In a meeting of the comedy minds, Nathan Fielder sat down with Jack Black on Sunday afternoon for a conversation about The Rehearsal, his buzzy HBO series that dove deep into the aviation industry.
In the second season of the show, Fielder spent two-and-a-half years becoming a real pilot, on a journey to support his hypothesis that co-pilot-to-pilot communication is the leading cause of plane crashes. He told Black — who questioned how he got the FYC event moderator gig, suggesting Christopher Nolan instead — that he had been interested in commercial aviation disasters for almost 20 years and noticed that pilot communication was a common thread.
In the season two finale, Fielder actually flies a 737, with 150 actors as passengers. Black declared when he was watching the show, “You tricked me because I thought we were heading towards a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. You’re going to be sitting at a panel, you’re going to be talking to all of the members of Congress about flight safety; and then you pulled a switcheroo on us, and the finale episode is actually you’ve learned how to fly a 737, an unbelievable twist I did not see coming.”
“If I could get in front of the Congress panel, I would have done that and I will still do that, if they will have me,” Fielder responded, pointing out how the FAA made a statement this week about the show, which he had previously called “dumb.” He touched on it again at the event, saying, “They don’t seem to know what they’re talking about, truly.”
Fielder explained that once he had the basic idea for the show, he figured that the best way to truly understand the aviation industry was to become a pilot himself, which would “also help me when I’m talking to these pilots, to be like, ‘Hey, I’m a pilot too.’”
“I wanted to get to the point where I was like, even though it’s a small plane, still if I’m a commercial pilot it takes a lot of work. And I was like, well, that’ll really help me go through the mindset but also sort of show that I’m trying to take this seriously. And so that was the initial goal,” he continued. “And then flying the big plane thing, we didn’t actually know that we could do that for sure until, literally, like days before it happened. We were still trying to figure it out.”
And though him becoming an actual pilot was a surprise to the audience until the final episode, Fielder said he was open about it to the people he talked with on camera. “And then in the edit, we were sort of like, oh, it’s more interesting if maybe this is like a reveal in the last episode, rather than having it sort of spread out throughout the season. So part of it was an edit choice.”
Black asked Fielder now that he is a certified pilot how often he is flying, with the comedian revealing, “I do it when I have time. I just had to send my passport to the Chinese Consulate to get a China crew visa for a flight that I’m supposed to do soon.”
“But also, when you don’t fly all the time, it gets a little scary,” he admitted to laughs from the crowd. “So anyways, I’m gonna do it I think, but it’s like when there’s large spaces in between each flight, you start to be like, should I get some more practice maybe? But I’m sure it’s fine, right? I mean, I passed the test, so I must know what I’m doing.”
With an entire episode dedicated to the life of Sully Sullenberger, who famously landed a plane on the Hudson River in 2009, Fielder also revealed, “I haven’t spoken to him. I tried to reach out at one point, I wanted to talk to him — it was through someone that represented him, I guess so he didn’t reply. I don’t think we heard back, but I’m sure he watched it and was probably just shocked at someone figuring out what actually happened in that plane. I assume he just can’t actually acknowledge it, because it would be illegal, right?” he deadpanned of his “discovery” in the show that Sullenberger was listening to an Evanescence song on his iPod during the landing.
Fielder teased, “The reason we’re highlighting him is because he did the right thing in terms of the communication — even though he did wait till they were pretty close to the water. Maybe he could have asked [his co-pilot for his opinion] a little earlier, if I can give any note now that we’re sort of peers, I guess. Very few of us have been able to achieve a miracle in the plane, we’re a small group. So hopefully he’ll reach out now.”
Black concluded the screening at Vidiots by telling Fielder, “Your contribution to television and cinema history is magical. I watch it and I laugh so hard and I go, ‘Oh, that’s so stupid, that’s hilarious.’ And then there’s this magical thing where it actually solves actual problems and it works. And it’s like, how the fuck does he do that? What’s happening here?”
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