Required Watching

About Required Watching

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 (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Required Watching

Category

tv & film

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Jun 2020

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

186 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Oct 2026

   The Technical Flex (The Revenant and Tangerine)

   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: the discipline to fight a tool's defaults is the only technical flex that was ever real.

2. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Film School is a Scam. Here's the Real Curriculum

   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 in High and Low, the ending of Memories of Murder, and the reason Japanese sentence structure teaches screen tension better than any seminar.Films mentioned: High and Low (1963) · Memories of Murder (2003) · Pulp Fiction (1994) · Oldboy (2003)

3. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Why Modern Actors All Sound Like They're Whispering

   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 perform, why sound designers are furious about it, and what three films did differently that nobody gave them credit for.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 52 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

73

Social presence

94

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

Contact Required Watching

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.