The Projection Booth

Nancy Kwan talks with Mike about The World of Nancy Kwan, her new memoir written with Deborah Davis and a foreword by her nephew Kevin Kwan. Kwan revisits how she landed The World of Suzie Wong almost by accident, tagging along to watch her favorite Hong Kong actresses screen-test before a casting director pulled her in front of the camera, which led to a Hollywood contract, acting lessons with Jeff Corey, and a national tour of the stage production after France Nuyen won the film role.

They dig into working with William Holden on Suzie Wong, the yellow...

When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa.

Sargent traces her path from modern dance and experimental theater to a Mike Figgis-mentored short shot days before she met her biological mother in Korea. She explains how the Take Me Home short went from diary entry to Sundance...

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle join Mike for Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), third in their trilogy after Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Made with a Guggenheim grant, it grows from the 2020 CZU fire that forced the couple to evacuate their Santa Cruz Mountains home for two and a half months, turning a burn scar the size of Delaware into a portrait of a community, its goats, dog, and beloved peacock, that refused to fall apart.

Stephens and Sprinkle unpack what ecosexual means (loving the Earth as...

Digital Kitchen's Mason Nicoll and Andrew "AJ" Julien talk with Mike about designing the Emmy-nominated title sequences for Spider-Noir and Smoke. They walk through the studio's pitch process, from log-line-only briefs to full pilot screenings, and how Spider-Noir's period-accurate 1931 noir look came from surrealist photography, Man Ray, Seconds, and a Lady from Shanghai homage they didn't know the show was making until after the fact.

They dig into Smoke's objects-as-characters concept, physically burning items in reverse to stand in for Taron Egerton's and Jurnee Smollett's characters, and the different approval chains between a Marvel/Sony/Amazon property and...

Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a lonely gas station clerk, steals a bicycle and ends up sidekick to its owner, The Girl (Lara Wolf), a blank-eyed, scarred vigilante who may or may not be a superhero. Luka Marčetić's Girl in the Night (2026) just took Best Picture in Fantastic Fest's Main Competition, and Mike talks with Marčetić and Wolf about the Slovenian deadpan charmer.

Marčetić traces the film from a one-line logline and a scrapped romantic comedy to a tone shaped by Napoleon Dynamite, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Riley Stearns. The pair recall 20 winter nights of whispered filming in Ljub...

Sirens wail, smoke drifts past the hedgerows, and inside a tidy English cottage two grown adults earn "nifties" for good behavior. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson's darkly comic feature debut, Littermates (2026), turns a vague apocalypse into a strange, tender story of siblinghood, and Mike talks with both directors about how they pulled it off.

Friends since film school, the pair recount reverse-engineering the script around a borrowed country house and three performers they know best, including Liam (Joey Bader), a character Bader had been doing around the house for years. They also relive shooting the entire film on...

Lou Ferrigno talks with Mike about Hard Redemption (2026), the martial-arts action thriller from director-writer-star Jino Kang and co-director Christine Lam. The film plays out a Die Hard-in-a-classroom premise: a GED teacher with a hidden past (Kang) has to fight off a San Francisco gang holding his students hostage, one grudge match at a time through the school's hallways to a gymnasium showdown.

Ferrigno, best known as television's original Hulk, joins the cast in a supporting role opposite David Kurzhal, Jessie Pettit, James Aaron Oh, and Mikaila Maei. Mike talks with Ferrigno about the film, his role in it...

Agata Trzebuchowska joins Mike for a Special Report on Sick (2026), her feature debut as writer and director, fresh off winning Best Director in Fantastic Fest's Next Wave competition. Sent to the Polish countryside to nurse their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk), sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) feel the summer heat bend their bond into something neither of them can name.

Best known as the novice nun at the heart of Paweł Pawlikowski's Oscar-winning Ida, Trzebuchowska talks about moving behind the camera, from her Sundance short Heat to the stalled project whose frustrations gav...

Rob St. Mary and Jedidiah Ayres join Mike for The Salton Sea (2002), D.J. Caruso's meth-fueled noir starring Val Kilmer in a dual role: junkie informant Danny Parker, who's secretly Tom Van Allen, a grieving trumpet player hunting the corrupt cops who murdered his wife. Chasing them drags Danny deep into the orbit of Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a nose-less speed freak who'll snort anything, and Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard), closing in as his double life unravels.

Screenwriter Tony Gayton and director D.J. Caruso join Mike to talk making the film — Gayton on writing the script and hi...

Nick Simon talks with Mike about What Happened to Doris? (2026), his film revisiting the real case that inspired The Entity (1982). Doris Bither was a Culver City single mother whose reports of violent supernatural attacks drew paranormal investigators from UCLA and became one of the most documented hauntings in American history. Simon developed the project with the blessing of Doris's real son, Brian, adjusting details to honor her experience while centering the story on her fight to be believed rather than the haunting itself.

Simon talks about pursuing Heather Graham for the lead with a personal letter laying out...

Peter M. Hoffman talks with Mike about Karmic Winds: Reflections from the "Smartest Guy in Hollywood", his memoir written largely in pencil during an eight-month prison sentence for a tax-credit case a federal judge had already ruled legal. Hoffman traces his path from Yale tax law into the movie business, tax-engineering Superman for Alex Salkind, working with manager Albert Grossman, and untangling Dolly Parton's publishing split from Porter Wagoner so she could reclaim her catalog outright.

They dig into Carolco, the independent studio Hoffman built with Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, from the capital-gains maneuver that got Marlon...

Director Jessica Earnshaw talks with Mike about Baby Doe (2025), her documentary on Gail, tried decades after a newborn's 1993 death, and the phenomenon of pregnancy denial. Earnshaw traces her path from photojournalism, including a National Geographic essay on aging in prison, to her debut Jacinta, and how the film began with Emily Weaver's case before an appeals delay sent her searching for another, leading her to Gail.

They dig into building trust as a nearly one-woman crew, archival footage pulled from prosecutors' files, decades-old news coverage, and Gail's own home movies, and denial as a survival mechanism. Earnshaw talks...

Director Lena Khan talks with Mike about Best of the Best (2026), her Bollywood-fusion dance comedy for Netflix from writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Khan traces her path from UCLA activism and music videos to her debut The Tiger Hunter, and how Minhaj and Venkataramanujam brought her on after asking for script notes and liking what she said.

They dig into the rewrite process, Khan's push for tonal consistency across the film's teen-comedy, dance-movie, and female-friendship strands, and her call to trade a boy-subplot for a betrayal that lands harder. Khan talks choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Mackenzie Dustman...

Cassie Workman talks with Mike about her new horror-comedy series, Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, a puppet-and-drawings deep dive into occult history that plays, in Mike's words, like "a demented kid show." Workman traces her path from stand-up in Perth, Australia, and a run as head writer on The Aaron Chen Show, to fusing comedy and the occult into a series she finally pitched after years on the back burner, landing with manager Lawrence and Etch's Will Battersby and Phil.

They dig into the puppet cast, including Ben Russell's King Grimsquawk, built from one note ("Just do Werner...

Failure becomes a creative strategy in Mooch, Jeff Ryan’s scrappy New Jersey crime comedy about a nearly thirty-year-old caddie who stumbles into private-eye work. Mike talks with the film’s writer, director, editor, and star about transforming a teenage insult into an intensely personal character, channeling Jim Carrey’s physical fearlessness and the Coen brothers’ off-kilter language, and building the story to an emo soundtrack. Ryan also gets candid about wearing too many hats, trusting cinematographer Kenneth Wales while acting, surviving a long postproduction, and answering festival rejection with the gleefully defiant Rejecta Film Festival. Sometimes the best way forward...

When government planning turns communities into maps and statistics, whose lives disappear from the page? Mike talks with director Casey Carter about To Use a Mountain, his visually arresting journey through six American sites considered for a permanent nuclear-waste repository. Carter traces the film from his study of photography, physics, and architecture to six years of fieldwork, relationship-building, cinematography, animation, and editing. He discusses the human stories missing from Department of Energy reports, the challenge of joining investigative rigor to landscape portraiture, and the radioactive dinosaur bones he encountered along the way. The result asks what it means for a...

A child’s inner life deserves to be taken seriously. Mike talks with writer-director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla about Ah Girl, her tender, funny feature debut set amid family fracture in 1994 Singapore. Ang traces the film’s decade-long path from painful autobiographical memories to a story of healing, explains how counseling transformed the script, and reveals how play, trust, and close observation shaped the remarkable performances of young actors Ong Xuan Jing and Sydney Wong. She also discusses Singapore’s chewing-gum ban, hearing an audience member weep at the film’s Rotterdam world premiere, and cinema’s power to assure people fro...

John H. Cunningham and Ted E. Haynes talk with Mike about Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers, their documentary on the founding members of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band. The pair met at the Key West Film Festival and set out to make a short about steel guitarist Roger Bartlett; six interviews in, they knew they had a feature, and by the time they wrapped in April 2025 they'd shot eighteen more and amassed six hundred pieces of archival material.

They talk about the trust the surviving Reefers placed in them, editor Richard Lowe (Muscle Shoals) and archival producer...

Mike White is joined by El Goro and Jedidiah Ayres to discuss George P. Cosmatos’s 1993 Western, Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer in his career-defining turn as Doc Holliday. The conversation digs into Kevin Jarre’s ambitious original screenplay, his short-lived stint as director, Kurt Russell’s unusually hands-on role after Jarre was fired, and the material that disappeared as Tombstone transformed from a sprawling historical epic into the lean, quotable film audiences know today.

They also examine the movie’s version of the Earp legend, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt’s...

Harry Dodge and Silas Howard talk with Mike about By Hook or By Crook, their 2001 queer-cinema landmark, now touring U.S. theaters and streaming on VOD in a new 4K restoration. The pair met working at a dyke-run cafe in late-1980s San Francisco, and trace the film's origin story to an absurdly literal turning point: Dodge getting a cigarette-littering ticket that forced a thirteen-hour drive to Portland and back, during which the idea for a buddy story about Shy (Howard) and Valentine (Dodge) started to take shape.

They talk about writing the script out of their own...

Mia-Kate Russell talks with Mike about Penny Lane Is Dead, her Ozploitation slasher debut, now streaming on Shudder. After twenty years as a film and TV makeup artist, Russell wrote and shot the film off the back of five self-funded shorts, drawing on her own delinquent 1980s Australian childhood and a long-held urge to put a genuinely awful teenage girl on screen — the impulse that became Penny's cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn).

She talks about landing at Fantasia and getting matched with producers at Umbrella Entertainment and Shudder, shooting in a wintry Adelaide with a cast and crew she'd mo...

Berner talks with Mike about Splash City, the crime thriller he co-wrote, co-directed, produced, and financed himself — inspired by San Francisco's real-life "bipping" (smash-and-grab) epidemic. The Bay Area rapper and Cookies cannabis founder describes handing his own outline to co-writer David to build into a full screenplay, turning over most of the directing to his creative partner Alex, and stepping behind the camera himself for six scenes when the shoot ran out of money.

He talks about the film's ballooning budget (from a planned $500,000 to $2 million), the two-year in-house edit at his own Cookies offices, scrapping and re-recording th...

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine talk with Mike about Teenage Wasteland, their documentary premiering on Netflix September 4th. The film resurrects five hundred hours of decaying VHS tape shot between 1991 and 1997 by English teacher Fred Isseks and his Middletown, New York, students as they investigated a toxic dump — and stumbled into a conspiracy involving organized crime and cover-ups reaching the state government.

Moss and McBaine, the Boys State and Girls State team, describe tracking down Isseks, winning his trust over a twelve-course brunch, and the moment a crayon-drawn map of his gutted classroom convinced them to physically rebuild it...

Music can build suspense, reveal emotion, and reshape a scene—but who ensures that it works in harmony with the picture? Mike talks with Emmy-winning music editor Ben Schor about the often-invisible craft of guiding a production’s score from the earliest temp tracks through recording and the final mix. Schor traces his path from singer-songwriter to film and television, beginning with Gigli and developing long-running collaborations with composers including Jeff Russo. He explains how Alien: Earth balances the musical legacy of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner with eerie new sounds created using contrabass flute, Aztec death whistle, and the spec...

Mike talks to director Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure) along with stars Andrzej Konopka and Noomi Rapace about their new film Hot Spot (2026). It's a dystopian detective story about where Djonny (Andrzej Konopka) investigates a murder at a refugee camp at the behest of a sentient A.I. where he encounters a witch named Rana (Noomi Rapace).

Find out more at https://www.focusfeatures.com/hot-spot

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Rob Spencer joins Mike and Jedidiah Ayres -- our full-time co-host for this Val-halla series -- as we discuss some Val Kilmer films. We start with the neo-noir Kill Me Again from 1989. Written by David Warfield and John Dahl (who also directed), it stars Kilmer as a private detective who's hired by the two-timing Fay (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) who's on the run from the psychotic Vince "Vega" Miller (Michael Madsen).

Dahl and Warfield speak about the making of the film and the struggle to get their visions to screen.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www...

DB Frick and director Julius Olivas talk with Mike about Saving Ferris Butler, their scrappy, sub-$30,000 documentary chasing down the wildest claim in comedy history: that Ferris Butler, a fired 1980-81 Saturday Night Live writer and the mind behind the underground cable-access sketch show Waste Meat News, is the real inspiration for John Hughes's Ferris Bueller. Frick met Butler at a New York open mic fifteen years ago and spent years hearing him make the case; Olivas came aboard after directing Inky, his documentary on forgotten Hollywood ghostwriter Neil Gumbel, and dove into what turned out to be thousands of...

Gloria Mercer and Aidan West talk with Mike about A Safe Distance (2026), their scrappy, off-grid Canadian crime thriller that started as a pandemic-era proof-of-concept short and grew into a full-blown Bonnie-and-Clyde riff shot on borrowed forest properties outside Vancouver. Mercer directs and West writes, and the two — longtime collaborators since their Simon Fraser University film school days — dig into how a straightforward drama about a woman who says no to a camping-trip proposal picked up a bag of stolen money and a pair of outlaw lovers along the way, channeling Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy and the Wachowskis' Bound in equal meas...

Director Seth A. Smith joins Mike for a Special Report from the Fantasia International Film Festival on Permanent Damage (2026), his fairy-tale crime comedy about escaped convict Tommy Gods (Calem MacDonald), who holes up in a condemned Halifax housing complex and falls for Joe (Olivia Scriven), niece of the brutal landlord (Stephen Dorff) whose "golden goose" the two of them plan to steal.

Smith talks about the spray-foam insulation that sparked the idea, shooting in a townhouse complex already vacated and slated for demolition, casting Stephen McHattie as an eccentric pet-shop owner who spends most of the film in...

Writer-director Tim Riedel joins Mike for Ancestral Beasts (2026), a Red River Métis horror feature in which Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) retreats to a remote family cabin after her mother's death and finds something in the woods that feeds on everything she won't face.

Riedel traces the film back to his mother's Sixties Scoop childhood and her later borderline personality disorder diagnosis — the creature he grew up sensing in the shadows — then through a documentary career, a shoestring proof of concept that landed at Frontières during Cannes, and a 20-day Manitoba shoot with a largely Indigenous cast and crew t...

Rob St. Mary and Josh Hadley join Mike for The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked western about Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his aging outlaws chasing one last job against Robert Ryan's bounty hunter, a former member of the gang. When Angel is captured by the Mexican warlord Mapache, the Bunch has to decide whether to ride away or ride back for him.

We have a plethora of interviews for this one with actress Lilia Castillo, actor Alfonso Arau (Herrera), screenwriter Walon Green, Kathryn Jones, author of Tall in the Saddle: The Life of Ben Johnson, Hollywood's Real...

Spider-Man: Brand New Day argues a hero can be both the mask and the man, no universe reset required. Mike welcomes Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast for a crossover dissecting Destin Daniel Cretton's grounded, detective-flavored entry in the Tom Holland era, one that ditches multiverse noise for a genuine emotional throughline between Peter Parker and a scene-stealing Sadie Sink.

Mike and Chris unpack why this might be the best Holland Spider-Man yet, how Marisa Tomei's Aunt May keeps the franchise grounded, the Man-Spider mutation plot pulled from The Other, Jon Bernthal's Punisher partnership, and what a psychic rampage...

How do you make a documentary about an artist so iconic she's practically wallpaper — flowers, bones, desert light, done to death? Filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner set out to demythologize Georgia O'Keeffe instead, and Mike sits down with the married directing team to talk about it. They trace the project from a small University of Virginia exhibit revealing O'Keeffe's forgotten Charlottesville summers to a full-scale feature, built around the intimate Stieglitz letters released decades after her death and voiced in the film by Claire Danes. Paul and Ellen discuss securing cooperation from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, filming across he...

A gold-plated chain gang, a snowbound death march, and a father hunting a killer who's already survived the trip: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent closed out his western career with Cut-Throats Nine (1972), still cited as the goriest Spanish western ever made. Mike White talks with Nick Schlegel and Heather Drain about how Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and daughter Cathy (Emma Cohen) end up stranded with seven condemned convicts after a botched bandit ambush, and how gold hidden in their chains curdles cooperation into betrayal, torture, and a murder mystery Brown never gets to solve. They trace Romero Marchent's late-career demolition of...

You don't usually think about the editor when a comedy lands its jokes, but editor Whit Conway is exactly why Never Change! moves the way it does. Mike talks with Conway about a career built on doing a little bit of everything — Chicago advertising work, Second City, SNL's pre-tape department, DP'ing for The Late Show, directing for Jimmy Kimmel Live! — and how that generalist grounding prepared him for this movie's absurd production math: shooting wrapped in late October 2025, and the finished film hit Hulu on June 17, 2026. Conway breaks down his years-long shorthand with director Marty Schousboe from three seasons of Joe...

What if America's most famous uncaught serial killer was never one man at all? Eddie McNamara — former NYPD officer, 9/11 first responder, and author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer — joins Mike to argue the Zodiac wasn't a criminal mastermind but a myth stitched together from unrelated crimes, media hunger, and one compromised homicide detective. Drawing on police files, FBI records, court transcripts, and years of cold-calling witnesses, McNamara explains why Vallejo's own investigators never believed the first two murders were Zodiac's, digs into Dave Toschi's documented history of planting fan letters about himself in San Francisco pape...

Donald Westlake — writing as Richard Stark — said only one movie made from a Parker novel "got the feeling right." That's John Flynn's The Outfit (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin, out of prison to find his brother murdered by the mob over a bank job. Rather than run, Macklin runs at them, hitting every vulnerable Outfit operation until they pay. Joe Don Baker and Karen Black co-star alongside a murderer's row of noir faces: Robert Ryan, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Timothy Carey, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Jedidiah Ayres and Gary Phillips join Mike to dig into Westlake's dual-track care...

Alfred Hitchcock remains cinema's Master of Suspense a century after directing his first film, but decades of biography have blurred the line between the man and the myth. Mike talks with author Tony Lee Moral about his sixth Hitchcock book, A Century of Hitchcock, and the archival discovery that reshaped it: a 36-page 1980 transcript of biographer Donald Spoto's own interview with Tippi Hedren.

Moral traces how Spoto's personal grievances against Hitchcock — including being routinely ignored by name and bitten by the director's West Highland terrier — colored The Darkside of Genius and shaped decades of tabloid narrative. Drawing on new...

Nick Taylor built The Nick Taylor Horror Show by asking filmmakers how they actually got their movies made — an unofficial film school he later put to use directing his own feature. Mike talks with Taylor about turning that same curiosity on Steve Johnson, the special makeup effects legend behind Slimer, the Fright Night vampires, and the Howling werewolves, and a childhood hero whose success validated Taylor's own outsider love of monsters.

Taylor traces the six-year odyssey of Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson, from meeting Johnson at Monsterpalooza through the funding struggles of an unapologetically niche passion pr...

Roland Klick's Deadlock (1970) strips the spaghetti western down to its bones — no horses, no heroism, just three men and a suitcase in the Negev. When the wounded Kid (Marquard Bohm) staggers out of the desert clutching stolen cash, Charles Dump (Mario Adorf) sees an opportunity. When the cold-eyed Mr. Sunshine (Anthony Dawson) arrives to collect, the triangle tightens. Klick shoots it all like a fever dream, backed by a Can soundtrack that makes the heat feel alive.

Jessica Shires, and Spencer Parsons join Mike to dig into this criminally underseen West German neo-western — its debt to Leone, its surr...