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IFH 731: The Screenwriter's Workout with Will Hicks · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Indie Film Huscle
• 0:14
  Podcast, Episode number seven thirty one. Screenwriting is the most prized of all
• 0:19
  the cinematic arts. Actually it isn't, but it should be. You Laurie
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  broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast,
• 0:30
  where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the
• 0:34
  jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome,
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  Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your
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  humble host Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur
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• 1:53
  Now, guys, this episode started off as one thing and has ended
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  up being something much much better than I originally thought. Our guest today is
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  Will Hicks, and Will's been in the business for many, many years,
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  working with studios in the script development area, worked in production for a long
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  time, and it's just a wealth of information. And Will wrote an amazing
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  book called The Screenwriter's Workout which he actually creates workouts creative workouts to get your
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  mind and your craft kind of like juiced up and build up those muscles,
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  and it's a pretty amazing approach. I've never seen an approach like that before.
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  So we do talk about that book and some of the approaches he does
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  about that, but honestly, when we started talking, it is this.
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  This episode, this conversation is essentially a masterclass in screenwriting. We're talking about
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  everything from plot to structure, to character development, to villains to antagonists to
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  protagonists. We cover everything, and we're using examples from some of the best
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  films of all time and why certain things work and why other things don't work.
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  It just was a wonderful kind of stream of consciousness conversation and I absolutely
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  love that. It runs over an hour and a half easily, and it
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  is well worth any screenwriter listening to because it will make you think about screenwriting,
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  possibly in a new way. So, without any further ado, please
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  enjoy my intriguing conversation with Will Hicks. I like to welcome to the show,
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  Will Hicks. How you doing well? Doing well? How about you?
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  I'm doing very good, my friend, I'm doing very good. We've
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  had a very spirited conversation even before we got started on this thing because today,
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  as of this recording, mister James Cameron released a masterclass. And I
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  generally don't fawn over masterclasses in general. Some of them are good, some
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  of them are, like you know, just basically YouTube videos. But there's
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  a handful of really good. But it's James Cameron. And I was fascinated
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  to see what James Cameron was doing, and I've just been sitting there consuming
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  it, and then we started talking about it and how he's very underrated as
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  not only a filmmaker but as a screenwriter. And you actually bring him into
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  your coursework, right, I do. Yeah, there's a bunch of takeaways
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  you can take away from Cameron. It reminds me of a story he tells
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  about I believe he was growing up in Canada and he would cut grass for
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  a living and you look at these massive lawns and say, oh my god,
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  this is going to take forever, just this huge, daunting thing.
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  And so then he would focus on one row at a time, one row
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  at a time, and he equated that to filmmaking. It just into screenwriting.
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  It seems like it's this massive endeavor, but you break it down into
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  its granuar level. One line at a time, one line at a time,
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  and suddenly you're you're done. Not only that, just to scenecraft alone.
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  When you look at I think there's this, there's this bit of a
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  perception. Hey, because you have commercial success, you know your work is
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  not artistic, And I just disagree with that vehemently. I think you can
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  have you can have both a work that not only reaches a large number of
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  people, but can also be an artistic you know it can. It has
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  something to say and meaning. And just how he constructs his scenes, they're
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  just tight, tight, beyond tight. His dialogue worthy of study. Yeah,
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  his story structure, I mean, and you go back to watching any
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  of his any any work early late mid from the recent as reason as Avatar,
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  which is now a decade, Oh it was, it's over ten years
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  we've seen an Avatar. It's he's he's insane, insane man in the best
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  possible way. And now we're going to get four avatars back to back to
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  back to back. Apparently so, but you look at a terminator right,
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  read that script, read aliens. Read the abyss. Oh my god,
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  the abyss true lies any of this and anytime he I remember when Titanic was
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  coming out, everyone was like, oh, he's oh, this is going
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  to be a bomb, this is going to be crazy, which everybody.
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  That's the long story. But I always used to tell people, I'm like,
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  in Cameron, I trust whatever he does, whatever he does, he
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  hasn't failed me yet, which is rare for a filmmaker because most filmmakers,
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  you know, stumble or didn't hit the mark. And that's okay, that's
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  all artists to that. But for what reason? Cameron, every one of
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  his movies, in my eyes, at least hits the mark from I mean,
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  True Lies is exactly what he wanted it to be. And Aliens was
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  exactly in Titanic, and then even Avatar, and even Avatar when Avatar was
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  coming out, after everything he's done, people were like, oh god,
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  blue people, Oh this is this looks ridiculous. And I'm like, hey,
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  okay, he made a movie about a boat and we all knew the
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  ending. Okay, we all knew the ending, and he used it against
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  us and in creating tension, which was masterful. It's masterful how he did
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  that. It's remarkable. It's so many lessons you can learn. Do you
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  agree, No, absolutely, and it's funny. I think that the length
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  of Titanic works for it because you know, we've reached we've reached the point
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  where in the film where it's like, Okay, this movie should be ending
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  sometime soon. And there's all these little moments there where Jack goes under the
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  water, comes back out of the water spoiler. And if you haven't seen
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  this on you guys, yeah, that was kind of my THINGU they got
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  it, and then you're like, oh, he just know he didn't.
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  And it starts to use its length to actually, you know, advance the
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  storytelling, and then from a structural perspective, you know, talking about story
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  structure and so forth, it's just like beautiful, beautiful, analyze it.
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  And the real knock or the real concern with Titanic back in the day was
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  everybody knew Cameron could do action. He had proven it time and again,
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  so nobody in the studios weren't worried about that. It was well, we
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  haven't really seen a love story. Now. To me, I go,
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  it's all we've seen, thank you. That's my point. Every movie,
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  every movie, from the chur Lies to Abyss to Aliens, determinator their love
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  stories. And that's exactly it. And so you know you're seeing you hear
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  in that scuttle and you're like, really, did you not watch the Terminator
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  not Orterminator two Ortreminnator two. Like their love stories. One is between a
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  man and why there was the love of a son and a daughter, a
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  son and the mother. Like it's just I mean the abyss. That's all
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  that is, is a love story. Yeah, and so and so that
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  you know, the whole conventional wisdom it is kind of al right, whatever,
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  and so yeah, I felt like we'd be in good hands. But
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  in particular, you know, going back to the original Terminator, to me
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  that that was kind of the finest of the two. I get into debates
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  for this all the time because they're t two fans and so forth. But
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  I mean, you're taking that world and bringing it upon us for the first
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  time in addition to all the heavy lifting you have to do with a story.
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  But yeah, mit, logically constructed just just thing of beauty to watch
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  and budget and on a low budget and on a very low budget, and
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  then of course launches you know, Terminator too, with you know, much
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  more or much greater resources at hand. But I felt the storytelling and and
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  Terminator one was just to me it was superior. And that's you know,
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  comparing uh two gems and saying, oh yeah, this one has more facets.
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  Okay, yeah, yeah, it was kind of cool. I uh
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  I had a screenplay going to development with the guy who shut down Titanic from
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  the studio, and so you know, it's kind of like, holy crap.
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  This guy, you know, went down and told James Cameron, you
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  know, you need to shut down and here he is working with, you
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  know, little old me, and I'm like, okay, So that was
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  kind of cool, my my little connection there. We'll be right back after
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  a word from our sponsor and now back to the show, My Favorite,
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  My Favorite, and then and then we will actually continue with this actual interview,
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  but we just started to geek out a little bit about Cameron. Is
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  that my favorite Cameron story I've ever heard it, which actually was in one
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  of the book, one of his books on his career, is he was
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  on the Abyss. And if anyone has not seen The Abyss, not only
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  watch the Abyss, but you have to watch the documentary about the Abyss that
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  comes with the DVD or the Blu ray because it is probably arguing one of
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  the best documentaries up there with Hearts of Darkness about the making of a film.
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  You just like see the absolute abuse that that entire crew, including Cameron,
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  took to make that it was an impossibility. Who go shuts down a
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  nuclear power plant or has a what a decommissioned nuclear power plant, fills it
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  up with the water and builds a set at it like he's insane. He's
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  an insane man, and I love him for that. But one day he
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  was he was good. There was some suits that came in from from the
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  studio going, hey, what's going on with this? This is getting a
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  little bit over budget here, which I think he ended up being around fifty
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  million in nineteen eighty eight, which which was a pretty big budget with you
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  know, no major big stars in it at the time. And Cameron had
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  just come up from a decompression period of about about three hours, because you
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  have he was underwater so long you have to decompress, and he was always
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  the last one, first one in, the last one out, so he
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  had just got done decompressing. He came out and this suit starts walking towards
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  him and as he gets out, he has this helmet on and these helmets
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  were if you remember watching the movie, the helmets, you could see through.
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  They designed the helmets themselves so they can shoot and see and listen to
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  dialogue and all this kind of stuff. So as he's taking it off,
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  he sees this guy and he starts to talk to him a second or two
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  about but he knows who he is, I mean, he knows it's the
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  studio. So he takes the helmet and throws it on top of the guy's
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  head. Now, without any air, you can't breathe. There's no air
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  connected to it, so now it's like he's basically suffocating. The dude grabs
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  him by the tie. He hangs him over the tank feet almost dangling.
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  He's just there like this, can't breathe, and he says if he falls,
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  the guy's not gonna make it. I mean again, not something you
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  want to do in today's world, in any time of period. But it's
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  fascinating to hear these mythical stories. He was like, if you ever come
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  on my set again, I will kill you. And then he throws them
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  back on. They pull the head off. He got it, got in
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  the car, got on the plane, and that was the last time any
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  suit ever showed up on the set of Tactic. No, it's great.
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  Yeah, that's called negotiations. So that is a that that's a James Cameron
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  negotiation. And I've heard he is softened over the years. I mean,
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  you know, I've heard he's I knew a lot of people who worked with
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  him on Titanic, and I've heard the stories and also on Avatar. But
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  he's still James Cammeron. He's always going to be Jafs Cammeron because he's frustrated,
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  because he's he's playing at a level that most human beings aren't. There's
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  and I always tell people, if there's one, if he's basically the only
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  human being on the planet, arguably that could make Avatar. Who could walk
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  into a studio and go, I need five hundred million. I'm going to
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  take about three or four years to develop this technology. It's going to be
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  about an ip that no one's ever heard of. I'm creating a new IP
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  and hopefully it's going to work. Who else no one's not getting that.
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  Fincher's not getting that, Spielberg's not getting that. No one else on the
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  planet is going to get that and then also be able to pull it off,
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  like he's one of the few people that can do it. So anyway,
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  that's enough about mister Cameron. I just we just got excited about the
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  new Master Class. I just wanted to talk about it. But anyway,
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  will we're here to talk about you and what you do, sir, or
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  how did you get into the business. So kind of the little bit of
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  a long story that goes back all the way to Star Wars. The initial
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  rely to that film and I saw it as a little kid. My dad
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  took me to see it. Actually I didn't want to see it. I
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  was at a like, I don't know, some little camp or whatever,
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  and all the kids were talking about it and I hadn't seen it yet,
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  so I'm like, I'm sick of this movie before even seeing it. But
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  my dad had heard about Lines, so we took off from work early and
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  we went to go see this film. And I walked in there just some
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  little kid from a podunktown in Georgia and came out of there knowing what I
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  wanted to do for the rest of my life. And it was profound an
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  experience. I mean, it was in a theater and so that sort of
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  set that path in motion. Now, the logical part of me was like
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  crazy making movies for a living. You might as well might as well told
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  my parents I wanted to deal crack, you know. It's like, Oh,
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  I want to go up be a crack dealer. You know. It
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  was kind of perceived that way, and of course they would be like,
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  oh God, he's going to be living on our couch for the rest of
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  his life. But it set that in motion. I'd never have any had
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  anything move me in that way, and so that sort of launched that career.
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  I tried a bunch of different things, you know, because cognitively I'm
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  like, okay, you know, the odds of making it in our businesses
• 15:09
  are slim. But eventually I just came back to it. I'm like,
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  you know, if I don't try this, if I don't do it,
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  I'll regret it for the rest of my life. There's a ditch that has
• 15:18
  to be scratched. I've got to at least if I try and fail,
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  all right, I can deal with that. I can live with that,
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  but I have to try it. And so that's what I did. Led
• 15:28
  to film school at the North Carolina School the Arts or the University of North
• 15:33
  Carolina School, the Arts School of Filmmaking, and from there I started working
• 15:39
  in production and did a ton of production. And you know, back then,
• 15:43
  my thought was, well, movies get made on the set. It
• 15:46
  was only later that you figure out now movies get made in boardrooms and they
• 15:50
  get shot, and they get shot on a set. But at the time,
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  you know, I was all about that. While I was pursuing a
• 15:58
  career in production, I was also pursuing screenwriting, kind of trying to do
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  both and balance the two. Her production career was doing extremely well, so
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  it didn't leave a lot of time for screenwriting. But I was part of
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  a screenwriting association and we had this outreach programm where we would teach screenwriting classes
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  and so forth, and so I was tapped to do that. So I
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  was teaching these screenwriting classes and one day my wife made the observation that you
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  know, when you come home from your classes, you're all like excited and
• 16:30
  stoked and really happy, and when you come back from the set, you're
• 16:33
  kind of awful and miserable. And so you know, of course, when
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  your wife makes a suggestion, it's kind of like, okay, but listen
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  to this. But I realized she was onto something. There was something rewarding
• 16:45
  about teaching that I wasn't getting from making movies. Oddly enough, you know,
• 16:49
  and so I decided to make their career shift there. And it happened.
• 16:53
  Actually, I was working on I don't know if you ever saw Cabin
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  Fever Eli Rolph film. Yeah, So I was working on that, and
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  there was one more morning where the rest of the crew got wrong directions from
• 17:08
  locations, so everybody was lost. And I was already there because my team
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  had been working on the set the previous week, so I knew how to
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  get there. And it was just this pre dawn morning. It was freezing
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  cold, all these stars in the sky, and nobody was there, and
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  so I had a moment to think and reflect, which is rare when you
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  work in film. Normally it's next thing, next thing, next thing,
• 17:30
  and you're always slammed. And had an epiphany and in that moment, I
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  was like, you know what, I'm going to shift my career and I'm
• 17:36
  going to I'm going to teach. So that that led to well, led
• 17:41
  to us sitting here right now, and there you go. There it turns
• 17:45
  out, yeah, it's I came up to the similar I came up with,
• 17:49
  like I don't want to be a PA anymore. After, Like,
• 17:51
  you know, it's three o'clock in the morning, I'm out here. I
• 17:53
  got to figure something else out. I'm like, hey, there's that there's
• 17:56
  a computer at the office that edits called an avid. Let me learn that
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  air conditioned maybe some carbal tunnel. I think that would be a good place
• 18:04
  for me to make my bones. And that's how I kind of started as
• 18:08
  well, Yeah, it's funny. It's just the different paths that you go
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  down. And I was thankful for all my experiences because they informed the teaching
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  obviously, but I was really fascinated by the form. And you know,
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  looking back to that that day a long time ago in a theater far far
• 18:23
  away, and looking back to that moment, what I realized is I couldn't
• 18:30
  figure out why this movie Star Wars Again affected me so and I wanted to
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  know why. And so that sort of set me on that journey. So
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  in academia, at least I get to study the form and the purity,
• 18:45
  and it's there's a purity to it. It's kind of like being at the
• 18:47
  at the temple. Then you don't have to worry about. You know,
• 18:51
  some the producers coming through saying, hey, you need to make these changes
• 18:53
  for for reasons that have nothing to do with the story, and it's understandable
• 18:57
  from their perspective. I get it, but it's no I can study the
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  purity of the craft and really dive into it. And you also, you're
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  in good company because it also launched many other careers. That movie that started
• 19:10
  it in started it out. And not to go back to Jim's camera,
• 19:12
  but that was one of the reasons why he jumped in as well, was
• 19:15
  because after watching Star Wars, he was like, well, I gotta I
• 19:18
  gotta make a movie. It's it's funny. So one of the first days
• 19:22
  of film school when I when I went there, they gathered the incoming class
• 19:27
  and so there are you know, I don't know a one hundred of us
• 19:30
  or so in there, and all the professors were up front and they asked,
• 19:34
  hey, what movie inspired you to make movies? And you know,
• 19:37
  and somebody said, you know, The Searchers because I was a d's favorite
• 19:41
  movie. I'm like, all right, suck up. But somebody said,
• 19:45
  you know, Citizen Kane. Then somebody said Star Wars, and then another
• 19:48
  person said Star Wars, and they asked a few other people. Then another
• 19:52
  person said Star Wars. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 20:00
  and now back to the show. So finally the professors you could tell
• 20:06
  they were fed up, and they just finally said, all right, how
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  many of you here were inspired by Star Wars to make movies? And two
• 20:15
  thirds of that class raised their hand, be among be among them. And
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  I sat there and sort of taken all that in. I'm like, holy
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  a, I'm like, you know, I'm home, I'm with I'm with
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  my peeps. But b I realized that was the impact of that movie.
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  It inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, not only you know, people in
• 20:37
  general, but actual filmmakers who were somehow touched by that film and then wanted
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  to go out and pursue this crazy art form of ours. And the funny
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  thing is, though, the person who said that that Citizen Kane inspired them,
• 20:51
  I think that's absolutely yes, because I love Citizen Kane. I think
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  it's you know, it's it's it's you know, it's it's it's it's what
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  it is. It's it was a groundbreaking film, but there wasn't like a
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  swash of people like you know, especially if your generation in sitting down in
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  the like well, yeah, I was sitting it down watching Citizen Kane the
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  other day. Like, no, man, you watched Cizen Kan because you're
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  introduced the Citizen Kane by going to class. It's not a movie that just
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  comd of pops up and you're like, oh, that black and white film
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  looks fantastic, Like no, but the Star Wars, Yeah, that was.
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  That was kind of my kind of running joke about it. It's like,
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  yeah, and you know what, Kung Fu Panned two was seen by
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  more people than Citizen Kane in sixty years and it's now. Does that mean
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  it's that's a measure of its artistic success. No, But when you think
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  about it, I mean, if you make a movie and nobody sees it,
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  it's like the movie doesn't exist. And those filmmakers and I'll stick with
• 21:48
  Kan Fu Panda two for whatever reason, but you know, they had a
• 21:52
  chance to share their message, to share their art, to share what they
• 21:56
  think with other people. To me, that's what the film is all about.
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  It's about it's about sharing your sensibilities, about what you think about the
• 22:04
  world. And we're able to share it with a lot of different people.
• 22:10
  And yeah, not a knock on Kane actually like Kane a lot, but
• 22:11
  yeah, exactly, But it's but it's not one of those films you're like,
• 22:15
  there's not there's nobody has you know, Citizen Kane dolls and uh,
• 22:19
  Citizen Kane action figures and Citizen Kane on the wall. Generally speaking, that's
• 22:23
  just not one of those films. It is a classic film and it should
• 22:26
  be studied, and it's what he did was remarkable on Orson Wells is a
• 22:30
  master and all that kind of stuff, But it's not the movie that inspired
• 22:33
  a generation to go to the move to become filmmakers. It's just not.
• 22:37
  But Star Wars, yeah, absolutely launched. God how many and even two
• 22:44
  thousand and one was another one, like how many you know people saw that
• 22:48
  and like, well, I think, well I gotta do that now.
• 22:52
  Yeah, that's exactly it. And and you know, ironically, you know,
• 22:56
  it's not that I make or would write science fiction. It was just
• 23:00
  it moved me somehow, and that was really the kind of the key piece
• 23:03
  of it. And when you find that films, I try to, you
• 23:07
  know, advise my students that whatever film. That is, if it was
• 23:10
  teenage mutant Ninja Turtles and it somehow touched you, don't ever let that movie
• 23:15
  go because it had something in it that said something to you, that inspired
• 23:21
  you, no matter what it is. Like, my favorite guilty pleasure movie
• 23:25
  is the old Flash Gordon film up. Yeah, of course, fantastic total
• 23:33
  guilty pleasure movie. When you put his hand in that thing and you don't
• 23:37
  know if he's gonna get oh my god, it still freaks me out.
• 23:41
  Yeah, And I usually like, you know, it's kind of you know,
• 23:45
  teaching film and stuff. You're you're supposed to like the other films,
• 23:49
  shall we say yes? But I'm like, now there's something about it.
• 23:52
  I mean, just it's the weirdest combination of things ever. You have this
• 23:55
  art deco style from the thirties, you have Queen doing the sound the science
• 24:00
  fiction film, and somehow it's like they gave you this recipe for a slushy
• 24:04
  and it's like, really, you're gonna put all this crap in it and
• 24:07
  it comes out it's like this awesome slushy and you never would guess it.
• 24:11
  So I don't know just that one. That one, and there's a certain
• 24:14
  degree of camp that I could really appreciate in the film. Yeah, and
• 24:18
  as film students or as a students of the craft, everyone listening here is
• 24:22
  that that's obviously studying the craft and wants to learn more about the craft.
• 24:27
  There are those films that touch you, like Star Wars touched most, you
• 24:30
  know, the huge amount of people, and uh. You know, there's
• 24:34
  certain films that when you were younger hit you, but then when you get
• 24:38
  older and you watch it again, you're like, that didn't meange. Well,
• 24:44
  Like I remember watching I remember watching blood Sport and I was like,
• 24:47
  oh my god, this is the greatest film I've ever seen. Uh,
• 24:51
  and then I watched it the other day I'm like, oh, this doesn't
• 24:55
  this does not hold up. So I've now made the choice of not going
• 25:00
  back to watch full versions of some of these old movies that I have wonderful
• 25:03
  recollections of because I have a feeling to that like oh that movie meant that
• 25:08
  to me. But then I go back and watch it and it ruins it
• 25:11
  sometimes, so it depends, but some movies transcend Star Wars. You can
• 25:15
  watch right now and it completely holds and continue. We'll continue to all and
• 25:18
  I think as a storytelling tool or lesson you can learn is George did such
• 25:26
  an amazing job with the structure of that story, using the hero's journey at
• 25:30
  such an expert level. I mean he was literally talking to Joseph Campbell about
• 25:34
  it as he was writing it. It's done so surgically that it will hold
• 25:41
  forever, regardless of sometimes maybe some of the visual effects might be a little
• 25:45
  janky things like that, But overall though, it will hold because of the
• 25:51
  story and because of the structure and those characters and how he was able to
• 25:55
  weave them all together. That thing will never I don't think that will overage.
• 25:59
  I mean still my kids to watch it now and their new generation who've
• 26:02
  grown up watching really high end visual effects and really high end storytelling, and
• 26:07
  they're actually much more literate story consumers than you or I was, because we
• 26:12
  didn't have as much content to consume as we were growing up. And it
• 26:17
  still hits them. It still goes right to the heart of it, and
• 26:21
  that's something that's you want out magic in your stories, in your scripts.
• 26:25
  Yeah, and I would I would say that comes that pours out of the
• 26:27
  characters, pours out of the characters, pours out of the tale it's being
• 26:33
  told. I like to think, and I teach a class called Deconstructing Star
• 26:37
  Wars where we dive into this that's amazing. So yeah, no surprise,
• 26:41
  I suppose given my background. But looking at it, to me, the
• 26:45
  big bang of Star Wars where all starts is that moment when Luke is walking
• 26:52
  out looking at the twin sunsets, and that's where it all. It's that's
• 26:57
  the big bang of that entire universe. Is some kid stuck on a farm
• 27:02
  wanting adventure, and that's everybody. But that's everybody, And that's how universal
• 27:07
  is that. It's and not a die and not a piece and not a
• 27:11
  piece of dialogue in that image. By the way, it's not like it.
• 27:15
  It is just the imagery. I mean, we know who the character
• 27:18
  is at that point, and he's a young boy living on a farm.
• 27:21
  But that moment there's not like, wow, I wish I had some adventure.
• 27:23
  No, there was no dialogue there. He just looks, and everywhere
• 27:27
  around the world, wherever you are, you just go, yep, that's
• 27:32
  what we want. We want that thing. We want to get out of
• 27:36
  where we are at one stage or another in our lives. We want to
• 27:38
  get out of where we are, or just go to another place, or
• 27:41
  go on a vacation or go on an adventure on something. When we said
• 27:45
  before, it's uh, it's it's remarkable. You're right, but that is
• 27:48
  the big bang of the entire Star Wars universe. I would agree with you.
• 27:52
  And it's interesting because you know, why do you go to movies to
• 27:56
  do the same thing, all right, to experience something that you can necessarily
• 28:02
  experience in real life or if it's a realistic film, you know, experiencing
• 28:06
  real life on steroids or something like that. But you know, to me,
• 28:10
  it's as much a film about the the about filmmaking as it is anything
• 28:12
  else. And then you touch on a really important point. It's something I
• 28:17
  discussed, you know, quite a bit in my book, but not to
• 28:19
  plug the book, but it really kind of cuts to the heart of how
• 28:22
  cinema communicates story and it's that idea that scene is silent, and the reason
• 28:30
  it works is because it's silent, and we the audience then insert whatever.
• 28:36
  You know, we could be thinking, oh, yeah, Luke is checking
• 28:37
  out, why are their two sons? And we could think that and it
• 28:41
  would work, or you know, obviously what the filmmaker intended, which is
• 28:45
  just longing for something. But notice, because it's silent, we put our
• 28:49
  thoughts in there and as a result, whatever works for you maybe different than
• 28:56
  works for me, but we both have the opportunity to do it as opposed
• 29:00
  to having yeah, other than having the on the nose dialogue and like,
• 29:06
  wow, I wish I had some adventure like which we see sometimes in Syriac's
• 29:10
  like no, just shush, shush, keep quiet. We were talking before
• 29:12
  we came on about finding inspiration or story elements from different weirdest places ever,
• 29:22
  and I was like, oh, I still remember this David Fincher commercial because
• 29:26
  I loved the David Fincher. I've studied all his commercial work and his music
• 29:30
  video work, and some of the stuff that he does is you know,
• 29:33
  they think of a lot of people think of him as a visual storyteller and
• 29:37
  you know, very technical, and his films are aesthetically you know, surgical
• 29:41
  almost, they really are, and they don't give them enough credit for emotion
• 29:48
  and character development. I think that's you know, I mean you look at
• 29:51
  seven, or you look at Fight Club and things like that. But this
• 29:53
  commercial was so simple. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 30:03
  and now back to the show, which was clear for Lonnie. For
• 30:08
  Lonnie, I think her name is. She was the girl from Men in
• 30:11
  Black and Not Men in Black Meet Joe Black. And she's sitting in a
• 30:15
  restaurant with an older gentleman, a good looking older gentleman, in a fancy
• 30:19
  restaurant, and she says, you much younger green. She must be in
• 30:22
  her early twenties, he must be in his probably late forties, early fifties.
• 30:26
  And they're having dinner, and then all of a sudden, it's raining
• 30:29
  outside, and there's a big glass window in the restaurant, and this young,
• 30:33
  strapping young guy who has desperation in his face, starts very allah the
• 30:38
  graduate banging on the glass, going you know, hi, dockhem, and
• 30:45
  everyone's like, oh my god, who is this? And she sees it,
• 30:48
  and she's like making the decision at that point, do I stay with
• 30:49
  this older, stable guy or do I go on this crazy adventure with this
• 30:55
  young one with I have no idea what's going to happen. And she decides
• 30:57
  to get up, goes outside, They kiss, they embrace in the rain.
• 31:02
  Everyone starts clapping, and of course then you pan down and go Levi's
• 31:06
  But the story was there and I put all everything I just explained to you,
• 31:11
  I made that up, meaning like I don't know who that get.
• 31:14
  That could have been her father, but I don't think it was, you
• 31:18
  know, I actually implanted the storyline in there, and I added the whole
• 31:23
  thing like this this guy. That guy could be super rich, that kid
• 31:26
  and he could be very successful. I don't know, but the way he
• 31:30
  left it open like that, you implant your own emotions there and your own
• 31:33
  storyline and just like the two moons in look yeah, and that's and that
• 31:40
  to me is the power of cinema. It's that ability, and it's one
• 31:44
  of those things we you know, talk about like a novelist for instance,
• 31:48
  they'll give you a story and you supply the visuals, you know, based
• 31:52
  on their words. Film we're just the opposite. We're giving you the visuals
• 31:57
  and asking you to start assembly that story, put the story together. Now
• 32:02
  obviously everything is is highly guided and and just like in the in the commercial,
• 32:08
  but it's that idea no no no, if you want to create meaning
• 32:12
  it's done by the person watching it and heavily guided by the filmmaker, who's
• 32:16
  you know, presenting these two images and saying, all right, put them
• 32:20
  together. And that's uh, it's it's an interesting thing. That's one of
• 32:24
  the things. Not that it's not, you know, an interview about Star
• 32:28
  Wars I suppose, but going back, Star Wars was a very experiential film.
• 32:31
  And think about it, Lucas creates an entire galaxy by from a bunch
• 32:37
  of dudes sitting around in rubber suits in a bar, and you imply,
• 32:42
  and we add all of that stuff to it. We're like, oh,
• 32:45
  yeah, where'd they come from? And what's their backstory and so forth,
• 32:47
  and so we start adding all these layers to it. It's a it's a
• 32:52
  it's a playground for your imagination to then start filling in all those pieces and
• 32:57
  then you watch the film to see what did I fill it incorrectly? I
• 33:00
  not fill it incorrectly and so forth, and so really masterful films, I
• 33:04
  think that's the craft. Usually a statement I say that gets me in trouble
• 33:09
  is a movie is not a story. It's evidence that a story is being
• 33:15
  told. Oh that's a great that's actually really interesting live looking at it.
• 33:20
  That's can you can you dig into that a little bit because I'm curious and
• 33:22
  where you're going with that. Well, it's the idea that so much of
• 33:28
  what we do in film makes storytelling and cinematic narrative is indirect. And you
• 33:35
  even touched on it, you know, talking about, oh, you don't
• 33:37
  write on the notes, Well why not? That'll tell the story the fastest
• 33:39
  way possible and you can pack more story in m but it clunks. It
• 33:44
  almost always clunks. And then we go, okay, why you know,
• 33:49
  why don't we want to be told these things? What do we want to
• 33:52
  do here? And we want to figure it out. We want to figure
• 33:54
  it out for ourselves, and so much of cinematic narrative is indirect. And
• 34:00
  it led me to the conclusion like, oh wait, we're not. It's
• 34:06
  not a pure story in the sense that we're sitting down around a campfire and
• 34:10
  you know, telling you these things, but rather we're showing you all of
• 34:15
  these events and allowing you, the audience member, to put it together in
• 34:19
  a very Once again, it's guided, it's very guided, but putting it
• 34:22
  together a way to come up with the story collaboratively film is in Oh man,
• 34:28
  it drives me crazy when people say oh, films a passive medium.
• 34:30
  No, it's not interactive, is it. Yeah, it's And the joystick
• 34:35
  isn't here. You know, the joystick is in here, it's in your
• 34:37
  mind. And you start and you start watching the film saying, oh,
• 34:42
  okay, well why'd they say that? And so forth, and then the
• 34:45
  film explores those things. Really smart films are are interactive by Nietzschure, right,
• 34:50
  And you start thinking about subtext. I mean, the subtext is not
• 34:53
  a subtext is not efficient, That is not efficient in the story tell like
• 34:58
  you can't you can't when you're telling a story around the campfire. Subtext is
• 35:01
  a difficult thing to have a conversation about, like you can't be like she
• 35:06
  said, clean the dishes, But what she really meant to tell her husband
• 35:09
  is that you don't love me anymore so, and that's hard to say,
• 35:15
  but it's so much easier in the visual medium to say, because of acting,
• 35:22
  because of environment, because of those nuances that very difficult to put in
• 35:28
  the word, extremely difficult to put in the rint word. But in cinema
• 35:31
  you're allowed to do that. And again we'll go back to that scene with
• 35:34
  the two moons. If you would have said that like, hey, I
• 35:38
  wish I had adventure, It doesn't have the same umph to it. If
• 35:45
  you would, just if you say the exact same thing in your head,
• 35:47
  because you feel like you're being pulled along, that you're part of this,
• 35:52
  you are luke. If someone tells you what they're feeling, you're not luke
• 35:57
  anymore. And that's where I think a lot of screenplays and films fail is
• 36:00
  that they don't give the audience the opportunity to identify and become that character.
• 36:08
  So you know, when we watch Indiana Jones, which now part five is
• 36:13
  being filmed as we speak, Hey man, I'm there. Why not I
• 36:17
  have to there? Look, you know, will will it? Will it
• 36:22
  nup the fridge? I don't know. But but when you're watching Raiders of
• 36:27
  the Lost Arc or Last Crusade or Temple of Doom, you're you're Indy.
• 36:32
  When you watch a James Bond movie, you're James Bond, you know,
• 36:37
  and you go along these adventures with these But the subtleties of what they say,
• 36:43
  how these I mean, Indiana Jones is full of subtexts. I mean
• 36:45
  every word he says almost some sort of subtext, And you know, oh
• 36:51
  my god, it's so amazing the way the way they crafted that again,
• 36:53
  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on that one, it's it's remarkable. But you're
• 36:59
  absolutely right. I really never kind of put it to words like you,
• 37:02
  just like how we've been having this discussion, and I hope people listening can
• 37:07
  really understand the power of the interactivity of the audience and only masters of the
• 37:13
  craft, both of screenwriting, but I think also of filmmaking because it turns
• 37:17
  into like there's only so much you can do on the page, and that
• 37:22
  it's then you have to give it over to the actors and the director and
• 37:24
  the day because some things happen on the day that you just can't write.
• 37:29
  So it is that collaborative art form. But is those masters like Hitchcock.
• 37:32
  I mean, I mean, he's one of the ones that everyone has to
• 37:36
  watch. But Hitchcock is one of those filmmakers that he even said it,
• 37:39
  He's like, I wish one day that I could just have a machine that
• 37:43
  I could touch a button and hit that in motion, and touch a button
• 37:45
  and hit that motion, play the audience like a piano. And that's what
• 37:50
  his films. I mean, you go back and watch Psycho. I mean,
• 37:54
  it's just a masterclass it all. I mean, moment there's a pier
• 37:59
  in north By, north Way, there's that period for for Togo that he
• 38:01
  had like six or seven his his his, his time. They're all masterful.
• 38:07
  They're just so masterful and you just go along with it and they still
• 38:09
  hold up even though they're older films and things like that, but the storytelling
• 38:14
  still holds up. And you're you're along for the ride. I mean you
• 38:16
  are, you are Oh god, what's her name in the shower? Jane
• 38:23
  Janetly you are Janet Lee. And when that figure comes in with the with
• 38:30
  the you feel like you've been you've been stabbed. It's fascinated to watch that
• 38:36
  sequence. It's so amazing to watch. Yeah, and with and within the
• 38:40
  context of the film itself because back in the day, Janet Lee was the
• 38:45
  star. Oh there's that, of course, and of course, you know,
• 38:50
  no movie kills off its star halfway through and then you're going, Okay,
• 38:53
  well, who do I hang out with now? Because you know,
• 38:57
  what's name Anthony Perkins? Like, do I hang out with this weird no?
• 39:01
  Yeah? And you don't have a choice. You have to. And
• 39:05
  it's like, Okay, well, I don't have a choice. I have
• 39:07
  to this is now my main character. So just the the guts. Uh.
• 39:10
  That was just the brilliance of the film in my mind because it played
• 39:15
  with your expectations. You're like, Okay, she'll somehow get out of it.
• 39:16
  No, no, she's gone. What do we do now? But
• 39:22
  there's but there's something to be said there about the curiosity aspect of it.
• 39:25
  Now now you're in. Now, I'm hooked. You are engaged because all
• 39:30
  your preconceived notions have been thrown out the window. And Hitchcock knew that when
• 39:36
  he was making that film. He knew that you thought that she's the star,
• 39:40
  she's going to keep going, and he completely flipped it. And now
• 39:44
  you're just like, wait a minute. If they could kill off the main
• 39:46
  actress, they can kill anybody off at any moment to the rest of this
• 39:50
  film. So I need to pay attention now. And then Wes Craven did
• 39:54
  it as well with Scream. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 39:59
  spawn, sir, And now back to the show when he killed off Drew
• 40:07
  Barrymore at the beginning of the before like you know, she's the best I
• 40:10
  was going to go to arguably arguably the biggest star in that movie. She's
• 40:15
  like, oh yeah, it's a Drew Barrymore movie, and she's on the
• 40:16
  poster and everything, and first ten minutes you're like, holy cow, it's
• 40:23
  I I call it now the Walking Dead effect, which is the when you
• 40:28
  watch the series The Walking Dead. Uh, and there's other series that kill
• 40:31
  off people. I think games are thrown. I never watched games with throw.
• 40:35
  But there's no one safe that that, no one safe thing keeps the
• 40:39
  audience at edge, especially if it's you've especially in long long form like television
• 40:45
  or streaming, that you can emotionally attached over, you know, you know
• 40:51
  sometimes seasons after seasons and you're like, oh my god, they're gone now,
• 40:54
  but knowing that at any moment it's gone. That's such a horrorful storytelling
• 41:00
  technique. It is, and it says that in motion. So now we're
• 41:05
  like, okay, nobody's safe, and you have to watch because you're not
• 41:07
  quite sure what could possibly happen next. And it's kind of like the I
• 41:13
  guess example from high school music, like the Surprise Symphony. Yeah, and
• 41:17
  you get this little bang. It's like, well, okay, and you
• 41:21
  never know when it's going to show up again, so you have to you
• 41:22
  always create that that level of tension in there, and films do the same
• 41:25
  thing, or can do the same thing if you want to go there.
• 41:28
  And that's why I love Bohemian Rhapsody, maybe the craziest, the craziest pop
• 41:35
  song ever written. And and you just sit there like, wait, is
• 41:37
  that an opera? Is that now? It's rock? Now? Is now?
• 41:40
  It's a ballad? Like what's going on? But you know that's we'll
• 41:45
  go That's another world we can go down later. But it's very, very
• 41:47
  similar though. It's like you were completely don't know what's going to happen.
• 41:52
  And if you, as a screenwriter can, as a storyteller, can keep
• 41:57
  your audience guessing in a and a thriller and a whore and an action,
• 42:02
  you will work for the rest of your life and you will always get paid
• 42:07
  to write. The bottom line. If you can keep the audience or the
• 42:10
  reader or the whoever's consuming your content on not knowing what's happening next, you
• 42:20
  want you want? Because we're so educated, for better or worse, everything's
• 42:23
  been done. It's so hard to surprise us. That's why when we are
• 42:28
  surprised with a twist. You know, remember sixth Sense Jesus Christ, when
• 42:32
  six Sens came out, I mean, one of the greatest, one of
• 42:37
  the greatest twists endings of all time. You built the entire career off of
• 42:39
  that. Now he's like, shit, I have to have to do twist
• 42:43
  endings all the time now, you know. It's it's like he had to
• 42:46
  build his career around twist endings. But that was one of the greatest twist
• 42:51
  endings ever in your as an audience member, if you can. And that's
• 42:57
  why that movie, I mean, it's essentially it's essentially a drama slash ghost
• 43:01
  story. Not really particularly scary, some scary parts, but it's essentially a
• 43:06
  drama. And we're all like, okay, we're all walking down the story.
• 43:09
  This is very nice inn but when that thing happens, everything from that
• 43:14
  moment before gets rewound in your head and you're just like, oh, wait
• 43:19
  a minute, and it just blows people's minds. And it was just remarkable
• 43:22
  as a storyteller. I have such respect for I mean, what he's been
• 43:25
  able to do and his career as a writer is remarkable. Well, and
• 43:30
  it kind of taps into the idea you know, of you know, a
• 43:34
  really good ending is not I didn't see that coming. A really good ending
• 43:37
  is I should have seen that coming. And you go back and watch.
• 43:42
  So, for instance, you go back and you know, watch sixth Cents
• 43:45
  like it's all there. Oh you just And that goes back to that idea
• 43:52
  of allowing the audience to put these elements together. It kind of goes back
• 43:54
  way back to the day you know, Billy Wilder you said, Ernest which
• 44:00
  you know, said let the audience add two plus two. They'll love you
• 44:02
  for it. And so it's the idea that we're sitting here looking at this
• 44:07
  movie as as an audience member, sticking with six cents for a little bit
• 44:10
  and going, okay, yeah, there's poor kid he's seeing and all the
• 44:15
  clues are there that oh yeah, Bruce willis once again spoiler you know,
• 44:20
  ain't among us these days. But we don't put it together that way because
• 44:24
  the way the film is presented. And then when you get the twists,
• 44:28
  that's the key you needed to understand to then go back and look, oh,
• 44:30
  no, wonder she didn't talk to him. He's not there because only
• 44:35
  the kid Hayley Joe Osmon whatever the kid's name is. Only he can see
• 44:37
  dead people. And so it's it's playing with those audience expectations and saying,
• 44:44
  okay, here's it's. Think of a movie as kind of like a Q
• 44:45
  and A session and think about the questions the audience is going to have and
• 44:49
  how they're going to be assembling the information you're presenting to them, and then
• 44:52
  you start to play around with it and allow them to draw the conclusion that
• 44:55
  oh, this isn't quite right, and then you can you can flip it
• 44:59
  on them and create those reversals and create that idea of unpredictability. It's really
• 45:02
  hard we think about it. You know, movie audiences today in particular are
• 45:08
  really savvy and they're like, okay, yeah, I see it coming.
• 45:12
  And if they could see that ending coming, usually not a good thing.
• 45:15
  But the irony is they also want the ending they want. So, you
• 45:20
  know, if I have I'll go back to Star Wars because any easy example,
• 45:24
  if I go back and Luke is there in the trench, you know,
• 45:29
  and use the false Luke let go, you know, and and Vader's
• 45:31
  like I have, you know, and blast him, and Luke just kind
• 45:35
  of goes and vaporizes, Well, he sucks. It'll be like this is
• 45:39
  the worst movie ever. You've got to be kidding me. And the Empire
• 45:43
  goes and blows up the Death Star and or blows up you know, the
• 45:45
  rebel base. We want that ending. We want the hero to be triumphant.
• 45:51
  We just don't want to see it coming because then it becomes predictable.
• 45:55
  So how do you create the predictable ending the ending we want, but make
• 46:00
  it unpredictable? And that's really the art of it. Well, I was
• 46:02
  just watching I was just watching The Handsmaid's Tale, and we're, as of
• 46:07
  this recording, getting towards the end of season four. I'm not gonna give
• 46:10
  any spoiler alerts, but something happens to a character there who's a bad character,
• 46:15
  and we're all going like, this guy needs to get his up,
• 46:19
  his coming up and uh in one way, shape or form. And then
• 46:22
  as you start seeing the episode, and we've been there four seasons built up
• 46:25
  so this, I mean, we've built this up and we're waiting for the
• 46:29
  character and something a twist happens for a second, like oh wait a minute,
• 46:32
  and our and our main character is doing something and you're like, oh
• 46:37
  wait, a minute, and then I literally was sitting there with my wife
• 46:39
  looking at and like and we're both trying to figure it out. We're like,
• 46:43
  is she gonna do? This? Is actually happen? Where's this going
• 46:45
  to go? Where are they? What's going on? And we're like,
• 46:47
  and we're so savvy. I mean, I'm probably a little bit more savvy
• 46:51
  you know, story analysts than both you know people, because I do this
• 46:55
  with her living so and my wife has just been with me for sees become
• 47:00
  one as well and shoe catch stuff. So we're like, this this we
• 47:04
  didn't see it coming exactly the way it happened, like we've looked. Oh
• 47:09
  and then afterwards you're like it was perfect, Oh my god, it was
• 47:15
  cool. Perfect. Well, like Breaking Bad. The end of Breaking Bad,
• 47:16
  you're like, you want, how do you end that. I'm not
• 47:19
  gonna break I'm not gonna spoil it for anyone, but you should anyone listening
• 47:22
  to this should have seen Breaking Bad at this point the entire series, but
• 47:24
  that ending, you're like, how do you end arguably one of the best
• 47:29
  shows ever written, ever ever produced, arguably some of the best storytelling ever,
• 47:35
  how do you end it? And didn't see it coming at all,
• 47:38
  completely original way they ended it, and it was so satisfying. And that's
• 47:43
  why endings of shows are so bad, because it's just it's just so hard.
• 47:49
  Yeah, it is. Well, you know, you think about TV,
• 47:51
  it's built to extend, you know, it's built to sustain, and
• 47:54
  it's not really built. You know, we can talk a lot about you
• 47:58
  know, film, at least the origins of film, they're really meant to
• 48:01
  be self contained, not you know, franchises, sequels and all that stuff
• 48:06
  disregarded. But it's meant to be a self contained story, whereas TV is
• 48:09
  meant to be a sustaining story goes on and on and on and so sometimes
• 48:14
  those endings, particularly for TV shows, are really hard because the medium is
• 48:19
  built differently, or at least the approach to the medium is built a little
• 48:22
  bit differently. Now, you you were talking to me off camera about this
• 48:27
  old PlayStation game called crash Bandicoot and that you found some gem of something in
• 48:36
  that in regards to story, can you please elaborate, Yeah, sure,
• 48:39
  a bit of a backstory to it. Well, my son was really little
• 48:45
  and I was playing this crash Bandicoot. He loved a game, he loved
• 48:47
  to watch it and watch me play this thing. But it wasn't just like
• 48:52
  the game is its entirety. It was a single level called the Great Gate
• 48:55
  of All Things and check it out if you haven't seen, watch I walk
• 49:00
  through on YouTube or what have you. But this one level, and I'd
• 49:02
  play the level and He's like again again, So I'd have to play the
• 49:06
  level again again again, Okay, and you know what you do for your
• 49:08
  kids, like all right, So I'll play it again and again and again.
• 49:13
  And he never got tired of this single level of this game. I
• 49:15
  must have played that thing. I don't know hundreds of times. I'd play
• 49:20
  with the controller upside down. I'd play with my eyes closed, you know,
• 49:22
  because I'm so bored to the stupid level. Right. And then there
• 49:27
  was this one little sequence in there where and if you're familiar with the game,
• 49:31
  there's a platform and it's tilted and there's this green moss stuff on the
• 49:37
  side of it, and then a little platform down below it. So it
• 49:40
  kind of looks a little bit like that, and the green moss stuff is
• 49:45
  flippery. And this may sound like the stupidest thing ever, but it hit
• 49:51
  me in that moment that, oh we were just taught a rule. Green
• 49:53
  moss is flippery. Now it's a video game, so very simple rule.
• 49:59
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 50:06
  the show. But we were taught at without steaks because there was a platform
• 50:12
  for you to land on so that you would be safe. Now imagine if
• 50:15
  you just slipped off and died, it'd be like a stupid game. I'm
• 50:19
  not gonna go back. Started over and what hit me in that mine?
• 50:23
  And then the next little sequence there they show you that, oh you can
• 50:27
  slip backwards, you can slip forward, and it kind of explores the idea
• 50:29
  of this green mos stuff. Of all things, But what dawned on me
• 50:34
  in that moment watching that thing, or the epiphany I had, was,
• 50:37
  oh, that was a storytelling element if we were to translated to film,
• 50:42
  that was set up without steaks. It was introduced before the game needed it
• 50:46
  and could then explore it. And then the connection for me and of all
• 50:52
  things, I was watching a duel like Spielberg TV movie and there's a shot
• 50:58
  close to the end, it's a really wide shout of the overturned and there's
• 51:01
  just a single wheel spinning and then they punch in for a close up all
• 51:07
  of that wheel, and I realized, oh, that's the same thing.
• 51:10
  That element was planted in the story to achieve the effect of just that wheel
• 51:15
  spinning at the end. And so the conclusion I drew from it was every
• 51:21
  element in the story has to be laid in before the story itself needs it.
• 51:29
  In other words, you put these elements in as storytelling devices before you
• 51:34
  actually need them to affect the narrative, affect the plot, affect the characters.
• 51:37
  And so that was the conclusion I drew, and it led to all
• 51:39
  sorts of good stuff that came out of that simple little moment there with green
• 51:44
  Moss and a crash Bandica game from two thousand and one or whatever. Yeah,
• 51:47
  and that's actually really profound. It's a really powerful tool that good screenwriters
• 51:53
  and good storytellers need to do. And if I'm maybing it back to mister
• 51:58
  Jimmy Cameron, if you go back to the scene in Aliens where Ripley at
• 52:04
  the beginning of the movie says, hey, I can I can drive that
• 52:07
  loader. I'm second level certified or something like that, and they'll like,
• 52:12
  go ahead, and they get into and she gets into that loader, and
• 52:14
  she starts walking around, starts moving boxes and stuff. There's the plant,
• 52:17
  right that's the plant. That's the plant right there. Because at the end,
• 52:22
  when she goes and fights the queen and arguably says the greatest line in
• 52:27
  sci fi history, get away from her, you bitch. Uh, it
• 52:31
  all came together at that moment, and it's all about that set up,
• 52:37
  payoff, set up, payoff. And if every good movie they'll drop a
• 52:42
  little nugget in or they'll focus on, you know, the the the letter
• 52:46
  opener on the desk for no reason at the beginning, and then towards the
• 52:51
  end, I'm like, that's what kills the bad guy, you know.
• 52:53
  So that is something that screenwriters really should in storytellers and directors really should focus
• 53:00
  on trying to do those plants and you know, set up reveal, set
• 53:02
  up, reveal, set up revealf And that's a yeah, And that's exactly
• 53:07
  the conclusion I do as well, just the power of that technique. But
• 53:12
  it's not just the elements within the plot itself, the content. It's actually
• 53:15
  how you how you tell the story itself, the devices you're going to use
• 53:21
  to convey the narrative, so to connect crash Baticude of all Things to Eternal
• 53:27
  Sunshine on the Spotless Mind. If you've ever seen that phone, it's a
• 53:30
  complete direct line. I completely see it, sir, Thank you. Yeah,
• 53:35
  we probably just lost to all the rest of your audience. But no,
• 53:37
  no, if you look at it early on in that film, they're
• 53:42
  going to show you all these different devices. So you have that's scene with
• 53:45
  Jim Carrey walking out of Barnes and Noble and into the living room of his
• 53:49
  friends and what at all frickod scene. But then you go, well,
• 53:54
  okay, they could have just cut you cut to the flashback of him in
• 53:57
  there with what's your name, Clementine, and then cut back to the to
• 54:01
  the living room, but they didn't, and you realize, oh, they're
• 54:05
  planning that as a storytelling device. In other words, be on the lookout
• 54:09
  because we're going to be messing with your perceptions in this movie, and we're
• 54:13
  going to be blending things like that and just cluing in the audience before the
• 54:16
  story needed to do it. And then once you've planted that device, then
• 54:21
  you can now use it because it's now familiar to the audience. And so
• 54:24
  that's what Crash Banditico did with Green Moss. But the key was that little
• 54:30
  platform that was there were no stakes to it, and it was just implanting
• 54:35
  that as a rule in the story. And so really good films they actually
• 54:38
  teach you how to consume the film, how to interact with the film.
• 54:44
  And back to what you were saying about plant playoff or set up in payoff,
• 54:49
  that's allowing the audience to interact with it. In other words, yeah,
• 54:52
  you're on board with me. You caught my setup, and now you
• 54:57
  catch in my payoff and informs the audience cluse the audience in that, oh
• 55:01
  I get this movie, I understand it, I'm with it, and so
• 55:05
  then you start looking for those elements and it just adds to the entertainment.
• 55:07
  So it really is about teaching the audience. Yeah. So then and we
• 55:10
  can go back to Star Wars again with the plant and payoff, which is
• 55:15
  the force. You set the force up so much. George sets the force
• 55:20
  up so much at the beginning and throughout the film about the force to force.
• 55:23
  The force. The jedis the force, the force. And at the
• 55:28
  end when he's down that he's about to shoot and he's using his technology,
• 55:31
  he's like, use the full sloop. That's the moment that everybody goes,
• 55:37
  Oh my god, it's the power is not outside, the power is within
• 55:42
  myself. And that is such a powerful message and it's so subtle, and
• 55:49
  it's and it's wrapped around a you know, a serial sci fi action movie,
• 55:55
  but that message hits so close to home for humanity that any struggles that
• 56:02
  we have, if we actually look inside, we will find the answer.
• 56:07
  That's what that is, and that's what the force is, and that's why
• 56:10
  people you know, there's actual people who run the religions around Jedi and all
• 56:15
  that stuff, which there's there's books, there's the Jedi Bible, and there's
• 56:19
  all this kind of stuff. I mean, I'm speaking from people who obviously
• 56:22
  aren't watching this. I have a life sized Yoda behind me. Obviously everyone
• 56:24
  knows that I'm a Star Wars fan. So but I do not go that
• 56:27
  far. I've never dressed up, not that there's anything wrong with it,
• 56:30
  but I've never done anything. I've never gone that far. But that concept
• 56:35
  is so so so powerful and one of the reasons why that film. And
• 56:39
  you obviously teach a class in this, So are you on board with what
• 56:42
  I'm saying? Oh, absolutely, Yeah, it's that universal aspect of it.
• 56:47
  No, I've never been a you know, on a desert planet,
• 56:51
  a in a galaxy far far away, and my dad isn't Darth Vader spoiler,
• 56:58
  but I can I can relate to that notion that there's some there's something
• 57:04
  else there and that that ability is inside you. And even Vader has that
• 57:07
  line in the original Star Wars. You know, don't be too proud of
• 57:09
  the technological arory constructive. Yes, it's not about the technology, dude,
• 57:14
  It's about believing in yourself and then diving into kind of Lucas's background and what
• 57:20
  led to the making of Star Wars. You see, this is a very
• 57:22
  personal story that's laid inside this huge you know you death stars and all that
• 57:28
  other stuff. It's at it's heart, it's a personal story, and so
• 57:31
  I think it gets the best of both worlds. Yeah, it's about his
• 57:34
  dad. It's about his relationship with his father. I mean, that's what
• 57:36
  he said very much, So that's what I mean, That's what Yeah,
• 57:38
  it's what Star Wars is about. It's a personal story. So there's that
• 57:43
  added level as well that you can sense there's an authenticity there in that relationship
• 57:49
  with with Darth Vader. And the best thing about it is that set up
• 57:53
  isn't paid off until the second movie because we don't know that he's his father.
• 57:59
  We don't know that until and arguably the greatest twist ending in movie history,
• 58:06
  you know, as a success aside is Empire Shark's back. Obviously,
• 58:12
  Oh no, that that's that's money, and it's like holy smokes. Now,
• 58:15
  ironically, at least my understanding is that wasn't the original plan. Yeah,
• 58:22
  and that sort of came about. It resolved a lot of story issues
• 58:24
  and it's like, oh yeah, let's make him his dad. It works
• 58:28
  perfectly, and indeed it did, but originally he wasn't the dad. But
• 58:34
  then you go, okay, Darth Vader, dark father or whatever. But
• 58:38
  I think, you know, looking at that, and it really is a
• 58:43
  telling moment, and it's one that I I kind of think about a lot.
• 58:45
  In that one particular class is when Obi Wan you know, Luke asks
• 58:51
  him, you know what about my dad? You know, Andy's like,
• 58:54
  well, you know, Vader betrayed and murdered your father. And there's this
• 58:58
  little pause there and I asked my students, you know, what's so we
• 59:01
  want thinking right there, and almost all of them it's like, hey,
• 59:05
  he's about to lie. But the original intent was no, it was just
• 59:08
  something. It was a painful episode. At least my understanding that Lucas didn't
• 59:13
  quite have that father thing figured out that came about as a result of writing
• 59:16
  imparsrespect right. And that's the thing too, is things that we see in
• 59:21
  cinema history that are like, well, that's exactly the way it was supposed
• 59:23
  to be. Wasn't at all the way the initial people were, the initial
• 59:30
  creators were thinking of. I was talking to somebody the other day who was
• 59:32
  telling me you should read the first draft of Back to the Future and then
• 59:37
  read the shooting draft about it a completely different movie. Did you ever read
• 59:40
  the first draft that Back to the Future. I've not read the first draft.
• 59:44
  You should send it to me totally. So the first draft, there
• 59:47
  is no clock tower. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
• 59:58
  And now back to the show. There is no lightning. They were
• 1:00:04
  going to go to our nuclear power plant to recharge the car to go back
• 1:00:08
  in time. Oh wow, that was where that was a whole thing.
• 1:00:12
  But then the studio said, hey, guys, we haven't got the budget
• 1:00:15
  for this, you're gonna have to do it on the back lot. And
• 1:00:16
  then Zamechis and Gale, both the bobs both looked. But there's a clock
• 1:00:20
  tower. I don't know, let lightning hit it and that's enough energy.
• 1:00:23
  All right, let's do that. A brilliant solution. It's a much better
• 1:00:29
  solution. But that's the thing. And a lot of times there is kiss
• 1:00:32
  me that happens with with storytelling and things that I mean. Obviously, the
• 1:00:39
  one of the great scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark is that whole scene
• 1:00:43
  where this guy, you know, the wheeling the knife and and there was
• 1:00:47
  I think Spielberg said that they shot it like six or seven times. There
• 1:00:51
  was a full action sequence to finally Harrison just like pulled out a gun and
• 1:00:54
  shot him. And we're like, well, that's the take. Why didn't
• 1:00:57
  we figure that out before? That wasn't on the page, But on the
• 1:01:00
  day it just made the most sad It's for one of the best laughs of
• 1:01:02
  the entire movie. Oh yeah, it totally takes what works. We're expecting
• 1:01:07
  this big, huge fight sequence and if I recall correctly, like I think
• 1:01:12
  Arison forre was sick with stomach flue. Like the folks almost set were sick,
• 1:01:15
  so we couldn't really do it, and oh, what an elegant solution.
• 1:01:19
  And it kind of goes back to that whole idea of limitations fostering creativity
• 1:01:22
  and coming up with a much more creative solution than what we intended, because,
• 1:01:27
  like he we could show you all this, but you know, just
• 1:01:29
  because we can show do I mean we should And I think the original Star
• 1:01:32
  Wars benefited from that in the sense that I can't show you. I don't
• 1:01:37
  have the budget to show you the entire galaxy, and so as a result,
• 1:01:40
  I'm going to show you little snippets of it, which then allowed the
• 1:01:43
  audience to fill all that in. And you know, I think when we
• 1:01:46
  look back at that some of these craft films from you know, back in
• 1:01:50
  the day that were really well crafted, but they had all these limitations to
• 1:01:52
  what they could show. That was indeed exactly what they created was a place
• 1:01:58
  for audiences to put the to add to the story, to to interact with
• 1:02:01
  it, and so forth. And so you know today and even Lucas talked
• 1:02:07
  a little bit about it. He's like, yeah, sometimes I have gotten
• 1:02:10
  my vision on the screen, and nobody really much cared for it, okay,
• 1:02:15
  but to me it was it was always, uh, you know,
• 1:02:16
  when you George Luis, you can do that. But to me, it
• 1:02:21
  was like, oh, this is cutting against what cinema does best, which
• 1:02:23
  is creating these moments and allowing us to find meeting in them. When we
• 1:02:28
  provide the meeting as filmmakers. When we complete the picture, we we kind
• 1:02:32
  of nuke the audience. We removed part of the entertainment value of it because
• 1:02:37
  it's your vision and not our vision. It kind of goes back, Gosh,
• 1:02:44
  always are leading back to Star Wars today for some reason, you know,
• 1:02:47
  to the idea. I saw a picture of Lucas, you know,
• 1:02:51
  wearing a hand shot first T shirt. I'm like, dude, you don't
• 1:02:53
  want to changed it. Of course, hand shot first. But it's really
• 1:03:00
  funny because then you go, well, Lucas's version of Han, the character
• 1:03:07
  is very different than our version of Han, and we took and so we're
• 1:03:10
  like, Noah, the character would never do that. But then who are
• 1:03:13
  we, I mean, we're telling the dude who created the character, you
• 1:03:16
  know, like, no, your character would never do that. It's a
• 1:03:19
  co construction. It's us the audience saying no. And that's and that's why
• 1:03:22
  there's so that's why there's so much vitriol towards Lucas sometimes about Star Wars,
• 1:03:29
  because people are so passionate about the like the prequels were an abomination, how
• 1:03:34
  dare you? The re releases We're an abomination? How dare you? And
• 1:03:37
  there's just so much passion about it. And I always, I'm always from
• 1:03:40
  the from the school of thought. I'm like, it's his. It's his,
• 1:03:44
  man, It's like it's his painting. If he wants to change a
• 1:03:45
  couple of strokes, that's up to him. Man, that's not our like
• 1:03:50
  we can enjoy it. But but that's how it's it's it's his. It's
• 1:03:54
  his blessing and his curse. He was so good as engaging the audience,
• 1:03:59
  but now he's got to deal with the audience. Yeah, and then we
• 1:04:02
  go, that's not that's not how I put it together, dude. And
• 1:04:08
  so no matter what he does, it's wrong. And I think, you
• 1:04:10
  know, as a filmmaker, he's like, all right, well, you
• 1:04:12
  know that it is. But I want to tell these stories, so I
• 1:04:14
  will, and you know, got on them for that. But me at
• 1:04:17
  the end of the day. I think when something is so beloved, it
• 1:04:20
  becomes no, this is not how we built it, and you know,
• 1:04:26
  it's like, well, that wasn't my intended at all anyway as a filmmaker,
• 1:04:30
  So it is kind of a yeah, it was a blessing and a
• 1:04:32
  curse. I think you put it quite well, and I think that the
• 1:04:36
  going back a little bit to that Indiana Jones scene play, if you,
• 1:04:40
  as a screenwriter can play with the expectations of the audience so that perfect scene
• 1:04:44
  illustrates that so wonderfully that we're expecting a full blown fight sequence and then in
• 1:04:50
  a second we don't get it, and it's such a pleasurable surprise because you're
• 1:04:56
  playing with our expectations. Hitchcock did that with the cycles Psycho and killing off
• 1:05:00
  the lead actress. If you can play with the audience's expectations a bit in
• 1:05:05
  your writing, again, you will work forever. Yeah. It's it's you're
• 1:05:13
  messing with the audience. That's what you're doing, and you're you're taking and
• 1:05:16
  it's tough because you go, well, gosh, an audience has made up
• 1:05:18
  a bunch of individual human beings, all with different you know, thoughts and
• 1:05:21
  ideas and so all right, how do I do that? And you actually
• 1:05:25
  create an audience, you can you build an audience in your film. Films
• 1:05:30
  start off, as you know, the successful ones in my opinion, start
• 1:05:33
  off as being aiming at a very broad sensibility and then begin to narrow and
• 1:05:40
  become more self referential. They start teaching you things. Here's the teacher saying,
• 1:05:44
  films teach, but they start teaching you things inside the film, and
• 1:05:47
  those are those setups. And then the payoffs come along. And what happens
• 1:05:53
  is you turn a group of individuals into an audience, and by the end
• 1:05:58
  of the film the film, most films typically become increasingly self referential. They
• 1:06:02
  were relied back on things they've shown you earlier in the movie in order to
• 1:06:06
  pay off their endings. And so films that do that tend to do really
• 1:06:11
  well because it takes into account, Yeah, I've got a bunch of individual
• 1:06:14
  people who are watching this thing. I can't please them all by no stretch,
• 1:06:18
  and I'm going to be communicating in a very indirect way. But what
• 1:06:23
  you do is you start to guide the audience into that place where you want
• 1:06:27
  them to be, and the reaction you want to get out of them at
• 1:06:30
  the end, and so it's just inefficient. But that's the power of cinema,
• 1:06:35
  at least in my mind. Yeah, and there's are also some films
• 1:06:40
  that in some stories that age that are ahead of their time, and they
• 1:06:44
  age much better than they were when they first sort of initially were released.
• 1:06:46
  So a film like fight Club, which we're talking about the twist ending something
• 1:06:53
  that you need to again, it is such very much like the sixth Sense
• 1:06:56
  where you're like, oh my god, yeah, and they go back and
• 1:06:58
  show you all the things. They're like, you should have seen the signs,
• 1:07:00
  seen the signs comment she had seen a sign of But that story,
• 1:07:03
  I mean, if it's still one of my favorite films of all time,
• 1:07:06
  you watch it today, it holds, It holds so brilliantly, even though
• 1:07:11
  some of the technology might be dated as far as like you know, the
• 1:07:14
  computers and the windows and things like that. But the style of it,
• 1:07:18
  the storytelling power of that film, I still argue is probably it's probably his
• 1:07:25
  best, maybe other than The Social Network, because to make the Social network
• 1:07:30
  interesting is you're a master You're a master man. It's a story. Remember
• 1:07:34
  when that came out and you're like, oh, they're gonna tell the story
• 1:07:38
  of Facebook. Who cares about the story of Face? Man just cares?
• 1:07:42
  And look I mean good. No, I was going to say, yeah,
• 1:07:47
  both those films. I'm a superb. Actually, Social Network is another
• 1:07:50
  movie I teach in one of my classes. Just exquisitely structured. But if
• 1:07:56
  you watch it, it's going to use those setups and payoffs just brilliant like
• 1:08:00
  and it's going to use some of the techniques we were talking about here in
• 1:08:02
  terms of being able to insert us inside the mind of that character and how
• 1:08:08
  it does it. It just really flick and it's like, okay, yeah,
• 1:08:14
  there's the craft. When we look at film and in terms of being
• 1:08:17
  an interactive medium and involving the audience, it's a collaboration with the audience.
• 1:08:24
  It's a Q and A. Oh yeah, it is actually Q and A.
• 1:08:27
  You're always asking questions, Well, what is he going to do next?
• 1:08:29
  What is she going to do next? How are they going to meet?
• 1:08:30
  What's going to happen? Is the bad guy going to get away?
• 1:08:33
  Is that it's always these questions and answers going back and forth with the audience.
• 1:08:38
  Good movies are and I always like, I always like analyzing bad movies,
• 1:08:42
  like why doesn't this work? And you know, there's my favorite bad
• 1:08:46
  movie of all time is The Room. But the reason why the Room is
• 1:08:49
  so bad is that because I always I always say this is like when movies
• 1:08:55
  transcend, they're so bad that they transcend to good. That's one of those
• 1:09:01
  movies. There's just bad movies, and the Room is so bad that it
• 1:09:04
  becomes good. And if you analyze The Room, which it's hard because it's
• 1:09:11
  so bad, nothing works. Nothing works on a story level, on an
• 1:09:16
  acting level, on a craft level, none of it works. But the
• 1:09:21
  only reason why people stand in line to watch that movie, it's not because
• 1:09:26
  it's a bad movie, is because the creator was trying to create a good
• 1:09:30
  movie. And that's what came out the authenticity of because he didn't go out
• 1:09:35
  to make one of the greatest cult bad movies of all time. He truly
• 1:09:40
  believed he was making a masterpiece. And that's what made it so good.
• 1:09:45
  Oh yeah, that's the you know the Sharknado's of the world. Well,
• 1:09:49
  no, but Sharknado knew. But shark Nado knew what they were doing the
• 1:09:53
  second they came up with Sharks of the Tornado. We'll be right back after
• 1:09:58
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. So it's
• 1:10:05
  and they tweaking it. But like you don't see the people in lining outside
• 1:10:10
  to see Sharknado in theaters. You know, there's not people with fan clubs
• 1:10:14
  about Sharknado, like not really the room. It's a freaking worldwide phenomen Oh
• 1:10:19
  yeah, yeah, I mean we can go. I don't know if you
• 1:10:20
  remember Birdemic, remember that thing? I get Birdemic? There's that was conscious.
• 1:10:26
  Yeah, that was a conscious thing. And you can tell a troll
• 1:10:29
  too, you know when you watch Troll two, which I by the way,
• 1:10:31
  I felt my soul die a little bit after I watched that movie because
• 1:10:35
  it was so bad. I actually enjoyed the documentary about the movie much more
• 1:10:40
  than the movie itself. It was so bad it was I can't. I
• 1:10:42
  literally died a little bit when I saw that film. But that was a
• 1:10:45
  film that the director had a vision and was thinking of making the greatest,
• 1:10:50
  you know, horror troll movie of all time. Uh, and there's you're
• 1:10:55
  right, but it's it has to be unintentional. If you go in intentionally,
• 1:10:59
  it doesn't work yeah, and that was kind of the thing with Burdemic
• 1:11:02
  that's sort of like, ah, yeah, it just doesn't feel and it
• 1:11:05
  ties back into of all things truth, and it's an idea. You know,
• 1:11:12
  I have a filmmaker who's trying to capture truth, and you boy,
• 1:11:15
  the audience can sense it. And if we get the sense that nah,
• 1:11:18
  they're just trying, they're purposely trying to achieve this effect by making it bad,
• 1:11:23
  then it unwinds the truth of the film and then we walk or you
• 1:11:27
  don't get quite the same reaction that. Really, that's a really great way
• 1:11:30
  of looking at that. I never really thought about that, but that is
• 1:11:32
  I use the word authenticity, but it is truth. It is the truth.
• 1:11:35
  As a filmmaker, you have this kind of social contract with the audience
• 1:11:42
  that you're going to try to entertain them, and you're going to try to
• 1:11:44
  do it in the truth of the story. Obviously, Star Wars is not
• 1:11:47
  a true story, but there is truth in it. There is universal messages
• 1:11:55
  in it that ring true. That's why it's so universally beloved throughout the world.
• 1:12:00
  And we're still talking about a movie that's what yours is now, I
• 1:12:04
  mean, fifty over fifty is at over fifty years old at this point,
• 1:12:08
  almost almost fifty, almost fifty, yeah, almost fifty, yeah, seventy
• 1:12:11
  seven. So yeah, So it's almost fifty years old now. And I
• 1:12:15
  hate to say, there's not a lot of films that are at that age
• 1:12:18
  that people constantly talk about. Rocky would be another one, Like you can
• 1:12:21
  watch Rocky one right now, and if you don't know the story of Rocky,
• 1:12:28
  it hits. It hits so perfectly. And I mean, and that's
• 1:12:33
  another person we talked about Cameron earlier. Still Owe such an underrated writer.
• 1:12:39
  I mean, he created Rocky Rambo and so many other things. He writes
• 1:12:45
  almost anything he does. I mean, but Rocky is you know, Jesus
• 1:12:48
  Christus Rocky. Yeah, No, I mean, and many many films later,
• 1:12:53
  And when you look at it, it's it's all character. It's you
• 1:12:59
  feel for this guy who's just kind of down on his luck, and you
• 1:13:02
  know, it's not the underdog story. Sure that's a component that feeds into
• 1:13:05
  it, but it's just another character who's aspiring for something and just things aren't
• 1:13:12
  working out. But universal is that, uh, and then gets a shot
• 1:13:15
  and then gets a shot that nobody in the world would ever get Like,
• 1:13:17
  you get a shot at the title and you're a bum. It's like,
• 1:13:21
  it's like a filmmaker going Steven Spiueber just called you up, and you're going
• 1:13:25
  to direct a two hundred million dollar movie. Yeah, but I've never been
• 1:13:30
  on set, uh, like you know. And then that was called Project
• 1:13:33
  green Light, but not quite but you know what I mean. But that's
• 1:13:39
  the equivalent of oh my god. And he gets a shot, and he
• 1:13:44
  initially refuses it, as he should because he's not insane, right, and
• 1:13:48
  it's like, oh, it wouldn't be very good. I mean, he
• 1:13:51
  just you know, and he has to be persuaded that there's our reluctant hero
• 1:13:57
  and our you know, refusal of a call. Mythologically speaking, mm hmm.
• 1:14:00
  But but within the context of the film, it totally makes sense,
• 1:14:03
  and we understand why he would refuse, you know, because he doesn't see
• 1:14:06
  himself as being much of anything. But then he goes for it, which
• 1:14:12
  you know kind of becomes the message of the film, right and then and
• 1:14:15
  and he needs Mickey to convince him to do it. The guy who saw
• 1:14:20
  the potential in him, but he never saw it in himself. He needed
• 1:14:24
  that that mentory figure. It all goes back to Joseph Campbell. Uh,
• 1:14:27
  that mentory figure that brings him, brings that out of him, and even
• 1:14:31
  in his own mind, he has to tell himself the story. I'm like,
• 1:14:34
  I'm not going to beat the champion of the world. I'm not going
• 1:14:39
  to win this fight. My goal is to stand on my feet and go
• 1:14:45
  the distance. That is the only goal I have in this this entire endeavor.
• 1:14:48
  I just want to stand and stay at a distance with the champ.
• 1:14:51
  That's all I want to do. When I stay there, I want to
• 1:14:54
  prove that to myself. I know I'm not good enough to beat this guy
• 1:14:57
  because he's the world champion. And even that one little story arc because they
• 1:15:01
  originally had him winning. They shot both endings, they shot both endings,
• 1:15:05
  they shot that he won, but they felt that the more powerful one is
• 1:15:09
  that he didn't win, of course, setting up sequels upon sequels upon sequels,
• 1:15:14
  but also he did And and you're exactly right in the scene prior.
• 1:15:17
  You know, he's there talking with Adrian and he's like, you know,
• 1:15:20
  nobody' difficult at a distance with Creed. You know, he's kind of doing
• 1:15:25
  his thing, and he's setting up, here's my victory condition and then we
• 1:15:28
  see we see how it plays out. But yeah, it would have been
• 1:15:31
  it would have been hey me, and especially at that era, so we're
• 1:15:34
  talking nineteen seventy six, so you know, we're still coming out of kind
• 1:15:39
  of American New Wave when most of those films ended, you know, downer
• 1:15:42
  notes, and boy, that would have been I think a big pill for
• 1:15:45
  the audience to swallow then, which is to have him emerged triumphant, because
• 1:15:49
  like, come on, dude, it undermines Apollo's character because Apollo, you
• 1:15:54
  know, it's the master of Disaster, the Count of Monti Fisto. It's
• 1:15:58
  so good. You know, you're good. Yeah, and even you know,
• 1:16:02
  part of me for kind of rambling, but even thinking of the character
• 1:16:04
  names, when you look at him, you have a rock going against Apollo,
• 1:16:10
  a god brilliantly you're right. Never even thought of that, but you're
• 1:16:14
  absolutely right. He's Apollo the god, and he's a rock. Yeah,
• 1:16:18
  hard who's gonna win this? They're good. Rocks are good at lasting,
• 1:16:25
  uh and taking punishment and taking punish and taking punishment. Yeah, and of
• 1:16:30
  course, you know, I mean, he's more along lines of rocky Marciano
• 1:16:32
  from a historical perspective, but just the you look at those small small details
• 1:16:38
  in there and they just work so well for the story and it's just kind
• 1:16:42
  of one of those things where it all comes together. But no, they
• 1:16:44
  they're the right ending for that movie is to not have him win, but
• 1:16:46
  have him win his self respect. And the funny thing is is because I
• 1:16:49
  know Stallone wrote up until I think the fourth one, and I'm sure if
• 1:16:53
  he wrote the fifth one or not, but he might have, but up
• 1:16:56
  into the fourth one. On the it's an arc of if you look at
• 1:17:00
  the first four Rockies, the set up and reveal, the setup and payoff,
• 1:17:04
  set up and payoff, You've built up this relationship with Apollo where now
• 1:17:09
  mister T is the bad guy and Apollo needs to help him, and that
• 1:17:13
  builds up that relationship to the point where a Rocky four everyone goes I still
• 1:17:17
  remember everyone like they killed the pola, they killed the pole, and that
• 1:17:23
  just I remember that, so like I'm like, I mean, You're like,
• 1:17:25
  what, how, what's going on? Then everyone rushed out to see
• 1:17:29
  the evil Russian guy, you know, beat the I just break you.
• 1:17:32
  Dolph Loungern and arguably one of the best performances of his life. He has
• 1:17:36
  like six lines and it's so amazing. But yeah, it was, it
• 1:17:42
  was, It was perfection. Even on that level, Stolone understood the audience
• 1:17:47
  and what he had built with those characters and was able to just play with
• 1:17:53
  the expectations again, because if you would have told me after watching Rocky One,
• 1:17:58
  I'm like, oh, in two movies from now, Apollo is going
• 1:18:00
  to become his best friend and help him defeat a new villain. Oh and
• 1:18:04
  by the way, then he's gonna have to pay revenge because some other guy's
• 1:18:08
  going to get Like you would have said, no, that's impossible. So
• 1:18:11
  you're playing with those expectations again over the course of multiple movies, which we
• 1:18:15
  all hope to have at one point or another. We have the ability and
• 1:18:17
  and the privilege to be able to tell a story over so many movies.
• 1:18:21
  Oh absolutely. And then it ties in really to the idea of Apollo not
• 1:18:27
  being a villain. He's an antagonist. Apollo is the hero of a Polo's
• 1:18:31
  story always. Yeah, and that's you know, that ties into two really
• 1:18:36
  good villains or antagonists, I should say. And so then it's like,
• 1:18:42
  oh, what a great, What a wonderful way of kind of reconcilement because
• 1:18:45
  always liked Apollo, it was cool. And to have him now helping or
• 1:18:49
  working with a hero, it's like, oh, that's that's just beautiful.
• 1:18:54
  What a nice compromise, because no, he's not evil at all. He
• 1:18:59
  was trying to you know, he sort of took the fight lightly as he
• 1:19:01
  should have, and it displayed hubris, which the ancient Greeks would have busted
• 1:19:05
  his shops for. And you know, Rocky you know, emerges triumphant eventually,
• 1:19:13
  but he was never a villain. He was antagonist and kind of delves
• 1:19:16
  into a little bit of difference between the two and still unsavle knew that he
• 1:19:20
  was able to you know, prode that character with you know, a tragic
• 1:19:25
  arc, but certainly an arc nonetheless. And that's the thing. Even in
• 1:19:29
  Rocky one, Apollo he was never a bad guy. He never did anything
• 1:19:33
  bad. If anything, he was giving him opportunities, yes, for selfish
• 1:19:39
  reasons, because he wanted to to get his image to be better. That
• 1:19:44
  was the reason why he, you know, chose this ridiculous idea of bringing
• 1:19:46
  a nobody in to fight the champ. Can you imagine like in the days
• 1:19:49
  of Tyson when he was at his power, Like he just brings some bum
• 1:19:53
  off the street who maybe had three or four fights or whatever, get destroyed,
• 1:20:00
  will be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 1:20:05
  to the show. But the brilliance of it that he was not a villain,
• 1:20:12
  and this actually leans into another conversation, which is the part of a
• 1:20:16
  villain. And I think that bad villains and bad antagonists don't have good They
• 1:20:24
  generally don't have a good story that they're telling themselves. So the idea of
• 1:20:30
  the twisting the mustache at the trail at the train station while the woman is
• 1:20:34
  tied up and the hero's coming to save it, that story at the time
• 1:20:40
  was very like, oh my god. But now you look at it,
• 1:20:42
  I'm like, why is he tied her up? What's the purpose? Why
• 1:20:45
  are you doing? You're just being bad for bad? That's boring. Bad
• 1:20:48
  for bad is absolutely boring. But someone like Thanos, who you know,
• 1:20:56
  they built Thanos up over the course of ten years, oh you know,
• 1:21:00
  dude, dripping him down like little little little easter eggs throughout all those movies.
• 1:21:06
  Thanos as a villain because he is a bad guy but his story that
• 1:21:12
  he tells himself, he's trying to do good. He's like, look,
• 1:21:15
  the universe is overpopulated, and I think the solution for that it's just the
• 1:21:18
  skill half everybody off. You know. It's just very pragmatic. It's just
• 1:21:23
  a very pragmatic way of going about things. Is it wrong? Yes,
• 1:21:26
  But in his stories like this is the only way I see. I'm trying
• 1:21:29
  to do a greater good in a very bad way. And most villains throughout
• 1:21:32
  history you start looking at, you know, power hungry dictators and things like
• 1:21:36
  that, and even throughout cinema history, the best villains always have just misguided
• 1:21:45
  visions of something good, trying to solve a problem, but just misguided in
• 1:21:50
  solving that problem. Magneto in The X Men, you know, he's just
• 1:21:55
  like, you know, oh, there is no working with these people.
• 1:21:58
  We are the superior race and we're now going to take over the world as
• 1:22:02
  mutants, you know. But then Professor Actes's other sides like, no,
• 1:22:05
  we could work with them, we can help them, we can. So
• 1:22:09
  it's like that, that whole thing. But he's an interesting villain as opposed
• 1:22:13
  to just a villain like I just if he would have said I don't like
• 1:22:16
  anybody else. I think I'm just going to kill people. It's boring.
• 1:22:20
  It's boring. There has to be a better story. Yeah, And when
• 1:22:26
  we think about that, so we look at the like the protags and antagonists,
• 1:22:29
  we're looking at two sides of the theme. And when you have the
• 1:22:32
  villain who's on the other side just saying just being evil for the sake of
• 1:22:35
  evil, you kind of think then it's like, there's no other side of
• 1:22:42
  the theme being presented. I think it's just one sided, and that becomes
• 1:22:45
  propaganda and we sense it and we're like, oh, okay, it's just
• 1:22:49
  all right, And so it starts to lose those layers. And then that
• 1:22:53
  ties back in a little bit too with the idea that the shadow archetype.
• 1:22:57
  You know, when we talk talk about hero's journey inside of the shadow represents
• 1:23:01
  a fallen hero, someone who was trying to be good, and when we
• 1:23:06
  look at their characteristics, you'll see, oh, there, they have a
• 1:23:10
  lot of wonderful traits, and then there's this one component. Typically it's it's
• 1:23:15
  related to selfishness. In other words, they're in it for themselves rather than
• 1:23:18
  for the benefiting others, and there's that that dividing line. The example I
• 1:23:26
  like to use is Hannibal Lecture of all people, who's a shadow archetype When
• 1:23:31
  when you look at the character really deeply, who who turned and who turned
• 1:23:34
  into an anti hero? Yeah, and that relationships cool too, But it
• 1:23:42
  makes sense because it draws on their their fallen heroes, their heroes who started
• 1:23:45
  out on the path of good or on the path to help others and realized,
• 1:23:49
  hey, wait a second, I've got all these powers, nobody's doing
• 1:23:51
  stuff for me. Then they decide to go into it for themselves. But
• 1:23:58
  if we look at Hannibal Lecter as a character and rattle off a list of
• 1:24:00
  traits like, oh, he's intelligent, it's admirable. He's a good artist.
• 1:24:09
  If you recall, you know, all the drawings he drew, all
• 1:24:12
  those from memory, doctor lector, you know that kind of like he's a
• 1:24:15
  fine you know, I guess he could run like a recipe channel. That'd
• 1:24:18
  be kind of cool. But he's polite, he's exceedingly polite, well mannered,
• 1:24:25
  like well mannered, like, yeah, he doesn't like the fact that
• 1:24:28
  together multiple makes and in the next cell, you know, it was rude
• 1:24:30
  to clarice, so he had him swallow his own tongue. If we rattle
• 1:24:35
  this list of traits, it's like, holy smokes, guy sounds great,
• 1:24:39
  and then you lay in, oh, yeah, okay, he maybe had
• 1:24:43
  you know, he eats people, goes one thing, he eats that thing.
• 1:24:46
  Yeah, one thing, he eats people. And that's the brilliance of
• 1:24:48
  that character and of that story. It's that, Yeah, you love you
• 1:24:54
  love Hannibal. You know you, you absolutely are you. You are in
• 1:24:59
  love with a cannibal, a vicious killing handled cannibal. And that's the brilliance.
• 1:25:08
  So that when you can love a villain that much, so much so
• 1:25:13
  that the villain then eventually turns into a hero in other movies, in other
• 1:25:17
  movies, and even arguably in Silence of the Lambs, it's it's he's the
• 1:25:21
  one that helps catch the ultimate bad villain of Buffalo Bill, who has no
• 1:25:27
  redeeming value whatsoever, none like he He's a sick, just sick person who
• 1:25:31
  has obvious issues, and obvious issues to say the least, does a few,
• 1:25:38
  but there's no redeeming. There's nothing redeeming about him. He I mean,
• 1:25:42
  that's nothing. I think the only redeeming thing about Buffalo Bill is his
• 1:25:45
  puppy. He doesn't hurt the animal he does, and that's like his only
• 1:25:49
  weakness is like, you know, that was the thing that finally, you
• 1:25:51
  know, one of the things that it was the puppy. That's the only
• 1:25:55
  thing I can remember of that character that's even remotely redeeming that he likes animals,
• 1:26:00
  Like you're reaching, I'm reaching on that one. Yeah, it's a
• 1:26:02
  bit of stretch. Yeah, dude, Okay, And that's exactly right.
• 1:26:11
  And so there's a difference between our our you know, shadow archetype and an
• 1:26:15
  antagonist. And so it's that notion of that fallen hero who kind of gave
• 1:26:20
  into themselves. And I don't know where we started or how we got started
• 1:26:25
  on this topic villain villains. It's those villains who do have like, Okay,
• 1:26:33
  I can see your motivations. I get it. And once again that
• 1:26:36
  ties us into how we relate to the film. We get it, we
• 1:26:40
  understand where they're coming from. And it's an intriguing question what would you do
• 1:26:43
  if you were putting those those shoes? And the filmmakers pop that as a
• 1:26:46
  question and now we may say, no, I would never kill off half
• 1:26:50
  the population. No, that's just wrong. But I can certainly see where
• 1:26:54
  Thanos is coming from, psychritic character identification with the villain. Once you do
• 1:26:59
  that, well, you got a good playground to play in a much more
• 1:27:01
  complex character than just you know, hanging out on the train tracks. I
• 1:27:04
  mean, so asked in the question, if you had the power of the
• 1:27:08
  Infinity Gauntlet, instead of killing off half a million or a half half the
• 1:27:13
  population of the universe, why not double the universe and have more places?
• 1:27:18
  Why not have more places for every more resources, Double all the resources,
• 1:27:21
  Triple all the resource make the resources infinite with the Infinity Gauntlet. The Infinity
• 1:27:29
  Gauntlet. Do you see, Thanos? You're wrong, sir, But but
• 1:27:32
  that's but that's a perspective. It's all about perspective on what he felt that
• 1:27:36
  was that was the way of going about it. But his and also he
• 1:27:41
  had so much pain because of that specific problem where they killed off his family
• 1:27:46
  and all this kind of stuff when he was younger. That that's why that
• 1:27:50
  pain caused him to go not towards the I'll just create more resources to I'm
• 1:27:56
  gonna have to kill half in his missiided way to do it exactly and notice
• 1:28:04
  what that does for us as an audience is that that cluses us in as
• 1:28:08
  to who he is as a person. Oddly enough, it reveals his character
• 1:28:14
  and it isolates it down. There's something we talk about like isolating the variable.
• 1:28:18
  It's a math term, but it's the idea that that personality, trait,
• 1:28:24
  whatever it is that drives that character. And I talk a lot about
• 1:28:27
  character design. I'm a design freak when it comes to the storytelling. But
• 1:28:32
  what it does is it isolates it down to, yeah, you could have
• 1:28:35
  chosen that, but you didn't, and that tells us something about who he
• 1:28:39
  is and also clues us into that aspect of pain, which can be relatable
• 1:28:44
  as well. And so really smart films will do that where it'll it'll say,
• 1:28:47
  yeah, you've got this choice, and you chose this why you know?
• 1:28:51
  And it kind of the questions implicit and then we watched the film to
• 1:28:55
  find out. Yeah, so you know, obviously one of the greatest films
• 1:28:59
  of wal time, Darth Vader. You know, at the core of Darth
• 1:29:00
  Vader, he's not a bad guy. He's angry, he he feels lost,
• 1:29:09
  but there's a humanity inside that villain. At the beginning, we don't
• 1:29:13
  see that. We just see the bad guy. But during the course of
• 1:29:16
  even the original trilogy, you see him arc to the point where he then
• 1:29:21
  becomes the savior. He becomes the redeem he becomes redeemed at at the end
• 1:29:28
  of Return of the Jedi. But that villain, you know, and then
• 1:29:33
  once you go back into the prequels, you kind of see where all that
• 1:29:38
  pain came from and the loss and everything like that that turned him into what
• 1:29:42
  he tended. But at the end of the day, though, he's still
• 1:29:46
  he's still he was still a good guy inside. Oh yeah, I mean,
• 1:29:50
  when you think about him, he's another He's similar to Hannibal Lictor in
• 1:29:54
  that regard. There's all these positive traits. Will be right, b after
• 1:30:00
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. He's strong,
• 1:30:09
  he's intelligent. He wants to bring order to the galaxy. Okay,
• 1:30:12
  the galaxy is a messy place. He's going to tidy it up. He
• 1:30:15
  wants to reconnect with his kid. Think about it, Luke never sent him
• 1:30:17
  a Father's daycard and he wants to connect with him. Okay, that's nice
• 1:30:23
  too, and oh yeah, by the way, I want to rule the
• 1:30:26
  galaxy. Of his father and son. Okay, and you're willing to choke
• 1:30:30
  people and do a lot of chaos in order to achieve all these things.
• 1:30:34
  And so there's that once again loaded up with all these positive attributes, and
• 1:30:39
  there's that that trait that gets at what's wrong with that character, their character
• 1:30:45
  flaw. In some ways, you touched on something that's kind of cool.
• 1:30:49
  We can look at the idea between our protagonists and antagonists as one who arcs
• 1:30:55
  versus one who doesn't, and ask yourself this check out check out movies,
• 1:31:00
  typically the villain does not arc, they don't change, they don't learn the
• 1:31:01
  lesson of the movie. The hero does and succeeds. The villain does not
• 1:31:05
  and is destroyed. And for movies you mentioned seven earlier, brad Pitt,
• 1:31:12
  you know What's in the Bogs, Brad Pitt doesn't learn the lesson of the
• 1:31:16
  film and gets destroyed by it. Right A spoiler again, But that's the
• 1:31:24
  idea at the core of really's story and at the core of what films tend
• 1:31:28
  to do. The successful ones, in my mind, is when a character
• 1:31:32
  learns that and is willing to grow and change as a result of you know
• 1:31:36
  what the film is presenting them with they tend to emerge triumphant. When they're
• 1:31:40
  not, they tend to be destroyed. Yeah, that's a really great point
• 1:31:43
  of view because I mean, Brad Pitt obviously never learned a lesson, and
• 1:31:46
  the only person, even even Morgan Freeman, he doesn't learn a lesson.
• 1:31:50
  He knew the lesson the entire time and he was trying to teach it.
• 1:31:54
  But yet he was like, oh my god, I've I've failed. The
• 1:31:57
  whole movie ends on the counter. I mean, they'll well it's a down
• 1:32:00
  or and there's no question about it. Even John Doe's character, he knew
• 1:32:05
  what was going on. And John Doe throughout the entire movie doesn't change,
• 1:32:11
  doesn't he doesn't want to change. He's he's a villain, and no one
• 1:32:16
  really knows why John Doe does what John Doe does. There was no there
• 1:32:20
  is no motivation. He is a pure villain from the beginning to end.
• 1:32:27
  And he does have a slight, a slight twisting of the mustache. But
• 1:32:34
  he does a slight, a slight bit of twisting of the mustache because he
• 1:32:38
  doesn't have and I'm not going back into the movie. I'm like, but
• 1:32:43
  for him, it's a game and that and that's what moves and motivates him,
• 1:32:47
  is like, oh, there's a new pawn on the table, on
• 1:32:51
  the on the chess board, and that's in that summer set, in the
• 1:32:54
  summerset Brad Pitt's character, Uh, and I'm gonna play with him. Now.
• 1:32:59
  That happens midway through the movie, you know, midway, like,
• 1:33:01
  oh okay, now the game has changed. And again once that middle midpoint
• 1:33:05
  is the point of no return, it does it. You can't go back
• 1:33:09
  now. Oh now, now John don't knows who you are. It's screwed.
• 1:33:12
  You can't go back. It's such a great yeah, and oh yeah,
• 1:33:16
  and it's the right end for the film. But kind of going back
• 1:33:20
  to that midpoint, that's something you know, we talk about from a structural
• 1:33:24
  perspective. You know, I've referred to it as the apex or the big
• 1:33:27
  twist where the film will flip on its head just to kind of refresh the
• 1:33:32
  narrative halfway through, because you know, movie can be long, and if
• 1:33:35
  you're hitting the same beats over and over again, it can feel really redundant
• 1:33:40
  and slow. And so watch watch that sixty minute mark, or watch that
• 1:33:45
  apex beat that middle point of the film, and you'll see where they'll twist
• 1:33:47
  it just to you know, kind of revive the second act and add additional
• 1:33:53
  complications that will lead into the third. Yeah. So yeah, no moment
• 1:33:57
  and no it is. And you start analyzing all the movies that are have
• 1:34:00
  had any success in the world in the cinema history, they all have that
• 1:34:04
  midpoint. There is a point where the character can't go back to the ordinary
• 1:34:10
  world. If we're using Joseph Campbell's or terms. Uh, there is that
• 1:34:15
  point where you're like, Okay, I've now crossed the threshold. I can't
• 1:34:17
  go back, even if I wanted to, I can't go back. So
• 1:34:20
  that that perfect example in seven, once John knows who Brad Pitt's character is,
• 1:34:28
  there's no going back now, whether he wants to or not, it's
• 1:34:30
  over now. It's gonna go it's gonna go down this road. And uh,
• 1:34:34
  and you need that as a story in the story, you do need
• 1:34:38
  that point where at any moment that first half, the character goes, you
• 1:34:44
  know what, because before before he meets John Doe, John Doe sees who
• 1:34:46
  he is, he goes says, you know what, I'm just gonna drop
• 1:34:48
  out of this case, is this just too hard? I don't want to
• 1:34:51
  deal with this anymore. He could leave, arguably, but once John Doe
• 1:34:56
  knows it's over, you can't go back. It's now out of your control
• 1:35:00
  on it. And what's the midpoint in Star Wars I'm trying to figure out
• 1:35:04
  off the top of my head. I can't remember, but there's a midpoint
• 1:35:06
  where Luke, I think is when Luke goes off with Obie. I think
• 1:35:10
  that's the point where like you, oh, no, when when the farm
• 1:35:14
  burned, like you can't go back off. There is a hole, it's
• 1:35:16
  been burnt. So that's the point where we're like, well, I guess
• 1:35:19
  I gotta go down this way. Yep. I only have one path left
• 1:35:23
  and I have to pursue it and I have to follow it. And yeah,
• 1:35:27
  it's one of the things that you know when you think about different structures
• 1:35:30
  and different ways to approach your story and storytelling as a whole. And I'm
• 1:35:35
  a fan of what I call a structural overlay, which are two structures laid
• 1:35:40
  on top of each other. And one is that hero's journey structure that we've
• 1:35:45
  been discussing, and another is what I call the aturn structure, which is
• 1:35:48
  more of a character based structure, and it's the idea that through the pursuit
• 1:35:53
  of the plot, of solving the plot, we reveal who this character is,
• 1:35:58
  what their flaw is, what they have to deal with internally. That's
• 1:36:01
  that internal storyline. And if we really want to look at the story in
• 1:36:04
  a very broad sense or cinematic narrative, in a broad sense, I would
• 1:36:09
  maintain it's the external force of plot against the internal force of character, and
• 1:36:15
  these two things colliding, and that midpoint is where that internal storyline starts to
• 1:36:24
  come up to the surface where we can see it and get at it.
• 1:36:26
  We may have thought it, we've hinted at it prior to, but now
• 1:36:30
  it's like, oh, in order to solve the plot of the film,
• 1:36:32
  whatever it may be, I'm going to have to change this aspect of my
• 1:36:36
  character. And there's the character's arc. That's what it's presented there. So
• 1:36:42
  it really is two structures kind of laid on top of each other. In
• 1:36:44
  one is what I would maintain, even things like Save the Cat. If
• 1:36:49
  you were to look at that approach and that storytelling model, it's kind of
• 1:36:55
  taking those two structural paradigms and spelling out what happens at those junctures there.
• 1:37:01
  But it really is those two things that's the source material for all of it.
• 1:37:04
  It's kind of cool. But those two, those two structures that I
• 1:37:09
  just discussed overlaid on top of each other. One is telling you the plot
• 1:37:13
  storyline, and one is telling you the character journey inside. Very very very
• 1:37:17
  cool. And I also, you know, we've been going on and on.
• 1:37:20
  This has been a fantastic conversation and we can continue to talk about stuff
• 1:37:24
  forever, and I have a feeling, but I also wanted to bring attention
• 1:37:28
  to your book the screenwriters workout. Now, when I first saw the title
• 1:37:32
  for this, I was like, this is interesting. And and then when
• 1:37:35
  I started digging into a little bit of like, oh no, like he's
• 1:37:38
  talking about reps, he's talking about sets, Like this is like for a
• 1:37:42
  writer. So can you talk a little bit about the screenwriter's workout? Oh?
• 1:37:46
  Sure? So that was that was the thought process. You know,
• 1:37:49
  I was thinking about mentioning earlier that Oh yeah, I tried just about everything
• 1:37:55
  else I could other than film, And so I was a science major exercise
• 1:37:59
  piseology. That makes sense now, Okay, So it's like, yeah,
• 1:38:03
  there's the connection. But when you think about any sort of performance sport,
• 1:38:09
  if you will, or even a performance art, you know, you go
• 1:38:12
  to the gym, you strengthen certain muscles, that you strengthen certain aspects so
• 1:38:15
  that you can use those in the pursuit. So as a football player,
• 1:38:18
  I need to, you know, be able to be very strong so I
• 1:38:21
  can push the line of scrimmage and tackle someone or run through a tackle or
• 1:38:24
  something like that. And for me, I was like, well, hey,
• 1:38:28
  screenwriters can do the same thing. It's not that now. Obviously we
• 1:38:31
  get we get better by reading screenplays, writing screenplays, and doing all those
• 1:38:35
  things, but we can also strengthen the skill sets that we can go to
• 1:38:40
  the gym and hit the equipment. And so what I try to do is
• 1:38:44
  create a gym for screenwriters where you can go there and strengthen certain aspects of
• 1:38:46
  your craft to improve your storytelling essentially. And so that was kind of the
• 1:38:49
  core approach to it. And then what I realized is I was going through
• 1:38:56
  the book, is crap. I got to do all that. I have
• 1:38:58
  to teach all this stuff in order for the later lessons to make sense.
• 1:39:01
  So the first part, you know, has quite a bit of theory that's
• 1:39:03
  going behind it so that you can get to some of the activities and exercises
• 1:39:08
  later on that should strengthen your storytelling craft. A lot of these were hounded
• 1:39:15
  in my classes, and so what I would do is try different exercises all
• 1:39:18
  my students to you know, not as an evil scientist or anything, but
• 1:39:23
  like, hey, try this and see if it helps. And so I
• 1:39:25
  was able to kind of glean which one seem to improve their storytelling to a
• 1:39:30
  high degree. And so then I tried to incorporate those into the book as
• 1:39:33
  well. And so it's kind of a combination of those two things. Some
• 1:39:36
  of the exercises are really you know, kind of you know, if you
• 1:39:41
  were a soup, what would you be, like, what does this have
• 1:39:43
  to do with screenwriting? But what I'm trying to do is strength is stretch
• 1:39:46
  your mind in terms of understanding the metaphoric connection between the actions that characters take
• 1:39:54
  versus the things we can see on the screen. You know, they're eating
• 1:39:57
  a ball, a terrible example, eating a bowl out little bit, sup?
• 1:40:00
  What does that mean? We'll be right back after a word from our
• 1:40:03
  sponsor, and now back to the show. Everything on that screen has meaning
• 1:40:13
  to us, So we're trying to look for meaning in those in those elements,
• 1:40:16
  and so I tried to put together a book that would explore and strengthen
• 1:40:20
  those skills in addition to your storytelling chops as a whole. Looking at it
• 1:40:26
  from a structural perspective, from a character design perspective, Like I said,
• 1:40:30
  I'm big into design. I think most of the issues that we find in
• 1:40:32
  a screenplay are based on a faulty design right from the get go. And
• 1:40:40
  to not be overly eloquent about it, it's kind of like what I would
• 1:40:44
  call a chocolate covered turd. You know, it looks great, it's got
• 1:40:47
  you know, raspberry sprinkles on it, and it's all like, man,
• 1:40:50
  this thing looks awesome, and then you take a bite and it's like I
• 1:40:53
  got a mouthful of crap. And it's no fault of the writer per se.
• 1:40:58
  It's just the design. The story wasn't designed from the get go to
• 1:41:01
  really work together and fit together. The elements don't don't quite go together right,
• 1:41:06
  and so no amount of artistry, no amount of of craft, can
• 1:41:12
  can resurrect it. It's just doomed right from the get go. And so
• 1:41:15
  There are elements talking about that in the book as well, just trying to
• 1:41:20
  to really get it. Story design and designing your story right from the get
• 1:41:25
  go, and then providing you know, a lot of the other soft skills
• 1:41:27
  that go into screenwriting. Now, I'm gonna ask you a few questions.
• 1:41:30
  Ask on my guests, what are three screenplays that ever screenwriters should read.
• 1:41:35
  Oh man, your other guest gave such really good ones. Let's see,
• 1:41:43
  I'll try to pick some that perhaps might not be quite so obvious. The
• 1:41:48
  Devil Worst Product, great script, Yeah it is script. So yeah,
• 1:41:55
  that'll that'll be one. Uh my best friend's wedding another greatest script. I'll
• 1:42:03
  pick that one. And in particular, uh that one for how the screenwriter
• 1:42:10
  was named Ron Bass, how he put his action description just kind of really
• 1:42:14
  cool. And then uh, okay lethal weapon, Oh well, Shane Black,
• 1:42:18
  of course, I mean death. I mean just just for description,
• 1:42:21
  just for descriptions alone. Descriptions are amazing. Yeah, And if you and
• 1:42:28
  if you want to stay in shame black world, I might suggest Last Boy
• 1:42:30
  Scout the original instead of that one. The original one he was a surfer
• 1:42:34
  and not Damon Wayne's Oh no, no, the the the script itself.
• 1:42:42
  I think if you read the action description in there, it's it's just it's
• 1:42:45
  a further distillation of lethal weapon. And I picked those for different reasons,
• 1:42:48
  but most of them have to do with words on the page, yep.
• 1:42:53
  And just how you how you create a movie on the page, because it's
• 1:42:57
  not the easiest task to do. And if you what advice would you give
• 1:43:00
  screenwriter trying to break into the business today, Know your craft? Ultimately,
• 1:43:08
  it's all gonna boil down to that you know, right gooder, But it's
• 1:43:14
  oh my god, that's a T shirt. That's a T shirt? Right
• 1:43:15
  good? Yeah, Most most of my lessons are like bumber stickers, is
• 1:43:19
  like come on man, or memes, No, no, no, seriously,
• 1:43:24
  it's know your craft, hone your craft. When you think you know
• 1:43:27
  it, you don't keep working at it. It's it takes so long to
• 1:43:33
  master these skill sets. It really does. And I think film school it's
• 1:43:36
  really cool. It serves a purpose of getting you further along that journey than
• 1:43:41
  perhaps you would do on your on your own. But it really is boiling
• 1:43:45
  down to a good story, well told, vibrant characters. They will they
• 1:43:49
  will find out, they will find the audio and find a home, a
• 1:43:53
  second guests the marketplace because you're gonna behind every time, every time. Yeah,
• 1:43:57
  what is the lesson that took you the longest to learn? Whether in
• 1:43:59
  the film industry or in life. I don't know. I'm still learning.
• 1:44:03
  No, structure is not formula. Yeah exactly there was, you know,
• 1:44:14
  young younger me. If I look back and it's like dude, yeah,
• 1:44:16
  okay, you're trying to be this artistic putts like, no, I'm above
• 1:44:20
  structure. No, nobody's above the craft. Nobody. As soon as the
• 1:44:24
  filmmaker thinks they're above the crafty, they just ended their career. I'm happened
• 1:44:28
  to Dchcock. Sorry, but it happens to to a lot of filmmakers.
• 1:44:32
  But no one is above the craft. It is so it's I think of
• 1:44:38
  beauty once you see it, but that that would be the one lesson.
• 1:44:42
  It's just like, yeah, it's not just because it's it's a structural paradigm.
• 1:44:45
  It's not a formula. There's reason for structure, and it's it's kind
• 1:44:49
  of cool that way, and once you understand the reasons, I'm I'm kind
• 1:44:53
  of a why guy. It's like, well, you know, very sis.
• 1:44:55
  Weall you need complicant film, you know, And I'm like terminator,
• 1:44:58
  you know why, you just do why? You know? I keep asking
• 1:45:00
  the same thing, and it's like, oh, here's why, and you
• 1:45:04
  start to understand there are reasons why certain things happen in movies, and it's
• 1:45:12
  you know, you can try to reinvent the wheel, and there's totally cool.
• 1:45:15
  I can appreciate the impulse, but ultimately that wheel's got a roll.
• 1:45:18
  If you reinvent the wheel, and then it doesn't roll, it's not a
• 1:45:20
  wheel. And and so you know, sometimes in our in our well intentioned
• 1:45:27
  of hey, I want to do things different and original, and certainly that
• 1:45:30
  would that would describe, you know, how how I wanted to approach the
• 1:45:32
  page. It's understanding there are certain reasons why certain things happen in a film,
• 1:45:41
  and it's now you provide your originality to that probe the originality to the
• 1:45:45
  content, unnecessarily the form. And it's a long answer enough, but yeah,
• 1:45:49
  hopefully and glean something out of it. And three of your favorite films
• 1:45:53
  of all time? Oh, I think we already discussed them. Yeah,
• 1:45:59
  that one, that one I'll have to list. It's funny before the class
• 1:46:02
  I hadn't watched it in years. It's kind of back to what you were
• 1:46:06
  talking about. So Star Wars Life is beautiful. Yeah, that one,
• 1:46:14
  that's beautifulul. I like the fact that it pulls in motion. And then
• 1:46:24
  seven Summer another and you can't go wrong with any of those at all.
• 1:46:30
  Well, man, thank you so much for taking all the time out.
• 1:46:32
  I know you have your busy schedule. You were in between classes right now,
• 1:46:36
  so I do appreciate you taking the time. It has been an absolutely
• 1:46:39
  enjoyable conversation about the craft and and hope we could do it again sometime.
• 1:46:44
  But thank you so much for dropping these knowledge bombs on our tribe today.
• 1:46:46
  So I appreciate it, my friend. Oh, thank you, and then
• 1:46:49
  do it again sometime. I want to thank Will so much for coming on
• 1:46:54
  the show and sharing his knowledge bombs with the tribe today. Thank you so
• 1:47:00
  much. Will. If you want to get links to anything we spoke about
• 1:47:01
  in this episode, including how to get Will's remarkable book, The Screenwriter's Workout,
• 1:47:06
  head over to the show notes at anifilmuscle dot com Forward Slash seven thirty
• 1:47:11
  one, and if you have it already, please head over to Filmmaking Podcast
• 1:47:15
  dot com, Subscribe and leave a good review for the show. It really
• 1:47:19
  helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again so much for listening.
• 1:47:21
  Guys, as always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive,
• 1:47:26
  Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for
• 1:47:28
  listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie film hustle dot com. That's
• 1:47:32
  I N D I E F I L M h U S T l E
• 1:47:36
  dot com.