Rian Johnson and Ana Lily Amirpour Talk ‘Star Wars,’ ‘The Bad Batch’ and Cinematic Boners — Listen
If you ever wanted to listen to the directors of “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” and “Looper” talk about cinematic boners, today’s your lucky day. Ana Lily Amirpour and Rian Johnson discuss all that and more — namely, their upcoming films “The Bad Batch” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” respectively — on the latest episode of the Talkhouse Film Podcast. Amirpour gets quotable early on when she goes in depth about being excited for a project: “I’ll just be like, ‘I’ve got no boner,’ or like, ‘My boner is at half mast — something is wrong, this lens is wrong…’ And you’ve got to listen to the boner.”
That isn’t the only filmmaking metaphor she uses; “The Shawshank Redemption” comes into play as well: “I always say that making a film to me is like ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ It’s like I’m Andy Dufresne, and thinking of the story and shooting is like coming up with plan and digging that tunnel, and it takes a lot of physical [effort] — you do it and get through it, and everything,” she continues.
“And then editing, to me, is crawling through that fucking tunnel. And you know that if it’s all as you [planned] … you’ll come out above ground and it will be raining and you’re eventually going to make it to Zihuatanejo.”
READ MORE: ‘The Bad Batch’ Trailer: Ana Lily Amirpour Dares Us to Find Comfort in the Wasteland
Johnson, meanwhile, invokes a far better movie when talking about his writing process for “The Last Jedi.” “What I did — because I was so petrified of pulling a ‘Barton Fink’ on this — I moved up to San Francisco and a couple times a week I would go in and just vomit out all the stuff I was working on, and we would just talk about it,” he says. “That just made me feel less alone, I guess.” Listen to the full episode below.
