ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Go beyond the screen with the official podcast from Required Watching. This is your audio masterclass in the art of storytelling, designed for filmmakers, screenwriters, and dedicated cinephiles.
Each week, host and film analyst Tray Epps (and sometimes other guests) deconstruct the craft of cinema, providing practical "Toolkit" episodes to improve your work and in-depth interviews with industry professionals who are shaping the future of film.
If you're looking for actionable advice on everything from writing dialogue to sound design, or you want to hear from the directors, editors, and composers behind your favorite films, you've found your new required listening.
New episodes every week.
Find our full video essays and written guides at requiredwatching.com.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosts:
Update frequency:
weekly
Average audio length:
18 minutes
English
United States
186 episodes
since June 11, 2020
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Two films, one lesson: the gear was never the flex. Tangerine was shot on three iPhones and a $8 anamorphic adapter — and it played Sundance. The Revenant was shot on one of the most expensive cinema camera bodies ever built, in natural light only, in brutal cold. Same argument, opposite budgets: t…
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Search past episodes of Required Watching.
PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
Eighty thousand dollars buys you the 180-degree rule and four years of fear. It doesn't buy you the three things every great film runs on: the Blueprint (how it was built), the Ghost (why it haunts you), and the Echo (what it changed). This is the real curriculum — through Kurosawa's power geometry…
There's a performance style that's taken over prestige cinema. Quiet, internal, barely-there. And everyone's blamed the actors. Wrong call. The whispering isn't coming from the performance. It's coming from the camera. This is a breakdown of the specific technical shift that changed how actors perf…
A personal audio essay on Glen Hansard, Once, and twenty years of chasing the feeling of that first screening. Recorded the week the world lost him.
Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.
…
Baz Luhrmann has made six feature films. Every single one is about the same thing — a person of extraordinary natural talent trapped inside a world that wants to commodify and contain that talent, expressed through maximalist visual language and music as emotional truth. EPiC, his first documentary…
Ten days. Ten episodes. This is the one where everything lands. Kokuho is a fictional film about a kabuki performer that tells the truth about what becoming an artist costs. EPiC is a documentary that refuses to be a documentary and presents Elvis at the peak of his powers with no mediation. The 20…
In October 2025, I was alone in Hiroshima. I wandered into a kabuki theater not knowing what kabuki was, and watched a performance of Princess Takiyasha. I didn't speak the language well enough to follow the dialogue. I followed every second of it anyway. Months later I watched Kokuho — Lee Sang-il…
Everyone came to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. Which means almost everyone is watching his career backwards — and missing the blueprint. Memories of Murder, his second film, contains every formal and political move he would spend the next seventeen years refining. This episode goes deep into the f…
Yesterday's episode made the case that Western TV pilots lie — that they're persuasion documents built for commissioners rather than honest first chapters built for audiences. Today is the answer. J-drama structures its first episode like a complete short film — establishing emotional register befo…
The TV pilot has one job: make you come back. The problem is that job has become structurally disconnected from the show that follows. Pilots front-load everything — spectacle, mystery, emotional hook — in ways that make for compelling first hours and then have nothing left to sustain the series be…
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Required Watching, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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