The Projection Booth
Weirding Way Media 1 000 episodes Nov 11, 2026
The Projection Booth is a film discussion podcast that covers a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis. The show regularly features special guest talent who discuss their past cinematic gems. It has been recognized as a premier film podcast by notable publications such as The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine.
Episodes
Episode 825: Phantom Lady (1944)
The one woman who can clear an innocent man has vanished, and nobody who saw her will admit it. November continues with Phantom Lady (1944), Robert Siodmak's adaptation of the Cornell Woolrich novel, published as William Irish, and the first film produced by Hitchcock veteran Joan Harrison. Alan Curtis is the man convicted of strangling his wife; Ella Raines is the secretary who turns detective; F
Special Report: Dissociated Me (2026)
What happens when a filmmaker can't make the movie of her own life? Janaé Rachel Ballot tried to write a biopic about herself, ran into dissociative episodes and flashbacks, and started shooting without a script instead. The result is Dissociated Me (2026), a comedy about trauma that she calls an anti-biopic and an anti-therapy film. Mike White talks with its writer and director right after its wo
Special Report: Sudden Flicker (2026)
Film history may be heading toward its own ending, and David Thomson wants to look at the whole thing while there is still something to see. The critic and historian behind Rosebud joins Mike White for a Projection Booth Special Report on his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, a revisionist history of the movies that took about three years to write.Thomson traces his obsession to a childhood scr
Special Report: Spectacular Optical
Kier-La Janisse wanted to be a film programmer. Instead she became a publisher and a filmmaker, because the festival that gave her a website in 2011 handed it over when it stopped reaching Quebec audiences. She turned that domain into Spectacular Optical, a book imprint that started in 2014 with Kid Power, partly because Canadian grants were easier to win for books than for magazines. Janisse join
Episode 824: Invention for Destruction (1958)
A world drawn in cross-hatched lines: water, ships and faces all look like Victorian engravings come to life. Czechtember 2026 opens with Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958), released in America as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, as Mike welcomes back Jonathan Owen and Professor Earl Jackson.Freely adapted from Verne's Facing the Fat, the film follows young engineer Simon Hart and Pr
Special Report: I See the Demon (2025)
A birthday party, a rented house and a person you only thought you knew: I See the Demon (2025) turns a breach of trust into sci-fi horror.This is a Special Report on a new voice and a festival film. First-time feature director Jacob Lees Johnson joins Mike White to talk about the movie that premiered at Cinequest in San Jose, then played Grimmfest in the UK and FilmQuest in Utah. It stars Jon Hed
Episode 823: The End of Man (1971)
A naked man walks out of the sea and into São Paulo, and nobody can agree whether he's the Messiah or a naughty boy with a beard. José Mojica Marins, best known as Coffin Joe, kicks off Shocktober 2026 with The End of Man (1971), a strange, scrappy sermon.Mike White, Rob St. Mary and Ben Buckingham dig into Finis Hominis: the head-in, tail-away walks that carry Mojica from scene to scene, an endin
Special Report: Joe Lansdale (2026)
Joe R. Lansdale writes like everybody he knows is dead, and Hollywood has been trying to catch up with him ever since. The Texas storyteller joins Mike for a Projection Booth Special Report that runs from Batman comics to the movies he hopes to make next.Lansdale, the author behind Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), argues the film needs no sequel: Bruce Campbell is that part. He explains why The Drive-In has b
Episode 822: Spartan (2004)
David Mamet strips the political thriller down until almost nothing is left, and the gaps are the point. Spartan (2004) sends Val Kilmer's Robert Scott after the president's missing daughter, through a cover-up told in clipped, half-finished sentences.Mike White, Jedidiah Ayres and Andrew Nette wrap up Valhalla, spoilers included. Is this the backstory of a long-running series hero in the Jack Rea
Special Report: Do You Want To Play? (2026)
What if the Ouija board were an app, and the app were hungry? Do You Want to Play? (2026), a new horror film fresh from its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest, turns the spirit board into an algorithm and lets a serial killer's demon climb inside a teenager through her phone.Writer-director Nick Lyon joins Mike White with Ricco Ross, the Aliens (1986) veteran who plays Scary Gary, a priest turned Y
Episode 821: Moontide (1942)
Is Moontide (1942) film noir, or a dockside melodrama with a hangover? Mike White, Heidi Honeycutt and Jedidiah Ayres take on Noirvember's strangest Hollywood experiment: 20th Century Fox's bid to turn French star Jean Gabin into a leading man.Archie Mayo directed after Fritz Lang shot three weeks and quit. Gabin wakes from a blackout unsure whether he killed a man, Ida Lupino walks into the surf,
Special Report: Stranded on Earth (2026)
Before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) there was Night Skies, a rural alien-horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed, spent roughly $700,000 on, and walked away from.Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, returns to The Projection Booth to talk about his new book, Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, out October 27 from 1984 Publis
Special Report: Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story (2026)
For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life. WFMU's Dave "the Spazz" Abramson spent nearly two decades chasing the man behind the face for Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story, his new biography from Feral House. He tells Mike h
Special Report: Cruel Love (2026)
She has already buried her husband. Then a charming stranger comes to her aid during a robbery, and she lets him in. That's when the con begins. Cruel Love (2026), Nick Lyon's new thriller, now streaming, turns real marriage fraud into what star Elisabeth Harnois calls "a cautionary tale with an element of emotional horror." Lyon tells Mike how he and the late Christian Oliver made it their first
Episode 820: Getting Straight (2026)
Why did the one campus-protest picture that drew a crowd end up forgotten? Mike White, Andras Jones and Bill Ackerman reopen Getting Straight (1970), Richard Rush's comedy about a Vietnam veteran, played by Elliott Gould, who is trying to finish his teaching degree while the faculty makes it hard and campus unrest makes it harder. Candice Bergen plays his girlfriend, Jan.The panel digs into Gould'
Special Report: Restoration at Grayson Manor (2026)
A hedonistic heir loses his hands, so his mother buys him new ones wired to his subconscious. Big mistake: his subconscious is a nasty place. The Restoration at Grayson Manor (2025), Glenn McQuaid's new Irish horror film, premiered at Fantastic Fest and pits Chris Colfer against Alice Krige, the Borg Queen herself, in a crumbling estate where mother and son know exactly where to cut. McQuaid, a Gl
Special Report: Kung Fu Deadly (2026)
Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny (Steven He) and Frank (Michael Tient), after a swarm of jiangshi, with Lian (Gemma Chua-Tran) as their reluctant ally. Writer-producer Paddy McDonald, who produced Predestination (2014), needed 12
Episode 818: Cat People (1982)
At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Josh Hadley and Heather Drain follow Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell into a
Special Report: Welcome to Dolly's House (2026)
What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of Madame Dolly, a sorceress who has lived for two millennia, and a house full of dolls. Seven YCH directs with Rady Fu and Tree Muta, blending live-action motion capture with 2D animation.Mik
Special Report: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026)
Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets, built in a family garage in Belleville, Ontario. Director Mason Newton DeRushie's feature debut had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest before heading to Australia's Monster Fest. Mason and his
Special Report: Best Served Cold (2026)
Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John Joseph Dunn, chases The Farmer (1977) from a Columbia release nobody could find to a gray-market YouTube upload that finally forced Code Red's hand. It had its world premiere at the Popcorn
Special Report: Sell Your House (2026)
What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), Francis Galluppi's debut feature, and the years of debt, freak storms and distribution dead ends that came after. It had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International
Episode 817: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)
A gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US as Cemetery Man, is a horror comedy that refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the point. To close Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Heather Drain and Rob Spencer take
Special Report: Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026)
Two adult film stars run a cross-country crime spree, robbing porn theaters to fund a getaway to France, and the real question isn't whether they survive but whether they stay together. Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026) is a new Texas-made road romance from writer-director Seth Magana, shot on one lens with his own money and headed for a November 17 premiere at Laemmle NoHo 7 before a theat
Special Report: The Dark Gets In (2026)
The scariest true-crime documentary is the one that stops being true. The Dark Gets In (2026), which premiered at Beyond Fest and heads to FrightFest in the UK, follows a documentary crew interviewing the parents of a teenage girl who vanished from a locked house, until the case turns somewhere far darker than anyone expected. Writer-director Sean Hogan, who made The Devil's Business (2011), shot
Special Report: Silver Screamers (2025)
A rejected horror-short application turned into a movie about what happens when retirees run the set. Sean Cisterna couldn't find funding for The Rug (2025), so he pitched a New Horizons for Seniors grant, recruited a crew in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and filmed the chaos as Silver Screamers (2025), a Fantastic Fest world premiere reaching U.S. viewers on BloodStream November 6. Cisterna joins Mike
Special Report: Wicker (2026)
A fisherwoman the village won't let alone commissions a basket weaver to build her a husband, and the husband is Alexander Skarsgård, worn as ten 3D-printed pieces of woven prosthetic with no CG replacement. Wicker (2026) is a new fable from directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, fresh from its Sundance premiere and opening nationwide October 30, with Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage, Eliz
Special Report: The Heretiks (2026)
Forget the cabin in the woods: this coven comes for you at home on Halloween night. The Heretiks (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere headed to Sitges, follows renegade witch Cai (Kimberly Epstein) as she protects two sisters and a friend from her former coven, led by the terrifying Neve (Tess Williams). Director Gregg Bishop of Siren (2016) and Dance of the Dead (2008) spent ten years shopping
Special Report: Detention (2026)
What if detention were group therapy? Detention (2026), a quirky teen comedy from Washington State's Bainbridge Island, swaps the usual punishment for something harder: a room of kids made to talk about what is really happening behind closed doors. Writer-director Emma Cameron, who co-directed with her husband Mark Cameron and also plays the sleep-deprived Dr. Messerschmitt, joins Mike after the f
Special Report: The Cycle (2026)
A body missing for 36 years turns up at a gruesome crime scene, and the daughter who goes looking learns her father's past is much worse than she thought. The Cycle (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan, comes from Jordan Downey, the filmmaker behind The Head Hunter (2018). Stephen King has already called it special, and it arrives on Shudder October
Special Report: We're Nothing at All (2026)
A bus explodes in downtown Hong Kong on Valentine's Day, and the trail of wreckage leads to two young men nobody was watching. We're Nothing at All (2026), a festival drama that has played Hong Kong and Udine's Far East Film Festival, intercuts a forensic investigation with the love story and desperation of a gay couple pushed toward disaster by poverty. Herman Yau, the Hong Kong veteran behind Ta
Special Report: The Long Way Home (1989)
In 1988, a Soviet underground rock hero flew west to record an album for CBS, and Michael Apted's cameras went with him. The Long Way Home (1989) follows Boris Grebenshchikov and his band Aquarium from studio sessions in New York and Montreal back to a Leningrad where glasnost was still a hope, with Dave Stewart, Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, and Crosby, Stills and Nash along for the ride. Now it'
Special Report: Into the Sky (2026)
A man comes home from an alien abduction to find a tenant living in his house. Into the Sky (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Sam Richardson, Sofia Black-D'Elia, and David Cross, pairs that premise with classic rom-com bones: the meet-cute, the estranged spouse, the big wedding. Drew Mylrea and Evan Wolf Buxbaum make their feature directing debut with an idea a decade in the making.
Special Report: Corporate Retreat (2026)
Nothing says team-building like a trap. Corporate Retreat (2026), a horror comedy that had its world premiere at BIFFF in Brussels, lures ambitious young executives to a luxury desert estate where the trust games turn deadly. Director Aaron Fisher follows his debut feature Inside the Rain (2019) with a cast that includes Odeya Rush, Rosanna Arquette, and Alan Ruck.Mike talks with Fisher and actres
Special Report: George Haddad on Lioness
Gunshots on Lioness aren't supposed to sound like movie gunshots. Supervising sound editor George Haddad, an Emmy winner for The Studio, talks with Mike about building Taylor Sheridan's CIA drama from authentic sources: researching how a specific weapon sounds in a specific place, recording a friend's Rivian for another series, and cleaning dialogue so viewers never reach for the subtitles.The con
Special Report: Capturing Bigfoot (2026)
Nearly sixty years after Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot the most famous footage in Bigfoot history, forty seconds of forgotten 16mm film locked in a safe for half a century threaten to blow the legend wide open. Capturing Bigfoot (2026), a SXSW documentary that had the Bigfoot community arguing before most of them had seen it, comes from director Marq Evans of Claydream (2021) and arrives Oct
Special Report: Etched in Pavement (2026)
The Joe Louis Fist is among Detroit's best-known monuments, yet plenty of people have forgotten whose fist it is. Etched in Pavement (2026), a festival documentary from Detroit photographer-turned-filmmaker John Sippel, brings that legacy back through two young fighters from Southwest Detroit. Sippel spent four years inside the grassroots Guns Down, Gloves Up movement, where boxing becomes an answ
Special Report: Gimme Truth (2026)
What does it cost to believe everything? Gimme Truth (2026), which had its world premiere at Hot Docs and went on to Fantastic Fest, follows UFO contactees, starseeds, anti-vaccine crusaders, and other seekers of hidden knowledge without sneering and without sharing their beliefs. Co-directors Simon Ennis, who made The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (2024), and Brad Abrahams care less about what t
Special Report: Little Doors (2026)
Mike talks with the two stars of Little Doors (2026) — married couple Anthony Oberbeck and Megan Koester — about a deadpan comedy in which a lonely woman, quietly living through the end of the world, discovers a small wooden door has grown into the side of her body and has to decide whether to open it.It’s the feature directorial debut of Oberbeck (Dad & Stepdad, the Reveries trilogy), who wro
Special Report: Clean Hands (2026)
Mike talks with Jake Allyn, writer-director of Clean Hands (2026), a true-crime drama about a celebrated Hagerstown, Maryland narcotics sergeant fighting the opioid pipeline he polices by day while his own daughter is consumed by it at home.Allyn found the story on YouTube during COVID and became close enough with the real Kevin and Dana Simmers that he calls them second parents; they and the poli
Special Report: No Rest for the WIcked (2026)
Mike talks with Danish writer-director Kasper Kalle about his sophomore feature No Rest for the Wicked (2026), a queer gothic romance shot on the Faroe Islands that slides from love story into vampire tale into body horror without the audience noticing the ground shifting under them.Kalle built the film from an 1885 short story by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs — one of the earliest unapologetic accounts o
Special Report: Lemonade Blessing (2026)
Mike talks with writer-director Chris Merola about his debut feature Lemonade Blessing (2025), a coming-of-age dramedy about a Catholic-school transfer student who falls for a girl who dares him into escalating sacrilege, all in the name of love.Merola wrote the script as a USC film student mining his own adolescence — a Catholic mother, a fake-named first crush, the general sense of being “unmoor
Special Report: Ones Who Grieve (2026)
Mike talks with French director Quarxx about The Ones Who Grieve (2026), in which a mysterious plague called the Black Veil and a father’s religious cruelty turn out to be the same disease.Quarxx came to filmmaking through a decade as a painter before ever picking up a camera, and this is his first script written with a co-author, novelist Frédéric Soulié, after years of collaborations that never
Special Report: Marcus Heslop on Frantastic!
Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew.Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books du
Special Report: Following Harry (2025)
Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time.Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access
Special Report: Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way.Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable interv
Special Report: This is Buzz (2026)
There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into
Special Report: The Squirrel (2026)
What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, it’s director Markus Lehmusruusu’s deadpan follow-up to Ricky Rapper an
Special Report: Galicia! (2026)
What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural Spanish winery, with the apocalypse folded in after the fact. Fresh off its world premiere at the Downtown F
Special Report: Big Girls Don't Cry (2026)
Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New Zealand summer in 2006. Mike talks with Schneideman and her two leads, Ani Palmer and Rain Spencer, about b
Special Report: Double Trouble (2026)
Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.P
Special Report: A Prayer for the Dying (2026)
Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD warps everything the audience sees through his eyes — and the novella's hidden debt to the Book of Job, w
Special Report: Donkey Princess (2026)
Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fue
Special Report: Ephemera (2026)
Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR, and discovering — only while writing the final log line — that he'd accidentally told his own story. Ric
Special Report: Bella Gonzales on Ted Lasso 4
Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and showrunner Jason Sudeikis worked to make the Kansas scenes feel distinct from the series' established English lo
Special Report: Family (2026)
First-time writer-director Benjamin Finkel built Family (2026) out of his own childhood: his father died of cancer when Finkel was fourteen, and he spent the years afterward filling a script with "everything that was scary and interesting" to him. He tells Mike White how a screenwriting professor passed that script to a literary manager, how a self-shot fake trailer (made in the house he grew up i
Special Report: Never After Dark (2026)
Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix a
Special Report: The Deputy (2026)
First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and reality is becoming increasingly absurd the whole time." Adapted from Victor Gischler's novel — relocate
Special Report: Hellbilly Hollow (2026)
After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) an
Special Report: Digger (2026)
The Projection Booth and The Kulturecast cross the streams to dig into Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's bombastic, heavily spoiled satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to convince the world he can fix the Arctic disaster he caused. Mike White and Chris Stachiw land on opposite sides of the "is it a $125 million folly or a willfully strange swing worth defending" debat
Special Report: Murder at the Movies (2026)
Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published.Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy Si
Special Report: Appofeniacs (2026)
Music-video veteran Chris Marrs Piliero (The Black Keys, Kesha, Ariana Grande) traces his feature debut, Appofeniacs, to two obsessions: the ease of deepfake manipulation, and apophenia — our compulsion to find connections in things that aren't actually connected. He tells Mike White how fan theories about his own music videos (imagined hidden messages, imagined Illuminati symbolism) convinced him
Special Report: Beware Boiúna (2026)
"What if Sorcerer was a creature feature?" That question is what unlocked Beware Boiúna for director Mike P. Nelson, who tells Mike White how William Friedkin's doomed-expedition structure — immerse the audience in an environment, let it become a character, then release the beast — became his blueprint after he initially turned down a "giant snake movie" pitch from producers Jeremy Bolt and Robert
Special Report: The World of Nancy Kwan
Nancy Kwan talks with Mike about The World of Nancy Kwan, her new memoir written with Deborah Davis and a foreword by her nephew Kevin Kwan. Kwan revisits how she landed The World of Suzie Wong almost by accident, tagging along to watch her favorite Hong Kong actresses screen-test before a casting director pulled her in front of the camera, which led to a Hollywood contract, acting lessons with Je
Special Report: Take Me Home (2026)
When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa.Sargent traces her path from modern d
Special Report: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025)
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle join Mike for Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), third in their trilogy after Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Made with a Guggenheim grant, it grows from the 2020 CZU fire that forced the couple to evacuate their Santa Cruz Mountains home for two and a half months, turning a burn scar t
Special Report: Digital Kitchen's Titles for Smoke and Spider-Noir
Digital Kitchen's Mason Nicoll and Andrew "AJ" Julien talk with Mike about designing the Emmy-nominated title sequences for Spider-Noir and Smoke. They walk through the studio's pitch process, from log-line-only briefs to full pilot screenings, and how Spider-Noir's period-accurate 1931 noir look came from surrealist photography, Man Ray, Seconds, and a Lady from Shanghai homage they didn't know t
Special Report: Girl in the Night (2026)
Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a lonely gas station clerk, steals a bicycle and ends up sidekick to its owner, The Girl (Lara Wolf), a blank-eyed, scarred vigilante who may or may not be a superhero. Luka Marčetić's Girl in the Night (2026) just took Best Picture in Fantastic Fest's Main Competition, and Mike talks with Marčetić and Wolf about the Slovenian deadpan charmer.Marčetić traces the film from a o
Special Report: Littermates (2026)
Sirens wail, smoke drifts past the hedgerows, and inside a tidy English cottage two grown adults earn "nifties" for good behavior. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson's darkly comic feature debut, Littermates (2026), turns a vague apocalypse into a strange, tender story of siblinghood, and Mike talks with both directors about how they pulled it off.Friends since film school, the pair recount reverse
Special Report: Lou Ferrigno on Hard Redemption (2026)
Lou Ferrigno talks with Mike about Hard Redemption (2026), the martial-arts action thriller from director-writer-star Jino Kang and co-director Christine Lam. The film plays out a Die Hard-in-a-classroom premise: a GED teacher with a hidden past (Kang) has to fight off a San Francisco gang holding his students hostage, one grudge match at a time through the school's hallways to a gymnasium showdow
Special Report: Sick (2026)
Agata Trzebuchowska joins Mike for a Special Report on Sick (2026), her feature debut as writer and director, fresh off winning Best Director in Fantastic Fest's Next Wave competition. Sent to the Polish countryside to nurse their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk), sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) feel the summer heat bend their bond into somethin
Episode 815: The Salton Sea (2002)
Rob St. Mary and Jedidiah Ayres join Mike for The Salton Sea (2002), D.J. Caruso's meth-fueled noir starring Val Kilmer in a dual role: junkie informant Danny Parker, who's secretly Tom Van Allen, a grieving trumpet player hunting the corrupt cops who murdered his wife. Chasing them drags Danny deep into the orbit of Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a nose-less speed freak who'll snort anything, and
Special Report: What Happened to Doris?
Nick Simon talks with Mike about What Happened to Doris? (2026), his film revisiting the real case that inspired The Entity (1982). Doris Bither was a Culver City single mother whose reports of violent supernatural attacks drew paranormal investigators from UCLA and became one of the most documented hauntings in American history. Simon developed the project with the blessing of Doris's real son, B
Special Report: Peter M. Hoffman on Karmic Winds
Peter M. Hoffman talks with Mike about Karmic Winds: Reflections from the "Smartest Guy in Hollywood", his memoir written largely in pencil during an eight-month prison sentence for a tax-credit case a federal judge had already ruled legal. Hoffman traces his path from Yale tax law into the movie business, tax-engineering Superman for Alex Salkind, working with manager Albert Grossman, and untangl
Special Report: Baby Doe (2025)
Director Jessica Earnshaw talks with Mike about Baby Doe (2025), her documentary on Gail, tried decades after a newborn's 1993 death, and the phenomenon of pregnancy denial. Earnshaw traces her path from photojournalism, including a National Geographic essay on aging in prison, to her debut Jacinta, and how the film began with Emily Weaver's case before an appeals delay sent her searching for anot
Special Report: Best of the Best (2026)
Director Lena Khan talks with Mike about Best of the Best (2026), her Bollywood-fusion dance comedy for Netflix from writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Khan traces her path from UCLA activism and music videos to her debut The Tiger Hunter, and how Minhaj and Venkataramanujam brought her on after asking for script notes and liking what she said.They dig into the rewrite process, K
Special Report: Cassie Workman is Witchy AF
Cassie Workman talks with Mike about her new horror-comedy series, Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, a puppet-and-drawings deep dive into occult history that plays, in Mike's words, like "a demented kid show." Workman traces her path from stand-up in Perth, Australia, and a run as head writer on The Aaron Chen Show, to fusing comedy and the occult into a series she finally pitched after years on the ba
Special Report: Mooch (2026)
Failure becomes a creative strategy in Mooch, Jeff Ryan’s scrappy New Jersey crime comedy about a nearly thirty-year-old caddie who stumbles into private-eye work. Mike talks with the film’s writer, director, editor, and star about transforming a teenage insult into an intensely personal character, channeling Jim Carrey’s physical fearlessness and the Coen brothers’ off-kilter language, and buildi
Special Report: To Use a Mountain (2026)
When government planning turns communities into maps and statistics, whose lives disappear from the page? Mike talks with director Casey Carter about To Use a Mountain, his visually arresting journey through six American sites considered for a permanent nuclear-waste repository. Carter traces the film from his study of photography, physics, and architecture to six years of fieldwork, relationship-
Special Report: Ah Girl (2026)
A child’s inner life deserves to be taken seriously. Mike talks with writer-director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla about Ah Girl, her tender, funny feature debut set amid family fracture in 1994 Singapore. Ang traces the film’s decade-long path from painful autobiographical memories to a story of healing, explains how counseling transformed the script, and reveals how play, trust, and close observation
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