sometimes when two people love each other very much, they don't do anything and nothing happens
a.e. stallings
matt using world beneath the sea in a dirties featurette that i hadn’t even seen before oh wow
matt: “it's a very fun project because it's a lot like Pinky and the Brain where these characters can more or less do anything provided they come home at the end of every episode.”
jay: “we can sort of just keep on the treadmill and always reinvent some new way to go around it—“
matt: “or so we say, i mean, we've made a grand total of 16 episodes of this TV show. so, yeah, (jay: we’re gonna be on forever) I'm sure on people who've made real shows that have been on 60 episodes are looking at this laughing their ass off. (jay: we’re gonna make 100)
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"no one but me"
exit we - brave shores, matt johnson on the criminally underrated podcast, the playlist interview, friend of a friend zine, ODS Gaming interview, npr interview, matt johnson on pod meets world, TorontoNOW interview, TorontoStar interview, splitsider interview, TIFF Canadian Television Comedy panel, Running Man Press interview, the dirties (hook commentary), here they are now to entertain us, TorontoLife Matt Johnson profile
(hugeeee shoutout to this archive of ntbts interviews for helping me re-trace these quotes and whatnot as well thank u)
Doris Dana, from a letter to Gabriela Mistral c. April 1949, translated by Velma García-Gorena
sometimes it's less about sexual attraction and more about owning them in as many ways as possible
interview from around 2020 (i think?). hadn't heard this one before. talking about his projects and film making, quite a bit about the dirties. really liked this segment:
I think that a lot of filmmakers are using a type of, how do I say it? It's almost like a confessional psychotherapy approach to telling stories, where they're taking things about themselves that they think are maybe, well, it's maybe not even happening consciously, but where they think these things are ugly, or these things are dangerous, or they're just sort of the shadow sides of themselves. And they're embracing them or putting them on the screen, in a way to, uh, not kill them, but in a way to kind of neutralize them. I guess this is kind of--this is pretty pretentious. It's kind of like a Jungian analysis of of why artists do certain things that they do. But I know for me, being able to take all of these qualities of egotism and, uh, anger and and anxiety and project that world into a story where I can see it is extremely therapeutic. And not even in a way that I'm conscious of. It's just like, okay, 'there it is'. And it's almost like you take it out of yourself and put it put it somewhere where everybody can see it and then you can kind of hide in broad daylight if that makes any sense. There's this there's this concept, this mating concept called Zahavian signaling where a bird or an animal will do something that is so personally expensive that the signal that it sends out is extremely pure. So, it's like a gazelle will like jump around in front of a tiger being like, "Look how healthy I am. Like, like try to chase me. I promise you I'll be able to get away." But that signal is so expensive, because if the tiger does decide to chase that gazelle down, it's going to die. It's extremely risky. And I think there's some version of that going on here where it's almost like you're daring people to believe that that really is you, right?
the whole thing with matt possibly being obsessed with chasing after a ghost of a older boy he had a crush on at camp and then sublimating that on to jay and jay being nonchalant about it and being able to fill that roll in high school since he was already the cool older kid who was really into music but then once they separate for a bit jay becomes the one who needs to prove that he's actually the real deal and can be that and so much more for matt. why he talks about back then he was "trying so hard to be funny" during the webseries, why the lyrics in exit we seem to be him convincing himself that he is the only one who understands matt, faults and all, and that matt truly NEEDS him in return, no one but me. and why jay is the one who's kinda obsessed with the return to their characters because it's the one time in their lives where it's like a full and complete giving oneself up to the other.
Once in a While I Am Reminded - Leila Chatti