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A director sat her film school entrance exam in a language she didn't speak, and this conversation goes somewhere press days rarely do, all the way to whether we gave up on faith too fast. Before A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen was a New Yorker studying directing in Łódź, Poland, where her graduation film earned a spot at Cannes. Now the film she spent 17 years trying to make is here, with Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly holding a Wisconsin town together in the 1870s. The talk opens on something she told a journalist as a student, that she couldn't wait to go home and make a film in English, and follows the long road from there through a Norwegian short, 10 years as a script supervisor and a co-production that shot a Wisconsin story in Slovakia. Dara explains why actors who couldn't understand a word she said taught her the most about directing. She talks about Kate McCullough, the cinematographer who started out as her roommate and is now godmother to her daughter, and the strange, inhuman way they taught the camera to move. Raised in an atheist home, she opens up about what religion might still offer people who've stopped believing. And she ends on the kind of failure she'd gladly pick over a safe success. What comes up: - The film school exam with a theme pulled from a hat - Why the camera only moves in straight lines and right angles - Growing up atheist and finding religion fascinating anyway - Praise and pans for the same film, and how she handled both - The one thing she'd tell her younger self Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

Comedy only works when the actor takes it dead seriously, Jack Griffo says, and from there the talk moves well past the usual press-day loop into producing, Nickelodeon notes and the sister who has been beside Violet McGraw since the start. You may know Violet McGraw from The Haunting of Hill House or as Cady in M3GAN, and Jack Griffo as Max Thunderman on Nickelodeon. In Double Trouble, a holiday heist comedy set in Las Vegas, they share the screen with Madeleine McGraw and Andrew Koji. The conversation opens on how Jack landed the role, through a recommendation he only ever heard about through the grapevine. Violet, who has worked almost entirely in horror, admits she was nervous walking into a comedy and found that improvising was what made her scenes feel natural. Jack lays out why a joke dies the moment the actor lets on that it's a joke. Then the talk turns to producing. Violet wanted a bigger voice on set after producing The Curse of the Necklace, and Jack describes returning to The Thundermans with Kira Kosarin as a management job that still feels like a school art project, only with more money. The closing stretch looks back at the people and notes that shaped them both. What comes up: - Going from a lifetime of horror to a first comedy - The improvising that made it into Double Trouble - Why a funny script has to be played completely straight - Moving from actor to executive producer - The rapid-fire sitcom notes that made film sets feel easy Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

On this episode, the directors of an Annecy-winning animated film talk about the 10 years it took to finish, the signed book that sent one of them back to school to learn English, and what keeps a production alive when it keeps stalling. Ervin Han has directed and produced animation for Disney and Cartoon Network and co-founded the Singapore studio Robot Playground Media. Raúl García spent years animating at Disney on films like Aladdin, The Lion King and Hercules before directing Extraordinary Tales. Together they made The Violinist, a hand-drawn Singapore, Spain and Italy co-production that won the Cristal for a Feature Film at Annecy and went on to play the Toronto International Film Festival. Raúl begins with a story about a book. He bought a signed copy of The Illusion of Life at a festival, lived on sandwiches for the rest of the trip because it cost so much, and managed to translate five pages in three months before deciding to study English instead. Ervin describes going looking for the mind of a young violin prodigy and coming away with a sentence from a violin teacher that now sits at the heart of the film, and he admits he should probably reach out to her soon. The two directors explain why they committed to an instrument that is famously hard to animate, and Ervin recalls watching composer Ricky Ho (who wrote the score with Isabel Latorre, with Joy Yong playing lead violin) direct his musicians the way an animator directs a scene. Raúl makes the case that the worst thing for any production is a stop followed by a restart. They close on what they hope the film will still be doing in 2050. What comes up: - Ervin explains why the story is built so that nobody needs a history lesson to follow it. - Raúl tells how a signed copy of The Illusion of Life made him learn English. - Ervin reveals where the film's line about the violin and the human voice really came from. - Ervin describes what he noticed while watching Ricky Ho direct the musicians. - Both directors explain how they kept a film alive for 10 years and how close it came to stopping. Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

Two Disney roles, one of them landed under a different name, is where this conversation begins, and it ends somewhere much quieter than a press junket usually goes. Demián Bichir, the Mexican actor Oscar-nominated for A Better Life and a voice a generation of Latin American kids grew up with, stars opposite Salma Hayek Pinault as Tito in Angelina Jolie's adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's Without Blood. Most of the film is two people at a table, and Demián explains why Tito never tries to run from it. He describes Salma as an actor who got great and then kept going, and he believes her work here is the best of her career so far. He gets into the healing side of the story: why nobody finds forgiveness without first coming to it truly sorry, and what changes when two people finally listen to each other. Asked where he still wants to grow, he names the one genre he hasn't tried on screen and looks back on playing El Pachuco in Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. There's also a song his mother sang on the radio as a young girl, and the reason it runs all the way through the film he directed. When the talk reaches October 2, 1968, and the massacre at Tlatelolco that happened when he was five, he stops to say he rarely gets conversations like this one before he answers. What comes up: - Two Little Mermaid roles, one under another name - Hatred or history: the harder thing to play opposite Salma - Why Tito never tries to escape the table - The musical he still wants to make - Being five years old in Mexico City in October 1968 Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

Tibi Useriu learned to run in a prison yard 27 steps long, and his story is the reason for this conversation, but the real fight turns out to be the one between a director who hated reenactments and a producer who only wanted to make Heat, and from there the talk drifts into mentors, family and a Burmese novel, the places a junket never reaches. Mila Aung-Thwin is the Canadian director and producer who co-founded the Montreal documentary company EyeSteelFilm, with more than 50 documentaries and two Emmys behind him, and whose new film The Ultra Runner premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026. Mila opens up about the five years he spent following Tiberiu Useriu, known as Tibi, a former jewel thief and bank robber who spent close to a decade in solitary confinement before becoming Romania's Ice Man and a repeat champion of the 6633 Arctic Ultra across the Canadian North. He talks about why he finds running dull to watch from the outside, and the single sentence Tibi said on their first day together that changed what the film could be. He gets candid about his own resistance to dramatized scenes, casting theatre actors across Romania, and the mayor in Bistrița who let the crew stage a crime scene in town at no charge. Mila walks through his early days shooting stills on the streets of Montreal beside his mentor Daniel Cross, and why the instincts that made his photographs work nearly failed him on video. He also reflects on a father who argued about films he hadn't seen yet, a grandmother's translation that made literary history, finishing the story of a mentor who left boxes of unfinished tape behind, and the first film he has ever pitched entirely on his own. What comes up: - The TIFF audience started reacting before the credits had even finished. - Tibi still counts to 27 when he runs across the Arctic, and Mila explains why. - A three-year argument over reenactments finally ends at a cottage table. - Still photography taught Mila something that video nearly unlearned. - His next film is the first one that started as his own idea. Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

Tessa Blake spent twenty years directing other people's television before anybody handed her a story she could originate herself. When one finally arrived, she took it to the very top of northern Minnesota for a month and made it with a cast she still sounds surprised said yes. She is the director behind American Horror Story, Matlock and 9-1-1, and the documentary Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me. If I Tell You, adapted from Lisa O'Donnell's novel Closed Doors with Jennifer Manocherian, is her narrative feature debut and it is in theatres now. Most of this conversation is about the two different jobs Tessa does. In television she describes taking a sacred oath with an episode she did not write, serving a vision that existed before she showed up and will outlast her. In a film she is the originating artist, and she says the work is less about imposing a vision than asking the material what it needs, which is not how most directors talk about themselves. She is known in writers rooms for getting handed the strange, weird episodes, and this is the opposite of that, a quiet story about secrets and the people who keep them. She also talks about the feature that never got finished, about why a child asking a sincere question is more dangerous than an adult asking a clever one, and about the thing she and I noticed together, halfway through, that she had not noticed herself. What comes up: - Whether the adults were wrong to keep a 12-year-old in the dark - The scene she is proudest of, where both people are right - The oath she takes with an episode of television she did not create - The feature she shot years ago that ran out of money and was shelved - Why "it's too complicated" never works on a child, or on a playground Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.e

A festival debut discussed without a single line of festival talk, and most of it is about what went wrong first, from unavailable equipment to a character who was written as the wrong person. Lauren Meyering is the director of Horsegirls, a debut feature about hobby horsing that premiered at Tribeca and is now in cinemas, and Lillian Carrier stars in it as Margarita. Lauren opens up about the thing that bonded the two of them immediately, which is that they are both twins, and about how that ended up shaping who was actually on set every day. She talks about the years directing narrative music videos with almost no budget and a single shooting day, and the single most useful thing that trained into her, which is what to do in the first two seconds after somebody tells you no. She gets candid about the scenes that had to change, including one built around a piece of medical equipment that turned out to be genuinely scarce in the state they were filming in, and the version of it that ended up in the film instead. Lillian describes negotiating, before she accepted the role, whether the production wanted her input or only her performance, and what she pushed back on once she had it. She also talks about a television character she recognised herself in years before she had the language for why, and the two of them each name the thing in their own life that other people refuse to take seriously. What comes up: - Two directors, two stars, and four twins between them - The scene rewritten because the equipment did not exist locally - The character who was cast against the script, and improved by it - Asking a production whether they want your expertise or just your performance - What each of them does that other people find ridiculous Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

A film shot in 2016, replicated on stage around the world, and then assembled into a feature nearly ten years later. The director explains why that order was deliberate and what it made possible. Daniel Askill is a director whose long collaboration with Sia produced Sia: Nostalgic for the Present, which the two of them co-directed, a film assembled roughly ten years after the material was originally shot. Daniel opens up about growing up in a musical family, jamming with his brothers upstate on drums and bass, and still playing piano as a release. He talks about the phone call asking him to direct a stage show, his own honest reaction that somebody more versed in live theatre might be the better choice, and the answer that made the whole approach clear. He explains why building the film first and replicating it on stage created something you cannot get any other way, letting actors appear on the video walls while dancers performed their parts live, with no cameras on stage but a show that looked like it was being filmed in the moment. He gets candid about the fact that this project genuinely does not fit an existing category, and the comparison he reaches for when pushed. Daniel also talks about what he brought to a group that functioned like a band, the traditional filmmaking background that freed the others to work on instinct, and what the whole thing means to him now with a decade of distance. What comes up: - Playing bass at nineteen on a record made at a painter's retreat - Building a film first so a stage show could replicate it - Why the video walls and the live dancers work together - A project that does not fit any existing category - Ten years of distance, and what it looks like now Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

On this episode, one of Spider-Noir's villains explains why he thinks the actor is the most replaceable person on a film set, and the conversation goes everywhere a junket never does, from a homicide-detective father to the studio he left Hollywood to build. Andrew Lewis Caldwell is the actor behind two decades of comedy and voice work, from Hannah Montana to College to the game Deathloop, now playing the electric, theatrical villain Megawatt in Nicolas Cage's Spider-Noir on Prime Video. Andrew opens up about why he walked away from the Los Angeles actor lifestyle after his son was born, unwilling to let the boy watch his father beg for work. He talks about building a life and an acting studio outside Buffalo instead, and getting cast in Spider-Noir shortly after the move. He gets candid about his father, a homicide detective in Flint, Michigan for more than thirty years, and the kind of validation that never came from a role. Andrew walks through how he built Megawatt one layer at a time, starting from a single shell-shocked face in a group photo and deciding the man sees the whole world as a stage (the character's real name is Dirk Leydon). He also reflects on the first play he ever did, where he wore one of his dad's actual police uniform shirts, and finding that same shirt back in his childhood home twenty-eight years later. What comes up: - Why he left the LA actor lifestyle after his son was born - The film with John Goodman that never saw the light of day - The most replaceable role on any movie set, in his own words - His father, the Flint homicide detective, and what finally earned the nod - Building Megawatt one layer at a time, from a single photo Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

Eight minutes of allotted junket time, and not one of them goes on choreography, because the first question is about a song he learned as a boy and it visibly resets the whole conversation. Joe Taslim is the Indonesian actor known for The Raid, Fast and Furious 6, Warrior and Mortal Kombat, now starring in the action drama The Furious. Joe opens up about the instrument he buys in whatever city he is shooting in, and about the thing he does with it on the last day of every production, which has nothing to do with taking it home. He talks about the question he wishes interviewers would ask instead of the one they always do, and about what he thinks action is actually for in a story. He gets candid about a childhood where his family could not afford the equipment for the sport he wanted, and the free one in his neighbourhood he took up instead, which turned out to set the whole course of his working life. Joe walks through his late father's lesson, delivered from a bench at ringside when he was fourteen and losing badly, and repeats the exact words, which are the reason this conversation opens where it does. He also describes the retirement he genuinely wants, and it is small, specific and involves a room where other people can play the instruments. What comes up: - The instrument he buys on location and never takes home - The question nobody in two days of press thought to ask - The sport he took up because it cost nothing - What his father said from the bench when he was fourteen - The very small retirement he is actually planning Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

The whole career traces back to a school Shakespeare festival and a drama teacher with a VHS camera, and from there the conversation goes into faith, fear, and what an actor protects when a shoot is moving too fast. Adelaide Clemens is the Australian actor behind Tawney in Rectify, Rebecca in Under the Banner of Heaven, and Sandy in Justified, now playing Freya in Timothy David's Kangaroo Island. Adelaide opens up about entering the Shakespeare festival every year at her Sydney school, and the moment John Bell told her drama teacher she should take acting seriously. She talks about a childhood spent moving, from Cognac in France to Queensland, and about the extended family who never left and what she understands about them because of it. She gets candid about the double edged sword of putting something off, how the fear of leaving grows the longer you delay it, and how that fear traps the woman she plays here. Adelaide walks through shooting more than a hundred scenes in twenty four days, what she has learned to be strategic about asking for, and the one thing she will not let a schedule rush. She also reflects on a run of deeply religious characters, the theology degree she nearly took, and watching her grandfather turn to faith while he was battling cancer. What comes up: - The Shakespeare festival entry that got noticed - Auditions recorded on VHS and posted to agents - What she thinks people who stay in one place understand - A hundred scenes in twenty four days, and what cannot be rushed - Why she keeps being drawn to women of deep faith Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

Men who could not finish a sentence were waiting for this director after his Sundance screenings, and the conversation traces that back through a nearly silent lead performance, a self-funded first feature, and two years spent on dirt floors in the Dominican Republic. Cole Webley is a commercial director out of Utah whose first feature, Omaha, premiered at Sundance and follows a father taking his two children on a road trip they do not understand, from a screenplay by Robert Machoian and starring John Magaro. Cole opens up about why he thinks the family dynamic is a source of both peace and damage for almost everybody, and why a father struggling in public breaks something open in an audience. He talks about coming from a home with two parents and none of the trauma in the film, and about the growth he needed to do before he could stop judging the parents in the story. He gets candid about Robert Machoian walking the actual route before writing it, pointing out the gas station where they stop for ice cream and the hotel where they swim. Cole walks through two years in the Dominican Republic at nineteen, living among people on dirt floors who saw the world as richly as he did, and what travel does to a person's sense of their own significance. He also reflects on six brothers who all flew in for the opening night screening, on self-funding a film at forty, and on the question he now asks before making anything. What comes up: - Why almost no dialogue hits harder than a speech - The writer who drove the route before he wrote it - What two years in the Dominican Republic changed - Six brothers who all flew in for one screening - The question he asks himself before making anything now Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

A six year old played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for Fred Rogers, and the idea he absorbed that day is still sitting under a film he made decades later, in a conversation that goes into loneliness, community, and eight extremely difficult plants. Nicholas Ma is the filmmaker behind Mabel, his narrative feature about a young girl named Callie and the potted plant she is inseparable from, co-written with Joy Goodwin, after producing the Fred Rogers documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor. Nicholas opens up about being a physics obsessed kid with a threadbare copy of A Brief History of Time who would happily argue with anyone about black holes. He talks about the beauty of finding one corner of the world where a child gets to feel like an expert, and the loneliness that arrives with it when nobody else knows every single thing about the same subject. He gets candid about the lesson he traces directly to Fred Rogers, that there is wisdom in a child's perspective and not only youth, and how easy it is to make films about children from an adult's eye instead. Nicholas walks through the thing he had to learn about loving people for how they differ from you rather than how they match, and why a friendship built on similarity cannot survive one person changing. He also reflects on the eight plants the production needed to get through the shoot, which he calls by far the most finicky cast members he had. What comes up: - The kid who wanted to argue about black holes - Why friendships built on sameness do not survive change - The Fred Rogers idea sitting under the whole film - Eight plants, and why the production needed all of them - What he hopes families do after the credits Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

A first feature with two very famous names on the poster, and the part of it he wants to talk about is the five years before, when nothing at all was happening. Hudson Hensley is a young actor from Nashville who appears in Song Sung Blue alongside Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, after five years of auditions and a long stretch with nothing to show for them. Hudson opens up about being five years old, watching a Tom Cruise film his father let him stay up for, and coming out of it with an unusually precise idea of what he wanted, which was not to be that man but to make an audience feel what he had just felt. He talks about three straight years with no callbacks at all, and about how a child interprets that silence, which he describes without softening it. He gets candid about the things nobody told him he was doing wrong, from the quality of his self tapes to the fact that he was reciting lines instead of listening to the other person, and about the exact moment that distinction landed. Hudson walks through the preparation for his role, including a playlist he was handed by the person he was portraying, and the conversation they had afterwards. He also reflects on going straight from a set full of A-listers back to walking dogs at home, an encounter that left him unable to produce actual words, and the object he brought for the show's new closing segment. What comes up: - Three years of auditions with no callbacks at all - The self tape mistakes nobody warns beginners about - Listening versus reciting, and when that finally landed - A playlist from the person he was playing - The object he brought, and the night it comes from Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.

A junket slot with a hard clock on it, and he uses it to give away the one lesson he says changed how he acts, rather than the usual talking points. Daniel MacPherson stars opposite Russell Crowe in Beast, an MMA drama about a former champion returning to the cage, written by David Frigerio and Russell Crowe, and it is the third film the two of them have made together. Daniel opens up about the day on their first film together when he stayed behind through lunch to watch his own close up on a monitor beside an Oscar winner's, and calls it the single greatest acting lesson he has had. He talks about what he took from that, a kind of stillness and relationship with the lens he says he did not have before, and about how each of the three films they have made has pushed him further into the frame rather than beside it. He gets candid about becoming a father at forty, twenty three years into an acting career, and describes what that did to his work in a phrase most actors would not reach for. Daniel walks through the two things he hopes his son takes from him, one about ambition and one about being allowed to fail, and traces the second back to his own parents. He also explains what the production was actually chasing with the fight sequences, and gives a straight answer about how much of it was real. What comes up: - The lunch break that taught him more than any class - What stillness on camera actually means - Fatherhood at forty, twenty three years into the career - What he hopes his son understands about him - How much of the fighting was genuinely landing Follow The McAuley Tucker Show wherever you listen, and find the full video conversation on YouTube (@mcauleytucker). More at mcauleytucker.com.