Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 700: How to Be a Screenwriter in Hollywood with Marshall Herskovitz

Transcript

IFH 700: How to Be a Screenwriter in Hollywood with Marshall Herskovitz · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Indie
• 0:13
  Film Hustle Podcast, Episode number seven hundred. I don't think that screenplay writing
• 0:19
  is the same as writing. I mean, I think it's a blueprint.
• 0:22
  Robert Altman broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle
• 0:29
  Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker
• 0:33
  in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
• 0:39
  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I
• 0:42
  am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of
• 0:46
  the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into a profitable business. It's
• 0:51
  harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films from
• 0:55
  predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them.
• 1:00
  The odds are stacked against the indie filmmaker. The old distribution model of making
• 1:03
  money with your film is broken, and there needs to be a change.
• 1:07
  The future of independent filmmaking is the entrepreneurial filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In
• 1:14
  Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, I break down how to actually make money with
• 1:18
  your film projects and show you how to turn your indie film into a profitable
• 1:22
  business. With case studies examining successes and failures. This book shows you the
• 1:26
  step by step method to turn your passion into a profitable career. If you're
• 1:32
  making a feature film, series, or any other kind of video content,
• 1:36
  the Film Entrepreneur method will set you up for success. The book is available
• 1:40
  in paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook. If you want to order
• 1:45
  it, just head over to www dot film bizbook dot com. That's film
• 1:49
  bizbook dot com. Now, guys, today on the show, we have
• 1:55
  writer, director, producer, showrunner Marshall Herskovitz. Now. Marshall is best
• 2:00
  known for being the other side of the desk with writing partner Edward Ziwick,
• 2:06
  who of course has been on the show before, and after talking to Edward,
• 2:09
  I reached out and said I'd love to get Marshall on the show as
• 2:13
  well to talk about what he has done as a writer, as a producer,
• 2:16
  and a screenwriter and see what his process is not only working with Ed,
• 2:21
  but also working by himself and as a director. In his journey through
• 2:24
  the business now, Marshall has co written projects like The Last Samurai, Love
• 2:30
  and Other Drugs, Jack Reacher, Never Go Back, The Great Wall,
• 2:34
  American Assassin, and he was involved with creating the eighties classic series Thirty Something
• 2:40
  and more recently Nashville. He is also a very accomplished producer and has produced
• 2:46
  projects like the Oscar winning film Traffic Defiance, Legends of the Fall, and
• 2:53
  many many more. Marshall was truly a wealth of information. It was like
• 2:59
  kind of going to a master class on screenwriting and on the business itself how
• 3:05
  to navigate the business over the years, which he has been able to do
• 3:08
  in great, great form. So, without any further ado, please enjoy
• 3:14
  my conversation with Marshall Herskovitz. I like to welcome to the show, Marshall
• 3:21
  Herskovitz. How are you doing, Marshall? I am well, How are
• 3:23
  you? I'm going well, my friend, thank you so much for doing
• 3:27
  this show. I'm I'm a fan of of of many many of your films,
• 3:31
  including the films not you've just written and produced, but directed as well,
• 3:36
  and we'll get into that in the future. But I heard nothing but
• 3:38
  good things from you from Ed who was on the show as well, Edward
• 3:44
  Ziwick, and I said, well, I gotta get Marshall on the show
• 3:47
  too. I can't just talk to Ed. I want to talk to Marshall
• 3:50
  as well. So thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it.
• 3:53
  Well, I'm happy to do it. And just know, if I
• 3:55
  say anything that Ed said, you stole it from me. Fair enough,
• 4:01
  fair enough. So before we get started, Marshall, how did you get
• 4:05
  into business? Well, you know, it's funny. I went to Brandeis
• 4:12
  back in the early seventies, which dates me severely, and I majored in
• 4:19
  English. In fact, I majored in Old English. I was very interested
• 4:23
  in medieval England. I was a token freak and just loved sort of Bayowolf
• 4:30
  and that whole kind of you know, early medieval epic poetry sort of thing.
• 4:35
  And at the same time, at that moment, for some reason I
• 4:40
  can't explain, there was a huge interest in old movies. Like when I
• 4:44
  was, you know, living in Boston, there were two different revival movie
• 4:47
  theaters in Cambridge and then on campus. One night a week there was an
• 4:51
  old movie shown, So basically I was watching three old movies a week.
• 4:56
  And when I look back on it, I realized that the real education I
• 5:00
  got in college was in movies. I just didn't know it at the time.
• 5:03
  And I fell in love with movies. I fell in love with classic
• 5:06
  movies, and by the time I was a senior in college, I wanted
• 5:11
  to be a filmmaker. And the odd thing is all I wanted to do
• 5:15
  was make medieval epics. That was my goal. Go to Hollywood and make
• 5:19
  medieval epics. And here I am forty years later and I haven't made one,
• 5:24
  but you know, there's still hope at any rate. That is what
• 5:30
  propelled me into the film business. I graduated, I made a short film
• 5:32
  which was not a medieval epic. It was a very intimate drama, and
• 5:38
  I came out to Hollywood thinking that that would be my ticket to fame and
• 5:44
  success, and I literally could not get one person to even look at it.
• 5:47
  It was the most disheartening. And in those days, all you had
• 5:51
  with the Yellow Pages. I went through the Yellow Pages for all production companies
• 5:57
  and called every single one in Los Angeles, and no one would look at
• 5:59
  it. So after about six months of floundering, I heard about this amazing
• 6:04
  film school called American Film Institute, and I thought, well, maybe I
• 6:09
  should do that instead, And so that's that's where I went. That's where
• 6:13
  I met ed on the first day, and and really that gave me my
• 6:16
  start. Really, and so you guys are just just you know, school
• 6:20
  school chums who got together and then and just stuck together for the last forty
• 6:24
  years working on projects together. That's right, that's right. We're the longest
• 6:28
  living partnership in Hollywood right now. Really, that's actually saying a lot,
• 6:31
  actually it actually is. I mean, I tell me, I'm very proud
• 6:36
  of and I know he is too, and we have worked independently all the
• 6:42
  long, but nevertheless our preferences to do things together. Yeah. Absolutely.
• 6:47
  I had a similar education when I but I didn't I had a video store.
• 6:51
  I worked at a video store for five hours while so I did the
• 6:55
  same thing. I've watched three movies a night. You know. It was
• 6:58
  high school, so there's nothing else to do home work, so I would
• 7:00
  just I would just take home movies and just watch and watch. And I
• 7:03
  got such an education. And that was before I even wanted to become a
• 7:06
  director. At the end, I was like, I guess, I guess
• 7:09
  I kind of want to be a director, kind of similar to you.
• 7:11
  So you wanted to make ex caliber but never did, is what you're saying.
• 7:14
  That's correct, Yes, yes, but there's still hope. There's still
• 7:16
  hope. I finally, after thirty years, got to write a screenplay of
• 7:23
  the story of ten sixty six, the Norman Conquest of England, which was
• 7:26
  something I had desperately wanted to do. And you know, I still have
• 7:30
  hope that will make that as a movie. But you know, it's not
• 7:32
  exactly a moment now in the history of the film business when you can make
• 7:36
  big films like that. So we'll see. I mean, you put a
• 7:40
  cape on the main character. I think you have a better shot. I
• 7:46
  know, that's the world up, you know, with superpowers? Could these
• 7:48
  various people have It's no that is that? Is that a serious conversation?
• 7:54
  Did someone actually have a conversation with you about that? Not about that,
• 7:57
  but about something as ridiculous, um, something I don't even want to go
• 8:03
  into it. It's ridiculous. It's just um. It was a thing about
• 8:07
  Vietnam and someone suggested that maybe if they had different superpowers, people might be
• 8:13
  more willing to look at a story about the Vietnam War. It was upsetting.
• 8:18
  It was kind of It's kind of like when when they went in and
• 8:22
  pitched James Cameron a Titanic too, you know, Jack's back. Like,
• 8:26
  at a certain point, you just gotta go enough. There you go,
• 8:28
  It's enough. Now. I have I have to ask. I was looking
• 8:31
  through your filmography, and I have to ask, what was it like work
• 8:35
  writing for Chips? Oh, I mean, I'm a seventies kid, right
• 8:41
  there, I went straight to I went straight to Chips because I had,
• 8:45
  by the way, I had the pleasure of directing Erica strad on some commercials
• 8:48
  years ago. And the stories, oh my god, the stories he told
• 8:52
  about what happened in the seventies. People just don't understand what the seventies were
• 8:56
  like. I understand by the way. I never went near the set,
• 8:58
  so I have no stories to tell about the production of it. All I
• 9:03
  can say is that that was the low point of my career. I was
• 9:09
  when I got out of film school, right I spent about three or four
• 9:13
  years trying to be a freelance writer in episodic television, which is, by
• 9:18
  the way, it doesn't really exist anymore. That you don't really have people
• 9:20
  to make a career as a freelance writer at the television anymore. And at
• 9:28
  one point Chips was the only job I could get. And I read one
• 9:31
  of their scripts and it was like it was written in another language. I
• 9:35
  just had no idea how to do this thing. There was no connection one
• 9:41
  scene went to the next. The dialogue didn't make sense. I literally was
• 9:43
  completely lost, and I came up with a sweet idea. Actually, we'll
• 9:50
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 9:58
  show about an old Native American who thought his grandson was losing, you know,
• 10:05
  was not knowing enough about the old ways. So he was raising his
• 10:09
  grandson in Griffith Park away from people, you know, getting away nice.
• 10:15
  And they bought it. They liked that. And it was Michael and Stara
• 10:18
  who played him, of course, because in those days, Michael and Stara
• 10:22
  played Native Americans, and so it didn't turn out so bad. But for
• 10:28
  me it was a very humiliating experience because I had no idea. I just
• 10:33
  it was not the type of thing I knew how to write, and in
• 10:35
  fact, that was part of what catalyzed I think the most one of the
• 10:43
  most important moments in my career, which was a decision I made, after
• 10:46
  three or four years of doing that that I just was going to stop.
• 10:52
  In other words, I sat down and wrote a screenplay as a spec thing
• 11:00
  ed and I wrote out the work the story together together, and then I
• 11:03
  wrote the screenplay and I said to my wife, I said, you know,
• 11:11
  either this is going to work or I'm leaving the business, because I
• 11:13
  just cannot go on doing what I feel to be a bad job, doing
• 11:18
  other people's voices, meaning the voices of shows, you know. And and
• 11:24
  so that willingness, I think to take that chance, and today I'm either
• 11:28
  going to make it on my terms or I'm going to walk away what turned
• 11:33
  everything around. And the interesting thing is that that screenplay that I wrote had
• 11:37
  never been made. It was almost made three times, but it did change
• 11:43
  everything for me because people were able to see my voice and I got work
• 11:46
  from it. And the work I got from it was what then gave me
• 11:48
  my career. So the willingness to bet on myself it was a scary thing
• 11:54
  at age twenty six or twenty seven. But that was that was what made
• 11:58
  it happen. I mean, that's pretty enlightened for a twenty six or twenty
• 12:01
  seven year old to be honest, because God knows, I was in much
• 12:05
  worse shape than you were at twenty six or twenty seven. I was lost.
• 12:07
  I was in the darkest pit of my time. That's a whole other
• 12:11
  story for another podcast. But but inst most twenty year olds don't have that
• 12:18
  kind of reflection or that honestly, that kind of bravery to just go,
• 12:20
  you know, I'm gonna make it on my end and people listening. It's
• 12:24
  a very different industry than it was when you were doing this. It was
• 12:28
  less competition. It wasn't cool to be a screenwriter or a director. It
• 12:31
  wasn't nobody even knew what that was. To just knew that movies would mean.
• 12:37
  Yeah, I know, it's true. I mean it was hard to
• 12:39
  break in by the way. There were trade offs because there was much fewer
• 12:45
  product. You know, there were three television networks in those days and instead
• 12:50
  of two hundred. You know, it's easier to get a job today,
• 12:54
  but harder to have your own voice today. You know, I think you
• 12:58
  could have a voice in those days, and and I felt that I had
• 13:03
  one and it was something that I that I felt I needed to listen to.
• 13:09
  So, um, you know, look, one thing has always been
• 13:15
  true, which is to make it in this business, you have to be
• 13:16
  driven, you have to be you have to need to do it. I
• 13:20
  remember when I was still in Boston talking to some person who had been to
• 13:24
  Hollywood, you know, saying, you know, how do I do this?
• 13:30
  And you know, do I have a chance of making it? And
• 13:33
  this person said to me, basically, if there's anything else you can do,
• 13:39
  you'll end up doing it. If there's nothing else you can do,
• 13:41
  then maybe you'll have a chance. I don't listen. I don't know if
• 13:45
  it happened to you. But I mean I've gone through this. I mean
• 13:48
  I've got a lot of shrapnel, I'm sure as you do. UM in
• 13:50
  this battle of these years working in this business. Um, And there was
• 13:56
  times I wanted to leave. I'd like, I just I can't take it
• 14:00
  anymore. I want to quit. It's I'm like, And then did the
• 14:05
  voice in the back of your heads like what else are you gonna do?
• 14:07
  What are you gonna go out gett a real job? What else are you
• 14:09
  gonna like it's at a certain point. He's just like, ah, and
• 14:13
  yeah, did that happen to you multiple times? And how did you break
• 14:16
  through that? Because it's still happening, it happens. I say about that,
• 14:22
  I say about that. First of all, I had an inherent belief
• 14:28
  in what they now call the hero's journey before I had any idea of what
• 14:33
  a hero's journey was. It's so deeply embedded in our culture that I believe
• 14:37
  that everything was a test, and you know, they're going to throw this
• 14:41
  shit at you to try to get you to quit, and therefore you just
• 14:45
  have to try harder. Why I thought that, I don't know. No
• 14:48
  one told me that. That was just my belief, and so my belief
• 14:52
  was, Okay, I get it. Oh, now sick, bad things
• 14:56
  have happened, and I want to leave. Okay, this is the moment
• 14:58
  when you have to dig down and take no, I'm not going to leave.
• 15:01
  I don't know why I believe that. I'm grateful that I did,
• 15:05
  because I think it got me through. But the other thing is it took
• 15:09
  me many years to realize it's something. Something ED and I talk about a
• 15:13
  lot. There's a cycle in this business and probably other businesses, but I
• 15:18
  think it's more of this business because it's so speculative. The cycle goes like
• 15:24
  this. You are nobody, you have nothing to lose. You you do
• 15:28
  something bold, you do something original, People notice it, you get attention,
• 15:37
  They start to build you up. You start to make money, people
• 15:41
  start to believe in you. You start to think that you know what you're
• 15:43
  doing. And in thinking that you know what you're doing, you become cautious
• 15:48
  and maybe arrogant, and then you make a stupid mistake and you come tumbling
• 15:54
  down and are completely humbled by the business. And in the midst of your
• 16:00
  spare you have nothing to lose, and you could start being original again.
• 16:03
  And I could chart five times in our career when that sort of thing has
• 16:10
  happened, where in some way you know how they say in southern California,
• 16:15
  fire is a natural part of the life cycle of this environment, and that
• 16:19
  you need to have fires. Well, failure is a natural part of the
• 16:23
  life cycle of a career. You have to have failure. You have to
• 16:30
  fail at things. That's the only way you learn, that's the only way
• 16:33
  you grow and become better. And I think people are so afraid of failure
• 16:38
  that they become mediocre to avoid it, and the business now allows for that.
• 16:44
  You know, we always talk about how people fail upwards, which means
• 16:48
  they're mediocre and they don't make a huge mistake, so they sort of keep
• 16:52
  sort of moving up. I'm not a believer in that. I'm a believer
• 16:56
  and you take the chance, and you take happens, you know, Like
• 17:00
  I mean, there's a filmmaker out right now who's you know, taking swings
• 17:06
  at the bat that I'm so regardless if you like the movies or not,
• 17:08
  but someone like Chris Nolan is taking massive swings, unbelievable swings at bat.
• 17:18
  And I'm so glad there's guys like him and Fincher and these kind of guys
• 17:22
  um that just go up there and just take massive because there's there's you could
• 17:26
  take creative choices or creative challenges and do things that are original at a lower
• 17:32
  budget. But when you get up to the one hundred and fifty two hundred
• 17:34
  million dollars and you do something like Inception or Tenant, I know, that's
• 17:40
  that's a that's a writ because imagine if that goes really badly, it's hard
• 17:45
  you can put in director jail. And that's the thing I understand, and
• 17:48
  I have enormous respect and as you say, it's like I couldn't even follow
• 17:53
  Tenant. You know, I'll be honest, I couldn't follow it. I
• 17:56
  want to watch it again. I want to watch it like words, you
• 18:00
  know. On that. Then he makes Dunkirk, which is like suppli you
• 18:04
  know what I mean. And it doesn't matter because he's an incredible filmmaker who
• 18:11
  has a vision, who has the resources to wherewithal and the courage to follow
• 18:17
  that vision. And you're right, we need people like that. We need
• 18:22
  a business that will still support people like that. And if there's one big
• 18:26
  difference between today and thirty forty years ago, it's that there were more people
• 18:30
  in positions of power who were willing to trust filmmakers back then. That's just
• 18:36
  a fact. I mean, Look, we wouldn't have Star Wars without Alan
• 18:38
  ladd I mean, Alan Ladder took the risk on a filmmaker who made thxleven
• 18:42
  thirty eight, which was a horrible bomb. He's likely, Hey, you
• 18:47
  know what I think, Let's give him thank him like nine million. Sure
• 18:49
  you can have the merchandising rights. I'm sure that I'll work, I'll find
• 18:52
  for everybody. It is one of the most famous stories in Hollywood that merchandise
• 19:00
  well because all contracts were rewritten after that. I mean, it was that
• 19:04
  totally because there's no money in lunch boxes and action figures. What is that
• 19:11
  to a sci fi movie tier take a kid, it's it's it's absolutely remarkable.
• 19:19
  I always talk I always talk about the punch that everybody gets in this
• 19:26
  in this business, no matter how big you are, no matter how accomplished
• 19:29
  are nowhere of what stage in life you are, punches continues to come all
• 19:33
  the time. And as you get as you get older, you learn how
• 19:37
  to duck a bit like when you're younger, you learn how to take it.
• 19:40
  You learn how to take the punch and keep going. Like you were
• 19:41
  saying, like, Okay, they through six or seven things, let me
• 19:45
  screw you. I'm still going. That's the taking of the punches. But
• 19:48
  some people get that first punch and they're out for out of the game because
• 19:52
  they're cold cocked. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 20:00
  and now back to the show. But as you get older, sometimes you
• 20:04
  can duck, sometimes you can weave. Sometimes it can skim off you and
• 20:07
  sometimes it just misses you all together. But that's that's age, that's experience.
• 20:12
  Well, can I tell you, I don't think ed and I have
• 20:15
  ever learned how to duck or we've I think we got one of the worst
• 20:21
  punches of our career just this past year in twenty twenty, and we were
• 20:26
  just destroyed by it. Destroyed And I'll even say what it is. We
• 20:30
  thought we were doing a reboot of thirty something. He had a great idea.
• 20:37
  Basically, it wasn't a redo. It was basically saying, it's another
• 20:41
  generation. All of their children are now in their thirties, and it's going
• 20:45
  to be as much about their children as it is about the original cast members.
• 20:49
  And we wrote seven scripts and we thought it was going to go,
• 20:55
  and we had our whole heart and soul in this thing, and ABC decided
• 21:02
  not to do it, and we were just like we were undone. So
• 21:07
  here we were. You know, there was no ducking, there was no
• 21:10
  weaving. That was a straight punch right to the face. Yeah, And
• 21:15
  you know, and you know the thing about the business, if you're a
• 21:21
  creative person, meaning if you when I say creative person, we're all creative
• 21:25
  people. But what I mean is if you make your living by creating things,
• 21:29
  either as a producer, director, writer, or that sort of thing,
• 21:33
  this is going to happen over and over and over again. You have
• 21:36
  to be willing to endure that kind of of rejection, which is not the
• 21:42
  same as failure. Failure is once you've made it and people shit on it.
• 21:47
  You know. Rejection is before you get to make it and people don't
• 21:51
  take it seriously, or they don't think it's good enough, or they decide
• 21:55
  they don't want to do it for whatever reason, you know, And and
• 22:00
  you know, the point is it takes just as much work we have.
• 22:03
  We put months and months and months at work into that, even though we
• 22:07
  hadn't shot you know anything, and it was it was awful. Um.
• 22:12
  But that's why. That's that's that's the job. If you can't handle that,
• 22:18
  you can't do this job. And that's the thing that I want people
• 22:19
  listening to understand, because a lot of people think, you know, someone
• 22:22
  like you and Ed, oh, you know, all all doors are wide
• 22:26
  open. They just you know, how much do you need Marshall? How
• 22:30
  much do you need Ed? Because of your track record? I mean,
• 22:33
  you guys having remarkable track workers individually and as a team, remarkable track workers
• 22:37
  as writers, producers and directors. And yet, and I've said this so
• 22:41
  many times, I look, I always use the example of Spielberg, but
• 22:44
  I'm going to use you guys as an extend. But like Spielberg couldn't get
• 22:45
  Lincoln, couldn't get Lincoln, you know, financing had to go, so
• 22:48
  scores Asian couldn't get Silence finance for twenty years ago. And they're two they're
• 22:52
  two icons. Yeah, they're two icons. And yet that might don't rad
• 22:56
  might go, oh, they should be able to do it. Us.
• 22:59
  I know it would be right. And then you know what, I've said
• 23:02
  that story to other people, like yourself, and they're like, you know
• 23:03
  what, I'm not crying for Steve. I'm not crying for Martie either.
• 23:07
  But I understand your point. Um, But there's people at every stage of
• 23:11
  their career, at every stage, no matter what they've done Oscars, no
• 23:15
  oscars, big box office hits, non bick offices, you still it's still
• 23:21
  a struggle. It's still a struggle, constant, struggle, constant. And
• 23:26
  that's and that's what I want people listening to understand that, like, there
• 23:29
  is no magical place that you'll get to in this career where just doors,
• 23:33
  doors will be wide open all the time. It might happen once or twice.
• 23:36
  Yeah, after big hit after big hit, you're you're the toast of
• 23:38
  the town. You're the bell of the ball. What would you like?
• 23:41
  And that's when you stick in that that project that you've been wanting to get
• 23:45
  done for the last twenty years, like a medieval ex caliber reboot the correct.
• 23:53
  Now, Um, when you brought up thirty something, how did you
• 23:56
  guys, you and Ed come up with that? Because I mean, I
• 23:59
  remember when I was growing up. I mean I wasn't in my thirties then,
• 24:00
  but I do remember. Thirty something was a heat. It was a
• 24:03
  monster hit. It was a monster hit for ABC when it came up.
• 24:08
  How did you guys come up with that whole that whole thing. There's a
• 24:11
  funny story behind it, you know. We Oh my god, you know,
• 24:17
  Um, I'm trying to figure out how far to back this up.
• 24:22
  But essentially because we had done this heating movie called Special bullet In, which
• 24:27
  I can talk about later, which made a big splash in the eighties.
• 24:32
  It was about nuclear proliferation and nuclear bombs and all of that. It kind
• 24:36
  of put us on the map. And we were offered a television deal at
• 24:38
  MGM Television, right, and of course we didn't want to do television,
• 24:41
  want to do movies. We thought television was, you know, shit,
• 24:47
  And so we took this deal at MGM Television explicitly for the purpose of the
• 24:52
  fact that I wanted to put a second story on my little tiny house Instanta
• 24:56
  Monica, and it would pay me just an money to do that. And
• 25:02
  the idea was to try to get out of doing anything they wanted us to
• 25:04
  do because they were going to pay us a guarantee. But we didn't have
• 25:07
  to do anything, you know, we were only obliged to try to sell
• 25:11
  the television series. That's that's it, just try to sell the television series.
• 25:15
  So the moment came where we were going to have the pitch meetings at
• 25:19
  the networks, and you know, we had come up with ideas for series
• 25:23
  and I turned to Ed and I said, you know, these are all
• 25:26
  terrible ideas. What if we sell one of these, It's like we would
• 25:30
  have to make this. This is awful, you know, And so this
• 25:34
  is not a joke. We sat there and we said, okay, what
• 25:37
  we need is an idea for a series that has no chance of going,
• 25:42
  but if it goes, we wouldn't mind doing so. We said what would
• 25:48
  that look like? And I sat there and I thought, well, you
• 25:49
  know what's interesting is that on television at this moment, and we're talking about
• 25:55
  now, nineteen eighty six, there's nothing that represents the baby boom generation except
• 26:00
  Saturday Night Live and a show called Katon Alley. Yeah, yeah, and
• 26:07
  that was it. Everything else had nothing to do with baby boomers. And
• 26:11
  I said, Ed, you know, look, we know all these people
• 26:15
  in this moment in their lives. They're having babies, they're messing with their
• 26:18
  careers. You know, this person's afraid to settle down. And it's very
• 26:22
  interesting because Ed, he was normally so open to everything, looked at me
• 26:27
  with this look he gets. You know, we have this thing. It's
• 26:33
  like he gets this look that looks like a grimace. And I go,
• 26:37
  why are you still down on this already? And he goes, I'm not
• 26:40
  down on it. It's just my face. I'm not making a face,
• 26:42
  you know, hey, rate he gave me that face, and he was
• 26:47
  he was just completely, you know, didn't buy this. And in those
• 26:51
  days, of course, we had this stupid little office at MGM, and
• 26:53
  at one in the afternoon we could just go home because we didn't have anything
• 26:56
  we had to do. So we went back to his house and his wife,
• 27:00
  Liberty, was there, and I tell her this idea I have,
• 27:04
  but why don't we just talk about people we know. Ed's whole point was,
• 27:07
  but there're no cops in it, There're no lawyers or no doctors.
• 27:11
  How are you going to sell a television series that doesn't have any of the
• 27:14
  franchises? And I said, what do we care about that? Their story?
• 27:18
  And God bless their Liberty went, oh my god, I love that
• 27:22
  idea, and she started just listing all the people she knew and all the
• 27:26
  dilemmas in her life. And because Ed is Ed and he loves Liberty somehow,
• 27:30
  when she said it made sense to him when I said it didn't make
• 27:33
  sense to him. So literally, by the end of that afternoon, we
• 27:37
  had sketched out the seven characters, you know, By the next day we
• 27:41
  had written this sort of manifesto of the series. We went in the day
• 27:45
  after that to ABC, and of course, who are the executives in the
• 27:48
  room, they're all in their thirties. One is pregnant. They were exactly
• 27:51
  the demographic for the show, and we basically sold it in the room to
• 27:56
  them, and you know it, the whole thing was kind of charmed.
• 28:02
  And the irony was that we didn't want to do it. We did not
• 28:06
  want to do it. Um. You know, it's sort of that's when
• 28:11
  Ed started quoting that great John Lennon line of you know, life is what
• 28:15
  happens while you're busy making other plans, because at every step along the way,
• 28:19
  you know. All right, So we wrote the pilot and people love
• 28:23
  the pilot, and they said, go make the pilot. And then I
• 28:26
  directed the pilot, which is the first thing I directed, and they loved
• 28:30
  the pilot. And then in those days, they had what was called selling
• 28:36
  season in New York City in May where they would you know, show everything
• 28:41
  to the advertisers and decide what they were going to pick up. It's what
• 28:44
  now it's called whatever, the TF sweete, not the sweeps, no,
• 28:48
  the uh, the TCAs whatever they're calling it, the upfronts basically, but
• 28:53
  in those days there were no cell phones, so you were ordered to go
• 28:59
  to New York and sit in your hotel room for five days and be within
• 29:03
  range of your telephone in the hotel room because you might get a call that
• 29:07
  your show was picked up. So we sat there like idiots for four days
• 29:14
  in New York. On the on the fourth day, we get a call
• 29:17
  from the head of the studio. And that's a whole other story. David
• 29:19
  Gerber, who was one of the greats, such a character. Um every
• 29:23
  second word was it was a curse word. And he says, and he
• 29:27
  had this they love this fucking Showel. That's great, but you gotta change
• 29:32
  the name. They don't thirty something. They make no sense, but you
• 29:33
  gotta change the name. They want to use grown ups. Then we go
• 29:37
  grown ups, that's a terrible idea. He goes, well, they don't
• 29:40
  know if they can get it because Joel Spiper owns it, but they want
• 29:41
  to use grown ups. And we go, well, we hate the idea.
• 29:45
  We don't want to use grown ups. We want it to be thirty
• 29:48
  something. Ah, And so he hangs up. Okay, so we thought
• 29:52
  it was over. You know, we'll be right back after a word from
• 29:56
  our sponsor. And now back to the show. And then of course,
• 30:04
  the next day at June, he calls and he goes, they're picking up
• 30:07
  the show, so you're actively trying to sabotage. Sabotage and not only that,
• 30:15
  I'll go further. We hang up the phone and he's like, oh,
• 30:19
  you guys are amazing. They're like, you could hear cheering behind that
• 30:22
  they picked up the show. We hang up the phone and we look at
• 30:26
  each other and the thing is ed and I have this shorthand with each other.
• 30:30
  We don't speak very often, you know, in sometimes in these situations.
• 30:33
  We just looked at each other and we just you know, chook our
• 30:36
  heads and went for a walk up Madison Avenue for about an hour, thinking
• 30:41
  that our lives had just been completely derailed and now we were doing a television
• 30:45
  series instead of being movie makers. And in those days, you remember,
• 30:49
  TV was the great waste land in those das, right, I was about
• 30:52
  to say that it's not the whole thing, like now TV's now the whole
• 30:56
  place to be. Yes, No, we were so out, so it's
• 30:59
  like, what are we doing with our lives? And I say that in
• 31:03
  the full knowledge of how stupid we were at that moment, and I delight
• 31:07
  in our stupidity at that moment. But that's where we were. We we
• 31:11
  we we thought, oh fuck, we sold a television series. I guess
• 31:15
  we're gonna have to go do it now. Um. And that's the thing,
• 31:18
  that's the one thing I've I've I've heard this from multiple people in the
• 31:22
  business. Um, if you want to get rich, you work in television.
• 31:26
  If you want to be an artist, you go to movies, because
• 31:29
  because there's a lot more money to be made, at least there was back
• 31:32
  you know, when the studio a lot of residual There was much more money
• 31:34
  to be made in television than there was withindication and all of that kind of
• 31:40
  stuff. As opposed to a movie. It's just a one. So it's
• 31:42
  like, that's right, that's right, yea. Nowadays that's you're one of
• 31:47
  those few people you know who you know, a few directors who can make
• 31:53
  ten million dollars a movie or the actors who can make twenty. But they're
• 31:57
  very rare, very rare, and especially in today's world. I mean,
• 32:00
  look, the last few movies that and I have made, literally we ended
• 32:05
  up losing money on them. You know. We made a woman movie called
• 32:07
  Woman Walks Ahead. We ended up not only giving up all our fees,
• 32:12
  but each of us paying twenty five thousand dollars you know, uh in the
• 32:15
  post process, and so we lost money on that film, you know.
• 32:21
  So that's you know, basically, the movie business now consists of ninety percent
• 32:25
  Indian films where nobody makes money, and ten percent these big studio productions that
• 32:30
  are two hundred million dollar productions. And that's a very small club that makes
• 32:34
  those movies. Right, it's and you're absolutely right, and I mean movies
• 32:39
  some of the movies that you guys got made, like Glory. I can't
• 32:43
  see Glory getting made in today's world. Um sure, you know, Legends
• 32:46
  of the Fall, I mean even even if even if you still had Brad
• 32:51
  Pitt and Anthony Anthony Hopkins in it, I'd still be a tough sell as
• 32:54
  a studio movie. It might be more as a mini major kind of scenario.
• 33:00
  We have a follow up to Legends of Fall. I don't mean a
• 33:04
  sequel. I mean a a a piece that's said in nineteen oh five,
• 33:09
  not the same characters or anything like that, but it has a lot of
• 33:12
  the deal of Legends of the Fall. We can't get anybody to even consider
• 33:17
  making that movie because it's just a different world. Now, that's all again,
• 33:22
  super if you put a cape on them. I'm just I'm just hey,
• 33:28
  I'm nobody. I'm just saying it might be a lot. I'm just
• 33:30
  trying to help. I'm just trying to help Marshall. So so obviously you
• 33:36
  and Ed have been you know, you know, you obviously been great friends
• 33:38
  since since the A five days. What is the writing process? Like,
• 33:44
  what is the process? How do you guys actually do the writing? Like
• 33:46
  I always love to hear a really good questions. Yeah. You know what's
• 33:51
  funny is that when we started, I did the writing. We would do
• 33:53
  the stories together, and then I would do the writing. And when I
• 33:59
  was supposed to write the pilot of thirty something, I was seriously blocked.
• 34:04
  I mean I was so blocked that after three weeks I had written one act.
• 34:08
  And you know, and God bless him, he came in one day.
• 34:15
  We had these little offices, like I said, at MGM, and
• 34:20
  he sat down next to me and he just took the keyboard and from that
• 34:23
  moment we started writing together. We never said a word about it. We
• 34:28
  never had we never discussed what the terms were. How we would do it.
• 34:31
  We just started doing it, and it was all him. He saved
• 34:34
  me at that moment. He literally saved me. And I think over the
• 34:37
  years, what we've worked out is we just handoff. In other words,
• 34:43
  some period of time I have the keyboard, some period of time he has
• 34:45
  the keyboard. And by the way, this works just as well over zoom.
• 34:50
  Actually we use a thing all go to meeting, but it's the same
• 34:52
  thing, but you can at least look at the document while you're doing it,
• 34:55
  or in person, and one person is looking at a monitor and the
• 34:59
  other person has the keyboard, and basically the person with the keyboard is kind
• 35:07
  of the captain of the ship at that moment. The other person talks and
• 35:10
  yells and says, no, do this, but the person of the keyboard
• 35:15
  says, no, I'm doing it this way, you know, unless we
• 35:16
  scream too much then, you know, But basically we we listen to each
• 35:22
  other. We you know. It's funny when when Ed and I started out,
• 35:29
  he had a very specific set of skills and I had a different set
• 35:32
  of skills. And over the years we've learned each other's skills. But he's
• 35:37
  still better at what he started out. At and I'm still better at what
• 35:38
  I started out at, and that's part of I think what makes us such
• 35:42
  a good team. And that difference is that Ed has the greatest story sense
• 35:47
  of anyone I've ever met in my life. I mean, I used to
• 35:51
  say, you could drop Ed in any story and in five minutes he can
• 35:54
  tell you where it came from and where it's going. You know, his
• 36:00
  to understand the schema of what has to happen, what happened before, where
• 36:08
  it has to go, where the other people fit into it is astonishing,
• 36:13
  and his speed at it's like speed chest watching him work sort of structuring a
• 36:16
  story. When I met him, he didn't really have much skill at sort
• 36:23
  of depicting how people actually speak or what happens, you know, between people
• 36:29
  and a scene. And that was my strength. I hadn't a clue what
• 36:31
  a story was, no clue at all. But I could write a scene.
• 36:35
  I could you get into the nuances of how people behave with each other
• 36:40
  and why sometimes people say what they feel and don't say what they feel,
• 36:45
  why they sometimes don't talk, and why at other times they can't stop speaking.
• 36:50
  And so you know, we quickly learned to respect the others skill.
• 36:54
  And so if I'm writing a scene and he would say, why are you
• 36:59
  doing that? Back and forth, so many times I would say, just
• 37:00
  shut up, it's going to work, you know, And then he would
• 37:02
  see that it would work because it would all go boom boom boom, just
• 37:06
  like that, you know, to people why. I don't know, yes,
• 37:07
  but you said that people talking over each other. That was something I
• 37:12
  understood. Whereas he would say, this scene makes no sense, that doesn't
• 37:17
  fit into what you're doing, I would learn to understand that he's right when
• 37:21
  he says that. So so we each apply our skills as it's going along.
• 37:28
  But there's a certain level of trust you have to have. I mean,
• 37:30
  I couldn't do this with anybody else because basically you're like you're you're just
• 37:36
  saying any stupid thing that comes to your mind, and what would come to
• 37:38
  realize. By the way, and I think this is really important to understand,
• 37:43
  We've come to understand that if there's a moment where you hesitate because you
• 37:49
  think your idea is dumb or embarrassing or revealing in some way, that's the
• 37:57
  moment where the other person has to say, what is that your thing?
• 37:59
  You're thinking right now, what does that thing stop? Right now? Tell
• 38:01
  me what you're thinking right now, Because whatever that thing is, that's going
• 38:05
  to be great. The thing you fear is going to be bad is going
• 38:08
  to be the good idea. And so we respect that at each other and
• 38:12
  it's a vulnerability that it's a sort of a mutual vulnerability where you know that
• 38:17
  the things that are the truest are the hardest to say, and therefore you're
• 38:22
  you're not gonna want to say them. And by the way, carlary to
• 38:25
  that is that we both hate writer's rooms. I mean, I you know,
• 38:30
  I know we are far outside the mainstream, but I think writer's rooms
• 38:34
  are terrible places for just that reason, because the best ideas can't be said
• 38:39
  in front of eight people. It's too revealing to say in front of eight
• 38:43
  people. And so when we do our shows, we don't have writer's rooms.
• 38:46
  I mean, we bring everybody in and we will sort of talk about
• 38:50
  the season in general. But then when we're working out each episode, we
• 38:53
  bring that writer in and we we set we work out the outline for that
• 39:00
  episode with that writer and let that writer go and write it. And that
• 39:04
  works out much more efficiently and with a much better product. We feel for
• 39:07
  that very reason because people then are less afraid to say what they're really thinking.
• 39:15
  Now you talking a little bit about fear and breaking kind of because there's
• 39:21
  this whole town is run by fear. Let's just be honest. I mean
• 39:24
  every you mean, the entire town has run by fear. This entire industry
• 39:29
  is run by fear, and it's getting worse and worse and worse as the
• 39:31
  years of gun fight. Even in my short tenure in this business, I've
• 39:35
  seen the corporate America is run by fear, and now the movie business is
• 39:38
  corporate America exactly. So you always so, did you ever write alone before
• 39:45
  Ed? Or did you guys just start and just that's not always wrote alone,
• 39:49
  but we both wrote alone. I wrote a bunch of things alone before
• 39:52
  Ed. Yes, okay, okay, So my question to you is when
• 39:55
  you decided to say to yourself, I want to be a screenwriter. We'll
• 40:00
  be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the
• 40:07
  show. And you sat down and you saw a blank page. Because I'm
• 40:13
  assuming there wasn't a screen at that point, it might more likely might have
• 40:15
  been a page or a screen up to you, it was a page.
• 40:20
  So when you looked at that blank page, Yeah, what did you say
• 40:23
  to yourself to break through the fear of actually starting to write? Because it
• 40:28
  is the most terrifying thing for a writer to see a blinking cursor or a
• 40:30
  blank white page. It is a terrifying place to start. It's the most
• 40:35
  terrifying thing. It's the thing. And by the way, I would say,
• 40:38
  it did me in for twenty years. I mean, I said,
• 40:40
  why was I blocked when I was writing thirty something? Because I of that
• 40:45
  fury you're talking about. I just I couldn't break through that beer. I
• 40:49
  think. Look, I'm a I'm a big proponent of psychotherapy, and I
• 40:54
  think psychotherapy in particular when it comes to work, when it comes to the
• 40:59
  creative process, is incredibly valuable because each of us has a voice inside our
• 41:07
  heads that is self loading. Then you just wrote as a piece of shit
• 41:10
  and it instantly goes into will tell you exact humiliated you will be when people
• 41:16
  read that horrible thing you just wrote, and it's paralyzing. That kind of
• 41:21
  fear is paralyzing. That's shame. It's really shame, is what we're talking
• 41:24
  about. Writing is so filled with shame because you are exposing yourself and you're
• 41:32
  exposing yourself to the worst kind of criticism, shaming criticism. How could you
• 41:37
  have thought that? How could you write that? You bore me, you
• 41:39
  know, you're uninteresting, you're bad, all of those things. So you
• 41:45
  have to develop the ability in yourself, the compassion in yourself to say,
• 41:52
  I'm going to write this anyway, even though i might be shamed. In
• 41:55
  other words, it's about letting the shame wash over you and realize you survived
• 42:00
  on the other side. Now, Ed's Wick who is less afflicted by shame
• 42:05
  than I am, although he certainly is afflicted by it for sure, but
• 42:07
  he's I think, more able to cut through that. His advice is write
• 42:13
  it bad. In other words, go right for the shame, to write
• 42:16
  it bad, because it won't be that bad anyway. But the point is
• 42:21
  accept that it's going to be bad and write it anyway because you can always
• 42:23
  rewrite. Rewriting is much easier than writing, and I think once I learned
• 42:28
  that, once I learned, I could try a scene and if it's bad,
• 42:34
  it's going to take me thirty minutes to rewrite it anyway. What's the
• 42:37
  difference. It was very freeing, and so it's much easier for me to
• 42:42
  write now than it was thirty years ago because I was so consumed with shame
• 42:45
  and fear of shame at that time. So I feel for every writer this
• 42:51
  is our lot in life, is to face that shame every single day,
• 42:55
  but it's to understand that it's shame. That's what you're afraid of. Shame.
• 43:00
  And I've said this on other episodes about this, and it's something that
• 43:05
  i've I mean, I think all creators go through it, but I think
• 43:07
  we we we go through it a little bit more as filmmakers and screenwriters.
• 43:10
  Is the ego is a very dangerous, dangerous thing inside of ourselves. And
• 43:17
  that that voice that you're talking about. I always use the analogy is if
• 43:22
  you go out and you have a big meal and and it's your stuffed and
• 43:27
  then the dessert tray comes, that voice in the back of your head goes,
• 43:30
  go ahead, have the cheesecake. You just work out tomorrow it'll be
• 43:35
  fine. Then you get the cheesecake, and then later that evening, when
• 43:38
  you're at home and you're undressing in front of the mirror, that same voice
• 43:42
  goes, you fat pig, hi, could you have eaten that damn cheesecake?
• 43:45
  And that is and that is the voice. This is a similar voice
• 43:49
  to the shame voice that you're talking about. It you can that voice is
• 43:52
  the one that got you to write. But then the other one, but
• 43:54
  it's also going to shame you. Is it's it's it's a horrible thing that
• 43:57
  we have to deal with as human beings. As human beings. And by
• 44:00
  the way, I see it as two different voices. Another way I see
• 44:05
  we all have parts, and that's what I believe. We all have parts,
• 44:08
  and there's one part that's a shaming part, and there's another part that
• 44:14
  has the appetite and the desire and wants to be a big deal or be
• 44:17
  creative, or be famous or be rich or any number of things. We
• 44:21
  have different parts, you know, And the problem is, at any given
• 44:25
  moment, one part is ascendant and the other part is pushed down. So
• 44:30
  yes, you look at that cheesecake, and the part that says, oh,
• 44:34
  I can do this takes over, and then the next morning the shamer
• 44:37
  says, you idiot, why did you do that? You know? And
• 44:42
  it's learning how to live with them and sort of figure out some middle ground
• 44:46
  between all these voices. And also, I believe very strongly at this point
• 44:51
  in my life in the idea of compassion for yourself. I think that's the
• 44:54
  thing I did not have. For many, many, many years, I
• 44:58
  had no compassion for myself, and I you know, I think most people
• 45:00
  would have described me as a very compassionate person toward other people. Um,
• 45:06
  it was something that was very important to me. I had no compassion for
• 45:09
  myself and that was very hard one and hard fought, and it's changed my
• 45:15
  life to be at a point where I do have some compassion for you know.
• 45:20
  Why I became that way, why I'm so susceptible to shame. And
• 45:24
  here's the problem. People don't go to Hollywood and go into this business if
• 45:30
  they're all right up here. I've said that a thousand times, thousand times.
• 45:36
  Some hole to fill. You know, you've got some deficit that you're
• 45:39
  trying to get over from your childhood if you're out here trying to do this
• 45:45
  instead of going into the family business in Pittsburgh or becoming you know what I
• 45:47
  mean. Honestly there there we were propelled by darkness, you know, in
• 45:54
  many ways to do this and that that's a part of our makeup, that
• 46:01
  that we're damaged in some way. I believe that, and I have a
• 46:05
  lot of compassion for that, you know, other people and then myself.
• 46:07
  And as you know, like the percentage of damaged people in the film business
• 46:12
  must be higher than than other uh other industry per capita. Yeah, I
• 46:19
  mean basically years surrounded by crazy people of one kind or another. This is
• 46:22
  one of the few, This is one of the few industries that reward you
• 46:27
  if your bipolar, reward you, if you have a d D. You
• 46:30
  know, rewards control things that would normally harm you in in other businesses.
• 46:37
  So you know, look, we we are that thing about they tilted the
• 46:42
  country and all the nuts and bolts, all the nuts went to California.
• 46:45
  There's some truth to that, you know, because because there was an ache
• 46:51
  that brought us out here to trying to achieve something. And you have to
• 46:54
  understand that that ache that's never You're never going to find a source of that
• 46:59
  in success. You're going to find the source of that in healing yourself.
• 47:01
  Yeah, And I would agree with you, and I think that's something that
• 47:05
  a lot of writers go through, is that that self compassion. And I
• 47:09
  mean in my early years and even into my mid to late thirties, I
• 47:14
  was brutal to myself, brutal. I just would just pound myself and be
• 47:19
  so hard and literally just tear myself apart. Where I wasn't more compassionate to
• 47:23
  people outside of me. And it took my wife to point it out to
• 47:28
  me, and she's just like, you've got to stop doing you can't beat
• 47:30
  yourself up about it. Till finally I finally get into the place where I'm
• 47:35
  like, I gotta I gotta give myself a bit of a break man,
• 47:37
  because it's I'm only hurting. You're only hurting yourself. You're hurting your chance.
• 47:43
  Makes it worse, It only makes it worse. It's tough enough,
• 47:45
  and it's tough enough. Now. You you have gone through a lot of
• 47:51
  ups. You've got you've gone through a lot of ups and downs in this
• 47:54
  business. You've been at the highest of highs and I'm sure you've been at
• 47:58
  the lowest of lows. How do you handle how does the psyche, the
• 48:01
  ego handle you know, being at you know the oscars um, you know,
• 48:07
  with a project or and then having thirty something you're thirty something completely just
• 48:13
  get punched in the face. How do you deal with at different stages of
• 48:16
  your life? What's your advice for that? It's it's along the lines of
• 48:20
  what we've been talking about, which is there was a wonderful book twenty years
• 48:22
  ago called Iron John by Robert Blai about what it is to be a man,
• 48:28
  and a lot of people made fun of that book because there were all
• 48:30
  these men's group that respawned from it, which we're kind of silly, But
• 48:35
  the book itself is filled with incredible wisdom, and that book helped me understand
• 48:40
  the idea that you know that that failure is part of the life cycle,
• 48:45
  and that no man can really avoid failure forever, and that you know,
• 48:52
  you have to embrace failure. And so I think understanding that as a big,
• 48:55
  big help. But it's look, these blows are just you know.
• 49:00
  I had a terrible thing happened thirteen fourteen years ago where I had a startup
• 49:07
  called quarter Life that that was a social network and also a show, an
• 49:15
  online show, and the online show was successful for a while, but the
• 49:20
  social network failed because at that time, the whole point of our social network
• 49:23
  was that Facebook was only open to college students, and we thought, well,
• 49:27
  what happens when you get out of college? You know? And of
• 49:30
  course, right when we were developing our website, Facebook just opened itself up
• 49:35
  to everybody. So our entire financial model went away and I lost a huge
• 49:39
  amount of money. And this this was a huge humiliation for me. And
• 49:43
  not just humiliation, it was destructive and it was horrible, and I had
• 49:47
  to say, you know what, I took a chance. This is something
• 49:51
  I believed in. I took a chance and it didn't work, and I
• 49:54
  got to move on. We'll be right back after a word from our answer,
• 50:02
  and now back to the show, you know. And so that took
• 50:08
  a while, but you pick yourself up, if you if you still have
• 50:14
  that fire inside to do something, then you have to listen to that and
• 50:19
  say, there are more challenges ahead. So that's all you can do.
• 50:22
  You live with the shame of that, and you move on. I mean,
• 50:25
  look, Katzenberg, you know, put out to put out Quimby,
• 50:30
  and he took a swing. He took a very billion, multi billion dollars
• 50:35
  swing, and you know what, and he he was he was chanting,
• 50:38
  he was taking a chance, and he's like you know what. I think
• 50:40
  this is where it's going. I have a pretty decent track record. I
• 50:44
  think this is what's going. And on paper it seemed like a solid injustment,
• 50:46
  but unfortunately it didn't go up. But you know what, I gave
• 50:50
  him nothing but props for taking the swing. You gotta gotta have people like
• 50:54
  that. If not, you know, if it wasn't you know, for
• 50:59
  um Space act or Elon Musk or Ford or Edison or Jobs or any of
• 51:05
  these guys who took those big swings in every aspect, we wouldn't be where
• 51:07
  we are today. So totally, that's that bravery. And I think as
• 51:10
  a creative, as a screenwriter, sometimes you gotta take that that swing as
• 51:15
  well. Um absolute and I've believed that way. I believe in that,
• 51:21
  and I and I'm willing to take my lumps because I believe in that.
• 51:24
  Because you because you're going to take lumps if that's the way you're going to
• 51:28
  live. Yeah, no question. Now I wanted to I wanted to take
• 51:31
  you to your first h your first directorial debut, Jack the Bear with Danny
• 51:37
  DeVito. I love that movie. It was it came out during my window,
• 51:42
  my window in the video store. My years at the video store,
• 51:45
  I came out, so I remember recommending it. I remember the box,
• 51:47
  the VHS box on this thing. Like like I tell a lot of my
• 51:51
  guests eighty seven and ninety four, I'll beat anybody in trivial who pursuit one
• 51:54
  movie tri yet, because that's the time. That's the time I saw everything
• 51:58
  that came out. Um, when you when you did that film, which
• 52:01
  was a wonderful film, you didn't write it, you directed. If I'm
• 52:05
  if I'm mistaken, corrected. Yeah, it was written by Steve Jillien,
• 52:07
  right, not about he's he's okay, he's done, okay, he's done
• 52:10
  okay for himself. Um, what was the biggest lesson you learned directing that
• 52:15
  film? Because I'm assuming I know you directed some episodic at that point.
• 52:17
  But yeah, yeah, you were you were, you were at you were
• 52:21
  at the game, you were at the at the at the big show.
• 52:24
  Well. I learned a lot of lessons from directing that film, and most
• 52:28
  of them were negative lessons. Um, it was a very difficult film,
• 52:31
  very very difficult. Um. There were a lot of problems attendant on that
• 52:37
  film, and um, and truth be known in retrospect, I think I
• 52:45
  should have withdrawn and not made it actually, Um, And that's a hard
• 52:49
  thing to say, yeah, but you know, without going too deeply into
• 52:52
  it, here's here's the issue. I think that, Um, although I
• 52:59
  think Steve jelly And is one of the greatest writers of our of our industry,
• 53:04
  that script had structural problems. When I got to the project. By
• 53:09
  page sixty, you did not know what that story was about. And I
• 53:14
  don't think a movie can sustain that. And so I wanted to make some
• 53:20
  serious structural changes in the first half of the movie. And Danny de Vito,
• 53:27
  who at that moment was very ascended in his career. He was actually
• 53:30
  prepping Haffa, which was his going to be his big, the big,
• 53:35
  big directorial project. You know, he had script approval and Dan and Danny
• 53:43
  loved the script as it was, and so they would not allow me to
• 53:49
  make any changes in the script. And I knew that it didn't work.
• 53:52
  It was a wonderful script from page to page. In the scenes, the
• 53:57
  dialogue you know, was wonderful. Actually it was very problematic and UM,
• 54:04
  and so I remember it's very interesting, UM, Danny and I had an
• 54:08
  interesting relationship, you know, in pre production, we argued a lot about
• 54:14
  the script. And uh and he he he's a very smart guy, Danny,
• 54:21
  and he he got he saw what my fear was and he and he
• 54:24
  went right to it. One day he said to me, he said,
• 54:28
  look, you're the director of this movie, and when we're shooting this movie,
• 54:31
  you tell me to stand here. I stand here, you tell me
• 54:34
  to laugh. I laugh. But right now we're talking about the script,
• 54:37
  and that's what's important. And he understood that. I, as a first
• 54:43
  time director, I had anxiety that I was working with this big star,
• 54:46
  you know. And he was true to his word, you know. As
• 54:50
  an actor, he was great to work with, and and and um cooperative
• 54:55
  and collaborative. You know. The issues were about the script, and we
• 55:01
  went ahead and shot the movie. We had a lot of issues in the
• 55:05
  shooting because the schedule was too short and I knew it, and the people
• 55:10
  in production knew it, but the studio didn't want to spend more money on
• 55:15
  it because it was a soft kind of movie, and so we went behind
• 55:19
  schedule, as I knew we would, and got into big fights about that.
• 55:24
  But the big problem came in editing. The big problem came in editing,
• 55:28
  because when we put it together, sure enough, the beginning part didn't
• 55:31
  work. As I had told them it would not work because you know,
• 55:36
  it just it was. It needed to be sort of condensed into something that
• 55:43
  you understood where you were going. And so they wanted to fire my editor.
• 55:46
  I said, you're not firing this editor. This is a guy,
• 55:50
  Steve Rosenbloom, who we've worked with both ed and I worked with since film
• 55:53
  school, who I think is the most brilliant editor in Hollywood. And and
• 56:00
  you know, I put my body in front of him. They actually brought
• 56:02
  in a second editor in addition to him, who finally gave up, saying,
• 56:07
  I don't know what to do with this. And you know, we
• 56:09
  were spent a year just editing that film. That's unheard of three months editing
• 56:17
  a film, three to four months tops editing a film, you know,
• 56:21
  a year just editing, and finally came up with something. I suggested two
• 56:28
  days of reshoots to help get some things together, and they gave me the
• 56:31
  two days of reshoots, and we were able to sort of create, you
• 56:37
  know, sort of knit together the story in such a way that that beginning
• 56:40
  part worked, and so you know, it was a difficult, painful process
• 56:47
  to it as a first movie, to have to do battle with the studio
• 56:52
  head, to do battle with your star and all of that. It was,
• 56:54
  it was, It was tough. It was tough. And then it
• 56:58
  came out and of course no business at all, and you know, and
• 57:02
  critics, here's an interesting thing that I that you know, you know,
• 57:07
  we're talking about you. You've never seen the bullet that hits you. You
• 57:10
  know, we we knew the problems were in the first half of the movie.
• 57:15
  Once we got through the first half of the movie, it worked like
• 57:19
  a top okay. And so I'm sitting there with my editor, Steve in
• 57:23
  a in the first preview and the audience is laughing and they're into it.
• 57:30
  And we get to halfway through the movie and they're clearly loving the movie,
• 57:36
  and we're like high fiving, like we solve this. And then you get
• 57:40
  to that last part of the movie where it turns dark and you know,
• 57:45
  the the neighbor Norman, you know, attacks the boy and and and all
• 57:50
  of that. You could feel the energy in the audience change immediately, and
• 57:57
  we realized, oh my god, people don't like this at all. And
• 58:00
  what I realized is that when you have a tone change in a movie late
• 58:06
  in the movie people don't like it doesn't mean it's not good. It means
• 58:10
  they don't like it. There's a difference in other words, that they thought
• 58:14
  it was one kind of movie and then it became a different kind of movie.
• 58:15
  Now, when you look at the movie, I put in a hundred
• 58:20
  warnings of what's coming, some of them I think very overt of like watch
• 58:23
  out, watch Out, watch Out. Monsters are real, Monsters are real.
• 58:28
  But people don't listen to that, do you know what I mean?
• 58:30
  They were taken by surprise and they thought it became a different kind of movie
• 58:35
  at the end, and that was you know, critics hated that, and
• 58:42
  it did no business. And so you know, look, I look at
• 58:45
  the movie and to me, it still worked as intended, and I think
• 58:50
  those warnings are there and they work, but for audiences it didn't work.
• 58:52
  So you know, I learned also that you have to think like an audience
• 59:00
  member. Can't just think as a filmmaker. And now, when I am
• 59:07
  writing and when I'm directing and when I'm editing, what I'm doing is I'm
• 59:12
  the audience. I'm not just the creator. I'm the person. I'm looking
• 59:16
  through both sides of the telescope, and I'm saying, what is my experience
• 59:21
  as an audience right now? And is it what I expect? Am I
• 59:24
  disturbed by it? And I disturbed in a good way in a bad way?
• 59:27
  Am I taken out of the movie. I think about that much more
• 59:34
  seriously than I did before that process. So I think there were lots of
• 59:39
  lessons from that movie. So I love the concept of the tone changes,
• 59:45
  because that is something that's a very dangerous thing to do in a film,
• 59:50
  is to change the tone, because you'll lose your audience. And on the
• 59:52
  one film that always stuck with my head is a Tarantino film which he wrote
• 59:58
  but didn't direct, which is called from Dustell don on We'll be right back
• 1:00:01
  after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show, which
• 1:00:10
  was the first half of the movie. Is basically a kidnapping heist film.
• 1:00:15
  Right then, out of nowhere, vampires show up, and then and then
• 1:00:20
  attentions to the vampire and the tone shift. It's just jars so jarring.
• 1:00:23
  There's nothing before that tells you, hey, there's some vampires coming, not
• 1:00:29
  even a poster on the wall. Nothing it was just nothing. So that's
• 1:00:31
  something that writer's listening. Really be careful with that tone change, because it
• 1:00:36
  can really just throw you off. Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely,
• 1:00:40
  Yeah, it's um, it's just one of those things. It's the difference
• 1:00:45
  between movie reality and real reality. And real reality, shit happens, you
• 1:00:49
  know all the study be able to car accident in your life just changed,
• 1:00:52
  tone shift, tone shifted. Yeah. But but in movie reality, there
• 1:00:57
  there has to be some unity of yeah, not just tone of character of
• 1:01:01
  a lot of things people expect. Yeah, like you can't have Darth Vader
• 1:01:07
  all of a sudden be the nice guy at the end. Like it's that
• 1:01:08
  that doesn't But but I've seen that happen in bad movies with the characters that
• 1:01:14
  just they weren't the guy, They weren't the kind of character that would kick
• 1:01:17
  the dog. But then halfway after, halfway through the movie they kicked the
• 1:01:21
  dog. You're like, wait a minute, I no, no, can't,
• 1:01:24
  you can't take me down the road and then sucker punch me like that.
• 1:01:29
  It's yeah, it's very very tough. Now, another project you were
• 1:01:32
  involved in as a producer, which I would love to hear any any stories
• 1:01:37
  behind the scenes of how you even got involved with it was Traffic. I
• 1:01:39
  mean that that is such a I mean, obviously it's at this point in
• 1:01:44
  the legendary film. I remember when it came out, It's it's Bestdaberg,
• 1:01:46
  who's you know, brilliant and so on. But it was a risky film,
• 1:01:52
  like the way he shot it, the way he constructed the storylines.
• 1:01:55
  How did how did you get involved with the movie and how how did that
• 1:01:59
  go? Well? First of all, that was mostly Ed. I mean
• 1:02:01
  Ed wanted to do a story about the war on drugs, and um,
• 1:02:07
  you know, I think I think my participation in that was more supportive than
• 1:02:14
  most of the things, especially because you know, we didn't write it,
• 1:02:17
  we didn't direct it. I mean Ed was going to direct it. But
• 1:02:21
  when he found out that Soderbergh was doing something very similar and had the rights
• 1:02:24
  to the Traffic miniseries, you know, he called Steven. I'm sure Ed
• 1:02:30
  told this story that he called oh it's very very interesting, because he was
• 1:02:36
  kind of stuck um and on how to make it work. And he called
• 1:02:42
  Steven and said, listen, we don't know each other. I know you're
• 1:02:45
  doing this thing. We're doing the same thing. Let's not try to do
• 1:02:50
  two things, let's work together. Would you be open to that? And
• 1:02:53
  Soderberg just said done. That was it. That was the whole conversation.
• 1:02:59
  And you know, so from that moment on, um, you know,
• 1:03:04
  yeah, he was going to direct it, we were going to produce it,
• 1:03:07
  and he kind of you know, got it together in such a way
• 1:03:13
  that the script worked and went and did it and looked. We had no
• 1:03:19
  interest in telling Soderberg what to do. I mean he was He's amazing,
• 1:03:22
  you know, and and we learned a lot from him. He had such
• 1:03:27
  a different style from us, and I just wanted to see how he worked.
• 1:03:30
  And I'll tell you an interesting thing that happened. Um. You know,
• 1:03:36
  it's basically three or four different movies. I mean, the casts and
• 1:03:39
  those different stories almost never saw each other, okay, and yet there's this
• 1:03:44
  incredible um um consistency of performance throughout the film. And I remember I was
• 1:03:51
  doing a panel when the film came out with two of the actors and one
• 1:03:57
  of the questions was how did so how does Soderberg work with the actors?
• 1:04:02
  And they each said, Soderberg never said a word to me, He never
• 1:04:05
  gave me any direction. I was so shocked because, you know, I
• 1:04:13
  spent a little time on the set, but not enough to really like,
• 1:04:15
  you know, first of all, Soderberg was the operator. Yeah, he's
• 1:04:20
  and so you know, you're he's right there with the actors, you're back
• 1:04:25
  with the monitors. I didn't really know if he was talking to them or
• 1:04:27
  not, you know, so, but I was shocked that he they said,
• 1:04:31
  literally, he didn't talk to us and I And it's funny. Ed
• 1:04:35
  has a theory um that that you know that a lot of directing is osmosis
• 1:04:45
  in the sense that you're bio rhythms as a director get transmitted to the actors
• 1:04:50
  and you know, and and so you have to be very careful of what
• 1:04:54
  your bio rhythms are because it's going to affect their performances. And what I
• 1:04:59
  realized at that moment was that Soderberg, if you know him, he's very
• 1:05:04
  taciturn. He's not that expressive as a person, which I think puts a
• 1:05:12
  lot of people on edge and makes him seem very serious. He's actually not
• 1:05:15
  that serious. He's very funny guy, but he seems very serious. But
• 1:05:19
  I think actors, when they're around Stephen, they know they can't fuck around.
• 1:05:27
  They know they have to show up. And there's something about his that
• 1:05:32
  that fear of being judged because he's not judgmental. I'm not saying that,
• 1:05:36
  but when somebody is not expressive or reactive, it out that thing, you
• 1:05:42
  know what I mean. And so I think having this guy six feet away
• 1:05:47
  from you holding the camera and sort of in the scene with you had the
• 1:05:51
  same effect on every actor, which brought out sort of their a game,
• 1:05:57
  their most grown up self, you know, And um, it's an amazing
• 1:06:02
  effect that that, you know, in some alchemical way, he got these
• 1:06:11
  consistent performances from everyone because of who he is. And that was a very
• 1:06:15
  interesting lesson for me. I mean, because the cast was I mean,
• 1:06:19
  that cast was remarkable in so many different styles of actor and acting and perform
• 1:06:26
  They were wonderful. And there's so every single one of them is so internal
• 1:06:30
  and so available. When I say internal, it means I can see into
• 1:06:35
  They're actually not internal there are they are. Their windows of into their thinking
• 1:06:42
  process is so open, you know. And Benicio del Toro is supplime,
• 1:06:47
  just subblime in the movie. It's like just watching the dailies, You're going
• 1:06:51
  this guy I it's like, you can't even imagine, you can't even call
• 1:06:57
  it acting. It's something else. It's it's some he's just some possessions,
• 1:07:01
  some possession, whatever it is. You know, um and Michael Douglas and
• 1:07:05
  all of them and Don Cheeto. They were all place, yes, all
• 1:07:11
  of the someplace that was so remarkable. And you know that's Soderbergh's gift that
• 1:07:16
  he creates that that world on the set that allows these actors to inhabit that
• 1:07:25
  place in themselves. Is that the Is that the first Please remind me,
• 1:07:30
  because I mean I'm not I'm not that keen on Soderberg's history, But was
• 1:07:34
  that the first time was the big hit? Because I know Aaron Brockovich and
• 1:07:38
  obviously was the same year he was nominated. He's one of the first,
• 1:07:44
  he's one of the only directors to be nominated against himself as a director for
• 1:07:48
  an Oscar. He was up for two Oscars as director that year, and
• 1:07:55
  and and Best Picture too, I think right that Best Picture, yes,
• 1:07:58
  yes, And he on for Traffic, he want director, he want director
• 1:08:01
  for Traffic. And I remember telling him on the phone, I said,
• 1:08:05
  you just have to beat that assholet Steve Stoderberg. I mean he's everywhere,
• 1:08:11
  this guy, this guy is everywhere. I mean he laughed. And by
• 1:08:15
  the way, when we were at the oscars um, it's just so terrible.
• 1:08:19
  Um. You know, you're we're in the second row and you could
• 1:08:23
  see into the wings at the in the in the auditorium, and so Michael
• 1:08:29
  Douglas comes out to give out Best Picture and you could see that first of
• 1:08:35
  all, they had three oscars four Best Picture and we had three producers.
• 1:08:41
  And then as he opens the envelope, I can see that the film is
• 1:08:45
  one word. I couldn't read it, but I could see it's one word,
• 1:08:48
  and so I hit ed and I whispered we won. And he goes
• 1:08:51
  and the winner is Gladiator, which was one word and had three oscars.
• 1:08:57
  So you know, it was it was one of those great horrible moments where
• 1:09:01
  we thought we won but we didn't. But you know, so what yeah,
• 1:09:05
  right, it was all no, I mean overall, you guys did
• 1:09:10
  okay, Yeah we did okay, and yeah, you know, just uh,
• 1:09:15
  don't get ahead of yourself, Mark. Yeah, and honestly talking about
• 1:09:18
  you know, guys who swing take swings at the plate, I mean,
• 1:09:21
  Jesus Attiberg. I mean he's not making use of I mean he's amazing,
• 1:09:29
  Yeah, really absolutely remarkable, So respect for him. I have to I
• 1:09:32
  have to ask, when you start writing, do you and ed start outlining
• 1:09:38
  first? Do you start with character first? You start with plot first?
• 1:09:41
  How do you how do you start that process? It's a good question.
• 1:09:45
  What we have learned over the years is not to try to structure anything at
• 1:09:49
  first, including the conversation. In other words, so much of what we
• 1:09:53
  do when we're starting something is just talk talking about how we feel about it.
• 1:09:59
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 1:10:05
  to the show. Talk what do the what ideas come to mind? How
• 1:10:11
  do we see the characters? But not not in any organized way. We
• 1:10:15
  will just go from history to things we've read to what this reminds us of.
• 1:10:21
  This is like my aunt Marcine, this is whatever you know that that
• 1:10:25
  that we just kind of inhabit that space and that could go on for a
• 1:10:30
  week, you know, or more where you're just kind of living in it,
• 1:10:34
  and you know, it's like somebody once said, you know, if
• 1:10:41
  you are I want to make a sculpture of an elephant. Just cut away
• 1:10:45
  everything that doesn't look like an elephant. Yeah, that in some way the
• 1:10:50
  thing exists there and you have to just pull it out that in some way
• 1:10:55
  that's true. It's just harder when it's something like this that's a story.
• 1:11:00
  But we still believe that in some way it exists and we have to find
• 1:11:02
  it. And that means being open to the most gossamer, floggy notions that
• 1:11:10
  might be true and be willing to change and follow something down the line.
• 1:11:15
  And so it's the willingness to be unguarded and unguided in that beginning part that
• 1:11:21
  allows you to really start to have a sense of what the thing is.
• 1:11:25
  And then you know, then we talk about the characters a lot, and
• 1:11:30
  I think we get to structure at that's the last thing. You know.
• 1:11:33
  There may be some things we know we want to happen, or we know
• 1:11:38
  we want the person to be this kind of person, and so that's going
• 1:11:41
  to dictate certain things are going to happen. But to actually structure the story,
• 1:11:45
  that's the last piece of the puzzle for us before we start writing.
• 1:11:49
  Now, there was a movie you did that was in your filmography that kind
• 1:11:53
  of like one thing like that old song like something and this thing doesn't belong,
• 1:11:58
  which was Jack Jack Reacher just I think the only sequel you ever did,
• 1:12:01
  right, and it's you know, it's a it's a you know,
• 1:12:05
  Tom Cruise vehicle. It's an action movie. Obviously there's a lot of action
• 1:12:09
  and a lot of like Class Samurai and other things you've done, but this
• 1:12:13
  was different. How did you guys approach this? And I mean when I
• 1:12:15
  spoke to it a little bit about it, He's like, I've never done
• 1:12:18
  it before, so I kind of just wanted to try it and see if
• 1:12:21
  I could do it. How did you guys approach the writing process of that?
• 1:12:26
  Well, I think you know, first of all, I mean,
• 1:12:30
  I'll talk about this. I tend to not want to talk about anything that
• 1:12:34
  pertains to other people or what other people said or did, and so I'm
• 1:12:38
  going to be a little bit circumspect, just out of respect for those people.
• 1:12:43
  But basically, the idea behind that film was to take one of the
• 1:12:48
  novels where Reacher is in relationship to someone, because usually he's not that much
• 1:12:54
  in relationship, because they wanted to humanize him a little bit, and so
• 1:12:59
  they that novel and so our mandate was too and I think why they used
• 1:13:03
  us was because they wanted the relationships. They wanted that sense of connection between
• 1:13:10
  him and the woman and the girl. And um, that's what we wrote
• 1:13:16
  and that's what ED shot and they loved it. And I remember Tom,
• 1:13:23
  who we love working with. By the way, we're doing two movies with
• 1:13:26
  Tom, and he's a great guy to work with. He's a he's that's
• 1:13:30
  a whole other subject. No, I mean, I've heard that. I'm
• 1:13:33
  happy to get into. But he is. He's you know, Um,
• 1:13:42
  who was it who said Tom shows up on the set each day and basically
• 1:13:45
  says, how can I make your dreams come true? I mean, that's
• 1:13:48
  how he looks at movies. He's full of gratitude and wants them to be
• 1:13:53
  great. And it's so it's a great experience. So at any rate,
• 1:13:57
  we made the film. Tom looked at the film. He turned to Ed
• 1:14:01
  and he said, this fucking film made me cry. None of my films
• 1:14:06
  made me cry, you know, thank you. Then we test the film
• 1:14:12
  and women love it and young men go it's too soft. In other words,
• 1:14:17
  the idea didn't work for the untended audience of the movie. Now,
• 1:14:23
  have I said too much? Maybe I don't know, but what the hell,
• 1:14:26
  it's past history. So we you know, we did some work on
• 1:14:31
  it didn't take that much. We did some work, we knit some things
• 1:14:36
  together, we shot a little bit more action. We just kind of toughened
• 1:14:42
  it up a little bit. And that's something I believe in. I look,
• 1:14:45
  I believe in the post production process very strongly, maybe because of my
• 1:14:49
  experience with Jack the Bear, but maybe also even from television, that you
• 1:14:54
  can surgically change something and bake it into something that worked better. And we've
• 1:15:00
  done that a lot, and so that's what we that's what we did with
• 1:15:03
  that. And um, you know, I think it's it's you know,
• 1:15:12
  it found some audience. It's just it was each of these things. Look
• 1:15:16
  to me, it's a miracle a movie ever gets made, and the movie
• 1:15:18
  is that he could And so I I don't. I look at that and
• 1:15:23
  I go, okay, I'm proud of it. We you know, we
• 1:15:25
  did what we were supposed to do and then we did what we could do
• 1:15:29
  and a lot of people liked it. So you know, if it's not
• 1:15:32
  the most popular movie of all time, we can survive, you know.
• 1:15:36
  And and I've spoken to multiple people who've worked with Tom, and they said,
• 1:15:41
  I've never heard of a negative word. Come. Everyone's always like he
• 1:15:45
  is the utmost professional. He shows up. He just is that. Can
• 1:15:49
  I tell you when we when we did West Amurai with Tom and we went
• 1:15:55
  to New Zealand, Yeah, after we'd been there a week, there was
• 1:15:59
  an ARTI go in the local paper saying that everyone on the crew had to
• 1:16:04
  sign a affidavit that they would not speak to Tom and they would not look
• 1:16:12
  Tom directly in the eye. And not only was that not true, but
• 1:16:18
  the opposite was true, which is of all the people I've worked with,
• 1:16:21
  he's probably the most polite to effion of the crew. If someone says high
• 1:16:27
  to him, he will actually stop and say hi, how are you and
• 1:16:30
  talk to them. You know. He's incredibly available to people. And I
• 1:16:34
  suddenly realized, maybe that's never been true. Maybe there's never been an agreement
• 1:16:39
  where you're not supposed to look at the star, you know, because we
• 1:16:41
  all think that that's like something that people have, and I thought maybe it
• 1:16:45
  doesn't exist, because it certainly wasn't true with him. I mean, I'm
• 1:16:48
  assuming you don't want to be in an actress eye line, but that's just
• 1:16:51
  being professional. That's different. That's different, and that's that's just a matter
• 1:16:55
  of and in fact that that's just understood on the set and anyone who is
• 1:17:00
  in the eyeline, we usually tell them to get out because it's just not
• 1:17:03
  nice to them. You know. That's that's difference. It's called be it's
• 1:17:05
  called being professional. But yeah, I've heard all the uh, you know,
• 1:17:10
  I only want green Eminem's in my in my trailer. And I heard
• 1:17:14
  the actually I actually heard the origin story of that, which was really the
• 1:17:18
  origin story to I can't actually say I'll tell you off air because it's there's
• 1:17:23
  it's a little it's a little saucy um. But I heard the story of
• 1:17:27
  that one. But yeah, you hear all these stories. And look,
• 1:17:30
  you know, talking to a lot of a lot of people like yourself and
• 1:17:34
  professionals in the business when they work with these big actors, the amount of
• 1:17:39
  attention and and you know that gets thrown on someone like a Tom Cruiser,
• 1:17:44
  Will Smith the rock under of these giant movie stars. A lot of times
• 1:17:48
  it sells papers, it's sensationalism, and a lot of times they want to
• 1:17:54
  tear tear them down. A lot of times they do. It's just it's
• 1:17:58
  a weird se that with Tom. And by the way, the thing that
• 1:18:00
  always hurts so bad for me was that thing about him jumping on the couch.
• 1:18:06
  Yeah, show, It's like that's Tom every day. Tom is the
• 1:18:13
  most enthusiastic person I've ever met. It's like when we did the Final Battle
• 1:18:17
  of Less Samurai and I came to the set that day and we have five
• 1:18:23
  hundred men on each side and he's in the full Japanese armor and we've got
• 1:18:28
  seven cameras up on towers. And Tom comes over to me and he grabs
• 1:18:31
  me by the chest and he screams at me, this is fucking great,
• 1:18:35
  This is fucking great. That's Tom. You just love the guy. He's
• 1:18:41
  the most enthusiastic person in the world. Why would you make fun of him
• 1:18:44
  for jumping on a couch. It's like, God, bless him. They
• 1:18:47
  always want to They always want to tear it down. And that's the thing.
• 1:18:50
  Look someone like Tom, and then we'll stop talking about Tim because I
• 1:18:54
  could talk about Tim forever. I've been a fan of his since since the
• 1:18:56
  beginning, since all the right thing, all the right moves. There is
• 1:19:00
  a charisma that these piece these stars have. There's an energy that they project
• 1:19:04
  on the screen. There's a reason why Tom Cruise has been a movie star
• 1:19:08
  for thirty plus years. There's not a lot of movie stars who have been
• 1:19:14
  a movie who are still movies exactly, exactly, still movie star. He's
• 1:19:19
  still the biggest movie star in the world. He green green lights a picture
• 1:19:25
  today just like he did in nineteen ninety after he did rain Man or Top
• 1:19:30
  Gun or any of these things. So, um, there's a reason.
• 1:19:33
  There's a reason for that. Um, And you gotta kind of respect that
• 1:19:38
  about him. And look, we all have bad and we all have bad
• 1:19:41
  days, and and of course when you have a bad day and you're Tom
• 1:19:44
  Cruise, it's news. When you and I have a bad day, no
• 1:19:48
  one cares about it. Um. Now I'm gonna ask you a few questions
• 1:19:51
  I ask all of my guests, Marshall, Um, what are three screenplays
• 1:19:56
  every screenwriter should read? Well, be right back after a word from our
• 1:20:00
  sponsor, and now back to the show. Oh my gosh, that's such
• 1:20:10
  a good one. Um. Put Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes up very
• 1:20:15
  often. Yeah, Um, Chinatown for sure. Um, And I would
• 1:20:23
  say Annie Hall probably because I mean, Annie Hall. It's funny because everyone's
• 1:20:29
  talking about this right now, and it's been a it's been a very particularly
• 1:20:31
  difficult experience for me because Woody. First of all, Ed has an own
• 1:20:36
  Woody since Ed was twenty two years old. He worked with comparison and in
• 1:20:43
  relationship with him, and he's not just a hero of ards, you know,
• 1:20:47
  creatively, he was such a touchstone for us, um and and you
• 1:20:53
  know, it's just been a very painful, painful experience and the only way
• 1:20:58
  I can live with it is to understand that many of the artists that we
• 1:21:02
  revere turned out to be monsters because it was a monster. Wagner was a
• 1:21:06
  monster. A lot of these people, you know, and you you know,
• 1:21:10
  artists are and I cannot take away the fact that you know, of
• 1:21:15
  you know, Annie Hall is probably my second favorite movie of all time,
• 1:21:19
  and that's just will continue to be a fact because he hacked so much about
• 1:21:27
  what it means to be a human being and what it means to be in
• 1:21:30
  relationship into that movie. Um, it's it's amazing and you can't take that
• 1:21:36
  away from him. I mean, how do you And that's a conversation about
• 1:21:41
  being able to um separate the artist with the art, and you know,
• 1:21:47
  is van you know, is Um Van Go? Do I appreciate Vano differently
• 1:21:51
  because the way he lived his life? Yeah, you know, I don't
• 1:21:56
  know. And that's a that's a much deeper question and and the more controversial
• 1:22:00
  conversation to have. But at the end of the day, you know,
• 1:22:02
  Annie Hall's Annie Hall. Yeah, it's and it was Annie Hall for a
• 1:22:08
  long long time. You know, tomorrow morning, Tomorrow morning, Francis for
• 1:22:12
  Coppola could go out and murder thirty people. But the but the Godfather don't
• 1:22:17
  made the Godfather, but the Godfather and the Godfather too, and The Apocalypse
• 1:22:20
  now and Dracula and all of these classics. It's it's still the Godfather right
• 1:22:27
  by the way. I think I should add a screenplay to that, yes,
• 1:22:30
  which is It's a Wonderful Life. You know. We named our company
• 1:22:32
  Bedford Falls. Yeah down, And it's a one boy because for me,
• 1:22:36
  it's far and away the best movie ever made. But it's really the best
• 1:22:39
  movie ever made because it's the best screenplay, because it shows what you can
• 1:22:44
  accomplish in storytelling. That this is a man I think I once counted.
• 1:22:49
  I think there are nine different stories in that movie that are then turned around
• 1:22:56
  in the period when he comes back and he never existed, where you instantly
• 1:23:00
  understand what has happened to those people because he didn't have an effect on them.
• 1:23:03
  And if you think it's easy to create nine stories and it once,
• 1:23:09
  that can understand the effect this guy's had on people's lives because he didn't exist.
• 1:23:14
  It's a remarkable piece of work and also filled with things that Ed and
• 1:23:18
  I call gifts to the audience, which is something I think I learned from
• 1:23:24
  George Lucas from from Star Wars. You know that just things to delight you.
• 1:23:28
  In other words, when you look at It's a wonderful life. The
• 1:23:30
  fact that the squirrel falls up Ulcabilly's shoulder, that they have a crow in
• 1:23:34
  the office, and the little bits that they play, and that Annie says
• 1:23:41
  at the end, I've been saving this money for a divorce in case I
• 1:23:45
  ever get a husband. It's like, there's so many great things in that
• 1:23:48
  film that are all in the screenplay, you know, And you know,
• 1:23:54
  as somebody said, you can have a shitty movie from a good screenplay,
• 1:23:59
  but you can never have a great movie from a bad screenplay. And that's
• 1:24:02
  that's the truth. It all starts with the screenplay. Now, what advice
• 1:24:06
  would you give a screenwriter wanting to break into the business today. That's simple.
• 1:24:11
  I've given this advice a lot. I have a theory about this.
• 1:24:15
  I believe there are thousands of undiscovered great actors. They're hundreds of undiscovered great
• 1:24:23
  directors, and there are no undiscovered grade writers. Because if you can write,
• 1:24:29
  you know, people will see it right away and you're absolutely and you
• 1:24:34
  can get people to read your stuff. You can get assistance. I'm a
• 1:24:38
  big believer in assistance. I think, you know, assistants run this town.
• 1:24:42
  And if you can get on the phone and get an assistant to read
• 1:24:46
  a script, because by the way, every one of those assistants is ambitious
• 1:24:49
  and wants to move up, and their capital is finding people, especially like
• 1:24:54
  if they work for a producer or they work for an agent, that sort
• 1:24:57
  of thing. And the thing is, if you can write, and I'm
• 1:25:00
  not saying this isn't really about talent per sae. It's about whether you're writing
• 1:25:05
  fits with the movie business. If you're writing fits with the movie business,
• 1:25:13
  people will see it, they will they will recognize it and there will be
• 1:25:15
  an energy coming towards you. And what I usually tell people is that this
• 1:25:18
  is very Dowinian and it's a sad but true fact of life. Be willing
• 1:25:24
  to write three spec scripts. If by the third spec script you don't feel
• 1:25:29
  that energy coming towards you, then you should probably do something else because you're
• 1:25:32
  missing something. Now, maybe you can learn it from one to the next
• 1:25:36
  and seeing what you did wrong. But if after three you haven't learned it,
• 1:25:42
  just it's not going to happen because you because because it's electric. When
• 1:25:47
  when people like what you've done, it's electric that energy that comes towards you
• 1:25:51
  from people because there's such a desire for good material. So I just tell
• 1:25:56
  people, Look, it's the simplest way to break in. You just write.
• 1:26:00
  It's not the easiest way. There is no easy way, but it's
• 1:26:03
  the simplest way. You don't need money. Yeah, I have to live,
• 1:26:08
  but I mean, you don't need equipment, you don't need to hire
• 1:26:10
  people, you don't need people to like you. You just have to write,
• 1:26:14
  which is hard enough. It's one of the toughest things any artist could
• 1:26:19
  ever do, is to write a good, solid story. And I've said
• 1:26:23
  this a million times as well in the show. I feel that screenwriting is
• 1:26:28
  probably the toughest form of writing, maybe next to a high coup that you
• 1:26:32
  can that you can do because of the condensed and the way it works.
• 1:26:35
  A novel is so much easier. And I've written, and I've written,
• 1:26:40
  I've written, um, you know, books, and I just oh my
• 1:26:43
  god when I when I've written scripts and I written books. When I started
• 1:26:45
  writing the book, I was like, oh my god, I'm free.
• 1:26:47
  I could just write what oh if it's someone to write, I don't have
• 1:26:49
  to worry about it and you just go whereas a screenplay you're like, what
• 1:26:54
  is the mean? And in this description is the do I need the Can
• 1:26:59
  I do a b? There? Can I do it too? Like it's
• 1:27:00
  it's by the way, so true true. We just go through and take
• 1:27:05
  out words, right, like why do you need a complete sentence? There?
• 1:27:10
  You know what you know? Um? Yeah. That's why it helps
• 1:27:15
  to read the greats because you realize how little they actually have people say,
• 1:27:19
  you know, um. And and also the greats who have people talk over
• 1:27:26
  each other and and and and create a kind of a kind of real interaction
• 1:27:31
  between people that you can just see on the page. Yeah, And I've
• 1:27:34
  seen descriptions by some of those grades, like the shame Blacks, Aaron Sorkins,
• 1:27:38
  Tarantino, those guys that you look at and they have like descriptions,
• 1:27:42
  like one word sentences, like just just because you want the screen you want
• 1:27:45
  the reading of the screenplay to feel like you're watching the movie. So if
• 1:27:48
  you're going to spend a page describing the scene, you know, that's you
• 1:27:54
  don't have a minute of the movie to do that. You're going to see
• 1:27:56
  that in one second, you know. So that's a really tricky thing.
• 1:28:00
  How do you convey a lot of information in a very short number of words?
• 1:28:04
  As you said earlier, this is our lot in life. This is
• 1:28:10
  our lot in life. This is why we get paid the big bucks.
• 1:28:13
  This is why we get paid the big bucks. If you're able to do
• 1:28:15
  that, if you can do it, if you can do it, well,
• 1:28:17
  now you get the medium books. But the medium bucks, medium bucks,
• 1:28:20
  no residuals, medium bucks, buy out. That's it. Now,
• 1:28:27
  What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether in the
• 1:28:30
  film business or in life. Oh boy, well, I'm gonna tell you
• 1:28:38
  something that I don't usually talk about out loud having to do. It's why
• 1:28:43
  I don't direct anymore. I mean, I direct, I'll direct an episode,
• 1:28:46
  but I don't direct movies anymore. I suffer from an anxiety disorder,
• 1:28:53
  and it took me many years to admit that it obviously affected my wife a
• 1:28:57
  great deal. But all I ever wanted to be you as a film director.
• 1:29:00
  I only became a writer so that I could direct films, you know.
• 1:29:04
  And after I made two films, and the second one was Dangerous Beauty,
• 1:29:10
  which is actually my favorite and something I really love. Beautiful Beautiful.
• 1:29:15
  I love that film and it still has a life today people. Even though
• 1:29:19
  it didn't do well when it came out, people still watch it. I
• 1:29:25
  realized that I paid too high a price directing a movie, that it's just
• 1:29:29
  too hard for me to get up every single day for seventy five days and
• 1:29:34
  go out there and function for sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hours a day at
• 1:29:40
  your top. I'm the continuation that needs a lot of time to process what's
• 1:29:45
  going on. That's how my anxiety, that's how I deal with my anxiety,
• 1:29:48
  is that I need downtime and you don't have that. You're suppressing it.
• 1:29:54
  Constantly, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
• 1:30:02
  now back to the show. And you know, you basically have to work
• 1:30:09
  all that time, be able to just fall into bed, fall asleep,
• 1:30:11
  immediately get your six to seven hours of sleep, get up, and immediately
• 1:30:15
  just perform at your best every single day for however many days of that schedule.
• 1:30:20
  And it killed me. It just killed me, and I realized,
• 1:30:25
  it was a very painful realization that here's this thing that I had wanted so
• 1:30:29
  much my whole life was to be a director. And part of that was
• 1:30:31
  ego, let's face it, you know, and part of it was creative
• 1:30:35
  that it just made me miserable. You know, it just wasn't worth doing
• 1:30:39
  if it made me miserable. And so I said, I'm going to stop.
• 1:30:43
  And that was very painful. And by the way, it still is
• 1:30:47
  because it affected my career, infected how much money I made, It affected
• 1:30:51
  you know, how people saw me. I think a lot of people didn't
• 1:30:56
  understand that it was my choice that I stopped because we didn't do well,
• 1:31:00
  so they thought maybe I couldn't get a job after that. Actually I was
• 1:31:02
  offered jobs. It was my choice to stop because it hurt too much.
• 1:31:08
  And so, you know, I think that was I think coming to accept
• 1:31:15
  that you are who you are. You have your strengths and you have your
• 1:31:16
  weaknesses, and they are all connected. You can't have one without the other,
• 1:31:21
  you know. And my sensibility, my sensitivity, my ability to see
• 1:31:27
  into how people feel, it's very connected to my anxiety, you know,
• 1:31:30
  it's all it's all part of the same thing. So I think again it
• 1:31:34
  has to do with compassion for yourself that that I realized. I just can't
• 1:31:40
  keep breaking myself on this rock just to prove something that I don't need to
• 1:31:45
  prove for myself, you know. So I've had a very good time since
• 1:31:48
  then as a writer and a producer and directing occasionally when it's only a few
• 1:31:54
  days, you know, it's an episode or something like that, but it's
• 1:31:58
  very painful at the time. I first of all, I appreciate you sharing
• 1:32:00
  that because I think that's something that the audience needs to understand. First of
• 1:32:03
  all, to be being honest with yourself and who you are is it self
• 1:32:08
  realization huge huge thing in our in our business, but as a human being
• 1:32:14
  in general, and the there's always this kind of myth of what a director
• 1:32:19
  does. And after I've talked to so many, so many, um,
• 1:32:25
  like you know, I mean I feel that I think I think it kind
• 1:32:28
  of started with with Spielberg, but then I think Tarantino put fire on that,
• 1:32:32
  which is called like the rock and roll director. It was like it
• 1:32:34
  was cool and hip to be a director when like in the seventies and the
• 1:32:39
  sixties and fifties, no one knew who made these things. Really, I
• 1:32:43
  mean Hitchcock probably, but that's it, um, But the reality of what
• 1:32:47
  it takes to be a director, Like I stopped directing commercials because I just
• 1:32:50
  couldn't. It sucked my soul. Like I'm like, I don't want to
• 1:32:55
  sell a product. This is not what I do. It paid well,
• 1:32:58
  um, but I just said, do you know what I it's not me.
• 1:33:00
  I gotta, I gotta. I'll just pull back. I'll go into
• 1:33:04
  post production, I'll open up a post house and I'll produce, and I'll
• 1:33:08
  do my short films and I'll write and I'll do other things. But it
• 1:33:11
  was a decision that I made for myself. But it was it's all about
• 1:33:14
  that self realization. So people who have the dream and screenwriters listening now,
• 1:33:17
  they think I'm gonna write and direct, my friend, I'm like, listen,
• 1:33:21
  it's it's a chore. And I've also talked to so many directors on
• 1:33:25
  the show that they they've told me when I go to direct the movie,
• 1:33:28
  I gotta I go into training, physical training, because it is brutal on
• 1:33:32
  the body. It's brutal. It's brutal, Yeah, brutal, brutal body,
• 1:33:36
  yes, and then and then mentally and your psyche and and that's best.
• 1:33:42
  That's best case scenario. Without a star that's giving you problems, without
• 1:33:45
  studio executives trying to sneak in, other people trying to cut your knees out
• 1:33:50
  underneath you because it's at their agenda. There's so many other politics. And
• 1:33:56
  that's one thing I never actually asked you about. And this is kind of
• 1:33:58
  a side note. Can you please talk a little bit about the politics of
• 1:34:02
  being a director, politics behind the scenes, because so many screenwriters, so
• 1:34:06
  many filmmakers, don't understand that. I mean, an agent told me once
• 1:34:12
  when I'm looking for a director, I'm looking for three people. I'm looking
• 1:34:14
  for an artist, a politician, and a business person. He goes,
• 1:34:19
  that's what I'm looking and if you, and and the and the greats,
• 1:34:23
  all the greats have those three. To have those three, what can you
• 1:34:27
  expect just a little bit about your your experience with the politics. You did
• 1:34:30
  a little bit with Jack the Bear, But any any any tips on how
• 1:34:32
  to deal with that? Well, I think it's you know, every situation
• 1:34:36
  is different. And by the way, I think the business has changed a
• 1:34:39
  lot. I think that when we came up, it was understood and expected
• 1:34:44
  that as a director or a producer you could be very difficult and take stands
• 1:34:48
  and you know, and and go in the face of studio executives and win.
• 1:34:55
  Now, if you do that, mostly they fire you. So,
• 1:34:58
  you know, unless you're knowing, you know, you don't get to do
• 1:35:00
  that anymore. So you have to sort of you have to be more political
• 1:35:05
  today than you were then. But I think nevertheless, Okay, I'll tell
• 1:35:14
  you a little story. I don't know if we're getting going over time or
• 1:35:16
  not. There was a wonderful book called Shogun in the seventh about medium in
• 1:35:25
  Japan. Yeah, okay, And there's a scene in that book where one
• 1:35:30
  of the Japanese warlords had captured the English soldiers and he was boiling one of
• 1:35:34
  them awive in a big vat, and he was having his people sort of
• 1:35:41
  engage the temperature of the boiling so that the screams of the man would be
• 1:35:46
  just the right catch for him. That would be like poetry for him.
• 1:35:51
  He's it was very brutal and horrible and statistic and at the same time spiritual
• 1:35:58
  in a way. You know that he would do this, okay. And
• 1:36:01
  his name was Yaboo. That was the that was the name of that character.
• 1:36:04
  And I remember saying to Ed that when you're budgeting a movie and you're
• 1:36:12
  in pre production, the studio will grind you and grind you and grind you
• 1:36:17
  down until the pitch of your screams change. This is not a joke.
• 1:36:25
  I realized this is true. Okay. They either consciously or unconsciously, they
• 1:36:30
  depend upon the director to actually protect the movie because at first your game,
• 1:36:33
  I'm not going to cut that thing. God, but there's a moment when
• 1:36:36
  you become desperate. Now you feel like they're destroying the movie. That was
• 1:36:42
  the moment when they would relent because they were actually depending on you to know
• 1:36:45
  what the movie really needed and not. And so when your screams change,
• 1:36:49
  that's when they would say, okay, that's the budget. Now, that
• 1:36:53
  was the old days. Now they decide beforehand, by a mathematical model,
• 1:36:59
  what the it's going to be, and they don't care what your screams are,
• 1:37:01
  and they won't make the movie. They just won't make it. It's
• 1:37:04
  like they'll you know, they'll just they'll just say forget it if it costs
• 1:37:10
  too much. You know. So it's a very different world now, and
• 1:37:13
  you have to decide can I make the movie I want to make without help
• 1:37:17
  from these people. They were your partner in those days. They might have
• 1:37:20
  been mean about it, but they were still your partner. They still wanted
• 1:37:24
  a great movie. Now it's different. Now, it's pretty much mathematical.
• 1:37:28
  It's algorithm invest Yeah, and because we can get our money back, and
• 1:37:34
  you don't have that sense of that. These were cowboys in the old days
• 1:37:39
  who would take chances on things they believed in. You know, you don't
• 1:37:42
  have that now. I mean it's rare. You occasionally have it, but
• 1:37:45
  it's rare. I mean, can you imagine Taxi driver today. I mean
• 1:37:49
  we had to put a superhero in it, and that was Joker. Yeah,
• 1:37:53
  there you go. That's the only way Taxi driver we get made in
• 1:37:56
  today's world. I heard um get them adult tell say this once and I
• 1:38:00
  think it's so an amazing analogy for working in Hollywood. He said, in
• 1:38:05
  Hollywood, you're going to eat a shit sandwich. Now you can change the
• 1:38:11
  bread, you can put some avocado on it, you can put a really
• 1:38:15
  nice grape poupon. But at the end of the day, you're eating some
• 1:38:17
  ship. By the way, we have our own version of that, which
• 1:38:23
  which we believed absolutely true. It's based on an old sexist joke where a
• 1:38:29
  man is hitting on a woman at a cocktail party and he says to her,
• 1:38:32
  if I paid you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?
• 1:38:35
  And a woman says, well, actually, if you actually paid me a
• 1:38:39
  million dollars, yeah, I probably would sleep with you. And he says,
• 1:38:41
  well, if I paid you five dollars, would you sleep with me?
• 1:38:44
  And she says, what do you think I am a prostitute? And
• 1:38:45
  he says, well, we've already established what you are. We're just negotiating
• 1:38:48
  the price. Okay, So horrible sexist joke it is. But the point
• 1:38:55
  is that applies to filmmaking, right which is, and it's not about money,
• 1:39:00
  it's not about sects. It's about quality that in the end you're going
• 1:39:04
  to compromise the quality of your film. You're going to compromise it's not going
• 1:39:10
  to be as good as you want it to be. And the question is
• 1:39:14
  negotiating the price. How high quality can you get before you have to compromise.
• 1:39:20
  It's that simple, And each film establishes that sort of going into it.
• 1:39:27
  You know, based on how much money you have, him and he
• 1:39:29
  sets you have, who the actors are, you kind of get like how
• 1:39:32
  good that movie can be. And you fight then at every step along the
• 1:39:36
  way for the highest price of quality that you can fight for before you give
• 1:39:42
  in. But every day you give in, every single day you give in,
• 1:39:45
  and you have to understand that you give in. It's every day that
• 1:39:50
  you are just basically losing at the highest level you possibly can. We'll be
• 1:39:58
  right back after a word from our answer and now back to the show.
• 1:40:05
  That's unfortunately the truth. But it's about get it there then you'll have a
• 1:40:11
  good movie, you know. And and it's about and the and the filmmakers
• 1:40:15
  that get those masterpieces done. It's about the battles that you can wage and
• 1:40:21
  win. I mean Coppola was, I mean, look, we had to
• 1:40:25
  go through with Godfather Apocalypse. Now, Jesus Christ, Oh my god,
• 1:40:29
  I mean Jesus a fuck. Listen now, I mean god for that documentary
• 1:40:32
  so we know what he went through. Oh god, that's by anyone listening
• 1:40:36
  prerequisite you need to watch Hearts of Darkness. The documentary. Apocalypse was such
• 1:40:41
  him on the phone saying, you mean I paid Brando a million dollars of
• 1:40:47
  my own money and he's now not going to show up when you see him
• 1:40:51
  in his kitchen, Yeah, yeah, you go, Oh my god.
• 1:40:56
  It's like, I never want to do this as long as I live.
• 1:40:58
  I never want to be in that episode. Or Martin Sheen punches the mirror
• 1:41:02
  out and he's like about he's about to he's drunk and he's about to go
• 1:41:05
  after Francis mother while they're shooting. It's like, it's I mean, keep
• 1:41:12
  it in the movie. His hands all bloodied out is the Oh yeah,
• 1:41:16
  totally. I mean it's it's it's insane, but it is about and when
• 1:41:20
  writers is tougher because you have less power. But as a writer producer or
• 1:41:26
  writer producer directory, it's about fighting and and look, I'll say this man.
• 1:41:31
  You and Ed have have fought some good fights, because you guys have
• 1:41:35
  put out some amazing quality work over the years. Some of my favorite films
• 1:41:43
  I mean, Lass, Samurai, Blood, I mean Blood, Diamond,
• 1:41:45
  and um Uh just everything that both you guys work together and separately together on
• 1:41:51
  it is you find. I mean, look, you can't get Less Samurai
• 1:41:56
  to where it was without fighting a couple of battles, Creative, We fought
• 1:42:01
  any battle, gift, any many battles. Listen. I feel very lucky.
• 1:42:05
  ED feels very lucky because we spent our entire careers making only what we
• 1:42:12
  were passionate about. Very few people get to do that, very few,
• 1:42:15
  and we are so grateful about that. And uh, you know, whether
• 1:42:21
  that was a combination of were you know, difficult or or or or ferocious,
• 1:42:27
  or or people liked us or whatever it was. You know, to
• 1:42:30
  be given that gift, to be to make movies and TV shows that you
• 1:42:33
  really love and care about and that you're not pushed into making, um is
• 1:42:38
  a great gift. And and and always be grateful for that. Marshall,
• 1:42:43
  Uh, thank you so much for your time. And you're and you're just
• 1:42:47
  transparency and you're rob brutal honesty, which is what what I'm all about and
• 1:42:51
  what the show is all about. Um, I hope, I hope it's
• 1:42:55
  scared and terrified people in a way that if it's not, if you're scared
• 1:42:59
  and sight and you don't think you should do this, don't. But if
• 1:43:01
  this is, but if this is emboldened you to like, you know what
• 1:43:05
  I can take that I can take that hit and I can keep going forward,
• 1:43:09
  then this is for you. But I'm so glad that you've helped us
• 1:43:12
  with that. So thank you so much, Marshall. Well, thank you.
• 1:43:15
  I really appreciate it. I want to thank Marshall for taking the time
• 1:43:18
  and coming by to drop those knowledge bombs on the tribe today. Thank you
• 1:43:24
  again so much, Marshall. If you want to get links to anything we
• 1:43:27
  spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at Indy film
• 1:43:30
  Muscle dot com forward slash seven hundred. If you haven't already, please head
• 1:43:34
  over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review for the
• 1:43:40
  show. It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again
• 1:43:43
  so much for listening. Guys. As always, keep that hustle going,
• 1:43:45
  keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll talk to you
• 1:43:48
  soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie Film hustle
• 1:43:54
  dot com. That's I N D I E F I L M hustl dot com