Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Oscar-Winning Creativity” with Emile Sherman

Transcript

“Oscar-Winning Creativity” with Emile Sherman · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
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  Here's a dangerous idea for you, the best way to transcend our differences and come together
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  as humans is through art.
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  That doesn't really sound like a very dangerous idea, actually.
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  It sounds almost like a cliche, maybe that's the dangerous idea.
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  Is it merely a cliche that art can bring people together, or is there a common empathy
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  that art can foster, that is basically crucial to the flourishing of humankind?
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  Emil Sherman thinks so, he's an Australian film television producer, he's been on the show
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  before, one of the few goats who is able to come back onto this illustrious program,
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  because he has a new podcast called The Sandbox, where he takes, so let me give you a
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  little bit background about it, so he is the managing director of this Australian and
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  British production company, and won an Academy Award for the King's Speech.
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  He won a BAFTA for Best Film, Best British Film.
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  He won a BAFTA for top of the lake television show, he was nominated for an Emmy for that,
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  he won a gold, sorry nominated for a golden globe for that, for a BAFTA as well.
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  The last time we was on the show, it was fascinating because he talks, it was not that long
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  after Will Smith did the slap, remember the slap at the Academy Awards, and Emil was there,
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  so we went into some detail about that, that's an episode worth digging out and finding,
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  and listening to, so I don't go into great detail in this episode about what it's like
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  to be at the Oscars, and what it feels like to win an Academy Award, but we do go into
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  all of that, and how you even prepare an Academy Award acceptance speech, and so on,
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  the last time that Emil was on the show.
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  What he's doing now, he's got this podcast called The Sandbox, where he takes the creatives
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  who have created some of the biggest television shows and movies that he's produced,
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  and he sits down with them and he talks about their creative process.
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  So there's an episode with the creator of One Life, which was this Anthony Hopkins film
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  about the guy who saved 700 Jewish refugees during World War II.
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  The creators of The Royal Hotel, of Lyon, the movie with Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel,
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  of Slow Horses, another one of Emil's production company's television shows,
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  Heart Stopper, Sweet Pea, all these amazing TV shows and movies to try to find what is the
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  common thread between people who create some of the most compelling and captivating art that we
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  currently consume. And here, I wanted to talk to Emil about what his insights are working with
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  creatives at the moment in the, I suppose, cultural moment we find ourselves in,
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  why it is that creatives can sometimes seem to lack a certain breadth of intellectual
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  imagination when it comes to their political activism and when it comes to how sort of narrowly
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  defined their social justice motivations can seem to be. We talk about whether artificial
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  intelligence is ever going to be creative. We go all over the place. I mean, it's just such a delight
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  to sit down with someone as brainy and as successful and as creative as a meal who has been able
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  to bridge these two worlds of business success and also enormous creative output. If you are a
• 3:16
  free subscriber, this will be a shorter preview of the longer conversation. The full conversation is
• 3:21
  an hour and a half plus and it goes all over the place. It's well worth subscribing for
• 3:25
  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com and getting your own private feed. Another reminder that if
• 3:31
  you haven't bought tickets to see Coleman Hughes and me in Melbourne on the 28th of August, race,
• 3:39
  race, race to your nearest smartphone to do so. You can find links in the description to this
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  episode. Please enjoy as much as my idea for one the only meal show.
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  Yeah, well, thanks for coming back. So creatives and like open-mindedness and intellect and what
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  kind of insight into humankind creatives have as well is what I'm interested in picking your
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  brain about today. You've got a new podcast, which is the sandbox, which is the sandbox comes from my
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  company seesaw films, which is a TV film production company based here in Australia and the UK and
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  we wanted to, you know, we realized we'd been working with such incredible creatives and often we
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  are like just in the doing all the time, but to have a podcast which steps back a second and explores
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  a little more philosophically and interestingly what creativity is and what it means to these
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  incredible people that we work with every day. And particularly I'm interested in creativity
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  under pressure. You know, this is not just a visual artist taking as long as they need to
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  painting or a novelist working in isolation. We need the script by Wednesday at 4pm because we
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  shoot on Thursday. Yeah. How do you be creative with the intensity of that time pressure? You know,
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  when you're shooting a show, the creativity and time pressure needed every day to get
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  these actors to play and to find truth. And at the same time, if you go five minutes over time,
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  that's going to cost us $10,000. Yeah. Yeah. Those are incredibly opposing forces. Yeah. I mean,
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  that's interesting. There's like pure creativity. Then there's creativity under pressure. But then
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  there's also what you do, which is which baffles me as well, which is being able to pick who's
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  going to be good at creativity under pressure. Like you have to be both creative and also a hard
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  nose business person who can who has a good eye for who is going to be for for a what kind of
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  creativity is going to work and what is there a market for. Yeah. And B, what is actually going
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  to function when the rubber meets the road and it's not going to be some pie in the sky,
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  airy, fairy creative who ends up wandering off and submitting half a draft. That's right. I mean,
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  you have to be creative as well as you have to be able to work in teams a lot in our business.
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  You've got to be able to, you know, work to deadline. So what are you looking for? What makes
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  what gives you the ability to pick it? Well, I think, you know, more than all of that, it's actually
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  as a creative business, you know, leader or, you know, having my own creative business.
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  It's about creating an an organization where creativity can flourish. That's how I think of
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  the problem we're trying to solve. How do we support creativity? And, you know, I guess provide
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  a structure and a context and a group of people and choosing a right group of people who can
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  bring out the best in the creative as we work with and also having a lot of amazing creative people
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  in our company. It sees all whether big producers, development team and whatever.
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  And do you do, do you do development in house or any of your big hits have they come from inside
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  the walls of the building, which they're all developing in house? No, I mean, the original
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  conceit of the idea. Are the original conceit, yes, some of them come internally. Often, you know,
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  there's that line of, well, you might have read an article or heard a podcast or you option something,
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  but then, you know, the journey from optioning something to the screen is a massive creative
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  journey. And so, you know, you can do massive amount of world building. Often writers, you know,
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  definitely bring us ideas a lot of it in television comes from writers, bring us ideas. Sometimes
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  we work shopping with them. We might find a book together, you know, it comes in all sorts of
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  ways. And how much is the idea and how much is your faith in the person? I think it's largely
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  the person, but you need a good idea. You need an idea that can go all the way. So, you know,
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  and a good idea, you know, you might want to question what that means and the answer would be
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  that obviously it has to hold all the needs of drama or comedy or whatever it is within it.
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  But it's also got to have a market for it. We have to understand the marketplace. You know,
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  who can we sell this to? Is it Netflix Australia or Netflix UK or the US? Is it a, you know,
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  a traditional broadcast or a streamer? You know, often we get a story, which might be a brilliant
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  story. We had one recently, which we had to let go of and mention which it is. But
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  it was a most fantastic book and story and hugely resonant for this moment. But it crossed over
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  between countries too much. So there was just no mark. There was no buyer for it because the
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  Australian buyers wouldn't buy it. It wasn't Aussie enough. The UK buyers wouldn't, the European
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  buyers, the US, we couldn't work out who was, whose interest was it to buy the show. So...
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  Does that make you sad? Very sad, very sad. But, you know, the marketplace is constantly changing
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  the economic structure of the marketplace determines hugely what content gets made. I mean,
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  people often forget about that, you know, I know Marxist analysis. It's the economics that
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  determine the economic base determines the superstructure of shows. I mean, yeah, that's right. And
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  it's funny that like when you talk about creatives, you're reminding me that very few creatives
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  are what the lay person, the lay non-creative thinks are creative is, which is someone who sits
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  alone in a room, gets struck by inspiration, and then paints their masterpiece of a painting
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  or writes their novel or something. Like most working creatives are assigned a job that someone
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  else has come up with. And they have to do that job, you know, most writers, especially in our
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  industry, in your industry. They're not coming up with the genesis of some idea that they then
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  shepherd through to its fruition. I mean, occasionally you'll have a showrunner who comes up with
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  a great idea and is still there at the finale. But very frequently, what it means to be a creative
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  is to be given a task and say, all right, you have to punch up this script because episode three
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  is not funny enough. And, you know, here's the bones of it, but we need to, we need the
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  antagonist to get from this state to that state over the course of this episode. Go, you've got
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  10 days. Yeah, I mean, we have a tradition in Australia, more similar to the US than the UK,
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  actually, of writers rooms. So you might have a core writer who's come up with an idea,
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  and then you build a room around them to be able to brainstorm and support. And sometimes,
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  you know, we have a writer's room going soon, which is six weeks, you know, enormous amount of time
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  to build out the story over eight hours of story. And I mean, television shoes up, the most
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  extraordinary amount of story. And so a lot of those writers there, pretty much all of them,
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  except one, didn't come up with the idea, but their creativity is what we're calling on. And it
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  is a delicate balance as a executive producer, producer, the development producer, whoever is
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  is helping, shepherding that process of not squashing the creativity, you know, our job is to
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  bring it out and to create in a writer's room, a condition where writers can explore,
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  be vulnerable. There's a lot of crying that goes on in these rooms.
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  Mostly when you're beating the writers for being late.
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  Yes. Well, you know, we're human beings and we respond, we resonate physically to things that
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  feel real and true. And we're in a business of fabricating truth. Actors' jobs is to, you know,
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  perform, but in a way that feels entirely true and a writer's job is to create characters and words
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  that feel like it's coming from the inside out, not from the outside in. And I think we all know
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  that when we watch a TV show or film and it feels like we know, we can see the mechanics,
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  then we can see the plot forcing the characters to do things because we need a conclusion or a big
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  moment here. And then we can also see ones that I think end up cutting through much more
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  substantively where it just seems to come naturally and then really creating a world of characters
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  who seem to just do shit. How do you stave off cliché? Because I think that's sort of what
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  you're talking about, isn't it? I mean, there are some, look, I'm always baffled by how successful
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  cliché can be. Like, baby reindeer, I hope you didn't have anything to do with that because I'm
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  about to insult it. But I was amazed at how successful that was. I mean, I pushed through
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  about three or four episodes and I was like, I turned to my partner, I said, I can, you give me a
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  napkin or an envelope and I'll jot on the back of it within five minutes of each episode,
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  basically what's going to happen. There's sort of rough beats, you know, it might not be
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  exactly right. But like, I know these characters. I don't know them from real life. I know them from
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  other works of art. Like, I know that it's based on a true story, but the way that it's being depicted
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  is these are the same ticks and mannerisms and character arcs that I've seen a million times.
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  Like, there's nothing new. Like, I'm surprised me. Like, give me something authentic and, you know,
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  there's a lot to say there. I mean, you know, there's there are different moments in the industry
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  where again, it does, you know, you can look at it through the economic lens and go, you know,
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  there was a big moment where streamers came in and they every streamer we went to said,
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  our mantra is to not be like linear broadcast television. So we want to be bold. We want to be
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  totally different. Whatever is crazy, let's do because they had to differentiate themself and not
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  be the show that you could watch for free. So that created a big sort of creative explosion of
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  trying to reinvent what television could be. We did a show called Top of the Lake at the early
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  stages of that, which was, you know, part of that sort of early stage, you know, I guess, thinking
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  outside the box of television. And then, you know, there's been this proliferation of streamers,
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  the market exploded huge numbers of production companies and writers spawned and everyone in the
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  industry. And so many streamers chasing eyeballs, but I think they realized that, yeah, they might
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  have over chased because the business model didn't really make sense. And so there's been this
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  big consolidation. And they're going back to basics and going, we need to do stuff that we know
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  is going to work. And so you end up with shows being essentially the same as that other show,
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  but with a twist. Right. And that's sort of where we are now with a lot of shows. And even with
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  the same, but with a little twist. Yeah. Yeah. And finding that you're reminding me that when I first
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  got to New York, my first agent in New York, God bless him, he wanted me to pitch every show that
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  idea that I had, not not script, this wasn't scripted entertainment. This was unscripted, right? So,
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  you know, in a documentary shows or me being a sort of a Louis Theroux flying on the water
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  character, but he wanted to always pitch as it's such and such, meets such and such, or like,
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  it's such and such, but on a plane, you know, the, like, the kind of snakes on a plane or like,
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  corner, it's like, you know, it's like Alcatraz, but it's at sea, or, yeah, some stupid thing like that.
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  And there is a lot of that. And I wonder if that, I mean, I wonder if actually when networks and
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  streamers say that they want something truly new, they're just saying that. And maybe they believe
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  it, and maybe they don't, but what, but if you actually bring them something new, they're like,
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  it's a bit weird. And then you bring them something that is sort of the same, but just slightly
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  different. They're like, yes, this is fresh. Well, particularly the, the real paradoxes when you
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  do a show, and top of the lake was an example of something that did break new grounds. Yes,
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  was Jane Campi in the show. She said in New Zealand, looks beautiful. Correct, correct.
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  Is it with moss? It was with moss, yeah. And there was a second season said in Sydney,
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  and with Nicole Kidman. But people after a show like that, which was a bit of a ground breaking
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  moment, say, we want something fresh like top of the lake, but you can't, you can't do another
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  top of the lake. Right. And it's not fresh. Right. So you're sort of trapped in that sort of
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  circular logic. Yeah, I look at depends on the moment. And that balance between the familiar,
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  there's the familiar that the audience needs. They need to often, I mean, again, depends what
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  sort of what the show is aiming for. But a lot of the time you want audiences to be invited into
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  something to feel that they're coming into something familiar, but it's a way of doing it that
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  they've never seen before. But then there's also how do you sell a show to the commissioner,
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  because the commissioners got a job and they need to make sure they don't lose their job.
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  The commissioners job is to say no. The commissioners job is to say no to anything that could in any
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  way get them fired, which is a problem in my experience, because commissioners are not creative
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  enough necessarily. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think you're very difficult to explain to
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  someone a vision that may not, that may be risky, because their brain is always going through,
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  and this is another way in which it may not work, and this is another way in which it may not work,
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  or may go wrong. Well, what's my, why, how, how can I say no to this? And you have to take them
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  something that is watertight. You can take it to the bank like there's no way they can say no to it.
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  Yeah, I mean, look, the fact is 99% of things they pitch, they say no to, because they've only got
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  X slots, you know, if you've got five slots a year, you were saying no to, you know, hundreds,
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  hundreds of shows. So most people will feel like their jobs to say no, a lucky few feel like it's
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  their job to say yes. And how do they choose that? Yes, it's a big bet they're putting. If you've
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  got five slots, it's a massive bet. So you want, and you don't lose your job. And, you know,
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  the more you've been, I mean, is it a huge bet? I mean, you go to them, you go Jane Campion,
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  Elizabeth Moss, Nicole Kidman, I mean, that, well, they feel like you can take that one. We did
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  get away very easily, but, you know, many other shows are a huge bet because, you know, they're
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  financing the large part of it. And they've only got five, you know, roles of the dice here,
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  or whatever metaphor we use. And if it doesn't have huge stars, and if it doesn't have huge stars,
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  but even if it does, they've got a lot of other projects with huge stars, they need the huge stars,
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  and they need a writer that they know is going to deliver, and they need a production company,
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  you can, they know they can, so how do you get something up like heart stopper, which doesn't,
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  which isn't an obvious sell, apart from the fact that I suppose thematically it's in the zeitgeist
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  figures where, you know, well, the budget, the lower the budget, the more room you've got to,
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  to be a little bit, a little bit more, you know, risky. And I think if the commissioner has had
• 18:24
  some big hits, and they've got some confidence, they're probably afforded to, you know, take some,
• 18:30
  take some risk, and heart stopper started off more in the kid's young person area of Netflix,
• 18:37
  and then move to main part. Right. But it was, you mean after it was made and released? No,
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  they're the sort of group that are originally got involved in it. So it, you know, the budget
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  was super low, and that's the way you make it. And if a commissioner has a bunch of wins under
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  their belt, and there's something with a lower budget, they know that it can go south, and it's not
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  going to cost them their job, because they can basically cross subsidize a few cheap experimental
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  projects with the wins from the other things that were more dependable. And then you look at
• 19:08
  the company, and where's the company at in its cycle of growth or competition? They have more money
• 19:14
  than they know what to do with or know any or enough. So just before we leave the concept of ideas
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  versus execution, a friend of mine, David Plott, who co-hosts the Slate Political Gab first, who
• 19:25
  has been a CEO basically all his life, as well as a journalist, but like a CEO of media companies,
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  says that like everyone thinks that ideas are important, but ideas at least in business are
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  just a dime. It doesn't like ideas really don't matter. What matters is your ability to implement
• 19:40
  ideas over a long period of time. And so we vastly over kind of index the importance of ideas,
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  and under index the importance of boring logistical execution of ideas. Does that apply
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  equally to the creative arts, as it does to journalism? Yeah, and I mean the execution
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  is about creative execution. Who is it going to be able to both hold the craft of writing,
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  if we're focusing on writing here? Particularly in television, it's unbelievably complex craft
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  of how to keep a story alive, every scene moving to the next scene propelling, I've learned
• 20:17
  an enormous amount over the last few years in television, very high level of craft mixed with
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  what do you mean by craft? Well, I mean, you know, just the creativity of being able to write great
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  dialogue and create great characters is not enough, you know, to be able to create an hour of
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  television that propels into another seven hours where the strands of story, the inciting incident,
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  the stakes and the threat are played through and the audience is held, seen by scene by scene,
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  you don't realize the spell you're in. I was watching, we've got a show called Slow Hosses,
• 20:56
  which is in a number of seasons and said the Emmy Awards, I saw that we were up against the show
• 21:02
  called The Gilded Age by Julian Fellows who did Downton Abbey. So I wanted to check out the show.
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  And the level of craft of that guy, how he's able to, almost immediately within like five minutes
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  create a world of characters who you just want to know what happens to the next. So you need a
• 21:22
  writer who can deliver, often we've got writers who maybe less experience, they've got germs,
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  a great ideas and creativity. So those are the two things you brought up, but they don't have the
• 21:31
  craft to be able to pull it off. And is craft, when you think about craft, so some people will hear
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  that and they'll think about, oh, you know, I once read a screenwriting book by Sid Field or Robert
• 21:41
  McKee, which said that on page, you know, 13, you need to have an inciting incident and then on page,
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  you know, 35, you know, you have to have the Dark Knight of the Soul or I've read my Joseph Campbell
• 21:51
  and the, you know, the hero myth and we're taking the template that you see across all great stories
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  and from Star Wars to this to that. And we're just going to rejig it and we're going to map our
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  story onto that. I mean, that's a reductionistic way of putting it. I don't mean to diminish that
• 22:06
  because everything I do believe in story and the importance of story structure. But is that what
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  you mean by craft or do you mean character development as well? I mean, I essentially mean that,
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  but the sophisticated version of that because obviously the idea is that you do it, but it's entirely
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  hidden. Yes, that it's not the last by the end of the third scene. Something has happened.
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  That propels the propels and makes the lives the mix of your, you know, need to keep watching.
• 22:31
  Exactly. And I think also we're in a moment now where broadcasters and streamers are really clear
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  that in the episode one, the proposition of the show needs to be set up. We're not in a world of
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  sopranos where, you know, you can, you can gamble about with character for a couple of episodes
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  and the motor of the story engine gets going later. You need to set up early. What's the,
• 22:54
  what's the challenge and what's the quest? What's the call to action and the call to action.
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  And then it's like then we're away. So there's a massive amount of craft of knowing how that works.
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  But you can bring in people's story producers and development producers who understand that it
• 23:11
  can help support writers. No one right can do everything. But you know, at the core of it,
• 23:17
  let's just be clear that it is about creativity. And that's what I'm excited to explore in the
• 23:22
  sandbox is because all the craft in the world and the best idea in the world is meaningless
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  without creating an infrastructure whereby creativity can flourish. And so what is creativity
• 23:35
  on a worker day basis? Because creativity, this is another thing, another, I'll make the analogy
• 23:41
  to the point that I just made about ideas that I'm stealing from David Plotts about the sort of
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  overrating of ideas. Everyone has walked along the street and been struck by a great creative
• 23:52
  insight of some kind, right? We all have those. But generating a script or sitting down in front
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  of the blinking cursor of a blank page of a, you know, of a computer and spending four hours
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  there even when the well is dry and you're feeling frustrated and not going off and doing the dishes
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  or cleaning the kitchen instead. You know, how much is perspiration and how much is inspiration?
• 24:20
  Yeah. And what does perspiration look like? Yeah. Where is the creativity in the perspiration?
• 24:24
  Because you know, at the risk of restating the question about ideas versus hard work, it's like
• 24:32
  I understand what you're asking. I understand what you're asking. I mean, it also relates,
• 24:36
  just to throw another thing in there. It also relates to the idea of right what you know, right? I mean,
• 24:40
  some of the best things I've written have been the least creative things because I've just been
• 24:44
  psychologically transcribing scenarios that I was already in. I mean, I, you don't have to make up
• 24:49
  out of whole cloth what humans are like. You've met humans. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just take,
• 24:56
  I mean, it's going to be, it's going to smell more real if you go, well, hang on a second,
• 25:01
  how would so-and-so who I once met at that, you know, party actually respond if I said X?
• 25:08
  Well, not how would the character, not how would the creative character that I've invented,
• 25:12
  you know, respond because that might be a cliche, I might be leaning on a cliche. Could we park
• 25:16
  the question around writing what we know versus imagination? Yeah. Because that's a great
• 25:20
  question and let's come back to that. Yeah. But the question on perspiration and inspiration,
• 25:26
  you know, perspiration looks like different things to different writers. You have to understand
• 25:31
  each writer has their own process and you have to understand how to bring out the best creative
• 25:37
  instincts in each writer. But there are different structures as well. For example, when I was talking
• 25:43
  to Jane Campion, you know, about her process, part of her process is literally, as you said,
• 25:50
  to stare at the page with her pen for four hours and not writing a single thing. Right. Right. Because
• 25:58
  she's trying to wait for her subconscious to, you know, throw her something. And so is that
• 26:07
  perspiration or inspiration? You're actually committing to a practice, a very rigorous and it's
• 26:12
  the hardest thing to do. It's much easier to go into a writer's room and go, hey, my friends,
• 26:17
  let's get some chocolates in here and some, you know, a drink and we're going to chat about the
• 26:23
  third act turning point in episode five. You've got a lot of energy there. But to sit there with no
• 26:27
  one else by yourself, just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting hour after hour after hour,
• 26:33
  that's really hard. So I think that's sort of the nexus of perspiration and inspiration.
• 26:38
  But there are other, you know, in England, the general process of writing television,
• 26:43
  it's quite solitary. One writer will generally write it and they will write normally at six hours,
• 26:48
  has been their sort of traditional BBC show in terms of like a limited series. And again,
• 26:56
  it comes down to that one writer and the job of the production company, the development producer,
• 27:00
  the executive producer is to support them and be a sounding board, to challenge them,
• 27:06
  to encourage them and to help unlock the best version of their voice. And at what point
• 27:12
  with that entity into the picture, suppose that they're a reasonable novice like they,
• 27:18
  you know, they might have done a few things, but they're not someone who a network or a production
• 27:22
  company is going to bank on yet necessarily. How much do they have to produce in the solitude of
• 27:27
  their own room before someone's going to buy some of the company? Well, traditionally they'll
• 27:32
  come to a production company, someone senior enough with a pitch and idea. And if we took it on,
• 27:39
  then we'd work on the script with them, maybe go to a broadcast early, maybe go later. If they're
• 27:45
  a novice, I mean, no one's backing novices in television. It's quite different to film interestingly.
• 27:52
  I mean, occasionally a novice is backed, you'd certainly have to write a script the first episode or
• 27:58
  two and prove that you can do it. But in television, there's a massive risk taken on the writer because
• 28:03
  a show is commissioned before all the scripts are written. And that's not like a film. A film is
• 28:09
  finance when you've got a script. So it means that totally new writer in film could come along
• 28:15
  write a genius script. And it could get made. It's not likely to be made. I've actually just been
• 28:20
  watching. I'm halfway through rewatching the sixth sense for the first time since it came out
• 28:24
  25 years ago. Which is an example of that. It's an incredible feat. It's such a shame that
• 28:31
  Shammell hasn't been able to match that consistently because I don't think he's done great work
• 28:36
  since. But on the whole, few notable exceptions. But that's just an amazing script and so well
• 28:43
  executed and so well executed. And he just wrote it. I mean, I just pulled it out of his ass. Yeah.
• 28:49
  Just had the idea and made it work. And then it sits on the page. So what's the risk that a
• 28:53
  financier distributes a studio's taking to make that? Zero because it's written. But if you go with
• 28:59
  episode one to, you know, to binge here and you say we want to do this, you know, you might
• 29:06
  develop another episode or two, but they have to commission the show. Right. Knowing that the writer
• 29:11
  together with the production house is going to be able to deliver. And how important is having a
• 29:15
  name? So like, you know, I don't know what order Shammell and got Bruce Wallace in. But presumably
• 29:20
  once that's attached, then that becomes a lot much easier sell. I know there were stories about
• 29:25
  the King's speech, which is a film that you produced about getting Jeffrey Rush on board.
• 29:29
  Did you leave or did someone leave the script at his doorstep? Because yeah, that was right.
• 29:37
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