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IFH 728: The Science of Storytelling for Screenwriters with Will Storr · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hussele
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  Podcast, Episode number seven twenty eight. There is no greater agony than bearing
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  an untold story inside You maya Angelo broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood.
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  It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive and
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  thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's
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  your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie
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  Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show
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  is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into
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  a profitable business. It's harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make
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  money with their films from predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators
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  film entrepreneur. In Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, I break down how to
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  of video content, the Film Entrepreneur method will set you up for success.
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  The book is available in paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook. If
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  you want to order it, just head over to www. Dot filmbiz book
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  dot com. That's film Bizbook dot com. Guys, I am super excited
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  to bring you today's episode. We have best selling author Will Store and his
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  book Look the Science of Storytelling, Why Stories Make Us Human and How to
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  Tell Them Better is an amazing deep dive into how story affects the brain.
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  And I gotta tell you, guys, I've done over five hundred interviews at
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  this point between all our podcasts in the last few years, and I've talked
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  to some of the greatest story minds, you know, analysts, and screenwriters
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  and storytellers on the planet, and it is rare for me to hear a
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  new concept in the world of storytelling, and Will brought that to this episode.
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  His combination of storytelling and science in the science of the brain and the
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  neuroscience of the brain is amazing. Really, I was so excited, you
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  know, once I took a look at the book to have them on the
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  show. And this conversation does not disappoint. If you can not spark an
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  idea for a story or how to take your character to the next level,
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  I don't know what else I can do. Because as I was talking to
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  Will, story ideas started popping into my head. I'm like, well,
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  if I did this to this character, I did that to that character is
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  It was really a remarkable experience and I cannot wait to bring this episode to
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  you. So, without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Will
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  Store. I'd like to welcome to the show, Will Store Man. How
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  are you doing, Will, I'm good, Thank you, Alex, how
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  are you? I'm doing fantastic, sir. You are on as they say,
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  the other side of the pond. Uh we are recording from It's I
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  I still love talking to people around the world. It's amazing our technology,
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  I know, it's quite It's incredible, isn't it. Yeah? I mean,
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  you know, calling the States was like a you know, cost a
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  fortune. Every minute you're being charged three video goals. Now it's video calls,
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  and like we take it for granted, and now we're just like,
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  isn't it funny howechnology works. It's like once you get it, you just
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  you assume and you demand it. It's kind of like, oh, well,
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  why is the connection across the world for free so bad? Today?
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  Oh god, you know it's it's insane, but not good enough. It's
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  not good enough. But listen, thank you so much again for being on
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  the show. I'm dying to dig into your book, The Science of Storytelling.
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  And before we do that, how did you get into the business.
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  How did you get into the story storytelling business? Well, so, my
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  background is I'm a journalist and I do a lot of science psychology reporting,
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  and I've written books based on psychology. But for longer than I've been a
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  journist, I wanted to write stories, you know, in fictional story.
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  So I try to write a novel. When I was like eight years old,
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  it was obviously terrible. You know, I always sort of wrestled with
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  that, and then, you know, I think the typical young person thing,
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  young man, young person thing of you know, when you're young,
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  you think, well, you know, I'm an artist. I don't need
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  those books on how to write a story. Is you've got to be a
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  genius. You know, you go through that phase and then eventually, when
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  you failed enough, you go fuck it. You know, I'm going to
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  do it. So so yeah, I was actually researching a book called The
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  Unpersuadables, which which is about why clever people believe crazy things. And I
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  was doing that and interviewing, you know, some world famous psychologists and neuroscientists.
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  And at the same time as that, I started reading all these books
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  on storytelling. So I was also working on my novel in my spare time.
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  So I was reading the Seven Basic Plots and have everyone McKee and you
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  know, all the usual kind of suspects. And I realized that what they're
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  kind of storytelling people were saying and what the scientists were saying, there was
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  so many commonalities between them, like the importance of change, you know,
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  character and character flaw. And I just thought that was really interesting, you
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  know, And so the kind of my my non fiction book, the answer
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  to that why clever people believe crazy things ended up being well, because the
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  brain's a storyteller, it's not a logic processor. He tells a story.
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  That's what he does. That's that's it's sort of function. And we tend
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  to believe stories that flatter our sense of heroism. And that's why I kind
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  of people end up leaving crazy stuff. And so you know that I carried
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  on kind of interrogating that for my own fiction work, and that became a
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  course. I started teaching a course at the Guardian newspaper on the science of
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  storytelling, and then that became the book. So it's kind of a weird
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  way around, isn't it. Isn't it interesting? Because if you start thinking
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  about it, you your whole life is story. Everything we do is story.
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  And it serves not only just like yeah, sure we're gonna go watch
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  the Avengers and that's nice and everything, but it serves a purpose because if
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  you tell the story, I'm like, Bob went down to the river and
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  around that corner there was a tiger that ate him. There might be a
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  group of tigers there. You want to stay away from that story. Yeah,
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  actually helps protect the tribe, if you will, on a very elemental
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  level. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that's absolutely right. And and it's
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  I think the big kind of light bulb for me was thinking that it isn't
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  that the brain is like a storyteller. It's that stories are like brains.
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  When we write the screenplayers and write novels, we're mimicking what the brain does.
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  And so as living creatures, we're surrounded by this chaos of confusing information.
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  Uh and and the brain has to kind of radically simplify that information.
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  There's a neuroscientist called Chris Frith that says the brain's kind of job is to
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  make you feel like you're the invisible actor at the center of the world.
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  And and and that's what it does, and what storyteller has been doing through
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  the through the ages, fictional storytellers is mimicking those processes, you know,
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  you know, the big three acts of archetypal storytelling. Crisis, struggle,
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  resolution, That's what happens to us when you know when things go wrong,
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  you know you're the train is late and you're going to miss your meeting,
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  or you know you slip into kind of crisis struggle resolution mode. You're you
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  know, you're conscious as narrows and now you're a hero at the center of
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  this story. How am I going to do it? How am I going
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  to get there? And that's what the brain does to help us solve problems,
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  to help us understand the world. And so there's so many Once you
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  understand that what you're doing when you're writing a screenplage, you're mimicking the way
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  a brain works, then there are so many kind of things that you can
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  you can get from science then about how to tell better stories. So like
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  you the example you just gave, which is basically like my train is late
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  and you go into the the into the crisis mode. You know, watching
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  Indiana Jones, that's just a heightened version of that. And obviously or watching
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  The Avengers or watching you know, any of these superhero tentpole films, it's
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  just heightened versions of the basic three things that you just have to exactly.
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  And if you're a modernist storyteller, like in the in the book, I
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  talk about a Kafka short story and that was literally his story. There was
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  a Gana tram and he noticed that the particular shape of a woman's ear,
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  and it gave him this. I can't remember what the thought was, some
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  profound kathgist thought. And that's the end of the story, you know.
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  So what you've got there is what I think are the minimal conditions for a
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  story, and that's that something happens that changes somebody somewhat. And then a
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  very kind of literary modern story of ray art house film. It's quite suffered
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  what changes. But in a great broad blockbuster, it's kind of obvious what
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  changes? The death style blows up, you know exactly? Now, can
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  you discuss what the model making brain is? Yeah? So, so this
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  is a really mad idea. What it's not even an idea is that it's
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  a it's a theory that is known to be true about this is how the
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  brain works. Essentially, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
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  and now back to the shell. And if you don't know this stuff,
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  it's at once really obvious when you think about it, but also really disturbing.
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  And that is that we don't experience reality like we think that our eyes
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  are windows and we're looking out of our windows into and we're seeing the world,
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  and the eyes are windows and our ears are these empty tubes into which
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  sounds come. But obviously that's not true. You don't look out of your
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  eyes. Information comes in one way, So how does that work? Well,
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  how that works is that it's the information kind of hits the senses.
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  The senses translate it to millions and millions of electrical pulses, and your brain
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  reads these electrical pulses. It's a bit like a computer reads a CD role
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  or a DVD and creates a model of the world. And what you experience
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  is that model of the world. It's not actual reality at all, so
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  you don't have any direct access to the real world. You don't really know
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  what it looks like outside your body. What you're getting is this fake model
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  of the world. And of course there's also debate about how accurate the model
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  we experience is. You know, humans have a certain kind of brain that
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  experience a certain kind of world. But there are some really fundamental differences,
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  sort of special effects the brain paints on to this model. And one of
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  those special effects is color. So around our bodies in the real world,
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  there's no color. Everything is monochrome. Atoms don't have color. What happens
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  is that some of that information is in light waves, and depending on the
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  length of the LightWave, your brain just goes, well, that's a pink,
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  that's a blue, that's a brown, and it paints it on.
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  So it's really kind of it's a really when you talk at the brain being
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  a storyteller, it really is from the ground upper storyteller. It's getting all
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  this chaotic information and it's conjuring this multi colored, kind of slightly fake world
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  for you to live in. That is, like Chris Fhrist says, you
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  know, you put you in the middle of it, it makes you the
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  all important center of it. So yeah, so that's that's that kind of
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  basic idea, and that's kind of what that's how story selling works on a
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  very basic level. So your brain doesn't care where it's getting information from.
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  You can be getting information from words on a page of a novel, or
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  from a cinema screen, or from a computer screen. As long as it's
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  giving it model information to build a model with, it's going to build that
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  model. So that's why when you say to something, don't imagine an earthan
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  they imagine an elephant, because your brains is constantly making models. So that's
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  what filmmakers are doing that. They're giving brains information with which to kind of
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  build models of imaginary worlds. So that's why a good writer who can use
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  the language like an artisan, can conjure up those images in your head so
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  much better. And that's what kind of not only on the craft standpoint,
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  but just on the not on the plotting standpoint and character standpoint, but just
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  literally using a being a wordsmith. You know, you read a Shane Black
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  screenplay and the he describes a rainy alley. It's not like the alley was
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  dark and rainy. No no, no, no, no. You when
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  he writes it, you smell it, you taste it, and that is
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  what that conjures those images in your head. So that's why that screenplay problem
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  was sold for a couple of million dollars. Yeah, and that's right.
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  You know, when you say you smell it and taste to that, that
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  is almost literally true. So when you put people in brain scanners and they
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  read about kind of the furry fuzz of a peach skin, the areas involved
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  in touch lights up in their brain. So so so that is really literally
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  true. You're's building a model of that of that furry touch and that's why
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  you know that that's why you know, the best writing. It has that
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  absolute clarity. You know, it's kind of it's kind of simplicity but kind
• 13:50
  of packed with kind of meaning, sensory meaning, you know, and when
• 13:54
  to write about dialogue. I think that's that that's one of the keys to
• 13:56
  really great dialogue. We look at really great dialogue, it's it's it has
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  that clarity, but it's packed with information about who the character is, about
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  where they're going, what they're doing, what the power dynamics are in the
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  room. You know, in great dialogue, you can just you can read
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  the first page with Arter Miller play and and know within the first few pages
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  exactly where the story is going, exactly who the characters are because because that
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  that dialogue is packed with so much information that the model making brain and then
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  use to create this world. And it's all unconscious, so it's just doing
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  it all the time. And so so I think that's that that's the key
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  to that that really great dial of writing. So that's kind of why you
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  know, for for writers it's not just you know, originally it was the
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  novel, you know, and or with the cave painting, if you want
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  to get real technical. But you know, the novel, then, films,
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  television, now video games have an argue arguably overtaken cinema as as a
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  way for people to completely fall into a world, and especially those role playing
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  RPGs where you're just walking around and they're literally creating the world with you.
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  And you want to talk about stimulation, you put that, you put the
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  earphones on, you put that. If you want to get into the VR
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  mold, You're You're completely gone. You are in. That's it, because
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  it's taking away the sense of information from the actual world and replacing with different
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  stuff. And it's like a movie, but you are literally the invisible actory
• 15:26
  at the center of that world. So and that's why they wonder why people
• 15:31
  get addicted to those video games and end up spending hours and hours and hours
• 15:33
  and days playing them, because you know, they are that they are,
• 15:39
  you know, creating much more incredible and interesting and emotional worlds for people to
• 15:45
  live in than their real world, so of course they get addicted to them.
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  It's kind of like, you know, from what we've been talking about
• 15:50
  so far, the matrix does not sound very outlandish. I mean, I've
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  always said the matrix is a documentary personally, I mean a lot of this
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  stuff, you know, on a subconscious level. But like the matrix,
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  you know, you arguably could maybe in our lifetime, maybe a couple hundred
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  years from now, who knows, but you could eventually be able to just
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  plug in to a computer and connect and download and up. I mean it
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  sounds crazy now, but yeah, it's not that crazy. No, well,
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  I mean, the brain is a virtual reality machine. That's that's literally
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  what it is. It's not a reality machine. It's a virtual reality machine.
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  It creates this virtual story world and suspends you in the middle of it
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  and feels it full of drama and you know, emotion and everyone's got you
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  know, if you're psychologically healthy, you've got goals you're trying to pursue,
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  and you're engaged in the kind of emotional ups and downs of the pursuit of
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  those goals. That's a story, that's a screenplay, you know. And
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  that's why, that's why when we're watching a great movie it feels so engaging
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  and evolving. It's just the very heightened life. It's a heightened kind of
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  human consciousness that is kind of easy to kind of tumble into. Yeah,
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  and that works with cinema, that works with you know, television, that
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  works with video games, that works with a novel. I mean, yeah,
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  I remember when I first read Harry Potter. In my mind was I
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  just like I was, I was like, what is this literary crack?
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  I was just completely in throat. Or you read a Stephen King novel or
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  something like, you're just good writing, You're just in and yeah, yeah,
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  that's it. And I think one of the one of the sort of
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  big takeaways I got from the science was the importance of cause and effect in
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  those big blockbusters and you know, the great sort of best setting novels.
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  You know. Cause and effect is a really fundamental way that human brains understand
• 17:47
  the world, and that kind of separates us from other animals. So there's
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  one study they did where they're compared the behavior of chimpanzees, or one of
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  our closest relatives to human children, And they gave them the task of like
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  stucking up these wooden blocks on their ends. But the wooden blocks had a
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  lead weight kind of buried in them in a weird place, so they keep
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  falling over. And what you find is that the chimpanzees just keep trying to
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  stack the blocks and they keep falling over and they just keep at it and
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  then they get bored. Whereas the human children, they're pre verbal children,
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  they start picking up the blocks and looking at them. They're asking, you
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  know, what caused that, what's the cause of that? So it's that
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  cause and effect. So you know that we understand the world in causes and
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  effects. That's that's you know, as soon as there's some unexpected change in
• 18:30
  our environment, it triggers our response and we look at it, it gets
• 18:33
  our attention. Then we you know what caused that and what's going to happen
• 18:37
  next, and so really really well written. You know, screenplays for blockbusters
• 18:42
  are very clear in their causes and effects. You know, it's very and
• 18:47
  that's what makes it kind of effortless to be engaged in the movie, because
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  because cause and effect is the natural language of the brain. Whereas difficult movies,
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  art house movies, you know, literary novels, the cause and efect
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  breaks down. It's quite quite hard to understand. First of that you're being
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  shown this, and then there's this, and who's this person? And hang
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  on a minute, why is it now nineteen seventy three? You know and
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  the reason you you know, house moves are often called dream like, and
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  they called dreamlike because the cause and effects brokes does it in dreams, you
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  know, and in novels. Literally novels often called it's hard work. And
• 19:22
  it's hard work because you're having to do the cognitive effort of working out how
• 19:25
  one thing connects with the other. And then you have all your arguments with
• 19:29
  your friends. Well, I think what the author really meant by the you
• 19:32
  know, the haunted acorn in the prairie was was this? And you have
• 19:36
  all these arguments, but you don't really get those arguments about Star Wars or
• 19:38
  Harry Potter because the causes and effects are really clear. One thing leads to
• 19:41
  the next, reduced to the next. And actually it sounds easy, but
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  as I'm sure lots of your view you know, viewers know, in practice,
• 19:51
  we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to
• 19:57
  the show. Adhering to that cause and effect. It's actually quite difficult,
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  you know, having one thing then lead to the next, then lead to
• 20:06
  the next, then lead to the next. It's quite difficult to write that.
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  It's not as easy as it. You could do one or two.
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  Yeah, you could do one or two of those cause of effects, but
• 20:15
  actually just string along a coherent cause and effect that moves your story along.
• 20:18
  It's great. That's actually fascinating because I've really never thought about that because like
• 20:22
  when you watch two thousand and one, that's that's dream. Yeah, there
• 20:27
  is no if you start thinking, there's really no cause and effect. There's
• 20:33
  some slight cause and effect with how, with how and what How's doing,
• 20:37
  but it's so minuscule compared to Star Wars, which is so so concrete as
• 20:42
  far as absolutely leads that leads to that, leads to that, leads to
• 20:47
  that leads to that. And it's just relentless, you know, it does
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  it doesn't let up, and you're glued to it. And it's that effortlessness.
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  And it's effortless because as I said, that's the language of the brain.
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  The brain speaks the language of cause and effect. And if you don't
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  give it that, you're gonna have you're gonna have to start eating, you
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  know, and your unconscious brain, but your you know, your front brain,
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  your thinking brain to what the fuck's going on? You know? And
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  that's why, right, and that's why a lot of times when you see,
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  you know, some of the masters like Kubrick. You know, a
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  lot of his films were misunderstood when they come out, and it takes years
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  for people to catch up to what he was trying to say in his stories.
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  And then there's like deeper levels and it's like, you know, like
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  the the Matrix has such a deep it's like such a deep onion as so
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  many layers to it. Yeah, but if you just want to see the
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  cause of effect of a really cool action movie, it's there. But as
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  you that's the meeniest of the Matrix. He manages to put off both tricks,
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  isn't it. Yeah, that's not that's it's Star Wars, but Star
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  Wars with like an insane amount of depth. And you can so you could
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  arguably have those art house conversations about the Matrix and also have the did you
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  see that action sequence conversation? Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know,
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  those are my favorite stories. I love those kinds of stories that that
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  that you know, because you can have you can have your cake and eat
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  it. I think in a sense, you can have, you know,
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  a great cause and effect, action packed film or novel that's really thoughtful and
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  profound. I mean, my favorite novel and one of my favorite movies is
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  One Flow Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I mean, it's just brilliant. I
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  mean, it's just it's a relentlessly efficient plot. It's absolutely it doesn't sag
• 22:26
  much. It has a little bit in the in the in the kind of
• 22:29
  the fourth act, but it's relentlessly entertaining. But it's it's completely emotional,
• 22:37
  but it's also really thoughtful and profound and symbolic, and it does all those
• 22:41
  kind of things that make it that kind of elevate it really into the art
• 22:45
  space as far as I'm concerned. So that that's my you know, that's
• 22:48
  my kind of sweet spot. And you know, we don't get we don't
• 22:51
  get movies so much like that coming out of Hollywood these days. It seems
• 22:55
  to me no, because because Hollywood hasn't been in the in the the movie
• 23:00
  business for quite some time. They're in the selling other stuff business. They're
• 23:03
  not well, yeah, it's yeah, exactly, that's what they do.
• 23:08
  It's not that. Where where we're finding those stories is now TV streaming series.
• 23:15
  You know, you watch Ozarks, you watch Breaking Bad, you watch
• 23:18
  Game of Thrones. That's where you're looking for that kind of storytelling. Yeah,
• 23:23
  absolutely right, there's no three hundred million dollars and arguably you can't tell
• 23:29
  it to a three hundred million dollar movie. That's a little bit risky.
• 23:32
  You can't, I get it. It's a business on a story standpoint.
• 23:37
  Now, you also talked about the domestic domesticated brain. Can you talk a
• 23:41
  little bit about that. Yeah, So this is a really again, really
• 23:45
  sort of critical kind of underlying idea behind the sounds of storytelling. And that's
• 23:51
  really the question of why why do we tell stories in the first place,
• 23:55
  Why do we evolve to kind of tell stories? And so to understand that,
• 24:00
  you've got to understand a bit about about human evolution. And so,
• 24:06
  you know, we were animals, were still are animals technically, but when
• 24:08
  we were some more than others this world. We know, when we kind
• 24:15
  of came down for the trees and started hanging out around camp campfires, we
• 24:18
  started existing much more in groups, tribes, tribes of humans, and so
• 24:26
  that kind of, uh, you know, we used to, like apes,
• 24:33
  settle our problems by fighting and ripping each other's arms off and all this
• 24:37
  violence basically, but when you're living in groups, you can't really do that.
• 24:40
  You have you have to learn how to kind of get on in better
• 24:44
  ways. So we we evolved to be much more collegiate, peaceful, and
• 24:51
  we essentially we're domesticated. We went through the same kinds of changes that the
• 24:56
  wolf went through to become the domesticated dog. We became much more, much
• 25:02
  more kind of socially, we're much more emotionally intelligent, and we started talking
• 25:07
  to each other. And so for a long time it was thought that we
• 25:11
  evolve language to kind of strategize to hunt, but now they're kind of dominant.
• 25:15
  Theory in psychology is that we actually evolved language in order to gossip.
• 25:19
  And that just seems like a mad thing, because well, that's crazy,
• 25:22
  that's such a stupid thing today. But actually it makes perfect sense because humans
• 25:27
  are now like human's worth and we haven't changed that much. You know,
• 25:30
  we can be amazing and wonderful and kind, but we're also quite selfish.
• 25:36
  We tend to put our own interests first. So you have to kind of
• 25:40
  manipulate people, such control people such without a police force or a judiciary or
• 25:45
  an army or a government, that they're going to put the tribe first,
• 25:48
  and they're going to steal the meat. They're not going to rip people off,
• 25:51
  they're not going to attack people. So how do you do that?
• 25:52
  You do it a gossip. You start telling stories about each other, you
• 25:56
  know, speak. So if if the gossip about you in the tribe is
• 26:00
  that you're a selfish, aggressive person, you're going to get a bad reputation,
• 26:06
  and the punishment of that is potentially lethal, you know, ultimately,
• 26:11
  you know, was once universal, so the ultimate the ultimate sanction was obviously
• 26:17
  death, but before that, you're humiliated, your ostracize, you could be
• 26:22
  kicked out of the tribe, which is also kind of death. So that's
• 26:26
  how we control each other with stories, with gossipy stories, and you want
• 26:29
  to hope that people are telling heroic stories about you and and then that's how
• 26:33
  you kind of start transmitting the kind of moral rules of the tribe. So,
• 26:37
  you know, you find out when you're growing up as a child,
• 26:41
  how do I behave in such a way that I'm celebrated and I've become a
• 26:44
  hero? You learn that through gossipy stories. Oh, you wouldn't believe it.
• 26:47
  You know, this person was so courageous on the hunt. You know,
• 26:49
  there was a thing a sabrity tiger was coming at him and he got
• 26:53
  in the way, and oh, it's amazing. So you learn, oh
• 26:56
  my god, that's how that's how you become a hero. And equally,
• 27:00
  you've got to learn how to not be kicked out the tribe, how to
• 27:03
  not be killed, and that's again through gossip. So that's why gossip is
• 27:07
  so fundamental to the human experience. It's so fundamental to our evolutionary history,
• 27:11
  and it's the basis of all our stories. And you think about any story
• 27:15
  that's kind of successful, it's basically based on gossip. You know, whether
• 27:19
  it's a you know, a story National Inquirer or it's Anna Karenina, it's
• 27:25
  basically you never believe what happened. Yeah, it's got it and it's all.
• 27:33
  And it's usually stories, especially if they're sort of you know, big
• 27:34
  screenplays or big first they lovious, that they're completely morally infused. You know
• 27:40
  that it's full of heroes doing morally good things, and very often at the
• 27:45
  end of the story when they really prove their heroism, it's it's it's you
• 27:51
  know, they put the tribes interests before their own, and that's how you
• 27:56
  know, you know, you identify them as the hero. They finally bust
• 27:59
  through their own self interest and blow up the death start. You know.
• 28:03
  So, so gossip is fundamental to our evolution. It's fundamental to We couldn't
• 28:10
  survive in society without gossip, and it's always there in successful stories in some
• 28:14
  way. Yeah, I mean you are. I mean even within the stories,
• 28:19
  the characters gossip about the other characters. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
• 28:22
  I mean you watch Shash and Redemption, which is one of my favorite
• 28:26
  films, and they're constantly talking about, Oh, there's that choir guy,
• 28:29
  Andy, Well, what's it? That's it, And that's how we learn
• 28:32
  about people in real life and in story is through gossip. But I think
• 28:34
  gossip is a universal we when we think about gossip, we think, oh,
• 28:37
  it's a terrible thing that people do and they shouldn't do it, but
• 28:40
  everybody does it. It's a universal it's cross cultural, it crosses the genders.
• 28:45
  Men and women gossip just as much as each other. But the scientists
• 28:47
  find that men gossip less when women are present. So we're just as oh
• 28:56
  no, no, it's absolutely that we don't do it, you know,
• 28:59
  absolutely, When the dudes get together and then the boys are together, or
• 29:02
  like did you hear did you see what that exactly? Or then do you
• 29:06
  gossip about what the football game you saw the day before? Like did you
• 29:10
  did you see what Beckham did? Did you see what? You know?
• 29:15
  It's a form of gossip because it's his moral judgment that you know, they
• 29:18
  were terrible, they didn't do this thing, they down, didn't pass the
• 29:22
  ball or whatever it is. Yeah, it's gossip. Gossip, gossip.
• 29:25
  It infuses our lives. And if you think about it that way, if
• 29:29
  language evolved to enable us to gossip, then the first stories, the original
• 29:33
  stories were that was was gossip. And again I think that's really that's a
• 29:38
  really sort of powerful insight for me about storytelling. When you read about the
• 29:42
  psychologists when they investigate gossip, you know, they talk about how it works,
• 29:47
  and most gossip is about moral infractions. We're not that interested in gossip
• 29:49
  about people being amazing. We much prefer gossip about people being dangerous. Obviously,
• 29:55
  National Geographic and National Inquirer is kind of like the bad stuff. We'll
• 30:00
  be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 30:10
  That's valuably intelligence. It's much more important that we learn who's the threat
• 30:14
  because yeah, and so you hear that gossipy story and you experience a very
• 30:22
  specific emotion, and that emotion is moral outrage and morell outrage is interesting because
• 30:26
  it compels you to act. It compels you to want to punish the transgressor
• 30:32
  to rescue the person that they're there attacking. You know, you feel like
• 30:37
  you want to act, but of course if you're watching a movie, you
• 30:38
  can't act. So what you do is you keep watching. You kind of
• 30:41
  glued to the screen. You keep watching, and then when finally, when
• 30:45
  you know, when Darth Vader gets his comeuppance, it's just this amazing emotional
• 30:51
  release. And when you feel that amazing emotional release, that's your tribal you
• 30:56
  know, survival circuitry being manipulated by the storyteller, you know. And that
• 31:00
  was all evolved tens of thousands of years ago when we were kind of learning
• 31:03
  how to live cooperatively in tribes. And I think that's one of the reasons
• 31:07
  the success of the Marvel Cinematic universe is that they took a decade to build
• 31:15
  that tension up to the point where in the endgame they finally to defeat Thanos.
• 31:21
  It was. I mean, it's a master work. And I've watched
• 31:23
  the video on YouTube, like the crowd reaction with if anybody hasn't seen an
• 31:29
  endgame spoiler alert, when when everything's down, Captain America is down, you
• 31:33
  know, Thor and Iron Man, and then all of a sudden, everybody
• 31:37
  shows up at one time to fight Thanos. It was like this war just
• 31:44
  like this amazing, Like I'm getting goosebumps just talking about it. I'm listening
• 31:48
  to you talking about it. But but you know, but that takes it
• 31:51
  seriously because those goosebumps, that's your revolution, you know, when you know
• 31:55
  when your when your tribe arrives on mass to fight the enemy, right to
• 32:00
  have those goosebumps and to want to go yeah, because that's that's that's how
• 32:04
  we survive. That's amazing. That's so like I knew we were going to
• 32:07
  we were going to poke the bear in this episode and this is this is
• 32:10
  this is awesome because I love talking about neuroscience. And it's a practical thing
• 32:15
  too, because you know, often when I'm teaching storytelling and especially when I'm
• 32:19
  getting the novelists who are who wanting to write this kind of high literature stuff,
• 32:22
  and you say to them, well, where's the moral outrage in your
• 32:24
  premise? You know what? You know, it's really important if you're moral
• 32:28
  outrage is such a powerful thing to get people glued into a story. As
• 32:31
  soon as you're experiencing a story and you experience moral outrage on behalf of a
• 32:35
  character you're in. You care about them, that's you know it's working.
• 32:38
  But but but if there's no sense of oh my god, that's not fair,
• 32:42
  it's very hard to understand, well, where's the how are you making
• 32:46
  people care about your character or this situation? If there's no and moral it
• 32:51
  doesn't have to be directed to a human being, as is a write in
• 32:53
  the book. And you know John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the moral
• 32:59
  outrage. You know it's set in the dust bowl and there's a drought,
• 33:02
  and you know the family are pushed out of Oklahoma and you feel moral outrage
• 33:07
  on their behalf against the weather. You know you can be that, but
• 33:10
  as always, you know, but you feel like, oh my god,
• 33:13
  it's not fair. They're an amazing the Clutters, they're such a hard working
• 33:15
  family and look what's happened to them. Oh my god, I hope they
• 33:17
  survive. And as soon as you start feeling those things you're in, you
• 33:21
  know, he's got you. Well, the easiest, the easiest way to
• 33:23
  I mean this is an all technique, but the easiest way to make a
• 33:27
  villain villainous is will have him kick the dog exactly. I mean, you
• 33:31
  you have the bad guy kick the dog. It's done, like he's there's
• 33:37
  like, oh, he's gotta go, you know, yeah, I mean,
• 33:42
  and that's it. And it's one of those things, you know,
• 33:44
  because I'm interested in storytelling, but I'm also reading all these science books you
• 33:47
  offered. I have had this experience of, you know, reading these science
• 33:51
  books and they say stuff like that, and you think, oh my god,
• 33:52
  that's just like story. And one of them is that when they when
• 33:55
  they do surveys of the contents of gossip in hunting troublits still exist, they
• 34:00
  say that most of it is about moral transgressions by high status people, you
• 34:05
  know, you know, big shot behavior, you know, our unpleasant kind
• 34:07
  of big shot behavior. And I think, well, that's story, you
• 34:10
  know, that's so that's so many stories are kind of focused. The enemy
• 34:15
  is a high status person who does something bad towards a low status individual or
• 34:22
  a dog, right, because that's just it's imbused modern storytelling, and it's
• 34:28
  all it is, all the way back in our gossip that we used to
• 34:30
  tell because we are we a lot of times we are. Unless you're the
• 34:35
  king, you are on our lowest downpoint. So you you identify much more
• 34:38
  with the dog than you do with the king, because yeah, we were
• 34:43
  never the king, you know, you know. And also that's the other
• 34:45
  interesting thing about human groups is like chimpanzee groups, is that is that you
• 34:51
  know, when we're evolving, there was never really a king. Human groups
• 34:53
  are always relatively leaderless, so it was the group that's always in charge,
• 34:59
  and the group is cohering with these kind of gossiply gossiply gossiply stories, and
• 35:02
  and and you get these awful, kind of terrifying accounts in the in the
• 35:07
  ethnographic literature of you know, some bastards. You know, there was one
• 35:12
  there read recently where some woman died of what we would know is a disease,
• 35:16
  but in the in Papa, New Guinea, they didn't know it was
• 35:19
  a disease. They decided that it was an act of malicious sorcery. And
• 35:22
  so the sorcerer does this magic ritual with some leaves and some burning leaves and
• 35:28
  decides this guy did it, and this guy is going fuck you know,
• 35:30
  and and and and and within days they went around gospel behind his back and
• 35:35
  consensus built. They had to be dealt with, and he was killed and
• 35:37
  eaten. You think, well, there's there's that. But that's how terrifying
• 35:45
  it was. I mean, you know, so so you know that's that's
• 35:49
  gossip. You know, these days gossip, I mean on social media,
• 35:52
  gossip can be pretty lethal for someone's careers. These days, you know,
• 35:54
  we're getting back to that. People aren't being killed and eaten quite but but
• 35:58
  you see the power of gossip communities. It's a lethally dangerous thing. It's
• 36:04
  a very powerful thing, got it. And then social media has heightened all
• 36:07
  of that because now our tribe is the world. And if you do something
• 36:13
  or you know, a video comes out or you say something that you're not
• 36:15
  supposed to you they pull something out from twenty years ago that you tweeted about
• 36:20
  or something, and your whole life is it gets up thrown upside down.
• 36:22
  We've seen careers, Yeah, ostracization, it's to say all the stuff that
• 36:27
  happens. Cancel culture online is just us being tribal as we're happy for tens
• 36:32
  of thousands of years. The reason that all those you know, social media
• 36:36
  platforms work is because we's tribal. You know, we've got the follow accounts,
• 36:38
  we've got the status updates. You know, it's all tribal, and
• 36:42
  it's all working on this very dangerous, very addictive, and very compulsive,
• 36:46
  very emotional, tribal neural architecture. And you know, cancel culture is just
• 36:52
  tribal ostracization. You know, it's what It's what we've been doing at our
• 36:55
  worst for tens of thousands of years. Yeah, I know, let's not
• 37:00
  get into social media because it's a whole lot of conversation. So can can
• 37:06
  you talk about the differences between the Western stories versus Eastern stories? Yeah?
• 37:13
  So, yeah, so this is something that in actually I wrote a book
• 37:15
  about social media and it came up in there, and I just thought this
• 37:20
  was kind of fascinating. So, as lots of people surely know, one
• 37:25
  of the big cultural differences between East and West is the East. In the
• 37:29
  West, we're much more individualistic. In the East, generally speaking, it's
• 37:32
  more community area and there are various ideas about about how this came to be.
• 37:38
  But but you know, one of the ideas is that it all stems
• 37:43
  in the West. It all stems to ancient Greece. We are naturally groupish,
• 37:46
  we are naturally thinking groups. But in the West we had this.
• 37:51
  In ancient Greece, there was this weird kind of landscape. We were living
• 37:57
  in little islands and little communities who couldn't find because the soil was so bad,
• 38:00
  and we were forced to kind of survive on our own, you know,
• 38:05
  we couldn't survive as in China they had massive rice growing communities and education
• 38:10
  projects. Yeah, so they had so to survive in China, you had
• 38:15
  to be part of the group. The group had to be working as one.
• 38:17
  In the West was you had to stand in row two feet. So
• 38:21
  so, out of ancient Greece comes modern European culture. You know, self
• 38:25
  love, narcissists, not the word narcissism, for God's sake, comes from
• 38:30
  ancient Greece. So so, and that still kind of directs the differences in
• 38:36
  how we see the world. And it also directs the differences in the kind
• 38:38
  of ways that we tell our stories. So for the Westerner change is essentially
• 38:50
  down to the individual. We have the individual hero. Problems strike the world.
• 38:55
  The individual hero rises up like a Greek god, fights the monsters and
• 39:00
  comes back with all the boons and whatever where it else and learns the truth
• 39:05
  of the story. But in East Asia they don't have stories. But they
• 39:09
  don't they have other kinds of stories. They don't tend to tell those kinds
• 39:13
  of stories because they don't see change being the role of the individual. They
• 39:17
  see changes being kind of the role of the group. And so what you
• 39:21
  get in China is kind of these kinds of stories that we that we find
• 39:23
  difficult to process Westerners because for us, they don't have any endings. For
• 39:27
  example, so one of them have four act stories, and in that one
• 39:30
  change happens to somebody in act to it just carries on for a bit.
• 39:37
  Act three, you're just you're taking somewhere else to a completely different place,
• 39:42
  different context, different time, different person. Up four, you're back to
• 39:45
  the first person again, and then it ends and you're left, as the
• 39:50
  viewer the reader, to work out we'll be right back after a word from
• 39:54
  our sponsor, and now back to the show. How how do all these
• 40:05
  different disparate elements kind of achieve harmony. And so when I interviewed a psychologist
• 40:10
  in South Korea, he said, you know, you Westerns don't understand these
• 40:13
  stories because you want an ending, You want hero to come back with having
• 40:16
  learned the thing, and you want to be told what the truth is.
• 40:20
  But in the East, you know, we understand that that that changes,
• 40:23
  that that that you know changes it kind of a part is the function of
• 40:29
  the group, and your job is to work out how these kind of disparate
• 40:34
  elements can achieve harmony and how both of these things can be true at the
• 40:37
  same time. So it's a very different way of kind of telling stories.
• 40:40
  It's a very different way of understanding the world. I could go on on
• 40:44
  about it, but I won't. But but yeah, but but it was
• 40:45
  very interesting to me how you know this, You know, the crisis struggle
• 40:51
  resolution thing is particularly a Western model. One of the one of the sort
• 40:55
  quick takeaways I found was his extraordinary was that in China they didn't even have
• 40:59
  autoboil until very recently. So for us in the West, who we think
• 41:05
  about we think of individuals and individual heroes. What could be more obvious than
• 41:08
  telling the story of a hero you know, you would do that. It's
• 41:10
  an obvious thing to do. The autobiography has never really came about in China
• 41:15
  until relatively recently, and when they did come about, the kind of the
• 41:19
  subject of the autobiography wasn't in the middle of all the action. They're in
• 41:22
  the periphery of the action, kind of looking on at their lives, kind
• 41:24
  of commenting on it. So, yeah, really different ways of telling stories.
• 41:30
  Now, why do you think though, that American culture and individualistic culture
• 41:37
  specifically the American culture has completely invaded the rest of the world and has been
• 41:42
  so accept so our movies, our music, our culture, you know,
• 41:46
  even from I would probably argue since the seventies and eighties. It's when it
• 41:52
  started to be our number one export is our culture, which is extremely you
• 41:59
  know, individual, all about me, It's about the champ you know,
• 42:01
  it's about it's about Look, it's Rambo, it's it's Rocky, it's you
• 42:07
  know, it's it's still one. It's Schwarzenegger. Back in the eighties and
• 42:09
  nineties, like these bigger than life, you know, heroes that you know,
• 42:15
  took it all on themselves. How why is that so popular in Eastern
• 42:20
  cultures and how did how did that even become a thing? Yeah, that's
• 42:23
  a that's a really good question. So so I know, I haven't really
• 42:27
  thought about that in that way before, but my immediate response would be that,
• 42:31
  of course, you know, the twentieth century was the American century,
• 42:35
  and you know, at one point culture was all coming from Italy, and
• 42:39
  then it was coming from the from the UK. Yeah, and now it's
• 42:43
  the America's term because you're now the Western superpower, and you know, whereas
• 42:47
  everybody wants to look to Italy or US in the UK or you know,
• 42:52
  England, and now they look to you, you know. So so I
• 42:55
  think, I you know, I think there's that going on. But I
• 42:59
  also I think that I think the success of American culture in the East is
• 43:05
  a product of the fact that kind of these individualistic, individualistic values now are
• 43:14
  spreading around the world. So, you know, individualism from ancient Greece through
• 43:17
  to Italy, through Western Europe and then to America. From individualism, you
• 43:22
  get the you get the you get the Enlightenment, you get the invention of
• 43:28
  human rights, you you get capitalism. So so so basically modernity is this
• 43:32
  kind of and and and individualism are very very kind of tightly bound and of
• 43:38
  course that's going to spread around the world now. So I think wherever you
• 43:43
  get capitalism and capitalistic values, you're going to get individualistic values too. One
• 43:51
  of the places that I wrote about in my book Selfie was about South Korea,
• 43:54
  because South Korea is really interesting because it's is the most westernized Asian country,
• 44:02
  so you know, it's makes between Western values, but they've still got
• 44:14
  the Confucian values of that family and group too. And what you're also get
• 44:16
  in South Korea is like unbelievably high suicide rates. You know, the pressures
• 44:20
  on young people in South Korea are just so high because in the individualistic West,
• 44:23
  we kind of tend to feel like we have to please ourselves. In
• 44:27
  the East, they have to please their group and their parents. In South
• 44:30
  Korea have to please everyone, and it's just a nightmare. But of course
• 44:34
  in South Korea, do you get you know that those Western films, Western
• 44:37
  music is also really big in South Korea. So I think that, yeah,
• 44:43
  wherever you get those Western values of kind of capitalism, and you're going
• 44:50
  to find a kind of good ground for Western art too, right, Because
• 44:54
  I mean you look at like a country like India, which is obviously an
• 44:59
  Eastern country. You know, Bollywood do they make much more films, many
• 45:05
  more films. Their industry is so much larger than Hollywood, but yet it
• 45:09
  doesn't travel. It doesn't travel like Bollywood films. You know, they don't
• 45:16
  do They don't do much business here at all because they're very specific in this
• 45:22
  kind of storytelling they have. Though I don't know if you've seen some some
• 45:25
  of the some of the visual effects are fantastic, and some of the stuff
• 45:29
  that goes on in some of these action Bollywood films, You're just like,
• 45:32
  this is awesome because they're still outlandish. But they don't they don't travel.
• 45:37
  But yet our stories and it's not just about budget and about visual effects and
• 45:42
  and that kind of stuff, because other countries have that now, China and
• 45:45
  India and other countries. I think those stories, that's the question I have.
• 45:50
  It's like, why have our stories been able to travel into these into
• 45:54
  these tribes that historically don't like these kind of stories or are not roll or
• 46:00
  maybe maybe it taps into something that is inherent in all of our all of
• 46:05
  us as our ego inside. Because again I'm thinking about you know, before
• 46:09
  Hollywood, there was like Charles Dickens and you know Shakespeare, you know,
• 46:14
  the storytellers that yeah, also you know, yeah, in ancient Greece,
• 46:19
  those stories or you know, of travel around the orld. And I was
• 46:22
  also thinking about I forget what the tribe's name is, but there was a
• 46:24
  tribe where they have hardly any language, and so there was a theory that
• 46:30
  this was this was the only this was a human tribe that didn't have storytelling.
• 46:35
  And so what the researchers did was they took a DVD of the reboot
• 46:39
  of King Kong and showed the tribe this DVD of King Kong. And they
• 46:43
  said they weren't mad. They loved it. You know, they were cheering
• 46:45
  all the right places, running around in fear. You know. So,
• 46:49
  so it is I think, what what what? It's difficult for me to
• 46:54
  say because what from everyone from Shakespeare, from you know, from Shakespeare to
• 47:00
  Dickens to Hollywood today does is tap into very universal kind of ideas that should
• 47:05
  to be able to travel in such a way. But but but but yeah,
• 47:08
  it's a good question, you know why what if you want to know
• 47:13
  why stories from India and China don't travel so well in the other direction.
• 47:17
  Perhaps it's because at least over the period of history we're talking about, it's
• 47:22
  Western culture that's gone out around the world rather than the other way around.
• 47:27
  And maybe, you know, in the future, maybe without a flip,
• 47:29
  maybe in the you know, a hundred years, it'll be Chinese stories.
• 47:32
  We're all into. And I love what's going to happen. You're very optimistic.
• 47:37
  One hundred years, you're very optimistic with what's going on. I hope
• 47:44
  there is another long Yeah, I hope there's a long tail to the human
• 47:49
  race. I really do. Now, can we discuss a little bit about
• 47:52
  the flowed self and how that translates into storytelling? Yeah? Yeah, this
• 47:58
  is a for me, just probably the most important kind of thing that I've
• 48:02
  kind of worked out as I'm teaching this stuff, and that's that if there's
• 48:07
  one problem that storytellers have, whether they're writing screenplays or novels or whatever,
• 48:12
  is that they've got their plot and they've got their characters, and they're not
• 48:15
  they're not connected. You know. Usually they've got a great idea for a
• 48:17
  plot, they say, well, what if this happened and this happened,
• 48:20
  And I say to them, well, you know, tell me about your
• 48:22
  story, and they give you this sequence of events and I say, well,
• 48:24
  tell me about the character, the protagonist, and they go oh.
• 48:28
  And then you say, well, how do you know that's the sequence of
• 48:30
  events if you don't know who your character is, because your character is deciding
• 48:32
  those sequence of events. So I suppose that you know. It always goes
• 48:37
  back to the same thing, which is the story is a self. You
• 48:42
  know, when you're writing a story, you're recreating true reality that comes from
• 48:45
  a true, real person. And if you think about yourself as a story,
• 48:50
  you are a particular character with a particular background and a particular selection of
• 48:53
  flaws and problems. And you have a goal and that goal comes out of
• 48:59
  who you are, comes out of your background, your values, your hopes
• 49:00
  and dreams. It's a product of your character. You also have your flaws,
• 49:05
  you know, and you're you know, for all of us who are
• 49:07
  alive, you know, part of being alive is that you keep making the
• 49:12
  same mistakes over and over and over again. You know, you keep getting
• 49:15
  this thing wrong, all these things wrong. So and those are your kind
• 49:17
  of obstacles as you go through your life. You know, that's the plot
• 49:20
  of your life. Your goals and your kind of obstacles. And that's how
• 49:22
  it should be in story too, you know, so you should have a
• 49:25
  flawed you know that the plot should come out of who that character is.
• 49:34
  The plot should come out of that character's flawed idea about the world. And
• 49:37
  the example that I use is there's simplest exactly. Well, the example that
• 49:42
  I use in great in depth in the book is the Remains of the Day.
• 49:44
  But Shi Guru, you know, book award winning novel, and so
• 49:50
  you know that's that's about this guy Stevens, who is an English butler,
• 49:54
  will be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 50:01
  the show and his kind of flawed idea of the world. His complete kind
• 50:09
  of conception of how the world works is that England and the English are the
• 50:15
  best, and everyone else are idiots. And if you want to be,
• 50:20
  if you want to be a good proper English butler, you have to exercise
• 50:23
  emotional restraint. So it's really an interrogation of that old idea of the English
• 50:28
  upper lip. You know, it's like stoicism strength anybody who doesn't do that
• 50:31
  as an idiot. So the story that is Shaguru tells around Stephens is that,
• 50:37
  you know, he hasn't placed Stephens' story at the heart of the British
• 50:39
  Empire, heart of British power, in say, eighteen eighty. He's put
• 50:43
  it in nineteen fifty, when the decline of British power is beginning to be
• 50:49
  in full swing. The aristocrat that he used to serve is now long gone,
• 50:52
  and there's an American dude who now he has to serve in his mansion.
• 51:00
  But the Americans really friendly and like jokes with him, and he talks
• 51:02
  to him on a level, but he can't cope with it. He can't
• 51:06
  deal with it. So all of the things that he's having to deal with
• 51:08
  in his life are challenging that idea of English supremacy, of the English stiff
• 51:15
  upper lip, and the story of an Orange is him trying to cope with
• 51:19
  that, and so so that whole story comes out of his floor. It
• 51:22
  comes out of his character. And a much simpler example from the world of
• 51:25
  sort of blockbuster movies is Jaws. You know, you think about Jewels,
• 51:29
  what's Jaws? That it's a movie about to kill a shark? And yes,
• 51:30
  of course it's a movie about to kill a shark. But that movie
• 51:34
  is structured around a flawed self with a particular floor that he has to struggle
• 51:39
  with, and that is that Brody, this police chief who has just recently
• 51:44
  been put in charge of the coastal resort town of Amazeville, is scared of
• 51:46
  the water, Like he's really scared of the water when he when he gets
• 51:51
  the ferry across from the mainland, he can't even get out of his car.
• 51:53
  He's so scared of the water. And so the Great the Shark comes
• 51:58
  along it and what that means he has to has to wrestle with his floor.
• 52:02
  He can't carry on being scared of the water anyways. Either I was
• 52:05
  to go out there and deal with this thing, or it's over for him.
• 52:07
  So the shark kind of pulls him out. And then and then,
• 52:09
  you know, so the exact midpoint of the of the movie, he's he
• 52:15
  goes out to the you know, he gets the courage to go out into
• 52:17
  the water and fight the shark, and Act four happens. The shark fights
• 52:22
  back. He you know, he decides he's made a big mistake. He
• 52:27
  wants to go back to shore, but he can't. And then finally the
• 52:29
  Great Deliumont he kills the shark and as he swinging back to shore with his
• 52:34
  oceanographer mate, the very last thing that you see in the movie is him
• 52:37
  saying, I used to be scared of water. I can't imagine. I
• 52:39
  can't imagine why. So you see this great character change. So even a
• 52:44
  film like Jaws. You know, when I first wrote the book and was
• 52:46
  teaching this stuff, did we say to me, oh, well, that's
• 52:49
  true all the stuff you say about the floor character in very literary novels and
• 52:52
  very art house like, you know, intelligent films, But he's not really
• 52:55
  true in action films and so what he is actually but it's just not that
• 52:59
  hid in the mix, you know, but it's definitely but it's there,
• 53:01
  you know. So so so that's that. It's that if the plot needs
• 53:07
  to come out of the character, and it needs to, and it needs
• 53:09
  to be interrogating at that character's flaw and changing it, I think, isn't
• 53:15
  there? But isn't what you just said? With Jars? That's essentially life.
• 53:20
  You know, you meet people along the way that will challenge your flaw.
• 53:24
  We will challenge like if you're if you're afraid to stand up for yourself,
• 53:28
  I promise you you will meet a bully, you see. And and
• 53:32
  how I think about it is that is that most of us go through our
• 53:36
  lives and things are generally okay, but but but but but but often you
• 53:40
  know, something will happen to us that will completely that will specifically trigger us
• 53:45
  and will flip out and get really emotional, and people go, oh fucking
• 53:47
  hell, you know, that's your flaw, that's your kind of sacred floor.
• 53:51
  That that that that that I want to hear a story about because you
• 53:54
  know it's it's and that's what happens in lots of the great stories. Uh.
• 54:00
  It's that that that kind of ignition, the change that happens at the
• 54:05
  beginning of the story, which ignites the story, connects specifically with somebody's flaw
• 54:09
  in yours. You can't be scared of the water anymore. In the remains
• 54:14
  of the day. You think English, you think the English is so fucking
• 54:16
  great. Check out this American boss, and check out you know the decline
• 54:21
  of English power in the world. You know. So so that that to
• 54:25
  me is is you know, one of these things that is really often missed
• 54:30
  even in stories that get made, you get the sense that you've got they've
• 54:36
  come this brilliant idea for a story, but they've just got this cut out
• 54:38
  and keep vaguely good looking, physically correct people to do the story. And
• 54:45
  it's for me, it's not good enough, you know, it's you can
• 54:47
  sense when it's they that the kind of propulsion of the story and the originality
• 54:52
  of the story, and the thing that's making it not an exercising you know,
• 54:55
  color by numbers, is that it's coming out of a of a of
• 55:00
  a character with a very specific flaw. And in the book, I won't
• 55:06
  doing it takes a while, but in the book I use the example of
• 55:08
  Lawrence of Arabia in depth, you know, talking because you know that's that's
• 55:14
  a great example of that's all about this this this one guy's particular flow and
• 55:17
  it's both completely absorbing emotional but also really originally you just don't know what's going
• 55:24
  to happen next, right, And he in the Lawrence of Arabia, you
• 55:28
  literally have him completely beautifully dressed at the beginning, in his white everything,
• 55:34
  and he looks polished and he looks great, and at the end it's tor
• 55:37
  a part. He's got blood on him, He's got and you can visually
• 55:42
  see the difference between how that character changed, and that's one of the brilliant
• 55:45
  things about that film. But you see that in a lot and you know,
• 55:50
  it's kind of like when you see that that fresh recruit, that fresh
• 55:53
  private come off the plane to go to war and as as he's going into
• 56:00
  or you see the guys have been in there for a year going out,
• 56:02
  and you see the difference in their faces and their expressions and their look and
• 56:07
  what they've happened to them, And that's that's life. That's sorry. And
• 56:14
  you know, when you're doing the war movie, you know, like what
• 56:17
  what kind of a person is walking to change? And the thing about Lawrence
• 56:21
  is that he's got you know, you see Hm at the beginning of the
• 56:22
  movie and he's really cocky a level and to the authoritarian and he's a bit
• 56:29
  of a just a bit of a pride. You know, you come across
• 56:30
  a bit at work and you think, oh, that guy is a real
• 56:31
  dick. You know, you drop that dude in a war zone and you
• 56:36
  see what happens. You know, he becomes a monster because you know,
• 56:38
  he keeps being this rebel and he keeps thinking he's above everybody else, and
• 56:42
  it turns him into a you know, a monster, you know, and
• 56:45
  it has that amazing transformation at the beginning where he's berating somebody else for being
• 56:50
  a barbarous murderer, and by the end they flipped and now that person who's
• 56:53
  bracing racing him for being a barbarous murderer. I mean, it's this perfect,
• 56:59
  you know, it's per effectly done in that movie. Now, can
• 57:02
  you talk a little bit about the god moment? Yeah, so, I
• 57:07
  think one of the things that in archetypal storytelling, you know, what happens.
• 57:14
  You've got this flawed character and something happens to them which kind of challenges
• 57:19
  that floor, which forces them to deal with that floor. You know that
• 57:23
  broad you can't be scared of the You've got to choose now, are you
• 57:27
  going to be scared of the water or you or are you going to deal
• 57:30
  with your fears? And so, of course when that happens, they lose
• 57:34
  all control over their lives and their situation. And the more they fight,
• 57:37
  the more they struggle, the more they lose control and what you see and
• 57:42
  and that kind of loss of control happens on both the kind of levels of
• 57:45
  story. It happens on the level of the external drama sharks out there killing
• 57:50
  everybody, but it also happened happens on the interior psychological world of the of
• 57:54
  the protagonist. You know that that that they're struggling with who they are?
• 57:59
  Who am I going to be? Now? Am I going to be?
• 58:00
  You know? Is Steven's and remains that they're going to be somebody who is
• 58:05
  actually emotionally warm and can tell people he loves them and cares for them.
• 58:07
  And isn't just a cold bastard or is he going to carry on being a
• 58:12
  cold English you know, unemotional bastard. You know what you're going to do
• 58:15
  and so, And what you see at the end of story archetypal storytelling is
• 58:21
  that is that they finally, they finally get control over both of those kind
• 58:27
  of elements of story in one kind of perfect moment. They get control over
• 58:31
  the exterior world of the drama and the interior world of who they are.
• 58:36
  I mean the obvious example is Star Wars where Luke uses the force to you
• 58:39
  know, get control over and blow up the Death Star, but he also
• 58:44
  has the courage and becomes that hero and so, and it's it's almost like
• 58:47
  a fleeting moment, and I call it the God moment because that's the archetypal
• 58:51
  you know, who's Who's Who's the hero of the greatest story ever told?
• 58:53
  It's God. You know, religion is the most powerful story ever told.
• 58:57
  It obsesses billions of people around the world. And you know, God's defining
• 59:01
  characteristic is control. And if you think about it in its broadest terms,
• 59:06
  that's what we're all seeking. That's what brains want. They want control over
• 59:08
  the world because if we have control over the world and ourselves, we get
• 59:13
  what we want. So we're always trying to seek control. We're just trying
• 59:15
  to work out to get control. And that feeling of having control is kind
• 59:19
  of blissful. And you know, that's what we see, and that's very
• 59:22
  often we see. The kind of dramatic climax of archetycle stories is that is
• 59:27
  that wonderful moment. It's like at the end of one from the Cooko's Nest
• 59:30
  when when Chief picks up the concrete control panel, throws it through the window
• 59:37
  of the mental institution and jumps, you know, runs out into the moonlight.
• 59:42
  The story doesn't end ten minutes like he's having a piss behind the tree
• 59:45
  or like you know, two days later when he's arrested and sent back.
• 59:46
  It ends at that moment because that's his god moment. That's that beautiful moment
• 59:52
  where he finally, you know, got control over his floor. We'll be
• 59:59
  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:00:07
  And it's almost as well, it's almost a self realization in that moment,
• 1:00:14
  in that small moment of whatever that is. It's like, oh, I
• 1:00:17
  got this. I realized what's what's going on? And you were saying about
• 1:00:23
  people wanted to take control because they get things. I mean, there's you
• 1:00:27
  know, there's few people in the world that might take that a little extreme.
• 1:00:30
  Some of some of the worst human beings in history have taken that to
• 1:00:35
  the degree. Yeah, well, I mean really I was thinking about the
• 1:00:38
  Darwinian things surviving and reproduction. You know, fundamentally, what all of these
• 1:00:43
  things things want to do is work out how to survive and reproduce. How
• 1:00:45
  do we do that? And in human groups we live in social tribes,
• 1:00:50
  it's about working out what the rules how do I behave in order to be
• 1:00:53
  seen as a hero and get status, because if we get status in life,
• 1:00:58
  we tend to get rewards. And that's the same as kind of for
• 1:01:00
  any animal. So so you know, very often in the archtop or storytelling,
• 1:01:07
  in the god moment comes when they have an act of kind of pro
• 1:01:10
  tribe selflessness, just like you know, Skywalker risking his life for the good
• 1:01:17
  of the rebels. But why, I have to ask you this, So,
• 1:01:22
  why is breaking away from the tribe or at least putting the tribe ahead
• 1:01:28
  of your needs looked upon? As I guess I'm explaining it to myself,
• 1:01:34
  I'm answering myself because you're looking like that, like why is that being held
• 1:01:37
  up to a higher standard where when it really is about the tribe and being
• 1:01:44
  and being working with the tribe as opposed to being that individual who goes out
• 1:01:47
  and breaks the rules. And I guess it's the sacrificial part of them,
• 1:01:52
  like, oh, they're so great because they sacrifice themselves for the better of
• 1:01:55
  the group. Yeah, So I think I think the basic idea is that
• 1:02:00
  most of us are pretty selfish, most of us are looking out for ourselves,
• 1:02:02
  and so you kind of need to be bribed in order to put them
• 1:02:07
  first. And so part of that bribe is that's what heroes do and when
• 1:02:12
  you do that heroic thing, everyone's going to tell you you're amazing, and
• 1:02:15
  we're going to give you all these gifts of attention, and you know,
• 1:02:17
  and really, when they do studies about of status in hunter gatherer tribes,
• 1:02:22
  they find the higher status individuals have better access to better mates, so they
• 1:02:25
  get their choice of sleeping put in their partners, they get better access to
• 1:02:29
  the better food, they get safer sleeping sites. So there are rewards in
• 1:02:34
  human tribes and in all kinds of animal communities for earning status and in human
• 1:02:40
  in human groups, you're kind of bribed with status, you know, the
• 1:02:45
  status of a hero, the status of a loved person if you do these
• 1:02:51
  kind of selfless things. When they look at morality around the world, they
• 1:02:54
  find that that's the kind of basis of human morality is selflessness. When you
• 1:02:59
  put other people before your self, no matter where you around the world,
• 1:03:01
  people think that's great and wonderful. And when you put yourself for other people
• 1:03:06
  no matter where around the world, people think that's shitty. So so,
• 1:03:08
  and that's again that's a tribal thing. It's that it's that kind of because
• 1:03:13
  with selfish humans, we have to be bribed to act altruistically, and part
• 1:03:17
  of that is part of the way that we kind of propagandize that. You
• 1:03:22
  know, in the book, I say that the story is tribal propaganda.
• 1:03:23
  It's propaganda. It's saying, you know, if you do this, if
• 1:03:28
  you have the courage to attack our enemies for us, everyone's going to think
• 1:03:31
  you're amazing, and you're going to get to marry her. She's really hot,
• 1:03:35
  and you're going to get that steak over there, and everyone's going to
• 1:03:37
  say, you know so so. So that's kind of how that's kind of
• 1:03:39
  how it works. We have this idea of the hero, and we all
• 1:03:43
  try and try and be you know, if we're psychologically healthy, we all
• 1:03:46
  want to be the hero. It's very it's very different how how history looks
• 1:03:52
  like Genghis congresses mother Teresa. Yeah, that's right, I mean, and
• 1:03:55
  that's it. I mean, this isn't sort of part of the book.
• 1:03:58
  Is it's a part of my next book actually, But yeah. There are
• 1:04:00
  different ways that humans canon and status, and the three main ones are dominance,
• 1:04:05
  so violence, which is what we're doing since eran animals. Then it's
• 1:04:09
  virtue, so being you know, virtue is obviously moral, but there's also
• 1:04:13
  kind of competence. You play success games. It's like a chef will earn
• 1:04:16
  status about being amazing at something, so you get stories about that stuff too.
• 1:04:21
  You know that somebody becoming the best ice skater ether and it is it?
• 1:04:26
  And now is that one of the reasons why we Because I anytimes there's
• 1:04:30
  a movie, a documentary, a story in regards to telling a story about
• 1:04:34
  a person or a group that were exceptional at whatever they do, and I'll
• 1:04:41
  watch a documentary on like the greatest tennis player, the greatest this, the
• 1:04:45
  greatest chess player, the guy who knows how to paint with his foot,
• 1:04:50
  like whatever, Like that's the dude, or that's the girl who was able.
• 1:04:57
  I'm drawn by those kind of stories. Is that why those stories like
• 1:05:00
  Rudy even though Rudy is not a good exam because he wasn't the best,
• 1:05:03
  He just hit. He just was. He was sick and he was obviously
• 1:05:08
  sick in ahead and really really wanted to. Yeah, but to ask your
• 1:05:13
  question, that's absolutely correct. Yeah. So so in our evolving tribes,
• 1:05:21
  you would have punished dominance. So people don't like dominant people, but you
• 1:05:26
  would have rewarded virtue and you would have already competence too. So you know,
• 1:05:30
  if you're a great hunter, you you you you're you raise in status
• 1:05:33
  if you're you know so, and you know war movies, if you're courageous,
• 1:05:36
  you raise in status. So so yeah, you know all these stories
• 1:05:41
  that we have about people doing incredible documentaries, you know, about people doing
• 1:05:44
  incredible things, Yeah, just they're heroic because it's amazing that you can do
• 1:05:48
  that, and that's not a chance thing that humans find that amazing. We
• 1:05:54
  find that amazing and thrilling and entertaining because we've evolved reward that kind of behavior
• 1:05:59
  because that kind of behave is really useful for the trial. If you've got
• 1:06:01
  this expert, you can do something incredible that's good for everyone. So so
• 1:06:05
  he's no accent, no, no, no, no, this is accidental.
• 1:06:08
  You know. We love to watch that stuff for a reason. Yeah,
• 1:06:12
  And I mean, obviously the things the examples you gave are actually practical
• 1:06:15
  things that people could actually use. But like I just saw a documentary of
• 1:06:17
  the fastest Rubik's Cube Solver, who I love that. Yeah, I love
• 1:06:23
  that. With the cue, I'm fascinated by the subculture in general. But
• 1:06:27
  then like that it's like serious, it's like done, and I'm like how
• 1:06:31
  like And that's and you look at something that's a good example because so there's
• 1:06:35
  two things about that. Well, the first thing about that is that is
• 1:06:38
  that you can't take it too literally. So we don't we don't have a
• 1:06:41
  part in our brain that makes us think that people who are expert hunters are
• 1:06:45
  amazing. It's just expertise. It's just the basic gen any expertise. Expertise
• 1:06:50
  is great, you know. So uh. And the second thing about that
• 1:06:55
  Ruby's Cube movie in particular was was it was full of morality and kind of
• 1:07:00
  heroic behavior. Yeah. The guy who was the rival of the newcomer was
• 1:07:05
  so wonderfully magneticous. I was in tears. Yes, And again that is
• 1:07:13
  that that's playing with your tribal emotions. It's that it was this amazingly rare,
• 1:07:16
  virtuous display of your you're better than me and I love you. You
• 1:07:20
  never see that so special film, No, you watch you watch the Kant
• 1:07:27
  Donkey the Donkey Kong documentary about the guys who are fighting to be the best
• 1:07:30
  donkey kn't player in the world. Yeah, The King of Khank, King
• 1:07:32
  of kank what in a mill? And that that that guy, the rival
• 1:07:35
  was the point prick and everybody hated him because he was so arrogant. He
• 1:07:41
  walked along with a freaking tie and a video like it was such, he
• 1:07:45
  had a mullet. It was just, oh, such a prick. Yeah,
• 1:07:47
  but that's it again and again that's true because you know, we hate
• 1:07:50
  big shot behavior. If somebody puts them, if somebody status is earned,
• 1:07:56
  the group gives status. If somebody goes in and claims it, we just
• 1:08:00
  take them. You know, I'm a sucker. My guilty pleasure is reality
• 1:08:03
  television. I love a bit of reality TV because it's pure gossip. And
• 1:08:08
  this show got blow. Yeah, I think it's a big show in the
• 1:08:11
  States, but we don't. We've only had it's only just come out here
• 1:08:13
  called Below Decks. I've heard about it. It's like down to Abby on
• 1:08:17
  Yachts And every season they have they have a couple of real pricks who go
• 1:08:23
  on there and think they're above everybody else, and you just love hating them.
• 1:08:26
  You love hating them, and then they get fired and you go yes,
• 1:08:30
  and that's and that that's what triggers. That's why reality TV is such
• 1:08:33
  a you know, it's such a heightened reality reality. It's I don't think
• 1:08:39
  it has been reality for quite some time. But those that storytelling aspects they
• 1:08:43
  just they just take They just tap into our tribal instincts on the good guy,
• 1:08:49
  the bad guy, that the other stuff. And I've got a controversial
• 1:08:54
  kind of opinion that I think the reality TV produces are the great unsung heroes
• 1:08:58
  of storytelling because they have to get all this raw material from all these idiots,
• 1:09:02
  and they tell that, you know, they tell them that they have
• 1:09:05
  to make stories with them, and when it works, they do it to
• 1:09:09
  spectacular effects. If we have the show in the UK, Love Island,
• 1:09:12
  where it's just a bunch of kids are chucked in a resort, Yeah,
• 1:09:15
  yeah, I have Love Islands, and it's just like, you know,
• 1:09:17
  they're not the brightest people. They're not they're pretty, they're pretty, yeah,
• 1:09:20
  I get it, yeah yeah, and bickering every day. But every
• 1:09:24
  single day they build a story, a forty five minute story out of that,
• 1:09:27
  and every single day they get millions of viewers, And that to me
• 1:09:30
  is the kind of genius. Well, you watch storytelling, but if you
• 1:09:32
  watched, I mean, did you guys see that you guys start Tiger King
• 1:09:35
  right, Ah, that was brilliant. I mean it's it's in such an
• 1:09:41
  awe like and I've talked about that on the show before and please forgive me
• 1:09:44
  everyone listening, but I mean, you watch Tiger King. My wife looked
• 1:09:46
  at me like, why are you? Why are you watching this? I'm
• 1:09:49
  like, I can't turn away. This is a this is a train wreck.
• 1:09:53
  And as the story continues, just just like, no, we'll be
• 1:09:58
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:10:06
  No, that can't really have happened. No, And like it just
• 1:10:10
  every every episode was like, that's not real? How is that? That's
• 1:10:14
  a good example because one of the things there are in the book is I
• 1:10:15
  call it the dramatic question. And so the dramatic question is who is this
• 1:10:19
  person? Who are they really like when they're backs up against the wall?
• 1:10:23
  Who are they going to be? And so, you know, are they
• 1:10:27
  going to be the flawed version of themselves? They're going to be the new
• 1:10:29
  version themselves. And so lots of the best drama is when the action is
• 1:10:32
  forcing you know that you come across his idea before I'm sure the character to
• 1:10:35
  show who they are. And that's true in the Remains of the Day because
• 1:10:39
  you find out more and more about Stevens. He was a bit of an
• 1:10:42
  anti semi at one point, and you go, oh God, and then
• 1:10:44
  you find out something good he did and he go ah. And on that
• 1:10:46
  kind of level, the Tiger King was exactly the same as the Remains of
• 1:10:49
  the Day because you were constantly being told new things about who the Tiger King
• 1:10:55
  was. And sometimes you're going, oh, he's a hero, he's amazing,
• 1:10:58
  and other times you're going, oh, my god, he's a fucking
• 1:11:00
  lunatic. He's constantly asking that dramatic question, who is this person? And
• 1:11:05
  it played with that dramatic question so well that it was just he just kept
• 1:11:09
  you going to the end. I mean, I was always sure Carol was
• 1:11:12
  evil, but well, obviously Carol, Carol obviously killed her husband as tigers,
• 1:11:16
  yeah, I mean back at Arrobasan, obviously, obviously there has to
• 1:11:21
  be that. But then you watch it, like when you're watching that show
• 1:11:24
  and spoiler alert, one of the handlers the girl got her arm torn off
• 1:11:31
  by a tiger, and that she was so kind of cool about it,
• 1:11:36
  and she was like she was heroic and then you started to think about them
• 1:11:42
  like I love her, like I can't believe that she would be like she
• 1:11:45
  didn't sue, she didn't bitch, she didn't like, oh my god,
• 1:11:48
  this guy's a cret. No, she went back to work like four or
• 1:11:51
  five days later like it was. And what is that that is? That
• 1:11:55
  is displayed selflessness. She didn't sue, she didn't bitch, she wasn't me
• 1:11:58
  and me me. She was like, I'm gonna put the zoo first.
• 1:12:01
  Yeah, So that's why she's heroic because that's the essence of heroism. I
• 1:12:05
  mean, she had her arm ripped off and literally first, so that is
• 1:12:11
  yes. But that's another great example of selflessness is heroism. And then you
• 1:12:15
  see him like constantly it's all about me, and he takes the crown and
• 1:12:20
  he's he's so self invited. And then the best part about it, and
• 1:12:25
  then I'll stop talking about Tiger King, the best part about because I don't
• 1:12:29
  talk to people about Tiger King because I'm in quarantine, so I don't talk
• 1:12:31
  to people about it. But the best part was like when you hear those
• 1:12:35
  when you started those music videos that he was doing, and you're going,
• 1:12:40
  is it me or does the Tiger King have a decent voice, Like why
• 1:12:45
  he shouldn't sound this good? Then we come to find out that it was
• 1:12:48
  dubbed and somebody else, someone else, which makes all the sense of the
• 1:12:54
  world, because I was like, of course, of course he did that.
• 1:12:58
  Of course head this. Yeah. I mean when they were making whoever
• 1:13:05
  was making that, they must have been just thinking every day, oh my
• 1:13:09
  god, this is gold, like usually going home every day from that set,
• 1:13:13
  it's just kind of like this this cat. But it was also just
• 1:13:15
  constructed, so it was beautiful. It was just the six episode whatever of
• 1:13:20
  episode. It was so well, it was destruct so elegant, it was
• 1:13:26
  so brilliantly dumb. Yeah, elegant is the only time you'll ever hear the
• 1:13:30
  word elegant and Tiger King in the same set. Was theanship so good?
• 1:13:34
  Those you know, like from making Making a Murderer was so brilliantly made as
• 1:13:39
  well. I mean, Netflix are actually you know, we used we used
• 1:13:42
  to be quite proud in the UK BBC documentaries, but but the Netflix have
• 1:13:45
  made BBC documentaries look terrible. I mean, you know, like that I
• 1:13:49
  did that. They're they're they're they're making such brilliant non fiction films Netflix that
• 1:13:55
  that they're kind of leading the world I think in serious and stuff like that.
• 1:13:59
  In Yeah, I mean it's all still very celebrity led out here.
• 1:14:01
  You know, send a celebrity on a journey and god, it feels so
• 1:14:05
  dated now. Yeah, I know we're known for our celebrities as well here
• 1:14:11
  over here. Yeah, and then yeah, I mean, you know when
• 1:14:15
  there's people out there like the Target King and celebrity, absolutely that it's always
• 1:14:20
  a celebrity in tea is talking about their childhood. It's like, oh god,
• 1:14:28
  I want I want to ask you one last question about the book.
• 1:14:30
  What is the difference between plot as a recipe versus plat as a sympathy for
• 1:14:36
  change? Yeah, so this is something about you know, it's just talking
• 1:14:46
  about how how when story analysts in the past have tried to work out how
• 1:14:53
  story works through to Robert McKee and you know whoever, they've only had add
• 1:15:00
  other stories to go by, you know, so, so Robert McKee,
• 1:15:03
  I keep forgetting, is you know the here with a thousand would Doseph Campbell?
• 1:15:11
  Of course? Is it Campbell? We're having a middle aged moment there.
• 1:15:13
  Yeah, in Joseph Campbell, you know, all they have to go
• 1:15:15
  on is previous stories. So they get all the previous stories together and they
• 1:15:17
  compare them and they go, well, this is what they've got in common.
• 1:15:20
  And there's no there's no way of kind of communicating what they come up
• 1:15:27
  with as their solution. Then as a recipe, this thing happens, and
• 1:15:30
  then this thing happens, and then this thing happens, and then this thing
• 1:15:31
  happens. So and that you know, sometimes that works with Star Wars,
• 1:15:38
  with Jaws and something, but more often than not, it just when you're
• 1:15:41
  watching it, it just feels like it's a recipe. Someone just followed a
• 1:15:43
  recipe. And I think the good thing about starting with the science is that
• 1:15:46
  you're starting with something else, you know, and you're not starting with the
• 1:15:49
  recipe. And I think one of the kind of basic things about about human
• 1:15:54
  attention is that we're attracted to change. You know, if there's change in
• 1:15:57
  the in the room, we're just going to look at it. How great
• 1:15:59
  stories begin, and so, you know, in the book, I talk
• 1:16:02
  through various ways you can use traditional plot structure but in a smarter way with
• 1:16:08
  you know, using it properly with character. But you can also you know,
• 1:16:12
  forget all that stuff and just to just understand the fact that humans love
• 1:16:16
  change, and you know, really great stories are like a symphony of change,
• 1:16:20
  and there's all kinds of different things that can change on it. You
• 1:16:24
  know, the character can change, the situation, you can change, the
• 1:16:27
  people around their character can change. The characters' goals can change. The characters
• 1:16:30
  understands about the world can change, you know, and really great stories there's
• 1:16:32
  all these changes happening all at once and all these kind of different levels,
• 1:16:35
  and it's nice to kind of abstract, kind of art house level. That's
• 1:16:39
  what a story is. It's like, you know, it's stuff changing,
• 1:16:42
  and then you know, of course, the more that you kind of shape
• 1:16:45
  that, the more it becomes a kind of archetypal story. So that's that's
• 1:16:47
  what that's about. Really, it's about understanding that if you're just following that
• 1:16:54
  twenty two point and one a myth without really understanding some of this other stuff
• 1:16:58
  about kind of character and how people actually work, you risk just following a
• 1:17:01
  recipe and coming out with a supermarket cake. I mean, I know,
• 1:17:06
  we can talk for at least another two or three hours about this. I'm
• 1:17:12
  fascinated with your point of view on story because it comes from size and it's
• 1:17:20
  a different starting place. This is not theory. This is like, okay,
• 1:17:24
  how do we tell? And this is what Hitchcock said years ago.
• 1:17:27
  He goes, I'm going to find eventually, just find a way to play
• 1:17:30
  like pianos on a note. I want you to feel this boom and you
• 1:17:32
  hit this point and you laugh this, then you cry this when you get
• 1:17:35
  scared. And a good storyteller knows how to trigger all those elements. But
• 1:17:40
  if you, as a storyteller, understand, yeah, the rules of what
• 1:17:46
  see I think a lot of times screenwriters, specifically in storytellers in general,
• 1:17:50
  we all look at story from the story's point of view. We rarely look
• 1:17:57
  at it from the audience's point of view, in the sense of how how
• 1:18:00
  to trigger the audience. It's generally more of a Sometimes it's ego related,
• 1:18:04
  meaning it's like it's my story, I'm going to tell the story. But
• 1:18:08
  you never you know, it's rare to finally think about, like, well,
• 1:18:12
  how is the audience member going to react to this? Or how is
• 1:18:15
  the audience member going to react to that. It's not something that's trained in
• 1:18:20
  Hollywood. It's at least not to my understanding. No, No, But
• 1:18:24
  then I think that's because we just didn't know for such a long time.
• 1:18:27
  I mean, the science that's in the book is mostly very recent science from
• 1:18:30
  the last sort of ten twenty years, and especially the evolutionary stuff about moral
• 1:18:33
  outrage and status play. You know, you know, you know, how
• 1:18:40
  how do you get people to empathize with an antiher like Tennis soprano or Humber
• 1:18:45
  Humber. We just didn't know that until we understood gossip, you know,
• 1:18:48
  and how gossip works and why gossip works. So all these kind of previous
• 1:18:53
  people that have attempted to kind of tease out the secrets of story setting,
• 1:18:56
  they just didn't have. I mean, I'm just lucky that I've had these
• 1:18:59
  tools that the might suppose well because I happen to be alive now rather than
• 1:19:02
  thirty years ago. Well, i mean, you look, it gives us
• 1:19:05
  how new toolkit in a psychology. Right. So if you look at like
• 1:19:09
  a character like Walter White from Breaking Bad, who's an anti hero, yeah,
• 1:19:15
  there is moments anytime I'm looking at an anti hero, like I'm right
• 1:19:18
  now in the middle of watching I'm not sure if you know the show sons
• 1:19:20
  of anarchy. Yeah, it's a motorcycle gang here. And and the way
• 1:19:26
  those characters have changed right now, we're finding it a place where the main
• 1:19:30
  characters are they have no moral code anymore. They're losing their moral code.
• 1:19:38
  Walter White lost his moral code along along the way. Yeah, but anytime
• 1:19:44
  you look at an anti hero, there's always moments that he does or she
• 1:19:48
  does something morally correct that holds you on just a second longer before you just
• 1:19:56
  say, this guy or this girl has to go. We'll be right back
• 1:20:00
  after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show and towards
• 1:20:10
  the end, Walter Waite, even even in the last episode of spoiler Alert,
• 1:20:15
  is you know, he's still cared about pigment. He's exactly And that's
• 1:20:21
  the thing. I think he's a a great example of the of the you
• 1:20:25
  know, even of the tribal emotions, you know, because at the beginning
• 1:20:29
  of that the screenwriters go to great lengths to get us to empathize with it.
• 1:20:34
  He's low status, he's a teacher, he loves his job, he
• 1:20:38
  loves his wife, he loves his son, he thinks he's going to die,
• 1:20:41
  and selfless, selfless selfless. He's working in a spy, spend time
• 1:20:45
  in a in a car wash to race and move, has a handicap,
• 1:20:47
  he has a handicaps. He's doing it all for the family, so he
• 1:20:50
  could die. So so they do all those things which subconsciously make us love
• 1:20:56
  him. We root for him, and and he's such powerful emotions and they're
• 1:21:00
  so embedded in us that even when he's literally dissolving the bodies of his enemies
• 1:21:05
  in bars have acid, we're still rooting for him because he began as his
• 1:21:09
  underdog. And the other thing you often find with anti heroes, whether it's
• 1:21:12
  Tones Soprano or Humber Humber or water Eye, is you know that they're partly
• 1:21:17
  they're quite low status. So Tones Soprano wasn't the high He wasn't John Gotti.
• 1:21:20
  He was in this I think it was the Staten Island mab or the
• 1:21:24
  New Jersey mob. He was. He was in a crap mob. You
• 1:21:27
  know, it was a little lovel mob. It wasn't it wasn't. Yeah,
• 1:21:30
  he was surrounded. And what they are, they're usually surrounded by much
• 1:21:33
  worse characters. So soon as Soprano in the first episode, Uncle Junior and
• 1:21:38
  his mum were both plotting against him. He was trying to you know,
• 1:21:41
  he was doing all these quite nice things. He had this kind of anxiety
• 1:21:45
  attack when he saw some ducks. Every sensitive, you know, loads of
• 1:21:48
  reasons for us to like because he's very low status and the same as Humber
• 1:21:53
  Humber in Alita. I mean, how do you get the reader to care
• 1:21:56
  about a pedophile. Well, you just put a much worse pedophile in the
• 1:22:00
  story and have him kill him, so, you know, so you know,
• 1:22:02
  again in the book, I talk about Li Liita in a lots that's
• 1:22:05
  not the only thing that happens. But but but when you actually sort of,
• 1:22:09
  you know, really interrogate what the or what Nabokov did with the Lalita
• 1:22:14
  and Humbert Humber from the perspective of the psychology, it's there are so many
• 1:22:18
  little things he's done to manipulate us to care about Humbert Humber, and it's
• 1:22:23
  all about making him low status, making him selfless. You know, he
• 1:22:29
  doesn't do the really bad things. There's one of the kind of most egregious
• 1:22:34
  parts of that plot was that the leader's mum had to had to die in
• 1:22:39
  order to take get his hands on Alita, but rather than have Humbuk Killer,
• 1:22:43
  she was just randomly run over and in the street. And it's like,
• 1:22:46
  oh, come on, that's so bad. But he couldn't have humber
• 1:22:49
  Killer because then you just lose. So he's constantly, constantly, constantly thinking
• 1:22:56
  about you know what you were just saying. He's constantly thinking about how the
• 1:22:59
  audience is feeling, and he and he and he manages it beautifully. I
• 1:23:02
  mean, Jesus, to get you to care about a pedophile is quite an
• 1:23:06
  extraordinary feat. Yeah, exactly, and and and towards the end, even
• 1:23:13
  as Walter White was coming to his end, I still kind of cared about
• 1:23:17
  him. Yeah, it's so weird. And she's like, this guy is
• 1:23:21
  a monster. He's a monster, but he's like he's kind of a good
• 1:23:26
  monster. It was just such It's just such an amazing transformation. Now I'm
• 1:23:32
  gonna ask you a couple of questions to ask all my guests. What are
• 1:23:35
  three screenplays or three movies that every screenwriter should study. Oh my god,
• 1:23:43
  that's a really good question. I mean, I'm going to show my kind
• 1:23:45
  of era now because they're all from the same era. But like, I
• 1:23:49
  love doubt, that's so good, just extraordinary, Like one of my the
• 1:24:00
  ones teaching a class and I had somebody in the class who said she knew
• 1:24:03
  the person who wrote that, and she said, even he didn't. So
• 1:24:09
  if any of the people wat you don't know doubt based it's based around a
• 1:24:12
  Catholic priest and you're never the doubt is is he pedophile? Again? Is
• 1:24:15
  he a pedophile or not? And even the guy who wrote the screenplay didn't
• 1:24:20
  know, He hadn't decided. So it's really amazing, fantastic screenplay about doubts
• 1:24:26
  about that. I love American Beauty because American Beauty is another example of a
• 1:24:30
  story which is relentless in its plot but also really moving, really deep,
• 1:24:35
  you know, incredible characters. So that was my second one. And what
• 1:24:42
  other screenplay would I say is essential? Would say doubt American Beauty. And
• 1:24:48
  let's say Magnolia, because I think that's another one, another Philip Harfle one
• 1:24:53
  that there's another one which really there was such a great period, you know,
• 1:24:57
  the kind of late nineties two thousands for really amazing American film that didn't
• 1:25:04
  compromise in terms of watchability, but was really it was elevated to the level
• 1:25:10
  of art I think, yeah, I was. I think it started with
• 1:25:13
  the nineties, the early nineties with the Sundance crowd of filmmakers, which a
• 1:25:16
  lot of those guys came in and made those films, but then the studio
• 1:25:19
  started giving them money too, and the little juice behind them, and that's
• 1:25:24
  how like American Beauty and Magnolia and those kind of films were made. Now,
• 1:25:30
  what is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether in
• 1:25:32
  the in your business or in life. In my business, it's probably more
• 1:25:36
  interesting brevity. You know, a lot of my books used to be quite
• 1:25:43
  long. And I don't know if you know. There's an English writer called
• 1:25:46
  John Ronson who who he does screamwriting too, actually, but I interviewed him
• 1:25:51
  when I was a young in my early twenties. Is a big hero of
• 1:25:54
  mine. And as I was leaving his house, I said to him,
• 1:25:56
  Johnny's got just one bit of advice for me. He said, yeah,
• 1:25:59
  brevity. And I thought, that's a shit bit of advice, brevity,
• 1:26:01
  that it's rubbish. But it took me like twenty years to work out,
• 1:26:05
  Yeah, it really matters, It really matters. And actually, really great
• 1:26:09
  writing is that is that you know, clarity is concise but packed with meaning,
• 1:26:15
  you know. So that's the difficult stuff. It's easy to write one
• 1:26:17
  hundred and twenty thousand word book on the Censor storytelling. It's much harder to
• 1:26:23
  write an eighty thousand or a sixty thousand word book on the Suns storytelling.
• 1:26:26
  But if you crack the brevity, you'll get much bigger, much bigger audience.
• 1:26:30
  You know. Yeah, that's the creative lesson that the person is is
• 1:26:34
  that is that brevity is really hard but really important. When I was I
• 1:26:41
  always used to be told. Like I asked some of my early when I
• 1:26:44
  was early on, like what advice you gave me? They call patience,
• 1:26:46
  and I'm like, oh, that's crab patience. Yeah, there's a crab
• 1:26:48
  patience. What's bullshit? That's crap. Now and now when people ask people,
• 1:26:53
  what are you looking like? Patience? Man, patience, it's such
• 1:26:58
  a long row. You don't understand, but you can't understand. When you're
• 1:27:02
  twenty, you don't understand patients, And when you're twenty you don't understand Beever
• 1:27:06
  you think all my amazing ideas. I'm the best tire of this. Look
• 1:27:15
  a passively tire of my genius. I mean, I'll just you know,
• 1:27:19
  I'll wax up and you're forty, You're like, shut up, shut shut
• 1:27:24
  your whole and get to the point. I've got. I've got games are
• 1:27:29
  Throne to go watch. I don't have time for you, sir, Yeah,
• 1:27:34
  exactly. And then where can people find you and your books and more
• 1:27:40
  about what you do? So will store dot com w I L L s
• 1:27:45
  t O double r dot com and I tweeked at w store at W S
• 1:27:48
  t O double r and actually on YouTube, just google mynam on YouTube.
• 1:27:54
  There's a there's a free there's free kind of five videos of introductions to sonsors
• 1:27:59
  to retelling with some basic the basic ideas and some sort of good takeaway kind
• 1:28:05
  of tips. So if any of you are interested in the stuff I've been
• 1:28:09
  talking about, hit YouTube and there's there say, there's five short films that
• 1:28:14
  I've made on there as a kind of starter. Oh my god, Well,
• 1:28:17
  like I said before me, I could talk to you for hours about
• 1:28:21
  this. This is really been an amazing episode. I have probably another twenty
• 1:28:26
  questions easily that we can keep talking about. But I'm going to take your
• 1:28:30
  advice. Brevity, sir, Brevity so thank you again so much for coming
• 1:28:33
  on the show. And yeah, thank you so much. I want to
• 1:28:39
  thank Will for coming on the show and dropping those knowledge bombs today. I
• 1:28:43
  told you, guys, this would be a really, really interesting and fascinating
• 1:28:46
  conversation, and I think we held up our part of the bargain because Will
• 1:28:53
  made me think about story in a completely different way and just coming at it
• 1:29:00
  from the brain's point of view, which is really really a powerful thing.
• 1:29:04
  I recommend you by his book and read it asap. It's available everywhere on
• 1:29:11
  Audible, on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and so on. If you want
• 1:29:15
  to get links to the book and anything else we spoke about in this episode,
• 1:29:17
  including his amazing ted talk, head over to the show notes at any
• 1:29:23
  filmuscle dot com forward slash seven twenty eight, and if you have it already,
• 1:29:27
  please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good
• 1:29:32
  review for the show. It really helps us out a lot, guys.
• 1:29:35
  Thank you again so much for listening. Guys. As always, keep that
• 1:29:39
  hustle going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll
• 1:29:42
  talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie film Hustle Podcast at
• 1:29:45
  INDIEFILM Hustle dot com. That's I N D I E F I L M
• 1:29:49
  h U s t l E dot com.