Say It Again

Benny Safdie, co-director of Good Time (2017), praises Nathan For You’s “Finding Frances”

I am just going to include a couple of moments of inspiration that really knocked my socks off (ones that are probably not on other top 10 lists):

Nathan Fielder’s show “Nathan for You” on Comedy Central has always been a source of inspiration, but two episodes in this fourth season reached heights I never thought possible. The first was “The Anecdote” and it is about an appearance Nathan has on Jimmy Kimmel. Nathan methodically research hours “celebrity” interviews as preparation for his upcoming appearance. He finds common themes and punchlines in many of them leading him to come up with the “perfect” anecdote. The only problem is it is completely fabricated. To fix this he methodically spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the story true. Step by step the whole thing needs to happen to Nathan in order for the anecdote to sound genuine. What this episode says about performance and its basis in reality is so inspiring. When you finally see the anecdote performed on live tv at the end, you can see the subtleties of acting that could only be achieved because of the preparation and “realism” of the events.”

Finding Frances (2017)