Trailers: A Conversation
After releasing the trailer for Izac Brodrick’s short film ‘Flesh and Ivory’, Jackson Kanaris, Izac Brodrick, and Noah Gerometta decided to record an informal discussion about their different approaches in editing trailers, their opinions of trailers in general, and their perceptions of how trailers are constructed nowadays to promote movies aimed at different audiences. The conversation eventually spiralled into a tangent about Emmanuel Lubezki’s filmography, primarily through his work on the 2003 film ‘The Cat In The Hat’. The transcript of this conversation is below.
Izac Brodrick & Angus McArthur-Williams on set of ‘Flesh & Ivory’Izac: I can tell you how I think I should make a trailer.
Noah: Go.
Izac: I need to set up elements of the story so that there's a basic understanding of plot. Basic. Not spoiling. They at least need to understand maybe what the inciting incident is. That's as far as you can go, and because we're young filmmakers, I also wanted to show, well, the whole film is pretty. Thank you, Angus McArthur-Williams. But you want to show shots that display professional capability so that there's an implication that there's a general standard with regards to the trailer. And yeah, it sounds dumb… Cool music.
Jackson: [Laughs] it does.
Izac: It helps a lot.
Noah: Yeah, you can sell a whole film on music.
Izac: I looked for a couple of weeks to find that older classic song that I cannot remember the name of, but I should plug.
Jackson: That was a perfect 30 seconds that you found, honestly.
Izac: Yeah, that was tough because with old classical songs as well… There's plenty of great old classical songs, but… finding 30 seconds within a good one, that also fits the kind of pace that you want… I don’t need to explain. It's tough. Especially when you're like me, you don't have any bloody knowledge of classical music. I was just Googling and seeing what I found.
Jackson: How did you find that one? How did you stumble across it?
Izac: I looked up so many famous classical songs or piano driven songs. From that I found a few. And then if there were styles that I liked, I would just remember the name of the musician and then I'd go and look up other songs from him. And then eventually, I found that one.
Jackson: Okay. For sure.
Noah: Do you two watch trailers?
Jackson: Yeah.
Izac: Yeah.
Noah: You do?
Izac: Yeah.
Jackson: I… Well it depends
Noah: But you find that they're helpful in actually deciding whether you're going to watch it (the movie) or not?
Jackson: It depends on the movie. I mean, if something like…
Izac: This is interesting.
Jackson: Yeah… I knew I was going to watch the new Spider-Man. Didn't need to watch the trailer. I did but I didn't need to. Most movies, I’ll watch the trailer.
Izac: The new Spider-Man is actually a good example because in the poster, the main poster, it's just Spider-Man, correct me if I'm wrong, in the suit with all the legs. Then far in the distance there's Green Goblin, and in the trailer there's Electro. There's Green Goblin. There's Doc Oc. There's Sandman.
Jackson: The lizard
Izac: The lizard, who I can’t… Dr. Connors. I was so fucking excited to hear that they were gonna be in it, and obviously there’s the implication about Garfield and Maguire.
Noah: As somebody who hasn't seen the trailer, I probably would have had to have seen it (the movie), anyway. But the reason I feel like I have to see those sorts of movies is because the cultural conversation surrounding them is so huge that in order to have a discussion with your average person who is a casual movie goer (about movies), you need to see those movies. Because if you don't see those movies, it's just like; “You see the new Spider-Man?”. “No”. End of conversation. Because it's the hit thing, right? And so if you don't see the movie, (the conversation) it’s over. But I don't watch trailers ever. Hardly ever. There are some filmmakers where I have confidence that nothing is going to be spoiled in the trailer.
Izac: Right, so it's the fear of spoiling?
Noah: Pretty much. I don't like to know anything before I watch a movie. Like anything at all. Most of my movie watching is scrolling through IMDb and then being like, “Oh, that's a cool poster.”, and then off that just watching it.
Izac: Did you like the ‘I'm Thinking of Ending Things’ trailer?
Noah: Yeah, that was a good trailer… and I thought that it would be okay to watch because I thought Charlie Kaufman would have control over what the trailer was. But then there are some movies where it's just like.. Okay talking about Spider-Man trailers, does everybody remember the ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ trailer?
Izac: Where it advertised Rhino?
Jackson: Oh yeah.
Noah: No, no, no. Not even with Rhino. Not even the fact that they ended the trailer with the last shot of the movie…
Jackson: [Laughing]
Noah: That’s bad enough, but it’s way worse than that. There's a bit in the trailer where Spider-Man… the shot is from under him, and he's crying really, really heavily. [Rhetorically] It's like, shit I wonder why he's crying so heavily? I wonder what happened in this film? Like come on…
Jackson: [Laughing] Does a certain supporting actress die perhaps?
Noah: Yeah, exactly. It's just ridiculous. It’s like of course that's what happens in the movie.
Izac: Well it could’ve been May.
Noah: Sure. but you know somebody significant is gonna die, and so when one of those characters comes up in the film in a life threatening scenario, you're just like… there's no tension here. It's like, “Oh yeah, this is the same set piece, the same background when he was crying in the trailer”. [Rhetorically] “Shit I wonder what happens in this scene?”
Izac: Yeah. Sure.
Jackson: Yeah.
Noah: It’s just like in the ‘Blade Runner 2049 trailer’. Dennis asked to keep Harrison Ford a secret from all the marketing.
Izac: Yeah, cause it’s a reveal, to have him pop up.
Noah: Can you imagine going to sit down, watching that movie, not knowing anything, and then Harrison Ford pops up in the movie?
Jackson: Would have been great.
Noah: It would have been epic.
Izac: When he does, as well, in that big house.
Noah: Yeah, when he does especially. It's an amazing reveal. It's so cool. But he's in the poster… and so there's nobody on earth who saw that movie the way in which he wanted people to see that movie. Which sucks, and it makes sense because Harrison Ford, you put him in your trailer, that's how you get… maybe young people care about Harrison Ford, but older people absolutely do, and so there's incentive for everybody who during the 80’s, Blade Runner was their movie, to go see it, when you put Harrison Ford in it. Sure they know about Ryan Gosling but if Harrison Ford's coming back, that's so many more tickets sold.
Jackson: True.
Izac: That’s true.
Noah: I sort of refuse to watch trailers on principle just because I want to watch the movie as it is intended. I like to not know the events before going in because I like to have the events revealed to me in the way in which the screenwriter, director, whoever, intended for them to be revealed, if that makes sense.
Izac: So with all this being said, will ‘Bloom’ have a trailer?
Noah: Yeah... But… I don't know how I'm going to edit it.
Izac: I had… Well it's not the same issue, obviously it's a feature. But I had the same concern.
Noah: I don't think I'm in the same boat as you where I need people to know specific plot points that are going to come up. I don't care. But here's my problem as well; I'm somebody who doesn't care about trailers. I'm in a very very small minority of people who don't give a shit.
Izac: Yeah. Exactly.
Noah: And so I don't know how I'm gonna market this movie, trailer wise.
Jackson: It's a hard one. You don’t have any “known” actors.
Izac: They have to know something about the plot. They have to know that it's not just a series of nice shots to classical music.
Noah: Well maybe… maybe… There's trailers that I've seen like that-
Izac: Like ‘Cold War’.
Noah: Yeah like That ‘Cold War’ trailer is fucking gorgeous. I love that trailer so much. But that's my audience. That's the type of film I want to see. 30 seconds into that trailer I’d already made up my mind. How quickly can I see this film and where can I see it? Cause it's just so fucking gorgeous. I just couldn't believe it, and it was shot by the same guy who did ‘Ida’.
Izac: And ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’. Yeah, there you go.
Noah: Yeah, and so that was a no brainer for me when I knew that he (lukasz Zal) was the one who shot it after having watched (Ida), but I didn't know that when I saw the trailer. I saw the trailer and then I looked up the film and I was like, “Oh, ‘Ida’ cinematographer”. Now I have to see this movie, and I saw it and the movie was really really good.
Izac: It's incredible you didn't have this response when you found out that ‘The Cat in the Hat’ was Emmanuel Lubezki.
All: [laughing]
Jackson: And now the podcast begins!
Izac: We can run away from that for a little bit.
Noah: No, no, no the thing about… I had no idea… I saw ‘The Cat in The Hat’ I think like everybody else my age when I was six. I don’t know when it was released. Early 2000s, I think, and there was so much money put towards that movie. An insane amount of money, so Chivo was just like, “Let's go, dude”.
Jackson: Cause didn’t Chivo do something really, really good before and after ‘The Cat in the Hat?’
Izac: It might’ve been ‘Children of Men’ or something unbelievable like that.
Noah: I'm just gonna check release dates. I’m gonna check Chivo’s filmography. Give me two seconds.
Izac: While Noah is searching this up, Jackson, as producer of both ‘Flesh and Ivory’ and ‘Bloom’, when you think about putting a trailer out for the film, what are your thoughts on it?
Jackson: For ‘Bloom’s’ trailer?
Izac: For either. Being in the position of producer.
Jackson: It's really hard for a short film because there's not as much content to draw from.
Izac: Yup. You’re very right [laughs]
Jackson: So I was trying to get into the mindset of watching it as someone who didn't know about the film. So I was more focused on how the trailer was making me feel. Hence why when I first watched the ‘Flesh and Ivory’ trailer, I mentioned to you that it was cutting a bit fast and they couldn't process what certain shots were, even though I knew what the shots were. I was thinking that it was a bit too quick and that the average person wouldn't be able to process what they were seeing at the time, which made me a little bit disorientated and confused as to what I was seeing, which is why I thought that a slower pace would be a lot better. So I tried to just focus on what a regular audience would take away from it, if that makes any sense. But I think the way we did the trailer was right. Good music. Good shots to match the music. A bit of surreal elements that keep people interested in what's happening, and then some plot information as well. So I think that worked quite well. I don't know if that'll work quite as well for ‘Bloom’ being a feature film.
Noah: I don't remember who told me this advice or where I heard it or whatever but I like the idea that, or a general rule with trailers that you shouldn't show shots from the film past a certain point in the film.
Jackson: Oh, yes, I was gonna bring that up. I do remember a conversation with you where you said you didn't want to show scenes or shots from the trailer past a certain point in the film, which I won't spoil, but that was something that was on our mind.
Noah: Which point? Oh yeah I won’t say. I won’t say.
Izac: The thing about that rule is like… I was hesitant about bringing this up because of this (spoilers) but like… the thing about that rule is… Yes, sure, I agree… But I think if your trailer is abstract enough, and by abstract enough I mean… I flat out do not like trailers where the trailer is just a shorter version of the film.
Izac & Jackson: Yeah.
Noah: I don’t need to see the film now. I saw your whole movie in the trailer, and so if you cut up a whole bunch of shots and make it sort of abstract and layer a monologue or put a song over it, that seems to me to be a much more honest way of selling a film. A trailer is like a taste of the film. You know, if you like these shots and this song, and this mood that the trailer is evoking, hopefully the film will invoke the same mood as a whole. And so if you like a little bit of this, here's the whole thing of this. Not, “Here's the whole plot of this in two minutes. Now come sit down and watch the hour and a half long thing.” And so using shots from further on, in a certain point of the film, like past the halfway mark, or past the one third mark or whatever. I didn't necessarily think it's a bad thing as long as the shots are not… the reason you would do that is because you don't want audience members in the middle of your film ,(or) at the end of your film being like, “Oh, that's that shot from that trailer.”
Izac: Yeah.
Noah: There’s this movie called ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’, which is visually extraordinary. Some of the best stop motion animation I've ever seen, but there are shots in the trailer that are the best shots in the film, and so you go into the trailer seeing all these amazing shots and you're like, “Holy shit, this movie is gonna be amazing.” And then you watch the movie, and the shots still are amazing. They’re incredible shots, but when you watch the movie, expecting shots that are more amazing than the ones you saw in the trailer, they're not there, because they were just like, “Best shot. Best shot. Best shot. Put them all in the trailer.” So that's a let down when you go and actually see the movie.
Izac: That really hurts with comedies. That hurts a lot.
Noah: Yeah, put the best jokes in the trailer.
Izac: They put the best jokes in, then you see the punchline coming, especially if it’s something that (involves the) element of surprise. Terrible example but I think it’s ‘Pink Panther 2’. There's that joke where Steve Martin's character is explaining the element of surprise, and he walks over to his partner on the couch and he's demonstrating like, “This is the element of surprise”. Obviously he’s an idiot. There's a guy sleeping on the couch, his friend, and his friend body slams him, and it turns out that (his friend) was awake the whole time, and he surprises Steve Martin, rather than the other way around.
Jackson: [Sarcastic] Ha Ha Ha. Good one.
Izac: That was in the trailer, and so obviously when you go see the film, you know this guy's awake.
Noah: How ironic.
Izac: Yeah. [laughs]
Jackson: Peak comedy.
Noah: Here’s an element of surprise joke that’s spoiled for you in the trailer.
Izac: Yeah. That actually hurt in the ‘Jackass’ trailer a little bit. One of the big things and it's-
Noah: Is this for ‘Jackass 3D’?
Izac: ‘Jackass 4’
Noah: Okay don’t tell because I haven't seen the trailer. Actually just tell me I don't care. It’s worth it (for the podcast).
Izac: So there's one stunt, and you know exactly what's going to happen, but there is a part in it where-
Noah: Can you say something from it so people when they see the movie don't get spoiled of it, but still clarifies to the people who have seen the trailer what you're talking about?
Izac: I don't know if I can. It's a stunt that's advertised in the trailer.
Noah: Is it a physical stunt?
Izac: Yes, and you know exactly what's going to happen and they cut right before impact, and the draw is that you want to see what the guy's reaction to what is about to happen. They get this guy named Francis Ngannou, who in human history, has the hardest punch recorded in… ever.
Jackson: Is he in the UFC?
Izac: He’s the heavyweight champ right now, and in the trailer, they show that Ngannou is about to punch this guy in the testicles, and then the trailer cuts and I went “That's it. I'm seeing the film. I know how hard this guy hits. This is gonna be insane.” and then before the film came out they uploaded the full clip of him getting hit in the balls, rolling around, all that stuff that your morbid curiosity wants to see in the cinema.
Noah: Why would you do that?
Jackson: [rhetorical] So what’s the point of cutting that part out of the trailer if they’re just going to upload it?
Izac: It's like… trailers are one issue, and then you've got uploading movie clips. Why would you do that? That's a whole other kettle of fish. That hurts.
Noah: I've thought personally sometimes seeing some movies that the best way in which to sell the movie is to just upload a minute to two minutes of a scene from the film as opposed to doing a trailer.
Izac: Really early on in a film?
Noah: Yeah. Just early on, but there are certain movies where if you would have uploaded the first minute, or like the first sequence of the movie, literally from the opening credits, the opening of the film, people would see the movie.
Jackson: I think they did that for the new Spider-Man.
Noah: They did? Oh, I didn’t know.
Jackson: They had the first five minutes? Or the first few minutes of it.
Noah: I think it's a really smart way to advertise the movie to be honest. It depends on the movie. I think if your movie starts with some sort of high tension thing where you don't show the payoff, then that's kind of a smart way to advertise a movie because all you're doing is making people watch the movie from the beginning again. So you're not really spoiling any scenes from the middle. You don't know what's coming up, where the events are going to lead you, right? If ‘Bloom’ was a… [laughs] high powered thriller, or action thing, I would consider doing that, if there was a really intense opening sequence. So I think that would work for some movies, but I think the reason that ‘Jackass’… anybody who's seen a ‘Jackass’ movie knows, it's just a compilation of clips, and there's not really any transitions between the clips. If anything, the transitions between the clips are just shorter clips, shorter stunts... I would argue they're still cohesive films, but you know what you're getting into.
Izac: Yeah, (to transition) it's just a fade to black.
Noah: Yeah. I could compare it to something like a few of the ‘Monty Python’ movies, like ‘And Now For Something Completely Different’, or ‘The Meaning of Life.’ Those movies make a serious effort, most of the time, (to transition) unless they blatantly acknowledge (a lack of coherence) with a hard cut. It’s basically ‘sketch comedy’. There are sketches, and they link them together via some clever method. ‘Meaning of Life’, will separate the different parts of life as chapters of the film, which is a very simple, but clean way to do it, and then in ‘Now For Something Completely Different’, there's a guy who'll come out and say, “And Now For Something Completely Different”, and then they transition the film, and so they're just sketches. Cut up sketches. Same as ‘Jackass’. In a case like ‘Jackass’, I'm not too mad at them uploading one of the segments from the film onto YouTube in order to advertise the film, because I know I'm gonna want to see that stuff again, maybe, because it's funny the first time and it might still be funny the second time. I'm not mad at a quick clip being uploaded from a film. I just don't want them… I guess they could, if they really wanted to, upload every single sketch from the film to their YouTube channel that defeats the purpose of seeing the movie.
Izac: Yeah. Totally.
Noah: But I don’t know… I’m not mad at that marketing.
Jackson: I've been known to watch a few YouTube clips of movies before watching them. Mostly comedies and then I would laugh, and I’d decide to watch the whole movie. I did that for ‘The Big Short’. That scene where Margot Robbie’s in the bath trying to explain how CDOs work, and the editing, the performance just made me laugh so much I decided to watch the movie after that. It was great.
Noah: And then when you watched the movie, were you disappointed that you had seen that scene before?
Jackson: No, not for that movie.
Noah: Right. So it's a case by case. If you're clever about it, and you choose a scene that doesn't interrupt the flow of the film, if somebody has seen that scene before, then that's fine I think.
Jackson: I think so. Yeah. But in the case of a short film, we'll have to upload the first half of the movie. [laughs]
Izac: Can’t give away anything. [laughs].
Noah: What do you do for a trailer for a one minute film? [laughs]
Izac: I was kind of glad that we decided to make it 30 seconds, because now instead of one twentieth of the film, it's one fortieth of the film [laughs].
Noah: What’s the ‘Flesh and Ivory’ runtime?
Izac: 19 minutes and 30 seconds.
Noah: So a thirty second trailer is-
Izac: It's actually a good chunk of the movie.
Noah: Yeah, but it's also good (length).
Izac: It's small enough. One minute is too long.
Noah: Yeah, that's a good length for a trailer for a film that long.
Jackson: I’m excited for the ‘Bloom’ trailer. It's gonna be something.
Izac: I can’t wait. I rewatched the beginning of ‘Bloom’ before I went to bed the other night, after we had our discussion.
Jackson: We have our first fan.
All: [Laughing]
Izac: Yeah, I've seen it three times now [laughs].
Jackson: So do we find out which movie came before ‘Cat in the Hat’?
Noah: Yes!
[Izac and Noah start looking at IMDB on a phone.]
Emmanuel Lubezki's Filmography
Izac: Oh, yeah. It was ‘The Assassination of Richard Nixon’ and then there was one other one.
Noah: This man’s filmography is extraordinary.
Izac: I have not heard of that movie.
Jackson: I have not heard of it either. ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ is Chivo, too.
Noah: Yeah he did that after ‘Cat in the Hat’.
Jackson: Did he actually?
Izac: [rhetorical] Yeah, isn’t that wild?
Noah: So ‘Cat in the Hat’ was two thousand and…
Izac: This guy on variety… He is one of the greatest.
Jackson: A hundred percent.
Noah: So 2003 ‘Cat in the Hat’.
Izac: [in shock] Did he do ‘Ali’ with Will Smith?
Noah: Ali was 2001. So a nice change of pace from ‘Ali’ to ‘The Cat in the Hat’ [laughs]. ‘Sleepy Hollow’ he did previously to this. ‘Meet Joe Black’ previously to this.
Izac: [still in shock] He did ‘Meet Joe Black’?
Noah: Yup.
Jackson: What about directly after ‘Cat in the Hat’.
Noah: ‘Assassination of Richard Nixon’ was right after it, and then ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ after that. ‘Children of Men’ was in 2006, so three years after ‘Cat in the Hat, ‘Children of Men’.
Jackson & Noah: [laughing]
Izac: You can see the parallels.
Jackson & Noah: [laughing]
Noah: Two years after that, ‘Burn After Reading’.
Izac: [still in shock] He did ‘Burn After Reading’ as well?
Noah: Yeah, and ‘Tree of Life’ later on, and ‘Birdman’ obviously and ‘The Revenant’ and all that good shit.
Izac: I’m taking ‘Cat in the Hat’ over ‘Tree of Life’.
Jackson: Well he clearly peaked at ‘Cat in the Hat’.
Izac: Totally.
Jackson: Yeah. [laughs]
