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M.J. Bassett
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M.J. Bassett is an English director, writer, and producer of film and television. She began her career directing the cult horror films Deathwatch and Wilderness, the dark fantasy Solomon Kane, and the video game adaptation Silent Hill: Revelation. Since 2012, she has worked as a director and writer on high-profile television series like Strike Back, Ash vs Evil Dead, Power and Altered Carbon. Check out ROGUE with Megan Fox and the upcoming RED SONJA movie!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast & Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host Ken Volante. Editor and producer Peter Bauer.
00:00:16
Speaker
This is Ken Volante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast, and I'm very excited to welcome MJ Bassett, film director, producer, writer. MJ, welcome on to the philosophy and art program here. Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to see where our conversation takes us.
MJ Bassett's Work and Philosophy
00:00:40
Speaker
Yeah, I was mentioning before we popped on here, heard a couple of your combos on your Insta Live, and I thought you might be a likely candidate to kick around some of these fun questions, but also, I was following there because I love your damn movies.
00:01:02
Speaker
Oh, that's a plus. That's why I was there. And just so folks know, MJ's done a lot of great film and great film. And a few not so great.
00:01:30
Speaker
I'm very proud of that one. Thank you. I'm very proud of that.
00:01:37
Speaker
I wanted to ask you, just so I don't forget, and it was just one of those film questions that popped right off my head when I was watching again. It's like, I love your action sequences. I love the action in your films, and it feels different and exciting. I love action movies, and it doesn't always work that way. Can you tell just a regular person like me about those action scenes and creating an action scene and what you're trying to do?
00:02:08
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Well, action through character. Okay, the smarty pants answer is action through character, right? So even if you're just, I mean, the Solomon Kane, for those who don't know, is essentially a sword and sorcery movie based on Robert E. Howard's character, the guy who created Conan, created Solomon Kane. And it's sort of 16th century set fantasy adventure. In that context, there's lots of sword fighting.
00:02:35
Speaker
Now, I think the first thing is you've got to love it as a film-making. You've got to not shy away from the action sequences. And when you have an action date, it's like, oh, goody. Now we're getting into the fun stuff. So you've got to embrace that. You've got to know what you want. But it is action to character. So Solomon Kane, in that instance, fights a certain way for a certain reason.
00:02:57
Speaker
and approaches it with focused aggression and a certain skill set. That's what you've got to bring to the table whenever you do action. I ran a TV show called Strike Back for four seasons. I ran seven seasons. I did four of them.
00:03:14
Speaker
And my watchword was always, you know, action through character with momentum and movement and all those sorts of things. They don't stop and talk about character things. They're doing that whilst the guns are firing and the cars are crashing and the helicopters are strafing them. And I work in a budget space as well, where I have to lean into the practical aspect.
00:03:35
Speaker
I can't do, and I don't want to do Fast and the Furious where everything's green screen and it's a second unit stunt sequence and then it cuts back to the actors doing their thing. I want my performers, my actors, with me to be on the floor doing that thing.
00:03:51
Speaker
And it makes all the difference in the world. You know, I love my stunt performers. I love what the stunt crews do, but to be able to have them teach my performers what to do, or even to have actors like in Strike Back, Phillip and Sullivan, the two lead actors, know their weapons. They know how to handle it. They know how to clear a jammed, you know, a jam. They know how to change mags all on the fly.
00:04:15
Speaker
it makes so much different authenticity in that respect you can have the silliest stories you like but moment to moment the actors have to be doing things that make sense i'm literally as i'm talking to you now on my other computer screen i've got a sequence for a show that i've recently shot.
00:04:32
Speaker
for network television, which is an action sequence with shooting, I'm not gonna name the show, because I'm going to disparage it a little bit. It's just, and that's that nobody really knows what they're doing. So you're trying to when you when I come to the floor, and I have a skill set of, you know, rudimentary military tactics, because I've, you know, I've trained a little bit with these folks. And so you say, well, I want you to behave in a credible way. It's always about credibility.
00:04:57
Speaker
I think that's the key. I mean, that's really the answer. The answer is character and action to go hand in hand and credibility. And I don't like, I like physics. I think the world works in a physics way. And I don't like, as much as I'm trying to think of movies, well, most action movies where physics makes no sense.
00:05:16
Speaker
Bullets don't hurt and swords don't cut and you can get up from an injury now we're working in a fantasy movie space or a fantastical film world where bullets don't do quite as much damage as they do in real life. But they should hurt and you should want to not get shocked.
00:05:36
Speaker
Seriously, when you see stunties, and they have to do it because they're told to do it, they have to step out of cover or concealment to get shot.
00:05:47
Speaker
Or you have somebody hiding behind a car. A bullet passes through a car's bodywork. Unless you're hiding behind an engine block or a wheel, you're getting shot through a car. So even if you abandon that and go, okay, for this show or this movie or this sort of, I'm not going to do that, or I don't care about it, you should know it because it will inform something. And if it's a difference, if you have a character taking cover behind the engine block, at least you know they're making some attempt to save their life.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, don't treat the violence lightly. I mean, you know, we are particularly he's doing firearms, you know, there's a there is a danger of glorifying weapons and making everything look cool. And I said don't want it to look cool. I want it to feel intense and scary. And in the moment, and it's my version that that grows out of I'm not having a budget to do the fancy stuff. But also, that's just a sensibility I have.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah. Thanks for taking me in and taking us in. That's all right. I'm assuming that's what I'm here for. Yeah. Well, I'm going to jump back a little bit more origin. One of the questions I ask is...
00:06:55
Speaker
When did you see yourself as a creator, as an artist?
Inspiration from 'Alien'
00:07:00
Speaker
Was it a big moment or was it always there or are you still struggling with it? I think I'd say still struggling with that. I don't particularly see myself as an artist. I have a certain amount of artistry. I guess that's the whole point of this podcast, but that's the question. I've always drawn, I've always created, I've always made stuff.
00:07:22
Speaker
That's what I was always interested in. You know, mostly it was modeling for me. That was the model kits, painting those drawings. I was obsessed and I was too young to see the movie, but I was obsessed with Alien. Alien is the reason I'm a filmmaker. Beginning, middle and end, you know, prior to that, I mean, I was, Alien came out in 79, so I was way too young to see it at the cinema.
00:07:45
Speaker
And I like movies, but I didn't grow up in a movie culture. I grew up in a quiet English country town. There was no cinema nearby. Video was not yet a thing. I went to the movies three times as a kid. I think my dad took me to see Thunderball. My grandparents took me to see Close Encounters.
00:08:05
Speaker
I remember when Star Wars came out, my elder brother had an audio tape of the movie. This is early piracy. Somebody had recorded the audio from Star Wars. So we listened to the movie dozens of times before it came from the US to the UK.
00:08:24
Speaker
I was like seven years old and I had no idea what was going on. That's amazing. So we were making lightsaber sounds before when a lightsaber was. So it's kind of weird, but Alien was a movie for reasons I can't quite
00:08:43
Speaker
I can't tell you how I came into my worldview, but I was obsessed with it. I had a Making of Alien book and to my incredible regard, I also had a photo book of just stills from the movie, like hundreds of pages of stills from the movie, which I then cut up and stuck all over my school books.
00:09:03
Speaker
which now would probably be worth a fortune. But I drew the Alien and I looked at Giga's work. And it was the first time I sort of understood that people had come together to imagine and create. So that stuck with me forever. And a little aside, the Alien TV series is going into production. I think it's shooting in Thailand right now.
00:09:25
Speaker
And I had a meeting at Scott Free a few years ago, and I said, are you doing an A&T? And they were like, no, we're never going to do an A&T series. I said, I really like to be involved in that because I'm obsessed with the A&T. And they went, no, it's never going to happen. And then I hear Noah Hawley is going to make this show. So I write this incredibly impassioned letter.
00:09:44
Speaker
to the show and Noah Hawley saying, you know, I've been obsessed inside, just the reason I'm a filmmaker. I would just, you know, I'd make coffee on this set just to be in that world. It's all I've ever wanted. Didn't even get a reply. Not even a reply. But weirdly enough, my favorite movie is Blader and the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker was Alien. So just to talk about that. So I made models of the alien. I made an alien head.
00:10:15
Speaker
out of, I got like a mannequin head and I created, I'm terrible, but I built this full-size alien head. And then I made plastic models and I heat up the models and put them into different poses. And I made a diorama, there's a scene, it's in the cut sequence, it's in the extended directors because of Alien, where Dallas is cocooned.
00:10:38
Speaker
I don't know how well you know the movie. I'm getting deep dive now. But it's Alan Dean Foster's novelization, but it's not in the movie. And if it had been in the movie, it would have completely changed the trajectory of the alien franchise because the life cycle of the alien is completely different in the novel and in the director's cut. But I made this diorama of that. And I was so I think filmmaking and the art and craft of that was what I always wanted. I actually wanted to be a vet.
00:11:07
Speaker
I didn't want to, there was no ambition to be a film director or filmmaker at all. I started as a wildlife filmmaker. So I wanted to be a vet and I was an assistant at weekends and was a teenager. Weekends and evenings and I ran a wildlife hospital and wildlife and science is really what I know a lot about.
00:11:27
Speaker
And I was, I was going to be a vet and I just fucked up at school, didn't do, didn't work hard enough. But I ran this wildlife hospital and I was asked to be on television in the UK as a teenager talking about science and nature. So at 17 years old, I was on TV in the UK doing mostly children's programs, just talking about, and they'll give me a, like a llama or an elephant or an eagle. And I can talk about most animals for five minutes.
00:11:50
Speaker
and talking about environmental issues. And so in 1986, as I was beginning in the UK, we were talking about climate change and ice caps melting, and nobody wanted to hear that stuff back then, but we knew it was going to happen. And then while I was doing that, I had made enough money to buy a video camera, an old big VHS video camera, and started making short films. And I was only making films about animals. He's like, no, I want to blow shit up.
00:12:15
Speaker
Because that was the thing that I liked. I loved wildlife. I liked cinema and blowing shit up and wearing a dress, which nobody knew about. That's a whole other start of my life. But it was those, those are the things that kept me going. And yeah, so I started making short films and they were bad. And then I made a couple that were better. And I thought, oh, maybe I can be a filmmaker, but I'd like genre films. Rather than English kind of kitchen simp Ken Loach, Mike Lee, which I admire, but they're not my vibe. I like the Terminator.
00:12:45
Speaker
You know, James Cameron, Spielberg, Zemeckis, Ridley Scott is my hero. You know, it's like, you know, Catherine Bigelow comes along and she does amazing stuff. And you just figure that's okay, that's the world I want to play in. So to do that out of the UK is really difficult. And horror was the way in. But even with my first movie, which is a thing called Death Watch, it was a horror movie set in the trenches at World War I, that had the kind of grounded reality.
00:13:13
Speaker
which I suppose, if I've got any kind of consistent style, that's what I do, is I try and make things feel a bit real, even though they're genre.
00:13:24
Speaker
Did that answer the question? I don't know if that answered the question. Yeah, well, no, I mean, well, yeah. Well, you know, I had read about, you know, there's these powerful interests, you know, that drive us and your environmental concerns and animals and the way you described it with film coming on later. I think one of the things I wanted to
00:13:52
Speaker
to mention about I mean alien for me too is pivotal and there's something about seeing it that makes you want to do it as well I got a new two new kittens two calico cats two weeks ago and one of them is named Ripley okay the other one's Ami Dalla um I
00:14:12
Speaker
that the fifth
00:14:32
Speaker
and places and creeps up out of nowhere. There's nothing wrong with that movie. It's a perfect movie. The screenplay is amazing. I mean, Dan O'Bannon is such a good writer. You look at Dan O'Bannon's writing from the beginning of his career. Ridley's second movie. I mean, he made a thousand commercials, but it was his second movie.
00:14:55
Speaker
And so he was just firing on all cylinders and it was, you know, he's famously a difficult man to work for, but it's kind of worth it. But what obsessed me was the creature. I like monsters. I love monsters. And that was the thing that got me. I remember talking to my biology teacher at my secondary school. Could it be real? Why would it have acid for blood? And he used that as a way to teach me.
00:15:22
Speaker
about adaptation and evolution. He was brilliant how he turned my enthusiasm for this into lessons, which is what a fantastic thing to do. I was obsessed with Ray Harryhouse in movies as well. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Jason and the Argonauts. Those movies
00:15:43
Speaker
which are monster movies. You know, I don't think any of us, you know, you watch Monica and the and the monster verse that's existing with Godzilla and King Kong and they're like preposterous, but you can't not look at giant creatures smashing each other up. It's just so much. That's that's why maybe that's I think that's what I'm getting to on the something rather than nothing podcast with the philosophy is like,
00:16:05
Speaker
What is it about seeing things smash together that's going to draw us? The notion of things more powerful than we are. Yeah, I wanted to ask on the Monsters bit, I got a friend of mine, Devon, she studies monsters. She's a literature person.
00:16:27
Speaker
Love like the idea of a monster and how far that can go I wanted to ask you and I don't know if this is related at all But one of the big questions I ask is what is art?
Defining Art and Filmmaking
00:16:40
Speaker
What is art for you? Hey Wow, yeah, let's let's not go What is art Okay
00:16:51
Speaker
This isn't really, so there's a poem, it's called Ode to a Grecian Urn. I can't remember exactly who. I think it's Keats. I think it's Keats. Yeah. And I remember studying this in school. And there's a whole, the whole thing about this urn is whether it's art or not. This is certainly what we had in the class, right? And I remember always arguing very strongly that the urn itself is not art. The urn itself is craft. But the paintings on it are art.
00:17:21
Speaker
Right? Because art, to me, and I have huge arguments for people like this, art has no utility. Right? Craft has utility. Art has a purely kind of esoteric, intellectual objective. So this is why I struggle with the notion of filmmaker. My job as a filmmaker is a lot of craft.
00:17:49
Speaker
my job as a writer is perhaps more art, right, because I'm interested in thematics, because ultimately what is art? Art is a way of communicating the idea of what it is to be human, right, the human experience through these things. And if you go, okay, well, is it really because other cave paintings in Lasso and the early human art forms that you come across, well, they're talking about, I mean, you know, we don't know what was going through the minds of, you know, Bahama Haberliss or, you know, or Philip Ithaca, so whoever did these things,
00:18:19
Speaker
what they were thinking, they were communicating something about the world they lived in. And there's an incredible one, there's that painting, I can't remember where it is, where there's the outlines of hands. There's hundreds of hands drawn around and you see them on the cave walls. And those traveled with us from 65,000 years or 40,000 years. I'm just pulling numbers out the air, I can't remember exactly how old it was, but it feels like that's about the right amount of time.
00:18:45
Speaker
You know, that's traveled through time and space to communicate something with us. Now that's what art can do. It takes away time and space and allows us to communicate cross-generations. And I think that's an amazingly important thing. But it's what is the purpose of art? And what is art and what is the purpose of art? And two necessarily different questions as well. They feel like they're interchangeable, but they're not.
00:19:12
Speaker
Anything can be art if it has no purpose. I remember getting really annoyed with there was a movement in the 90s in the UK over the early aughts as well. Like an unmade bed was in some modern art gallery. And I think Tracey Emin was the artist who did it.
00:19:31
Speaker
And it was an unmade bed and there was a big theory, is this art? And they got some big Arts Council grant for it and said, is this art? What's it saying? What's it doing? And it sort of, well, kind of is art in its way because it's clearly trying to say something and we have to interpret it. And the fact that we're having a conversation about this thing.
00:19:49
Speaker
gives it some artistic value. It may mean nothing to me. I may look at it and go, hmm, okay. Somebody else may get something for it. So it's food for this notional concept of our soul, which I don't believe in, but let's for the sake of argument call it that. It nourishes us. It sort of promotes conversation and argument and thought. I'm a Darwinian reductionist to the core of my being, which essentially means I believe there is nothing outside our brains.
00:20:19
Speaker
There is, we are only a product of our brains and those particular neurons and how they fire. And the stimulation that we need to make them fire in a certain way to be able to engage in a societal way. And that's what art can do. Art is the glue of society. I think without art, very quickly, there's no culture which hasn't got art in some form. And they will take craft. This is a thing which does a job.
00:20:45
Speaker
And all by itself, it could do the job, but I'm going to do something else to it to impose myself onto this piece of craft. A chair is a chair is a chair, but it's the moment you start painting on it or going beyond its utility, suddenly there's art involved. Yeah. Oh man, I really love the conversation. You mentioned in the poem, Oda,
00:21:10
Speaker
to a Grecian urn. I hate to buy that. I hate it so much. But I remember one piece in that there's, I think philosophers and thinkers love that poem. There's some pieces in there about time or time being static, like in the art. Capturing the moment, yeah. And beauty is truth and truth is beauty and all that kind of stuff. That's the thing that he seemed to be wearing. And it's crazy that 35, much older than that, 35, 40 years later,
00:21:40
Speaker
That stuck with me. And this is the value of education, by the way. And this is the thing we're falling down on terribly in our current worlds. Like this value, this talk, these conversations, when you're younger and open, and even if you may despise the conversation, hate it that is valueless, you get to argue.
00:21:59
Speaker
and you get to get a perspective. And I return to this conversation all the time about this urn because it's craft, it does a job, it holds water, it holds flowers. So it's just a thing. But then you put something else onto it. You use it as a canvas for further meaning. Like movies are the same thing. You can have the same movie made by different filmmakers and they will all have different interpretations. They will all put different conversations within it.
00:22:27
Speaker
which will allow you to, even movies I don't like, like Killers on the Flower Moon, I think it's one of Scorsese's work pictures. But there's a conversation happening within it. So the art is built in. Let's talk about this thing. You know, so I think that's what film can do. Well, sorry to interrupt. I mean, I was wondering what you were mentioning there because knowing that
00:22:49
Speaker
that you're writing and directing and seeing maybe some of those different components when you're talking about art and craft and I think that's really challenging. I think those terms come up a lot of times when we're talking about art and how people see what they're doing. Do you feel that tension or coming from a different space you're writing and then we got the visuals there? Is that what's going on?
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yes, I think there's two. Well, the thing is, me as a filmmaker, I work at a, you know, I'm not terribly successful filmmaker, I make a good living at it. But a lot of the time, I'm working in a very reduced capacity. Like the thing that I want to do is I can't do that, because there's not budget or there's not time or time and budget at the same thing. So it's always budget, right? So if you have, I can, when I write, I write with no budget, so I can do anything I want.
00:23:40
Speaker
And the moment that translates into somebody's gonna give you an X amount of money to execute this story that you wish to tell. Now my job then as a director is to try and figure out how i can do it with all the things i want to do.
00:23:59
Speaker
versus the things that they don't want me to do because that costs too much money, or my collaborators and generally producers and studios, people with the money, don't give a shit about the thing that I'm trying to do. So I'm just finishing up an edit on a movie called Red Sonja, which is another sword and sorcery movie which I wanted to make forever.
00:24:20
Speaker
And the underlying theme of that movie is an environmental message, right? Sword and sorcery, all that kind of stuff. Now there's art in it as I go along, and there's fantastic moments in it, and the movie's going to be pretty good, but evidently some people in that production
00:24:35
Speaker
in the hierarchy of the studio didn't care about the mess. They didn't care about what I was trying to say and the philosophy and the religion that I was exploring and belief systems versus development versus the price we pay for progress. That's the conversation I wanted to have as a storyteller. And they're like, yeah, we just want the sword fights.
00:24:55
Speaker
Right? Because that's what sells in their mind. So I then have to compromise because it's their money and ultimately they have a final cut of the movie. Just what can I sneak in during my, my process? So the only true, I mean, you know, James Cameron and Scorsese and Spielberg and these guys and girls who, who have earned the right to say, this is my story. This is what I'm going to do. And nobody can get in the way of that.
00:25:22
Speaker
Amazing. For me, I'm always slightly compromised. But if I didn't want to be compromised, I'd write a novel. Or I'd paint or do a painting. I don't have the skills to be a painter, but I have the skills to be a novelist if that's what I wanted to do. So if there was a story I profoundly wanted to tell with no interference, the only recourse for me is poetry or prose writing. Because then that's just that's pure from me to you. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:50
Speaker
I appreciate mentioning Red Sonja and kind of that Conan universe, Robert E. Howard. One of the pieces that I like is the outer space stuff and the adventure swashbuckler stuff. Oh, you like those, okay. Yeah.
00:26:13
Speaker
And there's some great... One of the things that excited me is to see, you know, a bigger now interpretation of Sonya. And there's been these different treatments over time, I think, with all the characters in Howard's universe, some of them being very, well, pulpy from its source, right? Well, he's pulpy. I mean, there's an understandably pulpy. That's how you wrote.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yeah, and all that adventure. But one of the cool things is that the characters end up being around so much that they end up really developing these warrior heroes set in this universe. When you mentioned the environmental concerns or environment in Red Sony, I'm like, okay, I'm really jazzed to see.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yeah, because I inherited other drafts of the script, and I rewrote the script, it'll be credited to somebody else, but I rewrote it to make it mine. But previous drafts were dealing with gender issues, right? They were interested in, okay, a female warrior. And I don't, I mean, though I obviously am very interested in that for personal reasons, I think the bigger conversation to have is environmental stuff, because the planet's dying, there is no bigger conversation to have.
00:27:31
Speaker
Whether it's human, which I profoundly think it is human involvement, or just cycles of a planetary life, a life cycle which is changing to the detriment of human survival, we've got to talk about it. I mean, that's the point. But also you can't do it like you're eating your greens. Nobody wants to go and see that. Nobody's going to go and see. So if I say, hey, Sonya's an environmental movie, they'll go, well, we're not going to watch it. If I say, Sonya's a big sword and sorcery thing with a cyclops in it,
00:27:58
Speaker
People are like, oh, might as well watch that. Right? So it's figuring out, and I've made a few little environmental movies, which, you know, I did a, and this is one of the things about having freedom with low budget. So I made, I made two movies in Africa called, well, a bunch of stuff in Africa, but once I'm talking about, I did a mythical rogue, another one called endangered species. A rogue is an action movie with Megan Fox leading a bunch of mercenaries to rescue some kidnapped kids.
00:28:24
Speaker
Fine, it's a Megan Fox action picture. Didn't cost very much, but ultimately this group of mercenaries escaped with the kids and take refuge in an abandoned farm. It turns out the farm was an old lion breeding farm where the lions were being bred in captivity to be killed for their bones to be sold to the Oriental markets, China specifically in Vietnam.
00:28:47
Speaker
Right now, there are like 16,000 lions in captivity in South Africa for this purpose, and they're kept in terrible conditions. Again, I couldn't make a movie about that, but I could make a movie where Megan Fox ends up in this abandoned farm, and there's a lion left behind, and she's hunting them down, and there's more bad guys, there's lots of shooting and running, jumping and chasing. But ultimately, there is a conversation about lion farming in that movie. Now, Lionsgate, who released that film in the US, didn't really give a shit about what the movie was about.
00:29:17
Speaker
Right? They were like, you got Megan Fox, you got a gun, you got some shooting. That'll do for us. Right?
00:29:25
Speaker
And that's what I have to do. I have to sneak in what I'm interested in. And same with endangered species. American family goes on vacation. They rent a van. They go into a wildlife park. They take a wrong turn. A rhino protecting its baby turns over their van. Suddenly they've got to survive in the wilderness. They meet a poacher. Poacher saves them, but at the same time, he doesn't. Blah, blah, blah, right? ABCD storytelling, but it deals with rhino poaching.
00:29:52
Speaker
And also a grown up conversation about, do people living in their native environment have the right to exploit the wildlife that's around them? Because there's no economic survival without it, right? So I've got to be careful, you know, the whole Western white savior thing going to night. And I go to spend time in Africa and they say, well, do you have the right to tell us how to manage our lands when you have so famously failed to manage yours?
00:30:19
Speaker
And it's a pretty good argument. And you say to them, but you guys are the custodians, the last of these incredible creatures on earth, the mega fauna, nowhere in the world, rhinos, elephant, hippo, nowhere in the world's got that left anymore.
00:30:36
Speaker
That goes to conversation. I don't think that's art per se. I think it's using filmmaking to tell stories I'm interested in. Art stories, art, possibly. They also have a utility to change people's minds. Does that make them craft? This is the crux of the questions you're asking. Art has no utility.
00:30:58
Speaker
No, and I appreciate you talking about the environment and animals. Honestly, when I saw... I watched Rogue a couple of times. I love it. I'm a huge Megan Fox fan. And again, I like your action. But it wasn't foisted in the movie because that becomes so...
00:31:18
Speaker
like, transparent, it wasn't like foisted in there as part of the as part of the story. So it's a little caption at the end of the movie finishes, and then a little caption comes up and says like 14,000 16,000 lines are in captivity. I almost do a trade with the audience. I will entertain you for 95 minutes. Please read this message.
00:31:39
Speaker
Yeah. That's all I'm doing in a way. That's the exchange I'll make with you. If anybody listening to this watches Rogue, I apologize for the shitty lion VFX. That's the problem with a low budget movie. But it's also, it got me to where I want, if I'd spent more money on that film, I wouldn't have been able to make the film I wanted to make. So it's always this trade. I've done enough movies, I'm skilled enough as a filmmaker to be able to do quite a lot with not much.
00:32:08
Speaker
And I like being in that space. I don't even chase big studio pictures now. I don't know what I'd do with them. Too many cooks in those kitchens. I wanted to ask you a mention about the environment. I've asked this question in different ways, and I heard some comments answering what is art about the role of art. One of the things I've asked from time to time is,
00:32:32
Speaker
the thing
00:32:45
Speaker
I don't want to make the things. Richard Feynman, the famous scientist after the bomb was in deep depression because he's seen people build things and he's like, why the fuck build things? This shit's going to get knocked down anyway. So like these big ideas, is the role of art different in the context of our deep ecological and climate concerns? Is it different now?
00:33:12
Speaker
Well, that's really interesting. I mean, I think going back to our cave painting history of art, there's a couple of imperatives
Historical Purposes of Art
00:33:21
Speaker
there. I mean, some of the very first art was obviously fertility stuff. So it was to do with trying to understand fertility cycles and the creation of little mummers and things like that. The very, very first art that we feel is being created are
00:33:38
Speaker
female figures, fertility goddesses and things like that. So there's always been that it's about procreation, it's about the world we live in, it's exploring that. It's about divinity and the divine. I mean, those are the great, some of the great arts of human history is all to do with the divine in a way, reaching the divine, speaking to the divine.
00:34:00
Speaker
So there's that, which is a fundamental part of humanity, the kind of spiritual side. Again, I have no faith, but there's certainly something to do with how the mind works, how consciousness works, that compels us to create flying spaghetti monsters that we can believe in, we have to believe in. And that's also a binding structure for society.
00:34:24
Speaker
So there's that. And then you go, well, some of the very first are the Cape canes are of wildlife. They are the animals. They are of the environment. So art and the environment is so inextricably linked in the history of humanity that the answer is just yes. I mean, they belong together. They always have to know we get further and further from our
00:34:50
Speaker
historical and artistic roots, the more society gets deeply in the computer age and the Anthropocene comes along and we start changing our planet in ways which nobody can predict. But those are things which matter. And it's inextricably in our DNA. We come from the world. We come from the environment. We've spent the last several hundred, probably
00:35:15
Speaker
I don't know, the last 800 years, certainly Western civilization, trying to get away from it, trying to dominate it. And certainly the kind of the Judeo-Christian worldview is, we are here to dominate the world. And pre-Christian religions, we are part of the world.
00:35:35
Speaker
And therefore we have to make it work. Let's not say we wouldn't exploit things and kill things, we had to. But it's just figuring out where we fit in that space in terms of our art. And then the art of storytelling is fundamental. That was a way of communicating ideas and the campfire. One of the reasons I think cinema is so powerful is it's the equivalent of the campfire. We go into a dark space and we watch a flickering thing and are told stories.
00:35:59
Speaker
And it's essential to what we are. You know, that oral tradition is gone in its purest form, but it now exists in another form. So, yeah, the environment and art are just bound together. Yeah, I...
00:36:14
Speaker
I really appreciate your comments. I listen to this podcast called Rooted Pod and it's about the intersection of human histories and plant histories as far as our culture and just like this intertwining that I think you're right, there's this kind of domination mindset and I think kind of like consequences being away from us or we don't see them, really impacted.
Challenging Reality and Perception
00:36:40
Speaker
uh behavior i i got the big question i never know when to ask it mj which is which is a bigger question coming oh my god there's something rather than nothing question uh why why why why why is it that there's something rather than nothing well who's to say that's actually a statement of truth right i mean if you look at look at the very latest thinking on what is reality
00:37:10
Speaker
There's an argument there is no such thing as reality. There's something from nothing. There's a neurologist called Robert Sapolsky, who is a Stanford based neuro. I love his writing. I love his work. I love what he writes about how the brain works. I don't even believe that we have free will, ultimately. We don't know where ourselves come from. I'm speaking to you now. I'm not thinking about my words before they're coming out.
00:37:41
Speaker
So there's another part of me and the subconscious is doing this stuff. So if I'm not really thinking, the me that's saying, I don't know where my words are coming from is still generating, there's no, where's the free will in that? Where is that? Now, if you take away free, I mean, it's a very scary concept for lots of people, but for, I'm like, okay, that's fine. I feel like I have free will and kind of the illusion of free will gets me through the day.
00:38:05
Speaker
But we're just animals, we're just climbing, you know, the fact the coalescence of these particular subatomic particles for this infinitesimally tiny amount of time in the grand scheme of the universe.
00:38:18
Speaker
Right? It's meaningless. Right? And so and again, then you have to start really deconstructing, okay, what time we expect experience time because of the nature of entropy through living organisms, but time doesn't necessarily exist in the way that we think it does. It's just our perception of time. Is time a thing? Then you go, well, okay, what is the universe is the universe just a product of my consciousness? So therefore, is there something rather than nothing?
00:38:49
Speaker
So because your question is a great question, but it's actually, you could easily review the whole concept, the whole notion that it's built upon.
00:38:57
Speaker
There is nothing except just what's in my head right now. Why are you real? You're not real, right? There's so many things preventing the sense that you could be even a real thing right now. There's me, there's a camera, there's electrons, getting to the thing, it's going up, I guess, going into space, coming down from a satellite, going to you creating this pixelated image on my computer screen. How the hell do I know that's real?
00:39:24
Speaker
my kind of philosopher. I've certainly struggled deeply with the question of free will. I've always been a bit quizzical about how it is that humans are kind of like hoisted out of these causations and
00:39:48
Speaker
decide upon roads. I've had a lot of difficulty. Do you decide? The thing is, you don't decide. Yeah, that's the key, right? You think you decide, but you don't. And, you know, there's a full on experimental evidence says you think you make a decision, you're not making the decision. Your subconscious brain makes the decision before your conscious brain thinks it's made the decision. Therefore, if you're not driving, who's driving?
00:40:14
Speaker
Park the biological argument for a second, then just go, okay, is it a deterministic universe? And there's a deterministic universe argument, which is the position of every subatomic particle or every particle in the universe could be predicted by a kind of meta computer outside the universe powerful enough to track everything. And if it could track every particle, then it could understand the interactions of every particle. Therefore, the superpositions of all the neurons in your brain, all those microtubules and all the shit that Penrose talks about,
00:40:44
Speaker
They know where it's gonna be, they know where it was, they know where it is now, and they know where it's going to be. So the future is already foretold. Is that supercomputer then gone?
00:40:55
Speaker
Well, yeah, but it's a conceptual supercomputer, right? So no. But then of course, then the quantum physicists come in and say, well, the fundamental lack of determinism or probability stacks in the quantum arguments, they actually know it can't be a deterministic universe. So that kind of frees you from that one a little bit. Because for the longest time, I was a deterministic universe anyway.
00:41:21
Speaker
And there's a fantastic TV show called Devs that Alex Garland wrote and directed, which tries to make a story of that. And I love the show. He wasn't super, super successful. I love Garland as a writer and filmmaker. But yeah, he tackles that in Devs, you know, the quantum nature of the universe and the deterministic nature of the universe and the positioning of everything all the time. So even if you park that and just go back to the biological one,
00:41:50
Speaker
Because then you also have the argument, which I'm really interested in, is like, where does life even exist? How is something living and something not living? And what's the thing that makes that? What is the thing? Like, when we die, I mean, I've been reading about this, when we die, we don't die all at once, right? We die in pieces.
00:42:12
Speaker
Different organs die over different time frames. You go, this person's brain dead, they're dead. Well, the kidneys live for another five hours and the liver lives a bit longer. We're not a thing, we're a collective. The notion that a deal of our emotional sensibility comes from the bacteria in our guts.
00:42:40
Speaker
We're a shared space. We're not a thing. And it would behoove us as humans to realize that we're not these kind of singular special entities. We're just a slab of meat moving around.
00:42:57
Speaker
I love the discussion, MJ. With this question, it's funny because I ask it in the traditional way and it's funny because
00:43:11
Speaker
It's one of those things that always causes like almost like a vocal or visceral reaction or a chuckle or, you know, like this type of thing. But the other versions people have said is really, you know, from maybe more of a Buddhistic or Taoist perspective, you know, why is it that there's something, you know, rather than nothing, but also the person, maybe along the lines of more scientific thinking is how is there something rather than nothing?
00:43:41
Speaker
it's implicit and so it gets back to the how is it how is it the case and um i think that's the whole you guys what was at the beginning of the universal fields of potentiality they say right before the universe began was there anything before the universe not really because there was no time but there's no time to come so you can you can unpick it to the point where there's sort of almost no conversation to be had i think
00:44:08
Speaker
Because I come at it, I'm rooted in biology more than I am in physics.
00:44:15
Speaker
because they think everything comes from the brain. Our brains live inside a dark room. They have no understanding what the outside world is. All they have to do is these inputs, our senses, and they interpret those inputs. We have no reason to think that those are accurate interpretations, and they're not accurate interpretations of the world. That's the other thing, the brain is making assumptions and suppositions on a second to second basis about what the world might do next.
00:44:43
Speaker
you know based on what is done previously and there's the whole thing you know people talk about ghosts and aliens and the supernatural it's like well okay there's an argument to be said there are there must be this wavelengths of light that the human eye can't see but clearly it's out there and birds look different birds and flowers and insects look different to other birds insects and flowers because they see wavelengths of light that we don't see so their perception of their reality is they would argue no that's real and we say no no no butterflies this color
00:45:12
Speaker
And the bird would say, nonetheless, completely different color, right? There could be things that could be, I don't think there are, but there could be things which exist right in front of me now that I can't see because my eyes don't pick up that wavelength of light. And that's simply because the evolutionary steps that got me to being this human at this moment in time did not need to see those wavelengths of light for successful procreation.
00:45:37
Speaker
We're just gene machines. We just carry our genetic material for the four and a half billion years of unbroken, you and me and everybody else is alive, assuming everybody else is real, an unbroken line of successful breeding from the first cell division four and a half billion years ago. That's immortality religion, I've got immortality. Damn, I don't have the mic drop sound effect. Let's do this lo-fi, this whole...
00:46:07
Speaker
this whole program lo fi and uh... i uh... i i i i i want to say uh... mj uh... uh... great great chat with you i i wanted to make sure i had a couple a couple of things first of all though uh...
00:46:26
Speaker
about where to find, you know, where to find your work or what you'd like people to find or encounter or your important advocacy as well. I think I want to come in contact with you. Others will want to. So how do they do that? Oh, I mean, my only access is my Instagram, which I made. I was private while I made it public again. That's it. I mean, I don't get out there much. I don't engage with the world very much.
Life in Los Angeles & Advocacy for Kindness
00:46:55
Speaker
I live my life quietly in the Topanga Hills outside Los Angeles. I'd like to see, just be kind. Dear God, be kind. Have some empathy, an empathy on all sides. Obviously, I have politics. I live in America. I love this country. I'm not a citizen, but I'm very happy and grateful to live here.
00:47:16
Speaker
You just look at what's going on right why is everyone so frightened i think fear is driving everything i think it's people so scared. I'm not watching listening i'm a trans woman right i'm in a sound like it is but i am i live my life as a woman.
00:47:32
Speaker
It's been a joyful experience being truly me, but I live with a low degree of stress and fear these days about what's going to happen next, what's going to happen to people like me or people who are different, and just go, just be kind. Most people in my day-to-day experience of life traveling around the world filming, there is kindness.
00:47:54
Speaker
It's like, collectively, people can be mean, but individually, people are kind. And I think it's that it's just remembered kindness, which is a bit cod on a bit silly. But it's actually, I think the only thing that's going to get us through and don't waste shit. The planet is is fragile. Yeah, I want to I wanted to ask you just one more related. You know, I think that
00:48:20
Speaker
conversation and philosophy and engaging on ideas, part of the implicit part of my show has been to have it be variety and to bring in to have conversations about whether it's goofy or profound or both and to do that. And one of the things folks have let me know is
00:48:44
Speaker
they appreciate the space that ideas are exchanged and that there's a conversation and there's a dearth of that and as a philosopher for me i've been trained in being like big huge enormous disagreements don't intimidate me because it's a weird area to study and like move your brain into you know and i was just wondering
00:49:09
Speaker
In the bit of the kindness and such, what do we do about maybe the public forum or the idea that adults, it doesn't end in gunfire necessarily for us to be like, you believe that, I believe that? The terrible tragic history of humanity is that it always ends in gunfire.
00:49:32
Speaker
Yeah, tell me to talk about an empire or a civilization that hasn't at some point ended in they all they all end like that. Yeah, you know, they always they'll go out with a bang. And I think that's the tragic nature of humanity. The bangs get getting bigger, clearly.
00:49:50
Speaker
I listened to Sam Harris's podcast and he just had a guy and he was like, oh yeah, it's going to be nuclear war. It's like, okay, right? But I think one of the things I think people get stuck on is they think their thing is the right thing. And it's two things can be true.
00:50:12
Speaker
At the same time, it's not a zero-sum game. It's like your guy, your politician, can be an arsehole and sometimes be right, and my guy can be an arsehole and sometimes be right. It's like there's nothing wrong with saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, that bad person had a good idea or this good person is an idiot sometimes.
00:50:32
Speaker
But to defend it, it's like, no, no, no. It's like, no, come on. This is why the beginning of the conversation was education is everything. And I completely believe that. Education is everything. And the moment you start throttling that, restricting it, which we're seeing happening on a moment-to-moment basis live right now, access to information is being restricted. So somebody's truth is now no longer a truth. Let me get into the argument, well, it's truth anyway. And that's a whole other podcast.
00:51:01
Speaker
you know, objective realities, that notion is like, we've got to be able to say, I don't like that person, but this is a true statement. Or this is, I think, I think two things can be true. That should be on my gravestone. Two things can be true.
00:51:17
Speaker
And there we have it, not for your gravestone necessary, but at least towards the end of the episode here. MJ, as you know, a big fan, really stimulating conversation that I'm going to have to listen to again because in the host,
00:51:38
Speaker
listening to. I'm kind of moving between the two and listening deeply and hosting. But I wanted to thank you so much for making what you do. I really look forward to the Red Sonja movie and really deeply appreciate
00:51:58
Speaker
uh again watch Solomon came last night again um really appreciate your work and that action question was really a thrill for me i don't have that type of conversation but i kind of was looking at i'd be like why the why the fuck does that work so well and a lot of times i've seen i'm like oh my god they skipped on the action scene or you know so um just want to say
00:52:22
Speaker
Schedule on budget, that's what it is. Schedule on budget. But thank you for coming on to something rather than nothing and being great success in the work that you do. I look forward to seeing all the things you create. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you. This is something rather than nothing.
00:52:58
Speaker
and listeners to stay connected with us in our guests, visit something rather than nothing.com. Join our mailing list for exclusive updates and access to guest created art. If you enjoyed this episode or any episode, please like subscribe, leave a review on your podcast platform. People really read that shit.
00:53:19
Speaker
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00:53:47
Speaker
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