Ron Perlman | Club Random with Bill Maher
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LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. You know what my favorite superhero movie is? It's the one everyone thinks is garbage. Hellboy. Hellboy, yes. Well, the only reason I was in Quest for Fire, by the way, you thought it was for my acting. The guy was looking at my forehead and he was so fascinated. Club Random.

I just quit smoking one month ago. Cigarettes? Cigars. Cigars, but you don't inhale a cigar. I was inhaling cigars. Come on. I know. You look great. I can't believe you. I'm just trying to maintain. It's funny, you got handsomer as you got older. Thank you. No, really. Your first part of your career was always these parts. You know, Quest for Fire and Beauty and the Beast. They did everything they could to cover it.

It worked for you. I mean, look at the career you've had. But you actually grew into a nice... I would never guess that those were the roles, looking at you now, that you played early in your career. What are you drinking? I'm drinking... I think that's maybe Añejo tequila.

Perhaps. Well, whatever you want. Maybe it's already here. And here are some drinks that are already poured. That's some water. We will figure it out. That's water. Is this a drink? That's water as well. I can't get enough water. You got to hydrate. What are you, a communist? Have a drink?

There you go. And what do you want to mix it with? Nothing. Really? It's just like, just perfect. Look at that. Put hair on your chest. Just the ice. By the way, I remember seeing Quest for Fire in the theater in New York on 54th Street of Ziegfeld. Yes. Which was a big room. Do you remember the big- My favorite theater in the world was in Ziegfeld. Seriously? Well, my two favorite theaters, it's hard to-

generalized like this because, you know, I mean, Radio City Music Hall is a pretty nice space. But not movies. They don't show movies. Oh, yeah. I saw some amazing... They show movies at Radio City Music Hall? They used to. Oh, I'm thinking of Carnegie Hall. Yeah. Right. Radio City is a good place to go see a movie. But Cinerama Dome in L.A. and then the Ziegfeld in New York were my two favorite places to go see movies. And you're just...

You know, as luck would have it, that's the two theaters that Quest opened in. Oh, you remember that? You remember where it opened in New York? I only remember the good shit, Bill. But I mean, I remember it was 1981. Cheers, Bill. Yes, great to see you. Great to see you. I always loved seeing you when I saw you after the show. You'd be at the after party at real time, and I was always very flattered that you just wanted to be there. Like, more than I could tell you, and I appreciate it. Thank you very much. No, I had...

It was fantastic to watch you live the night I came, the last time I came. Fernand Amandi was the journalist who you had on the show that night, and he invited me as a guest. And watching you zigzag your way through all of these different mindsets was very acrobatic. Oh, thank you. I will say, although I'm sure it sounds immodest,

We did it, I mean, we do it still within real time. I mean, the show's called Real Time and we do it in real time. For most of the 21 years it's been, it was live. I mean, live, live. You know that. We shot it at seven o'clock where it aired out here. If you had the East Coast feed,

And it was 10 o'clock to the east. Oh, I wasn't aware that that ever changed. I assumed it was. No, when the pandemic came, then we had to move to 4 o'clock. Oh, okay. For like most of the things with the pandemic, no reason that ever saved one life. And you were doing it from one of your rooms in your house, right? Right fucking here and in my backyard for six months. I mean, my God.

Looking back, it just looks so stupid. But I don't want to get on that. You were one of the things that got us through, pal. Thanks. I mean, you know, everybody was like, you know, turning tail and going into a defensive crouch. Oh, I can't. And there you were. I can't stand...

we got to see pieces of your wardrobe we never knew existed exactly yes and my dogs were like bit players in my television show now my dogs are like getting a credit it was the whole thing was just so stupid anyway i do remember so vividly seeing that movie in that theater i also saw gandhi there yeah when it opened

I was so blown away. Gandhi. I mean, the way he portrayed him and just the way he enveloped that character and the feelings of peace and love and harmony that radiated through the screen. But the guy next to me would not shut up. I had to slug him. Did you? No, I'm just kidding. Was it a left or a right? No, but I saw Quest for Fire there and it was such...

I mean, I'd never seen a movie like that. I don't think they've made a movie like that since. And I'm wondering if you-- hmm, here's a good question. Do you keep up with-- like, I'm super fascinated with prehistory.

And 1981 to now is a long time, and they keep making discoveries. And I remember vividly saying on the screen when it came on, 80,000 BC. I was like, oh, that is so awesome. That is a great memory, a great thing to have remembered, because very few people-- that just escaped a lot of people.

I know because of all the questions you get when the movie opens. When did that take place? It was right there, motherfucker. 80,000 B.C. And, of course, I think for a lot of people who don't have this silly hobby I have of studying prehistory and following the latest discoveries of the archaeologists and shit, they can't place that. So let me place it for you. Homo sapiens, our species, is only 200,000 years old.

Which is pretty amazing. Now humans, our last common ancestor is six million years ago with the chimps. Then about 2.5 million years ago, we have Australopithecus. That's a human, like Lucy. Remember they called her Lucy, but four foot tall. Not that cute. No. Quite frankly. Not like Desi's Lucy. Unless you're a vole. No.

But so that's a human, but not a Homo sapien, of course. And they left Africa, humans did, about 2 million years ago. But it wasn't until-- now, they say fire was discovered in 300,000 BC, so before Homo sapiens. And the connection Yuval Harari makes in his book is that that's not coincidence. When they came up with fire, they

They could cook food which had formerly been filled with so many bacteria and parasites that the intestines had to be enormous. But cooking it allowed the intestines to shrink and the energy went up to the brain. And that's why our brains got bigger. Oh, wow. Not that you'd know it by this campaign. But so that's where I place you now.

Human fire, 300,000 BC. So it's been around for a while in 80,000 BC, but they still can't make it, I guess. Oh, wait. No, I think that's what they were saying. That's the whole conceit of the film. So that's in the 40-something years since they made that film, that's what's changed.

In your movie, 80,000 BC was when they were still trying to find how to make fire. They could capture it in the lightning. They captured it in that thing that the-- I call them the first schmuck, the guy who drops it in the stream. Yeah, yeah. They're carrying it. They have it, but you have to keep it in a tabernacle. Right. And it's the bald guy. I love that they made it the bald guy. It's always the bald guy.

He's vaudevillian. Let's just face it. But no, the whole conceit of the film is that the ability to evolve...

was commensurate with the kind of climate you lived in by that point. So that there were certain areas that were very cold and people were just living in a tremendously defensive manner just to try to stay alive. And then there were certain more tropical climates where people were evolving faster because...

The obstacles were not, you know, stultifying. So the conceit of the film is our fire goes out, we live on the north of the Pyrenees, and then these three warriors are sent to find fire, which is a commodity, not something that happens spontaneously in nature. And we cross the Pyrenees, where it's much warmer, and lo and behold, there's Ray Dawn fucking Chong. Absolutely. Right? Naked.

And so... Right. And she... That was... You're talking about fire, baby. That's right. It was Ray John Chong. And she makes fire. It's this thing. Yeah. It's rubbing your hands together, basically, with a stick in the middle. Right. And...

You know, the fact that they hadn't figured that out yet and they needed her to tell us, I think is instructive. It says everything you need to know. Humans, and I mean, I could, you know, be the champion feminist here and say, sure, the woman figured it out, and the stupid man wouldn't ask for directions to fire. Well, no, but I mean, in your defense, it wasn't her specifically, but it was the tribe that she lived among. Well, she shows the guy.

She shows the guy, but then she takes him into this cave in this rather sacred moment of the film. It's a very climactic moment of the film. And introduces him to the shaman who is responsible for keeping this thing going. And so it's a skill that's already being passed down from what she happens to be a part of.

But yeah, that was the theory of when Jean-Jacques Arnault, great filmmaker, who has... And he's French, obviously. He's French, and I've done four movies with him. Is that right? That was the first movie I ever made, and that was certainly the first collaboration with him.

But he had made another movie called Black and White in Color, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. And Jean-Jacques is as intellectually curious as anyone who I've ever met in the business. He made Seven Years in Tibet. Later on, he made this movie called The Bear. He made another movie about these tigers in Cambodia. I remember The Bear.

called Brothers. He just has, he refuses to ever... He's still with us? He's still with us. He just made an incredibly beautiful rendition of the burning of Notre Dame.

which never got American distribution, but that's a whole other story. What, a documentary about when... It was not a documentary, although when you watch the movie, you think you're watching... Because Notre Dame really did burn a few years ago. He made him film about that, which was a fictionalized telling of a real event.

But the way he made it. Who done it? Who burned Notre Dame? Well, yeah. That's all in there. Interesting. And he's got these guys who are real firemen playing in the movie, acting in the movie. I don't think they've ever acted before. But they're so invested in what he's asking them to do.

that they're giving phenomenal performances. And you actually think... So the beauty of this film, which is indicative of Jean-Jacques' singular, non-commercial way of storytelling, is that you actually think... He's making you think you're watching real footage of the fire when the fire was a year and a half earlier. Right. He just recreated it. And he shot in about eight cathedrals all around Europe. I saw this one you did recently.

I can't remember the name, but I liked it a lot. It's recent. Famke Janssen is your co-star. You're a hit man. And Richard Dreyfuss is in it. I heard a wonderful-- I saw some stills of a wonderful moment you had with him right here in this chair. Moment. It went on for two hours. And-- oh, god, now everybody's going to be doing the Dreyfuss. No, no. Well, he had had a rough day.

He was having a rough moment. He was ill or something. He was not ill. He was just very relaxed. You mean there's no excuse? Well, to his credit, if you didn't see it and just listened to it, he was perfectly lucid. And, I mean, I'll always be a big Richard Dreyfuss fan, both, you know...

professionally and personally I did first thing we talked about he did a special on ABC was a big movie star at the time so he could get a thing like that's done in 1987 on the Constitution goes the 200th anniversary of the Constitution right and I was for some reason one of the young whippersnappers who was like on that show and

And it was a big feather in my cap at the time. I was thrilled that movie star Richard Dreyfuss was, you know, putting me in something and I was going to be on TV and not just telling jokes, but like doing a little high brow sort of thing with a big star. So, you know, the same way about him. He's real American royalty and he's cinema royalty.

And this little movie that you're referring to called Asher. Asher, right. Is something that I had a little production company of my own for about five years. It was a lot of lessons learned and no small amount of comeuppances. But it was a result of like...

If you just pick really, really cool material, you can make hundreds of millions of dollars. And every movie that I made lost money. Hollywood is like a cat. I mean, it's just moviemaking. They have declared it dead so many times. My theory was always it'll never die because it's something you can do on a date for two hours without talking, which is what everyone is looking for in life at a certain point in relationships.

I remember when, I don't remember when, I wasn't born yet, but I've seen the footage of when like CinemaScope or some, when TV came in, like in the early 50s, they were, they thought it was over for movies. So they made movies in like this way too big screen. And movies of that era, when they come on our TVs, they have to sort of box them weirdly.

Because they thought they could win the audience back with size. Like, TVs are small. So the other day I posted, in 1986, Billy Wilder won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. As he should. Very big deal. And it's one of my favorite speeches. But he starts off the second half of the speech with, I've been working in Hollywood for

for more than 50 years, which is also a half a century. And I've watched Hollywood vacillate between despair and fear. And it was such a witty thing to say that it took 30 seconds for the audience to realize, oh, that was a fucking great line. But then he went on to say, first it was sound that was going to kill us. Yes. And he goes through this whole litany of things. And this is 1986. The cell phone hadn't been invented yet.

He said the new thing that's going to kill us is the chip. What does it call them? The microchip? The microchip. He said whereby you won't need theaters anymore. You won't need studios anymore. A satellite will take an image and spread it over 5 million screens. And then he goes on to explain AI.

And this is 1986. And he lays it all out. Really? Oh, I got to see this. Can you YouTube this? Yeah. You must. And I'll shoot it to you. Shoot it to me. Shoot it, baby. All you do is Google Billy Wilder's acceptance speech in AFI.

But the point of it is, is that the reason why I posted it is because the last line of the movie is, so my fellow picture makers, don't despair. They may have the kingdom, but we have the power and the glory. Wow.

Which is one of the greatest lines in a speech that an artist can possibly give. It's biblical, right? It's from the Bible. It seems like, but it's... The power and the glory, yes, that's from the Bible. Yes. Yeah. But it's transcendent in so many ways. So many movie titles are.

east of eden right inherit the wind right i'm sure there's a list of 50 and i knew too so i'm gonna there you go you're way ahead of the game i'm gonna get off i didn't know any i'm gonna make believe that no but i'm sodom and gomorrah that was well that yeah i sound of music no that didn't i don't know from the bible when i had my um

genealogy done by Skip Gates you know that show the Henry Louis Gates the Oh finding your roots the brilliant I did Harvard professor Henry Louis I know they hit they you should do it I mean they would be perfect well I've been obsessed with doing something like a 23andMe or whatever they call them but they do all the research for but uh but this one sounds really you must have seen this it's on PBS since

Yeah, this is the one to do. Okay, so I did it, and they do like a... I mean, they do you on one day, and then they have another one, and they put two people together to make a more interesting episode. And, um...

They do the race. They've traced my heritage back to 1818 in Ireland. You know, they have the church records of the person. It's cool that you get that time. They give you a booklet with all the clippings and the information. I mean, you cannot get your geology done better for free. Or they may pay you a stipend, but...

I, when they, the star of my genealogy thing on the Skip Gates show was my grandfather, my Irish side grandfather, my father's father, who I never met. He died in 1940. But he was a major motherfucker. There's batter headlines in the New York Times from 1919, 1920. He was head of the Boatsman's Unions. He shut down New York Harbor. Yeah. Negotiated with the president. Yeah.

Maybe it was Woodrow Wilson, I think, himself. That's pretty big. Oh, that's cool. Oh, very cool. I'm kind of afraid of what they'll find. Why? Because, you know, the kind of simian features that I have. Oh, Neanderthals?

The only reason I was in Quest for Fire, by the way, you thought it was for my acting, but no. Well, you're acting with me too. But the guy was looking at my forehead and he was so fascinated. But that's what I'm saying. It's funny, at your age now, that's all gone. I know what you mean. I mean, we all noticed that. I'm a different kind of animal. You are a different kind of animal. Yes, a Neanderthal. But isn't that, to go back to Quest for Fire for a second, wasn't that...

Also part of the plot was that Rae Dawn Chung's tribe, who were much more human-like,

Then interbreeded, because we did interbreed. Everybody has, not everybody, but people do have Neanderthal blood in them. Well, the last image of the film is, you know, he's trying to fuck her from behind, and she turns him around. That's not the last frame of the film. I remember. I turned it off after that. That's all I knew. Okay, I can't watch my movies either.

Like, where is it? There are cannibal women in the avocado jungle. I love that film. I know all the dialogue. But no, the last shot, excuse me. It's not the last shot. The last shot is she is pregnant, looking at the moon. She's sitting against his chest, and they're looking at the moon, and...

Yeah. But about 30 minutes before the end, he goes to take her from behind. Okay. And she turns him around and shows him missionary. Apparently that scene meant a lot more to you. That's the only reason I took the movie. I feel like I'm... I said to myself, this is filmmaking. ♪

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Discover how audio marketing can surpass your current strategies. Just go to RadioactiveMedia.com or text RANDOM to 511-511. Text RANDOM to 511-511 today. Terms, conditions, message, and data rates may apply. I have a theory, and that is that the genius, the artistry, is constant.

It's always, always been there. Whose artistry? The actor? The writer? Artistry in general. Okay. People who are brilliant enough to paint, like Picasso and like Rembrandt and stuff. People who are brilliant enough to write music like Chopin and Gershwin and stuff. Constant. When we invent the new modality of storytelling, which was cinema back in the beginning of the 20th century,

They came out of the woodwork, geniuses. Geniuses. I mean, if you look at the... Like chaplains. Yeah. The only thing that changes is not the artistry. The artistry is constantly there. Right. And it's there to be tapped. A lot of it doesn't get tapped, but there's so much in reserve that is, you know, waiting to be tapped. The only thing that changed to me was the marketplace. So when, before there was cinema...

You had playwriting that was mind-blowingly exquisite and literature, you know, fiction writing, you know, great, great, you know, the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and the Falkners. Novelists, yeah. And then movies come along and you see those same guys writing for films. Some of them, yes. And then the studios started to falter in the 50s.

And it was really hard to make a living as one of those guys. So they started to move over to alternative sources of revenue. They went where the money was. So they went to television. Now, the reason why they're calling this the golden era of television is because little by little, the movie-going experience got fucked up, really fucked up, little by little.

You're talking about superhero movies and sequels. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I'm talking about the difference between an amusement park and a movie theater was almost unrecognizable. That's great. That's a perfect way to put it. But these geniuses, these great writers...

Still had phenomenal stories to tell they would have been writing them if it was the 70s and you had Ryan De Palma and Monty Scorsese and and those dudes motherfuckers You know doing that thing they would have been writing for cinema because that's where the money was But the money was no longer in cinema. So where do they go? And this is how you get FX becomes, you know, right a cable station and a mind-blowing content and

And all these cable stations start exploding to give these writers a place to go where they can write original mind-blowing shit, but also make a living. Like, make a living. Raise their kids, put them through school. You have the school that you hear all the time that the 70s was kind of like the peak of movie, like the movies of the 70s. Lots of people are always... Maybe it's just something to say at a cocktail party, you know, like... But...

I think there's great movies in every decade, of course, just like there's great music. But there is something about the '70s. Like, I was watching Three Days of the Condor recently. What a fucking movie. Right. I mean-- So fucking good. So fucking good. And they knew how to make something that was at once entertaining, but also serious.

It had adult themes and it was about a real thing. But it wasn't just a downer, which is, you know, it wasn't like, oh, homeless lady shits in a bucket.

which is like a lot of what they put out now. We did a whole thing on it one night. They should call the Oscars the Downers or the Debbies for Debbie Downer. And now here's your MC, the sad emoji, because they just seem to change the raison d'etre from we want you to enjoy yourselves and be entertained and think sometimes,

to we want you to see how worthy we are. We want you to see, and this is my thing about, you know, once it gets to that place of lecturing, then you're leaving the realm of art. Yeah. Now you're in the realm of polemics, which has a place, but it's not what art does. I mean, my feeling is that the golden age of cinema was the 30s and 40s. And then the 70s was a tremendously kind of

atypical, phenomenal period because you still had an infrastructure that would support the emergence of great new storytellers like Scorsese, like De Palma, like Coppola, like all the guys that came up in the 70s, like the guy who did Five Easy Pieces. Oh, Jack Nicholson, yeah. No, I know. Hal Ashby?

Well, Hal Ashby is one of them. I'll think of his name. But it was just one guy after another. But we still had an environment that would support them commercially. People were still going to the theater enough to justify giving $15 million. But again, because they knew they could walk and chew gum at the same time. Spielberg.

You know, I mean... But every era has shit and greatness. Every era has mostly shit. Most of everything is shit. Most music is shit. Most books are shit.

Most movies are shit. Most TV is shit. Life is mostly shit. You know, I mean, you said there's all these geniuses. Can I get some more to drink? Because this is, I really need this conversation. Am I depressing you? No, not at all. I'm just joking. But I did go through that tequila quite quickly. And I'm using my hand. Is that all right? Please do. Well.

We don't... We're brothers. We're brothers, and we don't stand on ceremony. You're a club, Random. Random is right in the title. Oh, my new Trader Vic's lighter. I love it. Here's to Trader Vic's coming back to L.A. here. They sent me all this awesome shit. I love the lighter. That's beautiful. I put some of the shit. Oh, yeah. There you go. Trader Vic's since 1934.

And I hear from one of the people I met when I came in here today that they're coming back to LA. Yes, they are. They have a presence again. Did you spend some time at the one on Wilshire and Santa Monica in your day? Well, when I first got here in the mid-'80s, it was one of my first stops because it's like 77 Sunset Strip. It's one of those places you just got to hit. But also because you could get so drunk.

The drinks were not like any other bar. I mean, it was a little kind of old-school-y, which is also what was kind of cool about it, booths. I mean, trust me, in the 80s, that was like a go-to-to-get-laid kind of place. Because, like, one of those drinks, and you were both on your ass. We were always doing a Richard Dreyfuss in those booths. We were always sliding around in the slush because they would bring out a fucking human skull.

it looked like. It was that big. Ceramic, beautiful ceramics. But it was a bowl of liquor. It was a bowl of like eight different kinds of liquor. And of course, the sugar amount that we took must have been just enough to make many diabetics. But you didn't do it all that often. But between the...

stuff that they put in to mask the multiple liquors in there and the liquor itself. But yeah, and big long straws. And you would just be under the table after, you know, one, and if you had two of them. So unfortunately, those days in my life are long gone. I can't drink like that. Can you still? No, I can't. I never could. I never could drink like that. But

I can drink a little. Not every night, but that's... Otherwise, you just wind up looking like Ted Kennedy. Yeah. I'm going through, you know, the thing about aging. I'm like north of 70 now, so... Right. That's as good as you can do. But it's very, very hard when you are confronted, not confronted, but smacked in the face...

With the fact that you can't do the things that were so de rigueur, that were so like, this is what we're doing tonight. We're going to go out. We're going to get five or six places. And then you get to the point where you go to see your doctor and go, I have this lower intestinal discomfort.

And he said, well, did you do anything different last night than you usually do? I said, no, no. I just went out and had seven or eight drinks. Oh. And I could have done that routinely. But not now. Well, now I'm finding out that my pancreas is revolting.

As Mel Brooks, the way Mel Brooks used the term, the people are revolting. Of course they are. They stink on ice. I know. Well, that is, I mean, my hat's off to you at that age to be able to drink like that. The point is I can't.

But for you, Bill, I'm making an exception. Look it. It's amazing because whatever the trade-off was when Jesus was making you in heaven, it was worth it because here you are at 73. That is not the skin of a 73-year-old, especially one who drinks. And that's usually what goes on people. I mean, you could definitely still play really any...

late middle age, you know, if the character's 59, that is not a problem. That's good. That's a good thing to, especially like, you know, you're a good heavy, right?

That's why I like that Asher movie. And we certainly have seen a zillion hitmen. I mean, talk about Hollywood and their lack of imagination. Can't they think of another way to say that a guy's morals are compromised? I mean, really, you could put a longer list than the names of the movies that come from the Bible to the list of...

What are we fascinated about, though? We really like people who take matters into their own hands. Ah, that's interesting. I think that that's the fascination. I think that that's why we like The Godfather so much and all the gangster movies so much. And the Cagney's and the Bogart's, if you want to go all the way back to the origin story. We just like vigilantes. But they weren't. But they were death-wished. Yes, vigilante. Okay, but that's a different category than assassin, hitman.

There's been many. I mean, Stallone has played it. I could name a lot of people, if we put our minds to it right now, who have played some version of a hitman. Remember the one, the French guy with, I think, Natalie Portman as the kid in it? Yeah, John Reno. He's terrific. And it's always, you know, I am a hitman, but I have a code.

But I have a heart of gold. Not a heart of gold, but they definitely have a code. No women and children and also hermaphrodites. I will not kill her. I have a code. You know, whatever it is. But I thought you guys brought whatever it was. It was moody and cool. So, you know, the fact that that's what it was, I guess that had to be the spine of the show.

of the project, but, uh, the tightrope walk, if you're going to, you know, immerse yourself in a hit man movie, then you have to, you're, you've already signed on to like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to walk a fine line here. And if I, if I go to the left too much or the right too much, I've fallen and I killed myself. Right. But, but, but the tightrope walk is that you have to make the audience believe that everybody you're killing has it coming.

Right. The world is better off with them dead. Well, yes. And that's where this thing comes in about, you know, this instant sort of justice that we're all longing for. Right. I think we're all longing. Definitely that there's an interesting way we see the psyche of America change by how we look at movies today.

with villains who in the past did not have to die. I'll give you an example. In the original Cape Fear. I love that movie. The original? Yeah. And the Scorsese. Scorsese was good, but the original was phenomenal. It's 1960, I think, the original. Probably, yeah. In 1960, he doesn't die at the end, the bad guy, the psycho, because in 1960, people still had faith in the justice system.

So if a guy was saying to the bad guy, well, that's it. You'll be going away for a very long time, and you will get your just comeuppance in this just country of ours, and that's just what I have to say to you. It was all good. But by the time you got to 1992 or whatever that was, the person has to die. The person always has to die. We do not trust the justice system. If there's an evil seed...

I was watching a Jennifer Lopez movie called The Boy Next Door, where she fucks this hot 45-year-old woman. That's a stretch. She fucks a teenager next door, a teenager. He looks like he's 35, and he's playing 18.

And he talks like someone who's 40. I mean, it's hysterical. But she, in a moment of weakness one night, fucks the boy next door. And then he sprung on her. And he becomes a psycho. And he's going to ruin her life. And he tries. We've seen this before.

pattern in many movies. It's amusing. And at the end, of course, he has to die. She has to kill him. He can't just keep being a psycho and we trust that the system will take care of you. Because he has it coming. He definitely has it coming. He had her coming that first night and that's where all the trouble is. Short-lived.

That's where the trouble started. Unsustainable, as they say. She gave into it that one night. In the Republican Party. I think a better movie would have been if she just went with it. She was like, oh, this is... That was a sequel. This is good dick.

And he's next door. Right. But the problem is he had befriended her teenage son as a kind of a mentor. Oh, my God, no. Bad, bad, bad move. That's hitting below the belt. You really have it coming when you use the teenage son to get a little. You want to put J-Lo in a messy situation and

I saw another one she just did called Mother. It's fantastic. Did you see that on Netflix? That's brand new, right? It's pretty new, yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen that one yet. Really good. But I read amazing things about it. Yeah, she's like up in Alaska. And again, I think she's a hitman or some shit. Yeah, and that's... She's definitely doing some badass stuff in the snow. Can I get back to something that we... Please do, Ron. Yeah, you...

hydrate a little bit there because I'll, I feel as though, um, you were onto something a minute ago where we talked about how there seemed to be an unstoppable, uh,

irresistible movement to keep everybody at home, which culminated with a pandemic, which was, you know, like nobody saw that coming, but everything was going in that way anyway, because Amazon was delivering everything to your house. Movies were being delivered to your house and, and you'd never had to really leave your house. You could even like, you know,

have put on some goggles and have a sensation like you were walking in the park, walking your dog virtually. I will never be one of those people. No, none of us. I don't think you ever look cool with goggles on your head.

But what I was saying was that it seemed as though when all of this was proliferating, that this was the new normal, that this was going to be the way it was. People were going to be consigned to doing everything at home, and there would be no more communal activity.

Right. Office. You know, what's... Yeah, like the office. Like there's no place where people gather communally. Yeah, there would be, you know, movie theaters were the synagogues and the churches. These were places where they were ritualistic in nature, but what you got out of them was real spiritual kind of nourishment. And all of those things began to become...

devalued by the fact that you don't have to leave your house now. You can stay home and get anything you want. Anything you want. And we thought, and I even thought, but then, you know, somehow it's like that little piece of grass that grows between the, in the concrete. It just, and somehow a movie does $180 million on a weekend and you go,

Not so fast. Look at Oppenheimer. I think that the message from the audience is do more of that. Work a little harder. But the idiots who run the show are going, they're always behind the eight. They're always two steps behind. They're always going, oh, wait, now we got to do this now? Okay, well, you can't blame them too much when Avengers Endgame

just made $350 million. I mean, there's a reason why they make the movies they make. They want to make money. If people didn't go to these. But a lot of those franchise ones are starting to peter out. You can only do it so many times. Even for kids. And they're all the same from each other. You know what my favorite superhero movie is? It's the one everyone thinks is garbage. Hellboy.

Hell boy, yes. Well, that's its own special category. Yes, I agree. It really is. But that was a great thing that happened for you. No, I'm kidding. No, it's a big thing. I took a shot there. No, it's great to have a tentpole franchise thing like that. Plus, what was great about it, now that I've taken this conversation, shoved it back my way, which you better watch out because I do that.

But it was basically a superhero movie about a slob who wanted to stay home and eat pizza and watch the Three Stooges. No, I've seen it. It's fun. So it's an underachiever superhero movie, which gives it a second layer. But anyway, enough about me. What do you think? No, no. I love Hellboy, so you don't have to apologize for that. I was just going to say the one I like that everyone hates is Catwoman.

For some reason, Spider-Man is genius and Catwoman is horrible. And to me, it's always the same movie. The origin story of how they got to be where they are. And it's like, I mean, AI looks at that and goes, oh, please. It'll take me one second to come out with the next one. I mean, they don't even need AI. They just feed in the last one.

And Catwoman... What is the opposite of artificial intelligence? Real intelligence? Non-intelligence. Well... Yeah, that's what you're describing. Yeah. I mean, it was just... Zero intelligence. At least in the Catwoman, I could look at Halle Berry. But, you know, I mean, it is amazing how much they will... Liam Neeson...

has done like three, I'm not talking about Taken, which is, I mean, the first one was great.

First Taken is great. Then, of course, it gets like, oh, Taken again. All these kind of movies where something crazy happens to somebody and the movie's such a big hit, they're like, well, I guess it's going to have to happen to Bruce Willis again in Die Hard 4. I think they should make Titanic 2 where she goes on another ship and it hits another iceberg. Call it Titanic 2. Is it me? LAUGHTER

But you know what I mean? They just, they paint themselves into this corner. But Liam Neeson has done this other thing where he did a movie where he was on a train and somebody's like blackmailing him to take over the train or else I'll kill your mom or something.

And then they did the same movie on a plane. It's almost the exact same script, but now we're on a plane. I'm like, my hat's off to you, Liam. That takes big Irish balls. You know, it goes back to William Goldman, who said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. Oh, yes. Right. That's an amazing book, the William Goldman. Amazing. It's called Adventures in the Screen Trade? Yeah, exactly. Isn't that the name of it?

I mean, it is such a handy guide to if you ever wonder about anything that's happened in show business, he will make sense of it for you. Like, I love the part where he says, "People think it's a mystery, like, how we get big movie stars to, you know, like, pick our script." Write them their first scene where you first see them. Write them a big fucking speech where they look like a hero, and they'll do your movie. Write them-- make them look cool.

Put that on the paper. And it's so true. Everyone, every star just about wants to just, in baseball they would say, stay in the show.

But the interesting thing about a guy like William Goldman is, you know, you can't assign more hits with a person than, you know, he was associated with. And yet he writes a book, which the first sentence is, here's the thing about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. Yeah. I think he's talking more about the studio heads and what's going to be a hit or not. But as far as like, how do you actually have a good script? And he's like Butch Cassidy, right? And

I mean, I can't. The Sting, is that William? Yes. I mean, yes. I can't remember all of them. But yes, he had an amazing run. And The Princess Bride. Oh, really? I didn't know that. But here's the thing, as you know better than I do, about movies is anything can fuck up a movie. You have to be lucky. There's so many elements. And if any one of them doesn't work...

It's probably not going to work. I'm sure when everybody... I mean, when I was making brilliant movies like Cannibal Women, I remember every day they come back from the dailies and it's just the greatest fucking thing anyone's ever seen. I mean, celluloid, this should be sent directly in the time capsule. Smithsonian. I smell Smithsonian. And this is like...

They all think when they're making it, and then I guess they get in the room with the editors and they put it together, and then suddenly it's like, oh. I mean, and you see so many movies from very talented directors that suck. They just miss. Yeah, no, I've never been working on a movie where all along the way you say, did you see The Dailies? Oh.

Right. I know. My God. I know. And then you go see the cast. You get invited to the casting for the screening. And you watch the movie. And you're like. Right. And you go, what happened to all those great dailies? Right. They never made it to the screen. But it's all just everybody's blowing smoke up everybody's ass. Right.

But the thing is, like... And you're right. The odds are so against something good taking place because 400 pair of hands touch this product before it comes out. Right, exactly. You have to, yeah. I gotta pee, to be perfectly honest.

I can't remember the name of the fellow in the white T-shirt who welcomed me here. Chris? The minute I got here, because I drove from Pasadena. Oh, really? And the minute I got here, I said, I need a bathroom. And that's only a 40-minute drive. I mean, you know, come on. Aging is not for the... Well, Betty Davis said it's not for sissies. It's so not for sissies. It's really not.

But the only thing that aging is good for, which you've always been good at, but you're better at now, is that you just don't give a fuck what anybody thinks. Yeah, and you're wiser. Club friends.

All right, man. Thanks, brother. This was really so much fun. I'm so glad we did this. I'm going to get up slowly because that's the only way I know how. Well, you know, Dreyfuss has the record, so you're never going to, you don't have to worry about the record. This is a very comfortable chair, but it's kind of low. I know.