The Projection Booth

What happens when a filmmaker can't make the movie of her own life? Janaé Rachel Ballot tried to write a biopic about herself, ran into dissociative episodes and flashbacks, and started shooting without a script instead. The result is Dissociated Me (2026), a comedy about trauma that she calls an anti-biopic and an anti-therapy film. Mike White talks with its writer and director right after its world premiere at the Reykjavik International Film Festival.

Ballot grew up in a Hollywood family, and the film opens with a song and dance act drawn from her own childhood of dance and pageants. She explains why she rebelled against the family business, how years of feature development taught her she had been producing all along, and why a biopic of Anthony Perkins gave way to her own story. Her pandemic-era short Managed was her first step into directing.

Then came the accident: a car hit Ballot the day before a shoot she had been waiting for, and the footage filmed in the trauma unit ended up in the movie. The two talk about how much is act and how much is real, a cast playing heightened versions of themselves, and editing a film about dissociation without stylistic tricks.

Mike also sets the film beside You Can See Everything (2026), another recent picture asking what is true and what is an act. Where does the performance end and the person begin?

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 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Film history may be heading toward its own ending, and David Thomson wants to look at the whole thing while there is still something to see. The critic and historian behind Rosebud joins Mike White for a Projection Booth Special Report on his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, a revisionist history of the movies that took about three years to write.

Thomson traces his obsession to a childhood screening of Henry V (1944), where a dissolve from sleeping page boys to flames lodged in his head for good. He explains why he gave up a place at Oxford for film school in 1960, remembers the time Citizen Kane (1941) played to an empty house and Orson Welles had almost no scholarship behind him, and weighs Pauline Kael's attack on the film.

Then the talk turns to where the medium is headed: photography giving way to electronic images and AI, editing as film's most decisive tool, and why Thomson calls Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) a hollow sham that may age like The Sound of Music (1965). He also makes the case that The Godfather (1972) still shapes how power looks on camera, and previews his next book, on Mickey Mouse.

What happens to movies when the picture stops being a photograph?

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 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Kier-La Janisse wanted to be a film programmer. Instead she became a publisher and a filmmaker, because the festival that gave her a website in 2011 handed it over when it stopped reaching Quebec audiences. She turned that domain into Spectacular Optical, a book imprint that started in 2014 with Kid Power, partly because Canadian grants were easier to win for books than for magazines. Janisse joins Mike for a freewheeling walk through the catalogue: the anthology model that lets a book come together fast, Satanic Panic and the care it took not to hurt real people, why Kid Power sat unsold until everyone rediscovered weird kids' movies, the 2017 pair The Yuletide Terror and The Lost Girls, the Jean Rollin book that sold out, and Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey Sr. Reader, the book she co-edited with Clint Enns because a hole needed filling. She also previews Sharp Edges, a book for Severin Films' 20th anniversary, and explains how a woman who never wanted to make movies keeps making them for Severin. Her work lives at spectacularoptical.com.

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 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A world drawn in cross-hatched lines: water, ships and faces all look like Victorian engravings come to life. Czechtember 2026 opens with Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958), released in America as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, as Mike welcomes back Jonathan Owen and Professor Earl Jackson.

Freely adapted from Verne's Facing the Fat, the film follows young engineer Simon Hart and Professor Roch, whose world-changing explosive lures the genteel pirate Count Artigas to a hollow volcano. Mike, Jonathan and Earl unpack Zeman's trickery: matte paintings, forced perspective, puppets, glass rippled frame by frame. They trace how Zeman strips out Verne's colonialism, the Cold War hunt for scientists humming underneath, and the real inventor who sued Verne. Along the way: Méliès, Guy Maddin and Hundreds of Beavers (2022).

Can spectacle this dense leave room for criticism, or is “wow” the most honest response?

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 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A birthday party, a rented house and a person you only thought you knew: I See the Demon (2025) turns a breach of trust into sci-fi horror.

This is a Special Report on a new voice and a festival film. First-time feature director Jacob Lees Johnson joins Mike White to talk about the movie that premiered at Cinequest in San Jose, then played Grimmfest in the UK and FilmQuest in Utah. It stars Jon Heder and Alex Zollicoffer, and it is now on VOD.

Lees Johnson explains where the sci-fi ideas came from, why the relationships are the real heart of the film, and how a first AD's blunt note sent the script back for a rewrite. He talks about shooting in ten days in a real house in Provo, cutting the film himself in Premiere, and living with one round of early test screenings. He also names the folk horror he wants to make next, and a dream take on the Sleepy Hollow legend.

Follow Lees Johnson on Instagram at @sir_lees.

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 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.