The Projection Booth

The Joe Louis Fist is among Detroit's best-known monuments, yet plenty of people have forgotten whose fist it is. Etched in Pavement (2026), a festival documentary from Detroit photographer-turned-filmmaker John Sippel, brings that legacy back through two young fighters from Southwest Detroit. Sippel spent four years inside the grassroots Guns Down, Gloves Up movement, where boxing becomes an answer to gun violence, addiction, and loss. After Woods Hole and a packed Detroit homecoming, the film is now on digital and VOD.Mike talks with Sippel about two and a half years of shooting, screening the first rough cut for his subjects in his living room, an $80,000 post-production budget raised through boxing gyms and Kickstarter, and Joe Louis's children speaking on film about their father for the first time.Visit the film's official website for more details.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

Mike talks with the two stars of Little Doors (2026) — married couple Anthony Oberbeck and Megan Koester — about a deadpan comedy in which a lonely woman, quietly living through the end of the world, discovers a small wooden door has grown into the side of her body and has to decide whether to open it.It’s the feature directorial debut of Oberbeck (Dad & Stepdad, the Reveries trilogy), who wrote, directed, edited, and co-stars in the film opposite his real-life wife, shooting almost entirely inside producer Eric Cotten’s mostly empty Baltimore house because emptying a room, Oberbeck found, was cheaper than dressing one. The same logic put both leads in identical blue jumpsuits for the whole shoot — sourced from a used-workwear tent in the City of Industry — so nobody had to track continuity or hire a wardrobe department. First-time film composer Lars Finberg, of garage-punk mainstays The Intelligence and Thee Oh Sees, scored the film from demos of his own next album, handing them over with “use whatever inspires you.” Oberbeck cut the whole thing from his bed, having no desk, while directing his own wife forced an early, blunt conversation about where “lead actress” ended and “spouse” began.Little Doors had its world premiere at the Calgary Underground Film Festival before playing its US premiere at Fantastic Fest.Follow Anthony Oberbeck and Megan Koester on Instagram for screening updates.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

Mike talks with Danish writer-director Kasper Kalle about his sophomore feature No Rest for the Wicked (2026), a queer gothic romance shot on the Faroe Islands that slides from love story into vampire tale into body horror without the audience noticing the ground shifting under them.Kalle built the film from an 1885 short story by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs — one of the earliest unapologetic accounts of gay love in print — and expanded its fifteen pages using the islands themselves: constant, unschedulable fog (created on set and in post), a 300-year-old stone village the crew stumbled on mid-scout, and composers from the Faroes so the score wouldn’t feel imported. Leads Egor Venned, a Faroese former model making his acting debut, and Danish star Pilou Asbæk (Game of Thrones) anchor the romance at the film’s center.After premiering at Fantasia and playing its US premiere at Fantastic Fest, the film is headed to US theaters, with Kalle already writing his next two projects.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

Mike talks with French director Quarxx about The Ones Who Grieve (2026), in which a mysterious plague called the Black Veil and a father’s religious cruelty turn out to be the same disease.Quarxx came to filmmaking through a decade as a painter before ever picking up a camera, and this is his first script written with a co-author, novelist Frédéric Soulié, after years of collaborations that never clicked. He reunites actors Thierry Frémont and Zélie Rixhon ten years after they played an unhealthily entangled pair in his debut All the Gods in the Sky — only now she’s grown into the role that reverses their dynamic. The film’s plague victims wear masks designed and sculpted from scratch for the production, a deliberate swerve away from standard zombie iconography toward something that isn’t dangerous, just hungry and discarded.Made on what Quarxx calls the lowest budget of his career after French funders balked at the material, the film premiered this year at Fantastic Fest following festival stops across Europe..Follow Quarxx on Instagram for updates on his next film.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

Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time.Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access that grew out of that friendship put her camera in the room as Trayvon Martin’s killing, Ferguson, and the Women’s March unfolded around him. The film closes on Belafonte’s own account of a state trooper who, after witnessing the brotherly love Belafonte brought into a room in 1963, took the bullets out of his gun and said they could never go back in. Rostock, trained as an ethnographic filmmaker under Margaret Mead before an early detour into editing SNL-era shorts (including the Ruttles’ faux-blues number in All You Need Is Cash), shoots everything first and assembles the structure only once she has a mountain of footage to sort through.This isn’t a legacy rewatch — the film is new, built from Rostock’s own archive of the last decade of Belafonte’s life, and arrives on VOD this week.Visit the film’s official website for where to watch.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

There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into a one-airing-only collage that, Pellington argues, predicted how media actually works now. Mike talks with Pellington about licensing the surviving PAL masters back from MTV decades later, the pre-Avid tape editing that gave Buzz its frantic rhythm, how the show’s DNA resurfaces in U2’s Zoo TV Tour, and why — after Arlington Road (1999) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) — he went looking for old footage instead of a script. The film is currently touring art-house screens, some with the multi-projector immersive setups Pellington built himself.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

What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural Spanish winery, with the apocalypse folded in after the fact. Fresh off its world premiere at the Downtown Festival in New York (Roxy Cinema, Oct. 13), ahead of a slot at the Santa Fe International Film Festival (Oct. 16), the film follows Maguire and Greenberg, plus new friends Maximiliano Betancourt, Paula Sartier Arán, and Sergio Freijo, through grape-stomping, lost luggage, and an unscripted shoot. Mike talks with the pair about building a “spiritual trilogy” out of real friendships, letting editor Saffron Weaver — once their teenage assistant-editing hire — shape raw footage into something stranger than a vacation video, and why they had to give the borrowed camera back.Follow Galicia! on Instagram and visit the film’s official website.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

Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.Piccinino details the chaos of filming inside a live, working casino — sound so loud from slot machines and chatter that nobody expected to salvage any production audio, until the sound team proved them wrong — and the night 4,000 football fans unexpectedly descended on the casino floor mid-shoot for the climactic lobby fight, which his longtime cinematographer Brad Rushing called the hardest shoot day of his career. Add the limited hours mandated for the film's underage leads, and Double Trouble becomes a case study in improvising around a city that never actually sleeps.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

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fueled process of splitting one overstuffed script into two films, Donkey Princess and its companion piece The Hyperboreans, written during Chile's 2019 social uprising and the pandemic that followed. They talk about the year and a half they spent animating a sequence for Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, their resistance to letting the film's politics dictate its story even as an editor read it as being about patriarchy and dictatorship, and how Francisco Melo's own experience as a father reshaped the king's arc.The directors also get into fairy tales as a shared cultural language, the six-stars-that-used-to-be-seven storytelling parable that keeps them hooked, and what's next — including a stop-motion adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. Donkey Princess, also starring Andrew Bargsted as Lalo, is awaiting North American distribution from KimStim, which previously released the duo's The Wolf House.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

Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and showrunner Jason Sudeikis worked to make the Kansas scenes feel distinct from the series' established English look without resorting to an overtly "American" filter — dusky light, a three-filter stack, and a deliberate Wizard of Oz reference when the characters first step off the plane.Gonzales traces her path to the show through her years on Fargo (seasons 4 and 5) and Alien: Earth, where she worked alongside DPs Colin Watkinson and Dave Franco, and talks about the prep process behind Ted Lasso — full shot lists, overheads, and photo boards built with Lowney and longtime series DP David Rom and Vanessa Whyte. She also gets into her approach to blocking (including the deceptively simple staging of Nate's Backyard Barbecue), the influence of her father's decades on film crews, and what she's working on next for Apple TV+.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

Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix at Warner Bros. with longtime American mixer Carlos, plus composer Jonathan Snipes — a deliberate pairing of Japanese and Western collaborators Boyle says rarely happens across either country's insular film industries.Hoshi, who plays wandering medium Airi, talks about the unusual challenge of acting opposite co-star Kurumi Inagaki's dead-sister character Miku, who appears only as a reflection — meaning entire scenes were performed without ever actually making eye contact with her scene partner, down to taping marks on walls to hit precise mirror angles. Boyle also details the funnier-than-scripted performance castmate Mutsuo Yoshioka brought to the film's mysterious man, and a hint of what's next: his in-development remake of the J-horror classic Pulse, based on what he calls his favorite script he's ever been handed.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

After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) and childlike, disfigured Tickles (Wayne, who also directs), around the real attraction's actual layout, shooting the whole film on-site and living in campers on the property.Wayne and Deimer tell Mike White about the three-week shoot, the freedom Wayne gave his co-star to improvise Bull's "deep inner soul of craziness," the pandemic slowdown that gave Deimer time to finish producing the original songs (mixed with mentor Chris Lord-Alge) that score the carnage, and the slate of horror-franchise sequels and other genre roles already lined up behind Hellbilly Hollow, including a new killer for producer Andy Gould (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects).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

Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published.Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy Sipala, and to her own fantasy of running a theater — the inspiration behind Audrey Sullivan, the Los Angeles transplant who inherits her grandmother's movie palace on a fictional Maine island only to find a body in the aisle after a Hitchcock screening goes wrong. Malone talks about disciplining herself to a deadline and a word count, getting early notes from noir historian Eddie Muller, and loading the book with classic-film Easter eggs for TCM viewers to spot.She and Mike also cover her favorite cozy-mystery writers, from Lorna Barrett's Book Town series to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, the already-underway sequel (A Killer in the Credits), and how she splits her time between the novels and her TCM, The Gilded Age, and Reel Destinations work. Murder at the Movies is out October 6th from Running Press.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