Joe Rogan Experience #2452 - Roger Avary

TL;DR

Filmmaker Roger Avary joins Joe Rogan to discuss cinema history, vampire films, and how digital technology and corporate interference have degraded modern moviemaking.

Key Points

• 1.Orson Welles dug holes in studio concrete floors with a pickaxe to get low-angle shots for Citizen Kane (1941), a wartime film that Hearst nearly buried because "Rosebud" was reportedly a nickname for his girlfriend's clitoris.
• 2.The famous opening tracking shot in Touch of Evil (1958) used a massive cast-iron Mitchell BNCR camera — a blimp-encased, four-man-operated beast — which Avary owns a version of, reportedly used to shoot The Godfather.
• 3.Avary explains that digital cinema is inherently flatter than film because light bounces back off a sensor rather than exposing silver in acetate, leading directors to shoot into the sun for lens flare to fake depth.
• 4.Netflix issues literal "white papers" dictating camera specs, lab processing, and increasingly story structure — an extension of the Syd Field screenplay formula that taught executives to expect beats at specific page numbers.
• 5.Roger Avary on Silent Hill: they shot dark scenes on digital and daylight scenes on film deliberately to create psychological dissonance between the two worlds.
• 6.Joe Rogan calls the new Nosferatu (2024, Bill Skarsgård) his favorite vampire movie ever; Avary says it feels haunted by Herzog's version the same way Herzog's was haunted by Murnau's original.
• 7.Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1978-79, Klaus Kinski) avoided close-ups at emotional peaks — showing characters as distant figures — because Herzog grew up isolated in Bavarian mountains, making his filmmaking feel temporally displaced.
• 8.Avary keeps the new Nosferatu Blu-ray in a stack at home, waiting for the exact right mood to watch it, calling it a great use of digital's ability to capture true darkness.
• 9.What We Do in the Shadows (Taika Waititi, mid-2000s) was unknown to Rogan; Avary calls it Waititi's best film and the foundation of everything he's done since.
• 10.Avary watches 2–3 Star Trek episodes daily with his wife cycling chronologically through all series; he defends DS9's Captain Sisko as one of the best captains because of his father-son storylines.
• 11.Star Trek TNG already explored gender and nonbinary themes organically — episodes include Riker falling for a neuter alien who awakens as female, and Kirk being turned into a woman — without feeling like corporate messaging.
• 12.Alex Kurtzman's new Trek era: Avary personally offered to write for scale just to work on Star Trek, but found Kurtzman wanted no one with attachment to the original shows; Starfleet Academy was subsequently canceled.
• 13.The Daily Wire's Pendragon/Merlin series surprised Avary — made on a micro-budget by CEO Jeremy Boring — calling it better Arthurian mythology than big-budget productions, with Excalibur as his personal high watermark.
• 14.Midnight Express is cited as Hollywood propaganda — Billy Hayes, the real person, spent years apologizing because key events (like a prison rape) never happened, with the film's success likely tied to anti-Turkey political sentiment of the era.
• 15.Game of Thrones' "murder porn" problem mirrors The Walking Dead's decline — both spike viewer serotonin by killing beloved characters rather than earning returns through genuine character love, though Rogan says he's rewatching GoT Season 3 and finding it great again.