The Projection Booth

Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew. Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books d...

Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time. Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access...

Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way. Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded their music into Freaked (1993); for this film he spent five years chasing an emotionally vulnerable inter...

There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into...

What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, it’s director Markus Lehmusruusu’s deadpan follow-up to Ricky Rapper an...

What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural Spanish winery, with the apocalypse folded in after the fact. Fresh off its world premiere at the Downtown F...

Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New Zealand summer in 2006. Mike talks with Schneideman and her two leads, Ani Palmer and Rain Spencer, about b...

Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon....

Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD warps everything the audience sees through his eyes — and the novella's hidden debt to the Book of Job, w...

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana. León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fu...

Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR, and discovering — only while writing the final log line — that he'd accidentally told his own story. Ric...

Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and showrunner Jason Sudeikis worked to make the Kansas scenes feel distinct from the series' established English lo...

First-time writer-director Benjamin Finkel built Family (2026) out of his own childhood: his father died of cancer when Finkel was fourteen, and he spent the years afterward filling a script with "everything that was scary and interesting" to him. He tells Mike White how a screenwriting professor passed that script to a literary manager, how a self-shot fake trailer (made in the house he grew up i...

Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix a...

First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and reality is becoming increasingly absurd the whole time." Adapted from Victor Gischler's novel — relocate...

After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) an...

The Projection Booth and The Kulturecast cross the streams to dig into Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's bombastic, heavily spoiled satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to convince the world he can fix the Arctic disaster he caused. Mike White and Chris Stachiw land on opposite sides of the "is it a $125 million folly or a willfully strange swing worth defending" debat...

Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published. Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy S...

Music-video veteran Chris Marrs Piliero (The Black Keys, Kesha, Ariana Grande) traces his feature debut, Appofeniacs, to two obsessions: the ease of deepfake manipulation, and apophenia — our compulsion to find connections in things that aren't actually connected. He tells Mike White how fan theories about his own music videos (imagined hidden messages, imagined Illuminati symbolism) convinced him...

"What if Sorcerer was a creature feature?" That question is what unlocked Beware Boiúna for director Mike P. Nelson, who tells Mike White how William Friedkin's doomed-expedition structure — immerse the audience in an environment, let it become a character, then release the beast — became his blueprint after he initially turned down a "giant snake movie" pitch from producers Jeremy Bolt and Robert...

Nancy Kwan talks with Mike about The World of Nancy Kwan, her new memoir written with Deborah Davis and a foreword by her nephew Kevin Kwan. Kwan revisits how she landed The World of Suzie Wong almost by accident, tagging along to watch her favorite Hong Kong actresses screen-test before a casting director pulled her in front of the camera, which led to a Hollywood contract, acting lessons with Je...

When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa. Sargent traces her path from modern...

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle join Mike for Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), third in their trilogy after Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Made with a Guggenheim grant, it grows from the 2020 CZU fire that forced the couple to evacuate their Santa Cruz Mountains home for two and a half months, turning a burn scar t...

Digital Kitchen's Mason Nicoll and Andrew "AJ" Julien talk with Mike about designing the Emmy-nominated title sequences for Spider-Noir and Smoke. They walk through the studio's pitch process, from log-line-only briefs to full pilot screenings, and how Spider-Noir's period-accurate 1931 noir look came from surrealist photography, Man Ray, Seconds, and a Lady from Shanghai homage they didn't know t...

Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a lonely gas station clerk, steals a bicycle and ends up sidekick to its owner, The Girl (Lara Wolf), a blank-eyed, scarred vigilante who may or may not be a superhero. Luka Marčetić's Girl in the Night (2026) just took Best Picture in Fantastic Fest's Main Competition, and Mike talks with Marčetić and Wolf about the Slovenian deadpan charmer. Marčetić traces the film from a...