The Interviews (ft. Jon Favreau, Joe Dante, Mike Figgis)
The Empire Film Podcast
Bauer Media
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's a packed line-up of directors this week on The Interviews, folks. Directorpalooza? First up, we bring you an extended excerpt from our spoiler special interview with The Mandalorian And Grogu, Jon Favreau, who tells Chris Hewitt about his intentions behind the first big-screen Star Wars film in seven years. Then Chris leaps onto Zoom to have a lovely natter with the great Joe Dante about his beloved (eventually) 1987 sci-fi comedy, InnerSpace, which is out now on 4K UHD, and English director Mike Figgis about his hard-hitting, Oscar-winning drama, Leaving Las Vegas, which has also received the 4K UHD treatment. The Figgis chat is an extended excerpt from an hour-long deep dive into the movie which, like the Favreau interview and Team Empire diving deep into The Mandalorian And Grogu, can be found over on our spoiler special feed. empirespoilerspecials.com, if you haven't already taken the plunge. Enjoy!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello Pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to another episode of The Interviews, the show that |
| 0:19.6 | gathers our chats with the Cream of the |
| 0:21.9 | Cinematic Crop. And in this episode, we've got three cracking directors talking about three |
| 0:27.4 | very different films. John Vavro is the director of films like Iron Man One and Two, Elf, |
| 0:35.8 | Chef, Cowboys and Aliens, Maid, The Jungle Book, and The Lion elf, chef, cowboys and aliens, maid, the jungle book, and the Lion King. |
| 0:40.7 | His last few years have been spent as co-creator, along with Dave Filoni, of the Mandalorian, |
| 0:47.1 | the Disney Plus Star Wars show that introduced a world to the Mandalorian bounty hunter |
| 0:51.4 | Din Jarin and his young apprentice, the cute, |
| 0:54.6 | forced sensitive alien known as Grogu, or Baby Yoda, if you're not into the whole Grogu thing. |
| 1:01.1 | After three seasons of the TV show, Favro has taken his creations to the big screen |
| 1:05.6 | with the Mandalorian and Grogu, and I sat down with him recently for a big old spoiler chat about the movie. |
| 1:12.9 | That interview can be heard in full, along with nearly two hours of Team Empire's deep dive into the film over at our spoiler special feed. |
| 1:21.2 | But right now, you're going to hear roughly the first half of it. |
| 1:24.8 | There are spoilers here, of course, So do tread carefully if you have not seen |
| 1:29.5 | the Mandalorian and Grogu. Enjoy. John Favro, director of the Mandalorian and Grogu, welcome to the |
| 1:36.6 | Empire podcast, Sporter Special. Pleasure speaking to you again. And likewise, likewise. How are you? |
| 1:40.8 | I'm great. I'm excited. So as we're sitting here, it's before the film came out, comes out. So people who are seeing this will have, we'll have assumed, so this is there's still the anticipation of how it's going to play, but I'm happy to talk about it. How's it been for you going around the world in this, this tour? I mean, who's seen the film? Who's seen the 27 minutes? A lot of people have seen we did a big IMAX event |
| 2:03.6 | where we played, I think, |
| 2:04.7 | in like 100 theaters around the world. |
| 2:06.3 | Yeah. |
| 2:06.7 | And people saw 25 minutes. |
| 2:08.2 | We don't usually do that with Star Wars, but we decided to do it and show people, |
... |
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