# The greatest movie of all time | Dan Houser and Lex Fridman *Lex Clips* · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftb2e_A0mbQ ## Summary Dan Houser talks with Lex Fridman about the films that influenced him, including The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino, True Romance, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, and Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He explains what makes these films great, from writing and pacing to memorable characters and worlds. He also reveals his new project Absurdiverse, an open-world comedy game with animated stories, and describes how he approached writing Red Dead by deliberately not bingeing Westerns. ## Key points - Dan Houser prefers Godfather II for its divided story between Little Italy and Sicily, calling the Ellis Island shot one of the best in cinema. - He believes Goodfellas changed cinema at the tail end of the '80s more than any other film, though he sometimes prefers Casino. - He is developing Absurdiverse, a comedy universe that will be an open-world video game plus animated shows, built in San Rafael. - He praises True Romance as possibly one of the best scripts ever written, loving its speed, characters, and dialogue. - His greatest war film is the Russian film Come and See when serious, and Apocalypse Now in its original cut when less serious. - He explains The Thin Red Line's film doesn't make narrative sense because two battle scenes from the book were edited into one. - His favorite Westerns are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch. - For Red Dead, he deliberately avoided bingeing Westerns and tried to write a take that would work today, making Red Dead 2 a different direction from Red Dead 1. ## Notes ### The Godfather - Houser prefers **Godfather II** for its divided story, the Little Italy and Sicily sections, and the Ellis Island shot of little Vito arriving in America. - He sees it as a "perfect film" where acting, writing, music, and shots are all seminal. - On pacing: audiences became fluent in cinematic storytelling, so films got edited faster, but he enjoys the slowness, especially rewatching on modern televisions. ### Scorsese and Vegas - **Goodfellas** changed cinema at the tail end of the '80s more than any other film; The Sopranos is completely inspired by it. - He sometimes prefers **Casino**, calling it the great Vegas film and praising the cold "why take a chance?" killing scene. - Competing Vegas films mentioned: Leaving Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose book he loved more than the film. ### Absurdiverse - A comedy universe being built in San Rafael: an open-world game plus animated TV shows or movies, aiming to feel like a living sitcom. - It needs comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and amusing life lessons — you can't just have jokes for 40 hours. - Includes an English Hunter S. Thompson-type character who is also a market gardener. - Games take years because you build a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment at once — "massive four-dimensional mosaics." ### True Romance and War Films - True Romance: possibly one of the best scripts ever written; fast, funny, unbelievable but you care about the characters, with a sweet love story and a large cast including Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, and Brad Pitt. - Greatest war film: **Come and See** (serious) or **Apocalypse Now** original cut (less serious). - The Thin Red Line film is beautiful but makes no narrative sense because two battle scenes from the book were edited into one. ### Westerns and Red Dead - Favorites: **Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid** and **The Wild Bunch**. - For Red Dead he deliberately avoided bingeing Westerns, writing a take that would work today; Red Dead 1 was more traditional, Red Dead 2 took a different direction. ## Transcript [00:03] You've helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories, and open worlds in video game history. But when you grew up in the late '70s and '80s, open-world video games wasn't a thing. So you've credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let's talk about film first, if we can. - Sure. - What to you are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time, maybe films that were highly influential on you? I mean, Godfather. - God, well, I think for me, probably Godfather II more than Godfather I, but I love both of them. But I love the divided story in Godfather II. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little Italy, and I love the sections in Sicily. I think and the bit, Ellis [00:50] Island is just one of the best shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot, it's amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in America. - How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the cinematography and how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got young Pacino. - Coppola started as a screenwriter, so I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script. So it's almost like the writing, directing almost become the same thing. But it's one of those films, both of them are those films, which I was thinking about this idea of a perfect film where everything's good. [01:29] Where the acting's seminal, where the writing's seminal, where the music is seminal, where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes you know, define what you think about things. It's impossible to think about the mafia and not think about The Godfather. - What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, slow. - Yes. - It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slow. - Life got faster. Life just got, you know, as I think as we moved from the '70s into the '80s, into the '90s, people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker, you could show a look and just that meant you realized that person was [02:14] gonna betray the other person. They just edited films much quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with modern, you know, high quality televisions, you don't have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you're rewatching them. So it doesn't bother me that they're long and slow. - Speaking of faster, life getting faster, I... I'm sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That's faster, right? - Yes. - A mixture of crime and humor. - And almost like an open world game in some ways, in that it's this slice of life. You know, I think that probably changed cinema at the tail end of the '80s, changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the '80s, [02:51] early '90s, more than any other film. And it's so iconic. In some ways I prefer Casino, but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino, you know, the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people, you know, it changed everything. The Sopranos is obviously completely inspired by Goodfellas. - Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything. - The look, the clothes... ...The music. - I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, just the drama building up to that between... - Dig another hole. - Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open world and creating a [03:32] character from the city. It's one of the great Vegas films. - I think the great Vegas film. There are bits that I always... that I love. At the end, when everything's wrapping up, and on the one hand you see the Robert De Niro character, he's still good at making money, so they let him return to normal life. But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the, the mob bosses from back home, they're discussing all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there's that incredibly cold line where one of them, they're thinking about the old, you know, I think it's the casino manager, and one of them just goes, "Ah, the way I see it, why take a chance?" And then the next thing, he's just shot. The brutality of it all is just [04:11] brilliant. - I don't know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There's at least some competitors. You got what, Nicolas Cage Leaving Las Vegas? I mean, falling in love with a prostitute. You've written some of the great crime stories ever. - Thank you. - And in some sense, there's love stories in there. And you've talked about- ...being a bit of a romantic yourself. Appreciating the depth of love stories in literature at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute. He got an Oscar for that. - I think he did for that, didn't he? - Plus there's the caricature of the drug world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That's an interesting one. [04:52] - I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18. And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book. - Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories? - No, but one of the things we're working on now, there's sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson if he was also a market gardener. I love that persona. But he's kind of... it's hard. If you make him American, it's hard for it not just to be Hunter S. Thompson. - Is this an American caper? - No, it's in this animated show we're developing in this sort of comedy world we're working on called Absurdiverse, and it's in one of the stories in that. - What is Absurdiverse? - Absurdiverse is a comedy [05:35] universe we're developing that will be an open-world video game and then some loosely adjacent stories that we're going to make as animated TV shows or possibly animated movies. We're still thinking that all through. And we're building the game up in San Rafael at the moment, and it's early days, but it's looking very exciting. And it's trying to be... like, trying to make a game that feels a a little bit like a living sitcom. - Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges, or is it pure comedy? - I hope it's got comedy, cynicism, heart, drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise, you can't just have jokes for 40 hours, it won't work. - Okay, so comedy needs some darkness. - Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century [06:23] is The Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes. - And there's going to be an open-world video game. - Yes. Yes. - When? - Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through. - So, what's the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game? Why does it take so long to get it right? - That's an interesting question. I think if you look at the scale at which they're built, you could argue it the other way, why is it so quick? I mean, you really are building, in one go, a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. and 40 hours of entertainment cut through it. You know, these things are [07:06] massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And I think that's us being kind of aggressive on the timeline. - We're taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent, but I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So first of all, you said you love great war books. - Yes. - and movies. - Yes. - So we have to throw in Platoon from Oliver Stone and Apocalypse Now, for me at least. - Of course. - There's more crime, fast-moving crime movies, like Scarface. I also love True Romance. - I love True Romance. Possibly the best, one of the best scripts ever written. - Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino. What do you love about True Romance? I think sometimes, depending on the [07:52] day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I've had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made. - Yeah, I mean, True Romance is super fun. Tony Scott was a really good director, so it moves at a really good speed. It's funny, it's completely unbelievable, but you really care about the characters. It's the kind of, you know, this world that obviously doesn't exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters are larger than life. The dialogue is unbelievable. You could just sit and watch unbelievable. You could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know, you just... it's amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking about, like, what do you like about films? It's the idea to be in a world. You want [08:29] to... they're not real. They're never real, but you want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented. - And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super racist discussion. - Yeah. Rant. - Rant. - Dennis Hopper is just sort of a dream dad. - Yeah. Dream dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on the couch. - Gary Oldman. - Gary Oldman. - As a rasta. - Yeah, and you have... I mean, a real love story. Like, a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context. - And it's just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film. [09:11] - Yeah. - It's endearing. - The... Elvis is a character. It's kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same beauty, the comedy, the love, the- - Yeah, and it's all crossed with Play It Again, Sam. It sort of feels a bit like that with the Elvis character. - What about greatest war film? What would it be for you? - Greatest war film? If I'm feeling serious, it would be a Russian film called Come and See. which is probably the most intense film ever made. And if I'm feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now, and I would always want to watch the original cut. I don't prefer the re-edits. I like the original first release. I think it's tighter and slicker and works the best. - Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness, [09:53] I think, madness. - Yeah, but from your first- - Yeah - scene onwards, it's just got these amazing set piece after set piece and, again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue. - Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems, and there's different ways of doing that. And you've talked about different books. The Thin Red Line is another book— ...and movie that shows that. - Yeah, yeah, and I watched the movie years before I read the book, and I didn't understand the movie. And then I read the book, and I read a lot about the editing of the movie, and I understood why I didn't understand the movie, and that's 'cause the movie makes no sense. It is beautifully shot, and the music is [10:37] one of the best film scores of all time. But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that they're spread apart by ages in the book to assemble... I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim. It would've been as a six-hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing that's incredibly beautiful but doesn't necessarily make narrative sense at the end of it. But it's still very beautiful, the film. - And in terms of Westerns, what's the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven? Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You've mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. - I think for me it's two films from, I think, pretty much the same year, Butch [11:12] Cassidy and The Wild Bunch. - I love Robert Redford. Rest in peace. - That film, it's just impossible to imagine any buddy film without Butch Cassidy. - It's Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you, also? Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead? - I love Unforgiven, but the truth is with Red Dead, I'd seen a lot of Westerns as a kid. My dad watched lots of Westerns. They were always on TV. You know, I felt I knew a lot, quite a bit about Westerns. And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work. And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns. I tried to watch no more Westerns and just think about what I liked about them, what I didn't like about them, what would be a take that would work today and would [12:00] work within the confines of a game. And I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional Western. And then having done that, tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction so that it felt like a worthy successor. Didn't just feel like more of the same.