13: Under Siege 2

Mmm, Hello everyone, and welcome to the Ensagal Podcast. I am your host, Kristash you, and I'm joined as always by my co host from the West Coast. Oh wow, yeah, oh, I thought you were no co host or the West Coast. Yeah, you beat me to it, My god. Sorry.

And also on the West Coast. He's here because he is this film's biggest fan, also close friend, writer, writer of soon to be published moth matt erotica known as Touch My Wings. They're quite furry, No horror, I go. We'll a bit DC Titans, Mothman prophecies. Writer, writer of the script of this film.

One of the co writers the script of this film, my good friend and yours, mister Richard, had him, I can tell you what to write. All you gotta do is write it. That is a quote from Steven Seagal, said directly to me and Matt Reeves in his living room when we met him in pre production for Dark Territory Undersiege. Two ladies and gentlemen, nothing can beat what Richard just said on anyone that we've had of this podcast yet. Richard has met and been in the same room with Steven Seagal, the man that Yeah, the man that we spent the last twelve episodes of our show talking.

Yeah, so if you can't tell, on this episode of the show, we are going to be talking about the sequel to under Siege. Under Siege too Dark Territory. Last time we had a guest on our show was for the original under Siege. That's what we had our good friend mister Verne on. Now we're having Richard on.

Verne is amazing. Yeah, he's a funny guy. Got all of his books up there on the shelf. I love vern verns a trip, so right out of the gate here, Richard, I don't even how do we want to talk about this movie? Well, I want to talk about it by trying to tell some stories I haven't told, because I feel like I've told so many in so many different venues and I don't remember literally on my other show, we've we've had a I interviewed you, you know, sit down, ask you questions about the movie.

Yeah, that was like a year ago. Maybe I don't know when it was, and I don't know exactly what stories I told. But I was trying to go back through my mind, going, well, did I talk about this and I talk about that and there's some early like stuff about Matt and I. So the movie was co written by Matt Reeves, who you may have heard of. He's got a little movie out right now called The Batman.

Oh is that new indie flay? Yeah? Right, yeah, yeah, you're gonna have to I think it might be on TV pretty so so too, I think, isn't it. Yeah, again, it will be. But I can tell you, I mean sort of based on that.

I mean, I'm trying to go back to the earliest, earliest, earliest development of the script and some various things we did. But then I can also talk about the infamous meeting we had with Steven Seagal that Matt and I talked about to this day. On when his movie opened, we were texting to each other and we just started joking. We just started sending each other quotes from Steven Seagal from that meeting because we still joke about it. Because The Baman opened the day The Batman opened.

Okay, so the day The Batman opened, I was in Toronto for production of Titans on HBO. Max were filming season four, so I was up there for that. So I was hanging out in my hotel room. It was that Saturday, like March fourth or something. Matt was at that moment quarantined in a London hotel because he flew to England to do publicity and for the big premiere of The Batman, and he got COVID like the day of the premiere, went to the premiere, but it resulted in him being quarantined in a hotel room for ten days while the movie opened.

So then, you know, but then you know, I mean, he was okay, obviously got over it and then flew home, and you know, we've talked since then, but on that day we were just like texting back and forth and we weren't even talking about Batman. Like. It started with me sending him a picture of the of a big display they had at Eaton Center in Toronto. I'm like, oh my god, look here's here's a big thing for your movie in Toronto. And within like two texts, we were just like just talking about thirty years ago and which is what we typically do, and just texting each other quotes from Steven Seagal and what we consider the horrifying, terrifying day we spent at his house.

So before we get to that day, tell our listeners a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about where this idea comes from, because initially, I know you've talked about this before on my show and other places. This script for Under Siege two, this even Seagal book. It takes place on a train, not on a boat. Same concept as the first movie.

Though somebody that is on X vehicle, Steven Ziagle happens to be there as well. Things get out of hand, Steven Seagle saves the day die Hard on a Blike, So, where did the idea come from? Well, I mean came from die Hard, right, because this was originally also not a Seagal movie. Correct, Well, I mean not in our minds okays nineteen eighty eight hearts. Though in our hearts we just we knew.

Well, listen, I literally I started crying today when I read that Deadline dot com article about Bruce Willis. Oh yeah, he's stepping away from acting now because of aphasia and other health issues. It sounds like he's maybe suffering from some sort of early dementia, early Alzheimer's. He might a stroke, even he's only in his sixties, he's like sixty seven or something. Yeah, I mean it's shocking that he's only a little bit older than me.

But it's but I literally teared up because the picture that his family sort of sent in the tweet or in whatever press release whatever do they send out, was a really early picture of him, and it was just like, Oh, I've known this actor my whole adult life, and now it's over for him, and we're getting you know, we're getting to that. I'm older than you guys. I know, I'm older than Chris, I swim, I'm older than Trevor. I'm what do you forty two? Okay, I'm fifty five.

I'm a place where people people are gonna start to die. Anyway, The fact that Bruce Willis isn't feeling well and it's stepping away from heartbreaking to me because die Hard was a transformational movie for people of my generation, even though it was not acknowledged as such at the time, because everyone felt like, well, you know, I mean, it's it's not a Martin Scores easy film, so we can't really say that it's brilliant. But from Moonlighting, come on, yeah, it's like, oh, you got to play down how much you liked it. But but Matt and I loved it. I mean we we The minute we saw it, it was like, this is superior filmmaking.

I mean it's it's it transit ended every action film of the time, and we didn't know it at the time, but it sort of obviously was now setting it's at a bar. Yeah, we loved it. I mean we loved it. That was an eighty eight and that was the summer we graduated film school at usc And it's funny you mentioned Diehard because this has come up a couple of times on the culture cast, this idea of like perfect movies. And I would contend that Diehard is a perfect movie.

It's perfect, like perfectly cast. Almost every bit of storytelling is pitch perfect, all the performances are great. It's a perfect movie. It is a no frame of that film is wasted. So it's one of those films like it's what I call a no bathroom break film because you don't want to miss a damn thing in that film.

It is just every scene, every frame is just something, just a wonder to behold, and it's just terrific because you know, and it's kind of funny because it was underestimated, because Bruce Willis was underestimated because at the time action starts with were like Stallone Schwarzenegger. I think Van Dan was just about starting up Bruce Wolves was kind of just like this, this kind of regular Joe smartass on Moonlighting, you know who was just playing this semi romantic kind of if will they want the thing? And they weren't thinking a serious action to start with. This guy, John McTiernan took a chance on him, and it, you know, turned into this amazing five movie franchise that's you know, still talked about to this day.

I mean, it's definitive film of the genre to some people. Absolutely, and it was. It was during a time when there was a very stark division between movie stars and TV stars, and for a TV star to suddenly be in a movie, it was kind of like, at already it's down a notch. So the fact that this movie was so brilliant and then of course led to a bunch of terrible movies in it. Are you talking about sequels or movies that ripped Diehard off?

Why not? Both? Actually to be fair well well, but you know what it happens with every movie, I mean with Silence. Silence of the Lambs then led to a bunch of really crappy serial killing movies, but it also led to seven. Okay, okay, but you know what I mean, like good with the bad though, right then this led to Batman, The Batman seven kind of yeah, yeah, I mean it kind of did.

And then I would argue that the sixth sense led to a lot of crappy movies, some of them, by end my channel in were all predicated on a late arriving twist that that that I would say, almost universally, there's only one movie that I think did it, and I don't think it was trying to copy the sixth sense, but had a very very late revelation that made you, Okay, let me, here's what I'm trying to say. In the sixth sense, you enjoyed the movie while it was playing, and you didn't need the twist to make the movie work. At no point doing the movie were you sitting back going, wait a second, there's something missing here. They're holding some cards back. They weren't.

And that's what's brilliant about it. That twist was not at it until like a late, late, late draft. The movie worked okay, but then it led to a bunch of other movies where you just sat the whole time going Okay, well, clearly this ain't the whole story. So now I'm just kind of looking at my watch and waiting for them to play the card, and with every passing minute you're thinking, well, this better be a pretty fucking good card. The only movie that did it, I think is The Others with Nicole Kidman.

Interesting, I mean, but those all things are those are also inspired by and draw from like easy comics, because those easy comics did the same thing. They told that story, and then they have the twist at the end, the little inversion at the end to change the story, and that's I mean. Shamalan mentioned this only because Cam has no surprise to me that Shamalan wanted to and was in talks too and was going to at one point reboot Tales from the Crypt. They couldn't get rights to the Crypt Keeper. But when I heard it was Shamalan, I was like, this makes perfect sense.

His entire career has been drawing from that well of utilizing the medium and then having a twist that changes the interpretation or in a lot of cases Tales from the Crypt it does very little, which is almost later Shamalan films traffic and twist that do nothing for the narrative at all. Well, I think I think he kind of got trapped into it because I think he felt like expectation, he felt like ever since the Sixth Sense was predicated, well, ever since the Sixth Sense is known for that twist that every film he makes has to have a twist to to play kate the audience, and you know, I feel like, kind of I feel I feel he felt kind of trapped in that whole thing because I mean he had the heat, not the happening.

Well, he did have the happening, but the one after that, Unbreakable had that, you know, the twist where you know, apparently Gruce Willis and Sam L. Jackson our hero and villain, and that kind of worked, I thought, kind of worked. The Shamalan redid that twist one more time from the Sixth Sense was Split, that ending of Split where it turns out that it's actually like in that universe and speaking of Bruce Willis, he's like that for me was like, Okay, you kind of changed, you kind of changed the makeup of this movie because now what's been going on makes sense because we're in this universe where his powers aren't that weird because other people also have powers because Bruce Willis's character is there in this grounded superhero universe.

Then they ruined it with the last movie. But you know, well, I mean as you do, and back to the others, I agree with you that twist. If I hadn't known about the twist, I probably would have been more shocked and more impressed. Unfortunately, that twist has ruined for me by the most random of places, a mad TV skit, Because there's a skit where Michael McDonald plays this really annoying box office agent oddly enough, and this woman's trying to go see a film and he's like down talking every film and the only film he'll recommend to her is Shrek. And so she gets tired of hearing about all these films.

She goes, Okay, I'll just what about the others, you know, She'll go see the others fine, and he, you know, and being a dick, he tells her, Oh, and the lady and her kids are dead and it's all been they're all in purgatory or whatever, good night, And people just get pissed him and start throwing shown like and then we was still in theaters when that skit came out. So I'm that sort and they're like, motherfucker. I still watched the others because it was still a film I wanted to watch. And it's a brilliant, atmospheric, moody, you know film. And you know the fact that they go not just that they're dead, they're in purgatory.

That's the whole thing. That was a more interesting That's a part. That's a really interesting part of the twist, because you know, when it comes to like twists about people being dead the whole time, it's really they rarely talk about, oh, they're in heaven or they're in heal. They don't rarely talk about purgatory because that's more of a Catholic ideology. But how explicit was the purgatory concept.

I don't. I can't remember. Well, I mean, from what I remember, it's been a wastin I saw the film. From what I remember, Nicole Kidman plays that this very deeply religious other of these children. Um, I think she I think at times in the film she tells them or warns them about purgatory.

Oh wow, okay, I think so, don't quote. She could be wrong. I could be wrong. But yeah, I think, you know, because she's played a very protective religious mother, you know, wanting your kids to be good, you know, Catholic, you know children, and yeah, and that when that came about. Yeah, I'm now I want to see it again and then again, Richard, I could be wrong.

Don't quote me. Well, don't at me. Yes, yeah, I'm gonna have me. I don't care about at you on Twitter. He's wrong.

You could add me on Twitter. I don't. Okay. So but if you go back to you know, the summer of nineteen eighty and nine, I think, okay, which is when Matt and I are like, god, we gotta we're out of college. We got nothing.

You know. We went to USC Film School. Thought that was going to do something for us. It didn't, you know. Spoiler alert.

Boy, that's just makes makes you feel good, doesn't it. Yeah. I say the same thing about my degree. Twenty five years later. All film stings out there don't lose hope, right.

I mean it's funny because people are like, well, do you need to go to film school? And I'm like, well, you don't need to go to film school, but if you do, you might meet Matt Reeves and then become best friends with him, and then and then partner with him on your films, which is like partnering with the smartest person in science to be your lab partner. And then suddenly your game comes up and uh. And also, you know, being Matt Reeves, you just you just laugh harder than you've ever laughed in your life. So and you also have a very you know, deep emotional you know kind of you know, he's like me, he's a neurotic guy.

I mean, we can sit around and just go, oh my god, I've never been more miserable than I am right now. Oh no, this is hell. We're in hell. This is the worst thing ever. Like we would that became the funniest thing in the world, was to sit at the little, you know, Cafe eighty four at USC and just go, we're dead.

Are the project we're working on is terrible. We've got nothing, We're going to fail film school. And then we started making jokes about how about how the cafeteria workers because we would always be the last people as they're like turning out the lights in this place, and we're like, it's like later when they make the documentary after we've killed ourselves. What it's like. They'll talk to the cafeteria workers, going.

I remember I saw them that night. They were sitting there and they were laughing, but they heard the world. They must have known even then, they must have known. I mean, we were the most miserable people. It was unconscionable how miserable we were.

And I'll talk about our misery more as the interview continues, but let me continue. It was nineteen eighty nine, it's the summer, and Matt's like, we should just write a movie. We've got to write a movie and try to sell a movie. We've got to do something. And I'm like, please, because I've been trying to write movies on my own, and let me tell you, it ain't working out.

So we do what you do when it's nineteen eighty nine and you want to write a movie. We went to Blockbuster and we're wandering through Blockbuster going, oh, my god, King of Comedy, this was the greatest movie of all time. And then we just talked about it. It's like, let's just rent this and watch this just for comfort. No, no, no, we gotta figure out, we gotta fare all.

We're gonna write looking in this movie and that movie and oh my god, these great Martin scoresazy movies and these great you know, the Star Wars movies and all these things. Die Hard. Oh my god, die Hard. Let's watch die Hard. And then and then it was like, what if we wrote a die Hard movie and it's nineteen eighty nine, No other die Hard ripoffs have come out yet.

We didn't nineteen years old. We're like, well, maybe there won't be any more die Hard ripoffs. Maybe you know, this is it. I'm sorry, weren't nineteen we were like twenty two, and it's like, it's like, well, let's watch Diehards. So we rented the vhs, went back to his mom's house in Santa Monica, put on the VHS and watched it, and when it was over, we're like, this is the great.

We could never ever do this movie. It's too brilliant. And then we thought, well, what if it was not in a building, Like, what's another place where all these sorts of events could happen? And then we thought, you know what a train, it's die Hard at one hundred miles an hour. Let's do that.

Let's just write that, and we're like, okay, We put vhs back in the VCR and we started watching it again, only this time we paused it at every scene, and he got out a yellow legal notepad and a pen and just started writing down everything that happened. It's like, okay, first scene, you know, airplane meets guy, fists with your toes, scene too, you know, meets our gyle, you know, whatever the beats were in Die Hard, we just wrote them all down and then and then sort of divided it up based on what we knew of screenplay structure. Okay, this is probably the end of aact one, here's the end of AAC two. This is act three. But we had pages and pages and pages where we had broken down the structure of Diehard scene first scene.

We basically now had an outline, and now, using that, we were like, well, now that we sort of know the structure of this kind of movie, let's figure out what our character is and how that's going to work. But let's try to but let's really stick to this structure. And it sounds very cynical, but it wasn't. It was because we didn't know what we were doing, and we were doing it out of love, I will tell you that. And we were just like for all we know this will be die Hard too.

In fact, that would be the greatest thing in the world. Let's write a movie that someone looks at and says, I think we have found our die Hard too. And that was our dream, of course. So that's how we did it. That's how it started.

So Richard, I have to have to mention this now that I've heard you tell this story a couple of times, this singular moment in your life at that Blockbuster is the one moment in your life that's unchangeable. It's like that fixed moment in time because there's like the if you had rented anything else, right, yeah, right, yeah, not to be fatalistic, but like if you had rented anything else, who knows. Well, here's the joke. You know, Matt is, you know, an artist, and if you've seen any movies that he's done, you know it's pretty clear which you should, You totally should. And you know he's got a deep, deep, deep knowledge film and love for film, but obviously has a deep, deep love and understanding of genre and and we both do.

And that's what makes things like, you know, an action movie, like a really well made action movie, a really well made thriller, suspense movie, a really well made horror movie. Those things resonate not because of their genre, but because they are definitive of their genre. I wouldn't say that Matt loves horror movies, but the handful of great ones, Exorcist, the Shining have become part of his visual language and narrative storytelling language, and then the same thing in various genres. And you can obviously see that in The Batman. But yeah, we were like we had no shame, and at USC everyone just said, you know, some creative executive would come down, you know, from you know, United Artists Films or something, whoa yeah, yeah, and they'd be like, you know, you know, and we you know, we we go home with a pilot scripts every weekend, and all we're looking for is a new voice.

And you know what, and we're not looking for the latest, you know, Star Wars rip off. You know that one gets put down, you know, but we just want a new, new, original voice. And everyone at USC is telling us to write about that summer with Grandpa at the you know, the farm in Vermont, and Matt and I are like, Matt grew up in Santa Monica. I grew up in you know, East LA in Monterey Park. All we did was watch TV and movies.

We're like, what do we have? We have nothing in our lives except we're idiots who sat in front of a TV our entire lives. We have nothing to share, So we can't write that movie. So let's write die Hard plant any And let me point out that everyone who went to USC film school at that time, for two of the ones that actually found a career, really yeah. Always, I've always wanted to ask you.

I've always wanted to ask you and never have, like because it's I feel like that's a little too person of a question. Jim Blake, did anybody else you know ever have the success that you and Matt have had? Not, I would not say, in our group of classmates in our years. And then he went on to grad school in the early nineties and I did not because he wanted to make a movie. So he's like, you know, I think I need to get personal grad school right, because he wanted to direct.

That was always his goal. His goal was not run just like just like Alex Winter did the same thing. He went to grad school at NYU made movies. I want to make a movie. So he went.

He made a movie, an amazing movie his and we worked on at the summer of ninety one, we worked on his grad school project, which was great. Matt was one of those guys in the very first week of film school, you know, they tell you, Okay, go out and make a movie and bring it back into class next week. And it's all based on the word whatever. And everyone else goes out and Len's cap is still on and the cameras pointed backwards and there's no focus and you can't see anything. And and week after week after week, Matt brought in these little gems, these these perfectly crafted, wonderfully edited friend of ours from the music school would write an original score.

He was making movies, and all of us are just like, okay, we should just jump off a building, right, or jump next to him, or jump next to him right exactly. Yeah. I was like, okay, maybe I can learn something here, right, And I will tell you that in the writing of this script, I learned more from Matt because Matt was writing from with a director's eye. When I wrote, I was just like, oh, this, this and this and this and this, and He's like, but what do you actually see on the screen minute to minute to minute, and I'm like, oh fuck, I've got to do that. But the you know, three four or five years we spent writing this movie, that's what I learned, and that's what I took forward with me, and I had a huge impact.

Well, you know, I do not have nearly as prolific a writing career as you do. But it is funny as someone who likes to write like I do and read, it's funny that you say that, because again, people have a hard time really understanding that when you look at a script versus a book, it doesn't cost Like in comic books, it doesn't cost anything to put Spider Man and Iron Man on the same page together. It costs nothing, zero. It costs them nothing additional other than someone has to draw those characters or write that character's name down on the pay. But like you said, there needs to be this counterbalance of like, if you don't keep in mind that there is an actual budget attached to this and actual expectations and reality, otherwise you will just get completely turned upside down.

Well, and not only that, but I always felt like, well, my job as a screenwriter is to do fifty percent. You know, I'm going to write this story, but the director is going to come and decide how this is shot. What I learned from Matt, which was really important, was no, you've got to do everything. You've got to write off this had the script has to be the movie. You've got to know.

And that doesn't mean you know close up. You know close up. You don't have to write in such a way that you're directing the eads imagination and you're also providing an emotional experience. And that's something that you know. When I teach classes at UCLA, I try to impart, which is like, if you're writing a comedy, I need to be laughing as I'm reading your script.

You can't just say, well, it is a comedy and you know Judd Apatol will make it funny. No, if it's a thriller, I've got to be scared and turning pages and like, oh my god, I gotta put the script down. Well, you had all the time with books and other things and scripts. When people talk about the scripts that they've worked on, their favorite scripts, it's like I couldn't put it down. I read it in one night, and it's like it has the script has to be the movie, right yea.

And for me that means emotionally it has to be the movie, but for Matt it literally is the movie. I was lucky enough to read drafts of the Planet of the Apes movies that he directed, Let Me In Remake and The Batman, and I what I realized, you know, years ago, was if I read one of his scripts, I've seen the movie, right, sure, there's two weeks ago when I saw The Batman, I'm like, yeah, up, Now, that's exactly exactly to the word, to the beat. Every single thing that you're seeing on screen was written in the script in a way that you experienced it the way you do in the movie, not just in a dry listing of shots. Emotionally, you're experiencing it in exactly the same way. And that is something that he just instinctually knew.

And I don't think he considered himself a writer. I think he does now, but then he didn't. But he knew if I'm writing, I gotta know what I'm seeing. And that was a lesson to me because I am not a visual guy. Well, I mean, it really does say something that even the fact that you read the script first before you even saw the movie.

The fact that you knew what beats were coming in the film, the film was still you know, successful and still well made. It's you know, that's if if you can put the same passion in the script that you can put it on the screen, that says a lot about you as a filmmaker, because you know, I mean, there's probably been a bunch of scripts that were really good, but when they put them on screen something fell apart. Oh oh god, that's a that's yeah, sure, that's like half of every failure in Hollywood is good script, bad movie. Yeah. So, like I'm saying, it's saying something that a script as written shows up just as good when it's finally produced and it you know, it still gives you that emotion what makes me Again, Matt and I talked about this all the time.

It's like, if we went back to that to sort of our ultimate draft of Dark Territory, which at the time I guess it was called me it was called Dark Territory, might we might have changed it to end of the line for a particular reason. That's so good though, come on, end of the line almost don's like a one liner. Cigal would say, in the film, Yeah, end of the line. And it's not as I wouldn't be as good as Harrison Ford saying no ticket, no ticket, get off my airplane. Yeah, that's a good one too, you know, Richard, before you kind of expounded what you're gonna expound, and I did want to ask because it kind of ties into it, what you know, and not from the shooting script because that's a completely different story obviously, But when you and Matt were working on the script initially, what were some original ideas that you guys had kind of kicked around hot and like different places you thought about going before you initially decided one hundred mile an hour train speeding can't stop die Hard?

Like, what was kind of where else did it go versus where it ends up? You know, with the you know, shooting script aside, Well, conceptually, die Hard on train was the first thing we came up with, and we just thought, well, it's just so perfect, we've got to do it. The immediate problem we ran into was it makes no sense. You said it, not me. It's it's fucking nineteen eighty nine.

No one rides on trains for any reason. Why would weirdos ride on train? Yes, I know, Trevor, Trevor, I was That's what I wanted. Trevor go what No, honest to God, don't like, if we're talking twenty twenty two, I'm more apt to get on a fucking train than an airplane. Well yeah, but I mean you don't.

It's not a thing people are. It's not like everyone talked to us like, oh yeah, no, I've been on a train a million times. But if you have a train station in your city, then you might have stand up comics. Don't don't stand up. They're going, you know, what is it with train bathrooms?

Yeah? Yeah, it's not a shared experience. So we're like, well, well, okay, so some people want to steal something it's on the train. Is it like a diamond. It's like, well then why not just steal it before it's on the train.

And then we're like and if it's a diamond, who cares? Like No, one's like that's not The stakes are pretty low and they don't really need are they going to take people hostage? Like what what could it possibly be? And then we're like, well, maybe someone has something really important. And that's where we went through things.

We're like, okay, For a while, it was a gas additive, which sounds stupid, but we were re searching stuff and at the time fell like for a fuel. Literally it was like what if, what if? What if you know, like Dow Chemical devises something that makes gasoline like twenty times or fifty times more efficient. Sure, so that right, we could use that now actually, but that's yeah, the gas companies would never want anyone to have it because then they would have to buy a less gas, right, And then we're like and they're like, oh, so that's like that could be worth like it's the electric car thing. Yeah, my god.

It lead to a Steven Seagal speech at the end of the film, all right though, shit, oh fire, that's that's like that's fired down below too. It is Native American fringe. Yeah, when will we learn to live in peace? Coal? It's bad for you and the environment.

No shit, Stephen. So then it was going to be that, and then it was going to be either wanted or they want to squash it. Then then for a while it was a cancer treatment, a cancer cure very specific like this is a this is it's all about sort of a schematic for like a blood test that just identifies where cancer is. And now and again it's like the terrorists are stealing it on behalf of the pharmaceutical company, right deep six it. Then we're like, well, but then couldn't they just then they just deep six it.

So there was all It took us a long time and a lot of research to sort of go, okay, it has to be a train so that it can be so that they can be undetectable. It's like we're going to be on the move and it's it's all going to happen right now. There's going to be people on the train who have a thing that is you know, that is worth money, that is that is a you know, a defense Department of Defense thing. They're going to get on the train and then then they're going to stay on the train and actually conduct a worldwide auction from the train, and then they're going to crash the train into another train. I kill everyone, kill all the witnesses.

They'll get off the train in a helicopter at the very last minute, and and no one will ever be the wiser. And it's like, great, this this is going to be we can maybe barely make this work. And then a version of that is what you see in Underseage two. Very very cool. So why not, so, Richard, I have to ask why not a boat?

Well, because it had already been done. Oh no, I haven't been done. No, it happens. I was like, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry, like because because what you just said, Like I like listening to you, I can hear you and Matt in a room together twenty thirty years ago, just going but no, but then they would just take it before, they would just take it before. I can like hear you guys going through it.

And it's like, cinematically, a train is a million times better, right exactly. It's like you you set yourselves up for like immense amounts of explanationary work right at step one, because it's like, how do we make the train a believable thing? Well, I think trains are. I think trains are just a more exciting form of transportation. When you're trying to keep something hidden from the military, you know what better than something that goes like hundreds of miles an hour and end up.

And the train became a metaphor for the movie and in our draft the train never stop and our and that was our rule, our rules. Once we're on the train. The train never stops, so you're on it. It's almost like it's more like speed in a way. It's like you're on it and you can't get off it.

Okay, I mean you're fuck you know, it's not stopping. One of the first things that our thing. One of the first things they do is they go into the engine car. They kill the guy and they rig up the thing, and it's like, okay, we are now going at top speed and you can't jump off. You can crawl outside.

It can be terrifying. You can have a fight on top of the train. You can duck for the tunnel. But but the train doesn't stop. Now in the movie they stop the train.

Bad idea, and then they started up again whatever. But our victim was the train doesn't stop until it explodes head on with another train. Richard, What you didn't know is that when you were having that conversation, Yost was behind you, listening and writing all this ship down and said, m what about a bus? And then well, I mean, I think Speed. Look, I actually think under Siege is an original.

The first one is a fun, entertaining movie. I think Speed is more fun and more entertaining for a million reasons, not just the bus. Yeah, but yeah, okay, so Speed has something that neither under Siege movie has. Keyan New's not on the bus. He has to get on the bus, which presents a whole which presents a whole exciting scenario that neither under Siege movie has, not even die Hard has it.

And that's like its own weird, like exciting thing because it's like, this fucking thing's not stopping. You gotta get on it. And it's this whole set piece that's like twenty minutes of the fucking movie. And it's like, there's twenty minutes right there. You don't even have to worry about.

It's it's a set piece on its own. Thing about I think about see under Siege and Speed. Speed is more kinetic. Speed is more kind of boom boom boom boom and never stop. It never stops under Siege, you know, I mean, it is a amazingly well made action film.

It may not be like Fast Furious, you know, kind of everything happening all at one time. It's very kind of methodically, kind of directed by what's his name again? I forget oh Andrew Davies and Andrew Davis we all know became who all we all know is a terrific director, can really do action. And he did The Fugitive, which you know, in all accounts it's a movie with not that much you know, frenetic action, but he makes it work and he makes it exciting because he knows how to direct it. And I think under Siege works in that regard because he really knows how to tell the story through the through the camera.

Well, what what Matt and I loved about die Hard was that it did a lot of what does not get done a lot in this particular way. It's got a lot of planting and payoff. Yeah. And also in rewatching die Hard recently, they're still rolling out story in the last ten minutes of the movie. Okay, you're still learning crucial information that adds to your enjoyment, whereas many die Hard esque movies they set everything up in act one and then the rest of the movie is just sort of like, well, Okay, now we know everything we need to know, and now we're just watching a guy kill a bunch of other guys.

Right, But Diehard, you're still you don't know about the whole Bearer bonds thing really until the last eight minutes of the movie. Yeah, that's when he explains his whole plan and Bonnie Badelia says, you're nothing but a common thief, and he says, I'm you know, and I'm an excellent thief. You know, I'm sorry. He says, who are you? That's my favorite part of the movies.

Alan Rickman's American acts, American accent, Yeah are you? You're one of them? Yeah? I prefer that Alan Recommend who says, mister Takaga will not to bear joining. I just love the way Alan Rickman, just the way he says that lie would not be drawn at all.

The rest of you and just oh Man a count of three, there will not be a four. So, Richard, I am curious about something else from the the initial pre you know script that before it ends up going into where it goes with the shooting script, which is its own thing best I can tell, right, because it ends up getting really changed a lot after you guys sold it, right, well, it changed, It never changed really structurally, right with why Matt and I retained soul credit sure because it was rewritten by Brian Helgland and then it was another rewrite by Jonathan Lemkin, and then yet a third rewrite by a writer whose name escapes me at the moment. And it wasn't Josh Wheden, is what you're saying, Josh Weason script doctor of the early nineties.

Yeah, yeah, No, it was never Josh Whedon, that's for sure. And it was sort of like our movie was here, and then Brian Hellegland like, well, let's make it this way. Brian Helligland changed it a lot, making it much worse, but making it more of a Steven Seagal movie, which was never our intention. Right when I say about what I mean is there's a fundamental difference between a movie about a person on a reluctant, unprepared hero who, against all odds, saves people from twelve armed terrorists and a movie about twelve terrorists who picked the wrong trained Uh yeah, yeah, man, I think you bring that up. That really does it?

Really? It's like, yeah, Seagal has never played the everyman, never played the everyman with like people underestimate because he's not well well, well, well hold on, technically, under Siege one is that movie, because under Siege one is a complete rip off of die Hard. Yeah, and it's oh, I'm just the cook. I'm just a cook. And of course Steven Seagal doesn't have doesn't have the ability to ever play the Jeopardy.

Bruce will Us plays the Jeopardy. He has skills, he can fight, he can shoot, but he's terrified, right yeah, and and and losing the entire time. There's a point where he's got him on the run, you know, he is maybe one second and then it drops back, which we had to know in our bones as we wrote, We're like, okay, but we gotta we gotta do this so that he's incrementally holding his own big things out but never running the board. Yeah, he's will always, you know, one against a million. And that's something that Harrison Ford can do weirdly does it in The Fugitive.

Yeah, and other actors can do it. But Schwarzenegger in Indiana Jones too, in Indiana perfect, perfect, Indiana Jones is like the perfect one against a million character. Yeah. Well, there's nothing you can have, doctor Jones that cannot be taken away from you fight me. Yeah, that's I mean, like you said, I mean, that's the thing about a sense, you know what, go one step further That's the thing about literally every single Steven Seagal movie is he is is immediately when he walks into the room.

He's the best at whatever it is, and there is no one that could do anything to harm him. We talked about this on almost every episode of our show. Steven Seagal never gets beaten for the most part, aside from one movie China Salesman. Oh yeah. But other than that, Steven Seagald beats whoever the antagonist of the movie is immediately.

There's no threat to them, there's no threat to him. It's that's It's like that thing from Watchman where it's like you're not I'm not looked in here with you. Yeah, you're locked in here with me. It's that same shit, right. We talked about this like you and I.

Like I said, we mentioned this lot. He never takes a hit. You never see him bleed, you ever see a scratch on him. His hair is always perfect. He never takes a hit.

And I think I know who's who was who thought about who whose idea that was? And the only time we've ever seen him killed, I mean, other than like executive decision was the what was the name of that film? We just watched it was in general Commander he dies in a perfect weapon. He died perfect weapon. Even when he dies in imperfect weapon, it turns out note that was his twin.

Yeah, and he still lives in the end to sequelvate us that will never happen. Well, they're almost, they're almost subgenres. It's its own thing in the genre. And and and believe me these are there's still great movie like Bruce Lee movie or you know, it's like Shorts and Air Bruce Chan, though Jackie Chan is more of the Harrison Ford Bruce willis right. Yeah, and his action is more kind of I wouldn't say lighthearted, but he is.

It is totally. It's he likes to play for the spot for the last and the fall. Yeah, you never feel like he's you never feel like there's any like he's in any like mortal danger. You don't think he would die. And that's again, Hey, James Bond movies, the reason James Bond villains have to be so big is to put James Bond in at least a minute or two of Jeopardy something throughout the movie.

But go into the movie waiting for James Bond to prevail, right, and that's part of the joy. Same thing with Schwarzenegger, same thing with Segal. So it's just a different kind of movie, right, it's its own, it's its own. Well. With Seagal, I never feel that he's indeed in right right, But I don't with Schwarzenegger either.

But the problem is Segal in a lot of these later movies there his charisma is never it's never always there. He has it from time to time. You can see it. It is there. I'm not going to discount it completely, but it's not like Schwarzenegger, who's just effortlessly charmed with charm in this film.

In under Stage two, you can tell he has a bit of charisma in this one, a little bit kind of you know, he has a sense of you know, it's not that much. It's the charisma of Look, it's like he is who he is. Yeah, Clint Eastwood is who he is. Dirty Harry isn't gonna lose. Dirty Harry is there to make you feel.

There's a character right now in America, in fiction and now on television that is the embodiment of I just want to watch this guy win and kick ass while he's Jack Reacher. Absolutely, you nailed it. And that's what that and that's the joy of the character. I've got all the books right there. I love him.

I'm enjoying the TV show. I'll have to tell my mom Richard, she loves those fucking yeah. I mean, never read a single one, but oh you'll read. Oh you're gonna read books. Read Killing Floor, read Killing Floor.

Yeah, yeah, and read them. They're fun. But that's what it is. It's like, you know, Jack Reacher's gonna win. It's gonna be tough, and he does bleed and he does take his punches, but you know he's going to end up on top and and and that's the agreement between writer and audience or performer and audience.

Now, yes, we know that Bruce Willis is not going to die in die Hard, but we also know that the way the story is told, we are being asked to believe that he is a vulnerable human being, and so we understand the story in those terms and we enjoy it for those values. And that's that's the song we were plant well. And that's why the later Diehard comes four and five especially weren't as successful audience wise, is because they turned Bruce Willis into a superhuman right, He's like he's jumping cars into hell. He's John McClean. He's, well, he's playing John McClean on steroids.

But no, no, But John mcclein meant nothing in the first movie to Be. John McClean meant jack shit in Diehard. To Be. John McClean only meant anything in two, three, four and five because at that point he's the guy who didn't stop Natomy Plaza. But you know, in two and three, I still felt the vulnerability of John McLean.

In four and five, he just he just kind of became kind of a just he became what they were trying to avoid him, becoming hardy him himself. Basically. I mean, I still enjoyed four. Sometimes there's a bit of it. I still enjoyed.

There were stuff to enjoy in it, But like after three, the series just didn't know what to do with him and didn't know how to make the everyman vulnerability thing work for a fourth or fifth time, I would I would, I would cut them. The lack of saying that it literally almost mathematically becomes diminishing returns. You can't you can't continually ask an audience to suspend their disbelief of an everyman being caught up in over the top situations. An audience can't can't do it, But what they can do is accept a more primitive hero tale like Hercules, where it's understood we're not asking for any sort of twentieth century you know, depth of character. We're just looking for stereotypes and those work, and and and in the crime genre in books and in movies, yeah, it's typically the latter.

It's usually not John McLean, it's usually James bond Well and and you know, as you know, you mentioned the you know books. It's funny like in books like say, uh, you know something I've been reading, like cad Veil. He's a Benedictine monk who solves mysteries, but these mysteries keep happening where he is. But in books, but in books, I just kind of don't care. But in the movies with Diehard, it's like, now it's unbelievable because it's a scope thing too, Like all of a sudden, he's he's wrapped up in one of these things again, and it's this big thing with multiple moving parts and all these things.

It's like, why is he here again? Well, just have goddamn happenstance. Well, even in Diehard Too, he says it. He goes, how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice? That's hanging a lantern on it, That's hanging a fucking lantern on it.

He realizes the situation he's in. He's a character who knows he's in a movie. For one line in ane And also it goes back to this this joke people make about murder. She wrote, it's like every time there's a murder, she happens to be in the place where it's happening. That's a literary thing where Jessica Fletcher happens to be in that place, right, I mean well, And the thing is is that is that you also have to take into account that the character themselves, they are aware of their own personal history.

That's what leads to a line that you quoted, how can the same thing happened to a guy twice? But it doesn't. John McClean inserts himself into die Hard two. Right, die Hard one, he's given no choice. Die Hard three is sort of a hybrid, and after that it's whacktown and the stakes have been raised.

Diehard three is my favorite after the first one. That's yeah, yeah, because it kind of isn't a weird way it becomes goofy, but also he feels like he's sort of jumped into it with no choice. It's sort of I've got to play this madman's game. If I'm going to say, because it is about him, it's about him. It's about him because Simon Gruber played, i mean played wonderfully by the way, by Jeremy Irons.

That's another thing that made Diehard three work is that Jeremy Irons was a terrific villain. So Bill Sadler though, yeah, I mean you know what I mean with that, with that, with that naked ass there at the beginning of a move, So I mean, yeah, Jeremy Irons, that's one of the greatest introductions to a villain in fucking film history. I'm sorry. Just him doing his fucking tai chi in front of the screen is just it's great. And none of thing that Jeremy Irons does that Hans Grouper did is make them think it's about one thing, but it turns out it's about another thing.

Because at first John thinks it's about revenge for killing his brother Hans, but in fact, no, it's about them knocking over the Federal Reserve taking all the gold and common crook, the common crook, And I just you know, that's why I think the film worked a lot. Plus he had Samuel Jackson, which is the only time, well not the only time he's had a psychick. He had justin long and knee fourth one. But yeah, but I mean Samuel Jackson, they worked off each other better than his other sidekicks. I think, yeah, these these are tricky movies.

And you know, looking back at it, well it was there was a lot. There was things going on, obviously in our lives and in you know, the lives of everyone in the world at that time. It was eighty nine and then ninety. So we started, we started writing the outline for the movie in nineteen eighty nine and then and then we stopped and didn't take it up again until the summer of nineteen ninety. And then when we did, it was like, we got to get this done.

We got to do this because we're running out of time and sequels are getting made, and we got to get this done. So it was really the summer of nineteen ninety into the fall of nineteen ninety that we outlined and then wrote the movie Okay. And the way we did it was I was living in Pasadena at the time and he was living at his mom's house in Santa Monica, and so we were on a four day a week schedule Monday through Thursday, because I was living with my girlfriend who I later married. She was my first wife now since divorced. But it was like, Okay, Monday through Thursday, we can do this.

And I was working another job because I was living on my own. He was living in his mom's house, so money wasn't quite like earning money wasn't as quite the issue for him as it was for me at the time. So I would work during the day at Tony Roma's or at al Manser Court, which was a golf course banquet place in Alhambra, and I was like working lunches, and then at five in the afternoon, I would drive out to Santa Monica, get to his house, get subway or something for dinner, and then the goal was five pages on the script. The goal was five pages a night because we figured, okay, work four days a week, that's twenty pages, so we'll work for six to eight weeks and we'll get a script. So but first we wrote a very very very detailed outline where every story problem was solved, every scene was created beginning middle end.

We had a whole map set out for ourselves, and then we wrote the script. So that was summer of ninety to fall of ninety and then in January of ninety one, our lawyer Carl Austin, who was a guy who was our age. He was like, you know, early mid twenties and just starting at an entertainment law firm, and Matt knew him from friend of a friend and from an even earlier project that Matt was trying to do, and we gave it to Carl, and Carl sent it around town and it went to every single studio. It went everywhere, and everybody passed on it. January of ninety one was also like, you know, the Gulf War, like there was a lot of stuff going on.

Whatever reason, no one bought it, so then it was like, what are we going to do. Well. Two producers, like young guys just starting out, got a hold of it and said can we option this? Can we pay you five hundred bucks for the next year and let us try to set this up. Well at that point, we had we had nothing else going for us, so we're like, sure, Martin Wiley and Jeffrey Newman, and they said, here's the thing.

We think we might have some financing from Japan. Okay. I think it was from TDK. I think it was like a literally like cassette company. It was a Japanese company that wanted to get into making movies and they were like, we want to do this, and we want to do it in Japan on the bullet Train, but we want to do it with an American star.

So we're like, okay. So we did an initial rewrite, you know, based on their notes, and then we were trying to develop it, and early on it was talks where that it would either be Kurt Russell or ironically Richard Gear that is ironic wouldn't have been something huh yeah, And I'm like, wow, Richard Ker writing a movie for Richard Gerr. Yeah, would that be like, uh you could say it was a prophecy of things to come? Oh yeah yeah. But they were considered like like actors you like who had a high profile and had like international fame, but weren't as expensive as Harrison Ford, It's like, okay.

So we were like, fine, are you kidding? You're gonna send us to Japan to make our movie? That would be like we would be the superstars of everyone we know. So we we wrote it, we did it, and we were trying and we're writing it to these specifications and oh we don't know yet. Oh we're trying to find out.

Oh we don't know. So this was like in all of ninety Wait, hold on a second, this was like ninety two. Maybe let's see. Hold on, this is like in ninety one and early ninety two. All this stuff was going on.

Then late summer of ninety two, Gary Goldstein got involved. Now Gary Goldstein was a literary manager and he worked with screenwriters and tried to get their movies set up at places. And his biggest client was j. F. Lawton, writer of Under Siege and Pretty Woman.

So he got a look at the script Martin and Jeffrey got the script to him. He read it and he said, okay, let me come on as producer and I will walk this into Warner Brothers. Okay. And what that means is based on my relationships with the people at Warner Brothers and based on the fact that I produced a big hit for them. In other words, I was J.

F. Lawton's literary manager and provided that literary material for you. And now you know that I have access to good material, and now I'm bringing you another thing that could fulfill your dream of making a sequel to under Siege. Let me do this, And Martin and Jeffrey said okay. So they cut him in on the deal and new contracts were drawn up.

But meanwhile, Matt and I hadn't really been paid much, like five hundred dollars for you know, two years of work. But that's fine, because you do the work on the hope that something big is going to happen on spec ladies and gentlemen. Exactly. It's fun. It's oh boy, it's fun.

So in late ninety two we did all this work, all these rewrites, all the way up through Christmas and then and then early in ninety three it was like, okay, we're going to send the script out again. Only here's the problem. A very close version of this script written by these same two guys us already went out, went through every studio's you know, coverage process, and was rejected. What we're going to do So what they did was they changed the title of the movie from Dark Territory to end of the Line, and they put pseudonyms on. So I was like Andy Ack and he was something they just came up, and there's invented two names.

That way, it would not trip up any of their files. Any studio getting it would go, note, we have never read the script, We've never done coverage. It's pretty smart. Yeah, And they'd all be new people. Most of the executives had by then moved on and switched places and everything.

It got sent out again, but primarily it was being given to Warner Brothers and through Gary Goldstein, to say, here is this product. Can it be the sequel? And then the story that I've told a million times is that Warner Brothers had already commissioned an in house script. It involved stealth votes for the military. That was the big premise of the movie somehow.

And there was another script that Matt and I were aware of, called Mailstorm. But we weren't aware of was that it was written by another one of Gary Goldstein's other clients. So Gary Goldstein basically had two out of the three movies, so he was going to win the odds were stacked and Gary Goldstein stave, it's like representing the same people on both sides of a deal. I'm gonna win either way. I mean, look, there was nothing illegal.

There was nothing even about it. It was just like, look the guy smart, you know what it was the one lawyer can represent the same two different parties in the same deal. That's not illegal either. It's you know, it has like it's like an agent representing two riders and going on your interview. Both of these writers to this movie.

So it was all good. And Mailstorm was an interesting movie. Mailstorm was and again this is all about In nineteen ninety three, Mailstorm was about a giant bank heist against the backdrop of a hurricane. So Storm of the Century will be our cover for knocking off a bank or maybe a series of banks in an East coast coastal town. Interesting.

And the one and the one you know, local yokel cop who who asked to battle the storm and the and the robbers to shut it all down. This sounds familiar. I mean it's a you know, I mean, it's been done since then, but this guy did it first, or did it because it sounds I think it became hard rained, didn't it was something I'm not sure if it was that. Wasn't there a movie that came out like last year or the year before that was essentially this as well, called like f F five or Iah the Storm or some shit. Yeah, right, it was the same thing.

It like takes place in New Orleans or something. I'm pretty sure it's I mean, it's a great idea, right, I mean, in a way it follows the tradition of Cliffhanger, which is, you know, again, die Hard style storytelling against a natural background. Natural it's die Hard in the Mountains and it had just come out that year. So and I've never seen Cliffhanger. It's one of those movies I really want to watch.

I just know it's die Hard in the Mountains. Oh yeah, check it out. It's fun. It's a fun movie. I was more when that movie came out the same day as another movie.

I was more interested in singing Christens. I'm talking about Angus Mario Brothers. Oh, super super Mario Brothers. It's being it's gonna be, it's gonna be re It's gonna be reappreciated later this year, my friends. Yes, Richard, I have a.

I have a question, and I don't remember if I asked this to you last time we spoke. But you know, again, you have the hindsight now of twenty years past this movie, twenty plus years, right, twenty years thirty right if if if you and Matt, like when you and Matt, I'll be okay, when you and Matt were writing the script, who were you writing the lead from in your mind? Were you writing it as Bruce Willis as the actor? It was either it was never Bruce Willis, it was always Harrison Ford. And then in later rewrites we were led to believe we had a shot at Mel Gibson.

No, but I'm asking you, like who you you two were thinking about when you were writing, like who, That's who you wanted. That's who you were writing the character as was this is going to be? So what we did? You have the mannerisms of a Harrison Ford's style character. Exactly and even more I mean almost almost like the Indiana Jones who's teaching at the college.

That's who we wanted, Okay, right, yeah, exactly? I mean again, like that's the more interesting character for this kind of movie. Our character was had never touched a gun. In his life. In the original script, he was an investigator, a rail investigator for the NTSB, the National Transit Safety Board.

In other words, we decided, let's just make a character where his only advantage is he knows the playing field better than they do. He knows everything about trains right right, fuck it, which is a fucking brilliant brill I mean that the movie that you wrote. I swear to God, that movie is probably it's as good as die Hard, right, I know, I genuinely believe, and I've seen the things that you've made yourself and then the things that Matt has made. The two of you. If that movie had been made the way that you wanted it to be made, we you and I would probably have never met, do you know?

But you know what I mean. I mean, I think it would be regarded in the same way as die Hard, because that is, for me, the perceived potential of the parties involved. Because of what it was, it could never be, It could never exceed die Hard. It could only considered one of the honorable mention in the die Hard. There are a few of those, so very few of those, um so so our thing was and then and then we're like well, we need to go find out.

So we hauled the National Transit Safety Board branch office in Los Angeles. Again, this is pre Internet, pre everything, you know, fucking white pages. And we met a guy named Mark Garcia who worked in the LA office, and we set up a meeting with him, and we're like, we're two college students who are thinking of writing an action movie on a train, and we just have some questions for you. Went and spoke to him and and and we were like, well, we want we want there to be this thing where some people could make it so that two trains could be heading right at each other, but we don't know if that's very realistic, and we don't really know how to do that, and we just want to know if that's a stupid idea.

And Mark Garcia said, oh no, that could happen, but it could only happen in dark territory. And Matt and I like rab each other's arms, like the moment of clarity, it's it's kist, it's yes, Well, you're filled with divine grace in that moment that the heavens open up and the light shines down on you. What do you what is it called dark? What is well, what what are you talking about. Well, dark territory is any section of unsignaled track.

And there's some tracks way out there, because you know, most of the tracks in America are one hundred and fifty years old, and they've they're not laying and they're in the middle of fucking nowhere. The middle of nowhere because that's the point you had to get from North Dakota to San Francisco or whatever. Yeah, but they're so far out there that they're that they have not been updated with signals. So all we need to know. The way that internet, you know, national rail travel is arranged is that anytime a train is goes into dark territory, you know exactly when it enters and when it leaves, and you have to make sure not to send a train in there.

And once it's out. Now you can send a train going the other direction, but you just have to know that that's dark territory. And we're like, wait a second. So but theoretically, if someone fucked with that, you could send two trains. He's like, oh yeah, oh, you could do it.

We're like, oh my god, oh my god, because once they're both in there, they can't do anything. About it. Once it's there, no one knows what's happening, and you can't do anything about it. So that's like, okay, great, And which is the greatest fucking conceit? I mean, that's such a good conceit.

Where is this? It's such a bummer to me. This is like the greatest conceit in this entire idea is there in there and you can't do anything about it. God, the guy didn't get suspicious of you two asking Hey, is there a way we could possibly Yeah, in this fucking day and age Richard, you'd be in some you'd be in some FBI file somewhere, asking the wrong questions. Screenwriters, we're trying to ready film.

We want to know if a train could possibly get into another train. Listen, Trevor. I gotta tell you every TV writer has this joke where it's like, oh, yeah, I work on criminal minds. If anyone looked at my Google, I would be in prison for the rest of my life. Right.

It's like when I talked to the guys who did Poughkeepsie Tapes movie, they were like, oh yeah, we had like fucking boxes full of these, like graphic crime scene photos and books about serial killers and shit, and they were like, we didn't know what to do with it. By the end of it, we just didn't want to really just throw it away. It's like yeah, but at the same time, somebody sees that, They're like, what are you doing work on TV accurate right now? With all the podcasts, the true crime podcasts. Yeah, yeah, everyone is just google searching every beheadings, you know, the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst on the internet.

Yeah. It becomes the point where Faces of Death is like, that's passe. Yeah, well we never forgot Mark Arcia. I still have his business card. It's an art effect for us.

It's like that was that was the thing that unlocked everything for us. And then then the other thing. The only other research we did was we went to Union Station and we rode an Amtrak train to Fullerton and back. We're like, let's just get on the train, let's walk it end to end. Let's look at the dining car, let's look at the bar car, Let's look at how much space there is.

And we went on the amtrack and we discovered that everything we were writing would never ever work to tall trains, way too small. They don't have overhead areas where you can a person can hide. You can't get from car to car in the way we needed. You can't the windows don't open, the bar. It was just like we were devastated.

And then we just we went back to his mom's house and we're like, Okay, this is the moment where we say we're gonna leave actual, actual, you know, reality behind and we're going to build a new reality. And what we very consciously decided was, let's let's design our train in a way that makes basic sense. Decide what it is and what it can do. That that's not crazy, it doesn't fly, but let's just figure out what it is, and then let's just write about that particular train because no one's gonna know, because the downside of no one being on a train is followed by an upside of no one's ever been on a train. Yeah, let's go, well, I'm on an MP drug is unintended benefit of lack of knowledge, right, It's it's happened a lot before with some with a lot of action films.

The hero is on this brand new thing that it's the grand opening of this of this new thing, and nobody's ever been on it, so you're figuring out the hero is also figuring out the epis and downs of the whole thing. It's brand new technical and oh a terror sticking over the very same day. So yeah, right, it's yeah, what what a what a coincidence? Huh Yeah, Well, we just figured no, we want this guy to be a total nabbish and and he's a he hates airplanes. He because he's afraid of flying, and so that's why he's a rail investigator and all that stuff.

And his divorced and his daughter's on the train and that's the that's the you know, Holly Gennaro stand in and we're like, we won't have eurotrash. Our idea was it was going to be for a long time, it was billionaires boys Club. It's a bunch of like twenty year old Harvard assholes. One. Yeah, and so if that that was it for a long time.

And then it became, well, if it's military, it's probably got to be people that have some sort of connection in the military. And and then it became very a lot more like what Eric Bogosian represented in the actual movie, who was one of the real bride spots. Oh my god. Yeah, god, his I mean one, it's Eric Bogosian. You don't usually think of him as playing well, especially in these types of films, because he is a very serious monologust playwright, very serious, you know, very you know, well respected, and now he's playing this absolutely insane villain that I thought was just as if not better than Tommy Lee Jones's villain in the first one.

I don't even think he's insane. He's so damn charismatic, like well, and he's smart. That's the thing, right Mark, he doesn't have to be no physically opposing because he's got he's got yeah, Richard Richard. You know what I noticed this time watching the movie, Eric Bogosian's character has Richard had him energy. I never met him, he never met me, so I know it's not that's sad.

It's wild though, because when I watched him, like he's got like Richard's energy where it's just like it's just like I love that confidence that his character has, because that's what you need. Oh yeah, that makes a good villain, right is the confidence, the confidence to be like I am the smartest guy in the room. It's like it's it's the you fired me big fucking mistake. You're you're done exactly exactly, that's exactly. I'll make you pay for it.

I'm gonna make you pay for underestimating my brilliance, and you'll do ye. Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. Yeah, we didn't write that line. I know you didn't write that line. That's the that like, that is the other good line from the movie, and I know you didn't write it.

There's only one line that everybody really remembers from this movie, and it's the Richard Adam line. No, No, that's the line they remember because it's it's pithy and it's short. Oh. No, one line. The only line of dialogue that remains from our draft is ladies and gentlemen, this is your captor speaking.

That is the greatest line in the movie. And you know that it is kind of speech that follows I mean literally word for word, the whole thing, you know, federal regulations required that we kill you. The whole was was We wrote that in the summer of nineteen ninety, you know, on Matt's you know Macintosh, you know, in his mom's house, and we were rolling on the ground with glee. We were so happy And here's why I say the movie that you guys made that never got made because the entire script is gutted, would have been something really special. Is because anyone I know who has seen this movie, and Verne even mentions it, and Trevor and Father Malone and everybody I know points to that goddamn line in the movie as some like really like this is like one of the better parts of the movie is because it's so it's so well written and memorable, and then you think to yourself, well, if this is it for that from you guys in the script, what was that script like?

Well, he's arguably, arguably he's the best character in the film. He's the character I love. But the tone is set for the character from that scene. It's that scene that sets the tone for the entire character. Oh, this guy is a dickhead, but a very smart dickhead.

Oh exactly. Yeah. Our goal was to build a machine in the way that Diehard is a machine. And and the thing that we talked about a lot was action as contraption. It's sort of like in Raiders of the Lost Arc there's that sequence where that really burly guy, the bald headed Nazi and the airplane, and and it's like this whole it's this very intricate sort of almost a mouse trap.

It's like I'm trying to get in, but I can't. You know, Marian gets in but gets trapped. Now the thing starts moving. Now I've got to fight this guy, but I've a tank. Now Here comes the airplane, but now here comes the gas tank.

Now the propeller, now here comes the flame. And now now she's now that it helps that but hurts this. It's this weird Rube Goldberg of action that Matt and I love, and it's present in certain movies, and Raiders is one of them where every little you don't just go, hey, there's a big fight. It's like, no, You've got to explain exactly where the fight turns. You know.

It's like, then this thing happens, which is good, but then this thing happens, which is bad. So we wrote this. So the end of the movie that we wrote that we were so excited about was that, and there were all these things where just you know, they've got to figure this out, and they distract the bad guy, and this happens. The trains are are streaking toward each other and Meanwhile, there's a helicopter. But but you know, our guy, you know, the character eventually played by Morris Chestnut, gets up into the helicopter and takes over the helicopter.

And now our character gets his daughter onto the rope ladder and she goes up and now and now it's now seconds to collision, and our guy is you know, is going to jump, and he looks back and here comes the bad guy running at him, and so our hero jumps onto the ladder, the rope ladder, okay, And he looks back and the bad guy has now run all the way to the back of the train and has a gun pointed straight at him. They're only about ten feet apart, and our hero is dead. He's come all this way, he's saved everyone, but he personally is going to die. And their eyes meet and the trains collide, and our bad guy is thrown off his feet as you would be according to the laws of physics, toward the point of impact and is killed as he's firing the gun.

And our guy is saved, and the bad guy is killed by his own plan, which of course was also something we really wanted to have happened, because that's what you want. Yeah, right, another sorry, sorry, well it was the most beautiful moment. It was. It was like, we have achieved exactly the machine we wanted to build. Yeah.

Now, what the movie did was the trains collide, but Steven Seagal is running away from the point of it, and there's just something weird about it. And that's when you realize, oh, right, you you can't do that. That's exactly the opposite. When two cars hit, the two drivers smash into the windshields. They don't fly backward.

You can't, especially if you're inside the train, right, But matter because Steven Seagal was superhuman. Yeah, us, that was like, well it's over. You already miss you already missed the goddamn point that was. That scene in particular was a scene that ciscuently Ebert were pointing out in their review of the film, and they still enjoyed. They still gave it a thumbtime and still recommended it, but they did They were talking about how fucking ridiculous the things in the film.

We're at we're at the you know, at at the moment because yeah, I was, as I was watching, I was watching that clip they were showing you see the trains. Basically, it's it's almost like um fitting us, you know, fitting us around object into a roundhold. They it just fits so perfectly. It's almost like the other train is like the condom that the Dick train is fitting into. And I'm thinking to myself, no, this does not work.

I it's fun to watch. It's arguably it's very fun to watch. It's very exciting, and it's very kind of kind of entertain you to watch. But you're not in a minute thinking this could actually happen. And at that point in the movie, you know, you're just you're just there for the ride.

You're enjoying it. The big budget movie balls in It, begoes In, is in it. There's enough to enjoy. I mean, I've got no complaints about that movie. I'm still getting residuals and they're decent.

So so I should have rented it last night instead of just Risus Server. It could have given you a couple more bucks. People are affectionate about the movie, and I've taught about this too. The longest time, I was embarrassed. I know that Matt, who was starting his directing career at that time, really didn't want to be associated with that movie, and I don't blame him, you know, I mean, frankly, neither did I.

You know, I wanted to go on and do other things action movies or whatever. But it wasn't thrilled to be like, oh, I've got a Steven Seagal movie. It was nice that it made a little money. It was not a big by the way, and did not do the box office they wanted it to do, but did okay. But you know, ultimately, twenty years on, twenty five years on, people who watch that movie now have a lot of affection for it because of its excesses.

All right, I mean, sorry, go ahead now, I was just gonna say, I mean, no one comes to me and says, oh, yeah, that movie was horrible. What I get is and almost universally it's a guy usually around my age, are a little younger like Trevor your age, and it's someone saying, oh my god, Underseas two, my dad and I love that movie, and it's this movie that guys watch with their dads, and that just I mean, that breaks my heart in the best way. I'm like, you know what, then then then then I'm proud. This gives you a great memory with your dad watching a goofy action movie. Yeah, I'm I'm proud.

I have a little different story because my dad hated Seagal. He really fucking hated Seagal, like there was a lot of things, like he hated Van Damn. Even though for my fifteenth birthday I had him take me to see Street Fighter. I could tell in all the whole time he was watching it he was in pain, but it was my birthday, so he relented. Anyway.

I don't know if I told you this story about how I saw underseaes you for the first time. I think it was the summer and when it came out, I was I got was just out of high school, was just out of my freshman year of high school. It was July nineteen ninety five, Okay, so I was just I was just ended my freshman year of high school during my summer break, and originally I called my friend Bobby Simpson, who usually was the guy I saw movies with. I said, Hey, do you want to go see Clueless because I want to see Clues because if you just opened it looked really good to me, Bobby, which I think, by the way, Trevor, I think for me like this story, would you tell it? It summarizes like eat you for me so perfectly.

This is why I love you to death. As one of my friends is like, I wanted to go see Clueless. We saw Underseage two. Well, here's here's how it happened. I'd say, Bobby, do you want to go see Clues with me?

He goes, Noah, I want to see understage two. And I go, let's go see Clues. He goes, no, Underseage two. This one on for like three or four more times, back and forth, until I relented. I'm like, fine, we'll see unders each two.

We'll go see understage two. Um. I think I don't know how we were able to get the tickets. I think either his dad Bottom or my dad bottom, or my dad just told the ticket taker it was okay to give him to us. But we saw Underseage two in the theater.

It was my first Seagal film in the theater. I think it was my last Seagal film in the theater. Yeah. And so me and Bobby went to the Mount like nine in Seattle and we saw, you know, we went and saw Underseage two, and you know, in THHX and Dolby Digital surrounds sound, and I just had a blast watching it. I thought it was a fun movie and still remains to me one of, if not my favorite Seagal film because it is a lot of fun.

It is it is. I know under Siege is a better made film, but under Siege two for me, just has that just just kinetic, more fun kind of action that I you know that I like. Under Siege is a fresh cheese. Under Siege two is an age cheese. It has a little bit of funk on it, but that's what makes it fun.

Yeah, but it's still cheese. It's still cheese. I mean under Siege two for I, honest to god, I've seen under Siege one twice. I've seen under Siege two six or seven times. I think that speaks for itself.

I've seen Undersiege two as many times as I've probably seen other action movies that are considered quote better unquote. I just remember just like, wow, this is And I don't know if I've even seen an Undersiege one yet I had. I saw Undersiege two before I saw Undersiege one. Yeah, I think that's what happened. It's like I was like, oh my god, this movie is great, the villain is amazing.

Oh my god, they just fucking they just annihilated a whole city with this, with this weapon that they don't necessarily make clear what it does, Like they say, like causes earthquakes or something, and another scene and now they make it sell like it's something different, right, mid air earthquake machine. Yeah, and like kurtwood Smith and the other guy are talking about like and all the time, I'm thinking, why the fun would the government make this? Like our earth weapons not good enough that we have to have us are you? Are you critiquing this man's movie in front of him compliment about an earthquake satellite? What's that?

Didn't it say it caused earthquakes? It was an earthquake? Yeah, But Richard said, what don't you get about earthquake satellites? Why would the government make it? That's my question?

Why not? Okay, why not? Why wouldn't they? Dude? The government's made worse things.

The government has made things like a literal gay government's made a literal gay bomb. You think of earthquake satellites. Outside of the question, they made they made something in the wad makes the frogs gay. Oh yeah, Sorry, Richard, I love you. I love the movie.

I don't want you to think that I you know, No, I'm just worried. I only ust you is did you finally see Clueless on video? Wow? I saw it on video? Good.

I just think, think Richards, one of those residuals that you got was from Trevor. I would I would more watch Underseachs two again. Thank Cluless. I still love Clueless, but I love Underseachs two a bit more because yeah, yeah, Matt and I were were heart heartbroken. We were heartbroken when we sold it.

I've told the story before. One of Matt's best friends, JJ Abrams, they went to school together and they, you know, the day it's sold, and and the story broke in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter when they were actual like you know, newspapers. JJ came over with a bottle of champagne to congratulate us, and we were like, no, JJ, you if you believe what you read. We did not get paid a million dollars. It's a million dollars deal, of which we're splitting about ninety thousand dollars.

Yeah, which even then was a lot of money I was in. That's a lot of money. Well, I mean, but not what deal like people were people were selling scripts for a million dollars. I mean people, it was every week. It felt like someone from somewhere was selling a script and making way more than we made well or as we had all those dreams and we thought, oh and so we were all depressed and like, no, it's nothing and it's gonna be Steven Seagal and it's a disaster.

And JJ was like, you guys are idiot. You sold a movie. Do you have any idea of the number of people in the world who are jealous of you right now and who wish they were you right now? There's a lot of people out there who did not sell a movie today, okay, And yours is gonna get made because there's already a star attached and a franchise, so your movie is gonna get made. I would say that ninety nine percent of the people who sold a movie today, this is the last money that we're gonna get because that movie ain't gonna get made.

Yours gonna get made. So if you can't enjoy this, get out of the business now. Because J. J. Abrams talks like he's in a movie.

Yes, like, I'm in a film myself. Here he talks so cinematic, I believe it. Yeah, so we're like, you're right, you're right. And we drank a little champaign with him and and and it's like then then then movie got rewritten, and then uh, and then we had to go through Writers Guild arbitration to to get our credit because Brian Hellglenn was the only of the other writers who challenged us. He was the only one who said I want my name on this movie too, Which was ironic because when we went back and you know, they sent us all the drafts, they would send us the drafts of the people who rewrote us and asked us to comment.

And that was so painful. I mean, I know it sounds crazy bother me at all, but at the time, it was almost like, this is like, you're the girl that broke up with you, sending her new boyfriend to you to get tips on how to fuck her with pictures fucking her too. Yeah, We're like he was the most. It was so painful, Right, Matt and I are already people who live on the edge of pain. It's like we're we're importing pain.

We haven't even paid for yet yeah, and now it's being served up fresh daily. It was brutal and leave these drafts and just go what is happening? And then we'd give notes, but it's like why are we even doing this? And so we would we experienced all of this and then and then it was weird about it was Brian Helgeland arguing for credit, but his draft had been rewritten even more than our draft, like the subsequent drafts actually brought it closer to us. So we're like, of all the writers who might have a claim to credit on this, he almost has the least.

But he submitted for credit anyway, because there's a lot of money at stake. He wouldn't need a lot of money, you know, and and at a certain point, you know, money's money, So that's why he did it. So we had to write. The way the Writers Guild works is you have to write sort of a whole defense of why your draft is the draft, And we both twenty five page document, page by page by page, comparing our draft that we sold to the shooting draft and basically saying, you know, it's like, yeah, characters are different, everything's different, but still here's where they get on the train, Here's where the terrorists take over. Here's the first moment of you know, here's the exact you know moment.

You know, we just went through the structure because the structure never changed. And at the end of it, the Writer's Guild panel was like, yeah, it's still their movie. You know, dialogue's different, but dialogue dialogue, the same beats are the same. It's your movie. And for us that meant, you know, a decent amount of change at a time when we really needed it.

So Richard, I think we would be remissed because we really haven't brought him up very much honestly in this episode. And I think, you know, kind of obviously there's a there's an inflection point here where we need to kind of talk about the the elephant in the room offense to his weight. But mister Steven Seagal, elephants, Yeah, no, offense to elephants. Really shit. So Richard, I know, you know, every you know, it's kind of a thing now, like you know, Tom Ford, a bunch of these comedians have they all have their like Steven Seagal story, Right, there's like everybody has like a Seagall story.

But I would say, you know, Richard, you and Matt kind of have an og Seagal story. This is before Seagal stories were a thing, So would you would you mind telling our listeners the age old meeting between Matt Reeves Richard had him and Steven Seagal. Well, I okay, So I'm I'm at Tony Romas during my lunch shit and the manager. I walk into the kitchen and the managers. The manager says, your wife is on the phone, you know, come take the call.

And I'm like what like? And you have to realize there were no cell phones. So so the idea that I'm sorry, it wasn't my wife, it was my girlfriend. He's like, there's she's called the woman who became my wife. Let's hold a whole lot of things.

This is ninety two, ninety three. No, we were married. We were already married. So he said, your wife's on the phone, and I'm like, okay, someone's dead. My parents are dead.

How would you ever get a call at work? Right? You're literally living in an episode of Seinfeld. Oh I don't have a cell phone? Man to call?

The passating to Tony Romas. It had never happened. I'd been working there for two years. Right, you never called me at any job I'd ever had. You didn't do that.

Why would you. I pick up the phone. She's like, hey, so I just got a call or you just got a message. There's supposed to be a meeting today. They want to know if you can make it today.

You need to call Gary Goldstein. And I'm like, okay, So I call Gary Goldstein. He's like, can you get someone to cover your shift? I'm like, what's going on? He's like, we have a meeting today at three o'clock at Steven Seagal's house.

You have to be there. We'll do whatever. We'll tell Tony Romas, we will pay for someone to cover your shift. It's a lot of nineties movie industry bullshit, though you're gonna say it's a lot of nineties movie tropes in one scene of your life. But it's a lot of like like there was a there was a feeling even in the nineties, of the way the lifestyle of movie people was supposed to be right, drop everything.

It's fast, exciting car, you know, a lot of like what I'm like, I have a car. It's like it's three o'clock. I'm like, that's fine. I can leave now, I'll go home, take a shower. Yeah, it's all fine.

Well he lives out in Bennedict Canyon or whatever. It was, okay, great, we all converge their three. Matt's there, I'm there. We're like, what is going on? And of course it's Matt and I and we're nobody.

We don't know what the fuck is going on. So we're terrified. We're like, what is happening? We're in dreamland. We're going to Steven s Gall's house.

How old are you at this point in your life? Twenty five? Holy shit, that's wild with anything. I mean, I'm not a movie guy. I don't come from a movie world.

Matt didn't. We're not people who are like, oh, meeting of Seagal, I mean picture yourselves suddenly like you gotta go and meet but at work to work with him, Well, you got to nail this meeting or your movie. It's like, oh right, it's not just your meeting Steven Seagal. Question, before you met Seagal, what was your experience with either Seagal films or your opinion of Seagal films or him as an actor as a person. Beforehand, had never seen I'd never seen one, but understood that they were cheap.

Yeah, you weren't real movies. They were You didn't have any preconceived notion. Yeah, it was. I think it was a fairly accurate assumption that it was, like, he's not much of an actor. Apparently he's a martial artist.

But these are not movies that that wide audiences see. These are movies that you know he's he was like a professional wrestler. That's how he felt to us. Yeah, yeah, I think that's it's a he's his own thing. He's his own thing.

He's not trying to act. He's just striding out on stage and being himself. And it's like that was no great interest. To remember when Charlie Sheen was doing that whole tour where he just went out and like talked about how weird it was to be Charlie Sheen. That's like Steven Seagal.

It's like, we're there's no gimmick, it's just you. It's a Stephen Seagal movie. Then it is a very it's a narrower thing. Yeah, he's got his own niche. But everyone was telling us rightly, they're like, you guys are crazy he's this is going to be a summer tenth pole movie.

Don't you don't turn up your nose to this? So we go into this house. It's it's Matt myself, Gary Goldstein, Lorenzo di Bonaventura. I don't know. I don't know if John Peters was involved.

Oh wow, talk about a head of hair man. Oh he may he may have been there whatever reason. I don't remember. But he was basically brought on as an uber producer to be the Seagal whisperer all Wrangel Seagal, don't you worry, you know, to put a giant, fucking mechanical spider in your movie? Yeah right, talk about somebody making a bookoo bucks off a one story for the rest of their lives.

Good lord. Okay, So we so we go to his houses. How some many you know, big branch style mansion and very you know, obviously expensive place. We only were in the living room. I will say this.

I remember when we were like in the driveway and people were sort of meeting up and we were like, well, should we go in? Well, you know, because again no one was texting anyone because it was nineteen ninety three. Yeah, So suddenly the door opens and Steven Seagal is there, and I do remember he filled the doorway. He is tall. He's a big guy.

Not every actor is not every movie starters. Most of them are shorter than you expect. And you've heard this from a million people. I was like, oh my god, I met so mus just alone. He's like this tall.

Seagal was like, oh shit, this guy is, you know, Sasquatch. We go into his house. We sit down and and he sits sort of at the head of the room in this chair, and we're on couches and he starts talking. They're all joking and oh my god, you know you're so great and under siege and blah blah blah, and Matt and I aren't saying a word. I mean, we are, you know, just that hangers on here and and Segal starts to pontificate.

He's like, well, I read your script. That's okay, but you know, you know, you got to really get into it, you know, you gotta get into the I see this guy's CIA, you know, and I think we gotta do, you know, reveal that he's part of the CIA and all this stuff. And we're like, what is he taught for real, like, do we have to do this? And he's like, you know, the guy who did my last movie, you know, I don't know. I had to.

I had to tell him count hair by count hair what to do. And while he's talking, there's this a guy comes like down the hall and is standing next to him and is standing there and standing there and standing there. Finally Segal turns and goes, what the fuck do you want? And the guy's like, I just wanted to know if anyone wants anything, and Seagal says, I'll have a cup of tea. Stuff standing there like some cocksucking faggott.

Oh my god, that sounds like Seal. Oh what an insufferable piece of shit. Oh yeah, sounds like this guy, this guy who was like the head of his company, the nicest guy, the guy we learned was like the nicest guy in the world. His job is to take ship from this asshole. And so he looks around at all of us, but Segal doesn't say anything, and we don't say anything.

So this guy walks away and comes back a few minutes later with one cup of tea for one person in the room. Good lord. Yeah, And that's when Segal. He's like, let me tell you. I'm gonna He's like, we can get out.

I can tell you what to write. All you gotta do is write it. He's like, I'll take you to my island in my private plane. And Matt and I are like what. He's like, yeah, just you and you and me, three of us on my island.

And we're like, oh, that is never happened. I don't we know that's gonna end with us being hunted at the island of Doctor Moreau. Dude, it's the most the most dangerous game. Yeah, son. So so we're like, ha, yeah, it's gonna be great.

It's gonna be great. So we leave and everyone's like, oh, yeah, that went great. That went great. If you don't understand what just happened there, it was great. And we're like okay, because for us, it was the worst hour of our lives.

Like this guy was worse than anything we ever could have expected. But we don't know. When we're twenty five and we don't, you know, It's like so then in subsequent years, I would go to meetings on my own and people would go, WHOA, So, Steven Seagal, did you ever meet did you ever meet him, and I'm like, oh, yeah, so what did you think? And I'm like, oh, I don't know. It was weird, you know, it's kind of weird.

And they'd go, well, let me tell you what happened when I met him, of course, and then people would start telling stories like what we experienced or worse, so I would say. After about a year, I began to realize, oh, okay, so I'm not gonna ruin anyone's reputation or shock anyone by saying he was obnoxious. Yeah, because people were literally telling stories and I was like, oh, did he pull a gun on you? Because he brought a gun to Warner Brothers when I met him and put it on the table and started talking about how many people he'd killed and why really everyone had everyone's story about Steven's adult was worse than the one before, while I'm like, okay, it's like an aristocrats joke, right, It's like, he didn't threaten to kill us outright, So I guess what happened to us wasn't all that, you know, amazing in terms of people at all.

But but it was hard to picture, Like we knew at that meeting this guy was over it's like, this doesn't last. He doesn't have the talent to pull this off. Even guys who have talent, you know, this this kind of bullshit doesn't really age. Well, no, because his attitude you could tell, you probably could tell that this was going to bite him in the ass. Well, it was tough.

It was nineteen ninety three. You know, it's not like it's not like things are now where people actually value people being decent human beings. Yeah, it's all about reputation. Yeah, I mean, you know we talked, you talk about quote unquote, you know, cancel culture, but back in the night these there really wasn't any it was more. And plus you know, word of mouth about a person didn't go didn't get sent out as fast as it does now.

Or you get today you hear today about things that happened back then that like, oh my god, I didn't know this person did this back then, But of course you didn't because there was no outlet for it. I mean, you had the gossip rags, but they weren't ever really taken serious. Well, it's you know, you say that, you know, I'm gonna here's here's my take on cancel culture, that it simultaneously, has always existed and doesn't exist at all. In other words, a lot of people canceled Cassius Clay when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and a lot of people canceled Cat Stevens when he changed his name to Yusef Islam. People have been getting canceled for a long time.

It's only now that are news streams and social media streams are are so are so quick. Yeah, the Dixie Chicks were canceled. People do canceled. Having said that, it's not canceling, it's simply announcing who and what you are. The Dixie Chicks simply said, even though we're country music or we're known for that, yeah we're not right wing Republicans.

We're actually left wing Democrats, and which should have been your first fucking clue. And now all it is is listen, guys, see anyone say whatever you want. All you're doing is saying out loud what audience you want and what audience you don't want. No one's getting canceled. For anyone getting canceled.

Believe me, they're replacing every one of those lost fans with a different kind of fan who likes the bullshit that they know. Do you think Richard, that celebrities are becoming less quote unquote phony and being more who they really are today, or do you think that they're more inclined to try to hide it. I don't know. Some people have been Jane Fonda, she got canceled. Oh yeah, that whole Hannoy Jane thing really fucking blew up in her face.

You know, Sean Penny has always been very open about what he supports and what he doesn't support. I would say that, um, a lot of people in the music field. John Lennon, you know, was pretty clear about his political views and and and gained fans and lost fans. Yeah. You know, well, one of the one of the biggest, one of the one of the most prevalent ones that I know that really kind of took a took a took a like a bullet to her career with Sinad O'Connor.

I mean she never really quite recovered from sand O'Connor. I mean, you've got to You've got a question, you know, what was her fan base and did it really cheat? And also what she did was puzzling even to people who later when they understood what she was doing and why ported it, so it wasn't a thing that she did. People immediately understood, Oh, I know exactly what that is, and I'm on board. Well, oh, is that what she was doing.

Oh, that's not so bad. I wish she'd said it more clearly. I think I would have agreed that. You know, I also believe in birth control and gay rights. Yeah.

I didn't realize that her singing that song and tearing up a picture of the pope meant that. Only learned later that her carrying up the pope was more about child abuse in the in the in the Catholic faith and the priest. Yeah, but no one want to that. So it just appeared puzzling, worrisome, and and then and it was during a time when I'm not even sure she was necessarily known for being hugely political. But maybe I'm wrong, I'm misremembering it.

Yeah, I'm always expecting that we'll say that. Oh, speaking of SNL, people who are never going to be back on the show. Oh, Sinad O'Connor, Steven Seagal getting getting axed from the future guest hosting pool for his terrible takes on rape sketches. Oh god, yeah, I told it. You've heard this.

Have you heard that story about rich about what Steven Seagal had an idea for a sketch or he would play. He would play a therapist to Victoria Jackson, who is a rape victim, and I think at the end of the sketch he would proceed to have sex with her at the end or something that effect. One if his sketch ideas got on the air where he like beats up this whole office full of executives and he ends it with this is what happens when you cause global warming, and that's where the sketch end. Wow, or something to that effect. He was a prick.

No one in the cast. It's pretty unanimous that he is the worst host ever. Every single cast member agrees that he was the worst. And he was never ever aspect of you know, admittedly, because you need to have a sense of humor about yourself to be successful on SNL. Yeah, it's I don't know, it's weird.

You know. His career after Undersiege two, there weren't a lot of movies. There were very there was a small handful of theatrical releases. There was Executive Decision stands out as a movie that he did not star in, but played an interesting role in. I think for a lot of people they were like, Oh, that actually is a really good sign because he can deploy his personality in a variety of ways.

And when I was briefly working with and for Stephen J. Candele, when I was writing one of the earliest incarnations of the eighteen movie that never got made, Candele even said, oh, yeah, he was one of those. Candle was one of the guys who said, do you ever meets a goal? What was your experience? And I told him and he's like yeah, I'm like, why did you meet him?

And He's like, I was actually thinking of casting him as the bad guy in a movie because I think he has that energy and could really play a really great heavy But man, I had one meeting with him and he just sucked all the air out of the room, and I thought, life is too short, It's not worth it. I think he goes back to like what I said, he doesn't seem to have a sense of humor about himself and he sense of self awareness? Is there no self awareness at all? He takes himself way too fucking seriously. I mean, someone who says count here in a business meeting clearly does not.

I don't think understands the world around them or or perceives the way around them the same way a lot of us do. I think he took the little bit of praise he got early in his career and just ran with it. Never he thinking he was untouchable the whole time. Well really got But but I will say, being being the old st in the room, that there there was a culture, like, like I became aware of Hollywood culture in the nineties, Hollywood culture in the nineties was wildly misogynist, maybe even maybe even worse than it had been in certain decades past. It was it was why I mean, this was the era of Joe Esterhouse and you know, show Girls and just a lot of like, hey ha ha, we're going to send a hooker over to your house as a thank you for your rewrite kind of bullshit.

I mean a lot of really shitty, shitty boys club bullshit. And Matt and I were terrified because we're just like because that it wasn't us didn't get it, and we're like we can't do this, Like we can't fake this. There's no if this is what Hollywood is, We're not going to last too long, and luckily it began to ease off. Like I think even ten years later, it was less, and I think it's it's much less now. I'm not saying it's great now, but I'm saying it's a lot less.

Like like, misogyny was a badge of honor with these guys. And and there are books you can read about the movie business in the eighties and nineties where it'll give you a real good picture of what that was. So he was part of it, and believe me, he was getting rewarded for it. Not a person in his life was telling him, Hey, I would to tone it down on being a fucking asshole. Yea.

Even if they had, it wouldn't work. But still yeah, I mean, Hollywood is very slow to adapt when it comes to any type of correctness or awareness. They seemed to love. They seem to not take anything seriously until the worst case scenario happened. Well, because because psychopathic behavior has always been associated with show business, even before the moves existed, there's always always been the insane artist.

So until I mean very recently, like in the last five years, there's always been this feeling of well, but that's kind of the business we're in. We're about one century away from the circus. Well, we're dealing with the artists and they're crazy, but crazy is rare and profitable. So somehow, NNA, you just gotta owe I know how to control this, but no one knows how to come anyway. But if it can turn a dollar, it's worth it.

And there's always been a self perpetuated belief that that is something to value and to indulge. You've got to be crazy. Saturday Night Live, we have to be there all night or the sketches won't be good. Really, you can't write them sketches during the day. Now, it's got to be all night.

And in the seventies it's got to be with cocaine. Twenty years later, when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were on the show and Will Ferrell all they were drinking we're fucking smoothies and you know, almond milk, and they were all doing yoga and working out and nobody smoked. And let me tell you, sketches were fucking hilarious. It doesn't take that. And then there's writers that I deal with now who are like, well, people say I should go to therapy.

But if I go to therapy, I'll never write again. No, no, no, you'll write again. You'll write better, and you'll write easier, and you'll be happier. So I think hopefully we're moving into an era in general in show business where it's okay not to be crazy, and it's okay not to be an asshole. In fact, it's super valued.

You don't have to put on the airs of being a dickhead constantly. Well it's always really not even the airs. Just let that part of you out right. In an environment that begs you to be an asshole, many people who are not assholes will find, you know, an opportunity because we all have a shitty side. There'll be an asshole just as easily.

If you're an environment that says, no, we don't really want that or need that. Guess what, Suddenly it ain't showing up every day. Well, it's always fascinated me how a right mind actually works when they're writing, Like what is going through their head emotionally? Like does the does their experiences in life affect how they write a thing that has nothing to do with their life? You know how they always say right, what you know?

Right? Whether what if you're writing something completely like genre specific, that has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with anything in your life. How much of your you know, how much of you emotionally is in that script? Like what is going through your head? And what?

Like? How what is there? When is your Like? Do you have a certain place you have to be to write successfully or a certain mindset? You know what I mean?

Does that make sense? I'll answer your question. First of all, the longer you do it, and if you're lucky enough to get work, you learn very quickly to work under any circumstance. So whether you're in a great mood that day, or it's the worst day of your life, or you've got the stomach flu or you're hungover, your craft has been developed enough that you can get it done. It's like, Okay, I feel like shit, but I know how to write it.

Scene between these two people, you know, and he's breaking up with her. I can write that scene. I know what the needs of this deular project are, right, what you know? The biggest misunderstood rule of writing and the one that was designed and purposely phrased in that way to shame, humiliate, and keep writers out because that's another thing. You know, writers of past generations believed their own bullshit and got high on their own supply of I'm magic and not writers are born.

You can't teach writing. You have to be born a writer and you've got it, you know, and then you've got to go, you know, you're everyone's got to be Hemingway and you shouldn't pick up a pen until you've gone to war, you know, against the you know, the Spanish fascists. It's like no, no, no, no no. And Matt and I had that problem because it's like, write what you know what, I'm going to write a movie about two white guys from la who went to film school. L Smith did it with Clerks, right, but what Richard right?

Asshole to put again? Like that again for all intents and purposes, right, like yeah, and you know, you know people who've been to've been in war, Yes, they can write about war. And it's like, oh, okay, I get it. And that cop wrote a really cool cop thing. Whatever.

Here's the thing. Everyone's been to high school. Everyone's had a crush, everyone's seeing that crush have a crush on someone else. Everyone has gone to a dance with someone that they love and it's the greatest moment of their life. And sometime that evening realized that the person said yes for reasons that I have nothing to do with you.

Everyone has gone through a lot of everyone has disappointed their parents. Everyone has felt unequal to the task, whether that task is your high school history final, or going out and getting a job at McDonald's, or asking someone out, or dealing with the scary guy. And that's what we mean. When people say write what you know. They don't mean write about the Coastguard because you were in the Coastguard.

They mean in any story you tell if you're writing about vampires. I've spent half my career writing about vampires. But I'm never writing about vampires. I'm writing about people with a drinking problem. I'm writing about people who got to have some every night and they wish they didn't, but they do, And how does that play hell with the life they're trying to live.

Yeah, So for me, a vampire, a werewolf, I am writing about me. I'm you know, I'm as long as you know what the metaphor is, Carrie, that's easy. Stephen King didn't write a great book called Carrie because he knew about psychokinesis, he knew about high school politics and the way high school kids carry each other's skin off. And he found a metaphor through which to tell that story. And that's why it's the story that it is, and it lived for fifty years.

And another thing of Stephen King I heard in a video once, like when he wrote The Tommy Knockers. This was after his drug or drinking problem. He wrote it as kind of an allegory to his about his drinking or drug problem, because the whole thing is about these people who become more creative and more you know thing after they get this substance, alien substance in them and they want more of it. And so Stephen King wrote that as an allegory to the fact that he couldn't write unless he was on something, so he was afraid that, you know, it's actually direct allegory to Robert Town and his creation of Chinatown and his subsequent fall from grace afterwards. He needs the magic dust to feel anything you can go through, and believe me, entire college courses I'm sure designed to do this.

Nothing would be more fun and going through you know, just say the first ten fifteen years of Stephen King novels and just going, Okay, what's the metaphor here, what's the allegory here? And sometimes they're very close. I mean sometimes it's almost just like, I mean, misery is like, well, there's no metaphor. It's about it's about the voracious fan. You know.

It's like and it's literally about a voracious fan. It's like, Okay, the Dark Half is literally about how you know, you know what, the freedom of the pseudonym, but the curse of the pseudonym, you know, and then then you can just go back to you know, it's like, well, okay, so really the dark half is Jacqueline High, Yeah, you know so, or is it Frankenstein. I Mean, there's nothing more fun than doing that math. But that's what the best writing is. So yes, sometimes a person lives a life in New York and then writes bright lights, big city or less than zero.

But for the rest of us, we're trying to figure out what zombies have to do with, you know, our lives, and it's not that hard to figure it out, and then writes right, because the best zombie stories the zombies are an allegory for something else. Anyways, Yeah, Romero did it perfectly, and so did Dan O'Bannon. The first Turn of the Living Dead the first night I have Living Dead about you know, racism. Dawn of the Dead was about consumerism, and I forget what. I forget what the last one was about.

Day of the Dead Dead, Yeah, forgot, it was about about war. Kind of so, Richard, because this episode has been going on for quite some time now, I think it would be only app since this is probably the last time that I will ever be talking to you about this movie in a recorded narrative, because this is the second time now, I wanted to kind of seed the floor to you, for you to kind of give your your kind of what what under Siege two ultimately means to you thirty years later and kind of like where you're kind of like again, you've already kind of talked to it a little bit, but like I just I guess I kind of want to know, with hindsight being what it is now, what does under Siege two mean to you?

Know? Sitting down and rewatch again, Well, it's I can enjoy it now much more than I could then because for the for many years, all I was seeing were the missed opportunities and remembering all the scenes that we wrote and the way we want things to play out. And then and then then you sort of turn a corner after a while. And luckily, other things happened in my career that I was very proud of and and happy about, and I got to feel that I did express something of my self, primarily in the Mothman prophecies and in the television show that I did Miracles, which which is very mothman esque, very much sort of that same mood and tone and of those same concerns. But after that, it was like, oh, you know what, people watch the movie, people enjoy it, people have good memories of it, even though they don't obviously have you know, you know, Steven Seagal is not anyone that you know, people are really proud of or excited about now, but back in the day when he was making movies, I think people do have good memories of the summer they saw that movie, or if they saw it with their dad, like I said, which is great, I mean, and that's all.

That's Look, a lot of people don't really know what movie stars are really like. The vast majority of them are fantastic people and then some are really really not. But the movie you're watching, you're allowed to enjoy it. You're allowed to enjoy whatever you want. You know, it's a work of art.

It isn't the person. I got past my own personal history with it. I came to enjoy it. I went to a twenty fifth anniversary screening of it in Los Angeles a few years back, and it was really fun to see it with a crowd of people far younger than me and see how they reacted to it and what their feeling was. And they just looked at it as this odd artifact, like this is nuts.

Those effects are precgi, the stunts are bizarre. The logic and tone and just assertion of what the values of the movie are are so not the way movies are made today. That that it's a revelation for people, and if they like movies, they really find it. I don't really find a campy maybe campy as part of it, but they certainly get a lot out of it and a lot to enjoy. So I have I have all you know, good memories.

I love Verne's book, I love Vern's coverage of it, I love Verney Away, and and when I look back on it as a time when I learned how to write, and when I was spending you know, hours and hours and hours. I mean, I've never I've never spent as much time with Matt since because he went off to direct and I went off into television, which was always my number one goal. And we've remained friends ever since, and we've seen each other and we've even worked together. He directed The Miracles pilot, which is And yet that was when we were young and hungry and terrified, and both of us utterly convinced we would never work in this business, that the odds were just against us, and that and that who were we to ever think we would ever be able to work in Hollywood?

And if there's a lesson to be learned, it's that, you know, spend the time. You know. We didn't do it as a lark. We worked for years on it before it ever was read by anyone else, because we wanted it to be the best action movie that had ever been made, even it was based structurally on something else. That's what you do if you if you sit down to write a romantic comedy, you watch every romantic comedy of the last eighty five years, and you all of that into the one that you write, and there's certain things that are always going to be there, you know, structurally, And that's what we were doing, and we did it with love, and we wrote a script that we love more than anything we'd ever done.

And I think even when we look back at it, we're like, God, that script, that was the one that was the one that told us that maybe we had we had what it took. Do you still have a copy of it? The original? Like first rep? I guess the question, I guess the real question, Richard is is that it for that script?

Oh yeah, yeah, neither one of us. It's like, yeah, we did that. There's you know, he's working obviously on his stuff. I'm doing my things. It was, you know, what happened happened one way or another.

It got us both to our next steps. Um, you know, with me, I kind of had to start over because it's tough when when you're when you're when you're moving forward as a writer. People saw that as well, this is co written and we don't know who wrote what, so now we need your thing. And it wasn't until actually nineteen ninety five, the year that movie came out, I wrote another movie that never got made, but it was the movie that got me every every job, at every meeting, and it was the first one that I ever wrote on my own that was really good. And then two years after that I wrote for three years after that, I wrote Mothman Prophecies, and then that one got bought and eventually made, And then that was the one that really sort of cemented me as, oh, okay, he's a writer on his own.

What was the one in between under siegeed Mothman Um. It was a script that was originally called Truther Consequences because it took place in New Mexico and there's a city in New Mexico. Yeah, yeah, and then and then and then and then I changed the title to Day of the Dead, but that was confusing because people thought it was the zombie thing, but I'm like, no, it's Dia de los Mortos. That's weird that we just mentioned that too. Yeah.

And then it was in development for a while under the time Little Redemption, which I never loved, and for a while it looked like it was going to get made, and then and then ultimately it just it just fell out of development and never quite got made, but it got me the job writing the A Team movie in nineteen ninety six, which was you know, at that time, The eighteen was my favorite show. Was kind of the reason I got into TV writing. So being able to work with Stephen Cannell and write that movie was the greatest year ever. But but ultimately that draft never got made and fourteen years later they made a different version and That's Fine, which was a movie I enjoyed. And then our version more lighthearted, more like the spirit of the show.

Yeah, I think so, I think because the Joe Carnahan film, I mean, as entertaining as it is, it's a really entertaining film, but it's it's darker than the eighteen usually is. Yeah, but it was enjoyable. It was made it a different time and and you know Candell always wanted to do He's like, the tone I want this movie to have is True Lies. I wanted to be over the top, but not to the point where you dismiss it and check out. But it's got to have that feeling.

It shouldn't feel like, you know, whatever the barn identity or aside from the problematic stuff in True Lies, it's a great movie. He loved it, like it's funny, but it's big, over the top action and that's what So that was what I was trying to do with my draft. And then but then, but then, then Moffman was was like eighteen didn't get made, was considered that script was considered a failure. I was kind of like Underseiege two would come out, you know, was not considered anything great and I only had shared credit. I was kind of nowhere, and and that's when I decided, I got I'm going to write a movie about the supernatural with no guns.

I was gonna write something totally different. And I had no money, I had no offers, I'd know nothing. And I wrote that script and then a couple two three very lucky things happened and it got made, and then that led to the show Miracles, which got me into TV. And the fact that that got made was a miracle. So make no mistake.

Yes, you got to be talented and then you have to be lucky. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I know the feeling. It's just you literally don't know. Well, now, let me ask you something like after Underseage two got released in theaters, like, were you ever approached to by this year?

Was like, hey, what about Underseage three? Do you have any ideas for that one? They just come out because because Matt and I did not continue as a writing team immediately. Yeah, if we had wanted to, and if if Matt's goal was to direct, and at the time, it didn't seem like us like us co writing things was going to lead to him directing things. So he, you know, in the early nineties, also went to uh grad school and then and then was like, I want to make a very small film for my first film, and his agents hooked him up with Jason Kadam's and they wrote The Pall Bearer and that, and that was designed to be his his directorial debut.

And while he was doing that, I was writing the eighteen movie and other big action things and then ultimately Mothman. So his movie came out, and then Mothman got purchased, and then over a number of years ultimately got made. And so we're just sort of been on different paths and and and so, so we never got a chance to take advantage of under Siege two. Yeah, So the Paul Barr you mean the David Schwimmer glance, Oh, I didn't I wrote that. I didn't know that that's interesting co wrote and directed it.

I didn't know well, and you know it's you know, like you've kind of mentioned, you know, in this you know, this Undersiege two story. The other thing is, I mean, you know your original script wasn't Undersea, wasn't an under Siege sequel to begin with? Right, you know. It's like it's like all those things that that were essentially you know, scripts for X Files episodes that God turned into movies like the one like Final Destination. Right, It's like, we've got this great script.

How do we take advantage of pre existing things? Yeah? Well it's like what Dihad the Vengeance that was supposed to be a lethal weapon film original? A lot of films turn up we're starting out is like other things fact scripts for other ideas. Yeah, So, I mean a lot of people don't know.

Die Hard was based on a book called Nothing Lest Forever by Rodert Thorpe, and the original quote unquote original starred Frank Sinatra as I think was called the Detective, and he was supposed to be in die Hard. Yeah, he had the option to star in diarc. He had the option to star and Diehard, and he turned it down, and they went to Bruce Willis and the rest is history, because I really can't see Frank Sinatra going hey, yippikaya, motherfucker. That would have been pretty great though that was more Telly Savalis than than Frank Sinatra. But whatever.

So Richard, I do want to thank you for joining us. This has been I think about as deep of a dive into under Siege two as I don't think anyone's covering this movie because I don't know. If there's an there must be an action movie podcast out there. There has to be. I just I don't understand why, like some of these Sagal movies are so fun and they just kind of get discounted because there's Sagal movie.

Like, yeah, well, that's what we do with the podcast. We do what Richard says, we'd kind of we we we see the film and not the artist. Yah. We watch well yeah, I mean because because I don't think we've hidden it very well that sometimes we do kind of shit on the on the pod. I mean, he has some pretty terrible opinions about stuff so well.

I mean, and some of those movies, especially like more directive video stuff, feel a little more self indulgent and then we kind of have to talk about that because you can't really not talk, you know, when you when you go back and read anything about Hollywood, you know, I mean, go go back to the eighties, the seventies, the sixties, fifties, go even further back. It's really reading about who these people were, from the studio chiefs to the directors to the actors. But there's a lot of genius and a lot of really reprehensible behavior, and some of it's a reflection of the time, and some of it's a reflection of Hollywood culture and and indulging artistic misbehavior and putting it, you know, and ascribing it too well, you know, what do you expect from an actor, a director, a writer, you know, the musician?

Yeah, you know, And then of course, and then of course we realize, oh wait a second, But it's everybody. It's it's it's politics, and it's business, and it's Wall Street, it's everywhere, it's it's anywhere people are given power. That power will be used to allow some people to do some pretty shitty things to other people. So so it's like, you know, it's just more interesting with Hollywood because you know the names well, and you get to end. They're making a product that I think is universally consumed.

You know, you know they're they're like you said, I was having this conversation Earlier's like, they're terrible people in all these industries. It's just they're not making movies that people watch. We don't. There's no way to really connect up with the shitty behavior of the people at you know, you know, Hewlett Packard. Yeah, some some tech firm or some you know, auto firm, or some oil firm.

It's like, yeah, okay, whatever. Definitely an oil firm because Segal will just yeah, He's show up and kill you, especially if you look like Michael Caine. So so Richard would you're not here? Where could people find you if they were looking for you or things that you have worked on? They can find me on Twitter at Richard HadAM And if you want to know what I've been doing for the last few years and I'm still doing now, check out Titans on HBO Max.

The first three seasons are available for streaming, and we're working on season four right now filming in Toronto. Jesus Christ. There could be five and six, and seven, and eight and nine, ten, who knows never Sky's the limit. Sky's the limit. When you're talking about comic book stuff.

They like to run things into the ground, and god damn it they will. Oh yeah, let's do it, baby. This is how you explain morbous. That's why they made morbious. They wanted to milk the Spider Man teat as much as they could, exactly, and Morbius is more.

Yeah, exactly. What about you, Trevor, Where can people find you? Well, you can find me on Twitter at ad Vertigo. Yeah, basically on Twitter because Instagram is something I don't really use that much Twitter. I mainly used to troll Scientology, but you know, yeah, you can find me on bed Forgo.

You can also find me from time to time on the Culture Cast with Yours truly Chris Stashu. Yeah, that's where you can go find me, and please find me. I need to be found. I don't know where I am right now. Help I'm lost, man and ask man.

Prophecies's a good one. And as for me, you can find me at c Stashu dot com, cstacchiw dot com. That's my link tree. Go there. I Richard and I work on a podcast together called rankin on Bass.

It's a waking nightmare for Richard, a true fever dream of an experience every time we get together and record with our dear friend who's also has his own show, mister Mike White of the Projection Booth podcast, who I work with on other shows like Barney Miller, Colombo other things that Richard has been on, actually on episodes of both of those. So you can find all that at c Stashu dot com. As for this show on sagal dot com, and that's it where you can go. We have a Facebook Twitter, but we just post the episodes. Come on, we're making the content.

Come listen. By the way, Underseage two is a ponytail up. Yeah it is. Well, it's like it's better than under Siege. So there you go, which I think we talked about Underseage like three hours.

So and big thanks to you, Richard. This has been a long episode. I think this is probably the longest episode that you and I have ever done together for Trevor and I. It's probably I think as long as the Verne episode, almost as long, maybe a little longer. We're at right now, we're at two hours and forty one minutes, so it's it's been feel bad for the guy who has this show.

But you know what, though, it's it's been a great two and a half hours because this has been a long time in the making. Like when I first mentioned Erse, I said to him, we gotta get Richard, we go, we gotta talk at Richard, and then I broke your heart and I was like, Richard and I have technically already talked about it together. Richard and I have probably talked about under Siege two together for like five fucking hours at this But I'm a stubborn son of a bitch. Chris, I know, it was like, I need we want average another. I was like, okay, bye, I gotta talk to Richard Man.

Chris knows that I, you know, I like to talk. So getting me to talk about anything, but especially under Siege two, you know that's not a big ask. I'm happy to do it. And it was so so great to be here, and I'm so happy to talk to you guys, and hopefully you guys will keep going with I don't know, some other podcast and I can go back and just not Cigal, nothing fucking Cigal. He's no more cical, no worse atal