Jonah Nolan (director & screenwriter)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

This was fun.

Fuck. yes, this was fun. Right out of the gates, he arrived in the coolest car, an Ariel Atom in the off-road setup. And I was like, what the fuck is this?

It was really cool.

Yes, and I was immediately like, okay, I see you, Jonah Nolan. I didn't know. I think of you as a very clever writer.

Auteur.

Probably smarter than me.

He was very smart.

He is smarter than me, but we had the car thing, so that was helpful. But Jonah Nolan is a director, producer, and Academy Award nominated screenwriter. He is famously brothers with Christopher Nolan and they have done so many of your favorite things together. The Prestige, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, Memento. Then, of course, Jonah was the director of Westworld, which was one of my favorite shows ever.

I hope they can't.

This is my show of 2024.

Based off the video game. Ew. Also, we talked about this when he left. This is like with Phineas and Billie Eilish. If I am the parents of these Nolan brothers, aren't you just...

Why don't they write a book?

So proud.

They got to write a book.

The parents.

Yes, on what to do.

We need to get some of these parents together.

Some of these parents need to get off their ass and write books. So please check out, I don't even have to tell you to, you're going to hear about it so much, but Fallout, which premieres on April 11th on Prime Video. Please enjoy Jonah Nolan.

But I thought you would appreciate it.

Oh my God. Of course. I walked out on him. Well, he's clearly here. Is it a Nomad?

It's a Nomad, yeah.

There was just one on Bring a Trailer. This week, do you go on, Bring a Trailer and sniff around?

I bought a car on Bring a Trailer two weeks ago. Oh, you did? I did. When did you buy? I bought a 991 911 GT3 Touring.

Oh, baby.

What year? 2018..

Oh, fuck.

Slightly softer suspension. I bought it in Colorado. I paid too much money for it. Sure. I flew out and drove it home on summer tires, which is a very bad idea.

Did they even make it? Those tires only lasted like 3,000 miles.

I was going to say. Now, when I had to wake up every day and kind of look to see, I found an app that will tell you how cold it's going to be along your route.

There's an app already for that.

It's cool. It's called How to Get There or something like that.

So you first get the car and you get in it and you're so excited to drive it. And then it's a long drive. I've done that drive a hundred times. It's 1,100 miles.

I had a little bit because I went down through the Raton Pass, which I'd never done before. I didn't have the guts to take on summer tires over the Rockies. I went through Santa Fe, Los Alamos, down across the top of northern New Mexico, Flagstaff, and back that way.

Oh, wow. So this is perfect, because you're already hitting where this sounds reminiscent of. I did a movie in New Mexico. I had been wanting to get a Cobra replica forever. I found one there that had the actual 68 FE big block.

It's pretty bumpy, but it's steering is so dialed in, so perfect. It's like driving a laser beam. Like you're enjoying the experience of driving it so much, even though you're getting jostled around a fair bit, it's still great. And that manual transmission, six speed, one of the greatest engines ever made.

I did not expect this from you.

Okay. This is the point in the conversation. And Monica, I know you're a Goodwill hunting fan. Yes.

How do you know this?

It's way to you?

I listened to you guys talking to Damon.

Oh, okay. Oh, yeah.

It's the moment where Ben Affleck goes in his place to the job interview. And they're kind of like, this is the moment where people start texting. They're like, who the fuck is this guy? Sure. And why doesn't he have an English accent?

That has been this great allure of you guys. Because I've never met either of you. I'm friends with Downey. Obviously, he just worked with your brother. So I got to hear Downey's impersonation.

Oh, dear.

But I've heard that these two are brothers, but one grew up more in Chicago, one grew up more in England, one has an American. Like, you're so fucking Chicagoan. It's hysterical.

That's what happens when you move to Chicago, 11 years old, with an English accent. If I've.

been 18, fantastic. Girls would have loved it. Guys would have thought you were intriguing.

Amazing. Yeah. 11 years old. That's not how it works out.

Yeah, that's fifth grade and you're a pariah.

A hundred percent. Two years, my social interactions consisted of, say my name is Bond, James Bond. Oh. Oh, my God. And now go away.

So he's shaking that sword for us and then get the fuck out of here. Just get out of here.

But what's the age difference?

Chris is way older than I am. He's six years older.

We have some similarities. So my brother is five years older than me. We're reversed though. He's a righty, I'm a lefty. Oh.

That's right.

And by the way, Jonah or Jonathan?

Everyone calls me Jonah. I was traveling when Memento came out. Chris doesn't like nicknames. I came back. I was like, oh, okay.

Like, okay, we're going with legal names. Like, I see. Okay.

Okay. Then they published the short story in Esquire, which was super cool. And I said, can I go by Jonah in Esquire? And then the copy editor called me back two weeks later and was like, we'd really rather that it matched the credits. And there it goes.

Okay. When did you adopt Jonah? God, I don't even know where to start in this story. It's so twisty-turdy. Also, I'm so distracted by how cute you look, Monica.

I am wearing a new outfit. And I was thinking, I was going off on my own journey when you were talking about cars, because I can't follow at all. But I thought, man, what they're talking about is the way I feel about new outfits. There you go. Like, I can't wait to wear it.

They're identical in that they become your identity. You infuse this thing and it helps your self-esteem. You now feel like a laser beam driving suit. You're like, you have athleticism that you, in your real life, don't have. A hundred percent.

Armor. It's all armor.

I feel a little judged there, Dax.

I apply that to myself. Let's just say an RS3 is a world-class car. And even if you're athletic, you didn't play in the NFL.

That's exactly right. It's funny, as you say, Monica, because my daughter was asking me the other day, I was getting dressed up to go to the Oscars. She said, daddy, guys never get to wear anything interesting. And I was like, it's true. It's getting a little better.

Shows your personality.

Also, you can be cool. I saved up and I got a 1984 Mustang GT in high school. And I'm a year older than you. I'm 75 or 76.. Is there a Fox Body one?

That was it. Dorky kid, English accent, trying as fast as I could to get rid of it. And I think the Chicago accent, Southern would have been tough, but Chicago is about as far a distance as you can travel. I mean, just look at the vowels, right? Like an English A to a Chicago A.

New Jonas.

A hundred percent.

And what was your first machine?

First one was my grandmother's 79 Buick Skyhawk. It's a terrible car. Rear wheel drive, massive economy, V6 in the front.

Okay. So it's shitty. But when it snowed, you're in the Dukes of Hazzard.

Didn't even have to snow. In Chicago in the summer, so summer after sophomore year, I spent the whole summer waiting for my driver's license to come. And then it turns out the driving school guy just hadn't filled in the paperwork and it didn't show up till the end. So then I've got all this pent up energy. I'm like, I'm going driving.

This is a seminal moment for every young aspiring Steve McQueen.

It was a learning moment. You learn to oversteer. I never forgot.

You learn quick when you throw a car into the ditch.

You do. My parents made me dig it out. They're like, okay, you can get it back out.

You guys don't look dissimilar. Are you realizing this?

Yeah, there's a lot happening right now. This is crazy. I think we're the exact same size as well.

Whoa, Sim.

Our mutual friend was like, you guys are either going to get along or it's going to be terrible.

Pete, you love Peter. I've told you about Peter in the past. He's living down in Austin, but they're moving back.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're coming back.

Wait, so his wife, you work with his wife somehow?

Yeah, we're partners. Athena.

Okay, wonderful. I've not ever met her. Really? Weirdly. And I've known Peter for, I guess, almost 20 years now.

No, you would remember. Athena is amazing.

Okay, great. And she is one of your producers?

Yeah, we worked together since I started working in television. She was a bad robot. And then Athena, myself, and my wife, Lisa- Stole her. Started her own-.

Headhunting her.

It's okay. Dak stole me. People steal from me.

I stole her from my wife. I mean, I jeopardized everything.

We started our own company and we've been working together ever since.

And you're at Amazon. You guys have a deal at Amazon now? 12 years. We do. Okay, great.

Adorable.

And you're one of three. Who's the second?

Chris is our middle brother. I'm the baby. I was the happy accident. The whistle-stop version of it is, my dad's an English guy. He's a madman.

And executive.

Wins a competition, and I think, and I'll get this all wrong, my mom would be so mad at me. I think he winds up at Ogilvy in New York and he hates it because it's the show. Before he passed away, I got him to watch two episodes and he's like, it wasn't like that. But I'm like, well, it wasn't enough like that. It was enough like that that he hated it.

Yeah, an enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine.

I'm going to try Chicago, where there was a healthy ad business, still a healthy ad business there. So, he moved there. Somehow goes to play beach volleyball, which is a thing in Chicago.

Not super English. This is out of his comfort zone, for sure.

The one time he ever went to play beach volleyball, and the one time my mom ever went to play beach volleyball. And they happened to pick the same random day to go play beach volleyball and they met each other.

Okay, great. And she was at the time a flight attendant? You got it. For what? Delta?

United.

United. United. Just flew United.

I still only fly United. Because of loyalty.

This is adorable. Okay, so they meet in Chicago. That was, I would have assumed the other way around.

They met in Chicago and about a month after they got married, he's like, we're going to move back to England.

This was in the sixties.

Late sixties, swing in London. And my mom, who's from Ohio, moves to London and has three kids, and London was very different. You couldn't go shopping on the weekends. She'd go to the supermarket and get a bunch of stuff. The guy at the end is like, have you brought any bags, madam?

Bring your own shopping cart.

Kind of. They still haven't invented a shopping cart.

So it wasn't for her.

Well, no. After my dad passed away, we were joking that she would move right back. And she's spent more of her life now, I think, in the UK than she has here. They argued for 42 happy years about where to live. And periodically my mom would be like, I need a cheeseburger.

Oh, so they didn't divorce?

No. Wait a minute. Happily married the whole way through.

So when you were living in Chicago, dad was still in England. So they would just have these long periods away.

We'd move together because he worked in the ad business. He had his own company. He could dance around.

So when you were 11 and your brother is now 17 or 18, you moved to Chicago, the whole family.

Well, the whole family at this point being the three of us. Chris is at boarding school and I sort of had that weird thing of kind of being a younger brother, but also kind of an only kid, for a while. Because of the boarding school things. Chris started going to boarding school when he was like 10.. My mom had gotten fed up with England.

Well, that the world is putting on you guys, for sure.

So then I guess you probably wouldn't have all of the isms I have from being a younger brother, five years younger. I would describe them as this, an insatiable hurry to prove I'm adult at all times. I wanted to show him I was worthy of hanging out. Some weird complex, that I'm bad at everything. And then I get around my peers and I'm like, oh wait, I am kind of strong.

100%.

I was skateboarding with him and I sucked. But then I got to sixth grade and I'm like, they think I'm the greatest skateboarder. All these weird juxtapositions of my experience in life. Did you have that stuff?

I still have it. Cause with directing, watching what he does, I'm like, well, I don't know if I could do what he does. And then I started working with other directors. I'm like, I know what I can do with that guy.

Yes. Is it trippy to you that he is so English?

Yes.

Cause you're so fucking American. It's hilarious.

On Memento, we worked together. I had written a story.

What was it called?

Memento Mori was the short story. I was still in college. I take some time off college cause my mom had tried to convince me to get a real job. She's like, I got one shot left. Some of this family is going to have a real job.

You got into Georgetown. I did. It's very promising.

Very good school.

Catholic high school. So a bit of a feeder. I had a bit of a boost.

Earmark Cooper was there when you were there, I'm sure.

Bradley Cooper and I rode together on the men's heavyweight crew team. No way!

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness. There's too many things to talk about. Okay, I'm going to try to keep.

this linear. We were the smallest guys on the boat.

You were not GT3 RSs.

Exactly.

The rest of the boat. You guys are Camaros.

Yes. I'll take that.

You guys are doing just fine.

In the space of a Fox boat. Good, in a straight line.

Yes. Entry level speed.

Bradley and I met walking into the cafeteria first week of Georgetown. The coach, Dan Lyons, was recruiting. He'd come from Annapolis and he wanted to build a good team. So he's literally just picking big guys.

You have wide shoulders. Come this way.

Come on down. I'd never rode in a boat in my life. And we wound up becoming friends, and it's been amazing.

How do I not know this either? Yeah. You don't know anything. I really am astounded with what little I know. Okay, so you're at Georgetown and then you decide you're going to bail out of there for a year to get a job?

I started at Georgetown in School of Foreign Service, which at the time it had been Bill Clinton's alma mater. I thought I would work for the State Department. I think I was motivated to some degree. I had all the isms, the younger brother stuff, but I had this thing for my mom, who's lovely and has supported my career the whole way through it. But in the beginning was like, how about you get a real job?

Yeah. You can even do a bad job and stick around forever.

A hundred percent.

You're like 10 years from the second you sign your employment contract.

A hundred percent. So I was like, I'm going to work for the State Department. Maybe I'll work for the CIA. I'll do the Marine Corps. for a couple of years after this.

You're too artistic.

I had long hair. They were like, no. And they let me sit there for a while. I lived in DC for five years. in the end.

Okay. Now we're really similar.

Not my wife's version of failure, which is a B plus, like an actual F. I was like, this isn't working. I'm not doing well. I'm flunking out of classes. I had a scholarship.

What was the scholarship for?

National Merit Scholarship through United.

No wonder you're flying United. Yeah, you got it. They brought you to the dance.

I was fighting. I felt like the English degree was the family curse. And I'm like, I think the one thing I always had, the one thing that always bailed me out of not doing my homework, not reading the book, was I could make it look pretty. I could dress up my bullshit. This is like perfect training for Hollywood.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Director. Dress up my bullshit in pretty language and do okay. And I thought, well, maybe it's the actual writing of the thing. is the thing that I'm actually talented at. What age?

And I just want to relate to you so much. Multiple choice were fucked. You give me any opportunity to answer a question in writing, I've got a shot.

Exactly. I'm going to dress it up with, look over here, silly bullshit. And maybe I got a shot. So I realized I was not heading in the right direction. It wasn't working.

Oh, wonderful. What part?

The Northland. So North of Auckland. Do you know it?

Well, I shot a movie down there, my very first movie. We were based in Wellington, but we traveled for half of the movie through, like Rotorua.

The rotten egg smell.

Yes, yes. From the sulfur coming out of the geothermal pools.

First time I ever hitchhiked anywhere was out of Rotorua.

Great country to do that in.

It was. This is 20 plus years ago. But I worked on, my cousins had a dairy farm North of Auckland, 800 head of dairy cattle, thousand acres, grass fed. We had gone down with my dad and kind of reconnected with him the previous year. And so I reached out and I was like, can I just come live on the farm and help out?

and shoots the cleaner.

Because this feels more humane, or something that they're not scared before they get killed.

Exactly. Sort of, makes a certain amount of sense.

Sure. Although when a guy steps out with a lab coat from behind a van, I'd rather have a guy in a hockey mask with a chainsaw, because some twisted shit's about to happen if a guy in.

a lab coat.

I'm still not a fan of drinking milk. In the farmhouse, they have one of those great classic libraries. Like one where you send off and they send you a different book every month. And every time I pull a book out, the spine would crack. Like no one had ever read any of these things.

There's also that Scottish, Irish culture of pride, way of life, herder, all that shit is in the mix.

It started kicking around in my head. That book is so filled with incredibly indelible images.

I'm so embarrassed. I haven't read Moby Dick. I even wear a shirt. It's one of my favorite.

shirts. I think I tried it in school.

I couldn't do it. I did read Old Man and the Sea.

Ah, I hated Old Man and the Sea.

Yeah, I think you did. Oh my God. Gals don't love Hemingway as much as boys do. Yeah, I wonder if it hurts. He's a pretty gendered author.

A little bit. It feels indulgent, or something. I don't know.

Too masculine.

Yeah, a little bit.

My daughter is a very precocious reader and has been reading ahead a little bit. So at least he gave her a copy of The Great Gatsby. That's a great book. She's 10.. It's a little early, but you reading it in high school, 15, 16..

Oh my God, we both have 10-year-olds? Yeah.

Wow.

It's getting weird. It's a rhythm and spice class.

We might as well set the microphones aside and just walk away.

No, I actually want to walk towards you and fuse. I feel like maybe we could walk at each other and just fuse.

Imagine how powerful we could be.

Do you have any tattoos?

Sadly, no. I was going to get one. during Memento. My sister-in-law and I were going to get one, and then we just kind of chickened out.

Leave them to me. I've got that covered. I actually think we got to be greater than the sum of our parts. I like that. Okay, so you read Moby Dick.

Okay, Moby Dick.

And you become obsessed with revenge.

Yeah. And so I started writing a short story. I wrote the first draft of Memento in an airplane vomit bag because I just got it stuck in my head. I was like, well, what if memory kind of serves as a balm for everything? And time, rather.

People have that?

One of the crazy experiences of that movie was that we'd go to festivals. Eventually, we managed to get it out into the world. And almost every time we went to a festival, I would meet someone who knew someone or had had a motorcycle accident or a good dramatic device. So many different things can cause it.

Oh, yeah, I've had like 19 different script ideas based on starting with amnesia.

Someone gave me a book once, and I was sort of vaguely offended, but it made a lot of sense. They're like, first time writers start with amnesia because it reflects their blank page. Where do I start?

Oh, interesting.

Interesting. They don't have any experience to draw on, i.e. they have no memory. Exactly. I had it for 14 hours from a head injury.

What did it feel like?

Well, I'll try to do the four-second version, because this is your interview and other people have heard it. But I had already fucked up my shoulder. I was waiting to get surgery. So I'm wakeboarding with one arm. I'm in Michigan.

Oh, wow.

Because I live in California, but I'm visiting Michigan. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, what fucking lake? There's no lakes in California. Who are you?

At least a sympathy chuckle while you're hurt.

And it was just dead silent. And then there's a long beep, and I go, have I said that before? And my mom goes, yes, honey, about 20 times. And I was like, and then I just started bawling. Because I'm like, oh, I broke my brain.

But you remember that?

Once my brain unswelled, I think a lot of that short term memory is on the outside. So it's just pressure on there. This surprised me. I was recording all that. So once the brain unswelled, I remembered all these loops.

But how'd you know, Bree?

Because I had been with her for eight years. It kind of washed two years back.

Weird.

It was very weird. We're so fragile. Like what we are is so.

Oh, my God, you're right.

It's absolutely terrifying.

What we are is so fucking fragile.

It's just this tiny little hallucination. And anything can kind of knock it out. And that was my experience. writing on that movie was talking to people that had an experience like yours. And starting to understand that whether something is coming from the limbic system, it could be cancer.

The precarious identity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've got your blanket and you've got your food, and you're sitting there and that's you. And then the wind comes and blows it away. And it's like, wait, what am I again?

I know. We think it's so concrete and foundational. And then you end up in a different group of people as a social animal. And all of a sudden you're not that person. Or you can no longer be that person.

Well, if you're a showrunner director and you're outside of your milieu, no one laughs at your jokes. They're like, maybe I'm not that funny.

We talk about this all the time.

We talk about that all the time.

When we're around like billionaires.

Yeah.

Not Bill. I just want to add, not Bill.

Bill is great.

But we've been around some billionaires, tech founders.

And people obviously around them inflate their egos.

It's not their fault. They have no way of knowing.

You kind of can't help yourself. There's no way.

How are they supposed to correct for this? Oh, it's so corrosive and weird.

I think this is one of the key things that you can do as a brother. Chris is having a good run. You just want someone in your life who remembers you when your shit did stink and can call you on it.

And you need a partner, probably who's not too blown away with you.

100%.

Yeah, very helpful.

Critical.

Okay, so what shocks me about your story is that you give this short story and or pitch it to Christopher. You're six years younger. You're a fucking cowherder. I don't know that my brother would have read the thing. That's to me.

What was interesting is because we had all this time, apart, being in different countries, boarding school, all of it, I remember quite distinctly. at one point, and it was when I was fairly young. It was before high school. He came back and he realized that I was funny. We shared a sense of humor.

You weren't around enough to have annoyed him. That's helpful.

A little bit. I was pretty annoying. You didn't steal his shit, though. I got annoying fast enough.

You caught up.

I watch this with my kids now where I'm, like, you're going to understand later. You're going to think he's great. Yeah. But I think there was just enough distance that he would actually listen to my shit. So I get to the end of my run.

I don't know why I fought this, but let's go. Why did I fight?

You just embrace it. The hell with it. And I write up my notes for the story. And then I've got our dad's old Honda Prelude. Favorite, favorite car.

Yeah, lovely car.

And it's completely destroyed at this point. I've had it in D.C. It gets towed once every two weeks.

But it'll never stop running. Never.

It's still running somewhere. Sadly, it did. And that was my fault. Interference, four cylinder. I never changed the timing.

Timing bell, and it blew all the valves out.

But we got it to California first. So Chris grew up dual national, so America was always an option for him as well. And him and his girlfriend, now wife, Emma, were trying to figure out, we want to do this movie thing.

And he's directed one feature.

Self-financed, tiny feature that I was a grip on. Friends and family coming in. I think he made it for about $5,000.. And Chris and Emma were trying to figure out if they could make a go of it in L.A. She was working as an assistant at a production company that had offices in L.A.

Cars come in handy in L.

Apparently. Quite important.

Jonah, the only advice I give to young actors when they ask me is I say buy a Honda. So that it'll run forever and you don't have to pour money into it.

We still have the same mechanic, Stacy, down on Melrose, Affordable Care. They only work on Hondas.

Oh, wow.

It was not only the car, but the mechanic.

That's a good tip.

Get a Honda, you'll be okay.

You can weather the storm.

Chris still has a Honda. He has this 85 white Honda Civic DX. Sadly not the prelude, because I didn't change the timing belt. And he still drives it.

Oh, that's great.

He's kind of fulfilling my fantasy. I had a 91 DX that I have thought about chasing down and buying. It was so reliable through the lean years, which there were eight of.

You can't help but bond with that car. Yeah. It's the horse that never leaves your side. Especially in L.A., all the PA jobs, all the craziness. I had an Accord that wasn't quite as reliable, but they're amazing.

And we did so much drunk driving together back when I was an addict.

It was such a boring car.

I never got pulled over.

Kept you alive. 100%. Oh, my God.

Okay. So Chris eventually decides to make the leap. And I drive from D.C., pick him up in Chicago. And we drive from Chicago to L.A. and we go the northern way.

Did you stop at Mount Rushmore?

Mount Rushmore, we did. Got a couple pictures there. And then looped down through Salt Lake City and across. It was my first time at Bonneville. I made Chris stop.

All the land speed records exist here.

Everything. Mecca. We got to Minnesota pulling out of Chicago. And, as brothers do, ran out of shit to say. I had a Chris Isaac cassette tape that got stuck.

That's a great song.

I still love it. A few hundred miles, yeah.

Well, sure, yeah.

And I was like, well, I have this idea. He made one movie and he was talking about his ideas for the next movie, which I can't describe, in case he ever wants to get back to them. They were very different. One of them was a comedy.

Unexpected.

Well, this thing about the guy, his public persona, is so kind of this. Reserved. But he's such a goofball. It's odd for me to resolve the public version with the guy.

Of course. I can only imagine my brother was in public and I had to watch and put on his show. And was so like. Erudite.

Yeah, there's a persona, for sure.

You get very mad at this. I used to get fed up with having to answer why my accent was different. I'm like, we're in America. I'm not the unusual sounding one. It's true.

Like when the argument is 50-50, moral high ground, logic, wise, and he's got that accent, it's going to tip. Just a little bit. So you pitch him, I'm assuming.

To this day, I'll read his stuff, he reads mine. And you just get that unvarnished feedback. He knows. If it's like, and I know. And I knew I had him because he got really quiet.

Well, he has such a visual component. I think that's why it's so sticky.

That was the thing. I'm like, this idea came to the wrong brother. Is he going to make a good short story? And I think it is a good short story, but I knew it would make a great movie. So I was like, I got to kind of pass this along.

That's big of you. I mean, it wouldn't be hard.

It worked out okay in the end. He did a good job. He called me at one point. He's like, I figured out, because one of the challenges was, how the hell do you tell that story?

His edition was going backwards, right?

And I was like, that's the dumbest idea I've heard. I wanted to tell the story as a deck of cards. You shuffle it and you just get fragments. But you can't do that with a movie. It's linear.

It just might.

First of all, the movies, I don't need to tell you, it's so mind blowing. There's a handful of movies I don't ever forget seeing and just going like, yeah, that broke all of my previous paradigms. Yeah, yeah. This is so out there. And he's so great in it too.

It's amazing.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

You wrote. Prestige?

I did. That was my first paid gig. Oh, my God. I love that movie. Oh, thank you.

Thank you. I never read the book. Is the book similar?

The book is super cool. You know, it's one of these books, we've tried a couple of them. It's sort of unadaptable. It had made the rounds. Oh, right.

Of course not. If you guys were sitting here, I don't think I would know what you told me.

When I showed up late to work one day with the entire cruise radios and I didn't get fired, people were like, wait a second. We make the movie. Chris cuts the movie. And we're like, it was easy. We showed up.

It turns out great.

And no one wanted to buy it. Everyone was like, this is great. We love this movie. It's terrific.

We have no clue how to market this.

The line was maybe more angry than that.

People are too dumb.

We get it. Bingo. That was it. That was a prevailing rule.

People won't get it.

The audience won't get it. I remember thinking to myself, well, I'm talking to you. You're pretty dumb.

That is the hilarious thing about that note is like. everyone excuses themselves from that. Well, I get it, but I can't imagine.

And I was like, why do you guys consistently underestimate the audience? Our whole career at first was based on the premise that it was a part of the audience that was bored and that wanted more complicated, weirder, challenging stuff.

This thread carries through to fallout, by the way. It's going to be one of the compliments I give you. Truly. You're almost uniquely comfortable letting us ask a bazillion questions and giving us other stuff that is satisfying story-wise, but just really dropping questions all over. I love it as a viewer.

I'm not sure. we set out, but once that became the challenge, once that was like, no, your movie's good, but we're never going to release it because we think the audience is dumb. At that point we'd made one movie. We were fans. We were the audience.

Yeah. They made it for four and a half million dollars and made $40 million. Yeah. It's nuts.

On video. You know, that was, those are the halcyon days of DVD.

Were you a two X your box office?

There was a year in which we'd made a movie and no one released the movie. And I was like, I got to get a job. And then it worked. And then Chris started talking to me about this book that someone had sent him about these magicians. So that was my first paid gig.

Yummy tacos. Oh, they're so nice. With the buttermilk dipping sauce.

You could read the newspaper through the tacos.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like deep fried or something. They're just ridiculous. They're great when you're drunk. That Honda Civic had thousands of those in there.

Oh, God. We might be the same person. Sort of the same nutritional composition. Yeah, yeah.

What a movie, though. I love that movie.

Yeah, so that's 2005.

It was a stress. So we were going to make it in 2003 with Jude Law. I think it was the original cast. And then Warners had hired Chris to reboot the Batman franchise. And the stories that led to that were the most crazy kind of Hollywood stories ever.

You're not going to like that. I bring this up, but I think it's so amusing. When they cast Jude Law, David O. Russell was mad because Jude dropped out of another thing and put Chris in a headlock. Oh, my God.

I owe David a headlock at some point. So I'm going to look out. Don't mess with my brother.

By the way, as the younger brother, you're living to protect your older brother. So much. This is like the dream of all dreams.

It was like a dinner party. There were journalists there. The whole thing was crazy.

One of many, David O. Russell dustups.

If I'd been there, it would have been the end of my career.

Do you like to fight? In general? Well, Dax wants to beat people up who hurt people in his life. Do you have that same instinct?

Complex.

That impulse is there. I grew up in Chicago.

I'm presuming there were a lot of fights in school.

I learned how to talk like a Yankee, and I learned how to defend myself a little bit. But two older brothers, too. You know, you're going to figure these things out.

You and your scrapping all the time. Suffice to say, David would have got probably knocked out that night if Jonah was there.

Good thing you weren't there.

I'm not very good at fighting.

You're probably better than David.

Potentially.

We don't know.

We're not going to start anything.

I love David. I love David.

Brilliant filmmaker. I don't know if he's much of a wrestler.

Exactly. In a history of these hilarious dustups. All this leaked footage of him screaming at actors and them screaming at him. I mean, it's wonderful.

Hollywood's getting so boring. It has gotten a little boring.

Yeah. I kind of love Tarantino punched out Don Simpson or Murphy, one of the Don. You know, all this crazy shit that happened. I love it.

The good old days. The good old days.

So, in that five years, though.

Supposed to be Jude.

We're going to make the prestige. I'm like, here we go. Amazing. And then Warners got nervous about Batman. And they thought, it's not just a movie.

He was the best there was in that role, don't you think? Incredible.

The formative part of our career was his belief. I didn't realize until later I learned more about Warner Brothers. I was 20, something. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. That there was sort of an ancestral philosophy at Warners that you would hire filmmakers and trust them and let them do things.

And keep them forever. Clint Eastwood.

When I finally got a parking spot on the Warners lot, it came out of Eastwood's allotment.

Oh, wow. And it took five years.

I had to write a billion dollar grossing movie before I was like, give the kid a parking spot.

Yeah, yeah.

So, Chris starts doing Batman Begins. And at a certain point in there, Robinoff said, well, you like writing with your brother. Why don't we put him on the picture too, and he can help? I had just moved to Boston with my girlfriend, now wife, who is getting a law degree. And we moved into the apartment and I took a phone call and I was like, I'm going to go away.

So, the first one's great and it makes a great deal of money. Totally resets the tone of all those movies. Do you have writing credit on the first one? I know you do. on the second one.

I was a consultant.

Okay, and the second one you do, and that one hits a billion dollars. And it becomes the biggest superhero movie ever, only to be surpassed by Dark Knight Rising. You have to acknowledge this happens to 20 writers in the history of Hollywood. Like this kind of franchise, with the critical response, all of it, it's very storybooky. I don't know where we go from here.

Television. Yes. I worked on Batman Begins in this kind of slightly arm's length capacity, but it was the one comic book my brother had ever given me as a kid. Batman Year One for my 14th birthday.

It was also on TV when we were kids.

Oh, 100%. And 10 years later, I was on the set working with him. That's nuts. I was like, this is nuts.

You have a good role in The Sim.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Congratulations.

Well, we try to curry favor with AI as much as possible. Okay. If it's the AI running The Sim, then that's why.

You want to be on their good side. 100%. They have a good side.

Most of my career is just trying to make sure that when they take over.

Yeah, you're picked.

Unless they have already taken over, to your point.

Oh, really quick. What is the mechanical process when you guys write something together? Is it basically you write a draft, and he looks at it, and he makes changes, and then it goes back to you? Or do you guys ever sit together?

The period, it felt slow as hell because I was in my 20s. We look back at it now as this incredibly productive period. for us. It was kind of a movie every couple of years. Batman Begins, 2005..

Yeah, yeah.

And then The Dark Knight Rises, and then Interstellar. And it was just kind of like boom, boom, boom, boom. And to me, that felt normal. I was like, oh, this is what we're doing. But it's Chris's incredible ability.

Right.

And it worked really nicely. So we would sit and talk about the story and figure things out. And then he would go away and go shoot the last one, and I would be stuck alone with this thing on the Warner's lot. And I felt like the ghost that haunted Warner Brothers. I'd go and talk for an inappropriate amount of time to the folks at Starbucks.

And I'm a fraud and I'm not good at this.

And I would crack away at it, and it was good. But I missed being on set. Both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. we shot in Chicago. The Dark Knight, Chris was on the fence about making another one.

You did all the hard work. You've established everything. You've got the tone.

You spent an hour doing the origin story, and it's great. But it's like, what can we do with this? And can we take the same characters and shift ever so slightly into a different genre? Can we go from an adventure film to a crime film to a mob movie?

Yeah.

Bring that feeling into it. So I was literally sitting with Chuck Roven and Chris and being like, dude, don't be a chicken ship. Let's do this. And I knew with the script, and he developed the story with David Goyer, with a little bit of input from me. And it was like, first act, pretty detailed.