How to Make and Distribute a Gothic Horror Film on a Shoestring | Justin Denton | Ep. 550
Release Date: 06/01/2026
Inside the VFX of Disclosure Day with Matthew Butler | Episode 560
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Steven Spielberg doesn't want you to know his aliens aren't real. That's the standard Matthew Butler had to hit on Disclosure Day: total photographic believability, zero tolerance for anything that reads as fantasy, even when the story is about a supposed decades-long government cover-up of extraterrestrial contact. Butler has been Spielberg's go-to VFX supervisor for grounded, "make it real" work since Ready Player One, and before that, he was Chris's first VFX supervisor ever, on The Day After Tomorrow. Back in Episode 557, Chris and Daniel broke down Disclosure Day as fans, tracing its DNA...
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Nolan's Odyssey Is Really a Movie About Waiting | Episode 559
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Is it a good movie if you have to watch it ten times? That's the question Chris and Daniel keep circling back to as they take on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, skipping the marketing noise and the wireframe-cyclops conspiracy theories to actually ask whether the thing works as a film. They dig into what Nolan is doing as a filmmaker, structurally and emotionally, in his adaptation of the oldest story in Western literature, and why a three hour runtime built around a decade-long wait might be the whole point rather than a flaw. The real conversation is about adaptation itself: what happens...
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Split Diopters, Indie Film Private Equity, and the Rock and Roll of Making Movies | Episode 558
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Something is shifting in independent film right now, and Ron Cohen, one of the producers on June July and a veteran of physical production, is exactly the person to make sense of it. Chris and Daniel bring him in for a wide-ranging conversation that touches on everything from The Odyssey's marketing to the A24 backlash of the moment, but the real news is that the team just wrapped a shoot on June July, and Ron walks through how it actually went. The conversation moves into the details of that shoot, where fully ray traced and relightable Gaussian splats, an unplanned split diopter, and a crew...
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Disclosure Day and The Secret Weirdness of Steven Spielberg | Episode 557
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Steven Spielberg is the most famous filmmaker alive, which is exactly why almost nobody actually understands him. Chris and Daniel use Disclosure Day, Spielberg's new alien chase thriller with Emily Blunt, to argue that the "safe, mainstream" reputation is a decades-long misdirection: underneath the crowd-pleasing surface is a genuinely weird, deeply personal artist who has been smuggling strange, uncomfortable ideas inside blockbuster packaging since at least Close Encounters. They trace it through Fabelman's casting David Lynch as John Ford, the theory that Kubrick handed Spielberg AI...
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A24, DeepMind, and the "No CGI" Marketing Lie Everyone's Tired Of | Episode 556
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A24 announced a $75 million research partnership with Google DeepMind and framed it as R&D for production tools, not a content deal. Nobody cared about the distinction. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins spend the first half of this Rough Cut on why that announcement landed like a betrayal anyway, then pull the same thread through the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Mark Ruffalo's New York Times op-ed on quiet industry retaliation, and what it means that four studios now control what used to take six. From there the panel turns to Christopher Nolan's press tour for...
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He Cold-Called Kubrick's Secret Number | Doug Trumbull | Episode 555
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Doug Trumbull spent fifty years trying to convince Hollywood that the way movies are projected is fundamentally broken, and most of the industry never listened. The visual effects supervisor behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm, Trumbull passed away in 2022. This conversation originally aired in July 2020, before a lot of you were listening, and it's one of the fullest records of him explaining his life's obsession in his own words. We're pulling it back out of the...
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What If Orson Welles Had a Steadicam? | Hnedel Maximore | Episode 554
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Hnedel Maximore did not come up through the traditional VFX pipeline. He started drafting floor plans in Liberia, studied architecture in Michigan, got laid off during the housing crash, and worked his way across industries before landing at Speed Shape in Detroit doing automotive commercials. That's also where he and Chris first crossed paths, years before either of them could have predicted where things would end up. What Hnedel built along the way was not just a technical skillset but a spatial intelligence that became the secret weapon behind one of the most visually distinctive streaming...
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Obsession, Backrooms, and the 1970s Moment Hollywood Needs Right Now | Episode 553
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For years Chris and Daniel have been saying the corner was going to turn, that history would repeat itself the way it did in the 1970s. It turned. Jason Blum said the same thing last week. Two horror films made by twenty-something YouTubers just proved everything the studio system has been getting wrong, and the box office numbers are not being polite about it. Obsession cost under a million dollars. Backrooms cost ten million. Both are outperforming movies that cost a hundred times more. Chris and Daniel break down both films as filmmakers. They get into what Obsession borrows from Takashi...
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Why Hollywood Keeps Getting Its Audience Wrong | Trina Renee & Julianna Politsky | Episode 552
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Hollywood is having a Marie Antoinette moment. The people running studios and making AI announcements have no idea how their decisions are landing with the audience that actually buys tickets, and the backlash to Jorge R. Gutierrez announcing Punky Duck as an AI project is just the most recent and visible proof. Chris and Daniel are joined by Trina Renee, a studio-side post producer whose client credits run through Warner Brothers and Fox, and Julianna Medina-Politsky, who spent a decade as an executive at Legendary Entertainment and now runs Station X Ventures, for a conversation that is more...
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Mocking AI With AI: Sergio Cilli on Why the Joke Only Works If You Actually Use It | Episode 551
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Sergio Cilli is going to get hate from both sides. The pro-AI crowd thinks he's mocking their tools. The anti-AI crowd thinks he's a hypocrite for using them. He's fine with that. Cilli is a director and writer who came up through sketch comedy and the writers' room of a David Spade Comedy Central show, went on to the Late Late Show as a segment producer, built a commercial directing career through Funny or Die, and has been making people laugh on the internet for twenty years. His Instagram series Will AI Replace Us? has become one of the sharpest, funniest pieces of AI criticism online...
info_outlineGothic horror is having a moment, and Justin Denton got there before the wave. His feature The Curse of the Sin Eater is now streaming on Prime, built for under a million dollars with 19 shooting days, a single private benefactor, Chicago theater actors, an English manor that half-burned down and got rebuilt by hand, and a composer found on Spotify who bowed his guitar like a cello because he didn't own one. Justin is a VFX veteran who has worked on $200 million productions, directed VR experiences for Legendary, and now has a completed independent feature with a Samuel Goldwyn distribution deal to show for a process that looks nothing like what Hollywood taught him and everything like what filmmaking actually requires.
Chris and Daniel dig into the full journey with Justin: how the sin eater mythology stuck with him through COVID, why he pitched it as a drama dressed in horror clothing, what it costs to make a real film in a union town, how distribution actually gets done in the backroom deals before AFM (American Film Market) even opens, and why not having a recognizable name in your cast is the one decision that follows a first-time director all the way to the release screen. The conversation ranges from the Philippou Brothers grinding out horror on YouTube in rural Australia to Demi Moore chasing a script nobody thought she would want, to why the studios are wrong about Gen Z and the movies. This is a real-world map of what it takes to make a feature right now.
Links and References:
The Curse of the Sin Eater Trailer >
The Curse of the Sin Eater on Amazon Prime >
Film discussed:
Talk to Me (dirs. Danny and Michael Philippou)
The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)
My Old Ass (dir. Megan Park)
Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger)
Obsession (dir. Cory Barker)
The Bride (dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Widows Bay (Apple TV+)
Honey Don't (dir. Ethan Coen)
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