The Business

It's time for that annual tradition--the year-end mega-banter! Kim Masters, Matthew Belloni and Michael Schneider take stock of the year that was in Hollywood.

Guillermo del Toro's new film, The Shape of Water, is a visually stunning love story between a mute cleaning woman and an exotic sea creature. It looks expensive, but del Toro actually came in under his modest budget. He tells us about the creative ways he stretched a dollar making his awards contender.

For his new series Wormwood, documentarian Errol Morris used interviews and archival footage to tell the story of Frank Olson, an Army scientist who died a mysterious death in 1953. But he also cast Peter Sarsgaard to play Olson in scripted sequences. Netflix footed the bill, though no one quite knew what they were getting themselves into when they first took on the project.

Documentary filmmaker Neil Berkeley desperately wanted to make a movie about the screeching comedian Gilbert Gottfried. But when he started spending time with Gottfried and his wife Dara, he found someone who was much different from -- and quieter than -- his onstage persona. Berkeley tells us about getting to know the real Gottfried and following him on the road, where he is shockingly frugal.

We revisit our conversation with actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish, who had a star-is-born moment earlier this summer with the raunchy comedy Girls Trip. Haddish says the movie has already changed her life, and she has big plans for where her career goes from here. Haddish and Girls Trip director Malcolm D. Lee tell us about filming during the actual Essence Festival and yes, a certain scene involving a grapefruit.

For the new movie Call Me By Your Name, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino started as a consultant but ended up as the director. He tells us about the decade-long journey making the film and how he convinced Armie Hammer to take the part of Oliver, a closeted graduate student who finds a passionate romance one summer in 1980s Italy.

Better Things co-creator Pamela Adlon tells us about learning to stop second guessing herself and embracing many roles -- writer, director, producer and actor. And yes, we ask her about Louis C.K. We spoke to Adlon just days before the New York Times published a story alleging that C.K., her long-time collaborator, had a history of sexual misconduct.

Hollywood chased after Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund following his well-received 2014 film Force Majeure. But Östlund isn't so sure he wants to be caught. He tells KCRW's Matt Holzman about staying in Scandinavia and his new movie The Square, a satirical dramedy that is his second film selected as Sweden's foreign language submission to the Oscars.

Two women who have carved out great careers in Hollywood share their stories of sexual harassment. Comedy writer Janis Hirsch and Grey's Anatomy showrunner Krista Vernoff talk about what they've had to put up with and their hope that the culture will finally change.

Actor Andy Serkis is best known for his pioneering motion capture work. Now Serkis has stepped behind the camera to direct the new movie Breathe. The film is a very personal one for producer Jonathan Cavendish; it tells the true story of his remarkable parents. Serkis and Cavendish tell us why they wanted to make an old-fashioned love story like Breathe, give a Jungle Book update and talk about some of the new projects in the works at their performance capture studio Imaginarium.

First, a news banter checking in on the Harvey Weinstein saga. Then, filmmaker Sean Baker, known for shooting movies on the iPhone, tells us why he went old school 35mm with The Florida Project, and how the discipline required when using real film actually helped him work with five- and six-year-old actors.

We have interesting guests on The Business, and sometimes our conversations are too long to fit into one show. This week we give you stories that were too good to leave on the cutting room floor, including some sharp insights on making it in the industry from David Mandel, David Simon, Shawn Levy and Matt Reeves.

Filmmakers and married couple Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton planned to release their film about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs before the 2016 presidential election. Then their star, Emma Stone, signed on to make La La Land and Battle of the Sexes got pushed back. Now their film -- about a battle against misogyny, gender discrimination and homophobia both on the tennis court and off -- suddenly has more resonance than they expected.

When Will & Grace co-creator Max Mutchnick went to his long-time writing partner David Kohan with the idea of reuniting the cast for a one-off web video, Kohan humored him. Little did he know the reunion would end up going far beyond that one short video. Will, Grace, Karen and of course, just Jack -- are now coming back to NBC for two new seasons.

In writer-director Mike White's new movie Brad's Status, Ben Stiller plays a man consumed with jealousy of friends from college, based on their social media. White tells us why he wanted to make a movie about ambition in the age of Instagram, and the challenge of making humanist movies when the studios only want the next superhero franchise.

When David Simon started shopping his new show The Deuce--about the rise and legalization of the porn industry--he quickly realized a lot of networks didn’t quite grasp his seriousness of purpose. The creator of The Wire and Treme tells us how The Deuce ended up back at his longtime TV home, HBO, and why he ended up making a show about porn in the first place.

Director Shawn Levy built a career on the Night at the Museum franchise, but wanted to break out of his box. He set out to produce, and this past year scored with the Netflix mega-hit Stranger Things, now up for 18 Emmys. He tells us how he went about getting the industry to reconsider him.

TV writer-producer Chuck Lorre has created some of the most successful multi-camera broadcast sitcoms ever, including Two and a Half Men, and The Big Bang Theory. Now he's entering a new stage in his career with two projects -- the Netflix pot comedy Disjointed and the single camera show Young Sheldon for CBS--that are pushing him outside his previous purview.

Billy Eichner has had recent roles in Hulu's Difficult People, Netflix's Friends from College, and in the upcoming season of American Horror Story on FX. But it's through his truTV game show, Billy on the Street, that he's in the Emmy race. He tells us about the evolution of his person-on-the-street antics and why not every celebrity is a good fit for the show.

Gigi Pritzker didn't plunge headlong into the movie business -- her original life plan was to run an NGO in Nepal. An accidental journey to film school set her on a path to producing lots of films, including the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water. But she'd never done television until Genius, on the life of Albert Einstein, demanded to be made as a series. The first season of the National Geographic anthology series is now up for 10 Emmys.