What do you get when you cross Stanley Kubrick‘s stately historical epic “Barry Lyndon” with George A. Romero’s darkly comic horror film “Monkey Shines?” You get this week’s episode of HBO‘s “The Righteous Gemstones,” where showrunner Danny McBride and his collaborators pay hilarious tribute to these two very different cinematic touchstones.
“Our background is in film and a love of film,” showrunner Danny McBride told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast in reference to himself and fellow “Gemstones” directors David Gordon Green, Jody Hill, and Jonathan Watson. “[Film history] is always a point of reference for us, and sometimes that means taking something like ‘Barry Lyndon’ and injecting it into the stupid shit we do to try to create something special.”
In Episode 5 (“You Shall Remember”) of the current and final season, the rivalry between megachurch pastors Jesse Gemstone (McBride) and Vance Simkins (Stephen Dorff) comes to a head at a meeting of the exclusive “cape and pistol” society — a perfect opportunity for director Jody Hill to imitate “Barry Lyndon” with a series of slow Zooms set to Schubert’s “Piano Trip No. 2,” a piece of music inextricably connected to Kubrick’s masterpiece in most cinephile’s minds.
The scene is hilarious regardless of one’s familiarity with “Barry Lyndon,” but fans of the movie get an extra laugh from the contrast between the historical weight and anthropological detail of Kubrick’s film and the absolute ridiculousness of Jesse and Vance’s sparring. There’s similar added value to the episode’s second cinematic influence, George A. Romero’s 1988 horror classic “Monkey Shines.”
In “Monkey Shines,” a quadriplegic ex-athlete forms an unhealthy bond with his service monkey Ella, who begins acting out her owner’s homicidal urges. On “The Righteous Gemstones,” BJ (Tim Baltz) becomes similarly close to his own support monkey, much to the concern of his wife Judy (Edi Patterson). “‘Monkey Shines’ was definitely an inspiration,” McBride said, adding that the crew quickly learned they were in for one big challenge: “A monkey doesn’t take direction.”
For McBride, casting a monkey as a key character was in keeping with the show’s tradition of “tasking the production with stuff we haven’t tried to do before, and then we all learn along the way. Even just Tim Baltz having to kiss the monkey and get comfortable around the monkey. That was definitely fun for us to play around with. You know, it was just us being ridiculous.”
“The Righteous Gemstones” airs Sunday nights on HBO and is streaming on Max. To make sure you don’t miss Danny McBride’s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
