This is a long episode of the podcast. It sort of had to be.
Consider this: Scott Swan and I met when we were in high school. We moved to Los Angeles in 1990. For much of the time since then, we have worked together daily, sometimes for up to ten or twelve hours. It is safe to say that there is no other person who I have had more conversations with other than, perhaps, my parents, and even then, I think Scott may still be the winner in terms of sheer hours logged.
I’d wager that about 85% of that time spent talking to Scott had something to do with “Star Wars.”
Even so, because of the way things work these days, when the news that JJ Abrams is directing “Star Wars” broke, I was on my way home from Sundance. I was at the airport. I wrote about it that night. I’ve written about it since then. But for one reason or another, I hadn’t spoken to Scott about it. Not in e-mail. Not by text. Not on the phone. Not at all. And I realized that if we were going to talk about it, we should do it for the podcast.
The thing is, there was another topic that had been brewing for a while that we also had not spoken about, and that was Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Django Unchained.” Scott was there with me opening night in the theater for “Reservoir Dogs” and for “Pulp Fiction” and for “Jackie Brown” and… well, for everything, actually, up until this time, with this film. For whatever reason, I did not see the film with him, and we had not had any time to discuss it.
So either one of those topics would have been enough for a whole podcast. I knew I only had Scott one night this week, so I decided to record him on both topics, and the result is one of the longest podcasts we have ever recorded, dense with information. We opened the podcast by discussing Sunday’s Super Bowl ads, and I’ll include those here in the article in case you haven’t seen them.
00:00 – 00:50 – Opening music
00:50 – 02:30 – Introduction
02:30 – 29:45 – Super Bowl Ads
2:30 – 8:10 / “Iron Man 3”
8:10 – 10:00 / “The Lone Ranger”
10:00 – 12:45 / “Fast Six”
12:45 -23:35 / “Oz – The Great and Powerful”
23:35 – 29:45 / “Star Trek Into Darkness”
30:10 – 1:05:00 – “Star Wars” and JJ Abrams
1:05:00 – 1:07:00 – Introduction to Famke Janssen
1:07:00 – 1:21:00 – Famke Janssen interview
1:21:00 – 2:09:34 – Deep into “Django Unchained”
That’s the full podcast, and I have no idea what to tell you regarding what else we’re doing with the podcast. When I know, you’ll know.
For now, it was just good to finally have those conversations, and great to be able to share them with you guys.