Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Eric Roth

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Eric Roth is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter best known for adapting Forrest Gump, for which he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He has received additional Academy Award nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Star Is Born, and Dune: Part One, and is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after writers. Roth co-wrote Killers of the Flower Moon with Martin Scorsese and continues to work on major studio projects, including the 2025 film The President’s Cake. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AG1 https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

tetragrammaton. And now I don't want to make this whole thing about death, but I just the thoughts of like, you know, which I'll repeat, but that comment my mother made as she was dying when, who's a lifetime atheist and communist and didn't believe in anything past this and I asked her, are you afraid when she was kind of at the end and she said she was curious. And I thought, well, that was a good place to start with something, you know. you know and then you sent me that beautiful poem about uh that when we're not watching ourselves maybe somebody else is watching us as we move move through something else you know and uh i loved

your book by the way i have it right behind me here he'll stay here now forever thank you so much i'm so glad you like it that was beautifully architectured uh and then you know in all ways in all ways are all stories good for the same reason i think they might be because uh i think you get to unleash the use of words into ideas, trying to put the, as a writer, trying to put the best word in front of the other. Some people are way better at it than others, you know, just to relate to well-known artists, a writer named Dennis Johnson, who I think was one of the great American writers, wrote a short story called Jesus Son that is pretty well recognized as one of the great short stories. And then more recently, I've been friendly with George Saunders, who's a wonderful

combination of words and science. You know, I tried to sort of compete with them in emails. It's like a joke. It's like talking to a poet. But I think it's how they've learned, as the great writers have, or great artists, same thing as painting or something, being able to put one breaststroke in front of another to, you know, to communicate an idea. So in that sense, I think all storytelling is the same and that's just how good you're able to do it but I think it's a cliche probably but probably true that everybody does have a story to tell us like I always believe everybody there's somebody for everybody same kind of thing do stories need a structure and do they need the same structure that I would say neither is true I think that's the that's up to the artist it's however they're

best communicate I mean you know that better than anybody with music that there's somebody will make just a sound and that sound will be everlasting and someone else will do it a different way. I'm pretty traditional in my structure, very Shakespearean, you know, not that I'm Shakespeare, but even though I think Shakespeare said the two greatest lines in the English language, exit ghost, you can think about that for a while.

But, yeah, I think you need that. It was scaring me with AI a little bit. It's now learned to, it learns dramatic function of Shakespeare, so he knows about catharsis and acts. structure and it. And that will then use that to obviously, you know, increase its ability to tell stories. But I think people can tell stories any way they can. I think you just do what you think is comfortable.

I think one thing I've learned, and I think I learned this oddly a little bit from Bob Dylan, just by osmosis, that anything's culturally appropriate in the sense that you can use anybody. else's work to if it encourages you it creates for you something that you hadn't thought about and then it becomes a wide kind of mass of what bubbles over in you something maybe beautiful or corny you know or that i remember was writing something and there was an emmie lou harris duet with like i think lefty friselle or somebody you know and it was like it was always very moving to me And it always kind of just stuck with me. But it helped me to then use that to appropriate that to not a particular song,

but that sound, whatever that felt like, to be able to try to articulate that. So I think there's, you know, haikus. And I wrote a movie a long time ago for, and I haven't told this story, so not that much, for Kurosawa. And he had asked me to help make an anglo. character in his movie called Rhapsody in August. And we had we talked through a translator, but he'd sent me the script, which was translated and it was like a haiku.

I mean, it was just so beautiful, just an ant on an ant hill. And however, he was describing things. It was really, really quite lovely. And then I realized I wrote in this kind of Jewish, intellectual, psychiatric, kind of prosy, you know, and it was so, so different from what the beautiful way he was explaining things. And you know, any artists will do things differently than another. But I think they all kind of have to borrow from each other

and also have to learn through some experience, you know. So you don't get to be Kandinsky or something without spending the time, you know, learning to be Kandinsky. And you don't get to be Rick Rubin without learning. It'll be you. On the psychological note, have you ever done therapy? I have some. Not much.

I had done it individually for a while in like late 60s, early 70s, I found myself kind of straying with my married life, let's put it that way. And I did in a lot of lucigenics, all kinds, you know, with privately and also with like people like Jerry Garcia and stuff. I mean, in other words, lots, lots of, you know,

acid tests and everything else. So, yeah, I had one psychiatrist I found was very enlightening, let's put it that way. And my problem is I get too hung up on kind of the style of the psychiatrist. But they've been incredibly helpful. Then I became psychologists, obviously, when they started just describing drugs. She was pretty amazing, yes. She wasn't intrusive at all.

Very sensitive, but I thought she led us in great areas. Yes, so that's psychiatry to me. How did you connect with a police psychologist? somebody made a recommendation, just her being really strong. And, yeah, I mean, she was really unobtrusive and let us kind of fight it out, you know, where we had to and love it out where we could. And it was important, yeah. She was a great facilitator that way. Have you done my psychiatry at all?

Done a lot of therapy, different kinds. Yeah, yeah, I love that, yeah. And I think it's important. Yeah. Been helpful. Yeah. I think that's part of what, when I, you know, sort of introduce myself to you that I want to go back to that in some form or fashion,

whether it's with a orthodox rabbi or a shaman, you know. What motivated you to reach out in the first place? Oh, well, no, this is why, because I've been having these kind of incredible, I call them the porch sessions, you know, these guys during, I don't know why, right before, I guess more during the pandemic, people just started coming over, want to sit on the porch talk and we could talk six feet away and I don't know I think it's more they were like old man Roth you know what does he have to say and all these people just start showing up you know it's like sometimes announced sometimes I'm not announced and and they've always been I'm sorry I didn't

tape them even though I understand since we have a ring camera they're all on there and I was I was talking to Jed Apatow who we both know together and a couple other people too who love you, James Gray and a few other people and really kind people. And I've just been enjoying this enlightening conversation about things that I wouldn't necessarily normally think about, you know, and how does it affect my work and my children and everything. And everybody said Rick Rubin. And so it was pretty easy, you know.

And then I figured when I text you, you would just never text back and I thought that was cool too. That'd be fine, but you've been very generous with your time. Tell me about the first time you took a hallucinogenic drug. Wow, first time. I was with a group of people in Haydashbury, truthfully, which sounds kind of corny. And someone said, try this. I'm always willing to try, you know. And I've had some pretty scary things but not, I mean, where I never minded like the floor opening up, you know, or all of a sudden I was, you know, sitting in a cloud or I think I had once a experience of feeling like I was having an affair with Time magazine, which was pretty interesting. I don't know what that was all about, but I never felt that I was going to become psychotic, you know, but I could see how it could become psychotic for somebody who has really tremendous fear, you know,

and unresolved things. But I think, you know, from just playing with marijuana and stuff, you know, and having a lovely time through the whatever, you know, the eroticism of it or just the taste of a brownie or some nonsense. you know, but that, I always felt it was expansive to my mind. I was never, I never liked cocaine, though. I just don't like that feeling. I mean, I guess I'm more toward, I'm not advocating this anyway, but heroin or something, you know, more mescaline then or, you know. But, I mean, I think drugs have their purpose, you know, and I guess it's, uh, I've always been interested in trying to find out what's the limits of what I'm trying to think about, you know, and where all this comes from.

I mean, to me, the greatest story where I said to Bob Dylan, what the Bob Dylan thing was that in his book called Chronicles, he talks about, he was at the time with Daniel Lenwa, who I'm sure you knew or know quite well. I think he's gone out. But he was struggling creatively, Bob Dylan, and he took a trip out to, like the Bayou, because they were, I think, working in New Orleans or something, and they went out to Lafayette. He said he had walked into a, in his book, he said he'd walked into a gift shop and he sort of found the secret to everything. It was a card that said, world's greatest grandpa. And so that somehow put together whatever he was struggling with, you know. And I thought, yeah, sometimes it's the most simple thing, yeah. Do you feel like you're the same person now as you were before you took any hallucinogens?

No. No, not at all. I think the same person's in there, but I think it's been re-informed in a way, you know, that at least it opened up the possibilities of things. But I don't want to emphasize this because my life hasn't been, you know, particularly about that. I mean, I think that's a nice afterthought in a sense. I mean, I'm way more interested in, for me, for the creative process is really important, And these things I mentioned earlier about what are my sources am I taking this from?

What I do as a screenwriter is kind of a bastardized form of, it's more of a craft than an art. You can be artful at it. But it's not a novel. You know, it's a fill a page up, a lot of ellipses and half thoughts, but strong visuals, you know. But it's a form of writing, you know, and it's like I've been lucky enough to people have. appreciate, I think, some of the things I had to impart, you know. One of my proudest was more recently with the actor, Josh Brolin. I had written a play of High Noon, we were considering, that he was considering,

and he was very close, and I wrote a play of High Noons, because they had never had a drama on Broadway, a Western drama on Broadway. I was told that Josh was telling people about, he decided not to do it, but his philosophy at the time, at least more recently, was a F. Scott Fitzgerald's story. More of an essay to an extent about life and death and this and that. And he was telling people about it. It turned out I had written it. It was from when I did Benjamin Button, and I had written a speech toward the end of it.

It was actually a speech that Nora Ephron asked me, who was planning her funeral, asked me if she couldn't use it. But it's funny how they attributed it to Scott for Sherald, who I couldn't hold a can. handle to, you know. But in this one instance, it's pretty powerful, I think, about just about life and about how, you know, there's no rules or anything, you know, as long as you're not hurting anybody else. And you can, and if you're not, if you're not succeeding at what you want to, you can just stop and change it, you know. It's easier said to not, obviously, but at least you can have, if you had the courage to go and try something else. Yeah, the idea of a Western on Broadway is a really cool idea. I like that.

Thank you. Yeah, I think it's a pretty powerful play that I, the play itself is very powerful. It's about the blacklist, really, and the movie was, and Gary Cooper and all, and sort of American econography of the whole thing. And it's about guns, and, you know, but I think I made it in hopefully a contemporary way. And, I mean, you'd appreciate this, and sure this is your Mettea anyway, is trying to put some contemporary music in it so that it feels. And the songs are all apt. I mean, there's a Rikudor song across the borderline,

and then somebody you know quite well, and I actually knew earlier than you, Johnny Cash song, which was from Nick Lowe, The Beast in Me, which he used on the Sopranos. Yeah, when I was younger, I was asked by the Cabray Department at William Morris. I was a client of William Morris, and I was pretty young to travel with a bunch of artists,

and they were all just kind of basically jerking off, wanting these little video ideas, you know. There was no MTV then or anything. And so I rode on the buses with Chani, he was the Cash family. And that was really interesting. And then Van Morrison was singing with us back to the audience at that point. And then, of course, great Jerry Garcia, you know, so.

How much do your experiences work their way into your work? Well, I think they do, but I try to make it, I think it's more about what the feeling is and the experience itself necessarily. I mean, the best kind of writing, which I still don't think I've mastered in any way, is subtextual writing, which is probably true about music too,

or certainly about filmmakers. I think Marty Scorsese, he's a great subtextual filmmaker, because even in, like, a taxi driver, all of a sudden there'd be some graffiti on a wall that he decided to show you, but the graffiti didn't say anything of any value. It was just a sense this is an art, and this is part of the city, you know.

So he expressed a lot that way. But, you know, the worst kind of writing is kind of Ernie the explainer. You know, it's like, good morning, Mr. Water, Commissioner, that kind of writing. So you want to try to find a way to have someone articulate what their most intimate concerns are through some other story about something, you know, if you're creating it fine or if it's a true story that comes from life. and that says the same thing without having to do this kind of thing with big headlines. It's a hard thing to do. I think the great musicians do it.

I mean, I think they do it through the lyrics. The lyrics are just spectacular, you know, where they don't necessarily talk about what they're talking about, but you know what they're talking about. As nutrition science advanced through the mid-20th century, researchers began to understand that modern eating patterns, Limited variety, processed foods, and time constraints could leave small but meaningful gaps in daily micronutrient intake.

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ensuring reliability from one serving to the next. It's no wonder AG1 is trusted by the world's top athletes and experts. What was once a futuristic concept? Daily nutritional support in a glass is now the result of applied science. Learn more at drinkag1.com slash tetra. Do it today. When you're adapting a story, how do you decide what's important enough to keep and what you can let go of? That's a great question because, you know, every book that was being given to me, I sit and I read it right and I start underlining what I think this could be dramatically interesting in this.

And all of a sudden the whole book literally is underlined. So now what do I do, you know? But I think he also gives you a sense of which you're very smart about as to what you're not going to use. because you can start coalescing things into where one dramatic moment takes care of four or five. Now, I always warn the author that it might not seem akin to what you wrote, but it will be. In other words, so I hope it will make it better if that's possible.

Or at least it will, it's just a different form because I guess my calling is I'm a dramatist, I guess, right? Hopefully some humor along the way. but that if I'm able to somehow express the human condition in an honest way and somebody could take something from it just even as entertainment, something as far as gump or something,

which was silly at its heart, but there was something was constant about it. And then there are, I think, some more sophisticated movies like The Insider that I did and a few others that I think articulated things that were important, you know, Tell me the story of the insider.

The insider was a guy who wanted to basically get his pension. That's all it was. He was going to retire. His wife was a daughter of a tobacco farmer. He was a very complicated man because he was a scientist, legitimate scientist, had a PhD in something chemistry or something. But you wonder what he was thinking. He was working for the tobacco company.

So he was sort of advocating, you know, the poison that they were putting out there. And he knew all about it, knew what was wrong. He could tell you in a second about the blood-brain barrier. And I had to smoke at the time, so I was aware of it. I couldn't talk to him, though, because he was under kind of a hole from the government. He wasn't allowed to talk. So we had to create kind of a guy in whole cloth. I mean, who was this man?

But the first thing I remember saying, what kind of guy is a tobacco scientist? And he didn't want really very much. He just want to retire and wanted his pension wasn't even very much. But when they said, we're not going to give you your pension, he said, well, I'm going to start talking about what's wrong with this industry, you know. And he was pretty brave. He was a very prickly guy when I finally could get to meet him. Anyway, that was a story, and it dovetailed with 60 minutes, the television show.

They did a report on him, and then they squelched it because tobacco companies didn't want it, but also the government was kind of involved. And it became very complicated with the personalities, Mike Wallace, the interviewer, the great journalist, because I think he was a great journalist, he was unafraid. And so they tried to not run the story and was made the producer nuts

and said, what about the integrity of CBS? And so it became a lot about honor, You know, and I remember Mike Wallace calling me, journalist. There was a man named Lowell Bergman whose story it was. He was a producer of the thing. He was very brave. And he was a great reporter. And he was yelling at me, Mike Wallace.

Well, what makes moral, it makes Lowell Bergman the moral fucking arbiter and that's and that. So I just wrote it down. So it's in the movie. Wow, that's great. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't have said it. Couldn't have said it any better, you know.

Yeah. How often does that happen? where real life works its way into the story? If you have real life people, and this happened in as Killers to the Flower Moon, where we imagine various things that we wanted the Osage to say, you know, and then there was no way I could say it as well as, or Marty or anybody else could say as well as the real people.

I mean, we can give them, we could give them sort of the ideas we want, maybe them to express, and then they turned it into what was affecting them as human, beings and their life stories, you know. So I could have never written that. I'm a kid from Brooklyn, you know. I have no clue.

The only other instance that comes right off the top of my head, it would be on Star is born. I said to Lady Gaga, let's just sit down here and talk and I'll write dialogue for you from what you're telling me, you know. So if you see, and Bradley did the same thing, Cooper, and like the scene in the parking lot where they're just sitting for bullshitting, all that, most of that's written. but it made her comfortable, you know, so when the real person shows up,

they have, you know, either limitations or abilities that you don't even know. And she's an interesting human being. The thing that was so striking about her, we were doing a read-through, and the songs were in there. There was no need for anybody to sing them. Bradley Cooper would just sort of talk them through,

but she started singing and God showed up, you know. I'm sure you know that. She has something. Amazing. Yeah, that you can't. So you have to work with, I think, who the person is. I mean, old story. Russell Crow was not, he didn't understand certain things about his character and the

insider. So Michael Mann had me fly down to Louisville. He said he won't come out of his trailer, all that nonsense. And so I went in there and did Rick Rubin with him and said, is there a way where you can find a happy medium here? And I explained the scene again to him. And he said, I'll try it, you know, eventually. And Michael, the director, is just trying to avoid having a continuing fight with him, you know, which wouldn't have been very productive.

Let's use that case as an example. When there's a logjam like that, what's really going on? What's it really about? I think he had fear. He was afraid, you know? In other words, and if an actor feels he doesn't understand it, whether he's right or wrong. I mean, you need to find a way to articulate to them what you intended. And that doesn't mean you end up with the exact same thing.

The insider, again, I got a call one morning from Al Pacino saying I had written a page and a half monologue. And Al said I could do this with one look. And I said, let me ask Michael, I have no problem with it. And so Michael, so let's shoot it both ways. And they left the look in all the words I wrote word out the window, you know, because he could do it without, you know, without, you know, and I thought that's fine. As a writer, that's something that you can't account for or prepare for an actor who can get the story across without saying the words. There's no way to prepare for that.

There's no way to write for that. No, except for I think after a while you get the experience of that. Certainly less is more if you can, you know, even though I think there's some great monologues. And then as some directors just go like to, you know, cut. We'll take it out because I had a thing recently on, I think, a pretty particularly beautiful movie. that I just finished called Here. We'll see if it works. It might be a disaster.

It's all set in one room over 100 years in a house, and the camera's locked off, so there's no coverage. It's just one angle. But the stories are beautiful of the people that live there, so you don't know what to anticipate, you know. But I feel a storytelling is very solid. How did that come about? Bob Zemeckis, the director, Forrest Gump,

and I have a nice relationship over the, years and I've done some other work for him and he called me he felt it's a graphic novel called here and the artist grew everything from this point of view everything was one way through a window well not through a window but you see a window in the back so we he said you have the right melancholy for it so maybe I do I don't know but I also have a sense of my mortality which is what it's about eventually you know so I could write that and then And he put in some, he's very humorous and kind of farcical and lovely. And, but it's about everything because dinosaurs walk through because anything that happened in that property, marsh birds.

And it's quite beautiful. I will see. Maybe it won't work. I think the tone is right. I start crying like a baby in the first five minutes. But I think it was because the Rachel Portman music was on it. It was really beautiful. So I don't know.

But we'll see. How do most projects originate? Does it usually start with you getting a call from a director or what are the different ways that a project will happen? I think there's everyone you can imagine, you know, like we did one recently. I did with my son called Walt Grace. It's from a John Mayer song, an old John Mayer. I don't know if you know the song, John loves it. And I didn't know John, but my son asked me, you think this is a good idea for a movie?

I said, it's great. It's about a guy who is kind of trapped in life. doesn't have a great relationship with his wife. He has one kid that does love him, one kid doesn't, or doesn't have a good relationship with him. And he has kind of a Groundhog Day life. He designs wings for, like, Lockheed. It's supposed to be set in 1967.

And he decides to build a submarine in the basement, which I don't know how he's going to get it out of there. But in ours, it's like an outbuilding, a garage. And sure enough, he takes off in a homemade submarine where he's got, you know, propellers are made of fans. And from the ceiling, and he's gone to the junkyard, and it's spectacular. So there's also a feeling of yellow submarine with it, I think.

But it's quite lovely, I think. We have some people seem to want to do it actually now. So we'll see. And John Mayer will do the music, I guess. So that's one way it came. Things come. Others are just books sent to me, you know, would I be interested? And it's really about the subject.

And then directors, Dan Evalon, who asked me to rewrite a rival, which I did, and then he asked me to do Dune, you know, so we had a relationship. And Dune was a little complicated for me because it wasn't my favorite book ever written. But it was an interesting assignment as to how to make this the best. And I tried, you know. It's one that's been attempted many times over the years. Yeah. It's a front history.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tricky. I think he did a good job. I think it's my problem with it was on being a little too honest probably, but there's a character named Duncan Idaho in it. Now, this isn't a translation. I mean, we're supposed to be millions and millions. I said, where does this name come from?

I understand the translation of whatever you want, Jamo Jacket, but it's not. But I think it's a prodigious book because he invented a glossary and geography and everything else. And it was a surprise. I mean, I think Starsborn was the most important movie in the more recent times,

not because it's a great movie. I think it is a good movie. And certainly I love the fact that it put me more in touch with the young people because young people really seem to enjoy it, even though it's an old story. But it made me feel vital, you know. And so I was in my 70s, so I said, you can still write that, huh? That, I think, gave me a, you know, I'm not saying I was done, but it did so well. And then all of a sudden they figure I know something still, you know, which is ridiculous.

Is it different writing for theatrical release versus something that's going to be watched on a streaming service? Well, that's a great question because I have tremendous guilt about, I began House of Cards. So Fincher, who's my best friend, I guess, in the world, one of the more loyal people you would ever meet, and I hope you have a time to meet him. He decided to do it with me. And I had actually been aware of it from earlier when we had seen the English version. that Pacino and I and Michael Mann were going to make it as a movie because it's just Richard the 3rd.

It's like, you know, you think these guys are so tough, watch me go in this room and fuck him. And then he'd go in the room and fuck him. How's the English version? I've never seen it. It's the same thing, basically. It's just that the guy is not,

he never wants to go past the station in life he is, which is sort of the whip of the party. In other words, and he's going to just manipulate everybody, you know, It's succession in that way, I guess, or succession is that, you know. And but it caught on. I wanted to sell it to HBO figuring we'd just get water cooler conversation like the Sopranos or something, but people started binging it, you know, and all of a sudden these eyeballs became available.

And I'm not happy about particularly the results, you know. I still, fortunately, get to write movies that doesn't mean they don't go right on streaming, but they start at least with the idea of, but the only one, I think, if there hadn't been a pandemic, I think Dune would have played for quite a while. But with the pandemic, you know, people just sat and watched it home.

Is there any benefit in that idea of binge watching or episodes that you can tell a story over six hours, 10 hours, season after season, as opposed to having to get it into a two-hour film? I've just been presented with that. And I'm not sure the answer. It's the same Dennis, John. I thought, how come they haven't done a movie about the guys who've come home from war, right?

Because every other era has done the best years of our lives, a movie called The Men that Marlon Brando was in. Coming Home, of course, famous one about Vietnam. So they haven't done that for this war. These wars, the Afghanistan, Iraq stuff, you know, and the guys are obviously in bad shape. So I was going to write that, and Spielberg came to me with something else, And I started conflict and the head of the studio.

So why don't you just sell it to HBO? So I did. And he said, they said, who do you want to write us? Dennis Johnson. They didn't know who even was. And I said, I'm getting him. And he wrote five of the most amazing scripts are called Unarmed. Everybody in, it's an ampeteer or a burn victim.

And the only triumph of it is one guy to walk across the street to leave. And it is so spectacular. And it's all written, as I say, in the subtextual way. and we're close now. Catherine Bigelow might do it. But it's important, I think, and we get to use all, we would have all disabled actors,

disabled veterans, and disabled civilians, and I think it would be pretty incredible. I mean, years ago, I was going to do Cuckoo's Nest, and my agent said, they'll never make it. Jack Nicholson was not involved.

And I was friends with Michael Douglas, really good friends. And so I went off to do a movie called the Onion Field. But then they got Jack Nicholson, and I went, oh, my God, I fuck the dog here, man. But I did come back and do rewriting, which was nice. But that has the same tenor of this, the black humor and anger, you know, so I'm hoping that we'll be able to do this.

We'll see, you know. So much of today's life happens on the whip. Square Space is your home base for building your dream presence in a online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in-style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor. No coding or technical experience is required. Understand your site's performance with in-depth website analytics tools.

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They're all very. I mean, I think sometimes events take over. I'd say the movie is different from what the original was with Killers of Flower Moon. I think it might be a more important movie. I had leaned into the Western nature of it, and then Leonardo decided he didn't want to play the hero, and he was right because he was worried that I'm going to be the Great White Hope here, you know, saving the Native Americans.

That's what the book was, and this happens to be fact. But so we went away from that, and they did that Marty did his work and saw the movie. He always was, we always tried together to get the culpability of everybody that people would just walk over dead bodies, you know. In other words, what is that all about? I mean, there's even a great trailer about saying, who is the wolf? You know, and that's the metaphor, right? You can spot the wolf. Don't worry.

And I think they leaned into it the right way. and so that the movie doesn't have that sense of having to do what's sort of the white guy saving everybody. But it's not done in a kind of, I don't want to put her down, Rachel Maddo, but it's not done with headlines, you know. It's done with a great taste. I think Marty's, he's an extraordinary artist, and I would work with him when we're going to work again together. I'll work to the end of the time with him, you know. But he's not always faithful to what you did, so you have to have pretty strong ego, you know. Well, that's what I wanted to ask about, about not being faithful.

Are you ever surprised by the direction it takes? And do you ever come around to think, oh, this is actually better than what I had originally envisioned? For sure, for sure. And I also think things have gone where they haven't gone as well as they could have. For sure. I did a movie called Lucky You that I never understood. I found out why later on that the director had Alzheimer's. but I never understood why he wanted to do it.

I figured, oh, he's going to come in and do something. It's about love story set in Las Vegas, the poker player and Drew Barrymore and Eric Bona. And I thought it was pretty good. And I actually took it from, there was a movie that Elizabeth Taylor did with Warren Beatty called The Only Game in Town, and that was about her playing basically a hooker,

even though they didn't call it that then. And he's just a degenerate gambler. And at the end of the movie is quite beautiful, where he's sitting on the curb and water's running down the curb. And you figure he's just dead, broke, man. He's got nothing left. And she comes sits beside him. And he sort of says, that's the way it goes, you know, if you're going to be a gambler. And he starts taking out $100 bills and making him into little boats and running down the river, right?

So it gets it worked out. But that was supposed to be the feeling of it, you know, what is luck and all that? and it didn't work. It was just no good. So I don't know. I guess I was disappointed, but I think you have to rely on the director's going to realize something, you know. You have to hope they have something.

I mean, I have a sort of philosophy that, and I've worked with everybody, that you have to take a third way. You know, there's your way, there's a director's way, and the director's always going to win. One of the stories I tell occasionally is I did a movie called, This was the Onion Field, actually. And I wrote a, I thought a great scene, and the director kept saying, it's not working.

And I said, yeah, it's really great. You just shoot it. He said, you know what, I'm going to go the other way. I'll leave in the script and not shoot it. And that was the end of that conversation. It wasn't very kind. And I don't think it was very brave of them, but that's the way it goes, you know. So you got to figure out a way to be part of what they need to articulate what their vision is, you know.

And they're the boss. And this is a film, but I don't think it's bullshit. I think it's their film. It's like a musician, and it doesn't go any other way. I think, you know, did a movie called Mank, which was about the guy fighting for credit with Orson Wells, you know, on Citizen Kane. And he set the ball, no question,

he set the boat off with the right architecture and the right journey, but director's got to take it there, you know. And if you don't get there and get to the right place, you're, it's not worth seeing. Do you do a lot of research for the projects? Tremendous amount. I like every, God is in the,

details, you know that. Yeah, I do. But everything, I think everything I read at that point is all gris for the mill, you know, and that's why I'm back to, at 78, particularly, what are the things are going to define? So I'm doing a thing called Rendezvous with Rama, which is an old Arthur Clark book that they've made, it's not that they made 2001, it was written around the same time same philosophy and uh i have an astronaut that's uh been helping me and uh he said when he went out of the spacecraft he just laid back like he was in a bath and looked up with stars you know and so i said okay so uh if i can get that feeling because i think the feeling of this particular piece really dovetails to the things i've been thinking about that the thing

that comes and interrupts these people's world doesn't have to have a reason it might just be God. And some of the people who are like kind of religious believe in this 2130 that Jesus showed up sent by God from the planets. And he just showed up in, you know, Palestine or Israel, whatever you'd like and did what he did. And then they crucified him. He went back up to the planets, you know, and that he's still doing that. So everybody adapts, you know, to whatever their ear is. but I think this overriding sense, and I don't think you can escape it, you get a particular age.

Doesn't mean you have to dwell on a tour and immobilizes you, but I think it spans your horizons, you know, and that's a good way to say it, I guess. When you're writing, let's say, a monologue for character, how important is the content of what they're saying versus this is a great line? I mean, you would like to say,

presidentially that you just want to put the... No, no, I know, but I'm sure you... There's no right answer. I mean, there's only your answer. I think there might... I get you, but I mean, I think it's kind of narcissistic to only dwell on what you think will last, you know. Maybe the whole speech will last and it's more important that way.

But I don't know if I really think about it either way. I mean, I think I try to write what's human. Is this what I do? Someone called me a sappy dog heart. I try to write that will be remembered. I like the fact that I built a legacy of things that I think I chose pretty well. You know, not always.

We've had some monster failures, but I think pretty well, and I still think I continue to choose pretty well. And, I mean, I have other issues, so it gets more complicated. So my mother was very tough on giving love. And so I always felt I needed some validation, right? And I still do.

in my wife's sister. He's eight years old. You feel like you need validation. You need like an Oscar nominee. I said, I don't want to. But it's like I want to go call my mom and say, look, my report card. You know what I'm saying? So there's your psychiatry again.

It's like, yeah, I don't know if I'm getting over it or not. I don't know. I'd like to. That's an interesting thing, though, when our parents pass away, who do you call? You know, when you get good news, you don't have that feeling. No, no. You don't have that thing that you could just share. know that you really love sharing, you know.

Yeah, I think that's true. I guess I think they do with my wife, maybe, you know. She's a doctor and she's pretty supportive. But she doesn't quite get this world I'm in, you know. It's just different, you know. She relies strictly on science. Whatever you say, it's got to be accurate, you know what I'm saying? You can't just make it up.

I remember Fincher being angry at me because in Benjamin Button, And I had some silly speech about with Brad Pitt in the middle of the night at the hotel. I gave her some bullshit about how you have to steep tea and this and that, you know. And David said, this is such nonsense, you know. And he left it in. Have you ever had a mystical experience? I think one, it ended up pleasant. It wasn't pleasant.

I had cancer a couple times in my life. I've been very sick a lot. But I had cancer twice. And the first time I was just 32, and it was directly from my grandfather, colon cancer. And in those days, they just bombarded you. I mean, they just didn't really quite know, you know. And I remember laying in bed, and I'm not religious, and I'm certainly not Catholic, and an angel showed up, and sort of form of a nun, kind of.

And she says, time to go. And I said, I didn't really wouldn't want to go yet. And I love my wife, and I love my kids. and can we just forestall this, you know? And she thought about it and said, okay. So, I don't know, that was my wish fulfillment, you know, but it felt real, it felt real. Beautiful.

I mean, the other thing, the other side of it, the bad side of it is when I, I think when I get afraid or I don't want to see certain things, I imagine rats are going around. I see a rat run across the ceiling or something, you know, something weird like that. That's about as mystical. I think I feel more mystical when I'm writing

that I can feel what imbues me, you know, what makes me sore and at least makes me feel like I'm soaring. And I don't know, I wish I could say I did mystical. I'm not sure I completely believe in magic. So I wish I did. So, I mean, I think that's what I'd like to learn how to, honestly. When you've had that feeling of soaring while you're writing,

is it just that the lines are coming? It's like, oh, this is good, this is good. is good. Describe it. It feels like you've, I love to go swimming in a lake in the summer where it's just cold and feels like you're coming alive, you know, and that's what it feels like. And you don't have to judge it. And you don't even know, because it's so corny the way I do it. I say out loud, the dialogue and the worst acting known to man, the voices never change, you know, any of that. And yet you feel like, wait a minute, you're not Mozart. This isn't coming right to you or you You only have to erase a buck a note, you know.

But you do feel like you're imbued with something. I don't know what it is. And I guess that's a creative spirit that you, and if it works, it's great. Even if it doesn't work, if you can try it out, why not, you know? Do you always write dialogue out loud? Pretty much. I have the, I say you just character. It's so bad.

It's embarrassing. So you'll basically act it out for yourself. It's less acting. I sort of almost whisper it, you know, like to see. I don't know why. to see if it feels right, I guess. And I also learned a long time ago, there was a director, Michael Chimino,

and he had prepared a wallet for Mickey Rourke, so Mickey Rourke knew where he came from. I'm sure Mickey Rourke never looked at the wallet. But it had a fortune from a fortune cookie in there, a picture of his daughter, his draft card, and this and that. And his point was that every single character has to have their own voice.

Every single character has to have their own psychological makeup that they came from something, they're going to go somewhere. And I took that to heart. So I think that's a big key about how, with the dialogue kind of thing, that everybody sounds different and interesting and doesn't have A, follow B, and says something off the cuff. And, I mean, in other words, where you try to make it as real as possible. Do you know all of that about the characters before you start,

or does their character come into focus as you're writing? When, as I'm writing pretty much, unless there's something so, to find for them in a book or something where you don't want to make the audience go crazy, you know. No, I think, like this one I'm writing with this rendezvous with Ram, it's a thing called that, that I've slowly kind of made this commander, this ship into somebody that was not really there and whatever I felt he should be, you know. And you just start describing things like, you know, I think I wrote that he has, he's very taciturned, but he has a great sense of irony or something.

So wherever that took me, you know, that was my first impression of him. And a lot of it's just, what I will say is that almost, I think every movie I wrote except from Munich began and end with the exact same scene I wrote, almost everyone. Yeah. And do you start with the beginning and the ending? Is that typical? Typical. I always want to know where I am to begin with and where I end.

The middle is a big mess. Have no clue, which is, I think, part of the fun. You get to take a journey, you know, and discover people. and things and things you'd never expect. If you do it well, great. If you don't do it so well, it's not so pretty. But it's, yeah, I mean, I think it's wonderful. And then I'll find that I'll really struggle over the first, like,

25, 30 pages or 20 pages and think I'm just not going to get through this. And all of a sudden, on page 70, you know what I'm saying, and then you're done. Something unlocked something. And I never fight it, which I think is what happens with people with like, when they get this fear of continuing. you know, in the blank page and all that stuff, riders block.

I just changed the weather. And I was making it rain or snow, and all of a sudden you look at it differently, you know. Do you always change the weather for story, or do you ever do something to change your condition to allow the change? I think I do both. Yeah, I think that will lead me to do something differently. Yeah.

Like, might you go for a drive or, you know, do something different instead of just sitting at the desk? That's exactly right. Now, that's exactly right. I'm very hidebound and kind of this has to do with, I think, with being born in the late 40s and being a 50s and 60s kid. Look it as a job in that way. I mean, I formally go to work. I get up, you know, whatever time, the same day as it's gotten earlier.

I've gotten older and try to do the Marshall McLuhan thing, stretch out the amount of hours available. But this came for a little bit from John Cheever, who I'd read, got up at 7 or 630, got draft. put his hat on, his tie on, his suit on, took the commuter train into New York, had rented a small basement, I think basement, a boiler kind of room place under apartment building where he worked from, took his pants off, folded them really neatly, sat in his underwear, took his hat off, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, 12 o'clock chime went off got up went and had a three martini lunch came back wrote till four put the suit back on they went to the computer you know took the computer trade home and so he felt

that was a job i mean there's a lot a lot of artists do that a lot don't you know so i don't think there's no rule for the same way you asked about how do you approach these things and what would you you know is everybody's different how they did and i think i'm sure you find every musician you work with this different you know can you work on more than one project at a time. Try not to, but the good news would be if they start dovetailing where you're rewriting one and starting another. I have the next year pretty well laid out.

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Does the breakthrough moment happen at the beginning of a project? Like, let's say you're asked to adapt a book. read the book, and as soon as you have an idea of, this is my way in, is that the big breakthrough, or does it happen later? It couldn't do either. Like, I read a book called Damnation Spring, I was looking at the book, that I assumed it was going to be about something it quite wasn't, but I'm going to make it about what I thought it was going to be.

That's great. I thought it was going to be about Moby Dick with the Redwood trees. It's about a logger and his sort of... of a cantanker's kind of guy and cutting, cutting down trees, cutting down trees. And it's not quite the story. And I wanted to make this guy be tall as Redwood as his Moby Dick, you know. And eventually, I don't want to give it away, but what I think he does with this. But I also like to, where as I say gods in the details, I love to go off on tangents.

Like I want to do what a like of a tree is and why do trees survive nuclear to holoca. and how do trees, how their roots join together and all these things we just don't see or know about, you know. There's a book called Overstory. It's spectacular that way about sort of like short stories about trees and things you never thought about. And so I love that. So that's part of the, you know, the excitement of doing something new.

And then there are other times you just kind of founder along and then all of a sudden something just hits you and you get it, you know, and you, in least you think you get it. You know, you don't know until it's all said and done, and then you have to give it to somebody else and all that stuff. But once you write, fade out, and you just feel pretty good for about an hour, you know, and then you think you fuck the whole thing out

and you think you could do it all over, you know. What's typical length of time that you'll work on a script? I used to work about a year. I've cut that down just because I really want to get more things accomplished with a limited time. So I think it's like five, six months now probably, and it's probably shorter than I would rather, but I think I have to.

And then I made the script shorter too. I used to do really long, like 180, 90, 200-page scripts. Do you think in going from a year to five or six months for a script that the scripts have gotten better or worse? I think it's the material, you know. Probably some of us is better because I think, I've learned a few experience word, how to say things, which I, before try.

to say in 17 different words and now could say twice and also have a certain, obviously, technique about how to tell who people are and identify their personality. But every single thing I write does sort of give the same problem, how are you going to articulate this the best possible way and how you can tell the story and is the story going to mean anything? I want to mean something, not to just fill up space, you know. Is every great movie about something bigger than what the story of the movie is? I think so.

I think so. I think it's something that's lasting. Yeah. I think you've done something of value. I think that's true. I hope that's true. Is the theme of the movie the same as the moral of the story? Well, that's interesting.

Well, I happen to write toward theme, and I think theme is most important rather than story. Most people completely confused story with theme. but I think you also have to know what the thing is eventually going to be about. Tell me what the theme is, that's why I'm asking. Is the theme the moral? I would say that's a little facile. I think it's more than that, Rick.

I think it's what makes something profound and not profound, and it's not for me to judge it's profound. You know, I'd rather pruss for her life to look at that, you know. But I know on Killers of Flower Moon, Marty wanted to do this culpability. about people being culpable with this destruction of these people. And how do we do that? And so it's really interesting to figure out how to do that.

And I knew that made this thematically more than just this murder mystery kind of thing. This made it about the sort of sadness and the destruction and the quality of what human beings do to one another, the worst part and what could be the best, you know, what's justice and all that. I mean, in other words, so I think it becomes where you'd like, like to make it feel profound. I mean, that's a, that's pretty arrogant to make you think you know what that is, but at least you, to yourself, you feel like I really said something here, you know. Can the theme always be reduced to a couple of sentences? Should, should, should, best of all. Yeah, I think should. Yeah, I guess that's another thing I've really learned was, you know,

every boy's kid about less is more, less is more, less is more, less is more, less is more. I think, and I would like to learn more about that. You know, I think still I probably overload my life and things I do, but maybe sitting and being quiet is fine too, you know. My wife says that, you know, she says, don't take somebody not answering you on a text, meaning anything. She's just silence, you know, and she's great that way. And I think I wish I could get that.

You know, that thing goes back to that validation. What the hell they didn't answer me? back, you know? And the silence is what I'd love to get to. You know, I think that's, that's what I think I'd like to lead to. And maybe that seems a little cliche about wanting how you want to end things, but I'd rather end in quiet, you know, in a certain way. Otherwise, it's just a fucking noise, man. It just seems too much. Do you watch a lot of movies? Yeah, I watched like every day, almost. And I like, I'm going to go today. I go like once or twice a week. Yeah, I, I'll watch. I love them. I mean, even if I don't like him, I like something about it.

I like sitting in theater, big screen, I like something, you know, 40 feet. I mean, not that I don't watch a movie on television, my phone like anybody else. But, yeah, I love to, I love that moment where something really moves you, a sound. I mean, I remember in all quiet in the Western Front last year, there was a sound of just music. I'm sure it was music as they were going into battle or something. It was so profound. I mean, it was profound. I was too much.

It just soaked into your inside you and your vertebra. You know, it's like that sound was so powerful. I mean, I'm such a wish, I guess if I had two things that I didn't do in life, I wish I'd become a novelist, but I was always afraid, and I wish I had the ability to do music. I think musicians, which I said to Greg, are the most non-judgmental people. I don't know if you feel that way,

but non-gengmental, carry their art with them, I don't really care much mostly about race of anybody. Just want that music to sound, you know, and it's just transcendent to me. I don't know really how to, I wish I could describe it, you know. And you know how. There's always grass is always greener. I know that actors always wish they were musicians

and most musicians wish they were actors. Really? Is that true? I didn't know that about musicians. I never knew a musician. It wasn't basically except for whatever their, you know, problems with drugs or whatever else trying to recreate experiences and get that feeling all the time. I never knew they want to be actors. I thought they were pretty happy with what they did, you know, if they're successful. If you're not successful, it's a whole different world.

Have you ever been asked to work on an adaptation and read the book and just felt like I don't see a way into this? Well, I've done it slightly differently. I've started it and I realized I can't do it and I sent the money back. I've done that like five, six times. And not because of the quality of the book. It just didn't, I just, I thought I saw something in it that I just didn't ever see. And then I never thought it went, went where I'd like it to go, I guess, which might be just my arrogance, not the books. Yeah. And then the other way around are there for times where you'll see something that you think it's either not good or doesn't have much potential. And then it turns into something really great without your involvement.

Yeah, most times actually. But the famous quotes are bad books and bad plays make great movies. So, yeah, because they're sort of, you know, you. You know, so people ignored them. And I would get Farras Gumped that. I mean, the book, to me, I mean, rest of soul, the man who wrote it. But it's just farcical, you know, sort of silly. And I'm not sure I made anything more than silly, but at least it had a heart to it, you know.

Was it a popular book before the movie? No, not much. And how did you come to the book? I came to the book through, I worked with Tom Hanks on what turned out to be a real, bad movie that we were had a whole different approach to which was called the postman which was a post-apocalypse thing that I tried to do as candide with he had four mules and he said they were called John George Ringo and I don't know Sarah you know saying and and it was funny it was sarcastic I was supposed to be sort of like Lilliput it was like

Gulliver and he's in this you know dystopian world and he's supposed to be an ex postman and so it had this kind of whole tongue and she looked to it and also, I liked it. I don't know if it was any good, but then 10 years down the line, Kevin Kossner made a very serious movie out of it. And I want a Razzie, which means you made the worst of your movie the year. So, yeah, I don't think you can quite know, you know, but it has to, I mean, to me, and especially now, it really has to speak to me in some way that I feel like it can be additive to

but you know, there's no point in just retyping it. So did Tom bring you the book? Is that how it started? No, the woman who had the book of the postman also owned Forrest Gump. And they had tried a couple scripts with the author and somebody else at one of the studios. And she said, what do you think of this? And I said, well, I like the way it transports you over the years and his kind of constant belief in God. The girl Jenny and his mother, you know, it's kind of interesting.

him being challenged, which we couldn't do anymore. But I thought maybe I could say some things about how I felt about where I grew up and how I grew up and what turmoil was in the world. And then the director's a stick in your eye kind of guy, but equal opportunity stick in your eye. And he doesn't care if you're a Democrat progressive. He puts, you know, Marilyn Monroe's picture in the bathroom, the White House, that kind of thing with the Kennedys. And he just didn't care, you know. The thing struck the nerve, though, and even though I don't think,

it's funny how that movie lasted, boy. It's kind of amazing, you know. People really grew to that. But you don't know, you don't know. But as long as it occupies, it occupies sort of the most important part of your life in that way, I mean, equal with your children and wife and everything.

That's when you get up, you can't wait to go. I like to, I like to be able to know what I'm going to write the next day. So I don't have to be anxious about it. So I won't write that. But I'll just sort of, you know, sort of scrap it out. And then be ready to write it the next day.

So I know I have something to start with, you know. Yeah, I have almost the opposite, I think. I like having a schedule where I'm showing up to do something. But if I think too much about what it is that I'm doing, then I'm already working on it before I get there. And then it undermines it. Wow, that's interesting. So I try to keep a distance from the work when I'm not in the moment with it.

Nice. I love that. I mean, I would be afraid of that. I would be afraid I wouldn't be able to get back into it or something. I don't know. That wouldn't carry over. Yeah, I like that feeling of coming to it new. I love that.

Wow. Every day like I've never seen it or heard it before. Wow, wow. But I do, see, I'm so hidebound that I'm opposite to you completely is that I read from page one every day. Wow. I think there's something to that, though, because context really is everything. And if you understand the flow of the information, I imagine it would be easier to continue it than to just pick it up where he left off. Yeah.

So it's like I just was looking here that I want him, I'm going to put into this particular Rama thing that I want him, his opening line to be, I am a navigator. So I love that what that could mean, you know. It's a great line. Yeah, I haven't thought about it. And then all of a sudden I said, well, that unlocks a bunch of things, you know, what this guy wants to do. And I have a thing with him where his wife supposedly had died and he went back in the service. But people live, they can live to 140 and such. It's supposed to be 2130.

But anyway, she said, you'll see me in your dreams. And he hasn't seen her in his dream. Until he gets into a certain part of this alien ship they get into that has a water feature to it. And he gets in the water. And all of a sudden it opens up all these other. things like an hallucinogenic kind of thing where he starts seeing her and i think it can be beautiful i think it'd be beautiful sounds great i like also someone saying you'll see me in your dreams it's beautiful yeah i say somebody said that in a song i think i think i think in the song yeah yeah i get a lot from the music

um one of the ones i took was um i don't know the group's name you probably know where he says over and over i can't take my eyes off of you yeah it's a really favorite song yeah i just love that It's a standard. There's so many different versions of it. I'm not sure which is like the original. This one was not somebody, a group I knew, but he says it like 30 times in a row, you know. And I use that in this thing I did with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, where he, first time he looks at her, says, I can't take my eyes off of you. So I know that's a good romance line. How does poetry work its way into your work? Well, I'm really well read, and I'm really interested in what the words are one in front of the other.

You know, why do people put these in this order? And some are so much better at it than others, you know, and that the poetry to me, I think, is a sense of feeling that it's the same sort of soaring you get and then starting to believe that maybe this actually is poetry. I don't know if it is, but you start feeling. like it could be, you know, it's just pretty freeing that you're now writing something. But that can either dovetail or it can conflict with the director. Some love you to try to be as expansive as you can be with prose and poetry and others don't like it. I mean, they feel like it inhibits their process.

And for instance, David Fincher is, as I say, I think he's a savant in some kind. He's just a genius. But he likes things really logical. He wants to fall away and like that. And you have to explain to him why it isn't. And I like that too. I mean, I think that that really presses you into rethinking what you thought you could just sort of willy-nilly throw out there, you know, to the universe. And for him, he needs to understand it and that it makes some sense what you put and adds to something else.

While others are much more gracious in saying, go for it. You know, Marty, Marty's that way. Marty will let you, if you want to write the movie backwards, so let's try it, you know. Let's try it, yeah. The directors are interesting people. Tell me about the different styles of the directors you've gotten to work with. How different are they? What do they expect from you and what they're like to work with?

Well, Marty is, Marty's very generous during the writing process, a little more reclusive when he's about to go make it. So he then takes over. I think he inhabits the movie then that I think it's part of my job to that. have them understand the movie that they're going to make, oddly. You know, in other words, this is what I can tell you, I think it is, and whatever you can add to that would be amazing. You know, if you have a point of view, Fincher's Rough. We argue like crazy, but he has something in mind that I want to try to get to for him.

Tell me about an argument. Like, what's the kind of thing you would argue about? He would say to me, he'd read it back to me, and said, this makes no sense. And I said, what do you think everything you say that makes sense? You know, we'd get, that's how we'd have an argument. And he says, well, that's just your writer and you thinking you're going to bring out words that are going to, you know, somehow attribute back to you. I mean, you get very personal. He also, I know he knows, he knows things about me with the validation stuff.

And he said, oh, you want to win an Oscar, whatever it is. But no, we would, I'd sat behind him during Mank and he would turn around. What do you think? And I'd say, well, I don't know, David, blah, blah, blah. And he said, well, you're wrong about that, you know. But we signed to fight it out and get to where we. I mean, we always love each other. He's a most loyal man, I know.

Most loyal man I know. So he's that way. Deney is very visionary. He said that he felt that I was the kind of the spiritual quality of Dune, you know, because I got that hallucinogenic, you know, that whole tribal thing. And early I work with a man named Bob Mulligan who did kill a mockingbird. He was very generous guy. Those guys in that era were very,

sort of Playhouse 90, if you remember that, or television. Yes. That's what they were steeped in. And I'm not talking about deep theater. I'm not talking about Glass Menagerie or something. But they got telling dramatic stories from stage plays in a way, they were television shows. Stuart Rosenberg was another one.

He did Cool Hand Luke. He was going to introduce me to Paul Newman, who I became friends with for life. I walked on the sit when I was like 19 or 20 with my, they needed rewriting and went down to Lafayette, Louisiana, and I bought a new pair of corduroy's and I had a new briefcase and Paul said our saviors here. I don't think so, but we were friends for life and, you know, and I stay friends with a lot of these people. I like to maintain relationships with them. I think they all expand my universe, I think, you know, and in the main, a few little times. toxic. You were saying about scripted versus ad libing earlier when you were talking about Starsborn. And in a way, it sounds like it stemmed from an ad lib. You got them to talk to you,

and then you organized it and refined it, but it starts with an ad lib. No, you're 100% right, and I think it started more with Bradley Cooper, first directing assignment and not really, I'm not saying he doesn't know music, but it's not his life. He wanted to portray a character that he created. I suggested him he should use Sam Elliott's voice. That's the huskiness that he kind of has there. So I think I was going along.

I rewrote that. I mean, because what they gave me, I just didn't like. And I said, I have to start from scratch. And I said, I'll do it really fast, but we all do it together. So in three in the morning we were changing, you know, but there was that ad-lib stuff, you're right. It was, or the improvisation would probably be better than ad-lib.

improvisational quality of it, but also it had an accuracy, because Lady Gaga knows what that life is. Bradley maybe doesn't know it to that extent. I was going to say, other than the dialogue, how much descriptive writing do you do in a script? A lot, a lot, probably too much, probably too much. But I think it, some directors like it because it establishes a tone. It gives kind of wonderful, I think, visual possibilities. I just wrote, I realized I was reading. I'd written about James Cook, the navigator, the explorer, and I was writing something about that

he had docked his ship somewhere in the Antarctic and letting the men have Christmas Eve celebration, and they got cold and they went down below, and he stayed up, and he sang, he started singing silent night by himself, but I thought, I love that, but I said, I don't know if I had the boat right, and so I looked at the boats, and I forgot they had those. oil lamps. So I put the oil lamps in, you know, and they're rocking. And I said that somehow refers to it. And then we cut from that to the spaceship in 21, 29. That's kind of a junky ship. It's supposed to be a work ship. But it's very sterile. And the people inside are very sterile. And they're like monkish almost because they go for seven months without doing anything. And they're

supposed to be putting these beacons up on asteroids to warn people about the asteroids coming. Anyway, it's quite different than the oil lanterns, you know. So I love that. Yeah, so I do put a lot of pros in there, but I think it's my downfall in the sense of it because I want to be a novelist, so this is the way I can do it. People still let me do it. They don't let most other writers do it anymore.

But I think it does impart to the director what I think it's going to look like. Some get annoyed, say, why do you have to just talk so much? So I said, okay. In an adaptation, how close do you feel like you need to stay to the original material? Depends on how good I think the original material is, you know. And then there's the other side of what does the audience expect? And I don't know that. Somebody's there.

Somebody's, you're looking at somebody. No, I thought I saw a feather out the window. It's strange. Oh, I love that. It's like I thought of bird. Oh, that's not strange. That's far as gump. It was a bird, but it was just a feather.

So maybe it was a bird holding a feather, but I couldn't see the bird. I could just see the feather. It's like, that's strange. That's interesting. I like that. It was beautiful. I just put up a hummingbird feeder yesterday. I'm a big hummingbird person.

Beautiful. And yeah, I put, I had my window at where I lived in Malibu in the colony there. I had a window that I didn't look at the beach because that's too distracting to me. I was looking at a tree and these hummingbirds just kept coming and coming. And my parents died that particular year, and somehow my mother somehow related to me, Hummingbird. And then I put it in Benjamin Button where David let it stay, where Brad Pitt's on the sea, like the Atlantic Ocean. And he's just been, he was on a tugboat and got crashed by a submarine, which was true story. And he was on now like a boat that he was safe.

And he looked down and he saw a hummingbird come up out of the sea. And he said, how did that get here? And I know how it got there. It's like a Robert Hunter lyric, right? Like, where did that come from? So, yeah, that's the adaptation part of it. Yeah. Are you superstitious?

I am to a certain extent. Are you? I don't think so. No, I think I am. I may have been at times. I don't think I am right now. But most people don't think they're superstitious, even though they're superstitious about things.

It's kind of funny. They think that's science in some way. I like to gamble, so I play horses. So I'm superstitious about that a little. Do you go to the track on a regular basis? Yeah, I go once a week. And I sit with guys who are 800 years old. What's the first time you went to the track?

My grandfather, a little Russian man, barely spoke English, spoke Yiddish, and I spoke Yiddish at the time. And he would take me, he had four loves in his life. He loved boxing, which I did, I fought. And he loved the horses. I'd go with him when I was like six, seven. years old. He loved baseball. We'd go stand on an apple box at Ebbets Field, and he loved fishing, and I still love fishing. So did you grow up on the East Coast? Yeah, Brooklyn. I wasn't for some reason I thought you grew up on the West Coast. Bedford's Tivis until a certain extent. Then I went to

high school out here. Has there ever been a window where you've stepped away from horse racing, or has it been a continuance since six or seven years old? I think I stayed with it the whole time. It's amazing. Yeah, but I like, I like, but that's, that would, That would be superstitious stuff. I like all sports, I guess. But I think I am super suspicious to a certain extent about some things. I'm not OCD about it. I won't count steps backwards or anything.

But I think I am, yeah, I'm interested that you're not. That's kind of interesting. But I hope to know what you think of magic and stuff, you know, it's just close to superstition. Well, I believe in magic. So I don't know. Yeah, I think you might. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what. But it's like someone, I can't remember who told me this, believes in a thing called manifestation, that if you manifest things, you can make them come true. And maybe that's true. Well, I think we do. Yeah, I guess we do. We envision these lives and they've appeared and it's unbelievable.

Does it make sense? No, it makes no sense, but you're able to inhabit them, you know? And that's how I feel about characters I write. I'm able to inhabit them, even though I may not know much about them, except for the psychological thing that everybody has this different, you know, and some things I don't understand because I don't understand the person, but I try to make him not understandable

and to some extent, but then you find that the character may understand himself better than you think you did, those kind of things. I think there's a reality to writing these things, you know. Is it harder to write for women? Probably is, but I haven't found it to be. I mean, I think they all have the same properties.

I mean, I don't know. Then we get into the whole sexual conversations with scenes, and I don't know if men are women, I don't think men are women the same that way particularly. But I think I've written a lot of good women. I mean, I think that they, you know, I think I wrote a beautiful character with Kate Blanchett and Benjamin Button, where she's a ballerina. You know, I thought it was pretty lovely. But I always infuse these things with time, like in that was like sort of the sliding doors idea where if something didn't happen, another thing didn't happen, another thing didn't happen, then she wouldn't have been hit by a cab, you know, that kind of thing.

And I love that. I love the randomness of things. And I did the same thing in Forrest Gump, you know, is he just flying around or is it destiny? I don't know the answer to any of that. So maybe I believe in Magic, you're probably right, you know. Yeah. I remember in Forrest Gump, I don't know if they were reenactments or actual old footage used. Do you remember?

Those are old footages, yeah. Did you write it in the script that we're going to use this footage from this event? In some cases, I didn't, some, they researched what would happen. Like I had, for instance, he's supposed to have been an All-American. And with the University of Alabama, they won the national title or something. And so he went and visited Kennedy, you know. And I have him visit him John, Lyndon Johnson as a veteran from Vietnam. And he gets shot in the butt.

And Lyndon Johnson makes a joke out of it. The interesting thing about that was that that was all brand new technique. The only one who had done anything like it was Woody Allen and Zellig. So Bob, who's the back that's sort of perfected this, but if you look at it

now, it's so rudimentary. It's a little silly, you know. But he's always, this thing here has a whole longer conversation for us about,

basically about AI, but this first, this deep fake stuff where they, the movie will have Tom and Robin Wright off stage say, hi, mom and dad,

this is Margaret, and he'll walk into the living room. And they'll both be, they'll be 22, years old. Tom will look like he's right out of big and she'll look like she's out of Princess Bride. So I don't know. The morality of all that gets really tricky. I don't know how I'm also curious how this will affect music. Had you seen Zellig and realized I can use this technique in Forest Gump? It's a really radical idea. This guy can be in these different places and we can

use actual footage. Yeah, I'm pretty visual and I thought, well, I think we can do this. Yeah, I think if someone knows how to do it, yeah, we can put him in that scene. And even worse, I know when it's quite done it, but I could put words in people's mouths they never said. So John Kennedy could have said, I love Hitler, you know, I'm saying to him, whisper it to him. And it's obviously you're taking liberties there. But, you know, we had whatever he said and he laughs and this and that. So they linked it to something that was part of another all-American ceremony. And then they just put him in there, you know. Yeah, I don't know how I envision that.

It just happened, you know. It's just something that came out of the blue. It's a radical idea, and I think it's as significant in the long-term success of the movie as anything else about it. Oh, no question. No question. Yeah. Oh, I think so. And that's magical again.

So we just had never seen anything like it before. And that idea of seeing a fictitious character in a familiar real-world situation. is very interesting. Yeah, it's very odd. And there was, do you remember the comedian on the radio, Phil Henry? Yes.

Yes, he did all those kind of different voices. He was kind of nasty, a little racist, but somebody called me and said, you need to listen to Phil Henry tonight. So he said he's announcing Faris Gump is dead. So I said, I joined in and I said, hi, I'm the writer of Farst Gump. And yeah, we're sad to say.

And I see Quentin Tarantino just did that with, with once upon a time on Hollywood, the character that Leonardo played, he said was dead, that he had died. So sometimes, yes, confusing what's real what it is. What are your all-time favorite movies as a fan? I love a movie called Amhercord that Fellini made.

It's like a dream. 2001 is probably my most favorite. Godfather, too, probably the ones that are traditionally, you know, that most people would... I was talking yesterday with somebody. I used to, when I was young, much younger, I loved the movie Giant. I thought that just summed everything up for big movies, and I watch it again.

It's not very good, you know. But there's that James Dean being heroic and climbing up and getting oil and Elizabeth Taylor, and there's something very American about it. I'm very American in my own way. I love things about America, what, that are... I think it's very moving about people who put their lives in jeopardy and then there's an ideal that we used to have. I hope we still have. I don't know.

We have a very rural place in Montana and I'll talk to these guys and we have completely different points of view. And fortunately, we'll be able to get over them, you know, just so we can have other things to talk about. But it's just a shame the country is so divided about the things that we all care about. I don't know what that's all. I don't know what's happened. You know, there's so much hatred and racism and everything else, you know. Are there any things that you firmly believed when you were young that now you've gone 180 on? Yeah, I think, well, my parents were both died in the world communist.

I was a red diaper baby. I can't tell you the number of times we stood in the rain to free the Rosenbergs. And I think their intentions were all the good, but they forgave the same fault to those people that, you know, You have to forgive all sorts of things. And my dad was a communist till his dying day, you know, and he thought even Stalin was pretty great, you know. So those are things that just don't resonate anymore that way. I think as American Communist Party members, they probably had some good beliefs about sort of socialism, you know, that, you know, how can you help people? And I think that was good.

The other thing is this since I've had cancer. and stuff, I'm not afraid of dying, but I am so interested in what I thought was kind of constant and it's not anymore about as you get older, what are these things that come toward the end of things? And what can you expect and what you can't? And I think I probably earlier on felt, well, you know, maybe it's X, Y, or Z. I even thought the other day, we were in London, outside of London, in this beautiful old cathedral, 9th century or something. and I said, what if it was all true? That's maybe all this was, there was a Jesus.

I mean, maybe that, never mind that, maybe all Buddhism, to whatever it is that all what we think is just, you know, made up mythology, but what if some of it's true? I mean, maybe it could be, so why not? Why not open your mind? I remember Tom Hanks once yelling at me. We were having, he was evangelical, I think, early on in his life. And we were talking about religion, and I was saying something kind of,

atheistic and kind of adamant about it. And he said, how do you know? And I said, I don't know. I don't know why I think I know. And I think that's the big difference. You know, you assume you know so much. And then that's your ego, narcissism and all. And then you find out you are wrong about many things. It's like, you know, I used to love to, this was before TSA and all, but I followed Joan Diddyan in the sense. So I was actually friendly with her and John. But she would sit in an airport. and write about people as they came off of planes. That's how she would design characters.

And I did that for a little bit. And then you realize, well, you're wrong about these people. You know, you have certain ideas you're going to create. Yeah, it's a fantasy, yeah, yeah. It's fun to do, but you're just always surprised. You're judging a book by its cover, and you figure this tattooed beast, and then all of a sudden they start talking about Keats or something.

You know, it's like, what the hell? I love that. I remember we were, Tupac Shakur came in to actually read for Forrest Gump to play Bubba. I didn't know who he was. Then he was renting a house in the colony and he was sitting on this stoop and he said, Mr. Roth. I said, I came over and I said, how were you? And I knew he was Tupac Shakur at that time. And he said, you don't remember I had tried out for that.

I said, why would you try out for that? I said, I don't know. I wanted to try something different and I want to find out who I was. was and this and that. There you go. Book by the cover, you know. And then here's this great artist, yeah. Great, great artist, yeah. Did you ever see Unforgiven? Oh, yeah, I love that movie. Yeah, I love the writer, David Peoples. He wrote Blade Runner also. Wow. He's amazing writer. And then I rewrote him on Munich, and I know him quite well. He's about my age. He's incredible writer. There used to be a whole world of screenwriters that were only screenwriters, not writer-directors.

Well, there's very few left, but Bo Goldman was probably one of the better writers ever. He won an Oscar for Harold and Melvin and for Cuckoo's Nest. We call both sides of the plate, you know. One of the things that was interesting, I remember when I saw Unforgiven, I bring it up, because up until then, in a Western, you expected the good guy was a clear-cut good guy, and all of the attributes he had was noble, and the bad guy was the bad guy, and he was evil. and Unforgiven broke that mold. Completely.

And it feels like maybe everything changed since then, that idea of just the good guy versus the bad guy, maybe that became obsolete with that movie. I think it probably did. I mean, to some extent, except for they have big super action heroes. And, you know, so I don't know. You know, those are the black hat and the white hat.

You wear the white hat. You're the hero. Black hat. You're not. I tried to write a movie for, Clinties, a Western, his last Western, and Bradley Cooper got me involved. And he said, the only thing I don't want is you to do a sequel to the Unforgiven. And I said, I get that.

So what I did was invent him as an ex-outlaw that this supposed to be 1906 at San Francisco earthquake. And he's a kind of policeman in, quote, Chinatown for that era. And somebody comes back because he had been a. an outlaw in the olden days who he supposedly killed a person's father and he came back and stabs him and this and that and then he says he's dying and they they have this whole journey to take him home and what happens along the way these people when bradley cooper plays his son but the big point of it was he's he was completely full of shit he had never been an outlaw and he created this whole myth for himself and so when you have to when he had to get in trouble

kind of at the toward the end of this he got himself out of it by being brave and he didn't have to make up a story but i love that i love the whole idea that so did clint he said oh my god the idea of just attending you're somebody and everybody giving you you know your props for that and turns out to be feet of clay you know yeah but then it turns around it's beautiful yeah that's what i did at the end i turned it around for him yeah yeah but would you say every story is a love story yes 100%. Yeah, I mean, I think what is the only thing we can't define love? I mean, it's probably the most primordial important thing there is, probably, right? I don't know if you can define. I can't define it. Maybe other people can. How far can you stray from the archetypical Hollywood movies, happy ending, romantic tension, conflict?

Are those rules to follow or can you break those rules? Well, I think you can break any rule. But I think you always will end up oddly with the same Shakespearean structure. Like the perfect example is Pulp Fiction. He told the story backwards and forwards. But he still had to have a beginning, a middle that has a beginning that states the problem, the middle that exacerbates it, has a catharsis, which leads you to the ending.

And so I think it's harder to do that. But I think as we modernize things like the great Charlie Kaufman would do things like adaptation where he's adapting the adaptation and making it part of his life and his brother's life or an imagined brother. I mean, so it's wonderful complications or sunshine of the endless mind, all that. But you still have this. I always found, at least even the nose, I could tell you the structure of them. You know, so I think that's a constant.

I guess it has to be. Maybe it has to be. But the ending stuff, I think the only truth about, I think in love stories that you should end where things are not resolved, that whether they feel either brokenhearted, very rarely are happy love stories. You want to have a bittersweet ending where somebody can't resolve it and you can't bring it to fruition, whether someone dies or someone leaves or. You want to sort of wish fulfillment, hoping that they'd in another world. I also believe, so here's magic. I believe that Francis Coppola and I were talking about this, that great movies just continue, great books, plays, music, whatever,

inhabit you in this light. They live on the other side of the moon, and they're all continuing their lives, that the godfathered people are all out doing whatever they do and whatever movies you love. And they're there, and you can always just go. pick them up and put them back in your pockets, you know. And I love that idea. It's beautiful.

I started, I was once going to, it didn't work out too well, but I did cat in the hat. And I started that he was one of these kind of magical creatures that lived on the other side of the moon. I would get a phone call, we need your help kind of thing, you know. But the only thing I loved about that script was, I think there was a good script altogether, but I rhymed every word like a Seuss book. You know, I love it. Was it going to be animated or no? No, no.

No, it was live action, and they ended up doing a really, I thought, bad movie with Jim Carrey, just over the top stuff. But what I made, it was primal that the mother was pregnant and the children were very jealous and afraid of what was coming into the house. And so the thing one and thing two, you know, all this stuff, thing one and all that. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's kind of fun. Tell me about the old days in New York, the experimental film. film world. Oh, I love that. I was very part of that. I was going to NYU film school and I gravitated down to, oh, actually I was an English major to begin with Columbia, but gravitated

down to this. Everything was an alphabet city, you know, below St. Mark's Place. And Bob Downey, Jude and Ed M. Schwiller, all these people doing these things in a place called a Millennium Film Workshop where you could just move around rooms. Was this in the 60s? Like 68. 67 65 yeah that all era andy warhol you know some of his people were there um i knew some of them i know moriarty and a few other people but um i knew bob downy i worked for in like four movies they were all insane bob downy senior and uh but all these really interesting artists but it's interesting how they just disappeared i don't know some just got old obviously but there were a continuation i think a about from you know Jack Kerouac and all that

I was gonna say beatniks yeah yeah beatniks basically that's like Bob's and heroes mother was a beatnik you know she always wore black and that whole thing how has the movie business changed over the course of your life well the loss of theaters I mean the idea that not to watch a movie at theater is the most important thing after that would be there used to be personal relationships she may not even like the people but you sort of knew everybody there was a lot content providers. There were probably seven, whatever the big studios were. Was it just a smaller business overall?

Smaller world felt like a high school. Now it's a big high school. You sort of knew your place in it, what you wanted to get to all that. But you know if I just had this happened recently that if somebody decided not to do a project of years saying, I'm going to pass on this, right? They would call you up and tell you why, you know, or it's just not for me. It's not my, Even if that's simple, it might not my cup of tea with it. There it is, but we, I appreciate you trying, you know, that kind of thing. Now you never hear from anybody. It's just your agent says they're not going to do it.

You know, the personnel, that's me. That's how I felt. I mean. It feels like less of a human business. Yeah, exactly. More commerce than relationship. Yeah. And it's become even the rallying cry, which is just sad, is that everybody says nothing matters.

And that's a fragity to me. I'm sorry, because I think it should matter, you know. What you're doing, what you're saying, even if it's not my tepottis, it doesn't matter, you know. Write the best action movie, write the best Star Wars, whatever you want to do. It's just, I don't know. I don't know what, I don't know about the younger people

the way I wish. And my son's young. He's a director now. And my other son's a wonderful writer. And they have different looks of things. When you're writing a character, do you typically have an actor in mind to play it? Not mostly. I don't know.

I don't like to do that too much. Sometimes, I mean, it's part and parcel of the deal. I knew Tom Hanks was going to be far as gone. So he was great because he could go in and pitch the thing. He said, I'm sitting on a bench and I'll do all that stuff as an actor. I would prefer, I have a general idea, general idea, and then you've got to get more. Is that a common thing for an actor and a writer to get together and, put something together and then pitch that as opposed to coming from a director?

It feels to me like it is. I don't know anymore, you know? Yeah, I think it is, yeah. But I've still done. I'm like, when we're done here, I'm going to Zoom with Jeremy Strong, that actor. And we have, I think, a pretty great idea. I'm able to figure it out with him. I'll be glad to do it with him, you know.

But it's more unusual with actors. Actors are good because they're only business. for like four months out of the year or, you know, then they have time. Directors are impossible because they, you know, it's a year and a half of their lives or whatever, two years. And so if you don't get it done, you ain't seeing them for two years. They'll be to something else, you know. Yeah. And it also seems like they're so in for two years on a project that after it, it's like they're not even themselves.

No, that's absolutely right. I mean, I had opportunities to direct when I was younger and I made a decision. and I'd rather stay with my children, you know. That's not this, I'm so heroic, but that's what I decided, because you're gone. You're just gone. You're missing their lives, and they know it. But something else is more important to them. Did you always want to be a writer from the beginning?

Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've, I've toyed with one point, I said, I think I want to be doctor, which was ridiculous. I can't even add six and eight. And I said, I think I'll go back to school and take all those courses, the organic chemistry, all that, and then go to some bad medical school like Grenada or Yankton or something, you know. I mean, what I admire about your life, as little as I know about you, is that you at least are

experiencing so many things, and I wish I'd experienced more things. Well, I am now. I didn't, for the majority of my life. Oh, you didn't? No, I was sat in a dark room for 18 hours a day for 30 years. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. Or I'm not sorry.

You probably learned a lot from that. Yeah. I would never have that discipline. No, this is a new adventure. I realized I can do my work anywhere. Anywhere. And I might as well do it in a beautiful place. And I first had that revelation when I started working in Los Angeles versus New York.

Because even though I would still work all day, it felt like I was on vacation compared to being in New York. I got you. Wow. Well, my sort of regret is so, like, juvenile. It's like romantic, right? I wish I had had that romantic year in Paris with whoever, you know, or just on my own or, you know, I never did those things or, you know, London, whatever, you know, Ireland, and it's not going to happen, you know, so all of a sudden. It can. I mean, it would just be a different one.

It would be the different version of a romantic year in Paris. You can do that. Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. No, you're so right. I sort of wish I had done when I was 30, you know what I'm saying. I don't know why.

It's just what I had to add to my experience. I always wanted my life to be like a Jack London fly leaf of his novel. He said he was a, you know, a fisherman and whatever else. He went to the Alaska and all that stuff, you know. And that's creating a personality, I guess I'm not, you know. It all worked out. It all worked out. Exactly if I would just get that in my head, you know, because there's too many small things.

It's like my mother would say to me, don't sweat the small stuff, you know. And she's so right. And I sweat this false stuff still, though. It's like I wish I could stop this nonsense about things that don't matter, you know. I'm a little better with it. I'm a little better with it. I had a whole thing. I won't mention what it was, but this whole weekend, I was, like, kind of upset about something.

And I realized this is so fucking stupid, but in the world. And then you get into a situation where I was mad at somebody and then they texted me and should I ghost them and all that whole thing. You know, it's like so petty. So juvenile. Oh, so juvenile. So I did. That's amazing. For the moment.

For the moment. That's amazing. Yeah, it's funny. Tetragramatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammaton? Counterculture?

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