I'm happy to see you for so many reasons.
I just admire you as a human being, as an actor,
as, now, as a director.
But I'm just happy to see you.
And I'm so happy you've made it for Cat Week.
You barely made it.
I'm deathly allergic to cats.
Oh, no.
So when they asked me, do you like cats?
I said, no, and, in fact, if they're there,
I might die so please help me.
Yeah.
No, we don't have any here.
OK, good.
No.
OK.
That would be cruel.
And I'm really happy to be here.
I am a huge fan of yours, and not only of your comedy,
of yourself, what you represent.
But I think you have the best taste
of anybody in show business.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Design--
Thank you.
--clothing, everything.
I, just-- you're a style god.
Style god.
Thank you.
I'm looking forward to seeing the house you're
building, because it looks like you have excellent taste, as
well.
I'm just trying to get on your level, Ellen, that's all.
All right, well, I look forward to seeing it.
I also think this is really cool.
You put out a magazine, free of charge--
Best kind.
--just wasting money so that people can have a magazine.
But you talk about weight issues and your fluctuating weight
and body shaming, and you interview people.
What made you want to do that?
Well, do we have the--
The magazine.
--sheet?
Yeah, do we have any of it?
I have it in my room.
Do we--
OK.
--have a--
That's far away from here.
OK.
That's in--
So basically, I kind of--
I think everybody has a version of themselves.
I call it, like, a snapshot, let's
say, at some point in your life, of the person you
are you're trying to kind of hide from the world
or makes you feel a certain way.
And even if you get success, or you grow up,
or you become good looking, or whatever,
the things that you think will fix the thing,
you kind of carry some part of that with you.
So, for me, it's definitely being,
like, this 14-year-old kid, being overweight,
wanting to fit in with these skaters and hip hop kids,
and just feeling lonely and maybe not understanding
my own worth.
So, at the end of the magazine, it
says this magazine is dedicated to this guy.
And it's me standing with that picture of myself at 14.
And a lot of the stuff I talk about in the magazine
is basically, like, I think--
you know, I came up in goofy comedies and this kind
of, like, curly haired, overweight kid.
And everyone had their own opinion on what I should be,
how they could speak to me, how they could treat me.
And it was only through writing and directing
Mid90s-- oh, OK, here we go.
This is the magazine.
Yeah.
This is it.
So, yeah.
Thank you.
To land my point, I'll sort of read the manifesto kind
of thing at the beginning, because it
might give it a little bit of a better context.
So, "I became famous in my late teens
and then spent most of my young adult life listening to people
say that I was fat and gross and unattractive.
And it's only in the last four years,
writing and directing my movie, Mid90s,
that I've started to understand how much that hurt
and got into my head.
I really believe everyone has a snapshot of themselves
from a time when they were young that they're ashamed of.
For me, it's that 14-year-old overweight and unattractive
kid, who felt ugly to the world, who listened to hip hop,
and wanted so badly to be accepted
by this community of skaters.
For this magazine, I asked 12 people I respect and admire
if they can relate to this in their own way,
and how they've learned to love themselves.
The interviews are all centered around the question,
what is that snapshot for you?
They turned it into some of the most meaningful conversations
I've ever had.
I hope you enjoy this magazine.
Jonah."
That's fantastic, right?
Yeah.
I love that you did that.
Yeah, it was really cool.
And I interviewed people, everyone from my sister,
Beanie Feldstein, who is a legend.
She was in Lady Bird.
Behati Prinsloo, DJ Premier, Dr. Phil Stutz-- my therapist--
Edie Falco, Katheryn Hahn, Kim Gordon, Gonz, Michael Cera,
Q-Tip, Raymond Pettibon, Na-Kel Smith.
So lots of different people.
And what I found amazing about it
is it was really a companion piece to writing and directing
Mid90s, because, to me, this movie is
about learning to love yourself and finding
a community of people that accepts you,
and how imperfect life is.
And, to me, it took a long time, honestly
until right now, for me to come out,
sort of, as the person, artist, mind, what I represent,
how I feel, how I'd like to be spoken to,
how I speak to the world in a way that actually represents
who I am as a person, as opposed to me trying to be something
else that I'm not.
Yeah.
Which is what a lot of people--
we enter into this business, especially actors
and actresses, first of all, looking for approval,
looking for love, to fill a void,
and also to kind of become other people to avoid
being exactly who we are.
Yeah.
And a lot of people get stuck into that role playing instead
of just knowing who you are.
So it's very cool that you have found
who you are and love who you are,
because you're a brilliant man.
So--
Thank you, Ellen.
--I'm glad you love yourself.
I'm under construction, like we all are.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean?
We are.
We're all just trying to figure it out.
But I will say, making things that mean something to you--
for me, what I've found is, like, this is the first thing
I've made, you know?
As an actor, you're a color in someone else's painting, right?
Or when you're doing--
you're acting other people's stuff,
now this is the Ellen show.
You're doing what you want to do in your mind.
It's like, that kind of thing is really freeing and empowering,
you know, because--
Well, talk about-- because they need to know--
this movie is very, very cool.
It almost looks like it's a documentary.
It's shot in such a raw, gritty way, in the best way.
And these kids don't look like they are acting.
As a matter of fact, most of them aren't actors.
Only one was.
But explain what the movie is, because it looks like it's just
a skateboard movie.
But that's just an element of it.
Yeah.
I mean, skateboarding is what they do,
and it's what ends up bringing them together,
but it's really about this kid, Stevie,
the kid in the little gray shirt on the right there.
And he's this lonely kid.
He's struggling to get love from his abusive older brother,
played by Lucas Hedges brilliantly, and his mom,
Katherine Waterston.
He's kind of a latchkey kid.
And he goes out into the world, and he finds community
in this group of skateboarders.
And, like anything in life, he learns
lots of horrible and amazing lessons.
He goes through lots of joy, lots of humor, lots of pain,
lots of agony, and it's about life.
It's really well done.
I mean, congratulations.
I can't believe this is your first film.
Thank you.
And to do it in this way, so--
because it's such a--
like I said, it almost feels like a documentary.
You know, I tried to make it as authentic as possible,
and I thought it was way more offensive to revise history
than to show it exactly how it was,
and it was very deliberate.
And the same thing goes for sexuality, toxic masculinity.
You know, there's a sex scene in the movie--
not a sex scene, but a sexual scene in the film.
And, for me, it was very important to show these kinds
of things, because we grew up--
I grew up skateboarding in the '90s,
and it was a very toxically masculine culture, right?
So this kid's terrified during his first sexual experience,
and he's literally shaking.
But, to me, he realizes--
like, he doesn't realize.
But the point I'm trying to make is that, essentially, you
were taught, when you were a young man at this time, that
sexuality isn't about two people joyously connecting.
It's about the currency it gets you to raise up
through a group of males, which is a bad lesson that we're
having to un-learn.
Yeah.
And so my job as a filmmaker is to present that palette
and not to judge it.
That's for the audience to do.
And it's been really interesting to show the movie to people,
and it's being really interesting to hold a mirror up
to a lot of the things we learned in generations past
that we're now dealing with and facing currently.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really, really good.
I hope-- I mean, it's getting great reviews.
I hope a lot of people see it, but this
will be the first of many films that you'll direct, I'm sure.
I hope so.