REPETE: Darren Hayes and Singin' In The Rain

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good day. This is Peter Hell. Are you welcome to
you ain't seen nothing yet?

Speaker 2 (00:03):
The movie Podcast where our chat to a movie lover
about a classic or beloved movie they haven't quite got
around to watching until now.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
And today's guest Pop Icon Darren Hayes. Do you really
think you have a chance against us?

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Mister cowboy?

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Open the pod bay doors.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Hell, I'll have what she's.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Having happen right, So don't see nothing new.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Darren Hayes used to be in a little band called
Savage Garden who happened to sell over twenty million records. Yes,
before Spotify and streams, these guys actually had people paying
for their records, over twenty million records sales, huge numbers
in the US and the UK and of course Australia.
Truly Madley Deeply to the Moon and Back, I Want You,

(01:17):
I Knew I loved You, the Animal song.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
They were huge hits, and.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Savage Garden were the hottest band on Earth. In fact,
you'd struggle the name a bigger pop sensation that's come
out of Australia.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
I know you might think Kylie Minogue, but Savage Garden
they wrote their own hits. I'm not having a go
at Kylie, I Love Kylie. The Savage Garden were self made, okay,
it was Darren Hayes and his mate Daniel Jones, not
Daniel John's he was in a different Sensation band at
that time, but Daniel Jones and they fond u his

(01:50):
massive partnership until you know, a couple of albums in
they went their separate ways and Darren went solo and
released the album Spin, the Ten and the Spark, and
then he actually started up his own indie record label
called Powdered Sugar and had the album's This Delicate Thing
We've Made.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
And Secret Codes and Battleships.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Darren has always presented as a genuine, funny, passionate artistic guy.
He has even tried his own hand at stand up
comedy and improv at Groundling's Over in the US, which
is actually very good at which.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
I do find slightly annoying.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
He has a new album out, boldly called Homosexual and
it's bloody genius. It sees Darren taking back control of
his identity and coming to terms with the things that
this crazy business has made him go through. He has
a world tour coming up and tickets are on sale
now get to a show. Often these introductions about what

(02:48):
people have done in their past, but perhaps for the
first time, I just want to say.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
This from the get go and sprew this episode.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
This may be my favorite episode of You ain't seen
nothing yet that we've ever done. You may already have
noticed the running time. It's a monster episode. We get
into so much here. Darren's three favorite movies alone all
represent something very deep inside of him. Darren was so
completely open and vulnerable and honest during our chat.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
I really he's busy promoting an album.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
He's organizing a lot of it himself as he's an
independent artist now, and I was really thrilled.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
And stoped that he made time to be with me today.

Speaker 4 (03:34):
Hey, I'm Darren Hayes. My three favorite films are Eaty Well.
Can you just beam up?

Speaker 1 (03:40):
This is reality for.

Speaker 4 (03:41):
The Emperor structs back, The Sun of Skywalker must not
become a Jed Day and Donnie Daco. Sometimes I doubt
your commitment to sparkle over shit. But up until last
nighte I'd never seen singing in the rain.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
You're seeing and in the range.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
What a glorious feel. And I'm Ergain, I'm laughing at.

Speaker 5 (04:13):
Us a dile.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yes, It's nineteen twenty seven and a revolution is coming
to Hollywood. When rumors of film being able to record
dialogue is largely dismissed until the jazz singer becomes a
bona fide hit, it turns the movie industry upside down.
It's particularly concerning for silent film co stars Don Lockwood,
screen legend Gene Kelly and Lena Lamont.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Gene Hagen, who's nominated for an oscar in this.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Role, who happens to have a voice like a chattering
of cockatoos. When Kathy seldom played by Prinsus Layer's mum,
Debbie Reynolds, it throws a spanner in Lena Lamont's world
and threatens the future of Hollywood's Golden Couple with his
longtime friend and now composer Cosmo Brown, the brilliant Donald
O'Connor singing and dancing alongside Singing in the Rain is

(05:03):
pure Hollywood magic, co directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley
Donan from a screenplay by Betty Comdon and Adolph Green.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Singing in the Rain Amazingly, he was only.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Nominated for two Oscars, who were Best Music and Best
Supporting actress Geen Hagen. It received mixed reviews upon release,
perhaps suffering in the shadow of another gene Kelly movie
released the year before, and American in Palace, which won
six Oscars. But time has been kind to Singing in
the Rain and it's often listed in the top ten
American films ever made. It's toad tapping, showstoppers, stunning choreography,

(05:36):
and the chemistry between the film stars and yes, gene
Kelly is a complete boss. Darren Hayes, be honest. Is
this your real voice?

Speaker 4 (05:46):
Yes? There was a time when I may have had
a stand in, but now I'm full anti Milli Vanilli.
This is the real deal. Mate.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
You are right in the middle of doing promo for
your new album and a tour announcement.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Homosexual amazing.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
We don't talk about it later, but at first that's
an amazing title for an album, and we'll get we'll
get to that. So thank you for doing your homework
and making time. But why hadn't you seen Singing in
the Rain?

Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah, such a great question, because people don't know. In
order to do this show, you know, there's a little
chat with you beforehand about like what film haven't you seen?
And I was a little coerced into seeing it because
I tried to rig the system. I tried to kind
of suggest some other films that maybe I hadn't seen,
and I put this in there and thinking, please don't

(06:40):
pick this film. So I don't know why. I already
had a sort of a bias against this film and
I don't know why. And part of it, you know
what the movie poster. I don't love the movie poster.
So there's something about the movie poster that at first
looked goofy to me.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Tell us about the movie poster, Well, what's the remind
us of the movie.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
So I when I imagine this film, I imagine the three
leads in their bright yellow trench coats and you can't
see me, but you know they're pulling a like face
like look at it, just looking like idiots, you know,
tap dancing in the rain or whatever. I'm just like,
what what is this about? You know, singing in the rain. Whatever.

(07:25):
So I'm you know, I have no idea what the
film's about from this poster. And also I'm sure everyone
experiences this. I call it like the good Netflix show effect.
If you didn't watch say Breaking Bad, Like I was
one of those people, and then years went by and
everyone said, this is the best television show ever made.

(07:46):
After a while you developed this, I'm never gonna watch
your attitude, right, So I am aware that Singing in
the Rain has a reputation of being one of the
best films ever made. And I guess I had a
chip on my shoulder which was like, look, I'm never
gonna watch it. Why. I think that's a human characteristic.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
It needs to be a word for because it happens
a lot.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
In fact, I was listening to the SmartLess Podcast is
a fun podcast with Jason Bateman, Will Arnette and Sean Hayes,
and they were talking about it this just recently, the
idea that the bigger I think.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Who are they talking to? I forget who they were,
but you're talking to But.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
They were saying, the bigger the film is, or the
bigger the series is, and the more people will tell
you to watch it, there's a tipping point where you're like, no,
I'm not watching it. And will Arnette was saying that
Jason Bateman would come to him on like Arrested Development.
He would say something like, you know, finally gave in
and watched the Blues Brothers. That's a really good film,
and it's like, what that nineteen seventy two classic that

(08:43):
everyone loves, The Blues Brothers is. It's a hot take, Jason,
but it is. There's something about there must be a
German word for it.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Something.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
There's a tipping point when too many people will tell
you to watch something and you're gonna love it.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
It's like, you won't tell me what I'm going to love.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
You know. It happened to me with even with technology.
It happened to me with the iPod.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (09:03):
I was like a resistor of the iPod and friends
of mine eventually just bought me one, and I was
annoyed when they brought me one. I was like, oh
I have I've already got my city Walkman, I don't
need this. And then a day later I was like,
do you realize that I've got a thousand songs in
my pocket? And they were like, yeah, we do. Isn't

(09:27):
it amazing? I'm like, I'm never going back.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs, he's probably trying to call you to
get you know, I want you to the moon and
back for an ad and You're like, nah, I'm not
into the iPod, but.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Yeah, I think you did hit on something. I think
we want to feel like we've discovered something. And so
if you're the person that you know, I used to
do this with music. Didoh back in the day before
Eminem sampled her for that fantastic song that Eminem did
stand or whatever, you know, she had an album that
wasn't really very successful, but I loved it and it
had all of those these singles of hers on it,

(10:01):
and I used to I bought probably twenty copies of
that album and I would give it to people and yeah,
it's I'll admit it's probably my ego. You like to
feel like you're the early adopter. You're the person that's like, hey,
I want to show you this really obscure film called
Singing in the Rain.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah you want that. There is something about very powerful
about that. I remember working today at fem in Sydney
and at an album.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
It was not even in a proper CD cover.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
It was in like a little paper sleeve thing and
it had Missy Higgins the Sound of White written on it,
and I thought, oh, I'll.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
Give it a give it a listen.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Somebody says she was local and was a stunned, you know,
by it. I hadn't even I hadn't heard Scar on
the radio before, and it was on Scar was on.
I'm like, this is amazing. And we had like Matt
Damon come in the next week, and I was like,
Matt Damon.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
He introduced me to Elliott Smith through Goodwill.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Hunting, so I was like, I'm going to do a
cool thing and actually introduce him to somebody. And I
gave him the Missy Higgins CD, thinking the next Matt
Damon film is going to have Scar on or you know,
the Sound of White or something you know.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
No, no, I did not, and I never heard whether
he liked it or not.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
But but every Matt Damon film I'm watching it go
on is a special two going to be on this.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
It's a very powerful thing.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Hey, let's talk about your three favorite films before we
I am now more curious than ever as to whether
you like Singing in the Rain or not. But let's
talk about I mean, I knew one. I knew Star
Wars was going to be represented where we're spoken about
Star Wars over the years before.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
But Empire strikes back? Why Empire?

Speaker 4 (11:43):
Oh gosh, the shortest version I can tell you is
that we were too poor to go to the cinema really,
and Empire came out when the VCR you know, explosion
happened in homes and that was at the point when
if you couldn't afford a VCA, you could rent one,

(12:05):
so you know, that was a huge financial debt for
our family. But we rented a VSR, which was such
a ripoff. And I remember my first viewing of the
Empire Struck's Back was well, it was at our parents
were separated, and I remember going to the drive in

(12:26):
movie theater and it was the second film they played
late at night, and everyone in the car had fallen
asleep but me and mum. And you don't have to
be Sigmund Freud to realize that film's all about fathers
and sons. I didn't have a great relationship with my father,
and that whole series is really about a boy who
believes his future lies somewhere else. So did I born

(12:50):
in Brisbane, desperately wanted to escape my home surroundings or whatever,
but also a boy who desperately wants to believe that
his father isn't a monster, you know, And in that film,
the monster in the film says I'm I'm your father
and joined me, joined me, you know, And there's this
this sort of reach out from the villain of the

(13:13):
film to the boy that is an orphan or thinks
he's an orphan, and it resonated so deeply with me,
that idea that somewhere out there in the world, there
was another destiny for me. And it didn't matter that
I was from Woodridge, didn't matter that my parents were fighting,
didn't matter that my father beat my mother up every night,

(13:34):
didn't matter that I was bullied as a kid and called,
you know, every name under the sun for being gay.
Maybe there was this destiny within me. Maybe there was
this magical force within me that was untapped, and it
was profound, profound feeling. And then the VCR thing was

(13:54):
that I remember a New Year's Eve and you know,
all the parents were off getting drunk and stuff like that.
But I watched that film on VCR. We had it
for a week and I just watched it two times
a day every day and was just fascinated with it.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
That's the magic of movies right there, to be able
to transport you and whether you're in a situation where
you're just going to see a movie and you may
have a you know, a happy home life, and it
can still transport you. But it's even more powerful when
you can feel like you are escaping a situation in
a way.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
And that's that's that's really powerful.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
So when you obviously you continue watching the Star Wars movies,
what were your hopes for Darth Vade or what how
did you feel when there's almost you know, I guess
in Jedi, when there is I guess redemption for the
data bade, how did you how did you feel about that?

Speaker 4 (14:53):
Well? As a child, that's all all I wanted. All
I really wanted was my own father to take the
mask off and to say sorry and to become well,
to acknowledge me, I think, And in my real life
what was happening was, you know, my father was the
first person that ever called me we can bleep this,
but ever called me a fagot. That word was introduced

(15:15):
to me by the person that was supposed to love me.
And the first song I ever wrote I played for
my father and he didn't even have a reaction. I remember,
he just said, huh, I walked away, And even when
I I remember, I did very well at school, and
he came from quite a rich family, even though we

(15:38):
were poor, because you know, alcoholism and handling of money
don't really go well together. And I was supposed to
go and study like law or something like that, but
from space, I was supposed to be an entertainer and
I wanted to go and study acting at a school
in Brisbane. And he told me that I would end

(16:00):
up living in the gutter if I did that. And
even years later, when I became famous, you know, I
bought that man a house and I remember, now our
family don't have anything to do with my dad, but
I remember him saying to me, you know, what do
I have to do, and me saying to him, just

(16:21):
as a young man in my twenties, just saying, just
be kind to me, you know, just be kind. But
in the films, it was incredibly satisfying because, well, the
father acknowledges how special the son is. The son forgives
the father, which I've done. You know, I think everyone
who knows anything about forgiveness knows you have to do

(16:42):
that to release that burden in yourself. And Luke had
so much compassion that between the two films, you know,
he became like a Buddhist, you know, and he had
so much compassion, and there was so much weight on
his shoulders and so much grief, you know, when he
was holding all those secrets. I was holding secrets. Couldn't
tell anyone what was happening at home, couldn't tell anyone

(17:03):
what was happening inside me. And as you know, so
my thoughts about boys and knowing that I liked boys
became almost like this secret sin, you know. So in
the films there was that parallel that Luke's essentially related to, well,
the space Nazi really, you know, right, and so he's

(17:27):
so ashamed of that, can't tell anyone whatever. So I
really related to those themes of shame, redemption, forgiveness. So
when he did, when his father did redeem himself and
forgive himself and tell his son that you were right
to believe that I could become someone else, I think
that sustained me for a long time in hoping that
my father would would change, and those values have continued

(17:52):
in my life. I think George was very smart as
someone that read Joseph Campbell and to sort of understand that,
you know, these equalities. Maybe besides Donald Trump, and Adolf
Hitler these equalities that we probably should try to extend
to most human beings, that everyone can at some point
stop and change course, and we should allow them to

(18:14):
be forgiven.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
I'm not sure if you've seen the movie still in
cinemas here in Australia. I also think it's available to
rent on the streaming services, but everywhere, everything, everywhere, all
at once.

Speaker 4 (18:26):
Oh gosh. Yeah, it's profoundly affected me.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
And the message what you just said about kindness, and
we won't I don't want to spoil but it's a
very powerful message and a very powerful point made by
short round that they make in that film, and that
movie blew me away me too.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
Yeah, anyone who's ever you know, I've been married for
seventeen years. I think anyone that's been in a really
long term relationship. It's the anti romance film, but it's
the real romance film, and it's about the stuff that
matters in life. And that line that you're talking about
broke me. And there was a moment in the car

(19:06):
park afterwards with my husband and I where we looked
at each other and we were just like, God, we're lucky.
And you know, I think anyone who's been married for
as long as that couple have been, and I have
been as definitely realized that that those first three years
of just chemicals and you know whatever, that's just designed
to get you to stick together. But the real stuff

(19:29):
is you know what he talks about in the film
that I won't spoil, but yeah, amazing line.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
It's an amazing line.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
I love hearing you talk about all of that stuff
because people often with Star Wars and I'm a massive
Star Wars fan, and I don't necessarily obviously I'm not
bringing a lot of that any of that to my
love of Star Wars, but people will often see a
Star Wars fan and they think, oh, the Lightsabers or
the you know, and you know, you can kind of
seem a bit cartoony people's love of Star Wars, but

(19:55):
it's a great reminder that really it's the magic of
movies like in be Transported the way. And so thank
you for sharing that. Another few thanks for asking another
movie that also is about a boy who you know,
I guess there is some kind of escape ord the
somebody coming from another land. He's et I saw this
in the cinema when I came out in Melbourne, and

(20:18):
my memory, my first memory of it is that I
lost my mum before the movie, so I was already
a little bit emotionally, you know, on edge, and then
just I think it was the first movie, perhaps I
remember just balling in.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
Well, I'm sorry, Pete. Yeah, that's heavy, that's beautiful. No,
that's there. No, I mean, how old were you when
you saw the film?

Speaker 1 (20:45):
I was I was eight. I was eight.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Sorry, I want to be very clear, So I want
to be very clear on this guy. I it might
be misunderstanding when I said I lost my mom. I
physically on that day lost my mom. I could not
find her.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
She was there.

Speaker 4 (21:03):
Piece of shit.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Actually that was not a setup.

Speaker 4 (21:09):
Piece of shit.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
I spun this is what happened. This is what happened.
I spun around.

Speaker 4 (21:15):
This is amazing.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
I thought, you mean sarcastic because you had shared so
much and misplaced my mom for like three minutes, and
and you were like, that's a beautiful story piece.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
And I'm like, yeah, it does seem a bit.

Speaker 4 (21:27):
No. I was just like, oh wow, I just here,
I am talking about my insignificant life and heat he
lost his mother at eight, You literally just lost her
any more.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Wow, it was three minutes. I'll never get back.

Speaker 4 (21:40):
But this is incredible. This is incredible. I love this.
This may be my podcast.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
This may be my favorite moment of the podcast ever.

Speaker 4 (21:50):
I think incredible because I'm so here's the thing. I'm
so earnest. When early on in my career people didn't
really get this about me, and often in reviews at
my shows, people would like be like, is he for real? Like,
because I am very earnest. So I listened to that
and I was like, that poor man, I need to
hug him. Now, I need to just hold his hand.

(22:11):
We're going to talk about ET and what it means
to me. This is amazing.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
I literally just spun around as an eight year old
in the city, and I must have been facing the
wrong direction. And then I just walked off, And I
was like, where's not even smart enough to turn around?

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Work out? How are three sixty works?

Speaker 4 (22:29):
You lose your mom and then you just go to
a movie without.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
No we have found it. Literally, I reckon, I was,
I was.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
I walked off and I might have been away for
like two minutes, it might not even been that.

Speaker 4 (22:40):
And then she took you to the movie.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, Well, we'll go into the movie that day. That's
what we're in the city to go do.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Okay, well, we probably already had our tickets, right and
then yeah, But so I was. I was a little
bit emotionally on edge because I thought I'd lost physically,
I'd misplaced my mom's listening.

Speaker 4 (22:56):
I just want everyone to know that everything is about perspective.
Did okay, So in Pete's world, in his ven diagram, Okay,
let's remember that this is akin to losing his mother
on a grand scale. He's a child, he has you know,
I was. I was an expert school teacher. So for Peter,
the trauma that he's experiencing this moment, you know, it's

(23:18):
very very real, and we have to scale it down
and understand his his you know, he's going into the
film understanding loss and potential future without his mother, and
that was what he was experiencing in that moment. But
you're still a piece of shit, amazing love it.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
And all I wanted was my mom to be riding
a bike with a basket in the front and me
to be in the front of it with a little
blanket over me.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
That's all that's all I wanted that day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
for sure. But tell us about it, tell us about
your love of.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
At Okay, So, first of all, I've studied this film
so much because I'm obsessed with and I've watched so
many making making of films. I was, you know, it
just hit at right at the right age. It was
nineteen eighty two, so I'm ten, so and you all
know about my home life at the time, right, so,

(24:08):
and the marketing was extraordinary, you know, I still remember
the poster. It said He's afraid, he's alone, He's three
million light years from home. That was the catchphrase. And
there were just these little fingers creeping out of a
door and you were like, what is this? Is this
a horror movie? Is this? What is it? And then
but then he was so beautiful because he was the

(24:30):
design of this creature was so intriguing. He had the
kindest eyes, and I think just in general, you know,
I have a five year old goddaughter now, who I
sort of half raised with her dad. He's a friend
that I met at grambling them you know anyway, that
she's been a part of my life since she was
a little baby. And so you know, if you have
if your dad or if you've been around kids, you understand,

(24:53):
like there are certain qualities that kids love about little
animals and puppies, and so he had all those things.
Very clever. He had the big eyes and the you know,
he was frail, and the way the character was designed
he fed into that secret wish that little kids have,
of like having their own little friend, their own little
pet that they can keep or whatever. But Stephen made

(25:15):
this film about divorce. Stephen had gone through divorce as
a child, and he did these fantastic things with the
film where everything was shot from a child's point of view,
so you don't see any adults unless they have childlike qualities.
So the only adult that you see in the film

(25:37):
up until maybe the very end of the film is
and She's Become a Friend of Mine, actually is the
actress d Wallace, who plays the mother, and so every
other add on the film is shot from the waist down,
so it's ET's point of view and also Elliott's point
of view. And the premise of the film essentially is
it's this mom who's raising these three kids on their own.

(26:00):
And there's this boy, Elliott. He's the youngest, well he's
a middle kid, but he felt like me. He was
the same age as me. When I'm watching this film
and he's grieving his dad, and the premise of the
film is, well, maybe the DNA in the script is
that he has to let go of the idea that
his father is ever coming back, and it's the transition

(26:23):
from boyhood into an adulthood because he in order for
him to get over this pain, he has to let
go of his father ever coming back. And the way
that Spielberg teaches this child how to do this is
that this alien is abandoned and it's in Elliott's care,

(26:43):
and Elliott gets to become a parent. Elliott gets to
be the one to take care of this frail little
friend who is slowly dying every day that he lives
on this planet. And all that Elliott wants to do
is him and he says it several times in the film,
I'm keeping him his mind. I found him his mind,

(27:05):
I'm keeping him and he hides him from everyone, but
ultimately what he has to do is let Et go.
And the power of letting go is so huge in
that film because it's only when Elliot lets e t
go that et lives, and it's only when Elliot lets

(27:31):
go of the idea of holding on to this little
creature that his relationship with his mother is repaired. You know,
all throughout the film he has a strained relationship to
his mother and his brother and his sister. He's so
angry and he's so alone, and he lashes out at
his mother so much, and yet it teaches him how
to think about someone other than himself. In the very

(27:54):
first scene in the film, he hurts his mother so
badly where he knows where his dad is. Their divorce
and it's one of those divorces where the dad tells
the kids everything, the mother doesn't know anything. And at
one point they you know, Elliott says, you know, dad
would understand me, and she says, well, maybe you should
talk to your dad about it, and he goes, I can't.
He's in Mexico, and he says it in such a
cruel way, and the mother starts crying, and the youngest

(28:17):
is the amazing Drew Barrymore, and she says, what's Mexico?
And the mother's crying, and the camera does that amazing
Spielberg thing where it's all eyes and Dean Wallace is
just crying. She has tears in her eyes, and she
just says he hates Mexico, and anyone who's ever broken
up with anyone or knows exactly what she's talking about.

(28:40):
And it just shows that golf between these two people
have like, Wow, we used to be so close together.
Now I don't speak to you anymore. Now I don't
even know where you are. Now you're in the place
that you used to say you used to hate, but
now you're there with your new girlfriend. And that's how
cruel Elliott is to his mother. And yet towards the
end of the film, hold her, he can hug her,

(29:02):
he can say I love you, he can let go
of this thing, he can let go of the idea
that his dad has abandoned them. And it was it
was really important to me as the kids loved it.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
And all the elements have come together beautifully with et
that like they said.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
The writing is so good.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
The performances, I mean, Drew Barrymore on debut is just
as Gerty is just brilliant and just acutesting any of
us ever seen Elliott, Have you seen the audition that
he gives. It is an extraordinary piece of work on
its own.

Speaker 4 (29:37):
One could almost say, it's almost child abuse because they
I'm joking.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
But yeah, they're they're.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Basically improvising with him and saying some pretty full on
things to him.

Speaker 4 (29:48):
Yeah, they're saying, we've got this a friend and we're
going to take him away, and they're they're you know,
he's really locked into the improv and he's crying, you know,
And you were amazing. The comments you said about the
other kids is amazing because Melissa Matheson, who wrote that screenplay,
she also wrote Black Beauty, which is how she got

(30:09):
that gig, and that's another extraordinary film about childhood and
loss and whatever. But she really worked with those kids.
The dialogues extraordinary. That's that amazing Spielberg dialogue where everything
feels conversational and improvisational, and maybe some of it was,
but it was just all that cross talk that was
in those early Spielberg films like Close Encounters and polter

(30:31):
Geis and whatever you like. You just hear people talking
over each other and it was so naturalistic. Also, it
was revolutionary at that time to show families as they were.
They were in a product, they were in like a
new housing project. The streets kind of looked like they
did in Australia back then too, you know, because we

(30:53):
were a newer country, our homes and those new building
projects were sort of happening. We had those dirt roads,
half built houses, and divorce was a new thing. You know.
It was very relatable to a lot of kids that
were going through that and just mums struggling with groceries
and stains on andre cleaning and you know, brothers and

(31:14):
sisters just kind of getting up the high jinks and
some of those lines from you know there's that famous
none of your business Penis breath and her as a
parent like laughing but then going I can't laugh at that,
and it just seems it just it was amazing, like
we felt like we were in on a secret watching it.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
I can't think of another film where it's clearly the
kids versus the adults that does not come across as
tweet one one ioda like often if it's like, yeah,
the kids are going to take on the adults and
the authorities, you know, and they're very young kids. I mean,
he's got the older brother who's you know, a teenager,
an older teenager, but you know, Henry's very young. Girtie

(31:53):
is extremely young and they're kind of taking on the adults, yeah,
the authorities, but it never comes across as I just
can't think of another movie where it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
It doesn't become like schmaltzy.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
No.

Speaker 4 (32:09):
And it's because of that wonderment. I think it's because
what maybe that central theme is is that if we
really really take it down to if this was a
film about divorce, you know, it's the one thing that
we miss sometimes is the child's point of view. So
he's gone back to a child's point of view, and

(32:31):
everything is just really through wonderment. And sometimes what we
lose as we get older is to just be in
the moment, be in wonderment. Have you know. That's why
Mary the Mother is so attractive. I think she's one
of the sexiest moms in cinema history in that film,

(32:52):
you know, because she's still she still is a bit
of a child. You know. There's a moment when they
order a pizza and she's like, who told you could
order pizza? You know, and someone says douchebag and she
slaps them on the None of that douchebag talk in
my house. Kids, But she's just kind of one of
the kids and but you know, that's why she's allowed
to be seen in that film, because she sees them.

(33:14):
She sees them, and Etie also sees her. There's there's
a frame when she's reading to Gerty and it always
amazed me, and she's reading Peter Pan and she says
to she says to Gerdy, there's a line in the
film that says, clap your hands, clap your hands. And
then she says to her daughter, do you believe in fairies?
And Gertie and I believe it's Drew Barrymore really answering,

(33:35):
saying I do. I do believe. I do believe in fairies,
you know, And she says, then clap your hands if
you believe in fairies. And you can tell that that
young actress is clapping her hands to try to bring
tinker Bell back to life, because that's how real the
connection was between everyone on set, you know. And that's
all children want, you know this, like children hate it
when you're condescending to them, and they just want you

(33:56):
to talk to them like adults. I don't want you
to like hey were you to do and talk to
them like a pet. They want you to see them.
And this was one of the first films. I think
when the camera really saw children, Yeah, and I felt seen, and.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Jake Gillenhall makes I think.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
I'm sure it was his debut, not a very He
certainly exploded onto the scene three with the Donnie Darko.
Some people get it, some people don't. I really enjoyed it.
Tell us about your love with Donny Darko.

Speaker 4 (34:25):
I'm obsessed with the eighties and I'm obsessed with time
travel and something so fascinating about this director, because I mean,
this was so much love. He seems to be like
a genius, but this feels like the only film where
he's really got it right and on his first attempt.

(34:46):
It has all these icons in it. Ironically, Drew Barrymore's
in it, so I love that she's in it. The
soundtrack is some of my favorite music. Music plays a
huge role in it. But what's the iconic tears for
fears head over heels. Yes, But you know, I've always
been fascinated with the idea of time travel and the
idea of parallel universes, and that's kind of what this

(35:08):
film is about. And you know, he's the ultimate anti hero.
Even the fact that he has the name Donnie darker,
and one character says, you know, you sound like a
superhero and he says to her, who says, I'm not,
you know, And I like it because he's a kid
who on one level he has mental illness. And his mother,

(35:31):
you guys will have to IMDb this, but but his
mother is incredible. She's you know, she's she loves her
son so much. But he's a teenager and he has
some sort of mental health issue that is never really
diagnosed in the film. He's possibly bipolar, he's possibly has
an identity disorder, or he is a time traveler who knows,

(35:57):
but who knows. But at one point and he says
to his mother, what does it feel like to have
a freak for a son? And she cries and she says,
it feels wonderful, you know, And she's got this grief
about his self, hatred about himself. But the film essentially
opens with a countdown and it basically says, on this date,
the world will end. And you know, it's that classic

(36:21):
premise of writing a screenplay where you put a ticking
bomb under a table in a cafe, and so you
set up that expectation and we're thinking, what the hell
is going to happen, and I don't know, it's magical
to me. It's just the idea that happenstance in the
world if it weren't for this or that I have
a personal experience of. So this film, without spoiling much,

(36:45):
involves the idea that there is a plane flying through
the air and one of the engines of a seven
four seven just falls off and crashes into a home
or does it all right? So that's one major catastroph
that happened in the film that sets off all sorts
of events. There are some legends in it, like Patrick

(37:06):
Swayze and Drew barrymore As I spoke about, I have
my own sort of plane what if moment, But that
happened around September eleven, which is that I was almost
on one of the planes that crashed, the one that
was traveling from New York to San Francisco and it
ended up being hijacked and it was on its way

(37:26):
to Washington. So the one where everyone fought back, and
if it weren't for just some intuition on my part
where I had just a change of heart, I would
have been on that plane. So I think about that
a lot.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
So your intuition was that you thought that something bad
was going to happen. I obviously couldn't have ford seen
what happened, But was it just based on that want
to go and visit that person, or go and do
that gig or what was.

Speaker 4 (38:00):
Yeah, I thought something bad was going to happen. I
was in New York and I was living in San
Francisco at the time, and i'd been I flew out.
I flew out there because Bono was doing this charity
record for Haiti to Was. It was talk about bad marketing.
The idea needed to be refined. If you're listening Bono,

(38:20):
just know you've had better ideas. There was no USA
for Africa. It was an amazing idea, but it just
wasn't refined enough because I can't even remember what it
was for. He had every star in the world. It
was Beyonce, Brittany, you know, just everyone you could imagine
on this record. And then I was on it and

(38:41):
we all flew out to New York to record and
it was extraordinary. He was producing the vocals, Michael Stipe
was in the room, like I was so star struck.
And it was two thousand and two. I guess or
two thousand and one, whenever. September two thousand and one,
and it was the year that my first solo record
was coming out and Michael Jackson was performing his thirtieth

(39:06):
anniversary show at Madison Square Gardens and I was a
huge Michael Jackson fan, so for me, it was like, Wow.
My friend from Australia, Claire, who's a choreographer, I flew
her over from Australia to come with me. It was
going to be this big, big deal and just something
was off. There was an energy in that city that
was just really really off. And I did the recording,

(39:30):
which was kind of magical, and I was single, and
there was someone there was a publicist that was working
that event that I had a connection with, and I'm
such a romantic And I remember saying to a friend
of a friend who knew him, like, Oh, I'm due
to fly back on a certain date, but I'm thinking

(39:51):
about staying for a few extra days. And she was like, yeah,
you should do it. You should do it. So I
called up my publisher, called up my team and basically
just said, can you change my flight to September eleven?
And this is the joy of working with people that
know you and know that you're a flake. So the

(40:11):
flight was the It left at like eight forty in
the morning or whatever, and they know I'm not a
morning person. They're like, are you sure that's really early
for you and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that was the only flight available, the only seat available,
so yes, just put me on that flight. And they're
like okay, and they didn't do it. So I then
went to see the Michael Jackson show. Mike bless him,

(40:34):
was not in the great shape. He was in the
midst of a lot of his sort of prescription drug
sort of issues. At the time, I didn't know what
was going on, but my heart kind of broke because
he was a childhood idol and I saw him and
they take that show over two nights. In the night
that I saw it, he was two hours late. He
struggled to do the show, and it was heartbreaking to
see an idol kind of in the midst of all

(40:56):
that sort of stuff. And Claire and I were just
like depressed after that. And then the next day we
had this walk around the city and it felt like
a montage of just no it was hot. I can
still remember moments of seeing like there was one guy
that was on a payphone who's slamming the phone into
the payphone. That's how old am It was a payphone,
and there was there was just this violence in the city.

(41:19):
There was violence that would describing this, this awful feeling.
And I also remember just thinking, what am I doing
waiting around for some guy like who hasn't called me back?
And I'm better than this and whatever. So I called
up and Claire had a vision. I'm not kidding you.
Claire had a vision about the towers. And this sounds
so crazy and disrespectful, but she did because she just
we went to the what's that amazing building where sleepless

(41:44):
and seat all is set, you know, the Empire State,
Empire State, and she looked at the towers and she
said they're going to fall down. One day when we
were on this trip, it was creepy, so creepy, and
I called up the office and just said, look, I
got a bad feeling, I don't want to be here.

(42:05):
I'm going to you know, don't change my flight. And
they said I didn't presco we they held it or something,
but they said, I didn't. You still have the original flight,
just come home. So I came home, and then I
dreamed about the morning of the event. I was at
home and I dreamed that I was in this field
and I was standing around what looked like Stonehenge. There

(42:28):
was this beautiful, like rocky moment, all these sort of
like monuments around me, and I was watching a hot
air balloon overhead and it caught fire. It hit the monuments.
They burst into flames, and I just remember in the
dream looking around and all my friends and family were
with me, and I said, out loud, oh my god,

(42:49):
thank god, everyone's okay. The phone rang. It was an
ex boyfriend who thought I was in New York because
I told everyone I was staying until September eleventh, and
coming home that day, thought I was on the flight.
And he just said, are you okay? And I told
him that dream, I just told you, and he got
the shivers and just said, you need to turn on
the TV. I turn on the TV and that flight

(43:13):
had crashed and it was in a field and all
that happened. Shit, I know, really, it sounds unbelievable, and
I'm not I mean, I'm not Shirley McLean, and I
think you know now after twenty five years in the business.
I haven't made a history of making these wild like
weird things, but that happened to me, and after all
of this time living, I just think that an event

(43:33):
that big and that horrific if animals in the wild,
like if you look at, say, when a lion is attacking,
like a herd of wild animals, and you watch them
and imperceptibly they all moved just a second before it
attacks or whatever. I just wonder as human beings, like
I think if an event that evil was being planned,

(43:54):
I wonder if there was just a vibe, and I
think when that moment happened was just so horrific. I
think that the human emotions, like if the brain has
electricity in it whatever. I don't know. I just feel
like there was something in the air and I picked
up on it and I listened to my gut a lot.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
Now I'm gonna say, what do you what do you
do with that information?

Speaker 4 (44:19):
Well?

Speaker 1 (44:19):
How does it how does that experience? How does it?

Speaker 2 (44:21):
How does it change your lucke you think? How often
do you think about it?

Speaker 4 (44:26):
Just? Yeah, I do. I just go with my gut
all the time, because I think our gut is just information.
I think what we're really picking up on is just
subliminal cues. I don't think it's magic. I don't think
I'm psychic. I think what it is is, you know,
I really broke it down. I think that was just
I'm probably just lucky. And I think that there was
some energy in the city. And you know, I don't know,

(44:50):
but in general, if I get a bad vibe about someone,
listen to it. You know that old Maya Angelo quote
of people tell you who they really are when you
first me them.

Speaker 1 (45:00):
I believe them.

Speaker 4 (45:01):
Yeah, we just have the human The naive part of
us wants to just be like, nah, they're not bad,
they just just it's like, no, they're really showing you
that there's a tell. You know, gamblers have a tell.
Everyone has a tell. And in that situation in New York,
the city is almost like an organism New York City,

(45:24):
it's a person. You know you've been there. It doesn't negotiate.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
No, no, you never experienced anything like the first time
I was on New York, I was like, oh, okay,
I get it now. I get all the songs, I
get all the I feel like I'm in the middle
of the universe right now, like it's it's it's and
it's a real feeling you get that doesn't quite exist.
I mean Paris kind of I look around Paris and go,
this is like the coolest city in the world. Like

(45:51):
I love, I love all these old notch of dams there.
Well it used to be, but you just kind of thing,
I love this place and I love I can feel
the history here. Yeah, but in New York, you really
feel like the world is a spinning around you.

Speaker 4 (46:05):
Yeah, And I think that really comes from our DNA,
Like I really think, like if you really break it down,
like so New York was, like you know, it's a
place of immigrants. It's a place of the blood and
sweat and death had sacrificed that people went through to
get there and finally make it. And then the generations
of people that survived same thing with the West in

(46:26):
order to have made it in California. You know that
there's a certain amount of grift, you know, even just
in the the idea that you had to survive that
treacherous trail. You know of so what type of person
that frontier mentality. It's no wonder these Americans who love
their guns, love their guns because it was a certain

(46:48):
type of person that had to be able to survive that.
It being Australian a similar thing, you know from you know,
it's changing now, but to set aside the incredible, wonderful
and digits culture and country that came before, you know,
white people invaded it. But those criminals, those discarded types

(47:10):
that were put on ships and just thrown here and
left to whatever. You know, that's a type of person too,
you know, and that that shapes the culture and shapes
the city. So it's it's the people that end up
in a place, what they had to endure, what they
had to survive, or what really does it's in the soil,
I think too, Darren.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
We need to move on to the movie we are
here to talk about. This may be a two part
or I think it's been amazing, but I'm really curious now.
Nineteen fifty two, Gene Kelly, it's Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connell,
what did you make of Singing in the Rain?

Speaker 4 (47:51):
I loved it so much and it was exactly what
I needed. Yes, loved it. Oh that was good, and
it was so arming and so magical and everything that
I really missed from movies now, and when I watched it, yes,
like I had no idea. What's stopped me watching it

(48:13):
all these years? I understand now because I did a
lot of research afterwards, understanding, oh, this movie is considered
to be one of the best, well the best musical
ever made. I read that about it. I read, you know,
I went in blind, so I was like, going, why
is that woman so familiar? I didn't realize you know
who I didn't realize that was DeBie Reynolds. You know,

(48:33):
she was just so delightful and you hit it right
off the top of their chemistry. And I looked at
a movie like La La Land, which I love, and
just thought, this is Lala Land's nothing like Wow, Okay,
they were really making a love letter to musicals when
they made Lala Land, because this is the template. You know,
I've always loved Gene Kelly. You know, I'm so cheesy

(48:56):
that I'm the person that loves Xanadu, right, and I do.
It's a terrible film, but you know there's a moment
where Geane Kelly tap dances with Olivin Newton John and
he insisted on directing that moment, and you can tell
all of these moments in the film are just magical.
But from the very inception of the film, the device

(49:17):
that they use, you know where you you get invited
to this red carpet at Man's Chinese Theater, and you
know it now because you're a tourist and you're like,
oh my god, that's Man's Chinese Theater. But it's like, oh,
it's set in the twenties and the thirties, but this
is color. So the fact that's it looks now, it's

(49:39):
like history has eaten itself. So this looks intentional.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
This looks like bes Leman. I imagine I's watched this film
many many.

Speaker 4 (49:46):
Times, absolutely so now a lot of this film looks
like cliches, but this is the original. So there are
so many techniques in this film and so many colors
that are put together for the first time, and and
you can tell they're doing things because they have the
technology to be like, we must paint their set yellow
because it's gonna look incredible in technicolor. So before he

(50:10):
was so handsome too, I didn't realize just what like
the jawline and the killer smile, and I saw so
many things from pop culture and music videos that have
stolen from this film that I didn't realize that even
I have absorbed and not realized where they've all come from.
I saw Michael Jackson's love of gene Kelly. I saw

(50:33):
a lot of Michael's moves in gen Kelly Vincent Patterson,
who's a choreographer that worked with Michael Jackson for a
long time. I saw like you little thieves. Good for you,
you know, because pop culture eats itself. But the chemistry
between those two and I love that simple like that
I hate you, I love you. You know. That first moment

(50:56):
of the way they set them up was just so
incredible that at first, you know, he's this swanky, you know,
movie star, but it's the silent era. What a wonderful
thing to kind of set up.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
The idea alone.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
I mean, we'll go through some of the songs and
talk about it, but the very idea, which I believe
comes from the two screenwriters, Betty Comdon and Adolph Green.
Adolf's name hasn't aged well, but they moved into they
rented a house, so they had all the songs that
the Alfred fried is the producer who's a songwriter lyricist,

(51:36):
so he'd had all these songs. I think the term
that they kind of coin later on is called a
jukebox musical.

Speaker 4 (51:43):
Yes, and the songs aren't really connected to the story.
Richard and I were talking about this. My husband were
just saying, it is a musical. That you could take
most of the songs out and put them in a
different musical that wouldn't matter. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Yeah, because Singing in the Rain, I think that song
is in seven other films, for example, and it's you know,
it was written in nineteen twenty nine, and I think
and there's very loose you know, you could loosely tie
the songs into part of the narrative, but it's really
mainly chemistry building, I think. But the very idea, because
I like you, I just had this idea that I

(52:16):
had the image of Gene Kelly singing and I thought,
that's impressive, but you know, maybe it's not for me.
And then it was Tony Martin on this podcast who
hadn't seen Top Gun, but one of his favorite films
was Singing in the Rain, and I never knew that
it was based on the idea of the transition from
silent films to talkies, and I thought, wow, wow, that's

(52:36):
such an interesting idea. It reminded me of feeling enough
Boogie Nights when they go from film to the videotape,
you know, and everything goes hey wire after that. But
the story, I think this film feels very modern in
a weird way, but it lends it that's the storyline alone,
lends itself to comedy, to color, the silliness.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
To all these things.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
But the Debbie and that off move into this house,
and the guy who they rented the house off was
selling it because he was a silent movie star who
had lost his wealth because he couldn't trans he couldn't
go to the talk, he wasn't working for him.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
So that's where the idea actually came from.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
So they built that, worked out the songs that they
already had, and then made this And it sounds like
an awful like there's no way that movie should be
as good as it is based on those things, I
don't think.

Speaker 4 (53:26):
Yeah, And it's held up by you know, the pins
of the tent is held up by the pins of
the three leads who are just so fascinating to watch. Sorry,
who is Who's Don? Who's the other?

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Donald O'Connor, Donald O'Connor.

Speaker 4 (53:41):
His name is Robert Face his expressions, but also the
film the fictitional, fictitious lead that Gene Kelly plays opposite.
She's hilarious and you don't realize, you know, because they're
silence stars, and they set up this joke where they
turn up at first and I'll do all the talking, darling,

(54:03):
and he's talking and stuff, and she's just she seems
like she looks a bit like a Marilyn Monroe or
a Bridget Budo or something. But you know, she's just
so beautiful. And then when she lets out that voids,
which is just horrible.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Let's have a listen of the first time. And like
you said, we've been on the red carpet. We've noted
that Don Lockwood has done all the talking. Then they're
on stage and every time she goes to talk, Don
come of you that kind of gives her a nudge
or steps in front of her and does the talking.
She gets off stage where all the executives are waiting,
and then be picking up there.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
What digg any kids as a smash?

Speaker 5 (54:42):
Mister Simpson on Lena, you were gorgeous, Yehlen you look
pretty good for girl.

Speaker 6 (54:46):
What's a big idea?

Speaker 4 (54:47):
Can the girl get away at edge Y after all?

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Down my public too, Elena, the publicity department right here
thought it would be much better if Don made all
the speeches for the team.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
Why, Lena, you're a beautiful woman.

Speaker 4 (55:00):
Audiences think you've got a voice to match.

Speaker 5 (55:01):
The studio's got to keep their stars from looking ridiculous
at any cost. No one's got that much money.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
What's the big idea? Am I done this something? I mean,
if that voice, like the whole movie hinges on her, really, like,
it's the idea that this voice, her voice, cannot make
the transition and she's not now suitable for this new world.
And if gene Hagen, who gets not many for the oscar,

(55:27):
If that doesn't work, and apparently she has a beautiful
voice so it is a real performance. If that doesn't work,
the movie actually falls apart.

Speaker 4 (55:35):
Yeah, it's funny listening to it. Separate from the vision.
She sounds like she sounds like Missus Costanza.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
Yes, yes, but.

Speaker 4 (55:47):
When you pair her voice with the act, with that
beautiful actress, it just it's like wow, you know, like
anyone would take ten steps away and just step back
because it just yeah, just did not work, an incredible premise,
so funny, and I found myself laughing from because you know,
a lot of comedy doesn't date, it doesn't age well.

(56:09):
And I was laughing from the first five minutes of
the film. And I was cynical, you know, like it
was a bit like this and you know what you're
like when you have homework to do as well, it's
a bit tired. And I was like, oh God, I
got to watch this film. And then I was like,
I love this film. And it put me in such
a good mood too, because I had a bit of
a rough day and it was just so charming, so

(56:32):
charming and lovely and like disappearing. Like I talked about
the qualities of the films that I loved in my life,
but this was such a like stepping into a beautiful
bath or into diving into a pool or whatever. Like
it's such an immersive experience of just this wonderland of
cinema in the way that when Bads gets it right,

(56:55):
he does it. But this was just delightful.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
It's pure joy.

Speaker 4 (56:59):
Everything about joy.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
It is like even like the villain is is the Alena,
but she's not, you know, like she's still funny. You know,
we kind of get it. There's another version of this movie.
It's told from her perspective, and you know, the others
are the villains who are trying to, yeah, maybe not
help her out. But what you said about it being funny,

(57:23):
I cannot agree more. Which was the thing that really
surprised me when I first watched it, And so Tony
was on the podcast about two years ago, and I've
watched it about four times since.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
I just love it.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
There's lines on the red carpet, like the idea where
he's talking about you know that well, first of all,
I think when there's there's people who are introduced and
she refers to somebody as an eligible bachelor, a bachelor,
and he's like eighty, it looks like he's like ninety
or something.

Speaker 4 (57:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
There's there's a point where there's all the motors he's
talking about his career.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
The motorcycle stunts are one way.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
This goes off a cliff and the song about is
him and Cosmo's career and he's just lying through his
teeth and we're seeing straight down the battle of the
camera and we're seeing the flashbacks of his career and he.

Speaker 4 (58:15):
Goes, yeah, we work always about dignity.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
We study that the Conservatory of the Fine Arts, and
this says them in a pub and a piano.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
It's so good.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
There's a line where somebody's watching a movie and I
think they're watching Don Lockwood on screen, and she says
he's so refined, I think I'll kill myself, which really.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Got to like.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
It made me laugh and it's like, wow, I wasn't
expecting that line in nineteen fifty two.

Speaker 4 (58:41):
Yeah, so dark. And there's another dark moment too later
on when people watch so later on in the film,
when they commit to the transition to sound and spoiler
that it sort of goes disastrously. And they have a
test screening and some of the audience comments as they're
coming out, Oh, man, if you've ever made anything and

(59:02):
you've had to as we are, you know, listen to
some feedback. It's brutal some of the audience comments, you know,
and they're thinking, well, is it that bad? Right? And
then it just keeps escalating the comments that people are
making as they come out. They're like, that is the
worst film I've ever seen. They're like, well, it's just
one film, right, They're like I'm never gonna watch one
of his films ever again. It's great.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Let's ever listen to. Possibly is the I haven't only
thought about it. Possibly might be the inciting incident where
we the news comes in. There're having a party, one
of the Hollywood party, one of the execs, uh you know,
palacial homes, and he has an announcement to make to
all the silent film stars gathered.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
This is a demonstation of a talking picture. It is
a picture of me and I am talking no how
I live, and the sound issuing from them. I think
our eyes together in perfect the.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Earliest there's somebody talking behind that street.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Of the island than mister Simpson. I'm right here of
our tie on.

Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
Then my voice has been recorded on a record, a
cock picture.

Speaker 6 (01:00:23):
Goodbye.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
Well it's just a toy.

Speaker 5 (01:00:31):
It's as great, it's vogue.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Do you think they'll ever really use it? I doubt it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
The Warner Brothers are making a whole talking picture with
this gadget the jazz singer.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
They'll lose their shirts.

Speaker 4 (01:00:41):
What do you think of a dexter?

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
It'll never amount to a thing.

Speaker 5 (01:00:43):
That's what they said about the horseless carriage.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
I mean, it's done always.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
I mean he he's got no character art at all, Cosmo,
but he's just he makes every scene better.

Speaker 4 (01:00:55):
And he keeps falling upward. He keeps getting promotion every
time some thing happens in the industry. Like, you know,
he goes from I don't even know what he is.
He's kind of like, you know, a sidekick, and then
he's suddenly like, you'll be the musical direcord, You'll be
the this, You'll be that, You'll be studio owner. Like

(01:01:16):
I did notice in the film too, like it seemed
very easy to get a job in the movies in
this in this film, Yes, very easy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Yeah, yeah, it's a fair point. It's a fair point.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Was there anything Yeah, you've had a twenty five year
career in music, was there anything like this is is
a massive moment in time for these people, like going
from silence to talking. Was there anything that you went,
oh shit, this is the industry has changed? Was it Spotify?
Was it social media? What was the biggest thing you thought, Oh,
hang on, this is everything that the landscape has changed.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
Yeah, that's why I took ten years out of the business,
to be honest, I mean, not the only reason, but
in retrospect, I realized that in twenty twelve Spotify was
really just becoming a thing, and that ability for the
public to really curate their own experience of music had

(01:02:13):
fundamentally changed the network, the landscape. Sorry, So it wasn't
just there were two massive shifts, you know, that first one,
which I still think was a massive mistake, which was
when Steve job said a song is worth less than
a buck. That was hard because there is music in everything.

(01:02:36):
You know, there's music and films, there's music in commercials.
Music is such a huge part of every art form,
every commercial output, everything that happens, and so it has
this value to it. But then we decided, once we
decided the song was less than a buck, it just

(01:03:00):
that was the end of one huge part of the
commercial world of music. So that changed things. And what
happened was budgets just dramatically dropped. You just couldn't make
the quality of things that you wanted to make anymore.
So music videos just didn't look as good anymore because
no one wanted you weren't getting the same return. That

(01:03:22):
didn't bother me so much, because you know, I'd made
a lot of money selling plastic discs and I've always
been about art, and I just poured money back into
that and into touring. But the Spotify thing, it took
a while for me as an artist to catch up.
I was like one of those those silent picture actors.

(01:03:42):
It took me a while to realize that I was
still trying to do things the old way, you know,
whereas now we live in a world where you can
secretly record a record and just drop it the next day.
You know, you don't have to make it ironically, even
though I've done it. You don't have to make music videos.
You don't have to ask a radio session to play record,

(01:04:03):
you don't have to do all those things. You can
just decide if you wanted to. I have a record,
it's going to come out on this day, and here's
how you can pre order it. And I'm going to
go touring next week. And this is it. You have
this direct connection to your audience. And there are young
people who are born into this model and that's the
only thing they know. And you know, I had to

(01:04:27):
learn to adapt very very quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
Did you have a singing in the rain. Did you
have a favorite song? There was a one that blew
you away more than another one, and for what reason.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
There were two things that, I mean, the first confession
of love that gene Kelly has where he says, I'm
so used to I'm such a hand I have to
do this the right way, and he takes it into
a studio stage. I can't remember the name of that song,
but it's.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
You Were Made for Me or something like that.

Speaker 4 (01:05:04):
It was so beautiful. I love that song. But there's
also the staging of one dance number that he does
in the end, where it's this endless sort of pink
and purple sunset and there's the stairs and this will
blow you Away. On the cover of my album, I'm

(01:05:24):
on this sort of peachy staircase and there's a sunset
and whatever. And I had actually pulled a still from
this film in my mood board for the photo shoot
from my album without even realizing it was from Singing
in the Rain Wow, and it's yeah, and it was
from this film. So when I saw that sequence unfold

(01:05:45):
and gene Kelly's dressed all in black and there's an
actress who's in this white outfit and there's this what
looks like a mile long piece of white fabric just
so beautiful what.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
She has called Broadway Melody.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
The whole the bigger piece is called Broadway Melody, and
the actress dancer is Sid Chares.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
And that portion of it was I think called brought
Broadway Ballet. And yeah, that was Gene Kelly's idea to
have this kind of this shoal. This went forever, And
I've heard the actress dances yes, and I've heard I've
heard her talk about it going because I had of
the fans and the wind.

Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
They had to really work out.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
It took it took a month of rehearse, two weeks
to shoot because six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which
was a fifth of their budget. And I've heard the
actress talk about it and she was saying the wind
was the wind machine because I had to work out, Okay,
if I move here, the shoal is going to go
over here. And she said the wind it was such

(01:06:48):
a heavy wind machine that it was actually even hard
to keep my balance. Wow, Like yeah, so get to
get that result. It was originally spasically, I'm not sure
how this really would have worked. Has been a completely
different dance sequence because it was supposed to be Donald
O'Connell and then he had a TV commitment, so he
had to leave, he had to go do blankety blanks
or something, I don't know, and so they had the very.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
Right of the sequence.

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
But it's an extraordinary The whole secrets goes from your
gutta dance, gotta dance into this. It's it's it's extraordinary.
It's it's beautiful and if you notice it, you're.

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
Very modern too.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
It's extremely modercause you see like that, not just seeing La,
but you see a lot. You know, they were using
those you know, Pink does it in her shows, which
you know, the acrobatics of tying yourself up in these
these shoals, and it's it's very sexy.

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
It's extraordinarily sexy.

Speaker 4 (01:07:43):
Very sexy and modern, and it reminds me it could
have been a it could be a tom Ford Gucci
campaign today. It could be. It was ahead of its
time and that it looked almost like Bob Fossy stuff.
And this was in the fifties, so it had a
real future Sixties like, there are moments in this film
that looked so Maude, yeah, meaning you know, like Maud

(01:08:03):
from the sixties. And I had to keep reminding myself, oh,
this was a nineteen fifties film. The other thing I
want to say about gen Kelly too, was that, you know,
he made dancing so sexy and so masculine, and he
was doing ballet, you know, he's tap dancing, and it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Was so.

Speaker 4 (01:08:22):
There was so much testosterone in the room. I was
just like, you know, that's literally balls, Like I don't
know it just he managed to be so like, you know,
he was like Brando.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
Well, funny you say that, because he said he said,
because Fredis Staire obviously was the other massive, you know,
dancer of the day, and he said that quite was.
Fredistae is a carry ground of dance, on the Marlon
Brando of dance, and that's he is.

Speaker 4 (01:08:50):
Yeah, And I just blew me away. I didn't because
I knew Gene Kelly obviously from later on in life.
But wow, what a what a movie star he really was.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
I mean, he looks always trying to think, always think.
Jimmy has come up a few times, Jimmy Stewart. If
you modernize him, he's almost Tom Hanks, you know, like
Tom Hanks is almost America's dad, you know. And I
get the George Clooney kind of vibe and Karry Graulsey.
George Clooney doesn't do the singing and the dancing, but
just on screen, the way he holds himself to me

(01:09:20):
is George and there. I'm sure if you noticed in
that dance, there was a little jump cut when they're together.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
If you rewatch it, there's a bit where she yes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
So what happened was there was they warned not to,
you know, there were certain things they couldn't couldn't do,
and it's a very sexy dance and one of the
things I want to do is not for her to
for sid cheries to wrap her leg or legs around
Gene Kelly. So that jump cut, it's believe they obviously

(01:09:51):
did that and then they couldn't they couldn't show.

Speaker 4 (01:09:54):
Is that because of that?

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
Because I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):
I think it's just the rating and they wouldn't have
been able to. I'm not sure what the where the
rating system was back then, or it would have affected
the releases, and it was in the various pressure groups.
I'm not sure it was McCarthyism. I think it came
through you know, Christian standards and those kinds of things.

Speaker 4 (01:10:17):
So released the Kelly Cut released the Kelly Cut.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
Well, the original the original print of this film was
burnt in a fire, so it doesn't it. Actually, I
was wondering whether they could find that, and they it's gone.

Speaker 1 (01:10:30):
They will never I'll never find it.

Speaker 4 (01:10:32):
There was also just imagine some fundamental Christian going kill
it with fire, kill it anyway. Sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
There was also a two hour stop during this sequence
at the start because there was cid. Urie was wearing
a very you know kind of her dress and had
to dance sexy, but you could actually there was somebody
had noticed you could see pubic hair, and they had
to shut down for two hours. For two hours. I
get the impression, Darren, it wouldn't been It wouldn't be

(01:11:01):
an issue these days. It wouldn't be an issue in
the Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 (01:11:06):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:11:07):
Well actually yeah, and also just because of ya, does
anyone have future apart from me?

Speaker 1 (01:11:14):
She also had to learn how to smoke.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
Somebody had the teacher how to smoke for this role
and for this and there's the only there's no talking
in it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
She's just dancing. She was amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
Gene Kelly also choreographed it to make it look like
you couldn't see that she was taller than him, so
there's no none of them side by side standing standing up.

Speaker 4 (01:11:34):
Very clever because it's on very graduated scares the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:38):
Yeah, very clever. Yeah, it's very good.

Speaker 4 (01:11:40):
I insisted on that with this podcast. You can't see
at home, but I insisted that Pete be on a
sort of an air pressure seat, that he was a
slightly short.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
Trying to slouch as well.

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
So the thing that made me laugh in that sequence,
because the idea behind it is that she is like
that the girlfriend of a mobster.

Speaker 1 (01:12:01):
Lot scarface.

Speaker 2 (01:12:02):
And the flipping of the coins, I thought it just
made me laugh every time, the flipping. He was flipping coins,
and then these henchmen would come over those flipping coins.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
It was just out about It made me laugh a lot.
It made me laugh.

Speaker 4 (01:12:17):
Yeah, I guess she she got lured by the money, Pete.
I don't know it's subtle, but I guess that's what
they'll get.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
I think that's what they might have been getting at
My favorite song was and sequence was make them laugh,
make them.

Speaker 5 (01:12:27):
Laugh, make them laugh. Don't you know everyone wants to laugh?

Speaker 3 (01:12:32):
Laugh?

Speaker 5 (01:12:33):
My dad said, be an act of my son but
be our comic.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
Come on, they'll be sad in lines.

Speaker 5 (01:12:41):
For those old monkey talk monkey shines. Or you could
study Shakespeare and be quite elite, and you could charm
the critics and have nothing to eat. Just slip on
a banana, peel the world at your feet. Make them laugh,
make them laugh, make them laugh, make.

Speaker 4 (01:12:58):
Them load.

Speaker 5 (01:12:59):
Don't you know everyone wants to laugh. My grandpa said,
go out and tell him a joke. But if I'll
make a row, make them screen take a call, but
a lost let us see it's not off by pretending
you're to dancer.

Speaker 4 (01:13:16):
With great if you wiggle to look jignalant.

Speaker 5 (01:13:19):
All over the place and then you get a great,
big custom lion a face and make them lap, make
them laugh, make them laugh.

Speaker 4 (01:13:25):
Well, the sequence is incredible. I mean that looked like
a lot of that was in one take, but I
was I couldn't stop laughing at make him laugh because
it went from him cheering up Gene Kelly sort of right,
the camera just pans off Geen Kelly. But I would
love to see someone film what Gene Kelly was doing

(01:13:48):
while this is happening, because I'd love it if Gene
was just like I don't know, checking his phone, not interested,
you know, because so much effort goes into this is
he's basically doing parquet.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:14:06):
Yeah, it's incredibly physically and it's so funny. And I
didn't realize that that's where this song comes from. It's
so famous, right, maybe it was really I think it's
this and I always sort of feel like that was
a super cheesy vaudeville type song, but in the sequence

(01:14:28):
it's hilarious and he's just beating up on himself and
his rubber face is just and body is incredible.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
The rubber faces was amazing, they say. Carry Grant thought
he needed to have his own solo and he thought
he had a vaudeville background.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
So he was like, are you choreographic? You just do it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:46):
All the tricks you can do, you just put it
into one song. So this wrote down all the things
he could do, the props of the planks and the
rubber face, and then he goes and do that thing
you do with the wall. And apparently Donald Connell was
a four packs a four pack of smoke to day
kind of guy, like that's a lot of smoke, really, yeah,

(01:15:07):
And he said I wasn't particularly fit and he suffered exhaustion,
very painful carpet burns. Apparently he was in bed for
three days afterwards. And then there was an accident with
the film stock. Somebody hadn't checked the aperture so it
got ruined, so he had to go do it. They
had to ask him to do it again. So it
was I mean, there's stories with this, like even with
Good Morning.

Speaker 1 (01:15:29):
That Debbie Reynolds.

Speaker 2 (01:15:30):
That's a beautiful song. It's a beautiful song, such a
beautiful song. And Debbie Reynolds was carried off set. She
burst blood, vessels in her feet, she had blood in
her shoes. But by the end of it, I mean,
we should point out Debbie Reynolds and you may have
come across this not a trained dancer, was like a gymnast,
was almost like a young veteran when it came to movies.

(01:15:51):
She'd done a lot, but she was not a trained dancer.
So what I understand, she was almost forced upon Gene Kelly,
and so the key pup with Gene Kelly.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
And uh and Donald.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
It was like and that sequence where they're dancing on stairs,
like yeah, I'm not sure about you, Darren, but I'm
at the age now, and I have been for a
few years where stairs it's the only thing that I
could empathize with Trump about.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
Trump had a fear of stairs.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
And I'm like, yeah, I'm getting to the age where
I just need to hold the rail just a little bit,
even if it's just a finger.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
There's a light finger on a rail, you.

Speaker 4 (01:16:29):
Should try to do it on stage. People opening like,
you know, like, oh my god, I've fallen off stage
in front of you know, an arena crowds where there's
been catwalks and stuff, and it's it's so embarrassing. So
stairs are definitely like and you can't really have rails
on stage because you look, it's embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
So yeah, but they're like they're like like almost barreling
the camera at least, looking straight ahead and in perfect
sync and doing these moves whilst they're moving down the stairs.
It's it's if you take time to think about it
for a second, it's incredible.

Speaker 4 (01:17:04):
It is incredible. I don't know if I'm going to
spoil something you'll bring up later, but I thought it
was so meta that part of the story of the
film was that Debbie Reynolds character is basically doing the
Millie Vanilli thing. So she is replacing the voice of
someone who can't sing. Yes, but it's not Debbie reynolds

(01:17:27):
voice in the movie either. In the singing, they had
someone else sing for Debbie Reynolds. Yes, this is and
they're open about that is crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:35):
It's so amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:17:36):
So when Debbie Reynolds is doing the talking not the singing,
at the end of the talking for Lena, that's actually
it's not her voice. It's actually gene Hagen's voice, who
actually plays Lena.

Speaker 1 (01:17:52):
So wow, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
So and then when she sings later on that is yeah,
like you said, another another singer at the end, so.

Speaker 1 (01:18:02):
That like, yes, it is. It's a really it's a
really fun fact.

Speaker 4 (01:18:06):
You had the power all along, Dorothy.

Speaker 2 (01:18:15):
One of the slight elephants in the room is is
that gene Kelly when you're discussing this, And for all
the research I've done, and it seems nobody's arguing with it,
not even gene Kelly. In fact, he said, I am
surprised to be reynalds. He's still speaking to me like
he was a hard task master.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
Because he was directing.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
It was co directing, and there was a point where
I've seen Donald I kind of say that. There's a
point where after they was shooting a Good Morning sequence
and Gene Kelly said to Donald, he said, in front
of everybody, he said, you got to stop, you got
to stop being mucking around and let's get serious and

(01:18:53):
this is you know, we've got a lot to do,
We've got a lot to get through. And he was
a bit taken aback, and he goes across the road
that they wrap in his favorite ordering hole with some
of the crew members, and Jean Kelly walks in and
he says to him, I'm sorry I yelled at you
in front of the crew.

Speaker 1 (01:19:09):
It was actually I wanted to.

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
Yell at Debbie, but if I yelled at her again
and again, I'd probably lose her for the rest of
the shoot. You know, it should be emotionally distraught. So
I just yelled at you. But it was actually my
I was trying to get through to the Debbie. There's
a there's a story of Debbie Reynolds crying like under
a piano, just hiding under a piano one day and

(01:19:32):
Fred Astaire, who was in the next studio shooting a movie,
came and came and saw her and like this took
her out and this had a word and said this,
you know, the hard work you're putting in is worth it,
because she was like she was working hard.

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
She's nineteen years old.

Speaker 2 (01:19:46):
She's still saying at her parents place a few hours away.
She takes she wakes at a four am each morning,
gets three buses.

Speaker 4 (01:19:53):
She's only nineteen, nineteen years old.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
Yeah, yeah, so, I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:19:59):
She's such a star in that film. You know, I
don't know much about the life of Gene Kelly. I
always just I did a little Google search and saw,
you know, he was married three times. But I read
one disturbing fact about him. It said that he was
cremated and he has had no funeral.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
Yeah it's I did not know that.

Speaker 4 (01:20:27):
Yeah, And I just thought, oh god, that's a bit sad.
But you know, recently Olivia and John passed away and
I've been watching a lot of stuff with her and
she worked with Geen Kelly, and I consider her to
be basically one of the nicest people who ever lived.
And she never said a bad word about him. And

(01:20:49):
I don't know. I know that he was a lapsed
Catholic and he fell out of the Catholic church because
he was disappointed that they weren't compassionate. And I know
that he was the reason I was McCarthyism is because
he was He was one of those actors who was thought,
you know, was a part of the pushback against censorship.
And so he was a Democrat. So I sort of

(01:21:09):
add all those things up and think, oh, kind of
my kind of person.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:21:12):
So, and then because I'm an egotist, I think that
means he's a good person.

Speaker 2 (01:21:16):
Well, I mean they mean god open, and I kind
of say, you know, he was he was a hard
task master. There's been a reckoning and an awakening in
recent years which has been really really good and positive.
It seems like not to have gone into any murky
areas outside of being unpleasant sometimes you know, and being
and I guess when you taking the pressure of but

(01:21:38):
he's doing the choreography, he's also directing.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
The pressure is on him.

Speaker 2 (01:21:42):
He's you know, he's come off a huge hit with
an American in Paris. Was it just stress or was
it you know something else?

Speaker 4 (01:21:50):
It's it's yeah, it's a tough one because I mean
he sounds like a perfectionist. I am a perfectionist, and
sometimes I have to think, you know, I always struggle
and care deeply about what people think about me, and
I always think about that too, Like god, am I mean?
Am I? You know? I had a similar thing recently
on a video shoot where and it was nothing like that,
but where I the lighting director was doing something and

(01:22:14):
she had an assistant do this move with a particular
gobo and it just wasn't I was directing, and it
just wasn't how I wanted it to be. And I,
in front of everyone, just said, no, I really think
you should you should do it. And the lighting director
is sort of you know, clapped back at me in

(01:22:36):
front of everyone and just said she's a kid, give
her a break, right and fair enough. And I felt
really bad because I realized I'd embarrassed this young intern,
this kid, And so I took a moment on set
and I just said, I can I just I just
want to apologize everyone, like I shouldn't have, you know,

(01:22:57):
you know. And so I made a point of like
apologizing for humili getting someone on set, and like I
knew where it came from, which was that, you know,
I am perfectionist and this is what I wanted and whatever,
and Afterwards, the DP came about the lighting director counter
to me and said, you didn't have to do that.
You're like the director and you can do you know.
But I felt like in these times and everything, I

(01:23:18):
was like, no, I did have to do that, like
I wanted to, you know, like I just felt like, yeah,
I wouldn't want someone yelling out in front of everyone,
some comment about my performance in front of the whole crew.
I'd want someone to pull me aside. And I didn't
do that. So I don't know why I say gued
into this is this my therapy session.

Speaker 2 (01:23:37):
Maybe it always turns in a little bit of this one.
I mean you should hear carry a bit more. During
a commercial break to the project, she ripped into me,
like nobody else. I mean, it's it's it's frightening.

Speaker 1 (01:23:48):
It's frightening.

Speaker 4 (01:23:49):
Really.

Speaker 2 (01:23:50):
Of course, I want to be very clear, very clear,
that is not what's amazing about this film, though we'll
wrapping up soon. Is just like it's parodying Hollywood, but
so early, like in a way this is nineteen fifty two.
And then yeah, obviously they write it and it takes
a couple of years, so I guess they're right, and
make I guess, you know, the talkies have only been

(01:24:12):
around for like twenty five years, and they're still parodying
the vanity of Hollywood, the studio system, the star system, fandom,
you know, the bullshit lies that go on in Hollywood.
Like it's a very very early kind of look bird's
eye view of Hollywood in the way to be able
to step back and kind of realize so early on

(01:24:33):
in Hollywood, I.

Speaker 4 (01:24:34):
Think, yeah, and that whole like it starts with that
device of the gossip columnist, you know, and that power
of the red carpet and that insatiable appetite for gossip,
and it's always you know, the whole thing is that
fear of like being exposed or your crib ending. And
then you know, the studio head in this film, he's

(01:24:56):
very morally ambiguous. You know, he has to be almost
blackmailed into like doing the right thing, and they talk
about the contracts and the studio contracts they're under, and yeah,
it's it's a bit you know, it is a bit
better because he's there. He is one of the biggest
stars in the world, sort of doing an autopsy on

(01:25:16):
how the industry kind of works, but getting away with
it because he's saying, oh, this was in the thirties.

Speaker 1 (01:25:21):
But not really.

Speaker 2 (01:25:23):
Yeah, yeah, well you satisfied with the ending, the reveal
and the way that the curtains and the I was the.

Speaker 4 (01:25:29):
Only thing that really and it's great. But the only
thing that just broke my heart was when he yelled
at Debbie I forget her character's name, Kathy, when he said,
you'll go out there and you'll sing this and whatever.
And just because of the times that that film was
written in that men could speak to him and like that,

(01:25:49):
and she just obeyed him, and she said, I'll do it,
but I'll never speak to you again. Yeah, you know,
when she was in love with him, and and I
knew why he was doing it was throwing a stone
at a puppy, and he needed her to do it
in order to expose the villain. But it just broke
my heart that for a second she had to experience thinking,

(01:26:11):
this man isn't who I think he is. I just
forget that this way. I don't write movies though, because
that's that was you were meant to experience that. But
for me, I just wanted him to be like, oh, sure,
let's do Yeah. I wanted all three of three of
them to be in on it, But it wasn't clear
to me that that anyone was going to be on it.

(01:26:32):
I knew he was going to do something morally positive,
but but yeah, I was. I loved it and I
loved it. They ended up together and they're on a
little Yeah. I loved the ending. I loved it. I
was so happy.

Speaker 1 (01:26:44):
Yeah, I love the film.

Speaker 2 (01:26:46):
Well, mate, like I said, thank you so much for
doing your homework. You are, like I said, you are
busy doing a whole lot of press anoun seeing.

Speaker 1 (01:26:54):
Your world tour well is yeah. Yeah, tell me tell
me I did.

Speaker 2 (01:27:00):
You When did you decide to call it homosexual? When
did that idea come to you? Because I imagine if
you had, like twenty years ago, said to your record company,
you know, you know what reactually would have got twenty
years ago as opposed to how it works.

Speaker 4 (01:27:14):
Now, Well, you just answered it. That's why I called
it that. Yeah, Because ultimately I remember so distinctly wondering
why one day I went from being one of the
biggest pop stars in the world to suddenly couldn't get
a call back, couldn't get a phone back from a major,
major record company. Because as a solo artist, made a

(01:27:37):
music video where I danced in it, and they were
all just so embarrassed to really just tell me the truth,
which was that they felt like I looked too gay,
which in itself is a repulsive thought and statement, but
that was their thing. They're like, oh my god, he
looks too gay. Their first response was, we need to

(01:27:59):
make him shoot this video and we'll put it on
his tab and they this is in America, and they
decided that, yeah, we can't let this kid do a
traditional promo run on this like I'd just come off
the back of singing with Pavarotti. You know, I was
known for my voice, and they just any TV promo

(01:28:22):
that I had in the US was pulled. So I
didn't you know, I'd had five six appearances on Jay Leno,
all those shows like that in the past. You know,
I launched a solo career in the US without a
single live performance on television because apparently when I moved,
I looked too gay and that was just too obvious

(01:28:42):
that was going to turn off the public. So, you know,
twenty years later for me to have this neon sign
on the front from my album and I'm lounging in
front of it. You know, it's tongue in cheek, but
it's also really making peace with that shame of like wow,

(01:29:03):
in the the history of that word obviously is so
clinical and whatever. But I'm you know, I'm reclaiming it.
I'm redefining my relationship to what that meant to be
called that as a child and this when you hear
the title track, it was named that. As soon as
I heard the music, I was just like, oh, I

(01:29:24):
have the most genius idea. I am just gonna because
the song was called that, but I was like, I'm
going to call the whole album this because it's not
a song about sex. Actually, it becomes an adjective that's
never been used before. It's like, this is the highest
compliment I can give you. This is the highest compliment
I can give the person I love. It's like a
jinasi qua. It's like, you know, the only way I

(01:29:46):
can describe this is that it's homosexual, therefore making it
an extremely positive word. And just yeah, the reading reading
sh and what's funny too. I just love it when
I go on a show and I just have someone
just says to say that word. It's just so funny

(01:30:07):
to me, so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:30:08):
But I often think of like I often I've spoke
Aba it's recently on a TV showdown here, where I
still feel like I'm answerable to the fourteen year old me,
you know, And I often think of that, the twelve, thirteen,
fourteen year old me, and would he be happy with
what I'm doing? And you know, the way I'm raising
my kids, the way my career has panned out, decisions

(01:30:31):
I make, you know, the way I treat people.

Speaker 1 (01:30:33):
I imagine.

Speaker 2 (01:30:35):
I'm not sure if you do the same thing, but
I imagine your thirteen year old self, who head would
have fucking explode looking at this with prepride, looking at
this album cover.

Speaker 4 (01:30:47):
Yes, there's a video that I posted on my social
media where I have a little distance from it now,
so I'm not so emotional. But when I described it,
I it just came from a nowhere, I said, crying
just because of the emotion and the release and the
emancipation that you know, you feel. Because I couldn't imagine
a world. I couldn't imagine a world where it was

(01:31:07):
okay to even feel how I felt. I couldn't imagine that,
you know, I didn't even know how to put it
into words because I didn't think there were gay people,
you know. I thought that all I knew was there
was a television ad with a grim reaper on it
with a bowling ball saying aids it, you know, it
doesn't discriminate. And I thought, if I thought about a boy,

(01:31:28):
I was going to get AIDS. That's how that's how
alien the concept was to me. And you know, being
half Catholic, I guess my mum was a lapsed Catholic,
but she had all of that, you know, guilt, and
so I still prayed to God and I would pray
to God, please just don't make me gay because I
don't want to die. That's what it was, you know.

(01:31:49):
So I couldn't imagine it. And yeah, it's mind blowing.
And the final thing I say is I love that
we live in a world now where there are young
people that are like so what, Like it's no big
deal them, And it's a very specific experience of mine.
You know, I am a fifty year old man who
grew up in the nineteen seventies, and so it's a

(01:32:10):
lot of my album is talking about also midlife, you know,
and I think a lot of women will relate to it,
where that feeling of like feeling a bit invisible, you know,
feeling like what now? You know, when you get to
that age in your life where the person in the
mirror doesn't look like the fourteen year old or the
twenty four year old or the thirty year old, that

(01:32:32):
you still feel like you are and you're like, huh,
that doesn't Is that what that looks like? From behind?
You know, you're really starting to struggling to love yourself.
And that was the place I came from and coming
back to music was really just trying, you know, trying
to find a place where it was like, how can
I love me today and really accept me today? And

(01:32:57):
putting that word in neon was the beginning step.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):
Well, my congratulations, I think I think it's a genius.
I cannot wait this. You know, the cee you back
down under on tour and I'll put the links on
our on our website for where you can get some tickets.
But thank you so much for doing your homework. This
it's a pleasure I'm going to say to you right now.
This I think has been my favorite episode we've done.
I think you've been so open and so informative with
your opinions on your three favorite films and also singing

(01:33:22):
in the rain.

Speaker 1 (01:33:23):
I'm so glad you enjoyed.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):
I kind of I was sometimes I when we agree
on a film, I'm excited. You know, Tom Tom Ballard,
he watched in Bruges, and I just knew he was
going to love it.

Speaker 4 (01:33:37):
And I had to love it.

Speaker 2 (01:33:39):
Yeah, I had a feeling you'd love this, and I'm
glad that I've got a little bit nervous when you
when you were opened with how much you had visit,
like pushed away, you know, pushed after this film. But
so I'm glad you had a tough day and you
watched it at the end of a tough day, and
I'm glad it's now it's now part of your life.

Speaker 4 (01:33:58):
It's it's one of my favorite films now.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
Pete, this is the dream. That's for real, This is
the dream.

Speaker 4 (01:34:04):
So thank you. And it's just you know, I'm a
huge fan of you, and it's always so lovely to
get to actually, you know, spend time with someone that
I love and admire and the show is great. So
I can't believe I finally got around.

Speaker 5 (01:34:15):
To do it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:15):
So thank you for having Thanks Manome.

Speaker 4 (01:34:21):
And sanging Lorae.

Speaker 1 (01:34:31):
Well there we go.

Speaker 2 (01:34:32):
That was well, that was a monster episode of You
Ain't Seen Nothing Yet with Darren Hayes, who it was
just fun hanging out with him. Our paths across a
few times over the years, and never have we been
able to chat for almost two hours about movies. He
was so open and giving and those I mean, I

(01:34:54):
do love and I know from the feedback we've been
getting from our listeners that you love the almost as
much as the film where we purport to discuss that
their favorite three films. You love hearing my guest talk
about those and wow, Darren hear and Darren talk about
Star Wars and his connection with that movie was just

(01:35:15):
incredible and et and that's Donny Darker. The story about
ninety eleven was just incredible. This I said it the Darren.
I'll say it again. I think this is my favorite
episode of the podcast. If you're looking to you know
they get somebody into the podcast. This is an episode
of Direct Him to I reckon Darren Hayes. His album

(01:35:36):
Homosexual is out now and his tour.

Speaker 1 (01:35:41):
Will be kicking off.

Speaker 2 (01:35:41):
So I just google Darren Hayes and you know things
are easy to find these days. But loved it, really
loved it. Derek Mayers runs Cassways Studios dot com dot au.
If you're trying to get a podcast up, this is
the man you need to talk to. Each of my
guests who comes through Castaway Studios here in Collingwood, they
leave with the card because Derek is forcing them on.

(01:36:02):
Then they just they beg, they beg for a card
in the end, and he's here with me today, Derek.

Speaker 6 (01:36:08):
That was amazing, an absolute mind blowing episode. It was
so much And I want to talk as a as
a listener of Yasney as a listener, like what I
get out of this show is just like everybody you
can see, I can feel it, like hearing people look
look into movies and see what they get out of
it makes you actually realize that as well, just as

(01:36:31):
a normal listener. And it's fantastic And I was. I
loved every second of Darren's insights into his three favorites
and seeing.

Speaker 4 (01:36:39):
In the Rain.

Speaker 2 (01:36:40):
I really I often say this because we had this
lovely often exchange with a lot of our guests once
we stopped recording, and they're like oh, thank you that
it's always it's it's I think uniformly been such a
positive experience for people who have come in. And what
I say to them is is the bit that I

(01:37:00):
love about it is we just don't we have this
romantic idea that we'll go see movies as adults and
then go off to a restaurant in the cafe and
discuss the movies. If we don't do that, you know,
I mean, I'm a comedian, and so I see a
lot of movies by myself mid morning before I head
off to the project. So and then I might say
to somebody, I saw this movie. But to actually discuss

(01:37:23):
a movie and to do a little bit of deep
diving and learning about it, it's been a joy, it really.

Speaker 1 (01:37:28):
I love doing this.

Speaker 2 (01:37:29):
Funnily enough, when we're discussing all the songs, and the
one song we probly spend much time on was the
titular song, Singing in the Rain, And I'll tell you
this a few little fun facts about that, which was
it wasn't in the original draft. It was well not
as was not in the original draft, not as it
turned out. It was supposed to be the three characters,
you know, returning from hearing about the talkies and been

(01:37:53):
a bit downhearted and trying to cheat themselves up.

Speaker 1 (01:37:57):
And then Gene.

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
Kelly thought, I think, I think Don deserves his own
his own song and so, and he was right and incredible.
He was suffering a temperature of one hundred and three
on the day. I'm not sure what that means in Celsius.
It's obviously fahrenheit. I imagine it's bloody hot and a
little bit sweaty with a sheen, I imagine. So the

(01:38:20):
fact that he pulled off one of the most iconic
sequences in Hollywood history as far as imagery goes, I mean,
you think Holywood. I think one of the first images
you have ever before I saw this film, I knew
that sequence.

Speaker 1 (01:38:34):
So incredible performance. They shot it at the shoot it twice.

Speaker 2 (01:38:38):
They shot it originally in the late afternoon, and they
time it got it badly without realizing it because everyone
was coming home from work and putting their sprinklers on,
which meant there was less water pressure coming through the pipes,
so it wasn't quite working. So Gene Cowley suggested they
reshoot it in the morning when everybody had gone to
work and less sprinklers on, I guess, and the result

(01:39:01):
was there for everybody to see. Just a genius, a
genius sequence, soteric like that, you know, the exact for
him to you almost had to place the puddles, you know,
like because there's moments where there's heavy splash coming, you know,
from the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
It's just genius. Wow.

Speaker 6 (01:39:17):
Thirty nine point four four.

Speaker 2 (01:39:19):
By the way, thirty nine point four four, that's about COVID.
That is that is only doing that. I could, you know,
barely get out of bed and then with that temperature,
so lots of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:39:32):
Thank you again, Darren Haze.

Speaker 2 (01:39:33):
Oh you know, I I need to give him a
hug next time I've seen because he thought my mum
was dead for a second. There there's a moment where
I thought, do I'm not telling him that my mum
is still alive? And I only got lost for two
minutes after he told me that really amazing story about
his dad. But you know I couldn't obviously, And yeah,

(01:39:55):
I love the episode. I think you can tell. We've
just recorded it. So I'm still on a bit of
a hum. If you haven't seen Singing in the Rain
that the same stylist did also gone with the Wind.
He said he worked harder on Singing in the Rain
because of all the He said, people have more of
an idea, they're more cluey as to maybe what it
was in their memory, because it was more like recent

(01:40:16):
history that their memory was sharper, as opposed to how
people looked and how they dressed in the twenties in
the late twenties, as opposed to the Civil War. So
he said he worked much harder on Singing in the
Rain than he had to Ongone with the Wind, which,
when you considered Gone with the Wind, was the biggest
epic of all time. It's quite a feat and quite
a statement. Next week on the show, we are following

(01:40:39):
up with a huge movie, a movie that's been nominated
for this podcast by so many people. They're asking, can
you find somebody who hasn't seen this movie. It's been
hard to find somebody who hadn't seen this movie. It's
considered perhaps one of the most loved, maybe the most
loved movie certainly the last thirty odd years. It's the
highest ranked movie on IMDb. It is the most replayed

(01:41:03):
movie in the history of US television. We finally found somebody.
Todd Samson my great mate from the grew and Transfer.
He's a filmmaker. He's made Body Hack, The's amazing documentaries.
He's got a new one called Mirror Mirror. We are
finally watching from nineteen ninety four Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman,

(01:41:27):
directed by Frank Darabon from a novel by Stephen King,
The Shawshank Redemption next week and you ain't seeing nothing yet.

Speaker 1 (01:41:38):
Strap yourselves in it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:39):
There's going to be a bumper episode and I can't
wait to chat with Todd about it.

Speaker 1 (01:41:43):
He's so insightful.

Speaker 2 (01:41:44):
He'll have opinions, he'll have thoughts, and I can't wait
to take them all in. Yes, let's get busy living
or get busy dying to Shaw Shaving Ntion next week
and you ain't saying nothing yet until then Bye for
an hour.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
And so we

Speaker 2 (01:42:06):
Leave old Pete safe and soult and to our friends
of the radio audience, we've been a pleasant good time.

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REPETE: Darren Hayes and Singin' In The Rain

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