True Detective

[Jasper]

i was really impressed with woody harrelson's girlfriends boobs.

We all were, creep. We all were.

[Artemis]

Thanks for that info, Jasper. Very interesting..

The woman with the antlers reminded me of Hannibal. Not sure if you watched that series last year, but there seemed to be a woman with antlers recurred throughout the season. Perhaps the inspiration was taken from the same source as True Detective.

[creep]

bullshit two week wait for the next episode. thanks superbowl.

good episode...a little slow at first but it picked up. it looks like shit is about to go down.

[farrellgirl99]

deleted my last post cause i answered my own question.

but that last scene was definitely creepy enough. scarier than walter white's tighty whiteys for sure.

[Pure Method]

last episode was boring

[Jasper]

It was a little slower than the first two episodes, but I still liked it a lot. It seems like the next episode will be pretty exciting.

The two-week wait is gonna suck. One week is bad enough.

BTW, I noticed something. Coincidence?

[Hokahey]

Last episode was incredible. MM's monologues were some of the best writing I've seen on TV. Add in his brilliant acting, the great cinematography and soundtrack and you're on to something special. I was as mesmerized by that episode and the words coming out of his mouth as I've ever been by a TV show.

[creep]

so does anyone think mcConaughey had something to do with the recent murder?

[Jasper]

so does anyone think mcConaughey had something to do with the recent murder?

I think they're using it a red herring. I mean, you could say that about Marty too, because he's obviously the MORE screwed up one. He's not honest about his faults like Rust is about his own, so Marty seems to be always on the verge of exploding. Even 19 years later, he's still rationalizing his philandering as being for the good of the family.

Anyway, they said there were elements of the recent murder that only they (cops) knew about. So unless they jailed the wrong person, the new killer is either a cop (or someone cop-related), or rather than there being one killer, there's a killing cult. We already know there's a cult in some way, due to things like the psycho writings of the dead prostitute from the '95 case. There was also that fucked up picture of the dead prostitute as a girl, surrounded by a freaky looking group of horsemen that looked kind of like a KKK from another dimension (Rust was looking at it when they interviewed the mother of the victim...the one with the bloody fingernails).

Also, I've never seen Kingpin, but apparently there's a scene where Woody Harrelson's character is shouting "You don't mow another man's lawn!", so there was a hidden joke in that confrontation with Rust...

[creep]

yeah i figured that they are just making it look like mm might be involved and woody has something to do with it. i guess i should learn their character's names. even though i just read them in your reply i can't remember.

[wally]

did anyone else notice that in woody's daughters drawings, the man didn't have balls, and in the last one he was wearing a mask?

[Hype]

I saw the first two episodes last night (god... a full hour at a time... it's just a series of excellent movies with cliff-hanger endings...)
I found the pilot episode very slow at first, and the two main characters' faux accents a bit annoying, but as it progressed it picked up steam and the accents stopped sounding put on. The show so far seems to me to be what Dexter could have been if it didn't rely on repetition and played out tropes.

I liked the show but it was difficult to keep up with the change in years. It's a bit all over the place and does not flow chronologically. (obviously that's the intent)

Woody Harrelson with hair= Past

Woody Harrelson without hair=Present

True Detective for Dummies

Wedding ring + Cheating = Past
No Wedding ring = Future.

This show is good at details.

[blackcoffee]

i was really impressed with woody harrelson's girlfriends boobs.

but what do they mean symbolically?

[Hype]

They mean he's a complex character with a lot of nuances to his personality.

[creep]

you can't say tonight's episode was boring.

[perkana]

It wasn't at all. I wanna have my babies with Mathew McConaughey (sorry creep)

[Artemis]

Last night's episode was the best thus far, imho. That last scene was so intense, I was on the edge of my sofa. I read that last scene was a single shot! The acting and directing continues to impress - BRAVO!

[Jasper]

I read that last scene was a single shot!

Yeah, the entire drug raid right until they get into Marty's car at the very end was a single shot by a single cameraman. It's so smooth it's hard to believe. Really ratcheted up the tension.

Feb 9 2014 10:02 PM EST
'True Detective': How Did They Pull Off That Final Shot?
Director Cary Fukunaga walks us through the epic six-minute take.

By Kevin P. Sullivan (@KPSull)

Four episodes into its run on HBO, "True Detective" is earning the kind of high praise usually saved for drama series with two or three seasons under their belts, thanks to its stunning visuals, pitch-black worldview and career-best performances from Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Cary Fukunaga helmed each installment of the eight-episode run, and his careful direction has been a key factor in "True Detective's" success, even if it's not as apparent as Harrelson's and McConaughey's acting.

But if you watched the fourth episode, "Who Goes There," tonight on HBO, by the end, it's likely you are very aware of just how good Cary Fukunaga is.

MILD SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 4 AHEAD

Before reaching the halfway point of the series, Fukunaga decided to end the episode with a six-minute oner, or long take, that follows Cohle into a heist inside a housing project, through a number of shootouts, outside to escape from swarming police, through another house, over a fence and finally into Hart's car. It's the kind of incredible shot that's worth watching again and again to catch every detail in it and further blurs the line between television and film.

To find out how he pulled off the complex sequence, I reached out to Fukunaga to see if he would walk me through the planning and execution of the best "True Detective" scene yet.

Off the bat, it's important to know that the oner is nothing new to Fukunaga. Having used the technique in both of his feature films, "Sin Nombre" and "Jane Eyre," Fukunaga signed onto "True Detective" knowing that he wanted to include a long take at some point, because he considers it a tenser kind of directing. "The best ones, you don't even realize that they're oners," Fukunaga said. "They're the most first-person experience you can get in a film."

Reading Nic Pizzolatto's script for "Who Goes There," Fukunaga knew almost immediately that the heist was the scene to make his oner. All he had to do was convince the entire crew that it wasn't impossible to pull off.

To cover as much ground as he wanted to in the sequence, Fukunaga needed to shoot in an actual housing project, and that was the first complication in planning the oner. It took weeks to even get permission to film on-location, but once he received it, Fukunaga went straight into mapping the shot and finding "the most interesting path, but also the most logical path" for Cohle to escape with Ginger. That interesting and logical path eventually takes Cohle and Ginger over a chain-link fence, a maneuver that proved to be the most complicated of the intricate sequence.

Watching just the fences portion of the oner back, the camera floats over the high barrier in a movement that almost looks effortless. Getting the shot, however, was anything but. Because the location was an actual housing project, the "True Detective" crew wasn't allowed to take down any portion of the fence, so they had to improvise. "At one point, we were going to build a ramp, and the operator was going to walk up it," Fukunaga said. "But that wasn't very safe." The solution ended up involving placing the Steadicam operator on an elevated jib, or a weighted crane, which carried him over the fence and back down to earth.

Once the camera movements were figured out, the production carefully choreographed everything that had to happen in front of the lens with the help of a stunt team led by Mark Norby, who personally worked with McConaughey to develop a fighting style for Cohle. The crew even built a replica of the stash house for the stunt team to practice in before the big shoot.

"We had ADs [assistant directors] all over the neighborhood because we had to release extras, crowd running background, police cars, stunt drivers. There were actual gun shots and stones being thrown through windows. There were a lot of things to put together," Fukunaga said. "Even the action, the stunt sequences were complicated. We're working on a television schedule. It isn't like a film where you can spend a lot of time working the stunts out with the actors. We only had a day and a half to get Matthew and everyone else on the same page."
All told, the sequence clocks in at around six minutes. Fukunaga and the crew ran through the whole thing seven times while the cameras were rolling. The director built in possible edit points if two takes had to be combined to make the perfect version of the shot, but anyone who is wondering should know that the sequence everyone saw in the episode is, in fact, a true single take and one of the great achievements of filmmaking for television.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/172200 ... take.jhtml

[creep]

It wasn't at all. I wanna have my babies with Mathew McConaughey (sorry creep)

don't forget about some of his horrible roles. you might change your mind.

here is an interesting clip. i didn't know woody was in surfer dude too. they have both come a long way.

[perkana]

But we will always have this

P.S. I couldn't see the surfer clip

[perkana]

This is kinda funny http://truedetectiveconversations.tumblr.com/

[blackula]

I just watched this past Sunday's episode....damn. Even though it's obvious the younger version of Cohle survives, the last 10 minutes were pretty suspenseful.

[Jasper]

Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective’

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/ ... detective/

By Michael Calia

Horror and mystery go hand in hand on HBO‘s “True Detective.” The hit series — which stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as Detectives Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle, respectively — is rich in dread similar to the kind inherent in the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and it has featured words and imagery derived from Robert W. Chambers‘ story anthology “The King in Yellow.” As a result, the show has opened up the worlds of weird fiction and cosmic horror to broader audiences.

Executive producer and writer Nic Pizzolatto, responding through email, commented to Speakeasy about some of the more ominous literary and philosophical influences on ”True Detective,” as well as some of his favorite horror writers. Read the Q&A.

Speakeasy: If you could recommend any single work of weird fiction and/or horror to people, what would it be?

Pizzolatto: That’s tough — on the one hand I want to name one of the blue-chip classics, and on the other I’d like to give an endorsement to people who may not usually get enough attention. I mean, I’d suggest Lovecraft or Poe, but everybody knows them already. More recently, I’d point people in the direction of Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, John Langan, Simon Strantzas and others. For fans of the show who’d like to see what contemporary voices have done with Chambers’ “King in Yellow,” I’d point them toward Karl Edward Wagner’s short story “The River of Night’s Dreaming” or the recent anthology “A Season in Carcosa.”

When did you first hear of and read Ligotti?

I first heard of Ligotti maybe six years ago, when Laird Barron’s first collection alerted me to this whole world of new weird fiction that I hadn’t known existed. I started looking around for the best contemporary stuff to read, and in any discussion of that kind, the name “Ligotti” comes up first. I couldn’t find any of his books in print, and their used prices were prohibitive for me at the time. But I located a couple at libraries, and his nightmare lyricism was enthralling and visionary.

What work of his do you find the most influential? Are you more attracted to his fiction or his nonfictional writing? Have you read his nonfiction book, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”?

I read “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster. In episode one [of "True Detective"] there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers. Which, of course, you got.

The philosophy Cohle promotes in the show’s earliest episodes is a kind of anti-natalist nihilism, and in that regard all cats should be unbagged: “Confessions of an Antinatalist,” “Nihil Unbound,” “In the Dust of this Planet,” “Better to Have Never Been,” and lots of Cioran were all on the reading list. This is before I came out to Hollywood, but I knew that in my next work I would have a detective who was (or thought he was) a nihilist. I’d already been reading E.M. Cioran for years and consider him one of my all-time favorite and, oddly, most nourishing writers. As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I’ve read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.

How do you feel about the philosophy in general?

To answer your question about my personal views, I’m about as far from a nihilist as you can get, though at times my personal philosophy would be deemed pessimistic. I would label it realist, though. Maybe beleaguered romantic. However, to openly confront the ideas of artists like Cioran and Ligotti, without defense, is to be riveted and increased by the power of their vision of the unspeakable, of annihilation at the most intimate level.

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

I’ve put off going into the philosophy Cohle espouses in the early episodes because I don’t want people making assumptions about the character of Cohle, or the ultimate aim of this season. The totality of Cohle’s character and the show’s agenda won’t be clear until the eighth episode has ended. It’s also important to me that the mass audience doesn’t need to know or engage these associations in order to enjoy the show. Likewise, I wouldn’t want any viewers to assume we had some nihilistic agenda, or reduce Cohle to an anti-natalist or nihilist. Cohle is more complicated than that. As I’ve said recently, Cohle may claim to be a nihilist, but an observation of him reveals otherwise. Far from “nothing meaning anything” to him, it’s almost as though everything means too much to him. He’s too passionate, too acutely sensitive, and he cares too much to be labeled a successful nihilist. And in his monologues, don’t we detect a whiff of desperation akin to someone who protests too much? When Cohle speaks of the unspeakable, is it with the same illusory perspective as when Hart speaks about the importance of having rules and boundaries? Perhaps that is what Hart references when he tells Cohle in episode 3, “You sound panicked.”

That doesn’t lessen the potential validity of the ideas he expresses, and that is what I finally think is disturbing about the show so far. It’s not the serial killer that’s unsettling; television shows you far worse than that all the time. What unsettles are the aspects of being human which the show chooses to highlight. That this stuff is being delivered through actors as instantly amiable and comforting as Harrelson and McConaughey makes it doubly subversive. And then I think you’ll find, as we go forward, the show keeps subverting its own subversions.

Nic Pizzolatto is also the author of the story collection “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” and the novel “Galveston,” which was published in 2010 and is slated to be adapted into a film.

[Juana]

So I have caught up on the first 4 episodes and I have to say this show is pretty fucking good. I was a bit torn after the first episode but it keeps building from what I have noticed and this last episode especially the final scene really kept me interested. The character of Cohle is very interesting to me.

[Jasper]

So I have caught up on the first 4 episodes and I have to say this show is pretty fucking good. I was a bit torn after the first episode but it keeps building from what I have noticed and this last episode especially the final scene really kept me interested. The character of Cohle is very interesting to me.

I loved the first episode, and the slow, atmospheric nature of the first three episodes, but either way if they can keep from fucking up this will be one of TV's all-time classics (at least this story/cast/season).

Too bad there's no more Rust & Marty after this.