Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Entertainment Series 6: Michael Mandaville / Producing “Taken” Trilogy / Novels / Storytelling

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Entertainment Series 6: Michael Mandaville / Producing “Taken” Trilogy / Novels / Storytelling · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together
• 0:15
  So So. California's nature, in
• 0:17
  particular, is incredible. Well, they used to have a map in
• 0:21
  the studios in the 30s and it would show the entire map of
• 0:24
  California and they would say, oh, Catalina Island, Tunisia,
• 0:29
  and certain forests up north would be Sherwood forests and on
• 0:34
  and on and on. So if you wanted to film
• 0:37
  somewhere in Southern California and you had this extremely
• 0:40
  varied coastline and interior deserts of course galore, it's
• 0:45
  so it was actually fundamentally a a map to the world in
• 0:49
  California for filming. Unfortunately, I heard that they
• 0:52
  don't film very much there anymore, that the other states
• 0:55
  offer much better tax incentives and stuff like that, right?
• 0:58
  Absolutely. Right now, Georgia is probably
• 1:02
  the number one, though I understand New Jersey is in that
• 1:07
  arena offering a percentage. But they also have what is seems
• 1:11
  to be a lot higher cost in terms of you get 30% back, but things
• 1:17
  are 20% higher. So you have to kind of weigh
• 1:20
  them all. And there's a new show on
• 1:26
  Netflix, I think it's called something on Lightning,
• 1:32
  defending the lightning or something like that, about the
• 1:36
  assassination of James Garfield, the president.
• 1:39
  Yes, I just saw that. Did you watch it yet?
• 1:42
  I haven't I started watching it but I did look it up and it was
• 1:45
  filmed in Budapest. Cool, there you go.
• 1:48
  So. So you could see a lot of things
• 1:51
  are fracturing as far as that goes from California film
• 1:54
  production and what is generally a very poorly run state in a lot
• 1:59
  of ways. I still have the weather.
• 2:02
  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I did though, right.
• 2:07
  I guess you still have the old guard of Hollywood, I suppose,
• 2:10
  right? Pardon me.
• 2:13
  And you have the old guard of Hollywood.
• 2:14
  You have the weather and the old guard.
• 2:17
  Well, you do. I think a lot of that has gone
• 2:19
  away by the streaming platforms that have changed a lot.
• 2:23
  The dynamics of TikTok and YouTube have changed a lot of
• 2:27
  what the old guard is. And in point of fact, I would
• 2:30
  actually go to a conference here called Vigcon and a lot of
• 2:35
  people have never even heard about it, particularly at the
• 2:38
  the Directors Guild, where I would go the Producers Guild and
• 2:42
  which I'm the member and you would mention them, oh, I'm
• 2:46
  going to Vigcon. And they had no idea what that
• 2:48
  was. What is it?
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  When I first learned about it, I said, oh, it's online video
• 2:54
  creators. And so I went down there to the
• 2:58
  Anaheim Convention Center. In the first year I went, they
• 3:02
  had one building, I think I went a couple years ago.
• 3:05
  I didn't go this year for I was travelling in Europe.
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  But essentially then they had every single building they were
• 3:13
  using at the Anaheim Convention Center.
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  And it is an enthralling multi level video convention where you
• 3:23
  have both the community creators and industry pros and you can
• 3:30
  always go there and learn very cutting edge stuff.
• 3:32
  People that go, I got a million followers this year and here's
• 3:36
  how I did it. And Hollywood is always behind
• 3:40
  that curve because they have institutional, what should we
• 3:45
  call it? Weight.
• 3:47
  Yeah, and it and weight in terms of wait before we institute
• 3:53
  anything. So they're way behind the curve.
• 3:56
  And ultimately, it's interesting that Vidcon was bought by
• 4:01
  Viacom, so Viacom went to them. They Vidcon didn't go to Viacom,
• 4:06
  and they could actually see some degree of the sea change as
• 4:12
  YouTube dominates even more so than a lot of Hollywood.
• 4:16
  And it's immediacy, it's niche marketing, its ability to have
• 4:22
  frenzied creativity without a lot of gatekeepers.
• 4:25
  So it really was a massive change that they haven't
• 4:29
  realized and I don't still don't think they much have.
• 4:32
  They're not sure what to do with it so.
• 4:34
  Yeah, it's cool to. It's cool to see.
• 4:37
  What's cool to see also is that there's so much because people
• 4:42
  say, you know, obviously, you know, there's the glamorous part
• 4:45
  of Hollywood and there's the much less glamorous part of
• 4:47
  Hollywood. And then there's also what
• 4:49
  everyone dreams of and everyone wants to be a part of, you know,
• 4:51
  like one way or the other, you know, And I just like even like,
• 4:55
  you know, even myself, I probably wouldn't be able to
• 4:58
  help but like want to get into a couple of movies, you know, like
• 5:00
  I probably wouldn't like, yeah, you probably wouldn't like pass
• 5:03
  up an opportunity to write a script for, you know, or produce
• 5:06
  a great film for if if Disney or Warner Brothers or or Sony or
• 5:10
  whoever knocks on your door. And you say you don't say Sony
• 5:13
  who or Disney who, even though relative to YouTube, you know,
• 5:16
  they are. But like another hand, I want to
• 5:19
  do it, you know, like Mr. Beast made those made those made that
• 5:22
  TV show with Amazon Prime and and you know, it did outstanding
• 5:26
  numbers and and like he's but like there's something about
• 5:30
  him. He didn't have to go to prime.
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  He has all the views that he needs on YouTube and he has all
• 5:34
  the money he could dream of from YouTube.
• 5:36
  You know, So there's something about, there's something about
• 5:40
  like the romantic vision of Hollywood that like, I think is
• 5:44
  still like, that's probably what's keeping it afloat at the
• 5:47
  moment that like, but by whatever degree, you know, it
• 5:50
  is, I'm sure that it's primarily just, you know, the look, it's
• 5:54
  the Hollywood, you know. I I agree, I think that you can
• 5:58
  get a certain legendary allure. And some part of that allure is
• 6:04
  of course, oh, I want to go make a movie and have a Hollywood
• 6:09
  life and that sort of thing. And of course, there's an old
• 6:13
  saying that the most exciting day in your life is the first
• 6:16
  day on a movie set, and the most boring day in your life is the
• 6:21
  2nd. Well, everything is a lot of
• 6:25
  hurry up and wait, and there are a lot of work behind the scenes
• 6:28
  to capture. One minute, 2 minutes, 3/5 of
• 6:31
  something, and it winds up being a lot of work.
• 6:35
  And that being said, there's still something amazing about
• 6:39
  seeing material come to life from a script page that goes
• 6:44
  right up on the screen there. Especially the big screen where
• 6:47
  you're going to actually see people in sitting in the middle
• 6:51
  of the audience, having them pulse with fear or, or
• 6:56
  excitement or thrills or comedy or everything like that.
• 7:00
  That kind of infectious group laughter and joy and all those
• 7:04
  emotions is something that you really can't capture except in a
• 7:08
  movie theater, maybe in a religious experience or a live
• 7:14
  performance, but it's pretty rare.
• 7:15
  I'd, I tend to think, and that's a a permanence you get that you
• 7:20
  don't get in a sporting event or a live live event or a concert.
• 7:24
  You get this over and over and over.
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  And I certainly have classic movies I still watch just
• 7:31
  because they're so well done. And I think a lot of people
• 7:35
  gravitate towards those as well. So there is definitely a great
• 7:40
  allure and I think a sense of legend that you've become part
• 7:44
  of, no doubt. Definitely.
• 7:47
  So tell me a little bit, tell us a little bit about your
• 7:49
  experience because you know, I, I, I, or at least your
• 7:53
  experience in Hollywood, because I know that you had something to
• 7:56
  do with some of my, one of my, I wouldn't even almost almost call
• 8:00
  that movie The like a prototype of a genre.
• 8:04
  You know, that like, I think that a lot of people,
• 8:08
  particularly streaming services, probably have tried to replica,
• 8:12
  you know, replicate rather your, you know, the, the, the, the
• 8:15
  films that you were part of. But why don't you tell me a
• 8:16
  little bit about your experiences?
• 8:18
  Sure. Well, I'll give you a little bit
• 8:21
  of background, I guess, just to tee it off.
• 8:25
  Sure. I grew up in West Los Angeles,
• 8:30
  and my Aunt Molly, who worked at 20th Century Fox from about 1935
• 8:35
  to almost 1970, she was there 35 years.
• 8:39
  So when I was a kid, she would actually take me over to Aunt
• 8:45
  Molly's studio, which was 20th Century Fox.
• 8:48
  And there we would drive in the gate.
• 8:51
  And because at the time my mother was ill, and so she would
• 8:58
  babysit me, basically. And so starting there, one of my
• 9:02
  first jobs was sorting a script mimeograph, not photocopied.
• 9:08
  So it was that mimeograph that you would hold up the page and
• 9:11
  smell it. It smelled really good.
• 9:13
  I mean, that goes pretty far back, but I was sorting a script
• 9:18
  called The Longest Day, which was a World War 2 movie.
• 9:22
  And literally, I think I was five and a half, six years old,
• 9:26
  and I got paid 1/4. So that was my first film job.
• 9:30
  I also got See's Candy, by the way.
• 9:32
  Marzipans. Wow, wow, I.
• 9:38
  Know it was it was definitely a very good payoff at the time,
• 9:41
  I'll say that. And she put me in a couple of
• 9:46
  films as an extra, like Hello Darling and No.
• 9:51
  Way the Barbra Streisand yes, get out of here.
• 9:55
  That's my son's. That's my that's been my son's
• 9:57
  favorite movie so far of his life.
• 10:00
  That is, I'm in there somewhere. And just how old are you?
• 10:04
  Anytime. You, you were a kid.
• 10:06
  I think I was 6-7 somewhere. Wow, amazing.
• 10:09
  That's so cool. OK.
• 10:12
  So I did that in a movie called The Great Race with Tony Curtis
• 10:16
  and a couple others. I can't remember them, but I
• 10:19
  also met a lot of film makers that she knew and she worked
• 10:23
  with Daryl Zanuck, who was the head of the studio for a long
• 10:27
  time, and his son Richard Zanuck.
• 10:31
  So through him, a lot of other people would come by and I'd get
• 10:36
  to see them between Alfred Hitchcock, William Wellman, John
• 10:40
  Ford, Reuben, I think Reuben Mamoulian and a number of others
• 10:44
  I think. So it was kind of, that's how I
• 10:48
  kind of worked there. And then later on I always
• 10:50
  wanted to be in the film industry.
• 10:52
  So one way or the other, I started kind of doing that when
• 10:54
  I was 1618, somewhere in there, a little bit on gripping
• 11:00
  electric PA work, etcetera, and then went off to college at UC
• 11:05
  Santa Barbara, came back, I got a degree in philosophy, which
• 11:09
  actually proves better than one thinks in terms of critical
• 11:12
  thinking and a number of other things.
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  So there you go. I want, I want, we'll circle
• 11:16
  back. I want to hear about that after
• 11:18
  you, after you keep on going. But I'm curious.
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  About that, yeah. And then then I basically went
• 11:22
  to work in the film industry, did a lot of different kinds of
• 11:25
  jobs, industrial films, etcetera, and finally worked as
• 11:29
  a director of development at a particular company called Queens
• 11:33
  Cross Productions. And as soon as he produced a
• 11:37
  film called Girlfriend From Hell and no Ephraim, it was not a
• 11:47
  documentary. It's it's based in a true story
• 11:51
  or Hollywood based in a true story.
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  Not my true story, but somebody's I think right.
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  And that started me off on that road of actually.
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  Then I undertook doing reshoots on the film, which led me to do
• 12:04
  line production and. Line production, I'm sorry.
• 12:08
  I want to ask a couple of clarifications.
• 12:11
  So first of all, line production, what's a producer
• 12:14
  do? Because everyone always talks
• 12:16
  about producers and it feels like it's a credit that's thrown
• 12:18
  around a lot or at least like it almost feels like I spoke with
• 12:23
  someone, a gentleman that's a music supervisor.
• 12:27
  And one thing that we were talking about is that a lot of
• 12:29
  times if a student doesn't have money to pay, you know, a
• 12:32
  particular talent, they'll throw them on as a producer.
• 12:34
  If someone wants to get involved in a project but isn't really
• 12:37
  want to act in there to be in front, you know, attach the name
• 12:39
  to it necessarily, They, they, you know, they'll get thrown on
• 12:41
  as a producer, but I'm but I also know that producers really
• 12:45
  do things, you know, so like, you know, how does that, how
• 12:48
  does that work? What do?
• 12:49
  What do they do? Oh, that's a great question,
• 12:51
  particularly in light of today's world where indeed they throw
• 12:55
  that on there as a producer or something.
• 12:58
  In a broad sense, you probably have about 5 categories of
• 13:04
  producers. You have an executive producer
• 13:06
  who might be a company executive, and I'm going by if
• 13:09
  you want to kind of have parameters and give people
• 13:14
  credit where credit is due. So you have an executive
• 13:17
  producer who will be from a company or you could have them
• 13:20
  put up money. They could also oversee the
• 13:23
  production in terms of maybe supplying a significant portion
• 13:27
  of the talent. You have a producer who
• 13:30
  theoretically found the script once to make the movie, knows
• 13:34
  how to put it all together in its pre production phase and
• 13:38
  work with the director and kind of giving them some degree of
• 13:41
  objectivity about it. How's this scene working or not?
• 13:45
  I've seen good ones that actually are in there having
• 13:48
  good discussions about it, watching the dailies, working
• 13:52
  everyday with crafting of the scene with the director if they
• 13:56
  have that good bond. And underneath that you would
• 14:00
  have maybe a Co producer or associate producer, which can be
• 14:04
  a casting director at times or somebody that's made a
• 14:08
  significant contribution. And then you have the line
• 14:11
  producer who overseas the entire project for either a studio or
• 14:16
  the finance company or a distributor.
• 14:20
  And they will have their hands on everything from starting up
• 14:24
  the production in pre production, going through
• 14:27
  production and at least a number of weeks into post production,
• 14:33
  maybe between 246 depending on what it is, and then hand it
• 14:37
  over to post production. The distortions of today's
• 14:42
  Hollywood lie in the fact that indeed you could go on to, I, I
• 14:47
  want to say it was an Al Pacino movie called, let's say Axis
• 14:51
  Sally. And I know about it because
• 14:53
  that's a World War 2 subject. And I'm a bit of a World War 2
• 14:56
  history junkie. And I think there were 38
• 15:03
  producers on that project and executive producers, producers,
• 15:08
  associate producers, maybe Co executive producers, on and on
• 15:12
  and on and on and on. And so that's indeed where you
• 15:16
  get a lot of distortions where I think people throw the title
• 15:18
  around quite a bit, right? Right.
• 15:21
  It's become, I mean, it feels like it's become a little
• 15:23
  diluted, but you described it. But the way you described it
• 15:28
  kind of make it sound a little bit like a combination of, you
• 15:33
  know, the guy running the show, you know, like making sure that
• 15:37
  everything's running, operating smoothly, and then also kind of
• 15:40
  having a little bit of creative vision or at least, you know,
• 15:43
  kind of offering some kind of insights as to like, you know
• 15:46
  what I mean? Presumably they're working with
• 15:48
  the director a little bit, you know, Or a studio a little.
• 15:50
  Bit line producer or the producer, I don't know.
• 15:54
  Whichever. Probably the producer should be,
• 15:57
  although you've had them that literally never show it up on
• 16:00
  set. I've had that happen At the same
• 16:03
  time, the line producer would ideally work with the director
• 16:06
  to say, what do you need for this scene and how can we make
• 16:09
  it better? I think there's always some good
• 16:11
  words to be able to say when you're actually a line producer
• 16:15
  is to start from the director's vision and work outward.
• 16:19
  A lot of times if if they're smart, if a director is smart,
• 16:24
  they will actually try and take the resources, learn about what
• 16:27
  they have and don't have. There's almost always a money
• 16:31
  limitation and then be able to craft a scene to go, well, this
• 16:37
  is a simpler scene. I don't need XY and Z.
• 16:41
  Let's save it for over here. And so when you do have that
• 16:45
  dialogue, you actually are saving a lot of money, but also
• 16:48
  you just you can amplify another scene because you say, well,
• 16:52
  we're going to have more extras, deep background.
• 16:55
  We're going to have a different skill set, A parent.
• 16:59
  One particular like restaurant scene where I visited a friend,
• 17:04
  they were able to save money and in the restaurant have people
• 17:07
  that can actually were waiters that actually and bartenders who
• 17:11
  actually could spin the bottles and do other things.
• 17:14
  And all of a sudden you are able to amplify that little visual
• 17:19
  acuity by taking the money from one place and putting it to
• 17:23
  another. And is that something that
• 17:25
  directors typically are not too conscient of?
• 17:29
  Pardon me. And that's some of the
• 17:30
  directors, I guess are not as conscientious of if they
• 17:33
  consider themselves to be more creative, they're you're not
• 17:35
  thinking about budgets or how much you know this is going to
• 17:37
  cost. It is how much this is going to
• 17:39
  save. Some of them don't think at all,
• 17:42
  and I think that is also at all. And it doesn't even enter their
• 17:48
  mind at all. And some are incredibly
• 17:53
  meticulously prepared and they know exactly what they want with
• 17:58
  a a certain number of shots and shot listing and preparation.
• 18:02
  And others have which becomes more rare is that they show up
• 18:09
  on the day of the shoot and go, OK, I'll figure it out today.
• 18:13
  And I actually think that the ones that do better and
• 18:17
  certainly deliver a film are the ones that have a plan.
• 18:20
  But you're not afraid to deviate from the plan when either
• 18:24
  circumstances prevail or an opportunity presents itself,
• 18:28
  Right. Because you could have a plan.
• 18:31
  And, you know, if Ephraim and Michael are doing a scene and
• 18:34
  the director looks and goes, OK, as it's written, it works.
• 18:40
  Something you guys are doing here is not making it work.
• 18:43
  Yeah. So do I give an adjustment to
• 18:46
  Ephraim to go? You want to, from an emotional
• 18:50
  point of view, you might sit and say the director might say, OK,
• 18:54
  Ephraim, if you don't get the underlying tone, the secret code
• 18:59
  from Michael somehow to get that information out of them, you
• 19:03
  know, all hell breaks loose. Something like that.
• 19:05
  So it can be a different emotional cue or it can be a
• 19:09
  different setup where you rearrange the furniture or
• 19:11
  something to give them more blocking.
• 19:14
  But the idea of the director is to fix it, get the emotional
• 19:19
  verve out of the scene that you want and the shots and the
• 19:22
  excitement. So.
• 19:25
  But some of them have no clue about the money at all and they
• 19:28
  don't particularly care. Yeah, I don't think I would care
• 19:33
  very much if I was in that situation.
• 19:35
  I think I'd be like, this is my image, this is my vision.
• 19:38
  I know I have XY and Z budget, you know, and like, I'm just
• 19:41
  going to do, I'm going to do what I can out of that, you
• 19:43
  know? But I think that, like you said,
• 19:45
  they'd probably be better off, you know, looking for, you know,
• 19:49
  at least being open to, you know, potential, you know,
• 19:51
  changes. There are potential
• 19:53
  opportunities, you know. Yeah.
• 19:55
  And I mean you, you don't dig as a director, you wouldn't dig
• 19:58
  deep into a lot of the finance budget arena.
• 20:03
  But you will have an assistant director who sits there and
• 20:06
  says, look, you from you have 32 shots on your list and the best
• 20:11
  day you've ever done is 22. So are we, are we going to get
• 20:16
  to an area later on today? Where we're going to have a
• 20:20
  question. So are you going to combine
• 20:21
  shots? Are you going to be able to do
• 20:23
  something? And I think that's good to have
• 20:25
  an honest appraisal like that because I've seen people that
• 20:28
  are so overly ambitious at the end of the day, they're they're
• 20:32
  just going wide to get whatever they need to fulfill the day.
• 20:36
  And even you may not have to know all the budgeting arena,
• 20:39
  but you want to know what you have and what you could work
• 20:42
  with. And I do think it's very smart
• 20:44
  to say, look, well, let's conserve the money and put it
• 20:46
  over here in a broad sense because you're mindful of of
• 20:51
  everything going on around you. So it's, it's a measured skill
• 20:55
  and some have it, some don't. And some just say, give me
• 20:59
  everything and have it wait on me and I'll decide.
• 21:02
  And including very expensive cranes that sit there and don't
• 21:06
  get used. So I think it's different skill
• 21:09
  sets, but if you look at directors like let's say Mike
• 21:12
  Nichols, he worked very well with the actors.
• 21:16
  But my understanding is he didn't set a lot of framing.
• 21:19
  In a lot of ways. He'd rely on ADP and a camera
• 21:24
  operator who really had a lot of skill in that regard.
• 21:26
  He's director of of photography, right?
• 21:29
  Yeah. So you get some that are very
• 21:31
  look like David Pincher is known to be extremely technical
• 21:35
  knowing even more than his his DIT is digital imaging tech.
• 21:43
  So he's equally as knowledgeable about that particular technical
• 21:48
  function as that person on the crew.
• 21:52
  He's he's the one that's directing the new Tarantino
• 21:55
  script with it's continuing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
• 22:01
  I think I. Think I thought it was.
• 22:03
  I thought it was David Fincher that got the directing role.
• 22:06
  But you know what? Yeah.
• 22:07
  It's a continuation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
• 22:10
  The script is still going to be Tarantino, but it's it's
• 22:13
  adventures of Cliff Booth as Brad Pitt and.
• 22:16
  Oh really? Oh no, that'll be fun.
• 22:18
  And Netflix will be doing. I'm real excited for it.
• 22:20
  I I thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might have been my
• 22:23
  favorite Tarantino movie. Yeah, based on the whole time
• 22:28
  period, based on the story based and, and, and just I, I mean,
• 22:32
  everything about that. It's funny because the first
• 22:34
  time I watched it, I actually didn't get it.
• 22:36
  And then I learned all about Charlie Manson.
• 22:38
  I learned about, you know, Hollywood and the, you know that
• 22:40
  that time period, you know the. Branch and everything like that
• 22:44
  and. Then and then after I did a
• 22:46
  whole bunch of homework, I went back and I'm like, this movie is
• 22:49
  just a work of art. Like, this is awesome, you know,
• 22:52
  and, and it rose to the ranks real quickly.
• 22:55
  He actually did such great work in terms of that because he got
• 22:59
  the ranch right and all the characters associated with it
• 23:03
  and the Bruce Lee scene, everything like that was pretty
• 23:08
  amazing. And definitely the the nostalgic
• 23:12
  side of Hollywood when filming here was more predominant.
• 23:17
  I, I did read that it, you know, he did not use a lot of visual
• 23:20
  effects. He actually went to a place and
• 23:22
  would find these nostalgic areas and yeah.
• 23:25
  He he likes to do that. Yeah, yeah.
• 23:29
  So I think and still uses film and he's not going to give up
• 23:34
  film. And I think that's he and
• 23:36
  Christopher Nolan. And I don't know about Fincher
• 23:39
  now because I think he's gone digital, but at the same time I
• 23:43
  think that he certainly honors Hollywood with its old school
• 23:46
  mentality and everything and loves film for the sake of film.
• 23:49
  So I have to give him credit on that one.
• 23:52
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me.
• 23:54
  Tell me about Taken. Sure, sure.
• 23:58
  Taken because I, I, if you don't mind, just a little, just a
• 24:01
  little context. I, you know, I probably, my dad
• 24:04
  probably showed me that movie when I was 14 or 15 for the
• 24:07
  first time and I was born in 95. I'm turning 30 in a couple of
• 24:11
  weeks. And, you know, so this must have
• 24:15
  been the early, you know, early to late 2000s.
• 24:18
  And I think taken two or three was coming out in theaters
• 24:22
  around that time. And my dad's like, before we go
• 24:25
  see it, let's watch the either the first one or the 1st 2, I
• 24:27
  don't remember. And we and I and we probably
• 24:31
  watched it 10 times that year. You know, I mean we.
• 24:34
  We. We.
• 24:35
  Loved it. There's something that that
• 24:37
  movie also that we know I was referring to that earlier.
• 24:39
  It was like the I feel like the prototype, you know, super, you
• 24:42
  know, like particular, you know, set of skills overcomes all the
• 24:46
  bad guys, you know, in one Great Hall.
• 24:50
  But tell me about the Tell me about everything, about how that
• 24:53
  movie got made and producing it and working on it.
• 24:57
  Well, I had worked with a woman in France and she was working
• 25:02
  with Luc Besson's company. My friend Marie and I had gone
• 25:07
  over there earlier, I think it was about 2002 or so, and did a
• 25:11
  movie there and got to know her. And so we kind of traded
• 25:16
  questions and information back. And I think she had a couple
• 25:20
  things she sent my way and I did the same.
• 25:23
  And then she said, I have this movie coming up called Taking
• 25:28
  It. We want to send you the script.
• 25:29
  Take a look at it. And we're going to have a number
• 25:32
  of weeks here shooting in the United States and obviously more
• 25:36
  in France. And so she wanted to know if I
• 25:40
  would be able to do that. And so I received the script
• 25:43
  taken and read it. And I have to say, it's one of
• 25:46
  the scripts that I read very quickly right away and meaning
• 25:51
  that the scripts I've been given, if you could read them,
• 25:57
  sometimes it takes a couple hours to read a script,
• 25:59
  sometimes it takes an hour or something, in the case of Lethal
• 26:05
  Weapon that I read and taken in another script, I'm trying to
• 26:12
  remember which one it was. But all of those took about 3540
• 26:15
  minutes to read talks. And it's kind of, pardon me.
• 26:21
  You just fly through them. You just fly through them and at
• 26:24
  the end of it, you actually put down the script and go, now
• 26:26
  that's a movie right there because it it just rolled
• 26:30
  really, really fast. And it's written by Robert Mark
• 26:33
  Hayman and Luke Bassan. And Robert Mark Hayman is done.
• 26:36
  I think he wrote the original Karate Kid, but a lot of other
• 26:39
  projects since then. So he's a very, very seasoned
• 26:44
  screenwriter. And after reading it, I went, Oh
• 26:47
  my gosh, this is this is thing just moves and moves very quick.
• 26:52
  And I think the smart thing about that is Luke Bassan, when
• 26:55
  he conceived the movie, made it an American operative who
• 27:00
  started off in America and then comes back to America.
• 27:03
  So it's bookended, as it were, who ends the story.
• 27:07
  And that way you had a immediately audience
• 27:12
  identification with Americans that would watch the movie.
• 27:16
  And on that they said, well, Liam Neeson wants to do it.
• 27:20
  And at that point in his career, Liam was, I think, searching for
• 27:25
  some degree of like, well, what do I do next kind of thing.
• 27:28
  He was mostly a dramatic actor. Oh, was he?
• 27:31
  What was he up to previously? Well, he did start it off.
• 27:35
  I know in films like The Bounty he played that.
• 27:40
  He did a lot of dramas, period piece movies.
• 27:44
  OK. Primarily, you know, Rob Roy.
• 27:48
  He did a number of others, but by and large, he wasn't really
• 27:52
  an action. And so he was a little, I think
• 27:57
  befuddled at that some degree. But he's always likable because
• 28:01
  I think men admire him and women like him.
• 28:04
  And so you, you hit that marker on both where men look at him
• 28:10
  and say, OK, I think that, you know, he's a, he could be a
• 28:12
  tough guy and, and I'd like to be like that and women would
• 28:16
  like to go out with him. And so you you get both parts of
• 28:21
  that equation there for the marketing.
• 28:24
  And so we started shooting that film.
• 28:29
  And I remember on the very first day we were shooting up near
• 28:36
  Hollywood Blvd. And we had a couple scenes there
• 28:38
  where his daughter tells him in a restaurant and Wi-Fi, I want
• 28:41
  to go to Europe. And then we were going to shoot
• 28:45
  down at the electronics store. And I don't this did not make
• 28:48
  the film. This particular scene where he
• 28:53
  buys the boom box that he got for his daughter a radio later
• 28:57
  at the party. And at that time, what happened
• 29:05
  is we were going to go down the street to Hollywood Blvd. to an
• 29:09
  electronic store, one we were fixing up.
• 29:13
  And his assistant, Liam's assistant, came out and said,
• 29:17
  Michael, Liam would like a word with you.
• 29:19
  And I said, OK, we'll see how this goes.
• 29:22
  And I went in there and he had his contract actually laid out
• 29:27
  on the table with a highlighter. And I said, what's going on?
• 29:32
  And he goes, well, I am 12 hours portal to portal.
• 29:36
  And that means that 12 hours starting starts the clock
• 29:41
  ticking when he's picked up at his hotel by his car and ends he
• 29:45
  should return 12 hours later at the end of the day, total of 12
• 29:52
  hours back at his hotel, which I was not informed.
• 29:59
  So I said to Liam. I said he goes, hey, pardon me.
• 30:06
  Is that considered standard that kind of 12 hour day?
• 30:09
  In essence, yes. And I think many actors do that
• 30:12
  smartly because they don't want to be working 14-16 hour days.
• 30:15
  It takes a toll. It's very difficult.
• 30:20
  And particularly for actors who are on screen, you can start to
• 30:23
  see they're getting tired in their face, which becomes a
• 30:25
  makeup issue to some degree. So you don't quite bounce back
• 30:29
  as a 25 year old actor that when you're slightly older, let's
• 30:33
  say. And so there is that.
• 30:36
  And so he pointed to his contract.
• 30:39
  He goes there, you could read it.
• 30:40
  And I said, no, it's OK, if that's what you're telling me,
• 30:42
  that's what it is. And he go, I go, let me go check
• 30:45
  where we are. And I believe it was about 11.
• 30:49
  We were 11 hours and 20 minutes into his day at that point.
• 30:54
  So he goes, Michael, look, we're not going to go get that other
• 30:57
  scene now. And then I I'm going to be back
• 30:59
  at 12. And I said, well, I said, well,
• 31:03
  Liam, I have to wear the coat of a pessimist, but I have the I
• 31:08
  have the heart of an optimist. So give me 3 minutes, I'll be
• 31:11
  right back, OK. And so I went out the door, I
• 31:14
  got on the walkie-talkie. I called the first AD.
• 31:18
  Which is a DS an assistant director.
• 31:24
  Assistant director. Thank you.
• 31:25
  The assistant director is running the set and they're
• 31:27
  actually down there on set, putting it together and making
• 31:31
  sure that we can get the lighting time, the all the props
• 31:35
  are ready, set, set deck, set decoration, set dressing is
• 31:40
  fine. Making sure all that kind of
• 31:43
  works right there on set, he's the commander on the set.
• 31:47
  Right there, the assistant director.
• 31:50
  Gotcha. So I got on the walkie-talkie
• 31:52
  and I checked with him and he says yeah, we're probably 20
• 31:55
  minutes away lighting and then, you know, we'll get Liam down
• 31:57
  here and of course now we're talking 11401145 and this isn't
• 32:01
  going to happen. So I said look, it's a one off
• 32:06
  scene it it's isolated, meaning we don't have continuity issues
• 32:09
  from 1 scene to another where we have to get it.
• 32:13
  So I said, look, just scratch the scene.
• 32:15
  It's day one of what we're shooting, and we'll figure out
• 32:19
  how to come back to it. And he goes, OK.
• 32:23
  And so then I went back in. I spoke to Liam, and I said, OK,
• 32:26
  we're going to scratch the scene.
• 32:29
  We'll get you in your car. I've already told your driver,
• 32:32
  and we'll get you back to the hotel.
• 32:34
  And I think he was very surprised.
• 32:36
  He came up and he went, what? And I went, yeah, we're going to
• 32:40
  do that. And he goes, Are you sure?
• 32:42
  And I said, sure. I mean, I'm not going to burn
• 32:47
  goodwill on day one. It makes no sense.
• 32:50
  Yeah. In that regard, if something
• 32:51
  does come down the line, it's beyond our control.
• 32:54
  And I so he said, Are you sure? And I go, yeah, we're we're
• 32:58
  good, we'll figure it out. And he goes, are you really
• 33:01
  sure? And then then he kind of took
• 33:04
  his hands and put them on my arms and shook me a little.
• 33:07
  He goes, Are you sure? And it was very funny.
• 33:12
  I go, yeah, Liam, no, not a not a problem.
• 33:14
  We'll get you going. And then, then the funny part
• 33:17
  was we wound up talking for 20 minutes.
• 33:20
  Oh man, there you go, you spent on the whole time.
• 33:23
  Yeah. Then we, they all of a sudden we
• 33:25
  spent a little time doing that, just talking.
• 33:27
  And then so then he goes, OK, and he changed and got in his
• 33:30
  car and left. And, and after that, the
• 33:33
  director showed up concerned about what was going on.
• 33:37
  I said no problem. I mean, we just have the scene
• 33:39
  we were going to go over. Makes no sense to do this on day
• 33:42
  one. He concurred Pierre Morrell and
• 33:46
  who's was steady Cam operator doing his first big feature.
• 33:51
  He done one previously called District 13, I believe.
• 33:56
  And so then Liam, you know, was grateful for that.
• 34:01
  And also in subsequently whenever something came up and
• 34:04
  he had a deal and there was things not being done to his
• 34:08
  deal, I made sure that they could happen.
• 34:11
  And so you start to build bridges and trusts there to make
• 34:15
  things work and work smartly, if you know what I mean.
• 34:18
  Yeah, definitely. I think that's what I mean.
• 34:21
  I feel I, I've heard some, I've heard and read so many stories
• 34:26
  in my life about how just the extension of good faith, how far
• 34:32
  that goes down the line and how, how valuable that is.
• 34:35
  And how people that, that make these short term decisions and
• 34:40
  short term easy gain decisions, but end up, you know,
• 34:43
  compromising or showing that they're compromising integrity
• 34:46
  or loyalty. Like they end up paying for it
• 34:48
  and everyone ends up, you know, knowing that, you know, and they
• 34:51
  still might make it. But like everyone knows that
• 34:53
  what you're dealing with is what you're dealing with.
• 34:55
  And I think that that that comes back to bite you eventually.
• 34:59
  So the So what movie exploded or did it it was AI know that it
• 35:04
  was a as far as I'm concerned, there's a cultural phenomenon,
• 35:07
  you know, but. Very much so.
• 35:09
  Very much so. It just went in the theaters,
• 35:11
  took right off. I can't even tell you how many
• 35:14
  people brought up when I could say, Oh yeah, that's the movie.
• 35:18
  And it became quite the hot ticket.
• 35:20
  What was that like for you? Was that crazy?
• 35:23
  Pardon me. Was that crazy?
• 35:25
  It was definitely crazy in a lot of regards because it became the
• 35:29
  hot ticket. I believe it had a Liam had a
• 35:33
  resurgence of his career in terms of, oh, you're an action
• 35:37
  guy, which is literally a genre that he had not really much been
• 35:41
  in. And subsequently, you could see
• 35:43
  a number of films that he did after that before taken to, I
• 35:47
  mean, just went crazy with the idea of him being an action
• 35:51
  figure. And so I, I don't think he
• 35:55
  couldn't quite believe it either.
• 35:56
  And that he was he was equally as surprised.
• 36:01
  But I think the film in particular did so well at the
• 36:04
  box office for its initial cost and everything else, that Fox
• 36:10
  knew they had something hot in their hands and that a sequel
• 36:14
  would be very good and profitable, as well as the
• 36:16
  third. And at the same time, there was
• 36:20
  actually very interesting things.
• 36:22
  As a father, you're going to feel this where, look, it's a
• 36:26
  pretty simple mission here where this bad guys have taken my
• 36:33
  daughter and I'm going to get her back and know what, no
• 36:36
  matter what. And that in and of itself
• 36:40
  becomes, of course, a galvanizing moment for fathers
• 36:45
  everywhere to realize, OK, here's a guy who is not going to
• 36:49
  take any prisoners and he's going to kill them all and get
• 36:51
  her back. And these are horrendous
• 36:57
  traffickers. And of which, personally, I have
• 37:02
  0 mercy for. I think that you have to be
• 37:05
  amongst the worst, basically, slavers, traffickers.
• 37:10
  I mean the same kind of mentality.
• 37:13
  So I think you hit a very strong emotional point there with
• 37:18
  fathers, and I mean fathers literally.
• 37:24
  I saw them say, oh, I worked on the Taken movie and they're
• 37:27
  like, they literally would straighten up and grow a spiny
• 37:30
  from in front of me. So they could be, they'd be
• 37:33
  hunched over and then all of a sudden they would be I'd kill
• 37:36
  those sons of bitches too. I must have had that reaction
• 37:41
  100 times where they would be just infuriated and say that's
• 37:46
  exactly what I want to do. And so I think it speaks very
• 37:51
  well to the notion of myth and storytelling that you have a
• 37:54
  heroic figure willing to do whatever it takes to get his
• 37:58
  daughter back. You can't ask for a a simpler
• 38:01
  yet more profound story. Yeah, exactly what it was.
• 38:06
  And I mean, do you have you have a son or daughter?
• 38:09
  What? I both.
• 38:11
  I have both. I have a 2 1/2 year old son and
• 38:13
  a six month old daughter. So, you know, you'll have a lot
• 38:16
  of those feelings of protection, which is the father's job and
• 38:20
  exactly the father's job these days.
• 38:22
  And the idea that you're going to protect your daughter is, I'd
• 38:26
  say, in child. But your daughter specifically
• 38:30
  is something that's gone through history as being one of the more
• 38:34
  noble virtues. Yeah, so I think it really hit
• 38:38
  on a on a, a primal level, something that echoed pretty far
• 38:44
  and wide in that regard with a likeable character.
• 38:46
  So, and certainly the action, Pierre Morrell was a Steadicam
• 38:52
  operator. He knew how to look through the
• 38:55
  barrel, look through the lens to see how it would work.
• 39:01
  You know, every day with action and notably, I mean, the
• 39:07
  relentless Press of Liam going through these bad guys.
• 39:13
  One of my favorite scenes, I'm not sure what was yours, but one
• 39:16
  of mine was when he went into the kitchen full of these pond
• 39:21
  scum and he was playing the tape.
• 39:23
  And they're like, oh, that's you.
• 39:25
  OK, now I've got you. And then the guy says good luck
• 39:31
  and Liam catches him and wipes them out and then the bad guy
• 39:37
  runs into the room afterwards seeing all the dead bodies and
• 39:40
  Liam pops up and gets him and and one of the guys is running
• 39:44
  down the stairs trying to escape and he shoots.
• 39:47
  Him, he was behind the body when he did that, right?
• 39:50
  That's right. Yeah.
• 39:51
  Yeah, yeah. OK.
• 39:51
  I remember what he was talking about.
• 39:54
  So that scene where you just go, OK, they deserve to die, end of
• 39:58
  story. I think it just.
• 40:00
  It wasn't any politically correct nonsense of like, oh,
• 40:02
  let me wound the guy or not, you know this nonsense.
• 40:05
  But it's a a bit of a avenging Angel in a way.
• 40:10
  And so, so I think definitely it hit a very, very strong mark in
• 40:15
  that regard across the board for both Liam, the film, the public
• 40:20
  and and then when on Taken 2 was shot in Istanbul, right?
• 40:32
  And so I, we did work in the US, but also we had to go over there
• 40:41
  to, I had to go over there to Istanbul was a very funny
• 40:47
  situation. Should I just keep going?
• 40:52
  Is that all? Right.
• 40:52
  Or yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, I wanted to, I
• 40:55
  wanted to ask, but you can, you can continue.
• 40:58
  I, I, I think I've heard at least and I what when your
• 41:03
  reaction, you do really well and take you do incredibly intaken,
• 41:06
  right. And then there's a the studio
• 41:10
  wants to, they probably want three, maybe they want 4 if they
• 41:13
  could try to squeeze out of it. But we know that the student
• 41:16
  that that where you're coming from as a producer, finding a
• 41:20
  great script that you can just, you know, inhale and you know,
• 41:24
  in 45 minutes and then turning it into a great movie.
• 41:29
  I know that there's sometimes there's hesitancy to get
• 41:31
  involved in building these, you know, franchises, at least from
• 41:34
  a creative standpoint, right? You're like, how many how many
• 41:37
  times are you going to be? How many times can I do this?
• 41:39
  Or what potential is there? How do you explore this in a new
• 41:41
  way? You know, did you did you feel
• 41:43
  like you wanted like you're like, Hey, this is a great
• 41:47
  opportunity to like make another movie?
• 41:48
  Or is this like, oh they kind of want just another one of what I
• 41:50
  already did? Well, a lot of that's generated
• 41:56
  by Luke Basson and Robert Mark Haman who wrote the scripts and
• 41:59
  they really are the ones who come up with the plots and
• 42:02
  everything else like that. So Robert Mark Haben is very
• 42:08
  seasoned, like I said, as a writer.
• 42:10
  And Luke Basson really is really has a whole different almost
• 42:17
  column that he was in when he started off his career.
• 42:21
  You would get a lot of French films, I would say that didn't
• 42:24
  quite have the verve of action that he did.
• 42:28
  And so I think he really admired that kind of high speed
• 42:31
  testosterone driven world. And so that was really his
• 42:36
  metier that he created there as kind of a personality and
• 42:42
  producer in France. So you think they were to
• 42:45
  continue with it? Pardon me, You think they were
• 42:47
  happy to continue with that, with that, with with this
• 42:49
  storyline? Well, they continued.
• 42:52
  But indeed, I think Lee impressed them to go, well, I'm
• 42:54
  not going to be a part of something that's just kind of a,
• 42:57
  a, a rather pedestrian kind of work.
• 43:03
  So I know one, it might have been between 2 taken two and
• 43:10
  three, he said. Well, you have to come up with a
• 43:12
  good script, otherwise this is just very bad parenting.
• 43:18
  My daughter keeps getting kidnapped.
• 43:19
  Well, what's going on here, right?
• 43:21
  And so you couldn't have her just getting kidnapped over and
• 43:25
  over and over and over and had to be kind of a threat from a
• 43:28
  different spot. And so how does she participate?
• 43:32
  Does she, what's her awareness in relation to danger at this
• 43:36
  point and take a a little more active participation?
• 43:44
  So I think that was definitely something that they didn't want
• 43:47
  to just say she's kidnapped again and again and again.
• 43:50
  You've kind of used that in the first one, right?
• 43:53
  So they definitely had a consideration there.
• 43:56
  And it's certainly been talked about.
• 43:59
  So is there a four coming out? And I, I just can't see Liam
• 44:02
  wanting to do that. And I think 3 is kind of a magic
• 44:06
  number when you see a lot of sequels.
• 44:07
  If you look at well, at least Indiana Jones I think was great
• 44:14
  on one. And then 3 is probably amongst
• 44:19
  the it's one in three that are my favorites.
• 44:23
  And four, OK, five I have not watched.
• 44:27
  I have to say. I just heard very bad things
• 44:30
  about that. I'm.
• 44:30
  Getting to the 5th of anything. Yes, yeah, I think that's very
• 44:35
  difficult to achieve. The same with Die Hard.
• 44:38
  I tended to think number one is was amazing.
• 44:42
  And I was actually driving down Pico Blvd. late at night after
• 44:49
  working on a particular film. And I'm driving down Pico and
• 44:58
  I'm looking at Century City. And that's when they blew the
• 45:00
  roof with this explosion. And I'm like, what's going on?
• 45:07
  You know, I'd drive over there going, my God, that building
• 45:10
  blew up or something. And they were filming and it was
• 45:14
  very fun because. Yeah.
• 45:16
  So, you know, they did it late at night, of course, so no
• 45:19
  traffic and issues, but it was one of those moments.
• 45:23
  Really crazy. Really, really cool.
• 45:26
  Really cool. Yeah.
• 45:27
  I, I think that I, I've heard that there's direct correlation.
• 45:32
  I, I don't know about direct, but there is a correlation.
• 45:36
  They, the sequels always make more money in the box office,
• 45:39
  but always drop off in the ratings, right.
• 45:41
  So typically speaking, right. So they'll almost never lose
• 45:47
  money, but they won't speak to the audience necessarily the
• 45:51
  same way. There's some, there's a couple
• 45:53
  of strong, strong cases, Toy Story or The Godfather or like
• 45:58
  there, there's a couple of movies where like the 1st and
• 46:02
  the second are like, and maybe if you're lucky, the third is
• 46:05
  really, really great. But it is it is an anomaly.
• 46:08
  It is. It's hard to do.
• 46:10
  It's very difficult to do. And in fact, it's interesting
• 46:13
  you brought up The Godfather, because that's the the movie I
• 46:17
  saw with my father when I was a kid because that made me want to
• 46:21
  make movies. I said I'm really, yeah.
• 46:23
  It really compelled me to say I'm going to figure out how they
• 46:27
  do this and I'm going to do it. And that was the movie.
• 46:31
  I could tell you where I sat and what I thought and everything
• 46:35
  about that. And I literally, my, my son
• 46:38
  bought me a great book by Francis Ford Coppola about the
• 46:41
  Godfather, The Notebook. And so I have that.
• 46:46
  Did you watch the show though? The show with Miles Teller in it
• 46:49
  about the making The Godfather from Oh yeah.
• 46:52
  In fact. Yeah.
• 46:54
  How was that? I thought it was really well
• 46:56
  done and I knew Betty Mccart, but I hadn't realized she had
• 47:00
  played through my friend Bob Leckie, a producer.
• 47:04
  Betty Mccart was a good friend of his and I had not realized
• 47:09
  that she had played such a keen role in The Godfather and I, I
• 47:15
  was really surprised about that. So I knew I had met her quite a
• 47:20
  few times through Bob Leckie and I thought they did a great job.
• 47:26
  I've heard stories about how they had to deal with the
• 47:29
  Colombo crime family back in New York to get things done.
• 47:34
  And in fact, the producer, Al Ruddy spoke, and he always had
• 47:40
  something very interesting to say about that.
• 47:41
  He spoke at a festival I saw I was at, and he said that he
• 47:50
  literally was at Paramount. They brought in a bunch of guys
• 47:54
  that were mafia guys. And the one thing they wanted to
• 47:58
  do was take out the word mafia. But he had the script there.
• 48:03
  And he goes, OK, look, you guys read the script.
• 48:06
  Well, none of them really wanted to read the script.
• 48:08
  So he said, you read it, you read it, you read it.
• 48:10
  No. And the four guys, I guess 3 or
• 48:13
  4 guys each kind of threw it off to the other guy.
• 48:16
  You have to read it. You have to read it.
• 48:18
  And he said, OK, we, I'll, I'll take the word mafia out of the
• 48:21
  script. And they all said, OK, neither.
• 48:24
  And none of them read it. But the key point was the word
• 48:27
  mafia was never in the script. To begin with.
• 48:31
  No, to begin with, but it sounded like he was giving them
• 48:34
  something, so they were happy about it.
• 48:36
  And but that's what he said. And so that one proviso was the
• 48:43
  thing. This thing of ours is what it
• 48:45
  became, which is, you know, the La Cusa Nostra vibe.
• 48:50
  But they had taken that out. So I thought it was very well
• 48:54
  done. In effect.
• 48:55
  A friend of mine who I went to USC with for professional
• 49:00
  writing, Nikki Toscano, was the showrunner on that.
• 49:05
  Cool. So, and she did a great job on
• 49:08
  that. Yeah.
• 49:09
  Wow, wow. Do you read the book?
• 49:12
  Oh, many times. The book was was phenomenal.
• 49:16
  The book was really, really spectacular.
• 49:19
  It was it was so rich. Yeah.
• 49:21
  I, I watched that movie for the first time in college.
• 49:23
  I, I took a film class my first semester.
• 49:25
  I got AC plus in it because big boss is 8:00 in the morning with
• 49:32
  a French professor that that had a very, very difficult to
• 49:37
  navigate accent or very difficult to, to discern.
• 49:41
  And, and just the combination of being so early, most of the time
• 49:46
  I was hungover, exhausted, you know, and then, and then also
• 49:50
  not being able to navigate what the professor was saying most of
• 49:53
  the time. But we watched the Godfather and
• 49:57
  that like snap that that's that, that that I didn't watch
• 50:00
  anything to do with any kind of mob or mafia organized crime
• 50:05
  until that point of my life until I was probably 1819 years
• 50:08
  old. And maybe I was exposed to like
• 50:11
  a scene or two from Goodfellas. But like that would have been
• 50:14
  it, you know, and and it just, it just started me down this
• 50:17
  path. And it's such a cool.
• 50:19
  I just did actually an episode last week with with with a
• 50:24
  gentleman, Dave Schwartz that is history professor at University
• 50:28
  of Las Vegas that specializes in gambling, in the history of
• 50:31
  gambling and bedding the Mafia's presence in Vegas.
• 50:34
  Yeah, really, really cool. And and we talked about Sinatra
• 50:39
  a bunch and his relationship, you know, his quote UN quote
• 50:42
  informal relationship, you know, and very.
• 50:45
  Much so. Very fascinating.
• 50:46
  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's and, and again, you know, there's, I
• 50:50
  think there's a reason why, you know, 60-70 years later, you
• 50:53
  know, everyone's still making these movies.
• 50:55
  And, you know, it's still one of the most actually Speaking of
• 50:58
  scripts, it's so funny you say that, you know, because we're
• 51:00
  talking years when you mentioned earlier how a script reads.
• 51:04
  My uncle had worked, my great uncle had worked for ABC for
• 51:08
  many, many years and was in the Writers Guild.
• 51:10
  And so he would always get scripts sent to him till to the
• 51:13
  till this day actually, you know, for people hoping that
• 51:16
  you'd vote on best on best, best script.
• 51:19
  And so he doesn't really read them anymore or vote very much
• 51:22
  anymore, But so he just hands a bunch of them off to me and I
• 51:26
  got the Irishman before I watched it.
• 51:30
  Oh, that's great. And I read the script and was
• 51:34
  like, this is incredible. And then I watched the movie and
• 51:38
  I hate to say it, but I was more than a little disappointed
• 51:42
  relative to what the script was. I really, really was a little
• 51:45
  let down. There are those cases where you
• 51:48
  actually see that and you're like, OK, this is not quite up
• 51:51
  to the par of the script. And it just, you know, it's
• 51:54
  written form supersedes it. And it's, it's very fascinating
• 52:01
  because when you mention a book and then you have the script and
• 52:05
  then you have the movie, there's very few of those that make that
• 52:09
  transition well where it equals the book.
• 52:13
  For me it was Silence of the Lambs and The Godfather.
• 52:18
  I would tend to put way up there.
• 52:20
  So in terms of being equally as good as the book, and those are
• 52:24
  the only two I could really think about right now.
• 52:27
  And it becomes a very nuanced sensibility to translate from a
• 52:36
  book to a script to that. What scenes are you deleting?
• 52:39
  What are you leaving out as much as what are you keeping in and
• 52:44
  then shortening the scenes to make them more vital in terms of
• 52:47
  the the drama involved and everything else.
• 52:50
  And indeed, I've read a number of scripts.
• 52:53
  Then you watch the movie and you go, God, what happened?
• 52:55
  They had a great start. Yeah.
• 52:57
  There's an old line in Hollywood where, God, there's movies that
• 53:01
  do not work at all and they're made for $100 million.
• 53:05
  And the question is, wait, you had $100 million, but you
• 53:09
  couldn't buy a script. What happened?
• 53:11
  Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, but you know, you know how
• 53:15
  money's spent, especially, especially living in the state
• 53:18
  of California. If you know how money's spent,
• 53:20
  then you know that, you know, the the amount of money you
• 53:23
  spend doesn't necessarily correlate to a positive outcome.
• 53:25
  You know, you got to have some heart behind all.
• 53:28
  Not at all. In point of fact, I think
• 53:30
  there's almost a inverse relationship in some ways.
• 53:34
  When you are desperate and you have to figure something out,
• 53:37
  sometimes things work a lot better.
• 53:39
  You know the story about Rocky, right?
• 53:42
  No, please. Well, Rocky was a movie shot in
• 53:47
  1975 and I actually worked as APA on it out of their office
• 53:53
  for a few days. That was it.
• 53:55
  But there was years later, I talked to Billy Chardoff, who
• 53:59
  Robert Chardoff was the producer on the project.
• 54:05
  And there was AI talked to him specifically about this scene in
• 54:10
  Rocky where he goes with his girl who he wants to impress to
• 54:15
  the ice skating rink. And they're running late.
• 54:18
  Well, the ice skating rink is getting closed up.
• 54:21
  The guy is literally closing up the ice skating rink.
• 54:24
  And I think at the time in the movie, he says, Rocky says, OK,
• 54:28
  I'll give you $50 if you could open this up and let me and my
• 54:32
  girl for 10 minutes skate around.
• 54:35
  And in 1976, fifty dollars is probably what people made in a
• 54:40
  day, more or less in a lot of ways, cost of living in
• 54:44
  inflation and all that may not seem like nothing now, but at
• 54:48
  the same time back then. So that was a lot of money.
• 54:52
  And particularly for a guy who was down on his luck to have 10
• 54:55
  minutes with his girl. Well, the entire scene, that was
• 54:59
  not the way it was written. What happened was is they had a
• 55:04
  full blown ice skating rink. And which means if you have an
• 55:09
  ice skating rink, 3400 extras, you need to have skates, you
• 55:14
  need to have medics. People are going to take a fall
• 55:18
  and give you all those people in coordinate that they can
• 55:21
  actually stand up on ice. Or the ones that don't you have
• 55:25
  to get pads for so they fall in a very fun manner and not get
• 55:29
  hurt. You need extra workers.
• 55:32
  You'll need restrooms, assistant directors, all of extra food and
• 55:36
  craft service. So when you start to add it up
• 55:39
  and they just did not have the money.
• 55:41
  So consequently when they actually looked and they said we
• 55:44
  don't have the money, somebody smartly said well we'll just
• 55:48
  have it closed and he pays the money to open you needed.
• 55:51
  The so smart, So creative. And in point of fact, it
• 55:55
  actually became a scene that was memorable.
• 55:58
  I mean, the guy is paying his hard earned money for his girl
• 56:04
  in a moment to be isolated and to have a moment on the ice with
• 56:07
  her. 10 minutes that actually elevated the scene by saying you
• 56:13
  meant you matter so much to me that I'm going to pay this
• 56:16
  amount just to have 10 minutes with you.
• 56:18
  And so you had infinitely a better scene.
• 56:21
  And of course, the the movie history made with Stallone
• 56:25
  sticking to his guns to say, 'cause he was offered, I think,
• 56:30
  I don't know, $250,000 or something like that for the
• 56:35
  script without him in it. And ultimately he took I think
• 56:39
  $20,000 or something for him to be in it.
• 56:43
  And he was so broke he had to sell his dog.
• 56:46
  Right, I heard about that part. Then he had bought them back
• 56:48
  once he when he bought it back, right.
• 56:50
  Once he made. I think he got $50.00 for the
• 56:52
  dog and bought him back for $10,000 or something.
• 56:57
  But I, I think there's a very good story in that just simply,
• 57:03
  and he speaks very candidly about the issue that he grew up
• 57:07
  in, like an old folks home. He, I believe he has his jaw and
• 57:13
  because it's a pinched nerve in his cheek when he was being
• 57:16
  born, literally the forceps damaged a nerve, I believe.
• 57:21
  So he speaks in that kind of stilted fashion because of a
• 57:26
  medical scenario and he grew up in an old folks home.
• 57:31
  He made his weights with a bar and bricks that he would just
• 57:34
  kind of work out in. And when he got his first agent,
• 57:38
  he literally went to this agent manager's office, only guy in
• 57:45
  there was just a one guy operation.
• 57:48
  He said I want you to be my agent.
• 57:50
  And the guy he slammed the door in his face and said go away.
• 57:54
  And he basically sat outside the guy's door for 8 hours.
• 57:59
  Yeah. And he opened the door and there
• 58:01
  he was. And he goes, OK, if you just
• 58:03
  leave me alone, I'll be your agent in essence, I guess so
• 58:07
  there's a Great American story there about perseverance and
• 58:11
  about not taking no for an answer and drive and belief.
• 58:18
  And I, I it's one of the Great American success stories of the
• 58:22
  screen. I don't know of many people that
• 58:25
  have persisted through such difficult circumstances to get
• 58:29
  where they wanted to go. Yeah, yeah.
• 58:32
  One thing that I I've realized with my very short, you know,
• 58:37
  experience, my very short and limited life experience is that
• 58:41
  what I've noticed is that what what makes the difference
• 58:43
  between making someone great or not is just whether they're
• 58:46
  willing to go a little bit longer than everyone else's.
• 58:48
  Like whether they're willing to just hang out.
• 58:50
  Like, you know, you know, one more episode, one more, you
• 58:56
  know, you know, casting, casting call, one more script, one more
• 59:00
  page of writing, one more productive hours spent today
• 59:03
  than yesterday. And like just a little bit more.
• 59:06
  And like then everyone else saw you need just a little bit more,
• 59:09
  you know, and then but that that really just shows, you know,
• 59:13
  like that history is filled with winners like that, you know,
• 59:16
  people that just stuck it with that.
• 59:19
  Yeah, absolutely. Well, you judge it by the
• 59:23
  Olympics. The Olympics certainly are
• 59:27
  judged by what, hundredths of a second more and you have a new
• 59:31
  record and you're now gold medal winner or 1/4 of an inch more
• 59:37
  when you. It's a very I tell joke, right,
• 59:40
  right, right. Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a
• 59:41
  joke in there, I guess you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 59:49
  But I, so when I, when I went back to the script, one of the
• 59:53
  things that I noticed after I watched The Irishman and I was a
• 59:57
  little disappointed by the actual film, was I went back to
• 1:00:01
  the script and when I reread it, I, I started hearing it in Joe
• 1:00:05
  Pesci's voice, in De Niro's voice and whatever, you know,
• 1:00:08
  because now that I know who's who's playing which part.
• 1:00:11
  And that did make a difference for me as to how I perceived the
• 1:00:14
  script. And so.
• 1:00:16
  What do you think, you know, when people say, I wrote this,
• 1:00:20
  this part with your voice, you know, like with your voice in
• 1:00:23
  it, you know, like I, I wrote this script for Ben Affleck.
• 1:00:26
  I wrote this script for Matt Damon or for, you know, Margaret
• 1:00:29
  Robbie. Like, do do you think that doing
• 1:00:34
  that would, could compromises the potential of the script
• 1:00:38
  because you're limiting your, you know, the, the, the dialogue
• 1:00:41
  to one particular voice that you have in your head or, you know,
• 1:00:46
  or do you think it's better to go for the tightest script that
• 1:00:48
  you could think of and then see who fills in the blanks better?
• 1:00:53
  Well, I definitely think it's good when a character speaks to
• 1:00:57
  you in a particular voice because I think there's a
• 1:01:00
  consistency that you can get there.
• 1:01:04
  You hear this voice and you say, oh, they wouldn't say it or they
• 1:01:07
  wouldn't say it that way. And I've certainly had in novels
• 1:01:12
  I wrote, there's a character I had called Misses Font Leroy.
• 1:01:15
  She's basically works at the US Embassy in Paris.
• 1:01:18
  And I got her voice in my head and she talked for like 10 or 12
• 1:01:23
  pages and I couldn't stop her. Wow.
• 1:01:27
  And so there is something enthralling about that where all
• 1:01:30
  of a sudden I think you hit flow.
• 1:01:33
  And when you're creating something and I think even if
• 1:01:37
  you are an actor, most actors are going to sit and go, oh,
• 1:01:40
  this is the character you want me to play.
• 1:01:43
  And I think if they hear a consistent voice, one that
• 1:01:47
  sounds alive, one that says, Oh yeah, I, I, I see this coming
• 1:01:52
  right off the page, that's a greater attribute and asset to
• 1:01:56
  have when you're pitching somebody than not that somebody
• 1:01:59
  can identify, oh, this is not generic at all.
• 1:02:04
  It's definitely a point of view. And, and so far as that goes,
• 1:02:09
  most actors will say, well, can I do that point of view?
• 1:02:13
  So I think that is much more enthralling and and enticing to
• 1:02:20
  an actor because they will sit and say this is something where
• 1:02:24
  the voice is real. And if the voice is real, then
• 1:02:28
  they could think, OK, leaping it into the actuality of making a
• 1:02:31
  movie makes even more sense and actually has a greater
• 1:02:36
  probability of attracting them. So if I were to pick one or the
• 1:02:40
  other on that road, that's the one I would pick.
• 1:02:43
  Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Tell me about novel writing.
• 1:02:46
  Because you you write fictional novels, right?
• 1:02:50
  Right. I've written a number of books,
• 1:02:53
  written a book on counterterrorism for one after
• 1:02:56
  911. And at the same time I've
• 1:02:59
  written fictional novels, techno thrillers.
• 1:03:03
  One book I have is set in Paris called Murder in the City of
• 1:03:06
  Light and that hit number one on Amazon a couple weeks ago on a
• 1:03:10
  number of. Congratulations, it's a great
• 1:03:12
  name. Pardon me, it's a great name
• 1:03:15
  too. Yeah, I think it, it definitely
• 1:03:18
  has gotten a lot of wings on that and that helped out a lot.
• 1:03:22
  And then? Congratulations, that's awesome.
• 1:03:24
  Thank you. Thank you.
• 1:03:25
  And working to make that into a series, ideally shooting in
• 1:03:29
  Paris or Romania where I came back from this summer and it's
• 1:03:33
  known as Little Paris, Bucharest is.
• 1:03:36
  So we'll see what happens there. And then I have another book
• 1:03:41
  that goes out in January called 7 Graves to Marrakech.
• 1:03:48
  So that's based on a scout that I did in Morocco.
• 1:03:53
  I met a friend of mine down there.
• 1:03:55
  I was in France. It was actually during COVID.
• 1:03:58
  And so I had to get on the plane in Paris, went down there to
• 1:04:02
  Casablanca and he picked me up and we toured Casablanca.
• 1:04:09
  Marrakech, Eswaria, I can never say that, right?
• 1:04:13
  But it's a beach city. Eswaria.
• 1:04:17
  They have a they shot Game of Thrones there along the cliffs
• 1:04:21
  in that city. That was in Ireland, no?
• 1:04:25
  Morocco, Yeah. Cool the cliffs but mohair,
• 1:04:30
  that's what it's called. Or something like that.
• 1:04:32
  Clips of. Mohair indeed in Ireland, and
• 1:04:34
  yeah, they are in. Ireland, that's a that's a
• 1:04:36
  famous, that's a famous. I thought I remember hearing the
• 1:04:40
  Harry Potter was definitely filmed there.
• 1:04:43
  Princess Bride may have been filmed there.
• 1:04:45
  And I believe I thought game of, I thought part of Game of
• 1:04:48
  Thrones. Maybe they did.
• 1:04:50
  I mean, I know they were in Northern Ireland.
• 1:04:52
  They were at the what they call the Giant Steps, and I know they
• 1:04:55
  probably shot there. I think those are iconically
• 1:04:59
  Irish. So when you go to the coast of
• 1:05:01
  Mohair, you're going to go to Ireland, you're probably going
• 1:05:04
  to shoot there, right? There's no doubt.
• 1:05:07
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, OK.
• 1:05:08
  So you went to these other places.
• 1:05:10
  You're you're. Yeah.
• 1:05:12
  And then that's where they did shoot Game of Thrones along the
• 1:05:16
  Fort, the old Fort there on the coast, on the cliffs and a place
• 1:05:21
  called Tucker Koos South of Marrakech.
• 1:05:24
  And so by doing that particular scout, then I, I kept a lot of
• 1:05:29
  notes about things. And like in Marrakech, we went
• 1:05:33
  to the polo fields to check them out, the, the town square,
• 1:05:36
  various alleys in the old city, the old Medina.
• 1:05:42
  And so I kept some very meticulous notes and that became
• 1:05:46
  somewhat of the outline, a very strong outline for the book, the
• 1:05:50
  novel. So I was able to do that and
• 1:05:53
  kind of build it up from there. Is that usually your your quote
• 1:05:57
  UN quote research project process is to like get your
• 1:06:01
  actually put your feet, you know, wherever you want to write
• 1:06:04
  about and to actually visit the place and check it out.
• 1:06:06
  Ideally, yes, because it's about walking the steps and a lot of
• 1:06:12
  times you sit there and you say, well, OK, if you want to go,
• 1:06:15
  it's a in Paris. I know Paris fairly well.
• 1:06:18
  I think I've been there about 40 times or so, but it's, if you go
• 1:06:23
  from, let's say, the Place de la Republique and you want to walk
• 1:06:30
  it for some reason or you're going to go into a different
• 1:06:32
  arrondissement, Well, what's around there?
• 1:06:35
  What are you seeing and hearing and tasting and everything else?
• 1:06:40
  And so it's very good to to do that because you could really
• 1:06:43
  enliven the page. So, and that's exactly what I
• 1:06:47
  did in Morocco. And so when I walked around
• 1:06:51
  Marrakech and you felt the street vendors and the close in
• 1:06:56
  and you would see, you know, baskets of spices that are
• 1:07:00
  extremely colorful. It's it kind of enlivens it.
• 1:07:03
  And that informed, for example, the chief of intelligence for
• 1:07:08
  Morocco, I made it his grandfather to be a spice
• 1:07:11
  merchant, basically, and, and to do colored dyes for clothing.
• 1:07:17
  And then there's a unique part of that that's there and part of
• 1:07:20
  the culture which is fascinating to explore.
• 1:07:23
  So absolutely, if you walk the streets, you're going to pick up
• 1:07:26
  a lot more. It also makes the writing a lot
• 1:07:28
  easier because you go, no, that's where it is.
• 1:07:31
  Yeah. So you kind of build into that
• 1:07:34
  reality. I think it's great.
• 1:07:35
  And people can travel and read the book and then enjoy the city
• 1:07:38
  they're going to. It's works right away.
• 1:07:41
  So when it comes to coming up with a plot or coming up with a
• 1:07:46
  concept, you know, I've spoken to a bunch of writers, you know,
• 1:07:51
  a bunch of writers on the show that I've done a lot of non
• 1:07:54
  fictional work. And you know, part of what they
• 1:07:55
  say, especially if they don't tend to be have that kind of
• 1:07:59
  mindset of being able to kind of capture a whole story in their
• 1:08:02
  head and then, you know, keep track of it while they're
• 1:08:04
  elaborating on details. Which I think is a super
• 1:08:08
  incredible talent and something I have a very hard time with.
• 1:08:11
  But what they do instead is they say, OK, we just take it like,
• 1:08:13
  you know, we want to talk about what it took to build a
• 1:08:15
  successful business. Here's a chunk of what you need
• 1:08:18
  to know. It's important to do accounting,
• 1:08:20
  you know, so let's write a chapter on that and like the
• 1:08:22
  point to do that. What's your process for coming
• 1:08:25
  up with a actual story? And how do you keep track of the
• 1:08:27
  narrative and the characters? And you know what, what goes
• 1:08:31
  into it? You know how, how do you, how do
• 1:08:32
  you, how do you do all that? Oh boy, that's a good question.
• 1:08:38
  That's the hardest part. That's the most daunting part of
• 1:08:40
  writing, I think is just is how much you got to keep track of
• 1:08:44
  and are you taking notes? Do you have files and binders?
• 1:08:47
  How do you how do you go about it?
• 1:08:49
  Well, let's see, I'm actually working on a sequel to Murder in
• 1:08:53
  the City of Light now, and I make use of when I start writing
• 1:09:01
  my first scripts and novels. Of course, you sit and you go,
• 1:09:04
  OK, I actually did that on a manual typewriter, believe it or
• 1:09:07
  not. But I mean, yeah, Well, what's
• 1:09:12
  interesting is when you have a manual typewriter, you want to
• 1:09:15
  be sure about the scene because you don't want to go through
• 1:09:18
  that pain in the ass retyping. Yeah, well, there is something
• 1:09:22
  about not having a delete button that makes you really question
• 1:09:27
  yourself before you actually do the work.
• 1:09:29
  And I think there is something missing about that when you have
• 1:09:35
  editorial or writing where you could say, oh, don't worry, I'll
• 1:09:38
  fix it later. So I think there's a mental game
• 1:09:41
  you have to get in behind there, as well as to be a bit
• 1:09:45
  determined and ruthless with yourself, and I absolutely have.
• 1:09:52
  Then when even working in Word and then other programs like
• 1:09:58
  Screenwriter or Final Draft, those gave you an organizational
• 1:10:01
  capacity that was much, much easier because you could put
• 1:10:04
  together all the little cards and then work out scenes in a
• 1:10:08
  linear. Yeah, in a very good linear
• 1:10:10
  fashion. So I use a couple different
• 1:10:14
  tools, and in particular one is called Plotter, which basically
• 1:10:18
  is a deck of cards on the screen, and that gives me very
• 1:10:22
  broad big picture strokes. That's currently what I'm using
• 1:10:26
  right now. And the nice part is that
• 1:10:28
  Plotter actually exports into Scrivener.
• 1:10:32
  Scrivener's a very inexpensive program.
• 1:10:35
  I think it's $60.00 or something, and it's extremely
• 1:10:38
  powerful. And so that allows you to
• 1:10:41
  organize. Scrivener allows me to organize
• 1:10:44
  electronically. Any research on place, time,
• 1:10:49
  character. Awesome.
• 1:10:52
  So it's kind of one big electronic bin.
• 1:10:55
  And the nice part is, of course you can copy and paste in there.
• 1:10:59
  So when I go from Scrivener to Plotter or something, then I'm
• 1:11:03
  able to kind of track that. So that's made it a lot easier
• 1:11:07
  than a linear writing in Microsoft Word where you're
• 1:11:12
  always up, where am I and you have to create indexes to know,
• 1:11:16
  OK, where, where's that chapter again?
• 1:11:18
  And that that becomes organizationally difficult.
• 1:11:22
  The nice part about plotter is I have a section in there where I
• 1:11:26
  could wing out an idea and see if it flies and just
• 1:11:31
  brainstorming, OK. And I like to do kind of what
• 1:11:34
  if, what if Efren and Mike Michael robbed the bank and
• 1:11:39
  escaped in a balloon? OK, How would that work in
• 1:11:43
  Florida? Oh, now we hit a typhoon.
• 1:11:46
  Maybe not a good idea, this kind of thing.
• 1:11:49
  But I think it's that out-of-the-box thinking that it
• 1:11:52
  really allows you to develop a big picture and get a lot of
• 1:11:56
  surprises. And structurally, nowadays, I
• 1:12:01
  think there's been some degree of change.
• 1:12:05
  And in this 7 Graves de Marrakesh novel, I was thinking,
• 1:12:10
  huh, what if I use the format, maintain the novel format, but
• 1:12:16
  I'm actually thinking in terms of almost like television
• 1:12:20
  episodes. We've become so ingrained in
• 1:12:24
  watching streaming, so each chapter has a hook and a number
• 1:12:30
  of acts, 6 acts or so, and then a cliffhanger.
• 1:12:33
  Nice. So I kind of like said, OK, I'm
• 1:12:36
  going to go with that and it kind of works out well because
• 1:12:40
  you start thinking in that metric a bit.
• 1:12:42
  And so, and then at the same time, I wrote a novel called
• 1:12:48
  Journey so Dreams May Come, which is very literary, more
• 1:12:52
  like Khalil Gibran, more like magical realism of Marquez and
• 1:12:58
  all this kind of feel. And it's definitely way
• 1:13:02
  different than anything else that I've written.
• 1:13:04
  But it was very literary and I wanted to get that book out.
• 1:13:07
  So that's one that kind of falls by the wayside in terms of
• 1:13:11
  format and reach and everything else.
• 1:13:13
  But it was a lot. Of fun to work when you do that,
• 1:13:15
  when you do, when you, when you do work that's totally unique to
• 1:13:21
  anything else that you've done. Do you feel like finally I'm
• 1:13:25
  able to express the part of myself or where'd that come
• 1:13:27
  from? You know, 'cause when I, when I
• 1:13:30
  was like a writing that I've done from, you know, a couple
• 1:13:32
  years ago, I'm like, who was that?
• 1:13:34
  Like who, who came up with that? That's crazy.
• 1:13:37
  You know, I wouldn't have come up with that, but it did, you
• 1:13:39
  know. So what do you think about that?
• 1:13:41
  Well, I definitely, I think you're on to something there,
• 1:13:43
  because indeed, writing is attached to the time in which we
• 1:13:50
  exist. Yeah.
• 1:13:52
  And I took that one book journey.
• 1:13:55
  So dreams may come and it took, I mean, I have no problem
• 1:14:01
  writing, no writer's block, but this one I was trying to get
• 1:14:03
  right in it. I think it took like 14 years,
• 1:14:06
  wow, of actually going to it and then going that's not it and
• 1:14:10
  that's not it, etcetera. And finally I got it to where I
• 1:14:13
  wanted it and then I put it out. In the meantime, of course, I've
• 1:14:18
  written like 20 scripts and four or five other books, eight other
• 1:14:21
  books I don't even know over that period of time.
• 1:14:24
  So sometimes that one became very personal as far as it goes
• 1:14:32
  and the story is basically a the story in a nutshell.
• 1:14:37
  And I don't like to talk long about stories because everybody
• 1:14:40
  gets bored and they can't keep track of it when you're talking
• 1:14:43
  actually. But it's essentially a young boy
• 1:14:46
  who's dying of cancer, He's blind, goes to see his kind of
• 1:14:50
  screw up uncle in Los Angeles who's an actor and says I'd like
• 1:14:55
  to go on a trip around the world.
• 1:14:57
  And he would physically never make it.
• 1:15:00
  So the uncle puts on the sounds and the smells and the voices of
• 1:15:06
  a trip around the world without ever leaving his house.
• 1:15:09
  Nice. Beautiful.
• 1:15:11
  So it becomes philosophical, it becomes personal, it becomes
• 1:15:15
  transformative. And visually, I actually had a
• 1:15:21
  producer, it was originally a script, and I said this would
• 1:15:25
  make a great novel. So that's started me on the
• 1:15:28
  path. So I wrote written the script
• 1:15:31
  and I gave it to a script named Larry Applebaum.
• 1:15:36
  And Larry was from New York. He'd worked on The French
• 1:15:39
  Connection and a bunch of other movies.
• 1:15:43
  And I think he was from Brooklyn.
• 1:15:46
  And his voice was like this and yeah, yeah, you know, and.
• 1:15:51
  Very. Very intense kind of, you know,
• 1:15:57
  could have been a mobster kind of vibe in the lot of ways for.
• 1:16:00
  Sure. And I gave him the script and I
• 1:16:06
  said to and he was a funny character and he and I got
• 1:16:08
  along. He was very gruff.
• 1:16:09
  But at one point I had him just I was BS ING him completely on
• 1:16:16
  this thing that the Irish we're one of the lost tribes of
• 1:16:20
  Israel. And I made-up all this history
• 1:16:26
  and when we were talking over a coffee or something, and somehow
• 1:16:29
  I literally bamboozled him into thinking that and and this whole
• 1:16:34
  other history. And then I dropped the the
• 1:16:36
  curtain on him and he goes, ah, you got me, Mike.
• 1:16:39
  You got me, you know, And he was playfully pissed off about it
• 1:16:43
  all. It was very funny.
• 1:16:45
  I, I could probably convince someone of the same thing, by
• 1:16:47
  the way, I could convince someone that the Irish, that the
• 1:16:50
  Irish are probably, you know, or extension or, you know, long,
• 1:16:53
  long lost family of the Jews for sure.
• 1:16:55
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think they have
• 1:16:57
  that, you know, Indigenous like self reliant quality and a lot
• 1:17:00
  of other things and they're out on this rock in the middle of
• 1:17:03
  the Atlantic and you know, it's. It's too I love the I love Irish
• 1:17:09
  folk music. I was exposed.
• 1:17:10
  To yeah, it's great. It's amazing.
• 1:17:12
  Awesome, awesome. And, and it's, there's good
• 1:17:15
  humor in the lyrics and a lot of it's very deep.
• 1:17:17
  A lot of it. I mean, there's some songs that,
• 1:17:20
  that, I mean, I, I, I actually teach high school part time in a
• 1:17:24
  Orthodox Jewish school. And, you know, these kids have
• 1:17:27
  never had any, very, very little exposure to anything like that.
• 1:17:31
  And I showed them some, you know, some great Irish tunes and
• 1:17:35
  that's great. And they, and they, and their
• 1:17:38
  minds are blown. You know, I showed them there's
• 1:17:40
  a great song called the Green Fields of France, which is a
• 1:17:43
  beautiful post war. It's a it's a World War One
• 1:17:46
  song. World One World War 10 my.
• 1:17:49
  Gosh, and, and, and that, and that day I showed it to them.
• 1:17:54
  You could see that it, it sat on them.
• 1:17:56
  You could see that like, you know, we're, you know, that they
• 1:17:59
  were thinking about weighing the consequences of, you know, war
• 1:18:03
  and mortality and, you know, and, and, and a young life loss
• 1:18:07
  and stuff like that. And I was like, yeah, man, this,
• 1:18:11
  you know, I think that it's good to think about.
• 1:18:13
  That's great for you. From that, you were able to
• 1:18:16
  bring that experience to yeah. I love the Irish.
• 1:18:19
  I love the Irish that they're, they're great, they're great.
• 1:18:22
  Oh, we're gonna get along. We're gonna be lifelong friends
• 1:18:24
  now. There you go.
• 1:18:25
  There you go. There you go.
• 1:18:28
  So yeah, I see. I see.
• 1:18:30
  Yeah. So it was originally a script.
• 1:18:31
  You gave it. You gave it to your you, you,
• 1:18:33
  you. You gave it to your buddy
• 1:18:34
  Applevaum from and Larry Read. It Larry read it and I'll never
• 1:18:38
  forget his reaction because he's this gruffled Brooklyn guy and
• 1:18:42
  he he goes, Mike, I read you a script.
• 1:18:45
  I frigging cried and and so he had this great reaction to it,
• 1:18:52
  which made me think, OK, there's great possibilities here.
• 1:18:55
  And how do I take that further? And how do I take it in a
• 1:18:59
  philosophical sense, as well as some other reading like Marquez
• 1:19:04
  with his magical realism and question, you know, important
• 1:19:09
  questions about life, not unlike what you asked your your
• 1:19:12
  students there about when you played them.
• 1:19:15
  The Irish song is what is the the metric we have for even
• 1:19:20
  having song and dance and film and good television, good
• 1:19:27
  streaming and other things. And it is for us to have a
• 1:19:32
  reflective learning sensibility to understand a what would say
• 1:19:37
  be feelings and moments and to actually bridge gaps of
• 1:19:41
  understanding going. Oh, so that's not a culture I
• 1:19:45
  know much about, but we have the same commonality of things.
• 1:19:49
  When I did AI did a movie in Egypt and it was very
• 1:19:52
  interesting. 2000, 6 or 7 and it was the first movie shown in
• 1:20:03
  Saudi Arabia in 35 years called Manahi and it was a Arabic
• 1:20:08
  language comedy. And a sheep herder or a goat
• 1:20:13
  herder who gets mistaken for a powerful guy and falls through
• 1:20:17
  all these circumstances. And what was interesting is
• 1:20:22
  talking to people on the Egyptian crew and hearing what
• 1:20:25
  they had to say about the world. And, and you realize a lot of
• 1:20:29
  them just go, look, I want to raise my kids and I want to
• 1:20:31
  laugh with them and and watch them grow up.
• 1:20:33
  And, and the commonality of that with our humanity is to go,
• 1:20:40
  well, OK, how do you just if peacefully do that?
• 1:20:43
  And where do you find the ground, the common ground?
• 1:20:47
  And I think that's the universal part about movies when they.
• 1:20:51
  Did the. Yeah, and they did a poll, I
• 1:20:53
  think in the 30s, and they said what's the capital of the United
• 1:20:55
  States? You know what the answer was.
• 1:20:58
  Hollywood. Yes, because they go how all
• 1:21:03
  this magic at the end of a movie that says made in Hollywood.
• 1:21:06
  Well, it's got to be it, right? I mean, that's.
• 1:21:09
  Yeah, Yeah. It's a really it's, it's a
• 1:21:11
  beautiful way of putting in. It's absolutely true.
• 1:21:13
  I think that and I think that a lot of a lot of the world, you
• 1:21:19
  know, at least it feels like it's designed to make us forget
• 1:21:22
  that about one another, you know, that most of the time, you
• 1:21:25
  know, all we do want is family. All we do want is relationships
• 1:21:29
  and good times together. And, you know, I mean, yeah,
• 1:21:33
  it's funny because I I, you know, I typically, I don't have
• 1:21:37
  a particular political camp. I think politics have been a
• 1:21:39
  little crazy. But one thing I was just
• 1:21:41
  thinking about just in general was that I live inside again,
• 1:21:45
  I'm a young guy in South Florida with young kids.
• 1:21:49
  And like, if my family got blown up because of an ideology,
• 1:21:55
  because of a conversation that other people had that had
• 1:21:58
  nothing to do with me in Florida is the Eastern seaboard and gets
• 1:22:01
  it gets hit first, you know, like nothing that anyone was
• 1:22:05
  fighting about is, is, is like worth my family.
• 1:22:08
  So like, what are you talking about?
• 1:22:10
  Like, how is this even a conversation?
• 1:22:11
  You know, and like, and, and, and, and, and if I think that if
• 1:22:14
  more people had put them had like put themselves in that
• 1:22:17
  situation before making decisions, you know, as in like
• 1:22:21
  who's, you know, who's actually taking the hit over here, You
• 1:22:24
  know, like what's happening over here, you know, that's, that's a
• 1:22:27
  tragedy. You know, that's that's that's
• 1:22:28
  that's where it gets. That's why the pain is.
• 1:22:31
  And then that just breathed more.
• 1:22:32
  That breathed more pain, you know, just keep on going.
• 1:22:35
  It becomes an endless cycle. And I think that indeed, aspects
• 1:22:41
  that dehumanize somebody else in so many different unfortunate
• 1:22:46
  manners and it makes it easier, of course, for someone to pick
• 1:22:50
  up violence and go in that direction.
• 1:22:52
  And you brought up World War One.
• 1:22:55
  And while I'm a very keen reader of history and particularly
• 1:23:00
  World War 2 history, my father was in there, my uncles, I mean,
• 1:23:05
  so many of my friends fathers, I mean on and on and on.
• 1:23:09
  So that's probably where the interest started.
• 1:23:11
  But when you read about World War One, what you do is you read
• 1:23:15
  about trench warfare and 100. I mean, I think in France alone
• 1:23:22
  they lost a million, three men. And it's probably the war I have
• 1:23:27
  read the least about. I've read about four or five
• 1:23:30
  books on it. But it the losses were so
• 1:23:34
  needless, so excessive. No one could tell you why why
• 1:23:39
  the war happened. It was essentially all these
• 1:23:42
  alliances that triggered it and then ratcheted up the anger with
• 1:23:48
  an archduke who gets assassinated and now we all have
• 1:23:50
  alliances. You got to step into the breach
• 1:23:52
  and at some point they could have pulled back and said, look,
• 1:23:57
  let's find the assassin and prosecute him and whatever
• 1:24:02
  instead of going to war with all our countries.
• 1:24:04
  And it was. The bloody, it was one of the
• 1:24:05
  bloodiest. I think it was the bloody.
• 1:24:07
  It was bloodier than World War 2, wasn't it?
• 1:24:09
  Well, don't add up. I, I think in terms of the
• 1:24:12
  number of dead, I think it, World War 2 exceeds that because
• 1:24:15
  of its scale, because you have China involved and then all of
• 1:24:19
  Russia and you know, the German Vermont pushing in there, which
• 1:24:24
  was at least 20 million dead. So I mean, you had war on a
• 1:24:29
  global scale even more so than World War One, but I think when
• 1:24:36
  you add the mobility of World War Two, in a lot of ways you
• 1:24:40
  add movement and you add some kind of progress made on the
• 1:24:43
  battlefield in some way. Right, right.
• 1:24:46
  But here you have something reminiscent of World War One
• 1:24:50
  that is like the Ukraine Russia war with trench warfare and this
• 1:24:55
  attrition that was just horrific things like men walking into
• 1:24:59
  machine gunfire, literally dying for yards of dirt that was.
• 1:25:06
  And so in that way, it was this tale that between the French and
• 1:25:13
  the British, an entire generation was wiped out.
• 1:25:17
  And so when they were hesitant to confront Germany going into
• 1:25:23
  the Rhine, supposedly when they went into the Rhine, the Germans
• 1:25:27
  remilitarized. They only had ammunition for
• 1:25:31
  like 3 days. If the French had gone in there
• 1:25:34
  and they really confronted them, they would have had to retreat.
• 1:25:37
  And so it has this profound echo of where there's a will to
• 1:25:42
  confront evil or to confront this aggression is is one of the
• 1:25:49
  many lessons you could learn. But I agree there's some part
• 1:25:53
  where bridging humanity, and I think the arts does that.
• 1:25:56
  And I think that storytelling, you could almost tell like a
• 1:26:02
  story of somebody who grew up in a country and then say, oh, that
• 1:26:06
  was Ireland or that was Egypt or that was Israel.
• 1:26:09
  And that way it literally doesn't matter.
• 1:26:10
  It's, it's, it's, it's, it's human, you know, there's human
• 1:26:13
  nature that that just does not change, you know, then change
• 1:26:17
  the context all you want, but a dad protecting a daughter, you
• 1:26:20
  know, or you know, you know, is timeless no matter where you,
• 1:26:24
  you know who you are, what you're dealing with, I think.
• 1:26:26
  I, I can give you, I know we're going to wrap up pretty soon,
• 1:26:29
  but I can give you 1 very interesting story of something
• 1:26:32
  you just hit on that had to do with the taken.
• 1:26:34
  Movies please. Essentially, I had to, at one
• 1:26:40
  point was I had to, they had Liam here in the US on Taken 2
• 1:26:46
  and he had to be fitted. So we had his costume designer
• 1:26:52
  show up and and fit him and then go shopping.
• 1:26:57
  And so she went to New York and she went to LA and she bought
• 1:27:01
  and customized everything for him exactly the way she knows it
• 1:27:06
  looks for him and the way the material drapes.
• 1:27:09
  It's really quite an art that they have down to make somebody
• 1:27:13
  look great. So they said to me, OK, Michael,
• 1:27:17
  you rearrange this and they transpo and everything and we'll
• 1:27:20
  get them measured and then we'll ship it off to Istanbul.
• 1:27:23
  I said, OK, great and no problem, we'll take care of
• 1:27:27
  that. And then literally a two days
• 1:27:30
  before they said, OK, well, we're really busy here, so you
• 1:27:35
  have to ship this off to Istanbul.
• 1:27:39
  And I went, what? And what you have to do is if
• 1:27:44
  you're taking something, a garment from, or any product,
• 1:27:49
  but a garment in particular, obviously if you take it from
• 1:27:52
  Los Angeles to Istanbul, you have to get a carne, you have to
• 1:27:56
  prove that you are not smuggling it into the country and you're
• 1:27:59
  going to take it out. So I literally called, I mean, a
• 1:28:03
  number of the studios and say, well, how do you take this shirt
• 1:28:06
  or yours? And there's a specific code like
• 1:28:09
  119 O3 O. Seven, I've done international.
• 1:28:13
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So you know what I'm talking
• 1:28:14
  about. Great.
• 1:28:16
  None of them knew and then trying to ship it I'd like 4
• 1:28:20
  boxes. So I basically found the only
• 1:28:24
  company in law in the United States that can issue a carne
• 1:28:28
  within the company, not the government agency.
• 1:28:31
  And they ship Rock'n'roll concert gear.
• 1:28:35
  So I went to them, I said I need to get this, I need to ship
• 1:28:38
  this, I need it right away. And they said, OK, we can do
• 1:28:42
  that, not a problem. And I said, good, now I'll make
• 1:28:45
  sure I'm going to give you guys each $100 to do it.
• 1:28:47
  And they go, you don't have to do it.
• 1:28:48
  And I go, trust me, I do. I'm going to give you money.
• 1:28:51
  And so I managed to get the materials, get it all together,
• 1:28:57
  book a ticket for Istanbul Direct on Turkish Airlines
• 1:29:00
  because they wanted to FedEx it through Hamburg.
• 1:29:03
  And I go, I don't know if that's going to arrive.
• 1:29:05
  Forget it. So I went to the airport and I
• 1:29:09
  went there and I go, OK, got all the boxes.
• 1:29:11
  I'm checking in. And the one thing I forgot the
• 1:29:15
  is packing tape. Yeah, I literally, because I
• 1:29:18
  literally was trying to get on this plane and get going.
• 1:29:21
  So I show up at the airport and I go, da, da, da, da.
• 1:29:24
  And the guy goes, OK, open it all up.
• 1:29:27
  And I went, Oh my God, I forgot packing tape.
• 1:29:29
  Can I buy some from you? I will pay you.
• 1:29:31
  I'm so sorry. And he goes, huh, what do you do
• 1:29:34
  that for? He goes, what's all this stuff
• 1:29:36
  for? And I go, do you have any
• 1:29:38
  daughters? And he goes, well, yeah, I got
• 1:29:40
  like, three daughters. I go, this is for a sequel to
• 1:29:43
  that movie Taken. And no sooner.
• 1:29:44
  And I said that the guy like straightened up and goes.
• 1:29:47
  No way. I'd kill those sons of bitches
• 1:29:50
  too. OK.
• 1:29:52
  And he literally says to me, OK, he opened up an edge of the box
• 1:29:56
  and looked in and goes, OK, go ahead, take it.
• 1:30:00
  So I got it. I got it on the plane and I got
• 1:30:04
  to Istanbul and I come off the a plane, same thing.
• 1:30:08
  I have to go through the customs, show them the boxes I
• 1:30:11
  got and the guy says, open them all up and I go, well, I don't
• 1:30:14
  have any packing tape. Do you have any daughters?
• 1:30:17
  He goes, I got four daughters. Jack Fox totally, totally from.
• 1:30:23
  So then I said, well, this is for a sequel to this movie,
• 1:30:27
  Taken Da, da, da. And he go, he knew it right away
• 1:30:29
  and he goes, oh, I would have killed all those guys too.
• 1:30:32
  That was such good movie. Absolutely.
• 1:30:34
  He goes, He opened up one, pulled out one garment, showed
• 1:30:38
  it to me, and he goes, it still has the label on it.
• 1:30:40
  You're supposed to have taken the labels off and they didn't.
• 1:30:42
  And I told them and he kind of looked and shook his head and
• 1:30:46
  stuffed it back in. He goes, OK, I looked at it.
• 1:30:48
  You could take them now. Beautiful.
• 1:30:52
  I got through customs because I'd worked on the first, taken
• 1:30:55
  for the 2nd, and that was, I got it back to the Para Palace,
• 1:31:01
  pulled up and there was the costume designer and she was
• 1:31:06
  just about crying because she wasn't sure if she was going to
• 1:31:08
  get her costumes in time. That played the next day.
• 1:31:12
  Wow. So, you know, but there's a sign
• 1:31:15
  right there that two fathers knew what I was doing and wanted
• 1:31:18
  to see a sequel, so. Beautiful.
• 1:31:21
  That's wonderful. That's wonderful.
• 1:31:23
  I love the I love the camaraderie over there.
• 1:31:26
  I feel like, like I, I feel like there's a million of those
• 1:31:29
  stories because there's always a sense of urgency, you know, you
• 1:31:33
  know, with what's going, with everything going on, right?
• 1:31:35
  Always. Yeah, it's you could have a
• 1:31:38
  nuclear weapon go off and somebody still has to look for
• 1:31:40
  the rubber chicken. I mean, that's it there.
• 1:31:43
  You know, it's tunnel vision and you, you have to get things
• 1:31:46
  done. Yeah, yeah, really cool.
• 1:31:50
  I kind of want to ask you before we go, before I, before I let
• 1:31:53
  you go, what is some of you think the most well done or
• 1:31:57
  accurate or enjoyable World War 2 movies that you've that you've
• 1:32:01
  come across as a fanatic yourself?
• 1:32:04
  Well, definitely Saving Private Ryan is way up there because of
• 1:32:08
  the I got. In trouble for showing that to
• 1:32:09
  my 10th graders last year, but that's OK.
• 1:32:14
  Yeah, I showed it to 12th grade and 10th grade. 12th grade, I
• 1:32:17
  was like, fairly confident that like, they were mature enough.
• 1:32:19
  They were pretty much of drafting age anyway to watch
• 1:32:22
  that. But the 10th graders were a
• 1:32:24
  little young, especially for the opening scene.
• 1:32:26
  That opening scene, I remember watching it in the theater and
• 1:32:30
  literary people were in mid drink, you know, getting ready
• 1:32:33
  for the movie. And they would like, yeah,
• 1:32:36
  stopped. And I've interviewed a lot and
• 1:32:40
  quite a few combat veterans, including World War 2, I mean,
• 1:32:43
  at one point, and forward operators.
• 1:32:48
  I've done martial arts most of my entire life and you can't do
• 1:32:53
  that. Yet.
• 1:32:55
  Right. And no, we didn't get into that
• 1:32:57
  one, but it's you with those people and the realism right
• 1:33:01
  there is probably the apex of World War 2 recreation movies.
• 1:33:07
  In a lot of ways. I think that that would be
• 1:33:11
  amongst my top ones. I have a favorite being The
• 1:33:14
  Longest Day, as that is the movie I started working on when
• 1:33:18
  I was a kid. So I will default to that.
• 1:33:21
  Cross of Iron certainly presents certain things.
• 1:33:24
  Enemy at the Gates is a World War 2 movie that is astounding
• 1:33:29
  with the enemy at the Gates. Yeah.
• 1:33:32
  Enemy at the Gates about one of the Soviet Union's best snipers,
• 1:33:38
  Vassili Zeitsev. And so that was very good, the
• 1:33:45
  harshness of war. I always tell people, you could
• 1:33:48
  look at a movie and you see the harshness of war and it is the
• 1:33:52
  second worst thing that can happen to you.
• 1:33:54
  Humanity is war. And then people go, well, what's
• 1:33:58
  the first? I said slavery.
• 1:34:01
  And I think that's true as far as it is for me, because the
• 1:34:07
  complete justification for rebellion under slavery,
• 1:34:11
  whatever it has been for every person on this planet somewhere,
• 1:34:15
  their ancestors were enslaved, it doesn't matter.
• 1:34:18
  And so, you know, war is amongst the worst things that can
• 1:34:25
  happen, but it's sometimes necessary.
• 1:34:28
  And it's that interplay between what is right and what is
• 1:34:33
  needed. And I'm grateful that you're
• 1:34:37
  showing that to these young men, that trying to imbue them with a
• 1:34:40
  sense of the green fields of France and everything else, that
• 1:34:44
  they can understand the cost of things, because that's the price
• 1:34:49
  of freedom, which can slip away very quickly, as we all know.
• 1:34:53
  Yeah, we spend far too much time talking about the beating up the
• 1:34:57
  bad guys and far, little, far less time talking about, you
• 1:35:01
  know, early deaths, PTSD, you know, broken families on, you
• 1:35:06
  know, on both ends of the, you know, both ends of the spectrum.
• 1:35:09
  And and, you know, again, I mean, it should be an absolute
• 1:35:13
  last resort, you know, and not something not not something
• 1:35:16
  anyone's too gung ho about. But, you know, yeah, I digress.
• 1:35:22
  Anyway, Michael, this is such a pleasure.
• 1:35:24
  We'll probably do another one if you're up for it because this is
• 1:35:27
  a very easy hour. And I'm sure this plan and there
• 1:35:30
  was a bunch more on the list that you and I wanted to get to
• 1:35:32
  including including martial arts.
• 1:35:34
  But but we shall be in touch and maybe get back to this in a
• 1:35:38
  couple of months, give you some. I'd love you from the Grex.
• 1:35:43
  That'd be great. Count me in.
• 1:35:44
  Awesome. Awesome, wonderful.
• 1:35:46
  This is so nice meeting you, so nice chatting a little bit and
• 1:35:48
  and I'm looking forward to doing it again soon.
• 1:35:51
  OK. You got it.
• 1:35:52
  Even let me know and. We'll be in.
• 1:35:53
  That's good evening. Take care.