You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and this is my interview with the director for heads of state, Ilya.

Mr. Prime Minister. Mr. President, it's our debut duet.

Duet.

Yeah, it's like I'm Dr. Dre and your Eminem, and we're taking that stage for the first time together.

I'm Eminem.

What is it with you? Walking around, thinking you're better than everybody else. What's the difference between me and you? You are the command of the chief, you know? Some DJ in Vegas. So what's the deepest between us? All right, I get it. You don't like my movies. I've never seen your movies. But the universe keeps telling me how to look cool with a gun in my hand. A toy gun.

What's that?

That can't be good.

Oh shit.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for joining me here today to talk about your new film, Heads of State. Thank you. Hello. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you for wanting to talk to us. It's, uh, but I say us, the royal week. No, to me. Thank you. No, I mean, I've been a big fan of yours ever since I saw hardcore Henry and I love the work that you did on Nobody.

So when I saw that this was coming, I immediately wanted to jump on it because I love the way that you shoot action.

I love the way that your mind works for how to stage these sequences.

I'm curious to now, first and foremost, when you're approaching something like this,

obviously it's more in the vein of work you did on nobody compared to the POV of Hardcore Henry.

But how would you chart the lessons that you've learned from those two films that you were

able to bring into making heads of state?

I think the cleanest answer would have to be tone because hardcore is pretty pretty specific, but it could get out there and I knew that I could go crazy

and now it would still work because the premise is so crazy.

Nobody had to be more fine-tuned because it was an action thriller first that I understood that I just leaned towards comedy.

Also, Bob is obviously a huge comedian, so it was one of these things where it was naturally I always think of the scene when in this in the tattoo parlor when the veteran understands who hutch really is and he goes away and I remember in the script he just left the tattoo parlor and I was like what if he goes to a door and he locks a lock and then then I'm like, what if he locks another lock?

And then what if he locks another one?

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