Joe Rogan | Why Did They Stop Making Movies Like in the 70's? w/Edward Norton

As someone who doesn't make movies, I always wonder, like, what happened between, like, say, Steve McQueen's Le Mans? Mm-hmm. Did you ever see that movie? Of course, yeah. Remember how there's no dialogue at all for, like, the longest time? And I remember I watched it recently over the last couple years, and one of the thoughts was I don't even know if they could do this today. If anybody would allow them to make a movie where no one talks for a long time, they're just sort of setting the stage of what it means to be a race car driver and what's the atmosphere of the races. It's just the idea that you were saying earlier about having this short attention span theater, this, these movies that are designed for what they believe is a populace of people that don't have the interest in something that's more unique or something that requires thought, something that drags you in. Yeah. And that's much more common in the past. Like, why was it more common in that era of McQueen and all those other movies that they did like that? And what has happened? And like, these rare examples, like when a guy does break through with something like Do the Right Thing or a few other examples, why doesn't that stimulate the appetite for more? Well... Is it that hard to do? On one level, on one level, yeah. It's easy to recognize when they're great, but it's still not easy to make them great. It's still... We're talking about people who are some of our greatest artists or directors, you know what I mean? Right. And lots of people, they try on some level, they try on some level, but they just... Not everybody is Spike Lee. Right. You know what I mean? Not everybody is Francis Coppola or... It's like... Sometimes people make things and they actually are slow. You know what I mean? It's just like... You know what I mean? You're like... It misses. Yeah. It's like in Spinal Tap when they're like, it's a fine line between stupid and clever. You know, no, it's a fine line between clever and stupid. You know what I mean? It's like... I think people try, but I think that there are some people who really do think Jaws had a big effect on movies because it was like the first true blockbuster, right? And I don't know. You know what? Actually though, I'm wrong. I think that what happens more often than not is adult people get the jobs at the big companies that make the decisions about what to make, right? And at a certain point, they sort of age out. They start to age out and they don't actually have any idea what the vibe is. They don't know what to make for the coming wave of younger people. And so these little windows open up now and then where in that era they needed new people. They needed like... You know, George Lucas making American Graffiti. Nobody thought that movie was going to be a hit. Nobody. You know, they open up, they say, we don't know what to do. Do something different. And a couple of new voices like come in and they make things that are really different, but the idea that that was only then... Like there's a whole book right now about 1999. You know, there's this book that came out about how 1999 was one of those years where because the studios had kind of lost their sense of exactly what to do and Miramax was making a shit ton of money on on autor driven movies made for low cost and the studios all went and set up little mini Miramaxes, right? And the result was that like in that year you had like Meg, you know, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Spike Jones, David O. Russell, Fincher, the Wachowskis, like an unbelievable array of directors made really, really memorable films in that year. And I think it was because it was like another one of those moments, like we don't know what to do. We're just going to have to like close our eyes and go, you kids figure it out. You know what I mean? Well, that's the thing about films, it seems to me, it's such a collaborative effort. And when you have so many moving pieces and so many people involved that have a say in the decision making process, it's got to be insanely difficult to get something out that's pure. Yes, that's true. That's true. I, Francis Coppola said that the best thing about making films is that they're collaborative and the worst thing about making films is that they're collaborative. He also said it's the last, it's the last moral totalitarian job in the world, like being a director or something. I can't remember. I can't remember.