Tarantino and Avary surrounded by the VHS tapes from their collection
Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery have launched a podcast together, a good opportunity to review which other film directors have opted for this format
That Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store has already ceased to be a movie buff fact to become popular culture. In the mid-1980s, the future director of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ hung around the halls of Video Archives with another store clerk, Roger Avary. The two moviegoers would become friends, collaborators, then ex-friends, and now co-workers.
podcast. When the store closed in 1995, Tarantino bought his entire catalog and replicated the store in the basement of his house. As crazy as it sounds.
Now in every episode of The Video Archives Podcast, the two choose one of the titles from the VHS collection and watch the film again to comment on what appears on the screen, also to evoke a time that no longer exists. The first examples have been ‘Dark Star’, John Carpenter’s debut film, and ‘Moonraker’, an installment of the James Bond saga in space that Avary hated at the time and with which he has now made peace.
Although it has been the novelty of the summer, Tarantino is not the first filmmaker to approach the microphones. There are many podcasts about cinema and of all kinds, but this time we will mention only programs in which we can listen directly to the directors. Advantage? Without the limitation of time or promotional windows, the director develops, shares secrets and argues decisions that are usually made behind closed doors: why the camera moves right there, what instructions did he give the actor in that scene or what image follows obsessing.
These types of impressions are the ones that usually creep into ‘Casa Paco’, where the director Paco Cabezas receives directors, screenwriters, actors and other “creative souls” to talk about cinema. In one of the last episodes Paula Ortiz, who this summer has shot her new film with Blanca Portillo, explains how she has been finding her personality as a director, assimilating the pressure of the charge. The interiors of a shoot, both its tensions and its moments of glory, also have space in ‘The podcast of Spanish cinema’, a varied program carried out by the Film Academy. Voices such as those of Cesc Gay, Gustavo Salmerón or Rodrigo Cortés, director of ‘Buried (Buried)’ and usual name in the national podcasting as co-host of ‘Almighty’.
Some platforms have also launched their own podcasts. With the Hispanic audience in mind, the MUBI streaming service is already in its second season of ‘MUBI Podcast: Encuentros’. Filmmakers like Gael García Bernal, Matías Piñeiro or Romina Paula They have participated in these dialogues where the creative process and the relationship between the camera and the performer’s body are exposed. In addition to directors, other fabulous conversation partners have also been formed. For example, the actresses Paulina García (‘Gloria’) and Mercedes Morán (‘La ciénaga’) star in a delightful talk entitled ‘The delivery’.
Anglo-Saxon territory
If something allows this format is to experiment and two directors who have been able to see it are Seth Rogen and Caveh Zahedi. The former, star of ‘Supersalidos’ and co-director of ‘La interview’, had a good schedule to have set up a conversational podcast among friends. “But Seth didn’t want to do that,” says show producer Frida Pérez in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Instead, we used the way Seth makes movies: stories with a beginning, a middle and an end.” That is, in each episode we find what could be a story for adults: hilarious anecdotes with unexpected twists, eschatological winks and a very careful production.
Some covers of the mentioned podcasts
For his part, Zahedi, an independent director that some will remember for his appearance in Richard Linklater’s film ‘Waking Life’, devised a novel formula: every day of 2021 he published a two or three minute pill in which he recounted some passage of his life. At the end of the year he completed ‘365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die’, a memoir told aloud in which his memories as a film student are mixed (when shared a room with a ‘fake’ David Lynch), love and professional disappointments (he tried to make a documentary about his own failures) and a tender resignation before the passage of time. Now all the pieces can be heard, upon payment, on their website.
Continuing in the United States, in addition to power and lobbying capacity, in that country the unions around the cinema also have podcasts. The Director’s Cut organizes The Director’s Cut and in recent months Guillermo del Toro, Kenneth Branagh, Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg, who shared the keys behind the remake of ‘West Side Story’.
Spielberg at a moment of the recording of the podcast /
The producers also participate in the podcasting board. The A24, for example, which has produced key titles in recent indie cinema, has brought together the Safdie brothers (‘Uncut Gems’) with Paul Thomas Anderson, Joanna Hogg (‘The Souvenir’) with Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader with Sofia Coppola (“On the Rocks”). Others that do not want to be left behind are cable television channels. TCM, a movie classic, has a great podcast called ‘The Plot Thickens’ with monographic seasons. The first was dedicated to Peter Bogdanovich, who “helped change the way movies were made in Hollywood” and who left us a few months ago. It is a fantastic documentary in which we can hear first-hand his reflections on what the industry was like in the 70s. As an extra, the interviews that Bogdanovich, as a film critic, did with Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock were also published. . Little more can you ask for.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.