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When I first had the idea to start setting up these podcast conversations, I made a list of four or five people who I really wanted to talk to, regardless of whether or not they had a new piece of work they were promoting. Gifted artists who I loved talking to and was excited to get to speak to in this truly in-depth format.
My guest today, Terence Nance, is the first on this elite list that I had a chance to sit down with.
He is at heart a multi-hyphenate, and showcased the originality of his voice and his dexterity mixing artistic forms in his 2012 autobiographical debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which he wrote, directed, starred in, animated and scored. His brilliant, boundary-pushing HBO show Random Acts of Flyness, which he created, directed, showran and hosted for two seasons, combined documentary, animation, sketch comedy, music, melodrama and more to create a sensorially overwhelming collage of the African American experience.
He’s also made a slew of excellent short films and music videos, and in recent years, he’s been putting out music too, the latest release being his 2025 album Vortex+.
And he’s also someone I’ve been lucky enough to work with a bunch over the past decade or so.
At Talkhouse Film, Terence was one of my original contributors, and from the start, his pieces stood out. I never quite knew what he was going to send me, but it was always smart, original, inspired, virtuosic, whether it was a stream-of-consciousness flight of fancy, a series of (fake) archival emails offering notes on a cut of the movie he was writing about, a hip-hop epic, or a heartfelt letter to one of his cinematic heroes.
He’s also been a standout guest on episodes of the Talkhouse Podcast, where he had great conversations with his Oversimplification collaborator Flying Lotus, and one of his favorite contemporary filmmakers, Michel Gondry.
Even though I knew Terence somewhat well going in, I learned a lot about him in a very organic and wide-ranging conversation that touched on many things including … communing with the dead, St. Peter as a Pauline Kael archetype, Tyrese Haliburton’s Game 7 injury in the context of stoic masculinity, the Abrahamic idea of God as surveillance system, why humans are seemingly hastening the end of the world, a discussion of the two AIs — Allen Iverson and artificial intelligence. And one big thing we’d never talked about before: Terence being fired by Warner Bros. as the writer-director of Space Jam: A New Legacy, and how he handled the aftermath of that. — N.D.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range.
