CG Garage

Steven Spielberg is the most famous filmmaker alive, which is exactly why almost nobody actually understands him. Chris and Daniel use Disclosure Day, Spielberg's new alien chase thriller with Emily Blunt, to argue that the "safe, mainstream" reputation is a decades-long misdirection: underneath the crowd-pleasing surface is a genuinely weird, deeply personal artist who has been smuggling strange, uncomfortable ideas inside blockbuster packaging since at least Close Encounters. They trace it through Fabelman's casting David Lynch as John Ford, the theory that Kubrick handed Spielberg AI specifically because Spielberg's glossy reputation could disguise a bleak, unnerving film, and the moment James Lipton caught Spielberg off guard by connecting his parents directly to Close Encounters on camera.
Disclosure Day itself is proving strangely divisive, and Chris and Daniel dig into why. They break down its Sugarland Express-style chase structure, an Emily Blunt performance that starts as broad comedy and quietly transforms into something much stranger, a train sequence built to feel genuinely dangerous rather than stylized, and the VFX work from longtime collaborator Matthew Butler. Along the way, a detour into Spielberg's actual filmmaking journey, from Close Encounters to Poltergeist to AI, makes the case that his reputation as the "obvious" director has always been the biggest misdirection in his own filmography.
Referenced in this episode:
Disclosure Day
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Poltergeist
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
War of the Worlds
Minority Report
The Fabelmans
Sugarland Express
Matthew Butler, VFX Supervisor
Sponsors:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

A24 announced a $75 million research partnership with Google DeepMind and framed it as R&D for production tools, not a content deal. Nobody cared about the distinction. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins spend the first half of this Rough Cut on why that announcement landed like a betrayal anyway, then pull the same thread through the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Mark Ruffalo's New York Times op-ed on quiet industry retaliation, and what it means that four studios now control what used to take six.
From there the panel turns to Christopher Nolan's press tour for The Odyssey and the practical-versus-VFX marketing dance that VFX artists roll their eyes at every single time it resurfaces. They close with a Monstrous Moonshine state of the union, walking through the June July shoot and a quick, lighthearted aside on why the show still uses AI tools like Suno for its own theme song.
Mentioned this episode:
A24, Google DeepMind
Paramount Skydance, Warner Bros. Discovery, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Stoller
Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey, D-Neg, Weta Workshop
Monstrous Moonshine
June July
Suno
Special thanks to our sponsor:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Doug Trumbull spent fifty years trying to convince Hollywood that the way movies are projected is fundamentally broken, and most of the industry never listened. The visual effects supervisor behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm, Trumbull passed away in 2022. This conversation originally aired in July 2020, before a lot of you were listening, and it's one of the fullest records of him explaining his life's obsession in his own words. We're pulling it back out of the archives because it deserves a wider audience than it got the first time around.
Chris and Doug cover the whole arc: getting hired at Graphic Films off a satellite painting, cold calling Stanley Kubrick's secret phone number to get on 2001, the accidental discovery of double stars that led him toward persistence of vision research, and the Showscan process he patented at Paramount. They also get into Trumbull's MAGI process, 4K stereo at 120 frames per second, representing 40 times the data of a traditional HD video, and Chris's own experience helping produce a piece of content rendered through it as a proof of concept. Trumbull gives his blunt account of Ang Lee allegedly misusing his patented process on Gemini Man. This is a conversation about a man who understood something about how movies work that almost nobody in the industry, including some of its biggest directors, ever fully grasped.
Guest: Doug Trumbull >
Referenced in this episode:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Blade Runner
Silent Running
Brainstorm
Showscan process >
Future General Corporation (Paramount R&D division) >
MAGI process >
Special thanks to our sponsor:
Center Grid Virtual Studio: https://cgvirtualstudio.com/

Hnedel Maximore did not come up through the traditional VFX pipeline. He started drafting floor plans in Liberia, studied architecture in Michigan, got laid off during the housing crash, and worked his way across industries before landing at Speed Shape in Detroit doing automotive commercials. That's also where he and Chris first crossed paths, years before either of them could have predicted where things would end up. What Hnedel built along the way was not just a technical skillset but a spatial intelligence that became the secret weapon behind one of the most visually distinctive streaming shows in recent memory.
Spider-Man Noir is shot in color and black and white simultaneously, built on sets too small for the scripted action, and executed with a noir discipline that its showrunner and director Harry Bradbeer summed up as: what if Orson Welles had a Steadicam? Hnedel breaks down how previs shaped what they could actually afford to build, how the stunt team and VFX department merged into a single production unit, and why the dual delivery format put black and white monitors at video village for the entire shoot. He also gets direct about where VFX gets siloed too late in the process, and what it means when the VFX supervisor is employee number four.
Guest:
Hnedel Maximore on LinkedIn >
Hnedel Maximore on IMDB >
References:
Spider-Man Noir (Amazon / Sony) >
Speed Shape
Torchlight (previs)
V-Ray >
ILM >
Fuse FX
Zero VFX
Scanline VFX
Digital Domain >
Sway
Chinatown (1974)
Wicked Is Pain (documentary)
Backrooms
Obsession
Honey Don't (Ethan Coen)
Blender


This episode is sponsored by:
Center Grid Virtual Studio
Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)

For years Chris and Daniel have been saying the corner was going to turn, that history would repeat itself the way it did in the 1970s. It turned. Jason Blum said the same thing last week. Two horror films made by twenty-something YouTubers just proved everything the studio system has been getting wrong, and the box office numbers are not being polite about it. Obsession cost under a million dollars. Backrooms cost ten million. Both are outperforming movies that cost a hundred times more.
Chris and Daniel break down both films as filmmakers. They get into what Obsession borrows from Takashi Miike's Audition and why that works, how Backrooms uses the architecture of infinite scroll and TikTok as genuine psychological horror, why sound design and shadows are a more effective budget tool than any AI pipeline, what the economics of AMC A-list are doing to studio revenue models, and why the wrong lesson from all of this is to go hire these directors to make a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel.
Referenced in this episode:
Obsession (2025)
Backrooms (2026)
Audition (1999, dir. Takashi Miike)
Avatar 3 (2025)
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan) (2026)
Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)
AMC A-list >
A24 >
Blumhouse >
This episode is sponsored by:
Center Grid Virtual Studio
Kitbash 3D (Use promocode "CGGarage" for 10% off)