Severed, the Ultimate Severance podcast.

Welcome back, Refinery.

I hope your outy is having a great holiday season, although you wouldn't know anything about that,

now would you?

You've once again found yourself listening to Severd, the Ultimate Severance podcast.

I'm your host, Alan S, our look at those things that inspired the creation of severance

continues with another installment of the Severed Origin series.

Up to this point, these Origins episodes have looked at

properties Dan Erickson has listed as inspiration during his creation of severance. Today we're

going to veer away from that directive just a bit. Instead of one of Dan's faves, I wanted to take a look

at a movie mentioned by both Ben Stiller and Jessica Lee Gagne as visual,

auditory, and artistic inspiration for Severance. It's a 1967 film directed by a French

madman. His name is Jacques Tatte and the film is called Playtime. A disclaimer here. Ref refiners, I will be the first to admit I am

very monolingual. We've got a lot of French coming up. I'll be trying my best with the French

pronunciations, but I'm not promising anything. Apologies in advance for butchering both names and

words. I'm a bit ashamed to admit I was not familiar with Playtime prior to seeing it on these lists.

It was also suggested as an origins topic by several podcast listeners.

I've always considered myself a bit of a film buff, but I missed this one.

As I've gotten into the research for this podcast episode, I've found

commenters and fans who list Playtime as their favorite movie. One of those is eclectic director

David Lynch who called it quite possibly the greatest film ever made. Playtime has been

called both groundbreaking and revolutionary. Tutti considers it his masterpiece and most daring work, even though its dismal take at the box office, left him bankrupt. The British Film Institute lists it as number 37 on their list of the 100 greatest films of all time. It's like nothing I've ever seen before.

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