SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The COVID pandemic affected every aspect of society, and that included the movies - the movies we watched, how we watched those movies, as well as the movies that got made or didn't get made. So as we mark five years since the COVID shutdowns, we want to bring in two people at NPR who I know spent a lot of that time watching movies, and that is NPR critic Bob Mondello - hey, Bob...
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Hi. Good to be here.
DETROW: ...And ALL THINGS CONSIDERED producer Marc Rivers. Hey, Marc.
MARC RIVERS, BYLINE: Hey there, Scott
DETROW: What do you remember about those early months when it came to movies? So, like, movies specifically - no "Tiger King."
(LAUGHTER)
RIVERS: Yeah. Only thing I know is that maybe a person got eaten by a tiger. I still, to this day, have not watched "Tiger King." For me, I kind of dove right into - you know, I wanted to watch movies that can kind of reflect feelings of isolation and the fear and paranoia we all felt. I know - weird.
MONDELLO: Ouch.
RIVERS: I'm more, like...
MONDELLO: That is horrible.
RIVERS: I don't want the movie...
MONDELLO: Why would you do that?
DETROW: There wasn't enough out there. You just kind of needed more.
RIVERS: I want to watch a movie and be like, do you understand what I'm going through? Do you see me in this moment? And honestly, one of those movies...
MONDELLO: Oh, my God.
RIVERS: ...One of those movies for me was John Carpenter's "The Thing." If we're talking isolated...
MONDELLO: OK.
RIVERS: ...There's a virus going around, we don't know who has it...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE THING")
KURT RUSSELL: (As RJ MacReady) We're going to draw a little bit of everybody's blood 'cause we're going to find out who's a thing.
RIVERS: ...You can't escape from where you are - that movie was very - felt very COVID coded. Another movie that I think we could all relate to - "Groundhog Day, " with...
MONDELLO: Ah.
RIVERS: Bill Murray. I mean...
MONDELLO: Every day did feel like...
RIVERS: Every day...
MONDELLO: ...You were just reliving the same day over and over and over again.
RIVERS: And we didn't even have the luxury of being with Punxsutawney Phil to do that, as well. I mean, I think there's one scene of that movie where Bill Murray is kind of deep into the cycle that I think kind of clearly lays out what we were all feeling.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GROUNDHOG DAY")
BILL MURRAY: (As Phil Connors) What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RICK OVERTON: (As Ralph) That about sums it up for me.
(LAUGHTER)
RIVERS: I think that sums it up for all of us. That sums it up for a lot of us.
MONDELLO: It's true. I...
DETROW: Which way did you lean, Bob?
MONDELLO: I was really trying to escape. Don't forget, I'm still a critic, and so I'm still...
RIVERS: You had a job to do.
MONDELLO: Yeah. There were people sending me movies that they were putting out there to the world. So I was still seeing a lot of films, and some of them had something to do with it. There was a movie called "Language Lessons"...
RIVERS: Oh, sure.
MONDELLO: ...That had Marc Duplass and Natalie Morales. It was about a guy who gets a gift of a hundred language lessons online, and so they - the premise of it allowed them to film it in separate places.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LANGUAGE LESSONS")
MARK DUPLASS: (As Adam) How does this whole thing work, since we're, like, you know, this way?
NATALIE MORALES: (As Carino, speaking Spanish).
DUPLASS: (As Adam) Oh, I don't know if he told you, but I don't - I'm not fluent in Spanish. I'm not very good, so do we have to?
MORALES: (As Carino) Si.
MONDELLO: What I gravitated to other than that was things that made me comfortable.
DETROW: Yeah.
MONDELLO: The isolation one that makes me comfortable is "Harold And Maude." I just love that movie, and it's about a kid who is just completely separate from the rest of the world and can't deal with...
RIVERS: He did not need a pandemic to be isolated. Yeah.
MONDELLO: Yeah. He did - he was socially isolated no matter what, and I sort of lived that. And then I guess I watched a whole bunch of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers movies...
DETROW: Yeah.
MONDELLO: ...Because - on the theory that, you know, they danced us out of the depression, now they could dance us through this somehow.
DETROW: I definitely lean comfort movies, too. Early on, I have this memory of just, like, seeing on Netflix that the original "Space Jam" had just been posted...
MONDELLO: (Laughter).
DETROW: ...And just, like, sitting on the floor, like, in a ball, watching "Space Jam" (laughter). It was just, like, really...
(CROSSTALK)
RIVERS: A good reminder that you're, like - a good reminder that you are a millennial.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: I forget sometimes.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPACE JAM")
MICHAEL JORDAN: (As self) Bugs Bunny?
BILLY WEST: (As Bugs Bunny) You were expecting maybe the Easter bunny?
JORDAN: (As self) You're a cartoon. You're not real.
MONDELLO: What you guys are describing is exactly what the public did generally, though.
DETROW: Yeah.
MONDELLO: I mean, they started watching old things that made them comfortable in some way. And all the streaming services got wind of that really quickly, or realized, and sort of pushed it. And so we all got into streaming.
DETROW: And yet, they were still trying to make movies...
MONDELLO: Yes.
DETROW: ...And there were some cartoonish attempts to do that, and there are some attempts that were kind of smart. And, Bob, walk us through how the movie industry responded because the basic premise of making a movie is a lot of people show up in the same space and spend a lot of time together. And that was very hard to do in 2020 and 2021.
MONDELLO: This is true. The big example that made headlines when The Sun reported it - they were making a "Mission: Impossible" movie then, and an incident on the set - my understanding is that two of the employees there were standing closer than the protocols called for. They were standing together at a computer terminal, and Tom Cruise saw them, and he said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOM CRUISE: We are not shutting this [expletive] movie down. Is it understood? If I see it again, you're [expletive] gone, and so are you. So you're going to cost him his job.
RIVERS: When you care about movies the way Tom Cruise cares about movies, this is what you get.
MONDELLO: Right.
RIVERS: This is what happens.
MONDELLO: But in fairness, what he said was, look, I think about this every day. There are thousands of people whose jobs depended on this. You know, they're...
RIVERS: The stakes are high.
MONDELLO: ...People are going to lose their homes, the - and that's real. I mean, the whole industry shut down. The industry stopped.
RIVERS: One of the movies that was supposed to, you know, save the movie theaters was Christopher Nolan's "Tenet."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: And that is "Tenet," the first blockbuster to hit theaters in months. Movie theater chains are really banking on it to bring back the crowds. Now...
MONDELLO: Oh, I remember the screening. They had it in an IMAX theater...
RIVERS: Yeah.
MONDELLO: ...That seated something like 450 people. And there were six other critics and me, and they had staked out seats that were as far apart from each other as we could be. So I'm watching this movie in late summer, thinking, this cannot be the future of...
RIVERS: Yeah.
MONDELLO: ...Moviegoing.
DETROW: And also...
RIVERS: Yeah.
DETROW: ...What is this plot?
RIVERS: And also...
MONDELLO: Well, yes.
(LAUGHTER)
RIVERS: Yeah, and...
MONDELLO: There was that.
RIVERS: And also yeah, it wasn't very good a movie.
MONDELLO: I disagree. It was a wonderful movie.
RIVERS: Bob. Bob.
MONDELLO: I love that movie,
DETROW: Is that the COVID fog speaking right now?
MONDELLO: Yes, very much.
DETROW: OK.
MONDELLO: It's just a wonderful movie.
RIVERS: Wonderful movie or not, it did not save the movie theaters, and it kind of - it forced Warner Bros., or it made them decide to - they were going to just release their movies...
DETROW: Right.
RIVERS: ...Simultaneously in theaters and streaming.
DETROW: Bob, when did you start noticing COVID showing up as a plot point, as an atmosphere of the movies?
MONDELLO: When did I first notice it? It might have been - this was a Netflix movie, but the - "Glass Onion."
DETROW: Yeah.
MONDELLO: The - right? That felt like a COVID party, right? They...
RIVERS: I mean, the cast had to - they had to quarantine together, right?
MONDELLO: Right.
RIVERS: Like, it was - yeah.
MONDELLO: And they...
DETROW: It's the premise of a rich, extravagant COVID quarantine...
RIVERS: Agatha Christie-esque mystery...
DETROW: ...Situation on an island.
MONDELLO: Yeah, this is "Knives Out."
RIVERS: ...Under quarantine.
DETROW: Yeah.
MONDELLO: "Knives Out" movie - and they all showed up in masks - right? - onto this island, and then they were isolated, and then they could go on with the plot.
RIVERS: I think I was more interested in the movies that were approaching COVID almost, like, atmospherically and not, like, kind of head-on, but as a way to kind of inform kind of the emotional reality of these movies. I mean, kind of an early one that I remember from 2021, funny enough, was M. Night Shyamalan's "Old," which was...
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: ...One of the first movies I saw in the theater since the shutdown started.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "OLD")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) What happened to her?
VICKY KRIEPS: (As Prisca Cappa) The body has decomposed.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) How quickly can that happen?
KRIEPS: (As Prisca Cappa) Seven years.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) But she just died.
KRIEPS: (As Prisca Cappa) Wait.
RIVERS: And if you think about that movie, where these people are trapped on this island and people are aging rapidly and no one knows what's happening, no one knows what's going on, I feel like people could relate to that, where, all of a sudden, you blink and the year - two years have gone by. I feel like, especially people with kids could relate to that feeling. And, you know, you know a Shyamalan movie these days will have actors kind of talking and delivering dialogue as if they've been lobotomized. I think that was also appropriate...
MONDELLO: Oh, I see.
RIVERS: ...Because you think about returning back to, you know, communal spaces, we didn't know how to talk to each other. We talked about how...
MONDELLO: Oh.
RIVERS: ...We discovered how to bake bread or how - about what our pet was eating.
DETROW: Oh, yeah. I remember being, like, very, like, awkwardly sweaty the first time (laughter) I was in, like, a social setting.
RIVERS: No one knew how to talk, so I think "Old" captured that.
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: We're still kind of coming to grips with what we experienced...
DETROW: Yeah.
RIVERS: ...What we went through, and I think we'll probably see more movies in the future that are trying to, like, make sense of the pandemic in their own kind of distinctive ways. But I think the emotional fallout of the pandemic, we still haven't truly or fully grappled with.
DETROW: That is NPR's Bob Mondello and Marc Rivers. Thanks to both of you.
MONDELLO: Great fun.
RIVERS: Thanks, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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