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Weirding Way Media

The Projection Booth features discussions of films from a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis while regularly attracting special guest talent eager to discuss their past gems. The podcast has been recognized as a premier film podcast by The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine. 

Visit http://www.projectionboothpodcast.com

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The Projection Booth Podcast

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

Sargent traces her path from modern dance and experimental theater to a Mike Figgis-mentored short shot days before she met her biological mother in Korea. She explains how the Take Me Home short went from diary entry to Sundance and the White House, why structured improv gave Anna ownership of every line, and how Emily (Ali Ahn) and parents Bob (Victor Slezak) and Joan (Marceline Hugot) grew beyond the real family. Plus: Anna kicking her sister out of press junkets, and a Long Duk Dong pitch born mid-interview.

Learn more at takemehomefilm.com and follow @take_me_home_film and @annasargentofficial.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Take Me Home (2026)

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

Stephens and Sprinkle unpack what ecosexual means (loving the Earth as a partner, not a mother), the indigenous fire science behind the film via Melissa Nelson and Kim TallBear, incarcerated firefighters paid a dollar an hour, and loggers, pot growers, and academics banding together to protect their neighbor Albert. They also cover weddings to nature (fire is next, in Berlin), Sprinkle at 72 after 50-plus years as a sex educator, Stephens's breast cancer diagnosis mid-release, and a possible fourth film, about air and AI.

Find out more at https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025)

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

They dig into Smoke's objects-as-characters concept, physically burning items in reverse to stand in for Taron Egerton's and Jurnee Smollett's characters, and the different approval chains between a Marvel/Sony/Amazon property and an Apple show built around a pre-selected Thom Yorke needle-drop.

Nicoll and Julien also trace their paths into title design, from Digital Kitchen's early work on Six Feet Under to AJ's start in sports graphics, plus war stories from Yellowjackets, Dead Like Me, and a font fight that got Nicoll pulled off a project.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Digital Kitchen's Titles for Smoke and Spider-Noir

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

Marčetić traces the film from a one-line logline and a scrapped romantic comedy to a tone shaped by Napoleon Dynamite, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Riley Stearns. The pair recall 20 winter nights of whispered filming in Ljubljana, the one-inch difference between "puppy eyes" and menace, and blinks erased in post. Plus: a ferret fight staged with a puppet, inspired by Bela Lugosi's rubber-octopus wrestling in Ed Wood, and a story rewritten in the edit.

Follow the film on Instagram at @dekle_noci.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Girl in the Night (2026)

Sirens wail, smoke drifts past the hedgerows, and inside a tidy English cottage two grown adults earn "nifties" for good behavior. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson's darkly comic feature debut, Littermates (2026), turns a vague apocalypse into a strange, tender story of siblinghood, and Mike talks with both directors about how they pulled it off.

Friends since film school, the pair recount reverse-engineering the script around a borrowed country house and three performers they know best, including Liam (Joey Bader), a character Bader had been doing around the house for years. They also relive shooting the entire film on one hulking Panavision zoom lens, with a tripod so heavy the cast had to help haul it.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Manchester Film Festival and the Narrative Feature Audience Award at Dances With Films LA, Littermates screened at Fantastic Fest before opening at Alamo Drafthouse on November 6. Learn more at littermatesfilm.com and follow @littermatesfilm.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Littermates (2026)

Lou Ferrigno talks with Mike about Hard Redemption (2026), the martial-arts action thriller from director-writer-star Jino Kang and co-director Christine Lam. The film plays out a Die Hard-in-a-classroom premise: a GED teacher with a hidden past (Kang) has to fight off a San Francisco gang holding his students hostage, one grudge match at a time through the school's hallways to a gymnasium showdown.

Ferrigno, best known as television's original Hulk, joins the cast in a supporting role opposite David Kurzhal, Jessie Pettit, James Aaron Oh, and Mikaila Maei. Mike talks with Ferrigno about the film, his role in it, and his long career in genre filmmaking. 

Hard Redemption is available now.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Lou Ferrigno on Hard Redemption (2026)

Agata Trzebuchowska joins Mike for a Special Report on Sick (2026), her feature debut as writer and director, fresh off winning Best Director in Fantastic Fest's Next Wave competition. Sent to the Polish countryside to nurse their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk), sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) feel the summer heat bend their bond into something neither of them can name.

Best known as the novice nun at the heart of Paweł Pawlikowski's Oscar-winning Ida, Trzebuchowska talks about moving behind the camera, from her Sundance short Heat to the stalled project whose frustrations gave birth to Sick. She digs into building dread through suggestion rather than explanation, guiding Kąkol and Łubik to performances that earned their own special mention from the Fantastic Fest jury, and the double meaning of that title.

Touch me, I'm sick. 

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Sick (2026)

Rob St. Mary and Jedidiah Ayres join Mike for The Salton Sea (2002), D.J. Caruso's meth-fueled noir starring Val Kilmer in a dual role: junkie informant Danny Parker, who's secretly Tom Van Allen, a grieving trumpet player hunting the corrupt cops who murdered his wife. Chasing them drags Danny deep into the orbit of Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a nose-less speed freak who'll snort anything, and Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard), closing in as his double life unravels.

Screenwriter Tony Gayton and director D.J. Caruso join Mike to talk making the film — Gayton on writing the script and his run-ins with John Milius, Caruso on landing D'Onofrio for Pooh-Bear and his kinetic, music-video style. Rob and Jed dig into Amir Mokri's cinematography, Thomas Newman's score, and how the real, decaying Salton Sea — once California's desert Riviera, now a toxic ghost resort — becomes the film's rotting metaphor. Part of our Val Kilmer retrospective.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Episode 815: The Salton Sea (2002)

Nick Simon talks with Mike about What Happened to Doris? (2026), his film revisiting the real case that inspired The Entity (1982). Doris Bither was a Culver City single mother whose reports of violent supernatural attacks drew paranormal investigators from UCLA and became one of the most documented hauntings in American history. Simon developed the project with the blessing of Doris's real son, Brian, adjusting details to honor her experience while centering the story on her fight to be believed rather than the haunting itself.

Simon talks about pursuing Heather Graham for the lead with a personal letter laying out his vision, working with Mimi Rogers and the cast, and building scares practically on an indie budget with creature designers Mario Torres Jr. and Roxanne McDaniel. Mike and Simon get into what drew him to Doris's story specifically, and why he wanted her perspective, not the entity's, to drive the film.

What Happened to Doris? premiered at Fantastic Fest 2026.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: What Happened to Doris?

Peter M. Hoffman talks with Mike about Karmic Winds: Reflections from the "Smartest Guy in Hollywood", his memoir written largely in pencil during an eight-month prison sentence for a tax-credit case a federal judge had already ruled legal. Hoffman traces his path from Yale tax law into the movie business, tax-engineering Superman for Alex Salkind, working with manager Albert Grossman, and untangling Dolly Parton's publishing split from Porter Wagoner so she could reclaim her catalog outright.

They dig into Carolco, the independent studio Hoffman built with Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, from the capital-gains maneuver that got Marlon Brando paid on Superman to landing Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct as back-to-back worldwide number-one grossers. Hoffman talks Verhoeven's instincts on Basic Instinct's ending, the collapsed Crusades project, buying Joe Eszterhas's script amid protest, and favorites like The Believer, Stander, and Jacob's Ladder.

Karmic Winds is out now; Hoffman's next project adapts The Master and Margarita.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Peter M. Hoffman on Karmic Winds

Director Lena Khan talks with Mike about Best of the Best (2026), her Bollywood-fusion dance comedy for Netflix from writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Khan traces her path from UCLA activism and music videos to her debut The Tiger Hunter, and how Minhaj and Venkataramanujam brought her on after asking for script notes and liking what she said.

They dig into the rewrite process, Khan's push for tonal consistency across the film's teen-comedy, dance-movie, and female-friendship strands, and her call to trade a boy-subplot for a betrayal that lands harder. Khan talks choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Mackenzie Dustman, cinematographer Adam Carbone, shooting dance numbers in a single day versus Bollywood's usual five or six, and calibrating the "15% Bollywood" spectacle without tipping into Glee. She also talks working with Rizwan Manji, mining her own friendships to crack a character, and what's next with her project Baby.

Best of the Best is now streaming on Netflix. 

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Special Report: Best of the Best (2026)

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