Hello, this is Simon Brew. I'm the editor of Film Stories magazine and a very warm welcome to a special episode of the Film Stories podcast.

Come with me. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

And movies. Movies that had stories.

That the story just sucks a man. This is just the beginning.

We would be honoured if you would join us.

Hello and a very warm welcome to film stories with Simon Brew.

I am Simon Brew.

As always, there's absolutely everything you need to know about me.

The aim of the podcast though, well, the title gives it away. I'm here to talk off the stories

of films. I tend to talk about development stories, production stories, marketing stories,

release stories, all the ingredients that go to make the films that we know and sometimes love,

just that, the films that we know and sometimes love. What you've happened upon here,

however, is one of my

occasional special episodes of the podcast where I invite in a filmmaker to talk about a new

release or their body of work. And I'm delighted this time to be joined by Hollywood producer

Will Packer. Now, Will Packer is, I mean, a prolific producer with a string of hits,

including films such as ride-along, girls' trip, stomp the yard, Little, and the film that

we're ostensibly here to talk about, the brand new release at the time of recording, Beast. Now,

Beast is a movie starring Idris Elba that we're going to be talking about throughout

this episode, but also I just want to set the scene because this one had a slightly unusual start to it.

So the interview with Will Packer took part, it was part of the global press junket that took place for Beast.

And so he was in the US, I was in the UK. We recorded this over

...