(upbeat music) - Flashes, huh? What's your favorite scary movie? - Um, not that one. (upbeat music) - All right, well, hi. We are Joe and Trace of Bloody Disgusting's work with his podcast. And I think we're just gonna jump right in, guys. (laughing) All right, so this is a great example of, you know, queer horror, both behind the camera and in front of it with actors like David Pike Pierce and non-binary leads like Ryan Simkins. So as two queer men, why is it important, I guess to you and just in general to include queer talent and queer storylines in your work? - 'Cause we're always left out. (laughing) - I don't know to see our work in the world and help other people have visibility and create visibility for people who don't see themselves out there. And also, I feel like the origins of queer, I feel like the origins of horror are so such a queer space. And I feel like what's happened now, and I don't mean this in any negative way, but as usual, it's getting gentrified by the straight people. (laughing) No, gentrification is great. - Yeah. So it's getting diluted a little bit. Well, so bridging onto that. So, I mean, there's a pretty major subplot in the film in which, you know, Tony is implied or maybe just stated to have been molested by one of his priests when he was a younger boy. And I will be blunt, it feels like as the film goes on, it kind of walks that back a little bit. And I was just curious if that was intentional on your part or not. - I don't even know what to say to that. - Yeah. Well, I want to respond to your question, but the question, what was it in the film that you viewed that made you feel like it was being walked back? - I think in the third act, when we kind of, sorry, we can spoil all this, obviously, this will come out after the movie actually comes out, but it felt like the implication the third act was very much that, oh, the priest just, quote unquote, got a demon into him. And it seemed to not want to, didn't address the molestation more beyond that point. It almost felt like it was saying, oh no, you think he was getting molested, but it was actually, quote unquote, just a demon. - Oh, interesting. - Oh, yeah, that really wasn't the intention, but it's interesting that all interpretations are valid and interesting in their own way. So, you know, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna tell you how to watch the movie. (laughing) - I mean, it was the thing, I felt like we were really dealing with it in that first act. And then it, I don't know, maybe my interpretation is wrong, but I guess then to branch off of that, how do you see queerness and religion intersecting in the film, you know? Was it a conscious decision to keep it contained in Tony's backstory? You know, for example, Lee tells Father Connor, she doesn't know what she believes. And I guess that's kind of what's adding into my perceived ambiguity of the situation. - By the way, I think a lot of ambiguity's are intentional. I think those are the kind of movies we like that kind of leave it to your interpretation, honestly. I don't think we should be saying this is exactly what happened. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think for us, the impetus for including queer characters in a film that was playing in the sort of tropes of a subgenre that is historically pretty, I hate using this word, it's so overused, but patriarchal, sexist and in curious about faith and except to just be a booster for Catholicism, you know, getting to sort of fuck around with that, to be honest, you know, meant, I don't know, you know, I was talking to someone else about this, you know, like I was born in '78 and I didn't know what sex was, but I knew what AIDS was before I knew what sex was and I knew that I was gonna get it, you know? I knew that I was part of a community that was viewed as dirty and broken and just outside of God's plan. And, you know, I did my time in Catholic school and I had been around, when I moved to the States, I was around a lot of evangelicals who God bless them, were pretty small-minded and I, especially now, I am, I'm pretty sure I speak for both of us, I am sick to fucking death of so-called religious leaders who don't strike me as terribly Christ-like, picking on queer people, queer kids, trans kids. And I don't know, for us, if we were going to play around in the world of what an exorcism movie looks like, it felt transgressive to just simply matter of factly have queer people be a part of the side that's trying to bring someone back to decency. - What did you do? - Was there? Sorry, sorry, go ahead, no, go ahead. - No, no, no, go ahead, you go ahead, you go ahead. - I always say, was there any pushback, I guess, from anyone involved, given the content of the film? Not at first. - Not at first, believe it or not. - But that implies that there was pushback later. - Yeah. (laughing) - Yeah. - And one person was quoted as saying, well, if it's not going to be, - Euphoria. - Yeah, lesbian sex, why do we need the storyline? - Oh, come on. - Yeah, so, you know, that kind of gives you a nutshell idea. You know, we were very fortunate that, you know, right from the outside, Kevin Williamson was like, very behind that, you know, behind this storyline. And then, you know, before we could do any reshoots, planned reshoots, you know, COVID happens, and then all of a sudden, you know, the industry starts having its, like, Grumell seizures over and over again, and then people are freaking out, and, you know, and I don't know, and who's going to be offended, and blah, blah, blah, you know, so you can kind of fill in the blanks. - Yeah. - And that comment specifically about, you know, if they're not doing, like, full-on, blue is the warmest color scissoring, you know, like, somehow, it's not worthy of, I mean, the innocence, the overall, the innocence, and kind of simplicity of Blake and Lee's relationship was by design. We were like, I remember somebody was like, suggesting, like, you should have one of them take a drag on the joint, and then she exhales the pot smoke into her mouth, and I was like, why? - 'Cause that's never been done. - Yeah, I know, I was shocked at it. - Yeah, first of all, I was like, wow, go on, I'm fascinated. - It's massive. - Ooh. - Yeah. - Unfortunately, that person's actually recently been-- - No, no, no, I don't wanna talk about it. - So, a person who suggested that, no longer working in Hollywood. - I don't wanna talk about it. - Okay. - So, good idea, bad ideas come from bad people. - Anyway, there we go. - So, yeah, it was a bit of a sticking point for a minute, but, you know, we didn't, we were tired of seeing women be hysterical and just ask, and then, you know, men save them. And I always, this is my byline for the movie that I want on my personal poster of it. It's about a bottom who's saved by two lesbians. (laughing) - If only we could have sold the film on that. - You know, and, you know, that just they did, they wouldn't put it on the poster. - No, I don't understand, I mean, come on, you gotta like get eyeballs, I say get eyeballs. - Well, we'll make it the caption of this interview. That's it, we'll, that's it, we'll-- - And that was interesting because, you know, Russell is such, in a way, like such a, such an archetype of male masculine, like such, I mean, oh my God, you know, I will intimidate you, I'm this giant, you know, indomitable iconic actor from Gladiator, you know, and we very much wanted to just spin that on its head. - Yeah, when we first met him, he said, you know, he was like, in movies, I like to be the one driving the bus and, you know, like, I remember putting him, I remember we put him on mute for a second. And then I put the Josh when I was like, girl, in this movie, you are the bus, like what, you know, like if you're possessed, you know, like, you're not in control. So that's, I think that was one of the more enticing ideas about casting Russell. And one of the, I think one of the things that he really brought to the movie was sort of going to, I think a more just uncomfortable place of vulnerability. More, I think it was uncomfortable for him to allow himself to be in scenes where it was like, like, we don't know if this guy's going to make it. And - Right, he bought a mapping, that's what it is, Jesus Christ. (laughing) So, and, you know, and I, you know, we think he's pretty great. And so, so yeah. So you mentioned COVID and reshoots, which is, I imagine, - Stressful. - Probably dominated a lot of conversations of movies that were made in a certain time period, but yeah, you know, this film obviously had a different title back in 2019, when it was "Green Lit," the Georgetown Project. So you've been working on this for like half a decade at this point. Can you walk us through some of-- - Tonight. (laughing) - I'm sorry. I'm sure you're very out to have it now finally come out and so on, but we're wondering, you know, can you walk us through like what changed over the course of that production? Like how did COVID and all of the changes and stuff affect it? - Or the lack of reshoots. You said you weren't able to do reshoots, were you? - Well, there are some things we were able to do, but we weren't able to ever like, truly, truly finish the movie. - Mm-hmm, okay. - I think, I don't know. I feel like we changed the most. - Yeah. - I feel like it was a very, and I think when you change drastically, well, the work does too because you're just different person looking back on something and it just looks different to you and you realize there's other things you wanna maybe emphasize or a storyline that really fills the resonates with more who you are today. So that was interesting trying to like track with that and by the end, I felt like we were maybe finally at a place where the movie met us where we were. - Yeah. - And that the ideas and the themes, when we were given the movie, see, there is that phase in the middle of this process that you're asking about where that Hollywood typical battle where the movie's taken away from you and everyone's gonna now panic try to figure it out. - Yeah, everyone but you knows better. - You know, and then eventually that movie gets put out and then there's those weird miracles that happen where the presence of the studio gets fired. Not sorry, not fired but replaced. So I don't know what happened. Then I really don't know. And then the new distribution company comes on board that's separate from the studio and they saw a trailer of the movie and they went whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. They're seen in the trailer that aren't in the movie. What's going on here? And we're like, well, let us and we don't throw anyone into the bus because it's cheap. So we just kind of said, look. - You wanna see? - Yeah, and we had a conversation and they said, "Well, look, the movie's coming out this day. "You have a month and a half to add this stuff in." So we had a very, very precise amount of time. I'd like another three, four months to be honest and maybe one day I would go directors at an official, like a real, real director's cut, which would be very drastically different than this movie in certain ways. - Yeah, especially the last third, actually. But I think we had an opportunity to go in and recut it and the re-queer and story. We put that back in, we put a lot of stuff back in. And I think while the movie still, we still wanna do more work on, I think we felt it spoke enough to our original intentions that we stand behind it and we want this movie in the world. And it was vindicating to get the queer elements back in, it was vindicating to get certain visual stuff and certain story stuff we wanted to get back in stuff, so. - I'm actually curious, I grew up very Catholic as well. I was a person like, I knew about sex before AIDS, but I definitely thought that they're just by having sex with a man, like I would get AIDS. I thought that was like, there's the automatic thing you get because sex education in Texas is not good. But I'm just curious, with both of your experience and like dealing with Catholicism, like how was it working on a film where you're indicting the Catholic church, you're also like showing it in a positive light to be like, look, you can be a good Catholic, it just has to, you have to work around it. I don't know. - I don't know that I would qualify the movie as an indictment of the Catholic church, so much as just allowing for a movie about faith versus darkness to make room for the fact that the Catholic church can be both the arsonist and the fireman, especially in terms of Anthony's problem. Yeah. - Yeah, go ahead. - No, go ahead, go ahead. I'm sorry. - I mean, when the exorcist came out, the Catholic church hated that movie. - Which is like so dumb because it's like the greatest commercial or the Catholic church ever produced. - Like they should hate the omen, not. - Hi, exorcist. - Hello. - I think, you know, my dad was, you know, fallen Catholic in many ways and had all the Catholic damage. My mother was Jewish and I always say, she had more Catholic damage than my dad who was Catholic. - No, it's so weird. - It's super weird. I think, you know, Mark has more direct experience with that stuff and I have always found it kind of spooky. I mean, just, I find like, I personally find Catholicism to feel like I'm going into horror movie. You know, when I've gone to my father's funeral and it was like this very formal Catholic ceremony. I was like, stand up, don't stand up, get on your knee, then do this and that. I was like, it, I choose my Jewish side because I always-- - My best side. - My best side. I just felt it was, it always was a bit haunting to me and more heavily rooted in you're going to hell because Jews don't believe in hell, right? So, although you're like parent, we'll try to convince you you're going to be wrong or guilty about something you've done because that's just be Jewish. - Yeah, it'll even guilt. - But you're not going to hell. You're just, you're living at your mother's house. That's what, that's hell. It's but it was afraid. - Yes, exactly, always. So, but I just felt that there was such a terror about it and there was such guilt associated with it. I was kept at distance and I felt like my dad was so tortured having grown up as an altar boy. You know, when he was cast and the exorcist, they, when Billy Frickin saw his play on Broadway, he was reading a playbill and my dad's picture was in there as the playwright and he was like, oh, that guy looks really tortured. That looks like a really tortured person. And, oh, this is so much better. (laughing) - The camera was like, no. (laughing) - And it, they were, I kind of thought, well, gosh. You know, that's true. My dad was always had that look and then he got the role. They didn't want him in that role originally. They wanted, I won't list the actors, but he didn't even want to be in the movie 'cause he just thought it was gonna be some popular trash. And he read the book and of course he related to the themes about a man who having a crisis of faith. So going back to what you're talking about, Mark, I think that we all have those like elements of faith that those, when we just really question it. But for me, that was when I was a queer person. It is, was I first really felt, I had like, I believed in the religious God. And then when I started to experiment, I thought, well, I'm going to hell and that's what's going to happen. And it was sort of like, well, what am I gonna choose? And so when we talk about, I think in some ways, the movie is addressing that like early pre-adolescent, like horror and trauma, a feeling abused in a way by the church, by the religious figures that were in my life who kind of in a certain way, conversion therapy is a form of obviously abuse. And I felt that some of the elements in my life at that time were like church abuses. And that was part of, I think also a factor, like a layer in this movie for us, for both of us. - All right, well, maybe we'll try something a little lighter, so as to not traumatize you for her or her. - No, we've been so traumatized. - Honestly, we've been talking and talking and talking. So we're just like, at this point, at this point, what's that, what's that great line in women? Is it women in chains, the B movie? She's in the car with the guy and he's like, oh, oh God, it's so horrible. It's so horrible, yeah. - He's like, I'm gonna rape you. - And she's like, you can't baloney, you can't rape me. I like sex. And it's just, you just go like, oh my God. Like, just, like, honestly though, why are you breaking? - I'm not following the-- - I'm okay with trauma. - Oh. - He likes being traumatized. - Well, I mean, you know, making anything, making anything is, is traumatic. - Kind of, you know, it's, it's, I feel comfortable talking about it 'cause I don't feel like I'm stuck there anymore, you know? - Okay, so one of the things we were wondering about is there's a couple of notable actors who appear quite briefly in the film. We were just wondering if folks like Samantha Mathis or Sam Worthington had additional scenes or larger arcs and they, yeah. - Oh yeah, yeah. - Wow, that under things that we didn't have time to address. - Oh, no, there were things they were also in the earlier, we just, the cuts that, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah. - We shot 'em. - Ooh, yeah. - Get them in. - Do you gotta ask how-- - Oh, good, no, go ahead, Joe. - And I ask how long, sorry. And I ask how long the original cut was when you first sort of submitted it because we did find that this is quite brief. Like, obviously this feels like a studio mandate, you know, Brigitte and at about 95 minutes or so on. - Yeah, pretty much. - I think about "Closer to the Two." - Maybe "One of Us." - "An Hour of 50." - Yeah. - Okay. - Do y'all have a, do y'all know anything about a physical release if it deleted scenes will be on a potential Blu-ray release of this film? - We, there haven't been specific conversations about that. - But I mean, but I mean what I say, like I would like to do at some point after I finish the next movie, I would like to do a kind of deep, deep dive into a director's cut version on this because there's a lot of cool scenes where there's scenes of the movie within the movie. We did a lot of those. And I think it was a really cool kind of like-- - That was the next question. (laughing) - 'Cause we love those parts and then it feels again, like as the movie progresses, it just kind of starts to drop off and we were like, no, they clearly had some vision for it because the movie opens with it. Many of the good like scary set pieces are involving the production of the film. So-- - Exactly. So we, I would love to ring all that back. It's really cool stuff. - Well, okay. So both the exorcism and the last film you all wrote together, The Final Girls, they both feature like a film within a film. Is that a specific interest of yours? I find it all fascinating because I love the concepts. But like again, like, so is that something you want to continue in like your next films or something like that? - I mean, I think it depends. It depends on just, I don't know. It's always story contingent. But I will say that I think Metahore or anything is an inherently queer. I mean, I hate this. Sometimes I, you know, like if you go in like a queer podcast suddenly it becomes sound like this like militant like-- - Oh, we love it. Bring it up. (laughing) - But I think it's an inherently queer sub-genre because it's about people questioning reality, questioning their own existence. You know, like questioning if what they're experiencing is real or false or some kind of construct. And so I don't know. I mean, I'll speak for myself. I think that was like very, that kind of like weird distancing effect was something I experienced. Certainly growing up and occasionally as an adult. And in the year of Orlour 2024. But I would say for me, it's the meta aspects of it are not necessarily like that's sort of an accident in a certain way. I think it's not, it's coming from a deeper choice which is, I mean, this is a conversation I just had with someone and it helped me sort of distill a lot of my trajectory and my life creatively. I'm an archivist. And I have a wealth of legacy and history behind me that I've been born into from my grandfather to my mother to my father to my brother to my, like it just, it never ends, right? Everyone in the family. And in a certain way, you can either like refute it or refuse it most of your life or you can just like sort of embrace it and go, I have a duty here to carry on my family's stories and legacy. And there's a creative act in that itself. And so, I mean, we're literally sitting in a room right now where we're organizing negatives of my grandfather's photography for a beautiful book that's gonna be published. And, you know, from his stuff in Palm Springs in the 40s and 50s. And, you know, that's something that we're both doing together and that is another piece of like archiving, doing unpacking sort of the mythology of the exorcist. Once again, we're making something about history. We're making about a historical film. These are all, I think this next movie that I wanna do to direct is also gonna be in that realm. So I think that's a huge part and that just inevitably becomes meta because you're making stories about stories. And I think that's also very queer because I think, as my friend said, he says, "Faggots are archivists." (laughing) - That's evidence. - You know? And we're, and the really like serious, you know, PhD faggots as he called them. You know, we know the deep cuts. We know the deep like layers of film history and where we're seeing and not seeing it and other parts of Hollywood history, but we're academic about it. And I think that comes from two places. I think it comes from always being under the threat of erasure, right? And then I can also like factor in having also being raised by a Holocaust survivor. So like those do combine, I'm like, "Okay, how do I continue to tell stories "about where I'm from and who I am, "which is where I'm from," to some degree, right? And so I think that's a huge part of it. And then I just think the meta stuff just falls in because it happens to be the milieu. Like, let's do a story about the making of that 'cause it's just 'cause it's part of the family lore. Okay. It's not an intention. It's not intended as a gimmick. - Oh, and that wasn't what I was implying by the way. - Oh, I know. Oh, no, I know. I'm just saying, like, I'm understanding it more for myself now, actually, for the first time. It's like, I'm just telling it. - I think I'll-- - And speaking of, just 'cause we know that we're probably nearly out of time, just thinking about how, yes, we often know our history and we are willing to reference it, just had a bit of a jokey final question. Is the vampire sorority show that Blake is meant to be a part of? Is that just a commentary on Buffy or other sort of teen genre affair or-- - Well, I mean, Kevin Williamsons are producers, so-- - Vampire directors. (laughing) - Yeah, but I mean, it's, I don't know. I, when we wrote it, we were like, well, like, what's a show that we would wanna, oh, vampire sorority, you know, like, I don't know. Like, put sorority on anything and I'm like, yes. - I'll watch it. - Sure. - I would have happily watched a clip of her like filming a scene from that show. (laughing) - Okay. Yeah, I'll have to put it. - And those girls, they had no, well, you know, Ryan and Chloe, they were just all in. - Yup. - Never had one issue about any of the sexuality between the two of them. They were completely comfortable. They were-- - It's a day of, they were like, yeah, let's do it. - Let's do it. - Let's do it. - Yeah. - There's no scissoring, no, no, no, no scissoring. - I mean, yeah, because as we all know, it's not really gay unless-- - Unless. (laughing) - I mean, there's just something so, I mean, obviously, misogynist about that to say the least, and just, of course. - Yeah. - Of course. - Leave. Anyway, this is an informative moment. (laughing) It learned a lot. - Well, thank y'all. I mean, I think that'll wrap it up for us, but thank y'all for, also your candor. I really appreciate that. Yeah. - Oh, if nothing else. (laughing) - You're welcome. - I'll tell you what. - We're very much looking forward to when you have full control, and hopefully you'll get to see that director's cut in the future. - Yes, yes, definitely. Definitely. We will have that, yeah. - Okay. - Just, just... - Release it online. (laughing) - Oh, I think it's very easy to put, I think it's very easy to do something like this. It's a bit of a highly copyright law. - Like, it didn't do this. (laughing) - Like, anything, it's about money, right? And so, we'll just put together the money in time, and after not, I don't want... Shoot the first move in the next movie. - Yeah. - And, like, after after that, for fun. - For sure. - Right. - All right. - Thank you guys so much. - No, yeah. Thank you all so much again. It's been a pleasure. - Thanks, guys. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
A spoiler-y interview with writer/director Joshua John Miller and his co-writer M.A. Fortin on their Russell Crowe-starring possession film The Exorcism (2024), including the five year process of bringing it to the screen, what would be in their Director's Cut, and queerness in horror.
Questions? Comments? Snark? Connect with the boys on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Letterboxd, Facebook, or join the Facebook Group to get in touch with other listeners
> Trace: @tracedthurman
> Joe: @bstolemyremote
Be sure to support the boys on Patreon!
Theme Music: Alexander Nakarada
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
