EP026 –  Literally Don’t Do This, But Don’t Do This Literally with Alex Ross Perry

We’re wandering through a mystery neighborhood (we don’t know the name) with Alex Ross Perry, who has TWO movies screening in Austin on the same day.

Here to promote his 10-year passion project VIDEO HEAVEN—an essay film about video stores screening at Austin Film Society, and his part of the omnibus VHS series at Fantastic Fest, Alex has built up a fair amount of cred since 2014’s LISTEN UP, PHILIP. Of course, “you can’t pay for Montessori preschool with cred.” Ain’t that the truth.

We catch Alex on the heels of last year’s PAVEMENTS, a fictional(?) documentary about the indie rock band Pavement that aims to be both fabricated—and factual. We’ve got questions and he’s got answers, pulling at the seams of a complicated film for which he created a fake Hollywood biopic (Joe Keery as Stephen Malkmus), staged a full off-Broadway musical with audiences who had no idea they were in a movie, and curated a hagiographic four-day Pavement museum all while cutting an archival dive into the 1990s phenoms against a 2022 reunion tour. It’s a lot.

We walk where the streets all have names… and end up with Alex’s contrarian take on AI, which is both slanted and enchanting: the long and short of it, he’s not worried. This industry is built on execs’ calendars filled with endless notes calls with the sole job of justifying everyone’s existence. Just like politicians, “studio execs won’t let themselves be put out to pasture….and nobody who’s rich shows themselves the door.”

Discussion links: IMPOLEX (2009) | LISTEN UP PHILIP (2014) | COLOR WHEEL (2011) | QUEEN OF EARTH (2015) | HER SMELL (2018) | RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW (2023) | VHS HALLOWEEN (2025) | VIDEO HEAVEN (2024) | SLOW CENTURY (2002) | PAVEMENTS (2024) | DUNKIRK (2017) | BARBIE (2023) | BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018) | ROCKET MAN (2019) | SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS 2 (2008)

Tags

Alex Ross Perry, Pavement documentary, Video Heaven, indie filmmaking, music documentary, documentary filmmaking, Stephen Malkmus, experimental documentary, mockumentary, Robert Greene editor, Austin Film Society, Fantastic Fest, video store documentary, indie rock documentary, fair use filmmaking, VHS horror, Listen Up Philip, screenwriting, AI and filmmaking, narrative documentary

So you guys didn't bring water?

No.

After all that, but we got work to do.

I see, I see.

Um, but I, and we only have so many hands

here.

Right.

You need like a, a hiking pack with the straw that goes into your,

Ooh, that could be a good potential sauce.

I mean, it's not,

Alex hadn't even thought of that.

It's not, it's not hospitable here.

It's not like go for a lovely, you know, we try and make it faster.

We're facing, we're facing some brutal weather many months out of the year.

And where are you based?

You're in New York, right?

Upstate now?

Yeah.

Upstate Hudson Valley.

Yeah.

Lower Hudson.

Lower Hudson.

Alright.

We've started walking.

We are in this neighborhood that nobody knows the answer to what it's called.

We are walking with somebody we're already talking to, but

we haven't introduced you two.

I think we're off to a pretty good start.

It's mysterious.

It's Alex Ross Perry.

Hello.

Oh, the mystery is solved.

Going for a stroll on your left.

You're listening to Dock Walks with Ben and Keith.

We're out walking.

It's not too hot today.

This is like for Austin.

You're

lucking

out.

I, I've had three weeks of weather at home, not breaking 79, so it's a bit

of a shock to come down here and see this in September when at home it's.

In, in the fifties.

By midnight.

Yeah.

I'm a little concerned with you wearing long pants

as well.

Oh, I, I, I don't, I don't wear shorts.

We're about to go do a q and a at Austin Film Society.

I'm not gonna show, I'm not gonna show up for that.

Well, you're a, you're a professional.

I appreciate that.

So what are you doing in Austin?

I made a segment in shutter's, annual franchise called VHS.

For those who don't know, the VHS franchise is.

An omnibus franchise built around found footage horror.

Each one is made up of either five or six segments made by five or six

different filmmakers, and I contributed a chapter to this year's awesome.

And it had its premier at Fantastic Fest in advance of an

October streaming date on Shutter.

Cool.

And I, I came down to promote it, do some press, meet the other filmmakers

in this big collaborative project and.

Coincidentally, I just happened to be looking and seeing where my other

recent film Video Heaven was playing these days and I said, wait, it's

playing in Austin while I am there.

Oh, this is coincidence.

A total coincidence.

My flight is at seven.

And I said, oh, if this is at like five, that's a bad coincidence.

And the screening was at 1230 and I said, my obligations to Shutter

are complete and I'll be there.

Amazing.

Wow.

You have two movies playing in Austin, Texas.

Two different movies.

In the same day.

That seems like success.

It does.

Of course, we know that there's versions of success that are

relevant and less relevant.

Obviously, getting to make a little 20 minute piece of a two hour

horror film is, is successful.

Spending 10 years on an essay film largely with one other collaborator

and editor, it's successful.

That's not something anybody can do, but we all know that no documentary

is going to make you rich much less a.

Side, side, side, project, essay, film.

Wait a second.

Documentary is not, we're not in it for the money.

I, well, I think you know this movie, video Heaven.

Like I said, the entire infrastructure of the movie over

a decade is less than 10 people.

And it was a very, very cheap movie.

'cause it's, we've created no material for it.

Right.

We sourced every clip in it.

So I think I'll make, I'll probably make more money on this than anything else I've

ever made, but that's, that's 10 years of making an essay film for under $50,000

that, you know, every screening that brings in 500 gets us closer to profit.

Right.

So we're fair using the whole thing, I'm assuming.

Oh, absolutely.

Fair use.

Yeah.

Yeah.

175 clips of.

Video store depictions in film and television from the late seventies

into the theoretical future.

Well, so we should video heaven, like we should do a full intro though.

Sure.

We're just off to the races, but let's,

let's, let's back up.

Let's back up.

So here we are.

We're walking.

This is Alex Ross Fest.

Easy for you to say.

This is Alex Ross Perry, visiting from New York.

Active filmmaker with multiple titles on the marquees this year.

We were chatting beforehand.

You met Ben back in 2009 when you put out your first film.

Yeah.

Cve.

What film was that?

A movie of mine was called Impex Impex.

16 millimeter kind of Midnight Fever Dream Gravity's Rainbow inspired.

73 minute curio.

There you go.

That's a great simple one-liner description.

I got it.

Well, I I've been giving it for 16 years.

Yeah, yeah.

I know how to describe it now.

There

you go.

I became aware of you with Listen Up Philip, which is 2014.

That's right.

Yeah.

And Jason

Schwartzman is in that.

That's right.

Yeah.

And, and so think of you as an indie scripted comedy with a twist,

sad comedy, interesting human experience kind of filmmaker.

Uh, but you've got three titles this year that, that defy that

overly simplified description.

Yeah.

How was that description

for you?

You know,

I haven't been practicing that for 16 years or, or ever.

It's

some that, that is, you know, I think after Color Wheel and listen up, Philip.

That was definitely mostly what anyone, who'd ever seen anything

I made would say and had seen.

And then, you know, I've, I just try to make different things and

the movies after that are highly scripted, of course, in their own way.

But everything's different.

And I don't think if somebody had only seen.

Queen of Earth and her smell, they would be like illiterate, humorous, dramatic.

Where it'd be like, wow, these are just kind of like intense psychological films.

Mm-hmm.

So you never know.

It just depends on which two or three people have maybe seen.

Yeah.

And if people have only seen stuff I've made in the last two years, they'll

be like, oh, I didn't know that guy.

Like made narrative films.

Exactly.

Well, and that's what's so interesting to talk with you about right now, is you

are primarily a scripted director who has made not one, but two documentaries.

In a row now.

Yeah,

in a row concurrently.

It's not like I finished one and made the other.

It's like they've come out in a row.

But of course, you know, you're often working on different

things with different people.

Right.

Do you consider both pavements, which came out in 2024 and is still kind

of, you know, bouncing around and this new film Video Heaven, which is

the video essay we were just talking about over the last 11 years, do

you consider those documentaries?

Oh, certainly.

Yeah, they're definitely documentaries.

Video happens strictly a documentary, but, you know, pavements is, it's, it's,

it's a, it's a fictional documentary or it's a, it's a scripted non-fiction film.

But yeah, it's, it's curious, you know, like up until I made this

movie, 2018 called Her Smell, I had written and directed at that

0.6 scripted cast, traditionally shot and edited narrative features.

Now, I made a concert film that has a narrative component in it.

I made pavement movie video heaven.

People say, how many movies have you made?

And I'm like, well.

I mean to me, like nine or 10.

But like someone might look at a concert film that I was just a co-director on

and be like, well, that's doesn't count.

Which one's that

it's called right here.

Right now.

It's by the Swedish Metal Band Ghost, who I collaborate with a lot.

Okay.

But yeah, you know, video Heavens a documentary.

It's an essay film.

It's nonfiction for sure.

Pavements is a documentary, but it's definitely fiction.

So it depends if, if, if, if you can have a documentary that's fiction, then

yeah, it's definitely a documentary.

Wow.

If that breaks the rules then, then no, it's just a fiction film that

uses the camera and editing aesthetics of documentary to make people not

understand what they're watching.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's exceeds.

I want to ask a lot of follow up questions about that.

'cause as a Pavement fan, I was so excited.

To see that trailer.

'cause I didn't know that you were working on that film until I saw the

trailer and I knew that there was already a pavement documentary made by Lance

Bangs probably what, 10, 15 years ago?

Something like that.

Oh, longer, I mean, yeah, it's mid, I would guess 2003 even.

It's pretty soon after they broke.

Okay.

Slow.

It's just a dvd.

Know it's a DVD.

So it came out in the DVD era, it wasn't Right, and I a film, it was not

like that movie was released in even like the minor music documentary way.

But so how does this, wait,

are

you leading us over here to look

at this?

I'm

just taking a look at what's going on over here.

This

assemblage of, of Bricker

Bride.

I saw Lance Bang shows up in the credits to your film.

It's true.

He via his, his, uh.

Inestimable, is that the right word?

When something's just like beyond esteem.

His, his unfathomable archive.

Yeah.

That he, he used to make his own movie.

Getting him involved was necessary in order to have access to some of

his material and most crucially, ideally, not stuff that he had used.

Right.

We wanna see other stuff, stuff he cut out.

He has this thing where Stephen Malus is sitting on the porch of a house.

Filming what is meant to be an introduction.

Welcome.

I'm Steven Malcolms from the band Pavement and the plane flies overhead

and you can, you know, they're kind of like, hang on, let's hold for sound.

And Malcolms just kind of sits there for like a minute and just keeps talking.

And of course when you're editing a real thing, you cut that out.

And me and the editor were both watching this, the kind of the same day.

And I text him and I was like, have you seen this thing where it's like

the camera's just rolling, but he like.

It's the stuff anyone else would cut out and he's like, yeah, we're

starting the movie with that, like the the introduction that you wouldn't

use the first time you make a movie.

Right Now we use the introduction where it's like, yeah, he's just

holding for sound and there's moments of truth in that.

Yeah.

Where the second someone says, hold for sound, but don't cut.

They're like, this will never get used.

Right.

I can make some funny faces.

I can clown around.

Yeah.

And you show 30 seconds of honesty.

That no one would ever give.

If it was like, okay, action go.

They just think like, all right, well you won't use this.

Yeah.

'cause the sound is weird.

So stuff like that was what we found in Lance's Archive and

he is a producer on the movie.

Gotcha.

And was uh, you know, supportive.

He was there at Venice with us New York Film Festival.

His footage really is valuable.

I appreciate that.

We have not held for sound, but we have created these dogs.

We're causing anxiety in the canine population of this neighborhood.

Well, there's, you know, bird birds and dogs in life.

Now that we are in this neighborhood, we are trying to

decide what this neighborhood is.

Mm-hmm.

And I've come to, remember now, I have driven around this neighborhood

before, and one of the things that makes me so excited about is all

the names of the streets in this neighborhood are people's names.

Okay.

So when you're giving people direct, if you live in this neighborhood and

you're giving people directions, it's you, you sound like a real gossip.

Sure.

Right.

The corner of Lisa and Isabelle.

Yeah.

Like, and if Lisa and Isabelle, you know.

Ever break up?

Like you gotta move,

you're in trouble.

Yeah.

You're not gonna know where you are.

There is

a, there actually is an intersection in here that is important to me.

My mother's name is Marilyn.

My wife's name is Sarah, and those two streets intersect in this neighborhood.

Alright,

well here we're,

we're, so we're talking about pavements.

And this is a big opportunity to kind of take a band that has like a

rabid following, has like tentacles of inspiration that go far beyond

that fan base and is also having a moment of re-emergence in 2022.

Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of that project, how it started?

It's very simple.

Their, their 30th anniversary reunion was meant to be in 2020.

It was curtailed by the pandemic and somewhere in that summer when

it became clear that they would be inactive for at least another year,

and just saying, we have to point out that as we're talking about your documentary

about an indie band, we are walking by what sounds like band practice here.

I think in this.

It was like some middle-aged dad banging away on his drums on Sunday.

Many

cars

there, 'cause the whole, the whole band is there.

You're saying, Hey,

at the

corner of

Isabel and Lisa, don't disparage middle-aged dads playing drums, please.

So they just, somewhere, somewhere in the chain of Matador

records, they're longtime label.

The idea was there that there's no reason that we're not using this time to, uh,

to make something, to make a movie.

It's, it's time.

This is an obvious thing.

Bands do it.

We should do it.

And it just kind of came from there.

And one of the film's producers.

Who Matt Matador went to.

Some producers, they, they knew.

One of the producers said, I think I've got the guy for this.

He said to me, I thought of you because as a scripted, fictional

character, it feels like you would create a Stephen Malus character.

He, as a person in, in the world, and his relationships with people and

his genius is, is very similar to the characters you would think of and make.

And I said, I agree.

So let's make him a, a, a, a fictional character in his own true story.

And it was kind of just from there, I, I came up with some very wonky

ideas, all of which are what the movie is, suggested them to him in

a series of casual conversations.

And he said, let's do it.

A year later or so, I had interviewed everyone in the band.

All their colleagues compiled research, and then their concerts finally happened

in 2022, and they, in the interim had.

Unexpected, unanticipated viral success of a huge nature that was

changing what they had always been in the eyes of fans and the public.

Right.

And that was a made the movie, movie clip About which song?

Harness your hopes.

It was B side that, you know, wasn't even really on my radar

as research because it played No, it played no role in their story.

It was not, they'd only ever performed it even in concert once prior to breaking up.

And suddenly, by the time we're making the movie two years later, it's a different

story than the one we set out to make.

That's wild.

That's documentary.

And that was

on

their last album, which was, it was actually a B side from the

penultimate album.

It was a B side from Bright in the Corners.

Bright in

the corners,

like even, even more, even more improbable.

And you know, the simplest way to explain the sort of real world

documentary relationship in this is sometimes the, the world writes

your story for you in a way that's favorable to the movie, but unexpected.

Yes.

One of my earliest jokes, ideas, concepts, was.

A very acclaimed band, beloved, phenomenally successful in their own way,

acclaim, but they never had the sales.

They never made the money.

So in the, in the world of this movie, we'll show a series of gold and platinum

records that in our fictional version of the band they have received, because

we want to tell a story about what if that outsized influence was real.

And then by the time we finish the movie, they have gold records.

No way.

So like, look at that.

It's just not even like the joke doesn't even read anymore.

Wow.

Because fans may have seen them on Instagram being given

their gold seven inches.

So then when they see the movie, it's like, yeah, this, of course

it's a band that's, this is a band that puts up those numbers.

That's incredible.

And that speaks to the power of documentary.

I mean, I think anybody who spends their time making nonfiction work has a

version of a story like that where it's like you set out to make this story.

And you discover in the process that there's actually a better story that kind

of rises to the occasion to meet you?

It can.

It can.

And something I never would've suggested we try to do is, you know,

it's in order to sell people in this fictional version of this story on

the band's outsize influence, it'd be great if we had like a clip of some

movie that made a billion dollars in which malus or pavement is referenced.

I couldn't come up with that because how could we, how could we generate that?

And by the time we're making the movie, I've been told like there's going to

be a Stephen Malus joke in Barbie.

And by the time, by the time we were finished our movie, we, we have the

clip of Barbie that in 2020 when we started, there would've been no, no

reason to assume that that would happen.

But by the time we finished the movie, we had it.

That's, you know, a joke I would've come up with is, wouldn't it be funny

if pavement were on the giant billboard?

Overlooking Times Square.

But by the time we finished the edit that had happened.

Wow.

So I, I went to Times Square and got the shot of their music video that I

also directed playing on the jumbotron.

That's incredible.

It sounds like you need to be some type of fortune teller payment

needs you to predict a lot more.

Well, it's things that are gonna happen.

It's interesting in terms of the, you know, the nonfiction aspects you wanna

talk about, which is just simply when I started these interviews in 2020.

No one in this band had seen each other in 10 years.

They hadn't been in the same room since their last reunion tour.

By the time we finished the film in 2024, they had experienced the most

overt success of their 35 year career.

Wow.

And that's just, that's just, you're making a movie about two different bands.

The band we started making the movie about, and the band, we.

Premiered the movie about the entire conceit I was exploring in all the

research was why didn't this band that are just undeniably beloved by many,

better than most acclaimed, why did they never go the distance with the,

with the, with the money and with the success and with the ticket sales, right?

But then by the time the movie was finished, they had done that.

They had, they had played the biggest shows of their career.

Biggest venues, highest ticket prices.

Younger audiences, diverse audiences, and we were, you know, the whole, the,

the initial conceit was irrelevant.

So as a filmmaker, were you like, I've wanted, it was great.

Yeah.

This is

jackpot.

It was better that all this stuff happened.

We had more material to play with.

Right.

Or was there a part of you that was like, but if that hadn't

happened, the jokes would've landed harder for your original con

No, the only thing that I really was like, it's not, I mean, you're here in

Austin, they're playing here next weekend.

Yeah.

I just wanted.

Some sense in the movie of this is their last show, maybe forever.

And of course years later they're still playing.

So I just thought it would be, you know, the, the previous

reunion tour ended definitively.

Yeah.

And we show that in the movie.

As you were first developing this idea, and Nick, you said you came up

with like a lot of different ideas and those ideas end up in the movie.

Can we kind of break those down into some subcategories?

Is that cool to talk about?

The, there's the movie.

Mm-hmm.

The

a a a Scripted Biopic of the Hokiest order.

Yes.

Oh, which is called Free Range.

Called Range Life.

Range Life.

When they make these movies about bands, you have to name it after.

Either their most acclaimed song, an album that everybody knows them from, the Queen

movies called Bohemian Rhapsody, right?

Elton John movies called Rocket Man.

You wanna point at a title that.

Yeah, everyone knows the song, but also in a weird way, the song

kind of encapsulates the movie.

Okay.

So you have the, the, the false range Life Biopics starring

Joe Q Joe Cur as Mouth Mess.

Yeah.

And a ca a cast of others.

Uh, Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heider is the Heads of Matador.

The other that's, you know, that's the, A side, the B side of that is

that we have a, a true mockumentary about the making of range life.

So not only do we have.

Traditionally shot 35 millimeter scenes of range life.

The B side of the Range Life storyline is Joe's Preposterous Method Actor work

to discover this character and nail it and be in character for the entire shoot.

Right now, of course, the shoot of Range Life was six days, so that's

the entire shoot that includes three days of mockumentary filming.

But the reality of the movie, of course, you want it to seem like this guy's been

working on this character for months.

Right.

Stretch it over time.

Yes.

Yeah.

So

that's, so Range Life kind of has two components in the movie, and

then there's a Broadway revival, uh, an Off Broadway Jukebox Musical.

Jukebox musical, yeah.

Workshop that we staged.

I wrote the musical.

Oh, you wrote it?

I wrote the musical.

Worked with a great composer, arranger, ke and Dewitt, who has done my other films.

And his partner Danny Morris, choreographed and co-directed with

Angela Trimer, a great choreographer.

And we rehearsed that show for two months.

We had open auditions the first week of October, and we did it like

December 2nd, third, and fourth.

So that's a, so, okay, so you're, I think you just answered one

of the questions I had, right?

The, the biopic is not a complete biopic, that is a calculated shot.

25 minutes,

right?

The.

Musical though Yes.

Was a a, a complete show.

And the audiences who went into that had a full experience.

Mm-hmm.

Were, were they aware that they were part of another?

No.

Okay.

They a thing on pavement's, Instagram pavement, musical workshop performances.

Two days, only $30 tickets sold out in five minutes.

Wow.

And people walked in with no clue that there was a movie.

We hadn't announced the movie, and the show had to be credible.

So that component of it, from a nonfiction standpoint.

Is the documentary about the musical, which is called Slanted Exclamation point.

Enchanted exclamation point.

Every moment in it is true.

The reality of the auditions, the weeks of rehearsal, the choreography,

there's no thumb on the scale.

It's being fabricated entirely by the documentary filmmaker.

Meaning,

and And do the cast know that?

Yeah, but they didn't care.

Okay.

I thought they would care more.

But ultimately, when you have.

Seven weeks to learn an hour of choreography and lyrics.

Yeah.

They don't care about whatever fuckery we're doing with this, with

this movie that no one understands.

And it is an honest to God document of the two month process of putting that

show arm, standing ovations, laughter, smiles, clapping along, singing along.

There's no telling.

I'm staging a scene.

Yeah.

With no script.

In public, and that's the same as the museum component, which

I'm sure you'll ask about.

We put up a pavement museum.

And how long was that open?

Four days.

It was open during the same four days that they did four sold

out shows on this initial tour.

Oh, that's good.

To like piggyback off the show shows so that the fans could come for

a year.

I said, you know, we know the dates for these four New York shows.

Yeah, that's gonna be Pavement Weekend in New York.

Blasted out.

Fans are gonna come from all over to go to these shows.

We gotta open those same four days and have people come in the

afternoon and go straight to the show.

And I spent about nine months curating, dealing with the archive, going to the

record labels, archive, getting everyone in the band to send me stuff based on

my research in which I asked everybody if you could tell the story of the band

through objects, what are those objects?

People sent me everything.

We rented a space, we production designed it inch by inch and it was a film set.

It was completely, we, we lit it like a film set and then we just

opened the doors and started filming every day and just see what happens.

And then on one day, ribbon cutting everybody from the

label, every one of our friends.

Secretly come Saturday morning, we had 300 people there, four bands, tribute acts.

I flew them in.

Everyone played three pavement songs.

And even people in that room were not like, this must be bogus.

Because at that moment the band's profile was such that this was

a, a highly credible event in the world of how acclaimed and beloved

this band was at that moment.

Yeah, in their reunion tour.

But the thing that I'm so struck by is like everything that you're

saying is that you did all of these things and you did them.

Sincerely, or, or maybe sincere is the wrong word to use,

but you did them actually.

Yeah.

But then the way that you described them a moment ago was fuckery and

this movie that nobody understands.

Yeah.

Well, you know, if you wanna make a documentary about something

like the, the musical is a perfect example of this, right?

You, if you need a scene in a movie of a musical performance happening

on stage, you have two options.

Fill up your theater with SAG extras.

Everyone gets a hundred bucks or something.

And they have to watch it in a loop for eight hours and they have to clap.

And we explored that to, you know, because maybe that's how you wanna do it.

Or you spend two months putting on a musical.

People pay you $30 to sit in the room.

They only have to watch it once.

And if they clap, they clap.

And if they don't, they don't.

And that's the movie.

And it's just, I wrote the scene.

The scene was opening Night pavement musical, sold out New York City.

Our cast has been working for months.

This is it, and then there's the rest of the page is blank.

'cause you know, whatever.

You get what you get.

The museum was the same.

I wanted them to come.

I didn't know Malcolm in the movie.

Clowns around with the woman who's an actress who I hired to play the news.

Reporter the news.

Yeah.

Said actress friend of mine.

I, you know, I didn't say, Hey, can you please pretend all of these fake

artifacts 'cause about a quarter of the things in the museum are fake.

The golden Platinum records I mentioned a, a, a bogus MTV

movie or MTV Video Music award.

Yeah.

The absolute vodka ad. Yeah.

It was a bit of fake stuff.

He, they, they knew there would be some falsehoods, but I didn't feed him lines.

And then I saw the footage two days later and I was like.

He played along for 40 minutes.

Wow.

I didn't know he was gonna do that.

That's a miracle.

He could have just said, all right, well I've seen enough.

Let me go do the ribbon cutting.

And you know, we did the ribbon cutting, then we pulled out another ribbon and

we moved the camera from the front to the back to get the reverse angle and we

did it again and people were confused.

It was very confusing for people, but it was fun.

You got to watch bands, you got to see the See the Heroes and Thurston Moore's

there like, you know, it's a real event.

And we gave people something.

You know, but that day it was one day, it was like 11 to three.

We had them, we had like seven cameras going and I was like, you

know, we only need like 10 minutes.

We'll get it.

Yeah.

Incredible.

Just what it is, is TBD.

Yeah.

Just like, you know, documentary filmmaker.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there's multiple threads in this film.

There's archival, and then the actual tour, right?

There's the archival thread.

There is the current day tour, the, like the most standard kind of like

rock doc stuff, fly on those two things.

And then there are these, these three kind of created threads of

the, the story, the film within the film and the making of the film.

Within the film, the musical and the museum.

Mm-hmm.

Are you budgeting.

The creation of all these things as a part of your production budget?

Yes.

Okay.

And then, but the musical pays for itself.

Well, no.

Maybe it doesn't earn back its whole.

No, no.

It was funny.

You know, I think we made $10,000, uh, on box office

sales, which just offsets right.

But it's funny because shortly before we did the Museum, Matador Records had done

a, a similar popup for Interpol, and they had indie label PR budget, whereas we had.

Indie movie budget, which shockingly is more, you wouldn't think an indie

movie budget or indie documentary budget is more than anything.

Not at all.

But it's more than a label can spend on a popup that's

open for two days and is free.

Right.

And you know, I'm talking, I'm talking a couple hundred thousand

dollars for each section of the movie.

Yeah.

We budgeted them all.

I mean, the budget of the movie that we budgeted for that would've

been perfect was 200% of what we ended up making it for.

The amount we got was, it's almost to the dollar 50% of the.

Ideal budget for the movie.

Sure.

We made it anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Good for you, man.

So cool.

Hit the road again.

One

example of that is like the full budget version was that we would've

range life the, the biopic.

I wrote 50 pages of it.

The full budget version is we shoot all 50.

The version we were then able to make is we can really only

afford to shoot about 20.

But now that gives us the idea of, okay, so that'll take like two and a half days.

So for the other days, now we get, now let's change our idea creatively and

do the mockumentary and now we'll do the Joe getting into method character.

'cause we don't have enough money or time to shoot 50 pages of a script.

But that now it turns out that's actually a much better idea.

Who are you having like the biggest like top level conversations around

creative with and who are you having those conversations around?

Producing production, funding line items with.

It's kind of all the same movie, has an improbable amount of producers

and partners, but that's just because it's two production companies and on a

production side, you know, people come from those companies, but the ones that

were really rolling up their sleeves from Vice Danny, goodbye, and ultimately Stu

Goldstein from Vice and then from All Day every day and now World War ii, Peter

Klein and Alex Needles, and then my.

Partner in all production logistics.

The only guy who could make a off-Broadway musical happen in a few weeks for a

couple hundred grand Craig Buddha.

And then the two heads of the label played by Schwartzman and Heider,

Gerard Colo, who lives here in Austin.

Yeah.

And Chris Lombardi were producers on the movie and they were on every single call,

every funding call, every creative call.

And you know, a lot of people, lot of lot of voices in the conversations.

Lame fan question, but I have to know.

If there was anything that you proposed to Malcolm that he didn't want to do?

No, because I was told these are things he won't want.

He won't want.

A hey geographic.

Then, you know, he even told me, and when we talked, he said, just, just don't, you

can't, you just can't make, you can't make a movie about how cool the nineties were

and how important we were and still are.

You can't just make a thing that's celebratory of something that

wasn't celebrated at the time.

Of course, that's exactly what we did, but we did it in a way that it's not

the overt meat and potatoes version.

We did it through all these layers of reality that I'm describing.

In order to do exactly that.

'cause that's the only movie you can make.

Mm-hmm.

You

can't make a movie that has no nostalgia, triumph, payoff.

Yeah.

Well, you gotta celebrate the thing you're making a documentary about.

Yeah.

But,

or attack it.

So,

so, so I heard that not as, literally don't do this.

But don't do this literally.

And that that was what we did.

Good

line.

I

think that might be the name of our episode.

Did the band join in that process and throw ideas on the wall

too, or did they step back?

Oh, certainly.

Well, they stepped back.

One they didn't want, they don't wanna be filmmakers.

Nobody does.

Nobody should.

And two, they're musicians and they were concentrating on

making this tour exceptional.

There was plenty of ideas from my initial interviews that became things I could

point at in the movie and say, so and so told me this, and this gave me this idea.

That's this moment.

Chris Lombardi says, I could almost have pictured something back in the day.

Like so huge.

Like I call him saying they want you on SNL, and he just says, no, but

I'll do Letterman if we can play the soundtrack to Stupid Animal Tricks.

And I said, all right Chris.

Well that's a scene in the movie now.

And now we put that scene in the scripted portion.

So the wait, so that didn't happen?

No.

And then countless people say Amazing.

So that actually happened.

They actually turned down SNL and they say Nope.

But they might as well have now.

'cause we put it in the movie.

But that's really just the guy who's been the partner for 30 plus years

saying, I could almost have seen something like this going down.

And I said, perfect.

Scene.

Perfect.

You just perfect.

Wrote, you just wrote, you just wrote a perfect awful biopic scene.

Yes.

'cause that's so, and I think it's the

trailer for the

film, isn't it?

It's very pro, it's very prominent in the marketing.

Yeah.

And, and it like, encapsulates the band so well.

Yeah, it's like, like that moment.

Rhymes with the Beavis and Butthead clip where they're saying

Dry.

Dry.

And I remember that so clearly and being so tickled by that at the time.

'cause I was such a fan of the band and it kind of nails their ethos.

Yeah.

And you know, the real story is that he turned down doing a

Rolling stone interview that has less sizzle than turning down SNL.

Sure.

So you as, as you would in any awful ha, geographic scripted biopic, you take

three stories and you make them one story.

So, wait a second.

I have to return to something that you said just a minute ago.

'cause this feels connected in some way.

You made a movie about a band that essentially was suspicious of

fame, and some could argue, maybe sabotaged their success in some way.

And then you just made the comment that nobody should want to be a filmmaker.

Well, it's just

very hard.

Takes a long time.

Doesn't pay well.

Yeah, but that's not why you do it, right?

No.

Well, you do it because theoretically you love.

You, you love making things, but after four years of unpaid work on something,

start to question your choices.

Yes.

When the movie's being rapturously received and you never got

paid to make it and you won't.

And all that work amounts to some, some cred.

And as you know with your kid, you can't take the cred.

To to, to the private school.

No, it doesn't pay for

Montessori.

No, it does not.

As I've learned having a kid Montessori preschool, I unfortunately have not

been able to pay for it with cred.

So it's all well and good, but that's the pavement lesson is that I learned from

working with Malcolm Miss for all these years and listening to him so much is

like all they had from 89 to 99 was cred.

They had no, I mean, they had money, obviously.

It was a different time where you could make good money touring and doing

merch and whatnot, but they weren't.

Mainstream successful.

It was just cred.

Then you put that on ice.

Obviously other things happen.

Solo career, small reunion, but then cred, unimpeachable, cred

plus 20 years equals legend status.

So I, I kind of just decided, all right, well, I can't make this whole movie

and look at this 30 year story that has the best possible ending and not say.

All right.

I'll just play the long game and see what this cred turns into

when my kid goes to college.

Right.

Can't pay for Montessori preschool with cred, but maybe I can pay for

college with cred plus two decades.

Well,

I was gonna say, because one of the things that I know about you that I'd

love is that similar to a, a friend that we shared, David Lowry, you

got hired to write a Disney script.

It's true, right?

Yes.

So like in a way, cred does sort of.

It's payoff, I guess.

Well,

in a way, you know, hiring to do a Disney, you know, David's

directed two Disney movies.

I've written two, one of which got made, one of which is maybe getting

made as a writer, but the cred, to your point earlier, a, a well-written

movie like, listen up, Philip being at Sundance gets you the, the cred

to be a, a professional writer.

No one to quote my friend Ty West, when we were going to Venice,

he said, no one's going to.

Say to you when you get back, congratulations on your

experimental documentary.

Here's a job.

And he was right.

Nobody did, and nobody will in the way that nobody in the mainstream

world rushed out to buy pavement.

CDs in the nineties.

No one's rushing out to see the movie.

But people who seek out things that are atypical, interesting.

It's out there now.

It'll, it'll exist.

Well, as a fan, I definitely rushed to see the movie

and it did great here.

I played, I played at a FS for like a month.

It played

a long time.

Yeah.

We sent a lot of people too.

It performed here by a shocking margin, and we just kept

getting extended down here.

Well, and I caught pavement on that 22 tour when they played Austin City Limits.

That's right.

Yeah.

That was, I think, filmed the, the moment in your film when they talk

about how much they've practiced.

Yeah.

And the thing that struck me about their performance at Austin

City Limits is how tight it was.

Yeah.

And it did not feel.

I, I don't make this as a slight, but you see this a lot in musicians,

like musicians who become famous in their early twenties mm-hmm.

Are playing off of like instinct and energy and, and hormones.

And if they've stayed with it for the next 30 years, they've had a

lot of time to hone their skills.

Yeah.

And you actually start to hear lots of chops that you

didn't hear in the original.

It was, it was very, I don't know, it was exciting to kind of see like the adult

version of some of those same songs and they were small differences, but, um.

But it was also like a little unsettling.

Um, yeah.

Well,

I mean, we show that in the movie they rehearsed more for this

tour than they'd ever rehearsed.

They have countless narratives in the movie, little sound clips of

them saying, yeah, back in the day, the first show was the rehearsal.

And this is famous, you know, a famously sloppy fly by the seat of

your pants, no set list, shambolic band, who made the decision for this

tour, 14 days of rehearsal, we're going to be the best we've ever been.

And every single person who saw the tour said they were.

Let's talk about the, the, the film is complicated visually, uh, structurally,

it's edited by Robert Green.

Mm-hmm.

He's known to play with questions of fiction and nonfiction in his work.

Yeah.

We're playing his game, but with his favorite band, but he's,

he doesn't got to direct it.

Yeah.

That show, I, I'll say it's not 50 50, but it's as much his movie as

it is mine in every single frame, and he's a producer and the editor.

I'm the producer and director.

I never once sat with him while he edited, he edited entirely by himself.

Wow.

At home in Columbia, Missouri.

It's his, it's his, it's his movie.

Every Frame of the edit.

And he was not present for hardly any of the, the filmmaking.

And it's my movie in every frame of that.

But we finished all these shoots, right?

Like seven cameras at the museum shooting for three hours.

Okay, let's over 20 hours of footage.

I don't know what to do with that.

I don't care.

We finished shooting range Life.

We've got a hundred hours of archival.

It's not like I'm saying you have this, this one moment from day four

you gotta get, it's like, here's, here's a hundred hours of footage.

Have fun.

My friend, two years later, he finished the movie.

Wow.

And what are your conversations?

What's your workflow if you're not sitting with him?

Is it the thematic or is it cut by

cut?

It's honestly too complicated to even begin to encapsulate, but essentially

it's his favorite band his whole life, 93, 94, became obsessed with them.

And every minute of it.

He said, I waited my whole life to edit this movie.

I've waited my whole life to edit a montage to this song.

I've waited my whole life to make a moment like this about Steven

Chemist, my favorite guy of all time.

I was getting cuts sometimes twice a week.

The first credible, entirely watchable cut of the movie that has the same

exact shape that it has now was three hours long, and then it was a year

of getting that 55 minutes shorter.

I told him I wanted the structure of the film to mirror

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk.

As much as possible a movie that has three timelines that take place

over a week, a day and an hour.

Mm-hmm.

And by an hour into the movie, they're all, they've all collided

and are happening concurrently.

We have a story that takes place over 30 years tour that

takes place over two years.

Range Life shoe that's meant to take place over a couple of months.

A musical is meant to take place over a couple of months, and a museum

is meant to take place over one day and about an hour 30 into our movie.

They're all, they all hit the same point.

And that was all I wanted.

I told him that and he figured it out somehow.

Wow.

That is a surprising reference.

A very cool one.

And they, they all collide around a sort of massive, concurrent moment of the song

Grounded being performed across space and time by the band in the nineties, by

the band today by our actors, Joe Curie, playing grounded on guitar, our musical

actors singing grounded on stage, and our super group of young female musicians

playing grounded at the ribbon cutting.

Wow.

And it all collides around that song when everything kind

of reaches cruising altitude.

I want to shift gears radically 'cause I feel like I could

talk about the payment movie.

Yeah.

All afternoon.

It's a complex

one.

It's fun to parse.

But we're coming up to the end of our walk here and we need to

get you back for your q and a.

Sure.

And I'm curious, you said so many things about filmmaking and about cred,

not paying the bills, but you also make these movies that are largely.

Not commercial, and they are about cred,

and so I'm, I'm just smart.

Not smart at all.

It's this thing, you know, it's the pavement model, like,

yeah,

there's nothing, there's no commercial benefit to making a three hour long

essay film about video stores, but.

You know, if you got, if you, if you have to do it, you have to do it right.

If you have to tell the story, you're not going to not do it

because there's no point to it.

Well, but that's what

I'm curious about, I guess is like, particularly in this moment, and I,

maybe it's because I have two small children who also go to Montessori school

that I have to pay for, but I'm really thinking a lot right now about like.

How all of this comes together.

Mm-hmm.

Like, you know, I run a commercial production company and I have to

make commercials to pay the bills while I'm doing my creative project.

That's why you do that.

That's what you do.

Yeah.

I, and, and, and so what I'm building up to ask you about is there's this

sort of existential threat hanging over all of our heads with ai and, you know,

people aren't going to the theater and there's just this sort of like

inflection point that always feels right now, like it's just around the corner.

Yeah.

And I just wonder like what's going.

Through your head about all that stuff right now too?

Like how are you thinking about the future of our industry and what you do?

I don't really have a good answer to that.

I don't think about it.

I understand what AI is for.

I don't not get it.

Every single person wants to do things faster and for less money.

Like I get it.

I wanna do things faster and for less money.

If I have a script job and I'm turning in a draft of a script,

I'm being paid to write, and as it always does, it's coming in long.

It's 130 pages and we know the goal is one 10.

That's a lot.

If someone's like, Hey man, it was an AI thing and you just feed it

in, it'll tell you the types of scenes that always get cut out.

Give it to me like, alright, fine.

'cause the producer's just saying cut 25 pages, right?

And I'm like, that's a different movie.

Like, that's not a note.

That's, that's like saying I need you to take one room out of a house.

And you're like, you can't take a room out of a house.

You can just lock the door.

But there is no shortcut for that.

That's not what AI's for either.

I'm not concerned about this because everything I think it is

for someone who's not used it.

Other than full disclosure to generate images of our cats doing

fantastical things for my daughter.

She's like, I wanna see Ripley in outer space.

I, I get you, I'll get you a photo, real picture of Ripley in outer space.

I'll admit I've done that.

I wanna see fig it on a boat.

All right.

I'll get you a photo, real picture, A fig one on a boat.

She loves it.

And I'm not taking money out of the hands of an artist, right, because of this.

Because the other solution is I'm drawing it with a crayon

and she would love that less.

So it's either I have to get a crayon and a piece of paper.

I can do this on my phone.

It's really just to make a kid laugh, which is really

what AI should be used for.

Of course.

Fundamentally, if I can give like a broader and vaguely honest answer, most

of what I do screenwriter, most of what you do, clients commercial production.

Yeah.

It is my opinion that the industry of screenwriting Hollywood development.

The industry of what you're doing, where you have a client,

you need to hear their feedback.

The industry is not driven on the end result.

The industry is driven on infrastructure and process.

Process.

I'm a screenwriter.

Every screenwriter says I'm afraid of ai.

I say, I'm not afraid of AI at all.

And they say, why?

And I say, because producers and executives, they don't

want to finish the script.

They don't want to have a perfect 95 page script.

Finished in two days because then they have to make it.

What do they do with that?

They don't want a finished perfect AI assisted product.

Eventually you want a finished script.

Eventually you want a finished commercial.

What people's job depends on is having eight to 10 hours a day of

work to do, not me, them producers and executives need to do something.

They don't want to say, I have an idea for a script.

We'll use ai.

We'll have it done by Friday.

And then it's like, well then what do you do on Monday?

Budget it.

What do you do the next Monday?

Make it like they, they don't want that.

That's right.

They

want work.

They don't want to have worked.

They want to be working.

If producers couldn't spend three weeks, three months, a year developing

a pitch, they would have nothing to do.

This is all they do.

You're you're developing, you're putting the pitch together for a job.

Ev a bid for every job.

Yeah.

If they couldn't say, all right, let's get on.

I read your latest draft.

I have some thoughts.

They would have nothing on their schedule.

And forget about the freelancers, the writers, the industry

needs those people, right?

'cause the industry feeds off of the producers and the executives,

right?

They cannot afford to work in a infrastructure where the only

thing that happens is end results.

Nothing about the film industry is about end results, except for a hundred

movies a year that Hollywood made.

Right.

It is about the thousands of movies that are being written, noted,

developed, redeveloped every single day.

These people don't want to, they don't wanna have nothing to do.

AI gives you nothing to do.

It gets you to the end result immediately.

And I'm just like, guys, I've never met a producer or executive who wants

a finished script, and everyone I've met wants a three hour notes call.

It could be an email.

That's a unique

and refreshing take, and I like that.

Yeah, but the main wrinkle in that argument is that the streamers own

everything now and they make their money off of phones and groceries,

and there is a world where they go, we don't need the executives who,

that's Trump, but executive they, they won't let them.

This is the same as politicians.

They won't let themselves be put out to pasture.

Mm-hmm.

For sure.

They don't need them, but the executives would have to show themselves the door.

Right.

And nobody who's rich shows themselves the door.

Right?

We have 75, 80-year-old baby boomers in politics and entertainment who

won't get outta the way so the 45-year-old can get a promotion.

No one's gonna show themselves out and they'll cling forever.

But yeah, I mean, obviously the,

when they're a buffer, right?

The streamers, the tech giants, the people who are actually.

Ideally paying for the things that we're making at this point in time.

They don't wanna deal with a guy like this.

They don't wanna deal with like me and you.

Mm-hmm.

They need a buffer.

They need somebody there between them.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

There's gonna shrink, that buffer's gonna shrink.

It already is.

Right.

There was, you know, seven execs at a 24, 2 years ago, and now there's four.

Yeah.

Good.

Well, hopefully soon there'll be zero.

And then there'll be like these great nineties companies that

don't exist anymore, where they had this moment and then the moment

passes and something else appears.

That's the cycle.

But you know.

If you were talking to a client who's like, all right, Ben, we're

gonna do a commercial, right?

Let me tell you exactly what I want.

You would say, no one's ever said that before.

True.

Because if you, if you the client Yeah.

Could tell me exactly what you want.

I could have this for you tomorrow.

Yeah.

And if you could tell me exactly what you want, you could have used AI to

make it on your way here, but nobody knows exactly what they want ever.

And the only way they figure out what they want.

Is by volleying ideas off of the person who they are paying

to be that bounce board.

No company that needs a commercial.

No studio, no producer, no script.

No one has ever known exactly what they want except for

the creative, the filmmaker.

That's the process.

Nobody will let go of that because if they do, the person who's

paying you has nothing to do.

They have no reason to get up.

They have no schedule.

They have no lunch meeting, they have no coffee, they have no feedback call.

That's all those people want.

And I'm like, guys, as long as those people need to stay employed, we're fine.

Man.

That is oddly very reassuring.

I 'cause, 'cause it is.

Because what you're doing is not the thing that everybody else seems to do.

You're not arguing against the efficacy of it.

Mm-hmm.

And I feel like that's always a counter argument is, oh, it's not that good.

I won't do that.

You're you're saying more like the system is full of inefficiencies.

Yeah.

And it has to stay that

way.

You can't talk about the, the dressing without talking

about the body that it's on.

Right.

And the body that AI is going on is an industry that is very precarious.

Very faulty.

Yeah.

Very temperamental And subject to the whims of the person driving the car.

Forget it.

I don't care about the efficacy of it.

I'm sure it's very, it is very efficient to make a picture

of my cat in outer space.

Yeah,

it can literally do that in seconds.

It's unbelievable, but like no one's paying me to do that.

Yeah.

But yeah, I don't know.

It's just like, this is just me as a freelance screenwriter.

It's like I see no threat because I've never met a single person who's like,

let me give you the movie scene by.

Line by line and I can type.

It's like, okay, well then type that into your AI prompt, right?

And you'll have your script done and you're like, oh, well, okay, then

I need you to take a look at it.

It's like, well, then you're still paying me.

I don't wanna say I have no faith in producers or executives.

I don't wanna say they have no brains.

They have no imagination.

They don't know what they want.

Right.

That is what you are paid to figure out.

What are they gonna do?

They're definitely not gonna come up with a three hour long essay

film about video stores, which is playing right now at the A FS cinema.

And you are getting back for the q and a about that.

I expected we were gonna talk more about that, but we got, we ran out of time.

We ran outta time because PA is so exciting to talk about.

You know, video

Heaven will be on streaming in the spring.

People can watch it and it's like kicking around in non-profits, fun art houses for

the rest of this year and into next year.

Yeah, well, I hope people check it out.

It was very exciting as far as reliving childhood glory.

You stopped in at my favorite video store.

Two boots.

I'd lived two blocks away from there for my entire twenties.

Okay.

And that was, that was our spot.

So the

traveling pants too goes in there.

I appreciated those traveling pan.

That is not a movie I was aware of.

I watched the screener.

I shared it like I'm not supposed to.

With my New York roommate who came over yesterday, we ate big

sandwiches and watched your film.

I don't care if people share it.

Thank you.

I want people to watch the movie.

I didn't spend 10 years making it for no money, so to protect it.

I hope people go out and watch pavements that's streaming right

now on Apple and Prime and, and you guys can go rent it and enjoy it.

Um, I have

lots more questions about video heaven and so hopefully maybe we're,

can have you back on at some point.

Maybe we'll come up to the lower Hudson Valley for a cooler walk in the shade.

Yeah.

Thanks

guys.

Here comes the train,

all that.

Oh, look at us in the reflection.

Okay.

Well, Dayton, sorry we were standing right by the train tracks

to record, uh, this intro outro.

That's what I said, outro.

Uh, and that

was Alex Ross

Perry.

That was Alex Ross Perry.

And you know what, like that is a guy who knows how to talk about his work, and

that is a guy who knows how to get people excited about digging behind the seams,

behind the scenes, under the covers.

Uh, yes.

I, again, I don't think that's the actual phrase, but I, I

know what you're trying to say.

I'm, Alex is pointing phrases left.

Alex is probably our most succinct guest in the sense that

he didn't really ever digress.

He knew exactly where he was going conversationally.

It was really interesting to talk to him, and I particularly love his take on ai.

Oh, uh, thanks for being

here.

For, uh, Alex.

Um, if you haven't seen pavements, you know, you've gotta see it, you know

too much about it to not have seen it.

And, uh, and, and, and

check out video Heaven, his new, uh, essay, film and, uh, just

basically all of Alex's work.

Yeah, he's a fascinating filmmaker.

We

didn't even get into her smell, which I'm a fan of and mm-hmm.

Listen up, Philip.

And so, anyway, um, thank you Alex.

Thank you guys for listening.

Uh, stay tuned next time.

On Dock walks for Mike Blizzard, we're gonna have Mike Blizzard on.

Uh, Mike is a mover and shaker in the Austin film community, but for the

last five movies or so, he has been Richard Linklater's primary producer.

Yep.

Including on two films coming out at the same time.

Right.

Blue Moon, blue Moon and Novo Vogue.

I'm so glad you said it, not me.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's an EP on the second one and a p on the first

one, but he's also a documentary director, um, with also starring

Austin and a documentary producer Yeah.

Of two baseball docs

and a long time just hub of the Austin film scene.

So he's like a great, a great guest, a great guy, and uh, we

hope you guys enjoy that episode.

So special thank you, uh, to the Austin Film Society for their help.

Um, in lining up Alex Ross Perry for this week and special thank you

to Mike Blizzard for talking to us

next time.

I thought you were gonna thank me, you were looking at me, and a

special thank you to you, Keith.

Well, that's a good place to end it.

Uh

oh.

Thank you to you, Ben.

Thank

you.

Bye guys.

Thanks for hanging out with us.

See you next time.

See you next time.

Doc Walks is.

Created, produced and edited by my friend Ben Steinhower of the Bear.

Hello, and my friend Keith Maitland of Go Valley.

Thanks for tuning in.

Follow us at Doc Walks Pod on Instagram X and YouTube.