait Like recognizing the the integrity and the hard work and He's kind of just taking all of that in and that moment putting together like He's he's a smart dude like you know cuz he's a spy and he's just putting together all the pieces of like realizing what this guy has been up to and Saying like okay. I can wait, you know

Elijah Davidson (02:40:44.388)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:40:59.525)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:41:05.818)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (02:41:08.898)
Love that moment Yeah, I had this like final thought that I wanted to like throw out there and then you can tell me like if you What you think about this? So I think I think there's this progression because we've been talking about Donovan a lot and his his moral Like his moral stances and I think those are there through the movie, but I think there's this like

Elijah Davidson (02:41:23.971)
Okay.

Eli (02:41:38.466)
progression. So I think he starts off his leading virtue, the way you're introduced to him, is he's a guy that does his job well by the books. And that's what his virtue is. His virtue is this, like, it's kind of this ethic of like following the rules and doing that and following the rules well that it seems like he kind of goes by.

And I think over the course of the movie and his interactions with Abel and just there's, there's this like natural ambition that he has that like drives him into that ethic. And I think it morphs into a greater ethic over the movie. or maybe like, maybe a better way to put it as a deeper ethic. even it's, I don't think it's explicitly like named obviously, but I think.

Elijah Davidson (02:42:31.216)
Hmm.

Eli (02:42:38.902)
So I think he starts off, basically my take is this, he starts off with this lesser value of like, I'm going to do with integrity my job well. And following his ambition into that ethic leads him to a deeper ethic of compassion, really. I don't think he starts off the movie feeling great compassion for Abel.

I he's just like, this is my job, I'm gonna do it well. But I think by leaning into that, lesser in a way, not lesser in the sense that it's not important, but just at a more shallow level ethic of doing your job well, leads him into a deeper ethic of compassion. And I don't know, I think there's this like,

Elijah Davidson (02:43:27.962)
Professionalism, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:43:32.496)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:43:36.85)
One of the things I was thinking about was just how impatient we've become with those lesser virtues. And it just feels like people are less and less, or I guess I should say more and more like giving up on those lesser virtues before it leads them into deeper virtues.

Like compassion and I don't know that's just something that I saw in the movie this progression of Donovan That I think is just another way that he can be like held up as this ideal of like This is what can happen if if we really like lean into these This it's it's almost like an easier ethic, you know to follow of like, okay I'm gonna have integrity in my profession and do this. Well, if you can lean into that

Elijah Davidson (02:44:02.681)
Hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:44:09.454)
Hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:44:20.047)
Hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:44:24.025)
Yeah.

Eli (02:44:31.436)
then eventually, if you push into it far enough, you're going to get to some deeper ethic underneath that. Which I think in this case is compassion. I think he really does grow a great compassion for Abel as the main one. But even like he has the interaction with powers on the plane where he throws that bit of wisdom at him, I think he has great compassion for him in that moment.

Elijah Davidson (02:44:37.412)
Hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:44:52.249)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:44:58.497)
Yeah.

Eli (02:44:59.97)
I don't know. That's just another thing I saw that I thought would be a final thought. Not fun, but like a good takeaway final thought. Um, I don't know. Do you think that's there?

Elijah Davidson (02:45:12.781)
Yeah, I do. think that the, I think that I like that framing of it. I feel like his first commitment is to the law, right? And this is the law says to do, this what we should do. It's he was very matter of fact about it. And it's interesting because, I mean, we can think of...

the law as like Paul says, like being something that points out our sinfulness to us, you know, like we can't live up to it or whatever. But we can also think about the law as in like, well, this is what it was meant for. It was meant for, why don't you practice these easy things and they can lead you to the greater things. know, practice the easy thing of not eating that kind of meat.

You know, that's in the grand scheme that hard of a thing to do, whatever. But it can lead you to a respect for your body, for other people's bodies, for health, for the environment, you know, for all these things. So it leads you, like you're saying, from like a lesser virtue to a greater one, to a deeper one. Maybe that's what God intended for the law to do for us.

Eli (02:46:35.074)
Yeah, yeah, and I think that's why Jesus is so angry with the religious leaders, because he's saying, no, no, no, no, you've taken these in the way we're talking about it, the language we're talking about it in, you've taken this lesser virtue, and you've just added a bunch more, maybe even shallower than that, virtues around it. No, you were supposed to go deeper with it.

Elijah Davidson (02:46:43.171)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:46:51.363)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:46:58.925)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (02:47:02.146)
you you've heard it said, and I say like the whole Sermon on the Mount stuff, it's like him showing like, no no no, you've gotten it all wrong. These lesser things were supposed to lead you to these deeper things. These like negative instructions were supposed to lead you toward the positive actions. And yeah, I think that is subtly there in this movie. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:03.267)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:07.246)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:19.843)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:26.957)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Eli (02:47:30.88)
Yeah, I think that's it. mean, I think we've, I think we covered everything. There's nothing else to talk about with this movie ever again. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you mentioned a little bit, where does this, where do you think this falls for you with like Spielberg in your arbitrary ranking? Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:34.489)
Great.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:38.799)
That's right, Bridges of Spies. I'll never have to watch it again, never think about it ever again. We're done. You're right.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:54.223)
arbitrary ranking.

Elijah Davidson (02:47:59.138)
mean, Spielberg's one those filmmakers where the distance between the top and the bottom is not a very large distance. Because even a movie like Always is interesting. And even a movie like Hook has a lot of amazing things in it. So I don't know, though. If I'm going to use the tiers, it's mid-tier Spielberg. But it's like high mid-tier. It's high mid-tier Spielberg.

Eli (02:48:00.78)
There's like a whole tier. Yeah.

Eli (02:48:16.267)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (02:48:22.764)
Yeah, I think that's fair.

Elijah Davidson (02:48:28.047)
It's really good mid-tier Spielberg.

Eli (02:48:29.344)
Yeah. Well, I was looking and it's like, I was like, man, I can put this like, after I finished, I was like, this is so good. I could put this up toward the top. But then I was like looking at the movies and I was like, I can't put it above so many of these and, but it feels like, you know, a lot of other directors, it would be at the top, you know? Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:48:41.027)
I know, yeah, I can't. I know, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:48:51.383)
it'd be their best movie, right? yeah I know. It's, I mean when you're Spielberg and you've made movies that changed the world, I mean, you know, when you've made Jaws, Close Encounters, and Raiders, and E.T., and Jurassic Park, and Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan, yeah. And Lincoln.

Eli (02:48:58.806)
Yeah.

Eli (02:49:09.322)
It just goes on and on. Yeah. man.

Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to, after this conversation, I'm excited to get to Lincoln, so, yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:49:23.373)
Yeah, I'll give you a little, you'll have a great conversation about Lincoln, you'll get into it. But I did a thing with Lincoln for a New Testament class. I was doing an independent study with a professor at Fuller, and he was teaching into a New Testament class, and he wanted me to do a thing to help the students in the class treat the Gospels as stories and not just as like a textbook.

Eli (02:49:33.74)
Okay.

Eli (02:49:50.294)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:49:51.937)
And so I was like, okay, let's use Lincoln. And I had the class watch Lincoln and we talked about how Lincoln is structured and how Lincoln is structured like a gospel, like the gospel of Mark or something. And we like paralleled the two and that was lots of fun and it works really well. Cause it's a story about a savior who just like walks around telling stories all the time about stuff. And

Eli (02:50:11.586)
That's cool.

Elijah Davidson (02:50:20.559)
is trying to accomplish something. So everything is communicated via story. A rag-tag group of disciples are out there causing a ruckus. And he's crucified and maybe resurrected in the end. So it's a very GDC movie. Fun. Yeah.

Eli (02:50:23.318)
has a ragtag group around him.

Yeah.

Eli (02:50:37.154)
Yeah.

Eli (02:50:41.826)
No, that's cool. Yeah, I'll definitely like keep that in the back of my mind watching it. But yeah, that was last week actually, Lincoln, or a couple of weeks ago, I guess. And next week we're gonna do a movie draft to go along with this. We're gonna do a Cold War movie draft. Pretty exciting to dig into some of these.

Elijah Davidson (02:50:50.457)
Anyhow.

Right.

Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:51:08.803)
Yeah.

Eli (02:51:12.32)
Yeah, that'll be next week. Then we'll be getting into the BFG. So that'll be fun too. but yeah, that's, that's really all we have this week. just a reminder. If you want to find out more about Elijah's work and, where to follow him and sign up for his newsletter and see all of his, his books and like come and see and stuff, you can go to ElijahDavidson.com real easy.

Elijah Davidson (02:51:40.867)
Yep, pretty easy.

Eli (02:51:41.218)
I'll link that in the episode description too, so that'll be easy to click on. But yeah. Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:51:47.087)
Can I just say real quick, this is a goofy thing. You can cut this out if you don't care. it's my own website that I run. it's just fun to have my own website that is on my own server and has my own setup and all that kind of stuff. I've been, being the age that I am, I've been on the internet since I was in junior high, like forever. And I've gone through so many iterations of like...

Eli (02:51:54.583)
Yeah.

Eli (02:51:59.777)
Yeah.

Elijah Davidson (02:52:17.058)
having a blog here or a blog there or whatever and it's fun to be at a place where I'm like, yep, I just have my own website and it's affordable to run and I can do whatever I want to with it and I can like have a sign up thing for come and see and I can like do a book or work and I can just do whatever. I can just do that, it's fun and I don't have to worry about like anybody coming along and adding ads to it or screwing it up, you know, it's just my own website to run. It's fun, neat. It's goofy, there's little, I'm saying this part because there are little.

Eli (02:52:28.608)
Yeah. All of your stuff centralized. Yeah.

Eli (02:52:39.681)
Mm-hmm.

Elijah Davidson (02:52:46.734)
tucked away corners of that website that a visitor might not find unless they click around just right. And I think that's kind of fun too. It's like a DVD menu with Easter eggs. That's kind of my thought process of running the website.

Eli (02:52:55.842)
Yeah.

Yeah, so that's what you should do. When you finish listening to this episode, click the link in the episode description and just start clicking stuff online. Yeah, you might find stuff that he didn't even know was there.

Elijah Davidson (02:53:04.813)
You

Elijah Davidson (02:53:09.934)
Click it around, see what you find. There's lots of weird stuff hidden in there. no, I know it's all there. But you may find stuff you wish you hadn't found. That could happen too. So.

Eli (02:53:17.666)
That could happen, who knows. Again, ElijahDavidson.com. There's all kinds of fun stuff on there. I love it. That's all we have for this week. Next week is our Cold War movie draft. But yeah, we are done. I have been Eli Price for Elijah Davidson. You've been listening to The Establishing Shot.

Elijah Davidson (02:53:27.566)
There you go.

DVD menu circa 2005.

you

Eli (02:53:47.424)
We will see you next time.