Diddy, Pete Holmes, and Coldplay kick off The A.V. Club’s SXSW coverage
Every year, The A.V. Club reports from the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. This year, we had three writers—Kyle Ryan, Marah Eakin, and Marc Hawthorne—down there on Tuesday night. We’ll beef up to five for tomorrow, but for now, here’s our daily mini-reports on the best stuff we saw, ate, and did. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
Kyle Ryan
SXSW Music has traditionally begun in earnest on Wednesday, but this year, plenty of things were happening on Tuesday, which coincided with the last day of SXSW Interactive. I hit a couple of panels during the afternoon, but the best part of the afternoon was seeing Robert Duvall do a sort of live Random Roles with Leonard Maltin. Duvall’s 83, and his hearing is going out, but he was full of great stories, as you’d expect from someone with such a long, rich filmography. Some of my favorites:
- On Billy Bob Thornton’s directing approach: “Rehearsal’s for pussies. Two takes, that’s it!” (Maybe that’s what Brett Ratner meant?)
- On directing himself in movies: “I almost put a mirror up so I can yell at the director any time I want.”
- Francis Ford Coppola would get frustrated with the Godfather cast because they joked around so much on set, particularly Duvall and “Jimmy” Caan, who liked to moon people on set.
- Coppola’s directing technique: “He turned the process around and put it on you to see what you’d bring,” instead of demanding things be done one way.
- Caan loved country music, so when they’d go home on the weekends while shooting The Godfather, he’d be singing along and listening to it so much, he’d have a bit of a drawl when he returned to shoot. “He’d have to go talk to the Teamsters for a little while,” Duvall said, to get his New York accent back in force.
It went on like this for an hour in a packed ballroom with a bunch of people waiting outside to get a seat in case anyone left. National treasure, that guy.
Comedy has become a much bigger part of SXSW, though it doesn’t seem as deluged with podcasts this year as it has been in the recent past. Pete Holmes recorded his first live You Made It Weird—an awesomely awkward episode with Chris Gethard, Judd Apatow, Kumail Nanjiani, and more—here in 2012, and this year he returned, crew from his TV show in tow, to chat with Jim Breuer, Tom Middleditch, Matt Braunger, Andy Haynes, and Nicole Byer. It moved at a much brisker pace than the last time Holmes was here, showing how doing a TV show has honed his hosting chops. Later I checked out the Imaginary Radio Program, a musical comedy show created by Drennon Davis. He uses sampling pedals to create loops for short, funny songs (inviting the inevitable Reggie Watts comparison) as he imagines flipping through various radio stations on the dial. It’s a clever setup and made for some very funny moments, particularly once he was joined by Nick Stargu, who acted as a sort of co-performer. They were joined by Karen Kilgariff (of Mr. Show fame and head writer for Pete Holmes’ show), who played a couple of her funny, surprisingly affecting songs (and did an amazing Björk impression), comedian Conan writer Andrés Du Bouchet, and comedian Jake Weisman.
