The Film Stage Presents

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie directors! And sometimes we get to talk to movie directors about their own B-Sides!

Today, with his new film Just Play Dead now in theaters and available on VOD/Digital, we spoke with the great Martin Campbell about his long, accomplished career. Along with Just Play Dead, we focus on his early films Criminal Law, Cast a Deadly Spell, and Beyond Borders.

The perennially underrated filmmaker tells us how he gets movies like Just Play Dead made these days, why he still wants to make an outright comedy, why his Green Lantern film didn’t work (spoiler alert: it was the script being written “by committee" and eleventh-hour budget cuts), and the freedom that comes with smaller budgets on independent productions. There are also brief discussions about GoldenEye (a final budget of just $58 million!), his cult classic No Escape, and why he doesn’t like the actual making of his movies but he loves the editing.

Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie stars and not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones they made in between. In a revisited episode as Mutiny arrives, Dan Mecca, Conor O'Donnell, and Jordan Raup discuss The B-Sides of Jason Statham’s career.

Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie stars and not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones they made in between. Today, in a revisited episode, we explore the career of a B-Side prince: Matt Damon. From his Oscar-laden breakout film Good Will Hunting to the upcoming Ford v Ferrari, the Boston-born filmmaker has made many hit movies, and twice as many that were underseen. And don’t get us started on all of the cameos!

Our Damon-focused episode explores Gerry, The Brothers Grimm, Hereafter and The Great Wall. We discuss the career of Terry Gilliam and his many troubles making Grimm. We dive into the tragic inspiration behind Gerry as well as Gus Van Sant and Matt Damon’s desire to experiment with long camera shots. We gauge how accurate podcast producer Conor O’Donnell’s review of The Great Wall was from a couple of years back.

When, a few years ago, I agreed to interview the filmmaker Rob Tregenza on the eve of his career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, I did not anticipate it would, before long, lead to a producing credit on his new film. Nor a whole other feature in the time between that he thanked me for helping motivate, or an extended interview on his strange experiences working with Béla Tarr.

This week marks the release of Tregenza’s sixth feature, Fast, a characteristically audacious and formally virtuosic that opens at MoMA on Wednesday, August 12 for a world-premiere one-week run, followed by an opening at Los Angeles’ Laemmle cinemas on August 21.

If you suspect I’m biased in the movie’s favor, good work; you are correct. But I also have as many questions about it as anyone else, and wanted to speak to Tregenza about Fast’s particulars and peculiarities. Thus this conversation that I hope you—whether you choose to be the listener or the reader—find as illuminating as I, the interviewer.

There’s podcasts about movies (hello) and there are movies about podcasts. A podcast helping create a movie that is not itself about the podcast, but reflects its worldviews and the sense of humor that has become a kind of lingua franca among people in their 20s and 30s: that is novel.

Thus: Chunks. If you’re a regular listener of Chapo Trap House, you’ve probably heard ads for the film proffered by the show’s producer Chris Wade, who has also taken up producing duties on this film, which is a comedy anthology that moves between public-access TV, animation, live-streamed poker, and more straight-ahead narrative projects that still reflect something of screen life and the modern dystopia. Chunks was spearheaded by Amber A'Lee Frost, a longtime contributor to Chapo who has since started ColdFeet, a production entity that previously supported Eephus. It was my pleasure speaking with Chis and Amber about Chunks, translating the Chapo sensibility to cinema, and ColdFeet’s forthcoming projects.
Music courtesy of Lex Walton: “Love Theme from an Unreleased Film” from the album Giving It Up.