Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doctor Strange. (When I was younger, Doctor Strange was one of my favorite comic characters, along with Green Lantern. At least one of them got a great movie.) Scott was gracious enough to take time from a very busy schedule to sit down for a chat about a wide number of topics. Using Doctor Strange as a template, we go in some detail through the immensely complicated process of taking a modern blockbuster movie from pitch to screen. But Scott's genre of choice is horror -- his other films include Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose -- and we move on to discussing why certain genres seem universal, before tackling even bigger issues about worldviews (Scott is Christian, I'm a naturalist) and how they affect one's life and work. Scott Derrickson is an acclaimed director, producer, and screenwriter. He earned his M.A. in film production from the University of Southern California. His films as a director include Hellraiser: Inferno, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil, and Doctor Strange. He has written or co-written numerous other films, including Land of Plenty (directed by Wim Wenders) and Devil's Knot (directed by Atom Egoyan). Wikipedia page IMDB page Twitter Doctor Strange on Wikipedia Interview with Scott Myers

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Lowe's, we help, you save. Valid through 527, WALSupplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for details. Visit your nearby Lowe's on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Today we have a special treat.

Scott Derrickson is an accomplished movie director, writer, and producer, responsible for films such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and most recently the Marvel movie Doctor Strange. Scott's also an extremely thoughtful guy with strong ideas about the craft of filmmaking, the history of cinema, and the relationship between movies and other art forms. So we have a wide-ranging conversation which basically falls into two parts. The first thing we did was we sort of deconstructed the making of a big blockbuster superhero movie using Dr. Strange as an example. So we lay out the whole thing from the initial pitch, the meeting where you talk to the studio and see if you're on the same wavelength, through pre-production, shooting, reshoots, and finally post-production.

You'll learn, for example, why the cast and crew, especially Benedict Cumberbotch, thought it was really important to shoot online. location in Nepal, and why digital photography is okay for most shots in a big movie like this, but why you have to switch to film once you're outside in the sunshine. These are things that as a theoretical physicist I'm not generally up on, so I really learned a lot from this conversation. Then in the second part, we'll talk more broadly about the idea of cinema and film and what it means, the role of themes and stories in filmmaking. Many of Scott's films have been horror movies, and we talk about the unique role of that particular genre, in evoking a certain kind of human reaction, how that relates to the existence of evil and everyday human anxieties,

whether or not you have supernatural boogeyman in your movie or not. We also come from different perspectives about the fundamental nature of reality. Scott is a Christian. I am a naturalist. And so we talk about how one's worldview influences the story one tries to tell in a movie. And Scott says the answer is a lot. He says it would be very, very different movie maker if he suddenly convert. into atheism tomorrow, but it's unlikely to happen. We also agreed, though, that the world is more interesting with people coming from different perspectives. So Scott says he doesn't want me to convert to his religious viewpoint. Only afterward that I realized that maybe this means I'm going to be condemned to eternal damnation. Happily, I'm also sure about that, and I don't even believe it myself, so I'm not

really worried. But it's one of the things that you have to take into account when you talk about these big picture issues. Anyway, this was truly a great conversation. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. Remember that if you're so inclined, you can support Mindscape on Patreon, patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll. We love our supporters. Thanks so much. And whether you're a Patreon pledger or not, thanks very much for listening. So let's go. Scott Derrickson, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. So good to be here. Thanks. Now, I do want to talk about big picture stuff, you know, themes and cinema and all these great things. I know that you have lots of opinions on. But I thought let's set the stage and get into it by being a little bit more down to Earth.

So you've directed Dr. Strange, a big blockbuster Marvel movie. When I see movies like this these days, when we all see them, one of the things is, at the end of it, the credits are very, very long. Yes. It's a gigantic operation to shepherd something like this from start to finish. So why don't you, for the audience who are not necessarily cinefiles, just explain what it's like from, you know, the initial pitch for the idea to opening night? I mean, for a movie that size, from the original pitch to opening night, is probably usually about two years, you know, for a movie of that size.

And the script process goes on for a good, you know, six to nine months before hard, what they call hard prep, hard pre-production, um, began. So that, there's always that, you know, six to nine month period where you're getting the scripts written, rewritten, putting it in shape where you're breaking it down and getting it ready to shoot. And then that process for a movie, this size, always continues through prep and through production. You never stop rewriting.

You never stop rewriting. And by the way, there are plenty of directors who work that way anyway. Stanley Kubrick, I'm reading the book about him and his relationship with Arthur C. Clark. and he was rewriting 2001 all the way through posts. I mean, he was just rewriting. My impression is his relationship with all of the authors he adapted was touchy. Well, yes, especially given the fact that he said only bad movies make, or only bad books make good movies.

I think that may have been a reason why the relationship was always touchy. But it was certainly in this, I highly recommend that book, by the way. The relationship that the two of them had is so fascinating. and the book is really dense, really well researched. And I know a lot about that movie, and I didn't know anything in that book. But anyway, so back to your question. Then you've got three major phases of filmmaking, which is pre-production. I think the longest and most important phase, because that's when you're really designing everything that will become the physical reality of the movie.

Well, actually, I don't want to pass too quickly over the pitch. Yeah, sure. Yeah, great. I mean, obviously, Dr. Strange is a pre-existing idea. So it's a different kind of thing. There's all sorts of different ways that a movie can come about. But did you have an angle on the movie and then go to Marvel? Or did they come to you and say, hey, do you want to think about this?

That's a good question. What they did is they had a pool of directors that in their minds were possibilities. And it was a large pool. I mean, dozens of directors that they liked. And at this point, Marvel was beginning its really big expansion, which has taken place in just the last few years. And they had approached me years ago about Thor and I just told them I wouldn't know how to make Thor and your superhero. Yeah, not my superhero.

And I don't think there's any superhero that I would have felt personally drawn to except for Dr. Strange. So when I heard they were making Dr. Strange, I felt immediately like this is something I could definitely do. And the way the process worked was they brought. me in along with, again, dozens of other directors. And they had a short document, signed an NDA, an disclosure agreement, and you read this document. And I was very impressed with a document because the things that were in there were essentially what they felt should and shouldn't be a Dr. Strange movie. It was very basic. But it lined up perfectly with mine, which would,

you know, they really liked the deep ideas and the philosophical overtones of the Dr. Strange comics. They, they, there were aspects of, of, uh, the, the lovecraftian monsters that they weren't interested in, at least in, in a, in an early film. And I was, I felt like they understood the character, this lonely, uh, isolated, uh, character who is, uh, different than other superheroes because of his relationship to other dimensions, not in a, not in a scientific sense, but in the, in the Marvel comic universe sense. And, and that they were looking for a way to open up, you know, the, the, the, the, the, um, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the Marvel comic universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to a multiverse, you know,

where you're actually dealing literally with other dimensions, unlike Osgard, which is out there in our own universe somewhere. You can fly there if you've got a means to get there. I was actually part of the science advising for Thor. Oh, yeah, which was a huge aspect of that movie. And I think because they did that so well in that movie, I think that they recognized that when it came to Dr. Strange, it was okay to let magic be magic. Exactly. And I think that the part of it was Thor, despite being a god in some sense, like we're going to portray him as pretty grounded.

We think he's a god because he's super powerful, but it has to make sense. And, you know, almost intentionally leaving the magic thing for later in the series, and that's where you could do it. Right. Because as much as I love and respect science, I don't think that an approach of trying to scientifically validate the mysticism of Dr. Strange would be interesting to me and would feel like a disrespect to the comics. And so the fact that that's not where they were coming from was great. So I immediately thought, I think I'm the right guy to do this movie. I mean, I felt a real deep conviction about it. And I decided that I would put everything I could into getting that job. And I just decided that I was going to work harder to try to get that job than anything I had ever done before in terms of efforts to get hired for things.

This is obnoxious, but I've said it publicly before. I spent $42,000 of my own money on a presentation, which was the eighth of eight meetings. I bet you made it back, didn't you? Well, not only did I make it back, but one of the first things when they hired me is they said, we have to buy that presentation because we need to own all that material. So that was immediately, that was my first, even before I had a directing deal, I got all that money back. But it was, for me, it was, it was coming from a very personal place. It wasn't so much that I, I mean, I was excited to make a Marvel movie, but I've never been somebody who's been enamored by big budget filmmaking as opposed to small budget filmmaking. You know, they all have their pros and cons as an artist to work on.

They all have their pros and cons as films to watch. But in this case, I just felt like this is a movie that I think I could do better than maybe anyone else. Like, I'm the right fit for this. And that became my focus was to show them why I was the right fit. Yeah. Yeah. And so you did that and they picked you. They did.

And so then you can start this wonderful process that you started. And so pre-production, I mean, there was, there's scripts being written. And I presume there's a certain Hollywood thing, right? There's some people who get credit for the script, but there's probably more voices that came into actually writing. In this case, there were, you know, the two credited writers were John Spate's who wrote the first draft, who's a mutual friend. I believe you know him. And he was one that we picked, you know, based on his original screenplay for Prometheus, which was called, I think, alien engineers was brilliant. You know, that screenplay was so good.

And I had been a fan of his original script for passengers was brilliant. And we hired him, so he did the first draft. And then myself and Cargo, my writing partner, who's here sitting next to me, just listening in. Hi, Cargo. Hi, everybody. That's Gargo. Follow him on Twitter. He's a great Twitter feed.

Yeah, follow Cargo on Twitter. That's, I'm here to pump Cargo's Twitter feed. But yeah, we came in and rewrote for quite a long time. I mean, we must have done, you know, 20 drafts, 25 drafts, something like that. And then there were some other writers who came in and took passes on it to add humor, to, you know, try fixing some structural problems that we were having. Dan Harmon did a quick pass on it, which there wasn't much that he wrote that ended up in the script, but his analysis of where we were having problems in the movie was so spot on.

Right. So he was actually a critical component in that movie, you know, eventually working. I'm finishing up, you know, writing a book, a popular book on quantum mechanics. And I always send out my books to be read, my drafts by other people. And sometimes they go like, no, chapter three needs to be chapter eight. I'm like, of course. Yeah, I think of that. Well, and I, that was, so that whole process working with, with a budget this,

is very common. It's not so common. Sometimes if you're working with a true uteur director, you know, they'll do everything on their own and it works out and sometimes it doesn't. But I don't mind the process of working hand in hand of rewriting other people's scripts or having my scripts rewritten as long as the people are talented. And meanwhile, there's like a million things going on. Casting, set design. It all happens all at the same time. And are you kind of the boss or partly the boss of all that? Yeah. You're the captain of the ship.

And so everything goes through you. And everybody has to come to you, you know, for information about what you're looking for and you give that information. And there's a tremendous amount of delegating clearly. But you ultimately are responsible as being the only person who's holding it all together in your head. Yeah. You know, and a big part of that process becomes,

helping, for me it's two, on Dr. Strange in particular, it was really two things. I mean, one of them was making it really clear to all the major department heads what the target of the movie was, what it was that we were going to be making. And for me, it was an emphasis upon this is a mind-bending, mind-trip action movie about a soul personality, about one guy overcoming himself, getting past his own selfishness. I mean, at some point, at this point, the Marvel cinematic universe is mature, right? Right.

You have to look for ways to distinguish. Yes, and you have to say, this is not, this is unlike these other films in this way. But we, I do like this sensibility, you know, for, you know, for Marvel. For example, when it came to performances,

you know, some Marvel films are more, um, uh, over the top and, and, and, and,

and, and, and, uh, or comic booky, if that, if I could use that phrase. and I for Dr. Strange because we were going to be venturing out into such fantastical terrain,

I actually wanted the performances to be very realistic. You know, so that was part of the casting process, which is, you know, why we got such serious actors, you know, to play pretty dramatic roles, Rachel McAdams and Tilda Swinton and Chautilatjifor and, you know, these Oscar-winning people and, of course, Benedict. And, and probably, you know, that sensibility was something that everyone needs to understand, you know. as a director, you have to make a certain basic vision of what the movie is going to be clear to everybody so that they understand the sensibility behind it. And I think that's so helpful.

And then encourage them, my whole process for sure, is encourage them to bring me better ideas than mine. Right. You know, and they always do. Are you doing a lot of recruiting of actors? I mean, sometimes they want the role really badly. the other times they're playing hard to get. No, no, no. In the case of the major roles for Dr. Strange, I mean, we went after every one of those actors,

you know, for specific reasons. Benedict was our first choice. We wanted him. And we talked about other possibilities for a very short time. But we, Kevin Feige, who, you know, runs Marvel, you really make the movie with him. You know, he's not just a studio head. He's very hands-on. really in there with you without a lot of middlemen.

And he and I quickly agreed that he was the right guy. And I flew to London immediately and met with Benedict. And the timing didn't work out because he was doing Hamlet in London. And so then I had to start looking for other actors. And nothing was, I mean, I met with amazing actors. But in the end, it was just like, it's got to be Benedict. And Kevin, to his credit, you know, went for the second time. to Disney and said, we really want Benedict, so we need to move the release date. So we moved the

release date from the summer. That's a huge deal. It's a huge deal because the fall is not as lucrative. It's just not. And so we probably could have made even more money in terms of opening day and that sort of thing, but we wouldn't have made, you know, the movie that we made because it's so centered around Benedict. And at the same time, you're deciding what the sets are going to look like. Like I remember, I don't know if you saw this little video you can find on YouTube, the Russo brothers did a video about Infinity Ward. They just analyzed like a little 30-second scene, right? And it was where Thor appears with the Guardians of the Galaxy. And it's a great scene, but it just impresses on, you know, someone like me who is not in the business, how much effort goes into those 30 seconds.

Like with the lighting coming from particular ways and the postures of every actor and which thing you're going to do. And this is all going in your mind in this pre-production phase, right? Yeah, and the breakdown of all the different elements that have to go into how to shoot those particular sets. And this is why the pre-production phase is the most critical phase, you know, because you've got to have enough time. First of all, to dream it up and then to thrash it and criticize it in your mind and think about what could be better. I think one of the main reasons why so many big blockbuster movies are not great is because you have enough money. to afford your first idea. And your first idea is rarely your best idea.

And so it takes a real conscious discipline to come up with these ideas, but then to be very harsh and critical of them. And to their credit, I think it's one of the things that Marvel does better than anybody. You know, they are not ever impressed with their own work. And so everything is always being criticized by everybody all the time. which can, as a director, can become a little painful at times, you know, but it, but it sounds like being scientist actually. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's the same, same idea, which is, you know, if you want to get to the, to the best version of something or to the truth of something or to, to an ideal of some kind, you know,

you're not going to get there without admitting to, uh, all your shortcomings and all your failures and all the things actually don't work and don't quite line that. And, you know, and it's true of writing as well. You know, the phrase that we would always use in working on Dr. Strange between myself and Cargill, in particular, John Spates, was we're doing a lot of hand-waving in this scene, you know, and the hand-waving of, we're all pretending like this works in a way it actually doesn't work. That's literally what physicists say to each other. You're hand-waving this particular question. Yes, and it's the same thing. And because so much of filmmaking, you know, is, like, I love the fact that the academy is the Academy is the Academy of Arts and Sciences, you know, because there's so much. much of, you know, what you're in service of is art. But so much of the actual making of a movie

is science. So much of it is just physical. It's practical. It's, you know, and even down to things in the case of Dr. Strange, and this gets still to your initial question about communicating with department heads, one of the things that I was adamant about from the beginning that was probably the hardest concept to get across to people was that we were going to have these incredible fantastical sequences of the, you know, mind trip through, you know, through multi-dimensional dimensions and, and New York being turned into this Escher-esque puzzle and, and people fighting in their astral forms, you know, all that. But my mantra was, I want the physical materials of what is on screen, the physical material that the audience is looking at to feel tactile and real

and like something they can relate to, as opposed to say the emperor's, you know, amorphous lightning bolt finger lights. Like we don't have a reference for anything that looks like that in our experience. You know, lightning is sharper edged than that. Yeah. You know, so even Tesla light is more defined than that. So I was always coming back to that, like no amorphous light, no, no, I don't want to represent magic as being this.

I want it to be, so, so for example, when they create the mantras, you know, that's very crispy, sparkly material that looks like the sparklers you grew up playing with and looks like fire. And it looks, you feel like you have a sense of what it would feel like to touch that material. Right. See, what of the distance between this crazy magic stuff and our human experience to be as short as possible? Exactly, because I think that as soon as it's not, as soon, if you try to merge, if you try to communicate magic, I felt, and I still feel that if you try to communicate magic with, with physical representations that have no human context, in terms of their tactile, your visual tactile relationship to them in your own mind,

then you're using something unrelatable to try to communicate something unrelated. And I really feel that the best way to get the audience to feel a sense of awe is if you're showing them something unrelatable, but everything that's actually in the frame has a physical relatability to their experience. Like that was a bit, and that's everything, I mean, it just took me, you know, like several minutes just to try to get the concept. up to you. And you can see how that's a difficult thing then to get across to a farm of,

you know, 50 visual effects operators. Well, is it the same thing where you're saying about, you know, the first idea is not the best one. In this CGI ready age, it's maybe too easy to just make some amorphous lightning bolts do all the work.

Exactly right. Exactly right. And it was, it was a constant struggle to, you know, reject things. And I think that at times it was very frustrating for the visual effects people because they, they, they aren't, weren't used to that kind of scrutiny. And I was pointing them.

I was saying, you know, we're doing these things that are so fantastical and no one's done it before. And, and we're, there's no precedent for the visual thing that we're doing. But it can't, it can't look unreal. Right. That's a tough challenge. Exactly. Yeah. So it was.

But they, but they, they did really get. behind it. Like they, I think that once they, once I managed to communicate that at a, at a deep enough level, something, something sort of kicked in. And it was a very, it was industrial light, industry and a company called Luma and a couple others. You know, they, the head people who were working on the project for those companies became very excited at the prospect, you know, and, and suddenly realized that they were going to get to create some things that, that, that, um, we're going to be boundary pushing for them. Right. You know, and that's a message across. And that's what you want. You want them to get excited that they get to be co-creators,

that they get to bring, I wanted them to bring me things that superseded my ideas, but I kept kicking them back because it was like it's not that kind of magic. It's not, you know, I don't, it has to feel physically tactile to the audience. They've got to have some way of relating to every piece of visual material they're looking at. Okay. In some point, production starts. There you are. Where did you start?

What was the first thing you did? The first thing we did is Nepal. We shot in Kathmandu, Nepal. And we'd gone there three times. I think we did an early scout there before the big earthquake. And then the earthquake occurred, and we did a second scout. And there was a real question about safety about working there. Because if another quake happened, you know, there were huge piles of rubble air.

everywhere. And some of the sets that we had picked were destroyed. Wow. I didn't hear it. So it was, but it was a pretty major decision. And Benedict, to his credit, sort of led the charge and saying, we have to shoot here now. Like, we have to. Like, they need it. They need, they need, they need to be Nepal to be represented because tourism, you know, it's a third world country. And tourism is one of their primary sources of income and tourism, just, you know, just vanished after the earthquake. And, and he really felt like, uh, this is a special place. He had history there. He'd been there when he was younger. And he said,

we have to shoot here now because it's a moral good. And, you know, we'll find a way to make it all safe. And everybody got behind that. It was great. Yeah. And how long does the actual shooting take overall? With the Marvel movie, shooting days are usually around 80 to 85 days, you know, which is not much. I mean... Does it feel rushed? Yes. Yeah. But they have very good reasons for doing it, I think, because I think that, you know, for example, my first assistant director who had just come off Specter, the James Bond movie, that movie was 123 shooting days, you know, and I made Doctor Strange in like 85. And but what it does is when you know that your production time is so compressed, it just makes everybody raise their game. because when you get the reality of the schedule in front of you and you realize on this week we have to accomplish all of this,

everyone works harder. And I think that there is a lot of truth to, I mean, it was Orson Wells who said the absence of boundaries is the enemy of art. And I really believe that's true, which you need, I think, a measure of pressure and limitation in order to facilitate the highest. measure of creativity. I think Robert Frost had the famous quote about, you know, would he ever write free verse? And he says, it's like playing tennis without a net, right? It's not fun anymore. Right, right, exactly. So I think that there's a real method to Marbles approach to that. But they also work with the understanding that there's almost certainly going to be a sizable amount of reshooting. I was going to ask. So I presume they're doing some special effects work,

while you're shooting, there must be an enormous amount of effort just to put together what you've shot on, are you shooting digitally? Yeah. Well, we actually, in Kathmandu, we shot all of that on film. I am a big believer in digital photography.

You know, it's certainly, it's not just the future, it's here. It's like what everybody works on, with the exception of a few autours like Tarantino and Chris Nolan, who can afford, you know, to shoot all of their films on,

on actual film. But I've yet to see still a daylight exterior, look great on digital. I just think daylight exteriors, you know, have a quality, even the best work that I've seen still has a quality that pales so to film. And so we did, I was able to convince everybody

that we need to shoot Catman do. It's an interesting science question because there's no reason in principle why it couldn't look as good. It's just two different ways of recording photons landing on your, you know, detector somehow. Yeah, but I think... Something about film, I agree.

Yeah. There's something that makes it feel more real. It makes it feel more real. And I think that it has to do with, um, with our experience of, of the specificities of sunlight. And again, it's like cloud cover. If it's a cloud cover day, like we did digital exteriors on Sinister and thank God there was cloud cover when we shot those because they look great. Right.

It all looks great. That, that, that, that, the differential between, um, you know, film and digital when it comes to, you know, cloud cover days is, in my opinion, negligible. It's not that important. But daylight exterior is when you're dealing with sunlight on people's faces or shooting the actual sky itself, the difference is enormous. I mean, it's so enormous that for me it always pulls me out of a movie when I'm looking at digital daylight exteriors. They just don't feel real. And when you start with the reshoots, are the reshoots something, I mean, it's planned in presumably to the schedule?

And is it mostly because you say this scene isn't working or we could do it better? What makes you go to a reshoot? Well, what you do is you put the movie together and, and, and, you're mostly because, you're, you know, most of the visual effects are not being done yet because you want to have the movie in relatively good shape before you start building all those visual elements. So the post-production process is when you build most of the effects. So there's a lot of green screen in that first cut. And what you really need to do is get it together and get it in front of people quickly. And whether at first it's, you know, five people, ten people, and then get a small little in-house

crew of you know 50 strangers to watch it and and you you will learn very uh soon and and and and and painfully like it or not what doesn't work you know and what does work and what doesn't work and you you get a good idea of okay here's here's what our problems are and uh and and and that begins the process of start you immediately start to plan okay what are we going to need to do to be different to make to solve some of these problems now Now, occasionally, even a big movie, like a Marvel movie, doesn't need much of that. I believe they only did a few days of reshoots for the Avengers, for the first Avengers. That movie just came in.

Everything worked, you know? That's rare even for, you know, a small independent film. You know, I mean, we did no reshoots on Sinistered that we didn't need them. That's rare. You know, it was a $3 million movie. But on Dr. Strange, we definitely did. But we also knew that we would because we knew. that we were struggling with certain things, you know, still in the screenplay while we were

making it. And the surprising thing is what does work that you didn't think would work and what doesn't work that you assumed would work. You know, it's always, it's always illuminating. I think filmmaking is a bit like baking, you know, where if you're a, if you're a chef, and especially if you're a world-class chef, you're an expert at understanding, you know, if I put these ingredients it's together and I put the, you know, but you got to do that. You got to do it. You got to do it. You have to do that the first time, you know, once. And filmmaking is like creating a recipe for the first time and you know so many things about how it's going to work. But then it goes into the oven and what comes out is what's going to come out. You know what I mean? And when it comes out,

it's going to come out and surprise you in some way. It might be way better than you thought. It probably will not be as good as you thought. I've had some dishes in fancy restaurants that clearly should have been tasted before they came out. Yeah. So there's a, there's a component of, I think, you put all the ingredients in, you make all the hard choices, you do, try to make, in your mind as a director, you've made a perfect film. You've visualized everything. You see it all, but then when the actual thing is there, you have to come to realize the things that don't work. And then how much time is spent between the end? of the reshoots and opening night?

We had a very short post-production schedule. I mean, there's the score and there's, you know, because of Benedict's schedule and having moved it to the fall, we still had, we had a long prep, which, again, I think was the most important thing, but we had a short post. And the result was a kind of, crazy panic because we had to get all those reshoots done

and get the visual effects done on time. Right. My visual effects team was so smart and that they hired multiple houses, big houses, to all start work at the same time, which you usually don't really do. You usually rely heavily on a single house, a single visual effects house. So that process for us, I think, was only like four months. You know, typically it's going to be more like six or seven months. And there's a deadline that is not fungible, right? Like it's staring at you.

Oh, yeah. I mean, movies of the size, you know, work from their release dates backwards. Right. You start the process reverse engineering from the day that the movie's going to come out. Are you fiddling with it right up to the last second? The film? Yeah. Let me put it this way.

My final work on Dr. Strange was at around 1230 or 1 in the morning when I finished color timing, which is the last thing you do, you finish the actual color timing of the master print. so that when you watch it, when you watch the finished color timing version, that's the finished movie. The sound is all mixed. You've done all the work there is to do. You're finished.

That's it. I finished that at 12.30 at night and was on a plane at six that morning. So five and a half hours later, I was on a plane to Hong Kong to start the press junket. So, yes, I was literally... Was it on thumb drive? I mean, where was this movie?

Well, this was all, you know, on the Disney lot. And, you know, it was all in those studios. And we really did, that's unusual, you know, the degree to which we just needed every last second. And that's when I was working seven days a week and 18 hour days for months. No time for podcasting. No time for podcasting. And it's exhausting, but very exhilarating because that post process is the most fun. Is it?

Oh, yes. just editing. All post-production is so much fun. Do all directors believe that or do different directors have different fun? I think that most directors probably prefer editing to other, I think that's probably the, I think the majority of us feel that way because you get to see all the work come together. It's another phase of writing. You're still getting to write the movie and it's, it's as creative as writing, definitely more creative in my opinion than production. But production is the worst. I mean, production is just, you know, grueling. It's just so... production in the sense of like making sure the craft services gets paid and stuff?

No, production meaning just working those long hours and the physical demand. I mean, what people really don't understand about making a movie the size is the physical toll that it takes. The physical demand on you is pretty extraordinary. Yeah. You know, I mean, you really do enter. People compare it to war, which is the most ridiculous analogy. That's probably too far. Yeah, yeah.

We eat, we eat craft, you know, we catered food. and and sleep in warm beds every night and we're getting paid huge amounts of money but otherwise it's and nobody dies but it's just like war but it is like it is kind of like joining the army you know it is it is that kind of boot camp just brutal this is not for the faint of heart you know and and and you you really do have to watch what you eat and drink and and and manage your sleep habits and because if you don't, the moving train that you're running in front of will mow you over. Well, that's why, you know, I can imagine personally writing a movie script someday. I can never even imagine directing a movie.

It just sounds like so much stuff is going on. It must take a very special kind of personality to say, like, that's what I want to do. I want to be in a thing where there's so many different failure modes that could go wrong around me. And I want to live with that. Is this what you wanted to do from the start? Yeah, it is. For me it was, and I think still is, a twofold thing. You know, part of it is just I have a talent for it.

I have a knack for it. And I think I felt that that was going to be the case when I was even in high school, you know, just putting together little Super 8 films and stuff like that. I just felt like I had a knack for understanding film language. And I'd watched, I grew up in a family that watched so many movies. so I understood movies in a way that I think people my age typically don't, or at least didn't then. I think now it's much more common. You know, people are watching so many films growing up.

But I think that what I love about directing, but the actual experience of directing is to, you know, do everything in the service of a piece of artistic entertainment that's going to be seen by millions of people and to feel the responsibility of, I get to have a couple hours of their hard-earned life, their rest time. Their hard-earned money is going to be spent on a Friday night to go with their girlfriend or wife or family, whatever, and watch this movie. I want them to have the best time of their week. Right. You know, and that's always there, and I want them to have something human. I want them to have a human experience and have fun and be amazed by it. And I want them to remember it and possibly watch it.

again and love it as a part of their of their life you know and so you start with that and that's the goal that's what you're in service of it's that that's a very there's a real altruistic i think truth to that but then in the action of actually doing it the satisfaction for me is that it demands usage of every single thing i'm good at like my ability to communicate my leadership skills my salesmanship you know along with my love for film language my understanding of cinema history, my ability to write, to be able to utilize and feel like you're in a profession where you are utilizing everything that you are really good at. It's all being utilized at the highest level.

That's the ultimate job for anyone. It's fulfilling in that sense. It's fulfilling in that sense. You know, Flannery O'Connor was asked, you know, why do you write these quirky little stories about freaks, these short stories about freaks? And her answer was, because I'm good at it. And I just thought that should be everybody's answer. That should be everybody's answer to why they do what they do.

You know, because if you're good at it and you love it, that's your calling. That's what you should do. And you have to do it, though, within this framework that we call Hollywood, right? Like, I mean, tell us a little bit about your fitting in with the whole Hollywood superstructure. Movies are obviously a big part of it, but business is a big part of it. Yeah. Those are a big part of it and so forth. Well, I think that I've been fortunate, you know, because I've managed to work

for a lot of difficult people, you know, and even people who are notoriously difficult within Hollywood. You know, I worked for the Weinsteins for years. And, and, and I think that I survived a lot of the people I worked for in the past. And, and survived in a way a lot of artists didn't, you know, and a lot of good artists didn't. So I think that, um, my survival skills are strong, you know, that there was that. But I, I, I think that it was also, um, uh, my ability to sell. My dad was a car dealer. you know and yeah my dad owned a couple dark car dealerships when I was in high school he got sick and lost all of his money when I was in college but but I worked as a car salesman for him and and I've always credited my working in as a car salesman to I think my talents as a filmmaker is is what it is but I think that my ability to navigate the waters of Hollywood and to actually put together a career and to keep working has so much to do with my ability to to sell because you're always selling an idea. You're selling

a script, a pitch, you're selling yourself to your crew members, you're selling yourself to the studios to get jobs, you're selling yourself in marketing the movie. I mean, that's such a big part of the job. To the actors to listen to you and you tell them to do something? For sure. And by the way, so much of that is like so much of what makes me an effective director

was understanding that when in sales, you know, you come to understand you can't talk to every customer the same way. your job is to figure out who are they? How do they need to be communicated with? Because that's your job. And so in actors, the same way. They're all

powerfully emotional people, but they all need to be spoken to in different ways depending on who they are. And so you have to learn to do that. And I think that I think so much of Hollywood success demands

either incredible luck, just, you know, unparalleled raw genius or an ability to sell. Right. Maybe two of those three would be helpful. Yeah. If you have two of those three, then, you know, then you're in really good shape. Then you're Stanley Kubrick.

Yeah, that's right. So you have done the big blockbuster superhero thing. Actually, before I leave that topic, how hard is it to keep the humanity, the character's narrative strength in a movie that is just that big? I'm really glad that you ask that question because I think that it is the greatest challenge of directing a film that big. And I think that it's the number one reason why you see big Hollywood blockbuster movies that don't work. Because a lot of times they've worked in a script phase in a way that they don't work by the time they reach the screen. And so often what I can feel from those movies is that the director was not able some, for whatever reason. Maybe it was his fault, maybe not.

or her fault, but that for some reason, that human emotional story was not, was not remaining central during the production because the production was so demanding. And that, in making Doctor Strange, I was determined that that would not be the way that movie would fail. Right. If there were plenty of ways for it to fail, but I was like, it won't feel it fell that way. So you, and what you have, what I literally had. had to do was I created a document for every shooting day that just had for every shooting day that I was on the movie that had the central emotional narrative story points for this character because I knew that that when I when I was shooting it that that all of my time would be spent talking to people about about practical issues and where the camera goes and and and and how how we can get this done on time and all of that and it's so easy to

lose that because you don't have time to be working through that much on a movie of the size. And so every day I would go in and I would remind myself what is the, I would start by reading at the top of my script what I just pitched to you. It's a psychotropic, whatever it was, psychotropic, you know, mind trip action movie about one man overcoming himself. Just to remind myself, that's what I'm making. And then to really focus on that with the characters and really understand here's the emotional quality of what this guy and the people around him are going through.

And I never lost side of that while making Doctor Strange. And the reason why that's so important is people pay to go see these movies because they see the trailer and they see the spectacle and they love Marvel, whatever. But when they get in there, the reason it works is because of an emotional connection to those actors. It's always the ceiling for how good a movie can be. A movie cannot be better than your lead character's story and performance. performance. Can't. It's impossible. It doesn't matter how great everything else is. If your lead

actors, character, and performance are not emotionally satisfying. The movie's not good. If that is satisfying, it's amazing how many things can be, cannot work, and the movie will still work for you. And that's why you push back the release date to get Benidtiger Cumberbodge in your movie. Precisely, you know, because he just had a quality that I felt for this particular character that he would be able to cover the range of emotions and the cockiness and the arrogance and still maintain likability because he is such a prick in the beginning of the movie as he was in the comics you know and he being Stephen Strange not Benedict Comberbos. Yeah no no he being Stephen Strange Benedict is lovely I love him he's he's really genuinely a great

great guy but yeah so you you got to get the right actors in those roles and you've got to stay focused on that you know and not do you think of yourself as mostly a story storyteller? Is that your task? Or is it something broader than that? I think that I think it's broader than that because I think cinema is broader than that. You know, I do, I do think that a story itself is important because the story says something that only a story can. It can't, what is, what makes a good story a good story is that it can't be reduced to something else. It can only, what it is communicating can only be communicated through that story. So you have to be a good storyteller.

But I think that's, you know, for me, and this is how I feel about movies I watch as well as the movies I make, cinema is something broader than just that. It's a major component. Perhaps it's even the spinal column of the animal of a movie. But the flesh and blood of cinema is something to me that is more. artful and ineffable, that there's a quality to, a dreamlike quality to the cinema experience

of submitting yourself to the immersion in this alternate reality that supersedes the individual, supersedes the art forms of just music and photography and blocking like theater and the storytelling of literature because it is a combination of,

all those things and the end result is still greater than the sum of its parts. Are you a fan of live theater also? Not really. You know, and I think the reason. I've sensed that by what you were saying. Yeah, no, I really, I'm really very hard on theater, you know, because I find the experience so, so limiting compared to cinema. I would much rather watch, you know, I'd rather watch a mediocre movie than a good play,

but a great play. Sure. can certainly be an experience that's unlike anything else. When I saw Hamilton, you know, for example, it's like, well, this is one of the great works of art in the last hundred years. And I experienced it and understood why. But I think that cinema is a kind of experience that is as close to dreamlike magic that we get when it comes to art and entertainment. I think that they're different. I mean, I was just in London a couple weeks ago,

and we got to see Ian McKellen as King Lear at the Duke of York Theatre, right? And so it was an interesting experience, not only because he's fantastic, but because you're familiar with him from movies. Right. And now he's 20 feet away from you being King Lear. And there's things that obviously

a live theater performance cannot do that cinema can, but I think vice versa also, right? And I think that maybe comparing them is wrong. I just thought of it because you were talking about the history a little bit, And I think of cinema's coming out of live theater back in the day. For sure. But it's at a hundred some years to develop.

And it's able to do things now that live theater can't even imagine. Yeah. And I think that the theater that I do enjoy tends to be more minimalistic. I will always enjoy a good Shakespeare play because it's some of the greatest writing in human history. And if it's well made and well acted, that's going to be. to be an extraordinary experience no matter what. So what I don't like is spectacle theater. Yeah.

And part of it's one of the reasons why I liked Hamilton because I loved, I love just entering in and seeing, oh, this is just an empty stage, you know, with a pretty, pretty simple backdrop and, and the experience was the music, the movement, you know, these things that are inherently theatrical. When it came to, you know, I mean, people, I'm going to step on toes, but it's like, you know, see the big phantom, you know, a chandelier hovering over the audience. I just think it's ridiculous. Cheezing.

Yeah, I'm like, you know, I can pay $8 and, you know, at a movie matinee and see something a thousand times greater than this, you know, right now. And do you think that gives, that, that's an immersive quality of cinema gives it this particular art form a way to get and connect with people's emotions and, you know, sort of a visceral response that other methods do? I do. I do. I think that it is primarily emotional.

I think that it is holistically emotional. I think that that's maybe, it's hard for me to describe it because I usually don't have to. But there is a soulful, holistic, emotional quality to the cinema experience that I do believe transcends the nature of the experience of any other individual kind of art. And it speaks to our subconscious in a way that other art forms don't,

and especially directors who are aware of that and can utilize that well. I just think that it's the greatest art form, you know, and it's only because it's the amalgam of all the other great art forms. It's the amalgam of photography and literature and theater and music. And when all those things come together into something that is pure and creates a pure experience,

the emotional power of it, can be overwhelming, you know, and, and, uh, and for me, even a bad movie has a quality of that that I still prefer to, you know, and the closest thing to it, I think is probably music, you know, in the way that it can, um, can move you and transcend your, your experience. And, and I'm an avid reader. So there's no disrespect for, for literature or formal art. But in this approach, it makes perfect sense when you say that, that one of your favorite genres would be the horror movie. right?

Yeah. That's a kind of connection. You don't see that many horror plays, right? It's hard to get scared in a play because you need the intimacy of being lost within your own, within your own imagination, within your own fears. And certainly horror literature works great. You know, good horror, a good scary Stephen King book scares you, you know, but not in the same way that a horror movie does. You know, you don't usually read even a great chapter in The Shining and physically feel your pulse race, you know, as you do in a good horror film where you get actually really scared. And that's what, and I think that cinema can do that, you know, this is something, this is something I'm just going to add in here while we're on the subject because we're talking about the nature of movies themselves and like what are movies.

And I think one of the real clues to what makes movies special is the categorization of movies. Because you've got action movies, horror movies, dramas, comedies, thrillers, and then you've got things like documentaries. But science fiction even. What's that? Rom-coms? Yeah, but those are, yeah, that's still in the comedy section. Okay. It's a branch out under the comedy banner.

These major categories, they're the same now on Netflix as they always were in Blockbuster. And I had this revelation one day when I was, I think a student, film student, and I was going into a blockbuster video somewhere. And I was looking at the net. And it just the thought hit me, who created these categories? Who created these categories? Like this has been the categories that I've known movies to be under my whole life. And the more I thought about it, I thought, well, the audience created these categories. The audience, by wanting to see these different kinds of movies that separated into these like seven or eight major categories.

And when I realize what they really are, is they're the major categories of human emotion. You know, fear for horror, you know, comedy for laughter, joy, drama for sorrow, for, you know, deeper feelings. The visceral excitements is action. and anxiety is thriller. You know, science, and I think science fiction is always has, is always built upon a sense of wonder, of wonderment combined usually with some other genre.

And, and I think that, that this is, these basic, speaking to these basic human emotions is the nature of cinema. It's just what it does, what movies do. So there's an obvious question

that I'd like to get your take on. Why do people go to horror movies? Why do people want to be scared? Like, why do you actually pay money for someone to make you feel unpleasant, in some sense? A lot of people don't, you know, and I think that the people who do, you know, they like it for the same reason. They like roller coasters. It's the powerful feeling of fear,

which I think is arguably the most powerful human emotion and to feel, to experience the visceral power of that emotion in an environment where you know you're safe, like in a roller coaster, you know you're not going to fly out of the car, but you feel like you're going to fly out of the car. And so you're experiencing the adrenaline rush of that. And then for people who are serious horror fans and people like me who consider it, you know, one of the undervalued great forms of movie art, it's that it gets to some of the most important human questions about good and evil, about metaphysics, you know, questions of the afterlife.

and the meaning of existence and how how unspoken and unspeakable fears can be tapped into by great horror. Like these are all made, these are things that I love. You know, I speak if I'm waxing poetic about it, you know, because I do, I love it. I love it and I review it and I think it's important.

But I also completely understand and have no, I have nothing negative to say to people who just don't like that. And so if somebody doesn't like that experience, they don't like it. And by the way, having spent my entire adult life making horror films, there is no such thing as a horror type. You know, it's like, you, you know, I've met some of the bravest cops in New York City who are terrified to watch a horror movie and would never do it. Like guys who drag people out of the towers on 9th.

9-11, you know, and, and it risks their lives over and over again, you know, and they're just like, just don't show me any of that stuff, you know. And then I'll meet a little old lady in a flower shop who's, you know, seen every nightmare in an street movie. You know, so it just loves them. Something human, but it's hard to predict what it is. Very hard to predict. Yeah. But I do want to get into these metaphysical presuppositions. I mean, I think for you, questions of evil and purpose and meaning.

life come into why you do horror, but maybe also why you do other movies also. It's why I've... And we disagree about the metaphysical physical... We do. It's one of the things that I've... Fairly disagreement, that's okay. It's one of the things I've loved about our relationship is that we've spoken about this many times.

You know, we have very differing views of the nature of existence itself, you know, but we've always admired and appreciated the other person's point of view and, and respect, uh, you know, the fact that both of those views are very personal and powerful to us as individuals. You know, they inform everything else that we do in our work and the way we think about everything from, you know, practical life politics right down to the meaning of our, of our own life. And for me, I do think that everything that I've done, perhaps the through line in all the work that I've done, including all the script work on things that have not, you know, been produced. is a combination of this sort of love for genre,

you know, for horror, thriller, action type sci-fi movies, and some kind of crossover into metaphysical questions, you know, questions about the nature of human existence and possibilities of what life could be. And certainly the moral questions that arise is, that's one of the interesting things to me about horror is it's almost very difficult to make an amoral horror film, you know, or a non-moral, you know, horror film. There's going to be a moral one way or the other.

The movie, even if it seems to have no moral center, that becomes a moral point. Well, good and evil are out there, right? Good and evil are out there. And so once you're dealing in horror, you're landing in terrain that is inherently so philosophical. It's inescapable. And I think it's inescapable in a way that it's not in other genres. And so I think that was a big part of the poll, too. That and the fact that there's a lot of room to improve the genre and has been in my life.

And I've really watched it happen and watching it happen. Right. There's more sophistication now. I think that horror in the 80s, in the 70s and 80s was just slasher movies. Like that's all anybody ever thought about, you know. But with the exception of masterworks by great non-horror directors like Kubrick making the Shining or Freed can making The Exorcists or something like that. But I think that now it's a genre that has gained a lot of respect for how it comments on the human experience.

Yeah, I mean, I remember being, I loved Sinister and I thought it was extremely scary. And I'm not an aficionado by any means, but since then the Babaduke is an amazingly good movie. And just now we started watching The Haunting of Hillhouse. We were just talking about that on the way here because we saw the, well, and by the way, we saw that of the billboard, and I asked Scargle. I said, have you heard anything? And I hear it's very good. And it's Mike Flanagan. I tweeted about the release of that yesterday.

And I haven't seen it yet, but he is such a good director. So good. And he is so talented. And, of course, I've read the book. The Shirley Jackson novel is amazing and really scary. Yeah. And which goes back to the original haunting by Robert Wise, which was, you know, a great movie. and it's

you know these these kind of tales regardless of your you know cosmological view of you know regardless of your philosophical

presuppositions about about the existence of the immaterial world or the existence of anything non-material these movies speak to to our fears they just do

and in a movie like that and in other movies you've made there's obviously a super supernatural element, but the response of the human characters to what they're seeing is what it would be, right? Or that's what counts. Like, I would totally feel this way in this circumstance, which I don't believe what ever happened because I'm an atheist. But, you know, if it did, that's how I would feel. That's what matters, right?

Well, yeah. And it's funny because I think that even if you're right and I'm wrong about the nature of the universe, the likelihood of something coming along, you know, in the course of history that is, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, does all of our safe assumptions about the nature of the world is going to be frightening. That will, like, encountering that will be scary. Exactly. You know, and I think it's, I think one of my favorite things that I remember hearing you talk about is how, you know, these sort of big revelations in science are typically

non-intuitive. Yeah. And, you know, relativity. I mean, what could be more non-intuitive than relativity, you know, and it takes so much effort just to try to conceptualize and understand what that even is. And the fact that somebody figured it out to me is still incredible. I still don't understand how that happened. And honestly, quantum mechanics is a hundred times worse. The opening line of my new book is going to, I hope, is right now something like you don't need a PhD in theoretical physics to be afraid of

quantum mechanics, but it doesn't hurt. Oh, see, that's great. And I think, I just think that, it all gets back to the mystery of the unknown. And I think that that's something where you and I have always had an unspoken overlapping respect, which is there's a lot that we know, but there's so much that we don't know, you know, and there's so much that's still out there to surprise us. Yeah, that's right. And that's so much of the human experience, not just in, when it comes to knowledge and, you know, what we know, what we know.

and what we believe about the universe, but that's our day-to-day experience. Life surprises us, and it scares us. And it throws us these curveballs, you know, and I think that this particular realm of visual storytelling is a great way to reckon with those fears. And you've made a couple movies about exorcisms. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you think that this is a real thing, right? I mean, that there is at least plausible, let's say. Possession.

It's funny because I didn't expect you to bring that up, but now that you have, I'm really glad you did. Because what I can say about it is, again, the primary word I would use to describe my own feeling about the phenomenon is mystery. There's a great mystery to it. But possession and exorcism is a fact. It's an anthropological reality that exists in all cultures and always have. People get into these crazy mindsets, you know, and start doing these things with certain predictable patterns. patterns, and then there's this kind of shock therapy ritual that every culture has developed that is often very effective, you know? And so for me, that's the starting point. The starting

point of what makes it so interesting isn't theological, it's anthropological. You know, that this is a part of, this is something that happens. And in fact, no one can deny that in the real world, exorcists go to people's houses because they believe that they are possessed and things happen. Precisely. And I think that, and I think that if, you know, and I've read dozens of books on the subject, including very skeptical books. And I think at the very least, you have to, if you look at credible cases, when I say credible, I mean well-researched, you know, well-analyzed cases, and certainly when you look at it as a phenomenon globally and historically, I do think there is a trans-state quality of it in the more extreme cases

of what I would call a legitimate case, is at the very least that. And therein you are entering into something very mysterious about the human mind, at the very least. And so I found that compelling. And when I first made the exorcism of Emily Rose, I have an open and liberal enough view of Scripture, for example, and my own theological views of things. and I'm always challenging myself to question what I believe. One of the reasons I went into that was to see if, do I believe that there's anything behind this? Do I believe that the devil exists? It's just all just a construct.

And in that particular case, what was so fascinating was by the time it was over, I didn't have any more answers than I went into going in because there really didn't seem to be any simple way to explain what happened to that particular girl in that case. No matter what angle I looked at it from, it was just confounding. And that's why it sparked so much interesting conversation. But I will finish by saying that I think that the vast majority of what you see and hear out there, people attributing to being demon possession and the work of the devil is nonsense. You know, it's like the vast majority of it is absolutely ridiculous. And the more extreme cases,

you know, I could be wrong. Maybe it's all some kind of psychological trans state, you know. But I personally, do I believe that there's a spiritual component behind it? I do. Yeah. And, you know, there's no question. Well, there's very little question, I guess. There's always some question, but it seems to be useful in describing human actions to believe

in the existence of evil. Some things just are evil. Yeah. And how, and there's a lot of evil going on in your films. How would your films be different if tomorrow you became? a naturalist. Oh, that's a really good question.

You know, it's obviously not an explicit. No, it's a really, really, really good question. I like the question a lot. I mean, they would be completely different

because they would be made from a completely different human experience. You know, my, my spirituality, you know, if I'm honest,

has been, you know, certainly scrutinized intellectually. I certainly take philosophy very seriously. I've changed a lot of what I believe because of critical thinking and all of that. But if I'm honest, my core belief system is born of my experience.

I wasn't raised in a religious home, but it has always been my nature from the time I was a small child to look around and feel the world as something that is much more than the material in front of me. I've always felt that the world was, that what was real was more than this and maybe what was primary was was more than this you know something else not even more but just something else that i've always experienced the world more immaterially than i have materially and that's just my been my my way of experiencing it and so um so i connect that that part of myself that experiences the world uh in that mystical kind of way i i relate to cinema in as as a part of that i relate

to the film experience as a viewer and as an artist is very, very connected to that. So I think that, and when it comes to philosophy, you know, where you would land, you know, much more with Hume, I'm going to land much more with crazy Kant, you know. Sorry, that's the deal breaker. I don't know if we can get along anymore after that. But, you know, I'm right with him when he says there's two things I'm sure about the stars above me

and the moral law within. And so I think that that, I think that, I do think, that belief in a moral law pre-existing within human behavior or something I do believe in. But if I were to become a naturalist and undo even that, I don't, I feel like suddenly this, like when you ask me that question, the honest answer is, well, I couldn't make any of the movies that I've made at all. Wipe the slate clean. And what would I make?

I'd have to live another life. You know, and if that actually, and by the way, it's possible that something could happen that would make me think that way. And what would the result be? I think that all I could make movies about, if that happened to me at this point in my life, all I could make movies about art, is that. Such a profound thing. About the shock value of experiencing life so long, and so powerfully for five decades and then to suddenly have the rug pulled out from under you. No, I think that's perfectly fair and vice versa. Like if I had a conversion experience tomorrow,

I would not be able to write about quantum mechanics anymore. It would be the most important thing in your life. And this makes me such a bad Christian too because I hear you say that. I'm like, oh, God, I hope that doesn't happen. John. The world is more interesting with the variety. Exactly right. No, we're not trying to convert each other.

That's a good thing. But it does, you know, I think that the relationship with mystery is an interesting thing. You brought it up. Mystery is crucially important to all movies. to all storytelling, to human existence, et cetera, et cetera, I was really annoyed by the famous J.J. Abrams' mystery box TED Talk. Did you see this TED Talk? Yeah, I did. I did see it.

And part of it, and maybe I'm being unfair, but part of it seemed to me to be, and maybe we'll disagree about this, that he was saying that mysteries are better, if, are better, best, only good if you don't even try to solve them in some sense, right? Like, if you assume that they're not solvable and keep them as mysteries.

And to me, mysteries are great because they can be solved. I mean, I go through life, presuming that, of course, there's a million questions I don't know the answers to, and I will die before I know all the answers to them. But in principle, I could get them, and that's what makes the quest worthwhile. Well, certainly when you're talking about the mysteries of the material world and the mysteries of science, that's a given, you know. What we don't know about dark matter and dark energy and, you know, these things in gravity, these things that science is still chasing.

Of course we have to believe that they can be answered, that those mysteries can be untaught. And just as relativity changed our human experience of the world. I'm sure future discoveries and quantum mechanics is already starting to do that as it seeps

out into popular culture. It's starting to affect the way that we feel. A lot of times in very sloppy ways and stories I know. But I think that that when you're talking about mystery, the mystery of human experience and the mystery of, say, the mystery of God, of the concept of God, the mystery of meaning, to me, there's always a quest to comprehend it. You know, there's always a quest to get deeper underneath it. That is

the point. I don't believe that there's power in just acknowledging, oh, it's a mystery, never know, well, if that's the case, I don't need to think about it. I love, I don't remember where I first heard this, but I've repeated it before. Maybe I, maybe I said it. I don't really don't remember, but it's certainly something I think about a lot, which is that to me, the concept of mystery is not the presence of something meaningless, but the presence of more meaning than we can yet comprehend. You know, that there's an awareness of there's more here. There's more here, than we can get our experience or our brains or our hearts around. And the whole point of evolving as a species, evolving as an individual,

is to get deeper into that mystery, start to understand it. You know, what's there? What is it there for? And I think that the important thing to me, though, that is worth protecting, and I didn't particularly agree with JJ's approach on the mystery box, either. But what I do believe, with respect to mystery, is that we have to make a practiced kind of discipline to not think that we understand more than we do. I think that's really important. And I think it's important because I think, and I've said this many times before,

but I think both science and religion, you know, have been guilty and continue to be guilty of sort of propagating the idea that we understand a lot more than we really. understand, you know, and they've both done it in very different ways. But they're broadcasting a sensibility to, to their constituents, you know, that we got the world figured out. Well, one of the terrible things about the way that we teach kids' science is that we teach a set of facts that we've learned rather than as a process for making hypotheses and then testing them against reality.

That statement alone is something that people don't understand. People don't think of science as a process. Right. They don't. It's not that hard. They think of it as irrevocable fact. That's it. And well,

and sometimes it is revoked. Exactly. Exactly. That's the whole history of science has been a process of it, of it sort of undercutting itself as it gets deeper into its understanding of how complex the world really is. All right? We can move into the lightning round because I know that you have to go to see a horror house, right? Yes.

Yeah. I'm meeting my kids at Katsuya. And then we're going to, we're going to go to the Warner Brothers. horror tour. Very consistent, excellent in your philosophical approach. So, but then very quickly,

because I do want to talk about, I mean, you're not just a director, but you're a, you are a lover of cinema and the history of cinema. I mean, what is your relationship to that history and what would you recommend to our listeners out there in podcast land? Like, you know, should they download Kurosawa on Netflix?

Such a great question. You know, my relationship to it is that, you know, I first learned, you know, movies from my father primarily because he was a movie lover, but he was straight genre. Not horror either, but he just loved action movies. He loved thrillers. So I grew up seeing tons of movies. American movies. We see two, three movies a day sometimes in our family. And so I developed a real love for movies. And then, of course, when video technology came in, I started to rewatch movies all the time. But then when I got to college, I was exposed to

international cinema. And it was really my discovery of the art of international cinema that made me really want to be a filmmaker. Because the first time that I saw Felini's eight and a half, I just, I actually had a panic attack at the end of the movie. The density of that experience, the dream quality of that film was so overwhelming. I kind of panicked. I literally left the classroom because I couldn't understand.

Immersive experience. I couldn't understand what was happening. happening to me in my brain in this experience. And then as I continue to rewatch it, the layers of meaning and poetry in that, in that movie were so amazing. And I didn't know, like, movies can do this, you know. And so that sent me really down the rabbit hole of exploring all the major movements in world cinema, you know, starting in the silent era in American cinema, you know, going all the way through the various major movements. And it was primarily Japanese cinema and European art cinema,

the French New Wave and Italian New Realism. These things really spoke to me. And Kurosawa is a great point for people who have limited exposure to international cinema. Kurosawa was a great starting point because he took, I think, the sensibility of Hollywood movies, the entertainment. value of Hollywood movies and merged it with the artfulness of European movies of his time. He was as much a fan of John Ford as he was of Igmar Bergman. And so there's a quality to his movies that are high art and high entertainment at the same time

that you really don't get with many directors ever. And so he's a great starting point. You know, watch the, you know, just Google the 10 Best Coroslav movies and every one of them will be a masterpiece worth watching. But you also have to find the directors. that you love. You know, it's like, you know,

Gadar, John Gadar is not for everybody. But for those of us who like love those movies or Bergman, like at Bergman movies, you know, you and I, it's so interesting, like I would love to watch a Bergman film with you

because he really believed in a godless universe. He believed in, in a, in a, in a, in a, if there is a God, it is certainly silence.

It's certainly non-communicative. We are alone. You know, and, and even though I've never held that, view, I experience his experience of the world through those movies so powerfully. And this is what movies can do, I think, again, in ways that other art forms don't, is they can, well, other art forms do the same thing, but for me, movies do it in a way nothing else does. I feel that experience.

I feel his human experience through those movies. And I am made more human for having felt it and for having understood it and having related to the truth quality in it. Because even though I have a system of belief that is different than that. I know what it's like to feel alone in the world. I know what it's like to not feel safe in a world. And I know certainly what it's like to be racked with doubt, which a lot of his films were about as well. And I think that's something that we both agree on and probably Bergman would agree with us

is that the question of whether or not God exists matters. Exactly. Exactly. No, and I think that's exactly right. And I think that, you know, we live in an age now of just, you know, shouting. People have been shouting at each other. And, you know, one of the things I love is being able to have conversations like this and hear something like that from somebody like you. That that question is an important question.

It's a profound question. It's one of the essential questions. And it needs to be reckoned with, you know. And that's more important than, to me, hearing that is a much more. more important voice than anybody advocating why they believe what they believe. You know, the starting point is we all need to deal with certain realities of, we have to answer certain questions if we are to live a full life, an enlightened life. We should, we should be, we should have an understanding of what we think the human

experience really is. Okay, two more questions, the lightning round. For whatever reason, you're told that you can make one more movie ever in your life. What would it be? you're allowed to change your mind later but well it would be the next movie that I'm going to make but I can't say anything about it that's very good is that the same answer

that is the correct answer we've made everybody happy you're going to make a move good yeah no and it's true you're living the life you know and I do believe in it because I made I made one decision early in my career you know to take a big studio movie because that's what you do you know when you're a young filmmaker if you get the opportunity you take it and and I ended up regretting that decision and since then I've always operated uh under the belief that I should make every movie as though it's my last movie because one day it will be exactly right you know you never know when that's gonna

well you believe in the afterlife I presume that there are directors in heaven or hell I don't know maybe they're only producers in hell maybe I don't know that's what it is all the producers are now, writers and directors, directors go to limbo, writers go to heaven. That's correct. All right. And the last one is, you are out there on Twitter. Yeah. Pissing people off, saying things.

I mean, you don't try to piss people off. I don't think that's your goal, but you're happy to say things truthfully, honestly, right? And I'm on Twitter also. People always debate, you know, it's not Twitter in particular, but just should we all just shut up, right? Like, should we protect ourselves? Should we lower the noise level and just not talk? But I find it very stimulating. You know, I try to put people in my Twitter feed who are rewarding.

Like, people who talk about Twitter as just a, you know, a source of terrible things. I'm like, you get to choose who you follow. So what is your relationship with that sort of more social aspect? I mean, you know, I left Twitter for a couple months just to feel the noise kind of calm down and to reevaluate my belief in it. And I came back. And I came back because I do value it. I do find it to be rewarding both, you know, by controlling my Twitter feed and who it is that I'm actually going to listen to. And having the lists of people who I, in a particular mood, well, I want to, I want to see what this list has to say today.

Sometimes I just want to hear about the NBA. Right. Right. Exactly. But I think as a user, you know, it's certainly been enlivening in that. I've met a lot of great people as a result of it. You know, I've made a lot of good connections.

But I love it as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a,

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not out there to try to influence anybody or change anybody's mind about anything, you know, um, so I'm not trying to,

I don't want to shout into the void about, you know, what I'm angry about and, and, and, I, I, I've tweeted plenty about Trump. Um, but usually just because it's an expression of, this is how I am feeling today about this lunatic. And I'm going to scaling back on that I'm trying to do less and less of that.

But I love it as just an opportunity to express what I think and feel about things. And for me, it's usually cinema and a little bit with politics. But Cargo and I spoke about this last night. And Cargo has been actively using his Twitter feed to tweet specifically about writing, about the craft of writing. And he was saying to because I said to, in last night, I said, what do you think I should be doing differently with my feed? You know, because I am getting a little bored with, with the whole world of it. And he was encouraging me to tweet more about the craft of directing.

Yeah. And I thought, you know, that's really true because no one's doing that. Yeah. And I can do that. And I think that that will have value and I think I'll enjoy it. And I love teaching. Yeah. And that's something where I can actually give valuable information that very few people have,

and nobody on Twitter is really doing that. Well, it makes perfect sense, maybe, but it seems like there's a vibrant screenwriting Twitter in a way that there's not a vibrant director. Absolutely true. Yeah, absolutely true. I think, and I think that's unfortunate. I think it should be that way. I think there should be a better...

If I can chime in for a second. You can see Robert Cargill and later that. You take a medium in which you're supposed to write and then you put writers in it and what do you expect? I mean, I'm married to a journalist. They cannot stop on Twitter. Yes. Scientists are much more reluctant. But, all right, that all makes a lot of sense.

This is extraordinarily fun and insightful. So Scott Derrickson, thanks so much for being on a podcast. Thank you.