An interview with Max Minghella
We talk to the filmmaker and star of The Handmaid’s Tale about his massive VHS collection, his love of vintage movie trailers, rare Tin Cup merch, and raiding L.A. estate sales for physical media.
MS: Hi, and welcome to our first ever interview for Tracking Noise. We're here with Max Minghella, who’s having an incredible week. The trailer for the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale just dropped, which looks very exciting. There was one shot of you in it, but you looked great. And Sony just dropped a brand-new 4K UHD Steelbook for The Social Network as well, so congratulations.
MM: (laughing) Yeah, look, it’s been… I’ve been popping champagne over the release of the 4K. (everyone laughs) No, I am excited for the release of the 4K Steelbook. I have all of my Finchers on Blu-ray and so there's always that question of, does one upgrade everything or not? Is 4K going to be a Laserdisc type situation or is it going to sustain itself? But recently I have been buying 4Ks almost exclusively.
MS: And you also famously collect VHS tapes as well, yeah?
MM: I would say that's my true passion and where the bulk of my collection lands. I have a slightly eccentric philosophy behind it, which is that I try and buy things in the format they would have been primarily released on, I guess. So most of the early 2000s stuff I have on DVD, then I switched to Blu-ray, and now I’m more 4K-ish for certain favorite things. What I love about VHS tapes is the trailers before the movie. There's something about entering a movie through that gate that I really enjoy and that genuinely adds to the experience for me.
MS: That's interesting, because our last post was about us going through the magazine stacks at Occidental College and pulling articles from these old film journals from the 70s. And part of the fun of that is you see the ads they were running at the time for formats I didn’t even know existed, like RCA VideoDisc, which was somewhere between LaserDisc and Betamax. And it’s such a fun part of having these physical objects. You can sink back into the time period of someone who was reading or watching these things and get a taste of what they were experiencing back then.
MM: Completely. I find that stuff so additive to the experience of watching something. I love to imagine what it would have been like to see something on opening weekend and what the theater would have looked like. When we were all growing up, the theatrical experience was much more of an event. And it's still super exciting. When you go see a movie at a place like the Vista [an LA theater owned by Quentin Tarantino] opening weekend, it often has that sensation to it. But it's much more localized now. And even growing up in England, if you wanted to see Sleeping with the Enemy on a Friday night, there was a certain kind of buzz in the theater that you may not get if that movie came out now.
MS: For sure. I feel like The Brutalist had that, which just played at the Vista. When you saw the movie, you got a poster and it had a little card that felt like a prop from the movie, which made it feel like one of those old school road shows that movies used to do back in the day.
DBS: There was more of an experience around VHS as well. When Fight Club came out, Blockbuster would have, like, 30 copies, and you'd go the weekend it came out and look behind each box and every copy is gone. That feeling doesn't really exist anymore.
MM: Totally. The scarcity is gone. And scarcity makes something so much more exciting. There's a movie called 200 Cigarettes. And if you guys know this movie, it's really not available online in any shape or form, so I was forced to get a physical copy of it on eBay, which cost an inordinate amount of money, because it's pretty rare. And I was really excited to sit down and watch that. But I don't know if I would have been as excited to sit down and watch that had I been able to just pull it up [on a streaming service].
MS: I think there is still that excitement with physical media, because not everything is on streaming. There's a lot of stuff that falls through the cracks and a lot of these boutique labels — because they do such limited runs — there is still that feeling of scarcity. This company Vinegar Syndrome just put out a 4K edition of Michael Mann's The Keep. I think they did an 8,000 run printing of it or whatever [Note: it was actually 12,000] and it sold out within 48 hours. I ordered it right away because I was like, this is definitely going to sell out. But I think there is something fun about that that reminds you of when you'd have to wait in line to get tickets to see your favorite band. And that’s part of the experience that you don't get from just clicking a button.
MM: We’re definitely in this new era of physical media with these very specialized box sets with lots of goodies in them. What's kind of eccentric about it is often these labels, they'll have access to lesser known titles, or more Blank Check-type movies [a reference to the popular film podcast, not the Disney movie]. And suddenly you have these, like, six disc versions of The Invasion remake with Nicole Kidman, which I love. I love that these movies that wouldn't necessarily be granted such specialized focus are being given attention, because all movies are interesting. Every movie has such an interesting story to it. And I find that almost any movie, you can find something about it from a backstory perspective that makes it compelling to watch. I also listened to this Tracy Letts interview on Sean Fennessey’s [The Big Picture] podcast. Did you guys see this?
DBS: I literally just watched it this morning. [Tracy Letts said he owns] 10,300 discs! He's like, I could watch a movie five times a day, every day for the rest of my life and maybe get through it all. But he's also like, I can't do that anymore.
MM: Exactly. I think at a certain point it’s almost like an art collection. I do spend an inordinate amount of time looking at my shelf and thinking and pondering. It’s sort of like having a church in your house, and there's something to that.
MS: I remember walking into your house for the first time and seeing your wall of VHS tapes. I think I stared at it for 20 minutes, just looking at everything like, “Oh my god, I used to own this one!” It was like an art installation.
MM: And you thought this person probably needs psychiatric help. (laughs)
DBS: That depends. How many VHS tapes are we talking about?
MM: So actually, I'm in a very unsettling moment in my life, because I'm moving house. All of my stuff is in boxes and I don't have shelving yet. So I'm in this place where I don't really know where I am. I've had about a year of buying new things that don't live anywhere, and so… I don't know. I would say, with my VHS tapes, I'm probably safely over 500 tapes.
MS: There is a sort of Egyptian pharaoh-ish quality to accumulating all of these things. Like, one day you’ll bury me with all of my Blu-rays. And then maybe some tomb raider in the future can uncover them and be like, “What are these strange artifacts?”
MM: If I ever have a will, that's probably the only thing I’ll have to share with anybody. There won't be anything of monetary value. It'll just be my Blu-rays.
MS: Part of the reason why we started this newsletter was to shine a light on a lot of these boutique labels and people who I think are really keeping [physical media] alive. Because as we talked about in our first post, I don't know that the streaming companies are the best stewards of this art form, right? And I think it's great that we have these companies and places like The Criterion Collection who are restoring and preserving these older, classic films or overlooked films or whatever.
MM: Absolutely right. It's a massive thing for film preservation, which is terrifying. I can't remember the numbers on how many films have been lost already. You really can't take this stuff for granted. We all know as filmmakers that sometimes the only physical copy of a movie we’ve made might be on a hard drive in our house. I believe I'm the sole proprietor of both my films so if my house gets burned down in a fire, I'm going to be looking for Teen Spirit on Blu-ray to make sure I can play it again. So it is scary. We don't really know how digital libraries are going to work and how long they'll last. It's all new technology, right? It could well be that none of this stuff actually has the circuitry to maintain itself, or a cloud could go down and suddenly every [streaming] movie of the last three years is just gone.
MS: Speaking of, can you talk at all about your new movie, Shell, or what's going on with that? I still haven't seen the film.
MM: I’m excited for you to see it. Shell is a film that is very much a product of collecting tapes. It really didn't start until the pandemic, to be honest. And I think whatever you're doing in your personal life tends to seep into your work. It’s a tribute to a kind of movie I was watching a lot of at the time. Everything from Double Jeopardy to Michael Crichton's Looker to Basic Instinct to The Fly… it's all in there. But I do think it was very much linked to my love of physical media, and the fact that, for a long period of time, I wasn't really watching much else. So that impacts your subconscious. When you're living in a certain time period that tends to influence what you're making.
MS: I can't help but notice that you're also wearing a Cannon Films sweatshirt. You have a pretty deep bench of movie merch you've acquired. Is there any rhyme or reason to that? Do you seek it out? Are you going on eBay and looking this stuff up?
MM: No, you know, sometimes it comes from like — (pause) There's a movie called Tin Cup. Do you know this movie?
DBS: Of course. Kevin Costner, yeah.
MS: The guy that did Bull Durham.
MM: Ron Shelton, yeah. A couple of years ago, I fell hard for that movie. I probably watched it five or six times in a six month span. I love, love, love this movie. And so I went on eBay, and was like, can I buy a “cast and crew” thing I can wear that symbolizes my affection for this film? So I have a Tin Cup T-shirt, which I'm incredibly proud of.
MS: Were you always a physical media collector?
MM: I don't think I had that kind of relationship to VHS as a kid, because you'd rent them, you know? They were very expensive to buy. There's a movie called Only You that I had an unhealthy obsession with as a kid, but it cost like $200 back then to buy a VHS tape. And so I remember [the price] being this bar for entry. And when DVDs started, I think that's when I bought the first couple of things. I think Cruel Intentions was the first DVD I bought, and I think The Matrix. But The Matrix came in a… what the fuck are they called? They're like the poppy box ones. It had a horrible sort of plastic —
MS: A snap case.
MM: Yeah. But the Cruel Intentions one came in a nice, quite sexy DVD case. And I remember really being happy with that. And I did buy DVDs, but not with the sense of collecting them, because there was nothing eccentric about it at that point. It was just how you would watch things, really. I guess it wasn’t until they became unpopular that I realized I was a collector. It was like, “Oh, I'm still doing this thing that nobody else seems to be doing.” But Matt, we need to turn the tables for a second. You are a next level collector because of your Plex system, which puts me to shame. That is the sign of a true collector cinephile. Talk a little bit about your Plex system for the readers at home.
MS: Okay, so yes, I do own a Plex server. It’s basically a computer with a bunch of hard drives in it, and I have every movie I own ripped and uploaded onto the server so I can watch my collection from anywhere because I travel a lot for work. Dave has actually been a recent beneficiary of this, because I gave him my Plex login, and he's probably watched —
MM: Wow, David. I haven't even had that privilege.
DBS: It’s the only streaming service I've been watching. I’ve seen Unlawful Entry, Night of the Hunter… real classics.
MS: Max, you can have the Plex login for doing this. That will be your reward.
MM: And in return, I will give you some of the 35mm scans that I've been downloading.
MS: I actually have a scan of Batman Forever I downloaded that you sent me that is, I think, a rough cut of the film. I totally forgot about that until just now.
MM: There’s a guy on Twitter… I won't blow up his spot, but he's been doing the Lord's work and scanning original 35mm prints of movies in 4K and then releasing them in limited windows for people to download. And they're gigantic files, but they’re beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And it is my new obsession. I believe Tarantino had him on his podcast recently and is doing work with him on some of his movies. But he also just upgraded his scanner and I see he's doing a 6K scan of Die Hard 2 right now.
MS: My God. I mean, at a certain point, it’s like… how many K’s do you need? But I think what's fun about the film print scans is usually, for those of you who don't know, when they do a 4K Blu-ray release, they're scanning the negative if they have it. And so you're getting a pristine image, versus a film print, which is probably… it's got scratches on it. It's been beaten up a little bit, but it's much more of the experience of what it was like watching a movie in the theater for the first time in the 90s or whatever. You're not seeing a fresh, brand-new print. You're seeing one that's been run 50 or 100 times already.
MM: For sure, it's really tangible. But a lot of them are scanned from the film cells, so they're open matte, and you're seeing the boom, and you're seeing crew members, and you're seeing things outside of the frame that you would never have seen before. And as somebody who makes movies, it's a fascinating thing. I just watched a Raiders of the Lost Ark print yesterday from the original UK release. All the VFX shots have this white perforation on the right side of the frame, which the scan is catching. And so you're really feeling each cut in the movie and it made me look at that film in a different way, which is obviously such a fascinating film to study, just from a pure filmmaking technique standpoint.
MS: I've seen some discussion about this on Twitter. I see people that are like, “We're not seeing the whole movie!” And it annoys me a little bit, because you're not supposed to see that. The filmmaker doesn't really want you to. But I agree, from a “student of film” standpoint, it is fascinating to be like, “Oh, without the matte, you can see they had a light just out of frame to give Harrison Ford that golden glow when he's looking at the idol,” or whatever. You can sort of see behind the curtain, which is fun, but it's not always what you were meant to see.
MM: That’s a really interesting thing that didn't occur to me until quite recently about VHS, which is that 99% of VHS tapes were pan-and-scan. So for most people, until the DVD came along, you hadn’t really seen the whole movie. You were only seeing a third of the frame of every movie. That was quite a revolutionary thing. My father was a filmmaker, and I remember when we got the first copy of The English Patient on DVD. We all sat around the TV, and it was just the craziest thing to see that movie in a resolution like that. And now, when I watch the DVD of that film, it looks like a nightmare. (laughs) But at the time, it was like, “Oh my God, we've never seen this movie that clearly!” And that's why I love collecting the Academy Screener VHS tapes, because they're the only way of getting most movies on VHS in letterbox, because the Academy versions would at least be in the correct aspect ratio.
DBS: Where do you source your VHS if you don’t mind me asking?
MM: Well, big shout out to WHAMMY! in LA which is a new store from the last couple years that’s amazing and I’ve been going to it an awful lot. I get a lot of stuff from there. And then eBay is always great for that stuff. But the thing about VHS tapes that I’m fascinated by is their market value. There’s a lot of debate about how much they’re worth. They’re sort of like NFTs in that way. They fluctuate in value so dramatically. And if you go online you’ll see certain tapes going for a hundred thousand dollars.
DBS: Did it go way up during the pandemic?
MM: It did, and then it dissipated and then it went up again… it’s a really fluctuating market so I’m curious to see where that will land or if there’s any logic behind it.
MS: Have you gone through your collection and seen if you own anything that valuable?
MM: So, Matt, your wife was at an estate sale and picked up a sealed SVHS — talk about formats that I didn't know existed — an SVHS copy of, I think, The Last Crusade or Temple of Doom. And I've looked that up, and that's worth quite a bit.
MS: I bet that’s a good resource for finding this stuff, especially in LA. People’s estate sales.
MM: (laughs) Like Nightcrawler. Just hovering around corpses looking for tapes.
MS: If you’re willing to do that, I think you deserve the money, right?
MM: God bless Sarah for giving me that. That was a lovely present. David, do you have a big collection too?
DBS: No, not that big. Mostly just DVDs. I don't have a big collection whatsoever.
MS: Dave's being modest. If you were to see his collection, you’d be like, “This is such a snapshot of where you were in your life at that time.”
DBS: It ends in like 2008. I think The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the most recent Criterion release.
MM: Nice.
MS: Max, what’s your prized possession? If the fires were coming to your house and you had ten minutes… other than your own movies, what would be the two or three things you might grab off the shelf?
MM: Good question. I have a German 4K Steelbook of a movie called Shadow in the Cloud, which is a movie I really like, and it's a beauty. That's probably the most beautiful one I have, just as an actual box. I also have these great Wong Kar Wais. My mother's from Hong Kong and I spent a lot of time there growing up. And in Hong Kong, they used to make these beautiful box sets of the Wong Kar Wai movies. And they were literally boxes, and you’d open them up and they tended to have something symbolic from the film [inside]. For example, Happy Together has the lamp from the movie. And they were amazing. Beautifully crafted. So I have like, three or four of those. I think I have one from 2046, one from In the Mood for Love. Maybe Chungking Express. I’d take those boxes. Those are beautiful, yeah.
MS: Okay, last question. Let’s say you’re on death row and they say you can watch one last movie before, you know —
MM: This should be a stock question for all your interviews.
MS: Yeah, this is like our version of a Desert Island Disc.
DBS: Death Row Watch.
MS: Any movie — past, present, available on physical media or not — what would you spin one last time?
MM: I don’t know the honest answer to that question, because that’s a big question. But I will say that a movie that is close to my heart and immediately sprang to mind when you asked me that question is The Firm.
MS: Wow.
DBS: Great movie.
MS: That’s a strong answer.
MM: It's not my favorite film, but it's a movie that I have a deep relationship with. I remember coming to America and renting that movie, which was a huge moment in my life, because I think it was still in theaters in the UK. Movies used to take forever to come out on home video and the fact that I could rent it here was so exciting and I vividly remember that moment.
MS: Well, I love that movie and part of why I love that answer is because… when you ask people their Letterboxd Top Four, they want to throw some impressive things in there to be like, “I know film. I’m a cineaste and I'm going to say some classic movie.” But if you're going to watch one movie before you die, it's going to be something that has some sort of fun element to it. You're not going to throw on, like… Jeanne Dielman or something. As much as you might love that film, that's not going to be your last movie. So I love that answer and I think we'll leave it at that.
DBS: Thank you, man. Really appreciate it.
MM: Thank you guys. That was so fun.
You can follow Max Minghella on Letterboxd here and on Instagram here. His debut film, TEEN SPIRIT, is available now on Blu-ray and digital, and his latest film, SHELL, premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and will be released in the U.S. later this year.
Great interview, I loved learning a little about Max's hobby...