00:00Realistically, what is the number that you guys, like, if someone knocked on your door,
00:05like, what would a person have to offer?
00:07To what? To rent the basement?
00:08Yeah.
00:09Is it Willem? He can come for free.
00:11Exactly.
00:12If Willem shows up, bro, come on in.
00:14Hey, pizza.
00:17Party, party.
00:17Yeah, you know.
00:23The big thing is choosing a director.
00:26That's the big thing.
00:28And I said, well, you know, she understands the book.
00:30She's a director, you know, and I go, well, this is great.
00:34And it was.
00:34So, you know, I mean, sometimes it's not.
00:36Sometimes you make that mistake, but, you know.
00:39Name names.
00:41Beat, party.
00:42Beat.
00:44You can never be sure that you're going to make a good film.
00:46But if you've got a good producer and a good director and you have, you know, fair to middling actors,
00:52then you have a really good chance to make a good film.
00:56And so I think it's that really rare thing where you hear about a book adaptation and you feel like,
01:02oh, I would actually just kill anybody else who tried to do this because I've thought about this book for 20 years
01:08and I still remember how I felt about this book when I first read it.
01:12It's about what was the effect on the initial reader.
01:15And I was like, I was that initial reader.
01:17This is me.
01:17I can only perceive it as I perceived it, you know, 20 plus years ago.
01:21And that's the person I'm sort of making the film for, I think.
01:24The genesis of the book for me, and somebody said, well, Mr. Moser, what do you think every black man in America needs?
01:34And I said, a white man locked up in their basement.
01:40Because then you could go downstairs and figure out why you didn't get the promotion.
01:44You know, it was a, there is, there's a, there's a humorous moment, you know, to, to the idea of having somebody locked up in your basement, you know, that it didn't come out in the book.
01:58Very humorous.
01:59I agree.
01:59But the humorous beginning.
02:01Oh, there's some funny things.
02:01There's some funny things.
02:03Yeah.
02:03There's a couple of crack holes.
02:04No, it's true.
02:04But it's.
02:05Yeah.
02:05The sexual aspect of the book really grabbed me too.
02:10Like, like Charles's relationship with the woman and you wake up on the couch and you hear them upstairs doing what they're doing.
02:18And then he comes down to the basement and sees Willem's character completely nude and his, is huge.
02:25And it's like, that's also, you know, like a black man singing.
02:31Like, what does that mean?
02:32Like all of that I thought was, so that really spoke to me too.
02:36I remember like reading this book and looking at Charles and this world and this sort of moral psychological puzzle piece that he's, he's sort of drifting through.
02:49And yeah, it is a strange thing to be like, sure, rent my basement, you know, and pay this absurd amount of money, but also why not?
02:58Like he needs it, you know, he needs the money.
03:00He also has nowhere else sort of in life to sort of go.
03:05And this is a man who is struggling with trauma.
03:08He's struggling with like, he's wrestling with his family history.
03:11He's wrestling with all of those demons.
03:14And, and I don't know, it was just, I remember reading Nadia's script and envisioning it like in just a different way.
03:21Again, like just wanting to run towards the, the, the challenge of it.
03:25I, you know, I play the scene at a time.
03:28You can't plant anything.
03:30You don't know what it is until you get there.
03:33And I always, I always feel like if you anticipate things, you start to get out of the scene.
03:40You're outside of what's going on.
03:42It has a lot to do with, you know, personal history, who they blame, where their roots are, what they identify with, what their identity is.
03:51It's very rich for that.
03:53So I don't know how you prepare for that, except for when you're really looking at the other guy and you're saying, listen, this is my story.
04:02Because that's, that's how this stuff is revealed.
04:05They don't have a particular agenda to share.
04:08It just, it sort of happens.
04:09Shameedly, I read the script first.
04:14Sorry, Walter.
04:16But it has this really rich black history there that's been kind of like pushed to the edges of society and it's now at the Hamptons.
04:23Yeah, I really always appreciate when stories are exploring these individuals, these communities that are not, you know, at the forefront anymore.
04:34Because there's real lives there and there's lots of history and pain there, which Charles' character represents.
04:41I mean, this film is about so much, but especially that enclave of black history.
04:46Particularly in America, the black experience being connected to the land and being connected to that history, especially for African-Americans, because the story of survival and resilience in that way, it's a different kind of connection to the ground in which we stand on and what Aniston represents as a threat to that.
05:06It's like a nihilism. Like, what if history didn't matter at all? Like, it's just the flip side of, like, what would happen if you completely freed yourself from your history and said, I can be whoever I want to be.
05:16Now, obviously, if you're a black person or a white person, those are very different, those are very different ideas.
05:19But actually, there's this idea of, like, history is something that is written by certain people.
05:25And actually, if you write your own history, what kind of power does that give you?
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