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IFH 758: The Philosophy of Screenwriting in Hollywood with Pen Densham · 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 Hustle
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  Podcast, Episode number seven fifty eight. Imagination is more important than knowledge.
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  For while knowledge defines where we currently know and understand, imaginations points us all
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  to where we might yet discover and create. Albert Einstein broadcasting from the back
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  alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you
• 0:38
  how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film
• 0:42
  biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
• 0:47
  episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex
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  Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn
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  your independent film into a profitable business. It's harder today than ever be for
• 1:00
  independent filmmakers to make money with their films from predatory film distributors ripping them off
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  to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them. The odds are stacked against the
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  indie filmmaker. The old distribution model of making money with your film is broken
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  and there needs to be a change. The future of independent filmmaking is the
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  entrepreneurial filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, I
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  break down how to actually make money with your film projects and show you how
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  to turn your indie film into a profitable business. With case studies examining successes
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  and failures. This book shows you the step by step method to turn your
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  passion into a profitable career. If you're making a feature film, series,
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  or any other kind of video content, the Film Entrepreneur method will set you
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  up for success. The book is available in paperback, ebook, and of
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  course audiobook. If you want to order it, just head over to www.
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  Dot filmbizbook dot com. That's film Bizbook dot com. Now, guys,
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  today, you're in for a treat. Today's guest is Penn Densham and
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  he is an award winning screenwriter, producer, and director and has made some
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  of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters of all time, including Robinhood, Prince of Thieves,
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  Backdraft, Blown Away, and even his new current movie that he's the
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  executive producer of, Harriet Now. Penn has been around the block and then
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  some. He is started off as a screenwriter and still is a screenwriter,
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  but also went into directing and producing as well. He is also the author
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  of the book Writing the Alligator, Strategies for a Career in Screenplay Writing and
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  Not Getting Eaten. I absolutely love this book. It is such a from
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  the inside, ground level, street level way of looking at how to approach
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  developing a career as a screenwriter in Hollywood. And Penn has seen it all
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  and work with some of the biggest movie stars of all time. And in
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  this episode, I wanted to kind of dig into his philosophy of screenwriting in
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  Hollywood because there is a specific way that he looks at developing a career in
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  Hollywood as a screenwriter, as well as just asking him what was it like
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  having like the number one movie of the summer back in the day with Robinhood
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  Prince of Thieves. What is it like to be the bell of the ball
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  in Hollywood and when everybody wants to work with you and having so many consistent
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  hits back to back. And Penn is just such a down to earth soul
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  and I just had just an amazing time talking to him, so without any
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  further ado, Please enjoy my conversation with Penn des Sham. I like to
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  walk to Michelle pen Densham. How you doing with my friend? I'm doing
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  great. It's nice to be chatting with you again. Yes, I know.
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  We met at a wonderful mixeror the other day and we hit it off,
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  and I'm like, well, you have to be on the show.
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  And you've written some of my favorite movies and produce some of my favorite movies
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  of all time, and I will get to all of those in a minute.
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  But before we even get started, how did you get into this business?
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  Oh? Well, I was born into it. My folks are making
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  short films when I was a little kid, and so I'm four years old
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  and I'm writing an alligator in a movie that my folks are making about people
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  who keep strange pets, dating myself. That movie actually went out with Africa
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  Queen into the movie theaters. So I saw my mom and dad with cameras
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  and the power of cameras, and since that time just yearned to tell stories
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  and have that. But I call it costing a spell. You're doing something
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  that's extraordinary. People are all drawn to it, and I don't think they
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  had babysitters back then because or they couldn't afford them. So they took me
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  to Water Street. So I'm four, you old, meeting the people that
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  are distributing their movies and sitting in the theater with them, watching them with
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  them, And from that time on I just yearned, literally yearned to be
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  involved. And then my mom died when I was eight. My father's behavior
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  was not as supportively, married a very difficult lady, and at fifteen I
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  left school and I love cameras, but my school was trying to punish me
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  out of being imaginative and helped me by getting me a job as a bank
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  clerk or something, and my stepmother and my father were doing the same thing.
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  And it's very destructive to your sense of self worth and your holistic the
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  way your mind works if you're a creative person to have people banging on you
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  for being egotistical or difficult. And so it left me with a deep sense
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  of trying to protect other people's creativity and also gave me a lot of understanding
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  about creativity and vulnerability, which I think people who have very complex and managinative
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  minds are also vulnerable to a lot of self doubt. And so we were
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  talking a bit about why I wrote a book on screenplay writing. It was
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  that I couldn't find a book that reassured me when I was starting to write
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  screenplays way back that I was normal, that this process was not perfection.
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  You sit down and write from A to Z, or you have to have
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  every plot, beat and every structure. I learned that when I let myself
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  go. Sometimes I would have the last lines of a movie in my head
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  that had been in my brain for two years, knowing I was going to
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  write it, get the last lines that made me cry, and then pursue
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  getting the rest of the movie, and it's illogical. And then sometimes we
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  had what we called islands of sanity, which you get two or three pieces
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  in a movie and you know you have to write the rest. And it's
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  not about writing to fit somebody's belief system or some architecture, but it's how
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  do you get that voice out of you? And I think if you get
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  that voice out of you, you write to a different potency level. And
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  also you protect your work for longer, You fight longer to try and make
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  it more approachable for a buyer, and so you don't give up on it.
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  Whereas if you write something to hit a formula, Oh, horror movies
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  are selling or rum coms are selling the right one, but it's not in
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  your nature. When the people that you're trying to sell it to give up
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  on you, you give up too. Whereas I have scripts that I fought
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  for generation to get made, and I can't give up on them because they're
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  somehow in my soul, which sounds crazy, but I'm very proud of that.
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  It doesn't sound crazy at all. Well, first of all, I
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  always tell people, we're all crazy to be in this business. We are
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  all carnies. We all ran away to join the circus we are. Isn't
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  that? Isn't that a good analogy? We all are carnis the most unique
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  people ever you meet in this business. They're all a little bit crazy.
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  You know. We just put on a show. And if you want to
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  get a complete you know, perfect analogy is when you're making a movie.
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  You go to a location, you put up your tent, you shoot for
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  the day, you put on a show, you record the show, you
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  put it down, and you move on to the next location. That's a
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  carnie. That's fascinating. I like it it slightly differently, but I still
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  think that's an incredibly valid way looking at it. I look at it because
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  I try to figure out how to overcome the suffering of it. Because the
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  way I looked at it is it's like a sport, and I absolutely loved
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  playing it, and the sport I think it is is American football. Because
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  I get hit, I have to put a team together. I don't have
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  to love everybody in that team, but I have to inspire them. I'm
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  going to have the ball strip from me. I'm going to sit on the
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  bench sometimes, but if I get to play and I love it enough,
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  it makes it worthwhile. Now you got your start in the business as a
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  screenwriter. Correct, Not quite no actually, and I don't like talking about
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  mile too much so, but left school at fifteen, tried to stop my
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  own businesses in England, fled to Canada at nineteen, thinking I was a
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  washed up failure, ended up in a culture where young people were being helped
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  to make move and I'm going, Holy Crow, and I'm watching a fifteen
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  year old guy making a sink sound sixteen mil movie. And because I've been
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  trying to sell things in England, I was able to help him sell his
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  movie to the TV network and started to see in Canada. There was an
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  exchange of ideas from young filmmakers and we were making short films. We were
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  learning from each other, selling to the world markets under schools of libraries,
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  which was a market back then. And in some ways I see this parallel
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  happening in the way that the business is now aggregating again many different avenues of
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  opportunity, and so we tried. I've worked with a couple of companies,
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  one including their interesty me to Marshall mccluan, who was the guru of communications
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  at that point in the world. We'll be right back after a word from
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  our sponsor. And now back to the show and that sense of freethinking and
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  the sense of starting something because you cared about it and pursuing it until you
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  put all the money together and all the pieces together. That the entrepreneurial side
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  was trained into us making short films at a point where we also learned if
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  you don't enter, you don't win awards, and if you don't win awards,
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  people don't know how to judge your movies. So award winning became something
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  we pursued and we ended up winning over sixty awards, got medals from the
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  Queen. But it's bullshit because if you don't pursue it, it doesn't happen.
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  And we made this one film which was finally important emotionally to me,
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  which is where we asked children to direct commercials for life as if they were
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  selling the And I wanted to make a movie about young people's imaginations in a
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  way of protecting the punishment that I'd gone through and saying, these people are
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  incredibly valuable in what age they are their imaginations of vital and powerful things.
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  So by doing this we got a movie that we ended up with nine young
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  people each directed their own commercial for Life with real actors, real cruise,
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  and we managed to get it nominated for an Oscar. And we I'd also
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  learned, being a huckster, being a Connie, that I'd seen other friends
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  of mine in Canada get occasionally nominated forern Oscar and wait to see if they
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  won, and went to the Oscars, didn't win, and came home and
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  no wonder what had happened. So I said, Okay, fuck it,
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  We're going to put every ounce of effort into making sure everybody knows that this
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  nomination happened, and so we were on the front page of every newspaper.
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  We had a film crew fly with us from Canada to the Oscars. We
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  got permission, with the government's help, to take all nine children to the
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  Oscar Ceramon and you know how how it is to get tickets. And the
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  end result was that when we lost, there was only three movies in that
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  year, but one was from the La Philharmonic. So we were on the
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  front page of every newspaper in Canada and we were on the nightly news for
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  losing, and that put our company on the map, which again gave us
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  the opportunity to go out and beg for more funds to go do films that
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  we cared about. That's amazing and it's something that they don't teach this that
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  exactly what you did is you get an opportunity like this, So, whether
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  if it's an Oscar nomination as a short film, sun Dan's a big event,
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  a big news article, something that you leverage it and you try to
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  use it to push yourself and your company or your movie further along. And
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  filmmakers aren't taught this. I yell at this about this at the top of
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  my life. You're writing a book about this, right, yeah. Yeah.
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  My new book, Rises the Film Entrepreneur talks about that as well as
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  many other ways of creating revenue streams and so on. But one thing I
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  wanted to talk to you before before I ask you some other questions I have
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  for you. The whole world of distribution is changing so dramatically. And you
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  know, we were talking off air about this whole distribut thing, and you
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  know, and all the press that I've been getting, and the and not
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  only me, but all these thousands of filmmakers who have been been hurt by
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  you know, the downfall of this film aggregator, and how that many ways
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  that the system is rigged against, especially at the at the low indie level,
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  the system's rigged against the independent filmmakers as far as distribution is concerned.
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  How do you see things going forward? I mean, we were we kind
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  of touched upon it a little bit, but there is going to be a
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  change. Look. Look, Netflix came along and literally changed the entire industry.
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  You know, this little little company that we could have been purchased for
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  fifty million bucks by Blockbuster back in two thousand and I think two or three
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  and now it's the one hundred and fifty billion and has changed not only the
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  industry, but change how we view our viewing habits, how the concept of
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  binging, the concept all the you know, it's changed the world. That's
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  there's still going to be more changes coming, and I think they're going to
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  come faster than we even anticipate. For independent films and for creators, what
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  do you think the future is in distribution? Well, you know, it's
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  it's the gold rush. Nobody knows where the veins are and no one knows
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  how you're going to chisel them out. It's creative entrepreneurism, which I always
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  call that process that you must spend as much effort selling your material to people
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  as you use to create it. And I call it also building a bridge
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  backwards, which is you can't anticipate that your buyer understands what you've got.
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  If you make them make the effort of trying to categorize what you've got,
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  you lose because you're doing something where they are too distracted and don't understand it.
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  So I break selling down into full component elements, which I'm now going
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  to give you my two minute lecture on how to sell. Please rule is
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  identify your buyer, because no one buys from a stranger. Research them,
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  and then reach out to them and find compatibility because you're not going to sell
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  to someone unless they feel that you understand them a little bit. So you
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  know that they were the people that did that particular movie that was successful,
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  and you praise them genuinely. Everything is about authenticity because people have a big
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  bullshit detector. You can't and you've got hustle on your forehead. You can't
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  hustle people when they don't feel the reality. Yesssion passion. So anyway,
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  so you research your buyer. You create a wrap up with your buyer by
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  meeting with them and talking about things that they value. Second one is demonstrate
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  passion, because why should they care if you don't. So you take you
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  take an idea and I tell my I taught a couple of times at usc
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  Film School, and I'd say you can be almost inarticulate if you demonstrate passion,
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  because the excitement is contagious. And if you have got something and it's
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  cold blooded and you don't really care and it's a marketing device, you're not
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  going to get me believing that you're going to go through brick walls to achieve
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  it. So by demonstrating passion, what you're doing is getting the this is
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  the root stem of my belief systems, that I'm investing in this thing,
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  and it's more likely to get people to support you. And when you're doing
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  a movie with somebody, if it's a development deal, they're putting that job
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  on the line a little bit with you. And so really a pitch is
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  a chance to have a conversation with somebody and not a chance to say,
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  Okay, I've got forty two minutes and I have to give you a to
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  z of a structure, because that's leaving them out. So then I use
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  a demonstration. I say that my wife had a dream and it was so
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  scary she stayed up nights and then she told me the dream. It seems
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  scary, it was keeping me up, but I decided to turn it into
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  a movie, which is my passion statement. There is a totally illusory one,
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  but it's helpful. And then I say that movie, which is what
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  I call the Goalposts, is sort of like halfway between The Exorcist and Alien.
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  Now, the reason I use that term before I where I what the
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  movie is is that I've made a relationship with the buyer. I'm demonstrating passion,
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  and I've told them that I'm going to show them what this movie is
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  in terms of the things they need, because selling a movie is really filling
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  the need of the buyer, not your idea of getting them buy you.
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  But what you're trying to do is sell them that you provide a solution to
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  their goals, which is when I say this movie is halfway between the Exissist
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  and Alien. Now what developed exact wouldn't like to have one of those in
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  there. And so what I've done is I put two goalposts up and simplicity.
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  I don't say it's halfway like the Exes, the Alien and Game of
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  Thrones, because you screw up there, remember, And so halfway between the
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  Exies and the Alien. And then I give them my pitch and I say,
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  this movie is about a defrocked alcoholic priest who's taken to the moon by
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  NASA because they have found the Devil's bones up there and people are becoming possessed.
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  And I could sell that, and I just is it as a pitch
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  module. But what I'm really trying to demonstrate is that people will send me
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  scripts or ideas. Every day I get dozens of emails, and I've got
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  a movie that's a horror movie, and horror movies are selling. I have
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  no interest in you. You haven't. You don't know that I did who
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  d Email Flanders, Robin Hood, and that I've I've got an interest in
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  physicalizing historical characters, and that I'm interested in making altruistic, cure heroes out
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  of things. You have no idea who I am or what i'm what i'm
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  and so because you didn't research me, you're not going to touch my heart.
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  And if you send me an email and you say, moll Flanders,
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  my wife and I cry when we saw that movie. We love seeing Whodini,
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  which you did, and we wondered if this project would happen to appeal
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  to you. That changes the whole dynamic. And so I also see people
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  trying to sell their work and they'll say, oh, this sold in the
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  movie theaters this weekend, and I got one just like it, And you
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  go, oh my god, I bet you You've already sent that out to
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  hundreds of people. And why would I care? Can we can? We
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  think? Yeah? Can we can? We? I just want to for
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  everyone listening right now. I need to just I want this to be put
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  out there into the universe. I've said it before, but I want to
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  say it one more time. If you're creating a pitch and you're making a
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  horror movie, do not use Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity as examples
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  of how much money your movie can make. Is that a fair statement to
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  say? Well, it's it's a fast statement because those are so extreme that
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  they're unlikely to be taken seriously. But if you can find a couple of
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  films that are really solid, yes, that it's gone to great lengths into
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  the market and have got a similarity of relationship, there's two goalposts things.
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  But also what you're looking at is the buyer is the most buyers don't want
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  to do exactly the same thing twice. There's no stimulus if you go to
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  a director and you say, hey, you did the Blair Witch while I've
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  got this other shaky camera movie about people, which out of which we'll be
• 20:02
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
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  You know. Whereas if you take and you look at them very seriously
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  and you study them a little bit and you say, you know, I
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  noticed you did this, this and this would this challenge you? Would this
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  be exciting? And you're you're you're really looking at the next stepping stone.
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  And actors are also excited to get involved with things that challenge their skills.
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  They like to be a little scared. And so if you've got to you
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  know, it's like going to cost and saying, hey, you just did
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  Robin, who would you like to do? Will will you tell? He's
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  going to say, no, I'm not, You're out of mind. But
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  when you like to play some of the investigating with John F. Kennedy death,
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  Yeah, because that's fascinating. And so your goal, is the artist
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  entrepreneur is trying to sell your work, is to try and see the buyers.
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  And there's a lot of buyers out there. You know. We normally
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  need to have you come at us through an agent or a manager or a
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  lawyer. Those are the three roots, but you can also go in through
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  its potentially a professor of school, a USC or somebody who would add their
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  name to you as an advocate. And I suggest to people going after the
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  actors or directors or producers with their own companies and avoid the studio because they
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  don't have a system to engage people like us, them or freebooters, but
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  the directors or the actors, they have people looking every day for things that
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  will stimulate their bosses. And so you don't look like you're coming from a
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  pro former place. You're coming from a place of discovery for them. And
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  if you can do that, then you've got a good chance of breaking through
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  the system and actually getting seen. But you've got to research your buyer.
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  You've got to even make friends with the assistance. A lot of us forget
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  that we're dealing with human beings, and it's human beings to human beings that
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  will help you. And by taking the time in a meeting when you're going
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  to meet the boss, take the time to say hello to the assistant,
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  get that number and phone them up afterwards and say, you know, is
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  there anything I could learn from what I went down and when would be a
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  good time to talk to you abouts And you realize a game assistance are on
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  every phone call. They monitor the progress and they also scuggle that with each
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  other about what their studio is looking for, what their boss is looking for.
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  And a lot of the time the students, the assistants in a structure
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  are people trying to get up through the system, just like you are.
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  And by taking again honest interest in them and asking for their experience to help
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  you get to your goals, you create friendship and as they as they go
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  to their levels of opportunity. And I've seen a directive friend of mine end
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  up being represented by the assistant to the to the agent he was with,
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  and he was with a big agent who never had any time for it.
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  And suddenly the assistant gets promoted to agent and she's only got three clients,
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  and so suddenly he's gone from being ignored to being someone that they're trying to
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  push and now she's the head of lit for a major agency. So again,
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  this process of creative entrepreneurism is looking at opportunity and trying to find it,
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  not being scared to look for ways to get yourself to the front.
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  And I also believe there are systems for reinforcing yourself, such as I call
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  it story midwives. But there are safe people that you trust who will tell
• 23:26
  you the truth in a kind way. And you've got to expose your work
• 23:32
  to people there before you expose it to the Philistines than they say is the
• 23:37
  difficult ones, because they can cross check all the things so that you get
• 23:42
  it really right and can be reassured when you go out to the other buyer
• 23:48
  that you've got most of the questions answered, or you've got most of the
• 23:52
  material clear so that people understand it. And we call that asshole proofing.
• 23:56
  So we don't send a script out until it's really clear that we've got most
• 24:00
  of the objections and the things that are hard to understand out of it,
• 24:04
  because you don't get to reads. And if you put a year of your
• 24:07
  life into a script or longer and you've got things that people didn't understand in
• 24:12
  it, it's it's like falling in the water of a stepping stone. You
• 24:17
  know you're going big thing, and then and then you're wet for the rest
• 24:19
  of the script, if the rest. Whereas if you fix those things,
• 24:25
  you've got a script that's solid and your friends have reassured you that it makes
• 24:29
  sense, and then you put it out to the world. But you never
• 24:32
  put it out until you've got it, because all that effort deserves that that
• 24:37
  kind of sense of value in your own stuf. Now you've spent you've said
• 24:42
  it a couple of times creative entrepreneurship, which I call film entrepreneurship, which
• 24:47
  is which is the same exact thing. I truly believe that in the future,
• 24:53
  the film entrepreneur is going to be the only way independent films, even
• 24:59
  if filmmakers can really make a living, is being an entrepreneurial filmmaker, an
• 25:03
  entrepreneurial creative, and that goes with screenwriting, that goes with filmmaking. Do
• 25:07
  you agree? Do you think that because because the opportunities I mean, you
• 25:11
  come from a time, you know, in the early nineties and before,
• 25:14
  but like specifically in the nineties, there were a lot of gates, a
• 25:18
  lot of gatekeepers. There was only a handful of places you could go with
• 25:22
  a project, and out of that you were like, really you were stuck
• 25:27
  in the really independent world where and again even there, there weren't a lot
• 25:32
  of outlets. Now the gates have been flown open. The big boys still
• 25:37
  have gatekeepers, but there's so many other places that will accept your your art,
• 25:41
  your projects, your writing that there's so much opportunity that if you're not
• 25:48
  entrepreneurial about going after those opportunities and then monetizing those opportunities. Once they come
• 25:53
  into your world, you won't survive because if you're trying to play the game
• 25:57
  by the rules that they said out for you, which is stacked against you.
• 26:02
  I don't believe that. I don't believe it will work. Do you
• 26:04
  do you believe that that the entrepreneurial creative, the creative entrepreneur is going to
• 26:10
  be the key to making a living in this business. We're in a revolution.
• 26:15
  We don't know where we're going. Well, I always figured there'd be
• 26:18
  one hundred million TV channels and I was thinking that since the nineties. So
• 26:22
  we're not too far off. We're not too far off. And it costs
• 26:26
  you nothing to upload your film now to YouTube and actually profit from it,
• 26:32
  so you can actually become your own studio and your own distributor. Now,
• 26:34
  what the next thing is how do you get an audience? And that comes
• 26:38
  back to being imaginative in some way. We did a TV special on magic
• 26:42
  many many years ago, and we to complete that show, we hung a
• 26:45
  guy in secret over the Niagara Falls and did the straight jack get escape?
• 26:48
  And that we you know, first of all, when we went to Niagara
• 26:55
  Falls Parks Commission, they said, no fricking way, you're ever going to
• 26:57
  do that, So then we realize that we've been totally rejected, and then
• 27:02
  we decided okay, So then we analyzed who was on the parks board.
• 27:04
  Found a guy who was eighty years old who knew my brother, my father
• 27:07
  in law, and we asked him if we could show in one of our
• 27:11
  movies, and we showed him a movie that was about sports heroes of Canada.
• 27:15
  He came out of the screen and crying, and he then let us
• 27:17
  go and make a presentation to the board again who'd already totally refused this.
• 27:21
  And I happened to go to that on a day when they were fixing Niagara
• 27:23
  Falls and they had a crane outside filling in concrete on places on it,
• 27:29
  and I said, I really, First of we'll have to apologize. I
• 27:32
  felt to tell you how important this was to our company. But secondly,
• 27:36
  I'm going to tell you a secret. My guy who's doing this stunt was
• 27:37
  the amazing Randy says, it's no worse than falling out of bed. It's
• 27:42
  like no danger, but we don't want to tell people that. And then
• 27:47
  I said, you already have people hanging out over the Niagara Falls right now.
• 27:49
  If you look out in the windows. So I all that effort ended
• 27:55
  up that I was able to shoot raised amazing Randy upside down over Niagara Falls
• 28:00
  in secret in the middle of winter. And then we held the photographs until
• 28:03
  the show went on the air, and I phoned up every newspaper in Canada
• 28:07
  and I said, we will give you exclusive on these photos that no one
• 28:12
  knew we'd done of a stunt at Niagara Falls if you'll put them on the
• 28:17
  front page, and we won't let any other newspaper have so, and we
• 28:22
  ended up getting front pages with our stunt, which promoted our movie. Now
• 28:27
  is that effort normal or is it what you have to do? I don't
• 28:30
  know, but it certainly for us it was the only way we could break
• 28:34
  through the clutter that we have back then. And I think that same kind
• 28:38
  of application of energy, whether it's finding a reason why an audience should tune
• 28:44
  in or finding a reason why a buyer should buy, those things are really
• 28:48
  part of making films. And I learned from Norman Jewis and my luck was
• 28:56
  that we did a lot of short films. Then we did a lot of
• 28:57
  TV specials, and we were not being given support to do a drama,
• 29:03
  and I eventually found to a friend of mine who's another filmmaker, said,
• 29:07
  CBC's giving ten grand anybody that can make an idea as a young filmmaker that
• 29:11
  they'll approve. I decided I would write a drama, which was the most
• 29:15
  miserable experience in my life. Never done it before. I didn't know how
• 29:18
  to write. I was thirty. I had always been too scared. Ended
• 29:22
  up working with directing actors that'd never done in my life. It was the
• 29:26
  most miserable experience. My pot edited like a sports film, took every pause
• 29:30
  out of it. It was a piece of shit, and I was so
• 29:36
  embarrassed. I sat with him in the editing room in those days it was
• 29:38
  takeing film, said oh my god, I've just let everybody down, but
• 29:44
  we have to do something. What happens? What does his face look like
• 29:47
  before he says that line, and you know your goes okay, And that
• 29:52
  was a minute, and that took a minute to do back then took oh
• 29:53
  yes, and you look at it. It looks like the guy's thinking,
• 29:59
  we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 30:06
  the show. And you go, oh my god, what else can we
• 30:10
  do. So I went through the whole thing, doctoring it with my partner,
• 30:12
  putting in into cuts, expanding the pauses, you know, and it
• 30:17
  won fourteen awards and I'm going, no, no, no, you don't
• 30:22
  understand. I just barely survived this. And Norman Jewison offers me free paper
• 30:29
  by the Canadian government come to Hollywood, and I'm going, oh, I
• 30:34
  don't desert this. You must I mustn't do this, because there's a thing
• 30:38
  pulled impostor syndrome. And when I'm coming back to some of you were talking
• 30:44
  about earlier, the people I'm invited every year by Final Draft to meet the
• 30:48
  winners of the Final Draft contest. And what I do is I have a
• 30:52
  breakfast with them and I talk about impostor syndrome, which is the failure to
• 30:57
  take advantage of an opportunity. And what we only get those opportunities once in
• 31:03
  a while, and if we question ourselves during that opportunity instead of pushing to
• 31:07
  its most possible beneficial outcome, we fail ourselves. And we're going to be
• 31:12
  polite, We're going to feel like it's wrong to push ourselves and that this
• 31:17
  is probably a mistake, and we don't deserve it, and I will frequently
• 31:21
  ask them, what else have you succeeded with? And I said, oh,
• 31:22
  you know, I was leaving the school play. I have several writing
• 31:26
  prizes, and you realize that these people have a consistency, but they don't
• 31:30
  validate it. And that's one of the most dangerous things as a creator,
• 31:33
  is not believing in yourself and not going to take opportunities. And I say,
• 31:40
  my worst personal damage is the things I failed to have the courage to
• 31:45
  stick my neck out and try. And I call those my errors of omission,
• 31:52
  and they still haunt me for going, Oh, you idiot, you
• 31:55
  could have walked across the room and past that guy that act. You didn't
• 32:00
  do it, because you didn't. And so I want to encourage people take
• 32:06
  the fucking shot. Because your eras of co mission where you embarrass yourself briefly
• 32:10
  minor compared with the opportunities you might find. And so going back to taking
• 32:15
  another shot at Niagara Falls, it was embarrassing, it was scary. I'd
• 32:20
  already been rejected less Moon Vets. When I had the idea of trying to
• 32:23
  revive the Twilight Zone the last time was revived rejected me soundly three times in
• 32:30
  a row, actually said yes and then changed his mind. Then I said
• 32:36
  him a letter saying, you know, because he changed his mind because the
• 32:39
  system they said TV couldn't use anthologies, And I said, well, you've
• 32:44
  got six minutes and you've got unsolved mysteries their anthologies, same host every week,
• 32:49
  different stories, and they've been number one. That's not the same thing.
• 32:52
  So I get shut down. And we got this clip of pieces from
• 32:55
  our At the Limits TV series, which was science fiction fans see some wonderful,
• 33:00
  really fascinating uh CGIs and things we were doing at that point, and
• 33:06
  we put this together to demonstrate what we've been doing, and I said to
• 33:09
  my partner John, could you put the twilight Zone music on that? So
• 33:14
  then I delivered it to Last Moon Vest and his people thought it was fantastic,
• 33:19
  and Less says, I'm not doing this. Stop it. Then Less
• 33:22
  gets control of UPM, which is the network at that time that had Star
• 33:27
  Trek on it and that was their number one show. And I got to
• 33:30
  my partner John and said, could you get to Last and mentioned that twilight
• 33:35
  Zone might be good because we found by the way that they owned the Twilight
• 33:38
  Zone so it was not me coming to them with something. I'm trying to
• 33:43
  actually get them to do something. I love the Twilight Zone. I'm the
• 33:45
  only person to actually revived both the Twilight Zone and the Out of Lits.
• 33:50
  So my partner says, no, no, no, you have to do
• 33:54
  it, and I've got I don't know how to do this. I'm too
• 33:57
  scared. I'm gonna he's gonna he's gonna like scream at me. And then
• 34:01
  what I did was I found what I call a framing device, which is
• 34:05
  and I'm taking you to the steps of trying to be entrepreneurial. I found
• 34:09
  something that made me comfortable and a framing device. We use these terms because
• 34:15
  we needed the we need to help each other find these things, which is
• 34:20
  something you could say or something you felt that protected you so you could take
• 34:24
  the risk of sticking your neck out and trying to get to your dream.
• 34:28
  And my framing device was I wasn't courageous enough to phone less, but I
• 34:32
  was willing to write them a letter. And my letter that came up to
• 34:37
  me that gave me permission to talk to him was deal less. So help
• 34:40
  me. I swear I will never mention the words Twilight Zone toil ever again
• 34:45
  after this, and that was my framing device and I felt great, and
• 34:49
  then I wrote how about it being a companion piece to Star Trek. I
• 34:53
  was in his office the next day. He said, I'm giving you ten
• 34:59
  days because we're against the deadline. You can write whatever you want, a
• 35:01
  ten minute presentation, whatever you want. I wrote a one hour pilot.
• 35:07
  I didn't know I could write a one air pilot. But if you put
• 35:09
  yourself under the it's amazing what you can do. We were shooting it within
• 35:15
  forty days. That's am It's unheard of in the industry. But it's because
• 35:22
  the demand his need. I was filling his need. He's taking over a
• 35:28
  network. He has a number one science fiction show, and the idea of
• 35:31
  teaming it up with one of the greatest anthology serieses And we always bowed to
• 35:42
  not being us. We were picking up the mantle of storytelling, but it
• 35:45
  wasn't our show. We were celebrating what had gone before. And that's an
• 35:53
  example of not giving up. That's that's that worked. But once in a
• 36:00
  while you end up with a success them that's amazing. And one thing that
• 36:07
  you said there, because we had two stories every episode. So that was
• 36:10
  fair enough. Fair enough. So the one thing you said that I wanted
• 36:15
  to touch on is that you were fulfilling his need. Where I feel that
• 36:19
  a lot of screenwriters and filmmakers are asking you to fulfill their needs, you're
• 36:25
  not being of service to you. So, like, if you're the person
• 36:30
  I'm trying to pitch or do something else doing that research, because you want
• 36:36
  good projects, you want good things to do, and so the studios and
• 36:39
  they all want you to be a good project. They all want your script
• 36:44
  to be the next greatest thing of all time. But most people and I
• 36:47
  see it. I get it in my inbox every day. I just literally
• 36:52
  got one today. They like, set me a screenwriting, a screenplay curry
• 36:57
  or script curry, whatever that thing is where they're like, hey, I
• 37:00
  have a new script. It got this kind of coverage. Would you like
• 37:01
  to do I'm like, do you not know who I am? Do you
• 37:05
  do you think I have some sort of Sure, here's a million dollars that's
• 37:08
  gonna make it. I'm not that guy. You did no research, but
• 37:12
  you sent it to me anyway. But by being of service to whoever you're
• 37:17
  trying to pitch is so much more powerful and also more powerful when you're selling
• 37:22
  to an audience, when you're selling to a customer, when you're selling to
• 37:27
  a producer a studio, being of service to them should be the way you
• 37:30
  lead with these pitches. Does that make sense, Well, you chose to
• 37:35
  play this game which costs millions and dollars, or if we now make a
• 37:37
  film on our iPhone, which is plausible, but you're still investing your time
• 37:43
  and energy. You have to look at the end result. He's trying to
• 37:45
  get it to a mass market. It's not like you're trying to do this
• 37:49
  for personal reasons. You're trying to get as many people as possible to see
• 37:52
  it. Now, if you were if you were selling a car, would
• 37:55
  you go out and sell a housewife a mini with who's got six family members?
• 38:01
  You know? So it's like asking those questions. You're going to sell
• 38:05
  a catac escalad to somebody who's just come out of college and has, you
• 38:09
  know, gigantic good bills for their education and no money. No, So
• 38:15
  you're what you're trying to do is fit your project, because there's probably a
• 38:20
  place your project might fit. If you've asked a proof of the project by
• 38:23
  checking out with people that you trust that the material is strong enough now and
• 38:30
  what you're looking is, okay, what what people could you see using this
• 38:37
  as a tool to get into their goals? Not I'm going to send it
• 38:40
  everywhere, but how can I make it personal? So that you see a
• 38:45
  director who's done several very very high key but very unemotional movies, Marvel comics
• 38:53
  or something, and you wonder if they and you see your research underneath them,
• 38:58
  you see, wow, my god, this guy studied Shakespeare and then
• 39:01
  and then you realize that maybe he'd liked something that's really contained but would really
• 39:06
  show up his skills working with actors and emotions, and you you then approach
• 39:13
  the system in his through his either his agencies, management or through his own
• 39:17
  production company, and you tell. And the most important thing in any letter
• 39:22
  is acknowledge the quality that you validate in that person, because the first thing
• 39:29
  they read is going to be oh, he gets me or she gets me,
• 39:34
  as opposed to I've just got this project and would you buy it?
• 39:37
  It is I understood from researching you because I loved you that and this and
• 39:43
  that, but also I saw that you had this deep heart and you actually
• 39:45
  donate money to charity for whatever this is, and I have immense feelings for
• 39:53
  that same thing. Would it be okay if I shared this project with you?
• 39:59
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back
• 40:06
  to the show. And another tool is don't sell ask for advice. Sometimes
• 40:15
  it is easier to get in to meet somebody or to exchange information by showing
• 40:21
  them that you understand what they've done, by finding an advocate. Maybe you've
• 40:24
  gone to film school and your professor will say, you know, I love
• 40:29
  this guy. He's very unique, and I believe that you're talking to him
• 40:31
  would help help his career. You get that out of your professor. You
• 40:35
  make the effort, and then you go to this person and you sit with
• 40:38
  them, talk about your career, what you could learn from them. You
• 40:42
  create a relationship, and along the way you mentioned the project. You think
• 40:45
  that he might like. That's the effort you have to go to. Not
• 40:47
  sending a frickin email out, You mean sending five thousand emails out and it
• 40:53
  doesn't even say their name, it just says hello, yes, or even
• 40:58
  worse, you know, and those poor people, you know, they're not
• 41:01
  wrong in sense. The school systems don't teach entrepreneurs. The colleges are not
• 41:08
  about trying to help you find roots to success. They're about trying to fit
• 41:14
  you into a system. And it doesn't mean to say that you won't succeed
• 41:17
  sometime. Just the lore of averages, the monkeys and typewriters will write Shakespeare,
• 41:22
  you know, if you have enough of them. But if you can
• 41:25
  help yourself by finding your framing devices and finding tools that reach out to people
• 41:30
  through your genuine care and excitement to deliver something to them that you believe it's
• 41:35
  special to their skills that you validate, that's a much easier way to sell.
• 41:39
  Now. I wanted. One of the things that we talked about when
• 41:44
  we first met at at that mixer was your work on a film that was
• 41:49
  released in nineteen ninety one called Robinhood Prince of Thieves. And I told you
• 41:52
  I sat there gushing because Robin Hood in nineteen ninety one, I still remember
• 41:58
  it so clearly. I was working at a video store during that time.
• 42:02
  UH and I went to the movie theater with my friend. We sat in
• 42:06
  the front row because it was sold almost sold out, so we had to
• 42:07
  sit in the very front and you know, with our next cranked up and
• 42:10
  we watched it. And I don't know if it was the reason that we
• 42:14
  felt like we were inside of it because we were so close to the screen,
• 42:17
  or who was just that impactful to that that high school kid. But
• 42:22
  when we walked out of the theater, we went right back in and watched
• 42:25
  it again within within twenty minutes. And I don't I could count on a
• 42:30
  hand how many times I've done that in my hand. That's how wonderful of
• 42:32
  an adventure it was for us. And it was such a It's one of
• 42:36
  my favorite films of that era. Can you tell me how did you you
• 42:40
  wrote? You wrote robin Hood Prince of Thieves and you're also a producer on
• 42:44
  it. How did you How did this whole thing come to come to be?
• 42:47
  Because Robinhood is one of those, you know, every every decade or
• 42:51
  two they just redo a robin Hood, you know, and they and I
• 42:53
  don't know, before Kevin Costner one, when was the last robin Hood,
• 42:58
  like prior to that? Probably Disney the animation, Yeah, got geez,
• 43:02
  so that we're talking about like thirty years prior to that. And then Flynn
• 43:06
  was prior to prior to that, and I remember that there was a fair
• 43:09
  answers before that. And I do remember that there was a TV movie that
• 43:15
  came around that was trying to just jump on that Robin Hood bandwagon. I
• 43:19
  remember very clearly, and they try to release it as a because I worked
• 43:22
  the video store, so I remember watching Oh yes, right, so I
• 43:24
  remember watching that video. Your story behind that too? Okay, Well,
• 43:30
  if I get boring, cut me off and just say get to the end.
• 43:32
  Okay. We've been very successful in Hollywood working with people like Stallone,
• 43:38
  who had asked us to fix things in his films as consultants, because our
• 43:44
  own hands on way with film was very successful for getting problems resolved. We
• 43:50
  worked outside of the definition of justice script so we had access to people,
• 43:54
  which was very cool. But we also looked at what we were also doing
• 44:00
  was in Canada. We choose and chose to pursue things that excited us.
• 44:06
  Having had the privilege of having my wife, I looked at what do I
• 44:09
  want to say? And I'm looking at Stillone making movies about killing lots of
• 44:13
  people and Swarts and the can making Commando where human beings are just targets,
• 44:16
  and I'm looking at us raising his kid and putting all its energy, and
• 44:20
  I'm going, what an enormous amount of love and effort it takes to raise
• 44:23
  a child? And who are using him as target practices? What would I
• 44:28
  like to say? And I came up with this idea of putting a Muslim
• 44:30
  in a Christian side by side in a robin Hood, which would show two
• 44:35
  people of different different who were supposed to be enemies, actually learning from each
• 44:38
  other. And I also came up with this idea of what I called the
• 44:44
  makers of life versus the takers of life, which was if you had a
• 44:49
  hero, and it could be a heroine who's willing to die for the future
• 44:53
  of someone else. That's like and we did backdrop, which is like a
• 44:59
  fireman, he was willing to die so that he gives other people a future.
• 45:01
  That's a maker of life. That's an altruistic hero, whereas a taker
• 45:06
  of life is someone that puts their foot on a hot, dead corpse and
• 45:08
  things, I've done something wonderful. So I went out and pitched a robin
• 45:13
  Hood that was about a lesson hidden inside an adventure. Because I'd grown up
• 45:19
  on robin hood. I'd grown up on the TV show just like you watched
• 45:22
  Hours and came away with my heart full and jumping off rocks with a sword
• 45:27
  in my hand. And I went to three different studios and pitched the robin
• 45:31
  Hood idea I had, which was to take it and make it an adventure,
• 45:37
  but with this idea of putting a Muslim with him, and the three
• 45:42
  all said pretty much the same thing. No one wants to see guys with
• 45:44
  swords. All you want to see these guys with guns. You're wasting time.
• 45:47
  And I was about to give up. There was a number of the
• 45:52
  There was a thought that I was also off course by trying to put an
• 45:57
  Arab in robin Hood. That wouldn't look good to a couple of people I
• 45:59
  knew, and we had a part. We had an assistant who was working
• 46:05
  with us called Mark Stern, and Marx sort of looked at my notes and
• 46:08
  said, you know what, I think it's a great idea if you start
• 46:13
  out, try and help you. And so the only reason Robinhood exists is
• 46:17
  because that guy gave me enough encouragement to blow on the embers of something that
• 46:22
  I'd almost given up on. And I started writing, and every day I
• 46:27
  looked at what I was writing, because I wrote just passionately, not with
• 46:31
  any plan, just to see what would come out of me. Every day
• 46:35
  I looked at my pages and thought they were obvious and silly and made Marion
• 46:40
  comes out and she's very large, and she's and Robin is shocked and looks
• 46:46
  up at her on the balcony and says, oh my, the years have
• 46:50
  been kind to you. And then suddenly he's jumped by our personally letters and
• 46:53
  that turns out to be made and that seems so obvious to me, and
• 46:58
  my assistant is no, no, no, And then he's giving the pages
• 47:01
  to John Watson, who's reading on the go no, no, keep going
• 47:05
  pen. So I got encouraged to keep taking risks, and we ended up
• 47:08
  that the film. I got the script out of me in three weeks,
• 47:15
  but it also then I gave it to John to go through it and format
• 47:20
  it and add any ideas and any adventures, and so it had his layer
• 47:24
  on it. And then as it got shot, different people added other elements
• 47:29
  and we ended up with a rich, funny, warm script that was the
• 47:35
  seeds of what I created and the energy of what I created, And for
• 47:37
  me, I was making a movie where you taught people a lesson about altruism,
• 47:43
  where you took the richest, most spoiled, obnoxious lord's son. And
• 47:46
  he had told his dad to go screw himself. He was going off to
• 47:50
  fight, and his father's begging him not to try and force a man to
• 47:53
  another man's religion. And he comes home, sees his father's dead and takes
• 47:58
  his anger by making his peasants go out and fight the shore, and then
• 48:01
  realized that all he's doing is destroying their lives. And then he has an
• 48:05
  epiphany and he's willing to die for their sons, for their children's future.
• 48:09
  And we put a birth scene in the movie, and the birth scene is
• 48:13
  metaphorically my son being born and robinhood doesn't. It is both an adventure but
• 48:22
  it's also a philosophical statement of life for me, and I couldn't give up
• 48:28
  on it. And John took on the challenge of He was what I call
• 48:34
  up to his ass in mud and arrows most of the time because he's a
• 48:36
  great on set producer and I'm more a philosopher producer. So I was working
• 48:40
  on changes and writings things, and whereas he was really taking the brunt and
• 48:45
  getting one hundred day shoot, but the movie itself grew as each ane as
• 48:51
  each element came to it, and Michael Cayman's score was just extraordinary. I
• 48:55
  also got to run the mix, and I am very much a bad out.
• 49:00
  When you create a movie, you're weaving a dream and the goal is
• 49:04
  never to let your audience wake up. It's like blowing up a balloon.
• 49:07
  You must never let the air out. And so in a mix, I
• 49:10
  worry about every facet of it. Can I pre lap a sound coming in
• 49:15
  from the next scenes there's no pause, but you're not conscious of it.
• 49:19
  If there's a pause in the in the dialogues, that's that's empty. Can
• 49:23
  I put birds flying from the trees so that your ear is tuned without it
• 49:28
  knowing that you didn't actually hear some dialogue. So I'm also excited in that
• 49:34
  process of keeping a trance, which is don't wake don't let the audience wake
• 49:39
  up. And so when you mix a movie, which is the most beautiful
• 49:43
  part of the movie, because like a Frankenstein, you're putting new blood in
• 49:45
  it and then and it comes to life. To me, every aspect of
• 49:51
  making a film is vible. Costumes tell a story. Sound effects tell a
• 49:57
  story. They have character and distribution. Even the title will be right back
• 50:02
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Your
• 50:10
  title sets up a trance state and an induction. I studied hypnosis, so
• 50:16
  there's a thing. You know. It's just inducing people, and inducing people
• 50:21
  makes them want to go with you into the dream state. And what is
• 50:23
  it? You know? I think Hollywood is is a called the dream factory,
• 50:28
  because truly stories work on our dream centers, like we have receptors in
• 50:34
  us. And that was what Marshall mcclun taught me when all those years ago,
• 50:39
  saying, look at an audience watching a movie and you'll see they're in
• 50:43
  a trance and they're moving their faces with the characters on the screen. And
• 50:47
  years later I found research that said the reason that that's happening, which is
• 50:52
  fascinating to me, is that we have a social structure in us, which
• 50:59
  is the ability to sense and feel empathy with others. And the way it
• 51:02
  works is that we're hardwired to our pain centers and we micromimic the expressions of
• 51:08
  others as we watch them, and then we feel what they feel. And
• 51:14
  if you botox yourself. You don't feel as much and you don't send us
• 51:17
  much right, which is fascinating. And we have these things called mirrorurans,
• 51:22
  which are in a switch light up in the parts of our brain when we
• 51:24
  watch somebody do something, or even when we read a book about somebody doing
• 51:30
  something, those same parts of our brain light up as what the characters doing
• 51:34
  in the book. So that's why I come back to this truant state.
• 51:38
  The purpose of a story, which is the thing that most people don't understand,
• 51:43
  is to teach us a lesson about ourselves, so that we can actually
• 51:46
  watch the struggles of the characters and make choices about our own lives and the
• 51:51
  things we struggle with based on making a decision having observed other struggles. Comes
• 51:58
  back to if you have a hero in a movie, Superman is invulnerable,
• 52:01
  he doesn't have a problem. There's nothing to learn from so and the real
• 52:08
  purpose of films is to find what the character's floor is, what their difficulty
• 52:14
  is, and illustrate it to the external story of getting the adventure out.
• 52:17
  But inside is the actual journey, and it's usually only like three steps.
• 52:22
  I'm a spoiled, rich brat. I then have a tantrum, which causes
• 52:27
  more problems. And then I come to learn who I should be if I
• 52:30
  was not spoiled and take responsibility for myself. That's Robin hood. No.
• 52:37
  And so the way you've explained it now knowing the movie so well as well
• 52:42
  as I do, is it just adds a whole other layer to it.
• 52:46
  You should have done the director's commentary or a commentary, producer's commentary, writer's
• 52:51
  commentary on the DVD track back in the day, because it does open up
• 52:54
  a completely do But you know again it different, different things get to a
• 52:59
  writing audience. I'll talk about these things. It's nutrition. An enormous number
• 53:05
  of stories don't have nutrition. And udition is that you've got a personal journey
• 53:09
  that you can relate to, that you can discover how to change yourself because
• 53:15
  of watching these people struggle. And I came up with the system inside our
• 53:19
  company because we developed hundreds of stories where a chance came up with code words
• 53:23
  called a nugget. The nugget for us is the seed inside the story that's
• 53:28
  going to grow in the brain of the person watching it. And what you
• 53:31
  know. An example would be a man is getting married and his girlfriend is
• 53:37
  starting to feel the closest of the date, the more he's sort of like
• 53:39
  living in her, in her world, and she's feeling that she's being suffocated
• 53:45
  because everything she's doing, he's there, and he's not letting her have a
• 53:47
  sense of her own freedom. And she calls off the wedding and she says
• 53:52
  to him, you know I can't do this, and you know you're you're
• 53:55
  not letting me be me. I'm and I'm And he says, you don't
• 53:59
  understand. My other left the family on Christmas Eve when I was five years
• 54:01
  old, and I didn't know how I love her enough, so she was
• 54:05
  stay with us. And she says, I'm not your mother. You have
• 54:07
  to trust me and you have to give me my freedom. That's a nugget,
• 54:13
  and it's three lines of dialogue, but it's got such pain and damage
• 54:16
  in it. And the story is can he let go of his old fears
• 54:22
  and trust this woman to be the one he wants her to be, and
• 54:25
  can he be the person he would have been if that damage had never happened
• 54:29
  to So once you look at the story and you say, okay, can
• 54:32
  I define those things? And my rule is you write stories anyway you can.
• 54:38
  Then you look for these things and see if you can emphasize them.
• 54:42
  And usually this piece of information is discussed at the belly of the Beast.
• 54:47
  As Joseph Campbell says, when the characters crash and burn at the end of
• 54:52
  the second act and all looks hopeless, they do a reassessment of who they
• 54:55
  are, and a character who has an influence on them will will suggest something
• 55:00
  or will will change their perspective on themselves. And the last act is can
• 55:06
  they become who they really should be? And we then learn about ourselves letting
• 55:12
  go of our own failure damages, or using strategies have a better position in
• 55:17
  life. Yes to everything you just said. Yes, it's it's it's it's
• 55:27
  amazing. I'm just sitting here just listening to you, and I'm just like,
• 55:30
  you know, like I feel like I'm just sitting here like an Aronald
• 55:32
  campfire r. And I'll talking to you as you explain these things the way
• 55:35
  you do. You have a very hypnotic tone to you. Get right.
• 55:39
  You have your voice is very hypnotic and a very good I'm right for everybody,
• 55:44
  because there's going to be people that do things absolutely different from anything I
• 55:46
  could imagine. No question, I say, and I say, Einstein said,
• 55:53
  It's not that I'm smartler than other people. I just stay, I
• 55:57
  think longer, and I have the privilege of doing so many stories and trying
• 56:00
  to make that process simpler and make it effective. And I'm a humanist,
• 56:05
  so I want my stories to reach out and I believe storytellers are basically what
• 56:08
  Shaman would have been around that campfire, which is to help the society pull
• 56:14
  together. That's its purpose. Now when you made when you made, you
• 56:19
  had a run of the two films back to back, which were pretty successful.
• 56:22
  You had Robin Hood and then you had Backdraft, which is the Ron
• 56:24
  Howard movie, and both of them are amazing films. Again, during my
• 56:29
  video story day, so I made sure to suggested to many many people s
• 56:31
  So, but what was it like? Because and I've had other guests on
• 56:37
  the show too when they had that one or two like that, there's moment.
• 56:40
  You've had multiple moments in your career, but I think that was probably
• 56:44
  one of the first big explosion that put us in the map in a different
• 56:47
  way. We've done several features, but nothing had it opened the doors as
• 56:52
  much. And even though the doors opened. It didn't mean you get caught
• 56:55
  blunch. No, I say scripts are like sperm in this town. There
• 57:00
  millions of them, also egs of production. So that's you can frustrate the
• 57:06
  heck out of yourself. You write a script and it could be the most
• 57:09
  beautiful, the most coherent, the most emotionally potent. You can't get it
• 57:15
  made, and you're damning yourself because you think you failed. No, when
• 57:20
  I look at my I vote in the Amplus every year, which is the
• 57:22
  Academy, and there's usually a list of three hundred movies. Only three hundred
• 57:28
  movies qualified in America to be considered the best hit. And so we've got
• 57:34
  thousands and thousands of scripts out there, and it's not necessarily a statement of
• 57:40
  failure when something doesn't get made. Now, what was it like? I
• 57:45
  always ask my guest this sometimes, especially if there's been that moment, that
• 57:47
  moment that kind of really explodes them in town. What is it like being
• 57:52
  the bell of the ball? Because I remember Robinhood when that came out.
• 57:55
  That was a monster hit. It was a very very large hit for both
• 57:59
  Kevin. I mean Kevin was on that was that was his peak time dances
• 58:04
  with wolves. So we were getting enormous amount dreams, getting terrible reviews.
• 58:10
  My son was with us in New York and he said, why do these
• 58:15
  people hate you, Dad? Because the reviews in the New York Times are
• 58:19
  horrible. But you know the thing, you know, time, time heals
• 58:23
  or wounds, and no one remembers critics. So you know, in a
• 58:28
  way, you can't judge what you've achieved except and that comes back to this
• 58:30
  thing. Do what you do, do it to the best of your skill
• 58:35
  level. Let let let time be the judge of it. But if you
• 58:38
  don't, and when I say right, create think you don't do it to
• 58:44
  the point where it's dangerous, which means you're going against the conventions. You're
• 58:47
  going against, you're taking it. You're not going to find your voice,
• 58:52
  you're not going to be the significant person. Everybody says, well, I
• 58:54
  want a film like his, because he's got a voice, and those films
• 59:00
  stick out with novelty and originality, but they're still going to follow the same
• 59:02
  footsteps of any good story, but they will be in a fresh way.
• 59:07
  So we get Robin Hood, we get some doors opened up, but we
• 59:13
  also get asked to do every bow and arrow film in the world. Oh,
• 59:17
  and then we find there are films that the system is not. It's
• 59:24
  you've got to love it and you can't get it, let it get you
• 59:27
  down. But I spent time with Markstone actually helping me with my writing assistant
• 59:32
  on that project. I spent time with Donald Schwarzenegger working on Gulliver's Travels for
• 59:37
  Disney, spent like eighteen months. The end of Disney at that time,
• 59:43
  goes you know, it's a really good script. I don't know why I'm
• 59:45
  not going to make it. And had Arnold attached, Yes, so Arnold
• 59:52
  in the nineties, which arguably he was still one of the biggest movie stars
• 59:55
  in the world at the time. We'll be right back after a word from
• 1:00:00
  our sponsor, and now back to the show. So, but you see,
• 1:00:12
  this is normal, and we've gone through dozens and dozens of steps,
• 1:00:17
  and you realize that the logistics of this are not one offs. There survive
• 1:00:22
  long enough. We keep trying to present the things you care about so that
• 1:00:25
  you're willing to take the risks of exposing yourself to try and get them to
• 1:00:30
  become reality. And if you don't care about what you've done, which goes
• 1:00:34
  back to don't just do something because you think it will sell. You're not
• 1:00:37
  going to keep going through the years and years. And we'll talk about Harriet
• 1:00:40
  Tubman briefly. Yes, yeah, yeah, So for everybody to know when
• 1:00:45
  we're recording this, Harriet just came out the weekend prior and it did the
• 1:00:50
  Gangbusters. I mean, people were like, it really overperforms, So please
• 1:00:52
  tell us how you're involved with that much more than anybody anticipated, which is
• 1:00:57
  wonderful. Harriet Tubman I discussed but as an Englishman listening to a quiz show
• 1:01:04
  which asked what woman wearing American uniform went into battle little soldiers, and I
• 1:01:10
  got that sounds interesting. It's the only woman ever. And I go and
• 1:01:15
  to start researching the answer, which is Harriet Tubman, and find this extraordinary,
• 1:01:19
  mythic, incredible, aptruistic heroine and it appeals to me very much to
• 1:01:24
  make films which have got a reinforcement of human nature. We managed to get
• 1:01:31
  Disney, which was Hollywood Pictures that time, to write a script with Gregory
• 1:01:37
  Allen Howard, who was one of the producers and one of the writers on
• 1:01:39
  the Harriet, and we got three drafts out and we couldn't get it made.
• 1:01:46
  Later on, we were approached by people who had picked up the baton
• 1:01:52
  and proud to say we did not stand in the way. We said take
• 1:01:57
  the project, did not charge the money for it, and said, just
• 1:02:00
  let us stay involved in some way, give us a credit if that's comfortable
• 1:02:05
  for you, But God bless you go out and get it made, because
• 1:02:08
  her story is much more important than us having you know, money in exchange
• 1:02:14
  for it. There are things that you you just think America needs that story.
• 1:02:21
  So then the producers on the movie who took up the challenge, you
• 1:02:28
  know, they go through fire, and they got through fire, and they
• 1:02:30
  ended up with a beautiful film, a wonderful human statement, a moral purpose
• 1:02:36
  that I am so proud to be associated with. But all I did was
• 1:02:39
  planted to see and you when did you start that journey? Correct? So
• 1:02:45
  I can only imagine trying to get ninety four when we sold Greg Allen Howard
• 1:02:52
  getting it written. So even there was four years of trying to get that
• 1:02:57
  and during the nineties, this was not going to happen like there was just
• 1:03:00
  I don't think it would have been very difficult in that environment. I mean,
• 1:03:04
  in today's world, it's it's it's tough, but there's an opening for
• 1:03:08
  that. There's a conversation about about minorities and about other other other stories that
• 1:03:15
  need to be told from different perspectives and so on. Back then it would
• 1:03:17
  have been very difficult. Like I'm just trying to think of the Hollywood Pictures
• 1:03:21
  logo coming up with that movie. I'm like in the nineties always I'm an
• 1:03:25
  optimist, so you never know. I mean, that's the thing. You
• 1:03:29
  gotta go, you gotta gory and the beauty of it is it it takes
• 1:03:37
  a team. I was I may have, you know, blown up the
• 1:03:40
  football at the beginning when I played the game. It takes a team where
• 1:03:47
  we chose a very difficult business. No, and it is and it's and
• 1:03:51
  I always tell people we've our our paint brushing canvas is probably one of the
• 1:03:54
  most expensive on the planet, you know, to play with him, other
• 1:03:58
  than architecture, I think. I always say is like, as far as
• 1:04:00
  an art form is concerned, this is probably one of the most expensive art
• 1:04:02
  forms there is. And as filmmakers and as creatives, we have to take
• 1:04:09
  some physical responsibility with the money that we're given or that we spend on this
• 1:04:14
  on these on this on this process where I just love when filmmakers who've never
• 1:04:17
  made a movie ever. And by the way, I put myself in this
• 1:04:19
  category because I said the exact same thing when I first started. All I
• 1:04:23
  need is three million, All I need is five million, five million I
• 1:04:26
  can make. It's nothing. It's five million. It's not that big a
• 1:04:28
  deal. The last movie was made for two hundred million Marvel spending five million
• 1:04:30
  on coffee, you know, And that's all fine? And did right.
• 1:04:34
  I've heard this. I'm sure you've heard this a million times anyone listening out
• 1:04:39
  there. No, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, there's some outliers,
• 1:04:43
  of course, that that you know, they make their their indie movie
• 1:04:45
  and that are given a Marvel movie or given a big studio movie or something
• 1:04:49
  like that. But they're outliers. It's not the way the business works.
• 1:04:53
  Is that fair to say, Well, you can create your own business if
• 1:04:57
  you're able to have enough guts or enough partners who are helping you. I
• 1:05:01
  do think that the movie businesses you've been asking is changing, but I can't
• 1:05:05
  tell you how it's changing. Where's the where would you put your energy right
• 1:05:11
  now to try and get movies made. I think that you know, the
• 1:05:15
  Apples and the netflixes is still not accepting independent films until you've succeeded. Then
• 1:05:20
  they'll cherry pick you. So your your goal is to try and get something
• 1:05:24
  out that gets viral, that gets emotional responses, that gets you to be
• 1:05:30
  noticed in legitimate awards, because I think there's a lot of awards groups that
• 1:05:36
  are out there that may not be actually giving your status, whereas the Nichols
• 1:05:42
  or Final Draft or the Austin very sincere, very real judgments on your work.
• 1:05:48
  And if you if you get and you got to fight for these things,
• 1:05:51
  and and and it's hard, frightening, de moralizing. And therefore that's
• 1:05:57
  why I keep coming back to if you have a personal philosophy and you're pursuing
• 1:06:02
  it, nothing you do is wasted. Every element that you write, even
• 1:06:08
  if that movie doesn't get made, adds to your ability. It's like muscle
• 1:06:12
  development. It adds to your ability the next time you write. And I've
• 1:06:15
  seen myself right out of sheer passion when I suddenly hit the click moment when
• 1:06:20
  it's ripe. And I was talking with another young writer yesterday, I'm talking
• 1:06:25
  about exactly the same thing. We tend to write a form that is our
• 1:06:30
  nature comes out of our subconscious. What you're really trying to do is to
• 1:06:33
  get it out of your subconscious, and I have tools for that. One
• 1:06:36
  of my tools is to look at the process like a Lewis and Clock expedition.
• 1:06:42
  Any frickin' way to the coast is legitimate. Amen. Brother, Amen,
• 1:06:48
  you've never been there before. How can you critique the journey? Once
• 1:06:55
  you get there? The brilliant thing is just get to the end, because
• 1:06:59
  just get up any way you can get to the end, and if necessary,
• 1:07:02
  I write and then so I might have an ending and then get to
• 1:07:05
  it. I might have a middle and an end. I don't write a
• 1:07:09
  linear form. I write whatever way it comes to me, and I'm grateful
• 1:07:12
  for it. Once you get to the end, then you get to see
• 1:07:15
  what you've created, and you see what you've actually subconsciously been given to yourself.
• 1:07:19
  And sometimes it's like dictation out of God. You know, you just
• 1:07:23
  don't know why you're getting it. But if you question it, you screw
• 1:07:26
  yourself. So there's a nag in your head that's going to piece of it.
• 1:07:30
  There's all the waste of time, no one's going to like it.
• 1:07:32
  That nag has nothing to be objective about. What it's doing is it's just
• 1:07:38
  trying to prevent you from going into a dark cave. And it's helpful when
• 1:07:41
  it's doing that, but it's not helpful when you're writing something you've never written
• 1:07:44
  before. So you got to ignore the nag and then you write down this
• 1:07:46
  stuff and you get to the end, and then you take a giant celebratory
• 1:07:50
  sigh, because that's a monumental achievement to get to the end of anything creatively.
• 1:07:56
  And then you get the permission to look at it and see why you
• 1:08:00
  really wrote it. And now you have this opportunity to see what it says
• 1:08:04
  to you, and it didn't exist before, so now you can make a
• 1:08:09
  judgment call, and I call that putting the freeway through. And what you're
• 1:08:13
  doing is you cleave off all the things you don't need. You're combine two
• 1:08:15
  characters so they become one. You essentially now know why you and how you
• 1:08:21
  want to go and why you're getting there. And then you put up the
• 1:08:24
  freeway sign so everybody else can follow you. But you don't do that as
• 1:08:28
  one thing you don't write. I got to be perfect. Got to get
• 1:08:30
  it out of me, and I've got to got to write it so it
• 1:08:32
  can be a hit. No, you just get it out of you and
• 1:08:35
  then tune it and then retune it once you had people read it, so
• 1:08:41
  that you make sure that the people who are reading it understand what your goals
• 1:08:45
  were and don't don't just have an ego snit and say, oh, that's
• 1:08:49
  obvious. They should know. If you're going to do that, then you're
• 1:08:53
  just damning yourself because you will find that most people don't know, they don't
• 1:08:58
  have the time to read, they read very badly, or they give it
• 1:09:01
  to somebody who does coverages, who's paid fifty bucks to read it in a
• 1:09:04
  hurry. And so the more powerful you can make the statement and I not
• 1:09:11
  allow it to be misunderstood, the more chance you have selling it now.
• 1:09:15
  You also, you work obviously as a producer. You've worked with many directors
• 1:09:19
  in your day, and you're always looking for collaborators to put that team together.
• 1:09:26
  Specifically, when you're hiring a director, what do you look for in
• 1:09:30
  that director? Because I think there's so much misinformation about what filmmakers. Why
• 1:09:35
  you're smiling because you're like because there's so many filmmakers have this illusion of what
• 1:09:43
  a director needs to be. Like I always tell people if you walk on
• 1:09:45
  a set and the director has a T shirt that says director or a hat
• 1:09:47
  that says director, you need to run away. Generally speaking, I don't
• 1:09:51
  see Ron Howard or I don't see Steven Spielberg wearing a director hat. Everyone
• 1:09:56
  just knows who they are. Will be right back after a word from our
• 1:10:00
  sponsor, and now back to the show. So what do you look for?
• 1:10:09
  What are the characteristics you look for for a good collaborator and specifically a
• 1:10:12
  good director. Well, the two different forms. One is in TV.
• 1:10:15
  I look for people who will bring the kind of style that I have envisioned
• 1:10:18
  for the show to the screen. And you know, I did Space Rangers,
• 1:10:25
  which was a great fun I called it rock and rolling out of space,
• 1:10:29
  compared with Star Trek, which was classical music and we only land.
• 1:10:31
  We only got six episode shot. But I chose people that could shoot it
• 1:10:35
  like Hill Street Blues with a sense of humor. So I was looking for
• 1:10:40
  directors who could actually facilitate things I couldn't do myself as a as a show
• 1:10:45
  creator. But the other way we look for is people who've written something that's
• 1:10:48
  so poetic and beautiful, were so potent that we understand that we can support
• 1:10:55
  them getting it to the screen. And so we frequently work with writer director
• 1:11:00
  because it is or we work with directors whose work we feel sympatical with,
• 1:11:06
  who are visionary, who tend to use the camera in a way that's poetic,
• 1:11:12
  so that our goal is if we're if I'm not doing it myself,
• 1:11:15
  I want to do it with somebody whose work I really think is exciting.
• 1:11:18
  And my mentorship as a producer on a set is to ask the questions of
• 1:11:25
  the director in the quiet spaces that you get what you want, don't give
• 1:11:30
  up. Let me figure out how to help you, because I know when
• 1:11:33
  I'm on a set that the amount of pressure, the number of people asking
• 1:11:38
  you questions, the time issues, that the frick and effect didn't work,
• 1:11:44
  and you've got somebody tapping and say we're going into golden time. And I
• 1:11:47
  know if you don't shoot it and it doesn't work right, don't accept it.
• 1:11:53
  We'll figure it out, because I've been there and I know if you
• 1:11:56
  accept it, you have a floored film. And and so I'm quietly trying
• 1:12:02
  to be an ally for the vision of the director, not telling him what
• 1:12:08
  to do. But I'll sometimes come with a palette of options because when you
• 1:12:13
  pressure, it's really easy to have ideas. Very true, very true.
• 1:12:17
  See three different ways you can solve this, and any of these help,
• 1:12:20
  but never telling him what to do. Now you've written this amazing book called
• 1:12:26
  Writing the Alligator. Can you go a little bit into details? And we
• 1:12:29
  talked about it a little bit earlier in the show, but can you just
• 1:12:31
  go into a little detail about what this book is and who should read it,
• 1:12:34
  because you know it's not just for screenplay writing. I mean it's also
• 1:12:39
  about the business in many ways, about how to deal and navigate the business,
• 1:12:43
  which is from a person who actually navigates the business and actually has navigated
• 1:12:47
  for many years. So tell me a little bit about the book, the
• 1:12:50
  origins of the book, and what you hope that it achieves. I was
• 1:12:56
  invited, well, it's an interesting thing again in the system to us.
• 1:12:59
  One of about execs who had left our company and gone to work for other
• 1:13:01
  companies came to me and said I got to talk to you, and I
• 1:13:04
  go, Okay, what is it? He says, you got to write
• 1:13:06
  a book because I'm not writing a book because I never heard anybody explain things
• 1:13:09
  the way you do. And I think because I worked with partners the whole
• 1:13:12
  time, and I am a visionary, I don't deny my creativity that I've
• 1:13:17
  always had to explain my creativity in some way to try and get other people
• 1:13:21
  on board so we could all go in the same direction. And so he
• 1:13:25
  said, write a book on creativity, and I'm never going to do that.
• 1:13:28
  And then my partner who's gone to USC and is now a chaired tenured
• 1:13:32
  professor there, so would you like to teach? And I going, I
• 1:13:35
  don't know if I want to teach, but and they said, well,
• 1:13:39
  it would be the entrepreneurial class, which is the pitching class. And I
• 1:13:42
  go, oh, cool, creative entrepreneurism. I wouldn't mind to find out
• 1:13:45
  what that is, because maybe this is when I could write a book.
• 1:13:48
  But I was too scared to write a book. But lady was. I
• 1:13:50
  wrote one chapter and I went in that first day, gave the students my
• 1:13:55
  chapter and I said, I'm the professor, mark my paper and it was
• 1:13:59
  unpassed. And I wrote the book based on what I felt I wanted to
• 1:14:03
  communicate where my biggest vulnerabilities were, where my biggest failings were, where the
• 1:14:09
  things I needed to be reassured about. To create a sense of voice,
• 1:14:14
  not to dictate what you should achieve, try and find ways to reinforce people's
• 1:14:18
  skills so they could take the risk of being themselves. And my book was
• 1:14:25
  determinedly responsive to what I was learning from the MFA students at USC about what
• 1:14:31
  were their instincts and what were their feelings, and how could I give them
• 1:14:34
  strength? So I don't believe in teaching, I believe in inspiring. I
• 1:14:41
  didn't want to make a book that was a formula because I one day we
• 1:14:47
  had a young guy get up and run out of the room, and I
• 1:14:49
  phoned them up and I said, what happened? He said, I just
• 1:14:53
  panic. And I decided I'd write a chapter on stress and the good side
• 1:14:58
  of stress, try and put stress in a perspective, which is stress is
• 1:15:02
  actually a positive survival mechanism. When you look at it the right way,
• 1:15:10
  you know we're naturally problem solving creatures. But it doesn't mean it doesn't cost
• 1:15:14
  us something to try and figure out how to solve the problems. So I've
• 1:15:16
  never seen a book with stress in it. I when I first went in,
• 1:15:23
  I never taught. I didn't know what a freaking syllabus was. I
• 1:15:26
  thought it was something you had to take penicillin for. So I'm looking at
• 1:15:30
  the syllabus and this the previous guy had taught with one book, and I'm
• 1:15:34
  going, I've got thirty people or reading one book. What a waste of
• 1:15:38
  time. So I then found eighteen books, and I found them on Amazon,
• 1:15:43
  and I said, Okay, we're going to divide these books up,
• 1:15:45
  and everybody's going to do one paragraph on this book and the ten most important
• 1:15:51
  things that they learned from it, as if this was information you're going to
• 1:15:56
  share with your friends. So the first week, the students come in and
• 1:16:00
  they're pitching the books and the ten things, and then I put ten of
• 1:16:06
  those in my book, which were so they could you could sample ten books
• 1:16:13
  on this in this area in Hollywood instantly and make the switches whether that book
• 1:16:19
  something you'd want to buy, where these ideas just sort of fit you.
• 1:16:23
  And I also found people like Shane Black and Leader Calla Gritas who was successful
• 1:16:30
  Hollywood, and I asked them to write a single small chapter on overcoming fear
• 1:16:36
  and what was the worst things that ever happened? And because I would bring
• 1:16:42
  in people and I wouldn't ask them, how did you succeed, I'd say,
• 1:16:44
  what's the worst thing you ever came And you find that, then it
• 1:16:48
  normalizes the process. You know. I spent one of the most wonderful things
• 1:16:53
  in my life was I got to be able to go and spend two days
• 1:16:58
  with David Lean and he was at the American Film Institute doing a retrospective of
• 1:17:03
  his films. And what we discovered was that when the film went up,
• 1:17:10
  he'd introduce it and he'd come in afterwards to answer the questions, and then
• 1:17:14
  he sat in the lobby, so well, you know, the guys that
• 1:17:17
  were smart went out in the lobby and spent two days asking him questions.
• 1:17:20
  And he complained about not being able to get the Laurentis to greenlight his version
• 1:17:28
  of Mutan Me on the Bounty of Robert Bolt script, and he felt sabotaged
• 1:17:31
  by that. He talked about his struggles to get things that he wanted done,
• 1:17:35
  and it wasn't as obvious and as simple as he makes it look when
• 1:17:39
  he succeeded, and it's not that I'm David Lean. But what it did
• 1:17:42
  was it humanized the process, and it made it so it was understandable and
• 1:17:47
  achieved to look at what he is, his body of work, and see
• 1:17:50
  how he worked, which again just gave me courage. And so I wanted
• 1:17:58
  my book to take the myths of being perfect. And I really don't like
• 1:18:03
  schematic books except as a checklist at the end of writing, then they're helpful.
• 1:18:10
  But at the beginning, if you're trying to write to someone else's formula,
• 1:18:13
  you're going to run into a lot of problems trying to think like someone
• 1:18:16
  else. And a lot of these people are wonderful, they development execs.
• 1:18:20
  They've gotten a lot of experience, but they've never initiated, and initiating is
• 1:18:26
  blowing on an amber sometimes and making it flame up. It's like getting a
• 1:18:30
  two year old to ride a bicycle when they're fifteen. You've got to get
• 1:18:34
  them all the way to all those stages of creativity. And you don't do
• 1:18:39
  that by yelling at it. You don't do it by beating it every time
• 1:18:42
  it falls over. It's like, you've got to be able to see yourself
• 1:18:44
  as nurtured and taking risks that making mistakes is normal and it's acceptable because if
• 1:18:50
  you don't, then you won't be able to take on the challenge of getting
• 1:18:55
  to the end of the script. We allow ourselves in film to do multiple
• 1:18:58
  takes with an actor and then we shoot another angle. So you know,
• 1:19:01
  we should allow ourselves that life that having multiple takes. You know, rewriting
• 1:19:06
  a book is more important than writing it in some way because you're able to
• 1:19:11
  distill down what you maybe took camp pages to write. You can now distill
• 1:19:15
  it down to a more coocient level. But you can't do that the first
• 1:19:17
  time you write it. And to criticize yourself from not writing coherently immediately is
• 1:19:24
  self flagellation. Is terribly unfair. So my thing was to try and help
• 1:19:30
  allow people to jump into the unknown and other things. Philosophies of choosing an
• 1:19:35
  agent or a manager, we tend to think we should get the biggest one
• 1:19:40
  because that's going to be a career bonus. In fact, the biggest one
• 1:19:44
  has to deal with the biggest other writers, and so you're getting very little
• 1:19:46
  of that person's time. My feeling was search for the person who is you're
• 1:19:54
  what we would call a foulware. The friend, we'll be right back after
• 1:19:59
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Someone who's
• 1:20:06
  going to talk to you when it's shitty, not somebody who's going to talk
• 1:20:10
  to you when it's easy to sell you that they're philosophically looking to support the
• 1:20:15
  vision and the style that you have got as a human being in your art.
• 1:20:20
  Because if you're working against them and they say, well, I can't
• 1:20:23
  sell that, I can't sell that, I can't sell that, you end
• 1:20:26
  up being demoralized. But if someone says, you know, if you just
• 1:20:29
  did that, I could sell it, that difference is enormous. It's vital
• 1:20:34
  to create a people. So my book's effort was to try and find and
• 1:20:38
  guide people to take steps in a career in a lifetime so that your work
• 1:20:44
  became your life, so that you could integrate both of them, and also
• 1:20:48
  deal with the fallow periods which along and also deal with the things that you
• 1:20:53
  don't necessarily sell because there's just too much out there, and also encourage to
• 1:20:58
  take risks and to stick your neck out and try entrepreneurial ideas and when they
• 1:21:03
  don't work, switch again. And it goes right down to the philosophy of
• 1:21:11
  how do you lay out a page, which you can't argue about when you're
• 1:21:14
  writing your first draft, but when you get down to it, every word
• 1:21:16
  you get off a page makes it easier to write, easier to read.
• 1:21:20
  So I worry at the end of the process, right down to the white
• 1:21:24
  space and the layout. And if you see a script that sort of helps
• 1:21:30
  you read it because it's embracing your eye and it doesn't have big watches,
• 1:21:33
  just an easier script to sell. So every step of my process is all
• 1:21:39
  about trying to get the thing I deeply care about to an audience that can
• 1:21:43
  buy it. And if it doesn't go there, at least I've carried it
• 1:21:45
  on with a sense of personal purpose and learned from the process. Amazing,
• 1:21:53
  sir, amazing. Now we've gone. We could talk for another three hours,
• 1:21:57
  I'm sure, but I am going to I'm going to ask you a
• 1:22:00
  few questions I ask all of my guests. So first of all, what
• 1:22:05
  are the top three screenplays every screenwriter should read? Thanks, we won't.
• 1:22:14
  I mean, it's not going to be on your grapestone, so just you
• 1:22:15
  know, just through. But it's not the sort of thing I think about.
• 1:22:18
  So I mean, I could I could riff three right now, and
• 1:22:21
  there'll be another three tomorrow. Yeah, gosh, that's awfully difficult. Everybody's
• 1:22:28
  going to say Lawrence of Arabia. Rubbolt wrote in a very distilled and powerful
• 1:22:32
  fashion. We actually got Proleshire meeting with him and trying to work with him
• 1:22:35
  on things, and actually did work with his son on some things. So
• 1:22:40
  a Bolt script is a great thing to read. I think you should read
• 1:22:44
  Lethal Weapon so good, which is again and it has what I call fusion
• 1:22:48
  writing. Fusion writing is what I really Again, you have these rules.
• 1:22:53
  You're supposed to use the descriptions for so and so. No, you're supposed
• 1:22:56
  to use the descriptions to support your story. And therefore, when you read
• 1:23:00
  it, Shane Black is like putting punchlines into the discript. He sees a
• 1:23:05
  gun. It's a big gun, and it's very gun. You know,
• 1:23:13
  your potency is in the description areas as well as in the dialogues. And
• 1:23:18
  if you know, actors can carry thoughts that make you see into their minds.
• 1:23:24
  So I insist that people write a thought in and I have other people
• 1:23:29
  say no, you know I do, that's against the rules. There are
• 1:23:30
  no rules. The rule is sell your story. So if you read Leaf
• 1:23:34
  Weapon, what you're reading is this potency of imagery, this fiction writing that
• 1:23:41
  it's just so dynamic that it causes you to want to keep reading and pulls
• 1:23:45
  you into the characters, into their lives and into their minds. So that's
• 1:23:48
  two free. Okay, it's a wonderful life. Okay, very good.
• 1:23:57
  Yeah, that'll do. That'll do. I yearned to try and make a
• 1:24:00
  film like It's a Wonderful Life. I work for twelve years on a project
• 1:24:03
  of mind cauled Father Time, which was about Father Time, who gives human
• 1:24:09
  beings time every year, and he argues with the original architect that we're just
• 1:24:13
  to waste the time and is forced to go down to Earth for the last
• 1:24:16
  twenty four hours before he has permission not to give us any more time and
• 1:24:19
  bumps into a family and learns what it is to be human. And I
• 1:24:24
  want to see that movie. Why is that movie that made Ben? There's
• 1:24:27
  more films out there than there are people to make them, more scripts out
• 1:24:31
  But it's a wonderful life. People think it as a comedy, but in
• 1:24:34
  fact it's a semi tragedy. He's a guy that's going to kill him and
• 1:24:40
  everybody that loves him, and he's going to leave him behind. And what
• 1:24:43
  it really is illustrated again of this altruistic heroism. The humanness of that film
• 1:24:48
  is just beautiful. So if you read it, you really get to grips
• 1:24:54
  with some of the elements of it that are very humanistic and quite troubling and
• 1:25:00
  at the same time very beautiful and reinforcing of human nature. Now, what
• 1:25:06
  advice would you give a filmmaker or screenwriter trying to break into the business today,
• 1:25:14
  Well, it depends what your goals are. If you want to write,
• 1:25:16
  I would say go and try and write anyway. In my book,
• 1:25:20
  I have a chapter on what to do if you're not actually in the business,
• 1:25:24
  which is go work somewhere that's created see creativity going on. Go work
• 1:25:29
  for a cable company that's doing local shows for the community, because they're going
• 1:25:33
  to likely let you do things because no one really wants to take on the
• 1:25:38
  work and volunteer for it. Try writing things that are that you put out
• 1:25:44
  yourself on your cell phone, put them on the internet, put them so
• 1:25:47
  that trying try and get noticed. You know, again, don't overwhelm yourself.
• 1:25:51
  I you know, the thing that Lifetimes nine was selling commercials for life
• 1:25:57
  and it was to not overwhelm the kids. And so sometimes people will do
• 1:26:00
  these epic things which they can't they struggle to achieve. But if you say
• 1:26:06
  I'm going to do a three minute, utterly incredibly potent short film, you'll
• 1:26:11
  get people to look at that. You can get that to a studio executive,
• 1:26:15
  you say, all I want is you know one hundred and for twenty
• 1:26:20
  four of your seconds or whatever it is. And if you've mastered something and
• 1:26:26
  you can do it, I mean commercials do it every day that is original,
• 1:26:29
  different, potent. You've got a better chance of getting noticed than if
• 1:26:32
  you do something which is ten minutes and floppy and doesn't quite hold together because
• 1:26:36
  you couldn't do so. My attitude is do tools that help you break in.
• 1:26:43
  Find allies who are willing to spend time with you already in there.
• 1:26:45
  So go to go tight classes on screenwriting. They're at night school, because
• 1:26:50
  you're going to meet other people that are doing it and you're going to find
• 1:26:54
  a community. That's the Ken Robinson who has the number one Ted talk,
• 1:26:58
  which is why house schools kill creativity. What he talks about is find your
• 1:27:04
  tribe and hang out with them. And that means engineers only feel comfortable for
• 1:27:09
  other engineers because their brains work that way. Musicians are most comfortable with other
• 1:27:14
  musicians, and they suddenly start grooving off each other and they start giving each
• 1:27:17
  other cathotic, charismatic, catalytic ideas. And so you should go try and
• 1:27:24
  find where you can hang with people that are doing something you want to achieve
• 1:27:28
  in a non dogmatic area so that you can learn from them. And I
• 1:27:31
  say that my buddy who phoned me up and said the CBC's got this TV
• 1:27:36
  shows the reason I have a career in Hollywood. A friend tip me off,
• 1:27:43
  and interestingly enough, we're still friends. I'm executive producer on his latest
• 1:27:47
  movie, which is a movie about the Beatles. Going to rich Kshesh with
• 1:27:51
  Maharishi and yesterday were chatting and you know, I was trying to help solve
• 1:27:58
  his problems because the outside it's so easy. You know, when you're in
• 1:28:01
  the middle of it, you got this clatter around your head. So is
• 1:28:04
  that movie being made? Is that movie being made? It's made, it's
• 1:28:08
  finished. I can't wait to see it. I can't wait to see it.
• 1:28:11
  And you know, I actually went with him and my wife and another
• 1:28:15
  friend, Terrisha Kesh a year ago and went to the Ashram, which is
• 1:28:20
  now like a jungle ruin and the Indian government is slowly trying to turn it
• 1:28:26
  back into tourist spot. Tourist neck that's amazing. He went when the Beatles
• 1:28:31
  first were there and photographed them because he was running away from a bad love
• 1:28:38
  breakup. And she's like, spend India sixty times now. Jesus, all
• 1:28:44
  right, So what is the lesson that took you the longest to learn,
• 1:28:46
  whether in the film business or in life. That's the one I haven't learned.
• 1:28:53
  Stick my neck out more, really take more chances. Is what you're
• 1:28:58
  saying. Yeah, I'm terrible. Well you've done okay, sir, You've
• 1:29:01
  done okay. But the interesting thing about creative people is the thing that you
• 1:29:08
  most care about is what you haven't achieved, especially if you're working on things
• 1:29:12
  that impassion you. I have projects two or three which are what I call
• 1:29:15
  life scripts. These are the things that forced me to write them. Time
• 1:29:20
  tells you, and I am failing my life scripts at the moment. I'm
• 1:29:25
  not doing enough to get the maid and I'm not finding the actors that can
• 1:29:29
  become the carry away to get the maide on. And I'm trying, but
• 1:29:32
  I'm not trying hard enough because they deserve more. Now, what was the
• 1:29:39
  biggest fear you had to overcome to make your first film or write your first
• 1:29:43
  screenplay? Uh? Well, self doubt. I think that that's the You
• 1:29:49
  know that this is a waste of time. I'm a freaking idiot, Who
• 1:29:51
  am I? We came to Hollywood. We'll be right back after a word
• 1:29:57
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show, and we sold a
• 1:30:06
  couple of projects, and we determined, even though I had won all these
• 1:30:11
  awards for this drama, I'm sure that I didn't know how to write,
• 1:30:15
  and that Hollywood writers didn't know how to write. And so we hired writers
• 1:30:19
  and then we looked at the work and realized that no better than us.
• 1:30:24
  There were. In fact, some ways we were better interpret I was better
• 1:30:29
  interpreting my ideas, and I kept doing that. I kept sort of trying
• 1:30:31
  to give someone my idea and have them write it because I was scared I
• 1:30:35
  wouldn't succeed with it. I wasn't good enough. That's and then when you
• 1:30:41
  see the result you go, oh, God, why did you do that?
• 1:30:45
  And I've done that to two or three projects where you go, oh,
• 1:30:48
  I should have stayed on and had the courage to write it. So
• 1:30:53
  self doubt is the biggest problem and putting yourself with the right piece. People
• 1:31:00
  don't hang around with people who do a lot of drugs do a lot,
• 1:31:02
  you know. And I sound pompass saying that, but I did jugs when
• 1:31:06
  I was a young guy. I tried them all at the fun But I
• 1:31:10
  actually want to hang out with people that are constructive, who are self starting,
• 1:31:15
  who have a vision of the future that is optimistic, and are going
• 1:31:18
  to be problem solving and they're going to be allies when it gets tough,
• 1:31:23
  and those are the people that you can build a foundation on. And coming
• 1:31:28
  to this town to start a career, you have to find those people.
• 1:31:31
  We have to work to get them, which is why trying to find community
• 1:31:35
  places like going to night school or something. It puts you in a banding
• 1:31:42
  opportunity and going through school or USC or something. I say, keep reaching
• 1:31:49
  out that network of people will be vital to you in the future. Try
• 1:31:54
  and help them, try and give them things so they want to trade with
• 1:31:58
  you because somebody, someone will know some access to something that can change your
• 1:32:01
  life. Now, where can people find your book and more about you?
• 1:32:08
  Well, I don't promote myself well enough. I did put up a kind
• 1:32:12
  of cheesy looking site called writing the Alligator dot com, and you can download
• 1:32:17
  a free chapter from my book, which I love. And also you can
• 1:32:21
  download there's a link to downloading a book I wrote, which is a mini
• 1:32:26
  book called a Creative Person's Success Manual. I wrote that out of passion when
• 1:32:33
  my son wrote me an email, who's also a writer, and we tend
• 1:32:38
  to mentor each other, and he wrote me an email one night saying I
• 1:32:41
  hate that, says ohful, and I decided I had to write him a
• 1:32:44
  letter by six o'clock the next day. I forced myself, and then the
• 1:32:47
  ideas kept coming. So I ended up with this vertical a minibook which was
• 1:32:51
  just a philosophy of structuring the process of creativity in a way that you could
• 1:32:58
  embrace it and see yourself inside it and see that you're normal and that the
• 1:33:03
  feelings you have are part of being a special creative person, and that there's
• 1:33:13
  things in there which I wanted to share learn from other people so that's for
• 1:33:16
  free. I got. I persuaded Michael we Cy Books to give it away,
• 1:33:21
  and it's like, what that was a big that's a big that's a
• 1:33:24
  big ask. Yeah, you know, but they see it that they you
• 1:33:28
  know, Michael we See Books is the best film book company in the world
• 1:33:32
  because they was. Michael says, I will ask an author to write a
• 1:33:36
  book that I don't necessarily believe will sell profitably, but because I think this
• 1:33:42
  voice needs to be in the film community. And so instead of writing books
• 1:33:46
  that are like Performer, which some companies do, you've got to have these
• 1:33:49
  stereotypical stuffs in the book. He's asking his writers to find their own passion
• 1:33:54
  and express to the book, and they're cool. So you can get if
• 1:34:02
  you've got to writingth alligator dot com, I'm doing my pictu which I verslfen
• 1:34:06
  do, you can get led to both the download of a chapter which is
• 1:34:12
  designed to inspire to write. It's designed to take away that fear that you
• 1:34:18
  must do it in a certain process, but to actually embrace yourself as being
• 1:34:23
  the instrument and that you're entitled to allow that instrument to play itself as you
• 1:34:27
  discover, and that that again is if I could catch somebody ever gets up
• 1:34:31
  at an oscar and says, you know, I read that chapter and it
• 1:34:34
  helped me. I will be so proud. Ben. It has been an
• 1:34:40
  absolute pleasure talking to you today. It is you've You've dropped all sorts of
• 1:34:44
  knowledge bombs on the tribe today and I truly truly appreciate you taking the time
• 1:34:49
  to share your experience and your knowledge and your wisdom with us. So thank
• 1:34:54
  you again for taking the time out. I truly appreciate it. Thank you
• 1:34:58
  so much for a great interview. Enjoyed it. It was easy to do.
• 1:35:01
  I want to thank Penn again for coming on and dropping those knowledge bombs
• 1:35:05
  on the Bulletproof Screenwriting Tribe. Thank you again, Penn. If you want
• 1:35:11
  to get Penn's book or want to get links to anything we spoke about in
• 1:35:15
  this episode, please head over to the show notes at any film muscle dot
• 1:35:17
  com forward slash seven fifty eight, and if you have it already, please
• 1:35:20
  head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review for
• 1:35:27
  the show. It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you
• 1:35:30
  again so much for listening to guys. As always, keep that Hustle going,
• 1:35:32
  keep that dream alive. Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to
• 1:35:35
  you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie film
• 1:35:42
  hustle dot com. That's I N D I E F I L M h
• 1:35:45
  U S T l E dot com.