Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Roger Avary

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Roger Avary is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, director, and producer. Best known for co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, he shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Avary made his feature-directing debut with the 1994 crime thriller Killing Zoe. He later directed Mr. Stitch, adapted Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, and returned to the crime genre with Lucky Day. His screenwriting credits also include the horror hit Silent Hill and Robert Zemeckis’s animated epic Beowulf. Additionally, he is the founder of Pulp Time, a social movie platform for always-on programming and interactive public and private watch parties. Currently, Avary is set to write and direct a feature adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost with Ex Machina Studios, set to release in 2027.  Projects Beowulf Pulp Fiction  Video Archives Podcast ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Anthropic ⁠https://Claude.com/tetra⁠ ------ AGZ ⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠ ------ LMNT Electrolytes ⁠https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace ⁠https://Squarespace.com/tetra⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

tetragameter. I loved this movie Excalibur when I was young. It's like one of my favorite movies of all time. I don't know if you know the movie. It's the Arthurian Legends. It's directed by this guy, John Borman, whose work I love. It's swords, and I was a Dungeons and Dragons kid. I love Dungeons and Dragons.

I grew up in the South Bay of Los Angeles. When I was in high school, I was disinterested in anything but making movies. And so it was just suffering through high school. But in English class, I was handed a book, and it was Beowulf. And so I see this book, and I'm like, okay, there's a guy with a sword. It's the Burton Ruffel edition. A guy with a sword, a dragon. Okay, this is for me.

And then I proceeded to try to read it, and it was like its epic poetry written in a kind of high middle English. It was almost impenetrable. I couldn't figure it out. I probably failed that class. But I stuck with it over the years, and I read it. I read it, and then I learned, like Shakespeare, you actually have to read it out loud. That's the only way to engage with it. You know, if you read it out loud, you have a different relationship with the written word.

And suddenly, I started to understand it, but I still was like something's wrong with this story. It's bifurcated into two parts. It's Beowulf the Young Man, Beowulf the Old Man. There's all sorts of weird things that happen in it. Grendel's mother is this kind of demon. And when he goes to fight her, he goes into this cave, and they describe. drive him like underwater for four days, I think is what it is. And when he comes out, he doesn't come out with the head of the mother. He comes out with the head of Grendel and with this other

sword. And so we don't know what happened to the sword. And so I was really into the idea of the unreliable narrator. And so I decided I wanted to make this as my Excalibur. I've been chasing Excalibur my whole life. And whenever I write anything that's even remotely, swords and sorcery or swords and sandals or whatever. I wrote a Robin Hood script still was chasing Excalibur. The themes of Excalibur, the look of Excalibur, the way that Borman was able to take Lamorte Arthur and the Arthurian legends and turned them into a very entertaining movie, which gives you a gateway into something that's great and eternal.

And so I wanted to make this since I was very young. But I'd only kind of figured out the first half of it, and I was working on the Sandman film at Warner Brothers. It didn't go well because John Peters, like, I don't want to besmirch the guy, but he just thought, oh, it's Batman, and there should be fistfights. And I don't know if you know the Sandman comics,

but I love the Sandman comics. And I basically walked, I didn't walk off the project. I left the project. And that's actually, I learned a bad thing to do in Hollywood. They don't like it when you do that. Like, it kind of taints you a little bit.

I was like, there's no way I'm going to be the guy. ruined Sandman. I had a very clear vision of it. Then I got a call from Neil Gaiman, who was the writer of San Mate, a novelist, and he just called me up to thank me. He said, hey, I want to thank you. I understand you actually left the project. You were trying to stay true to it. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, well, what are you doing now? And I said, well, I'm trying to figure out Beowulf. I've got these ideas about it. And I started telling him my ideas. But I said, I can't figure out, like, why is it bifurcated in the end? Like, why is this fractured storyline? Why is it's suddenly, I can't figure out the old man part of the story. And it's a very odd structure

for a movie. And then he said, well, but Roger, if everything you say is true, if this and this and this and this and this are true, that means the dragon is Beowulf's son. And it was like, like a third eye opened up in my head. And I was like, oh my God, you're right. Let's write it together. And I had already had like a bunch of it written. And so a friend of mine was he's deceased now, John Langley, the producer of cops, the TV series. And he had a lot of the TV series. And he had a had a house in Mexico. And so I asked him if I could borrow his house and we went down to Mexico and in just in like two weeks, we just wrote the script very fast. And our deal was, you get first placement in credit and I control the material because I wanted to direct it as well. And then I

suddenly realized Hollywood had been flirting with Beowulf for a long time. It was kind of a joke in Hollywood. People were like, oh, you're going to make Beowulf. But it hadn't ever really really been done at that point. And so I went around and I tried to get it made and basically didn't get it made. Then Robert Zemachus read it. And like he got it 100%. He was like, oh my God, Roger, I love this script. I love this script. I want to produce and I'm starting a company image movers. You're going to be our first film. But how are you going to like do Beowulf the young man and Beowulf the old man? That was his big thing. And I was like, well, you know, they did it in Excalibur. And Nigel Terry.

He plays a young Arthur, and then he's aged out, and he's kind of, they do the Hollywood thing. You suspension of disbelief. And he was like, well, you know, the best thing to do would be to graph someone's, the actor's head onto an old man's body. And he had all these, like, visual effects things he wanted to do. But I put my trust into him. We started developing it. Image Movers was kind of a shingle of Dreamworks. And Spielberg didn't like it.

He just, for whatever reason, he didn't like it. He didn't take a shine to it. And he didn't want to like. back it, and then it became that thing of does image movers really want to push a project as their first project? Next thing I knew the script was to put into turnaround after like working on it for however long at image movers. I went off on my merry way and started doing my own thing. I think I made at that point. Then I went off and I did this movie, The Rules of Attraction, Adaptation of a Brady-Sanellis novel. Time goes on. I finally circled back around and I decided I'm going to make Beowulf. Now,

my vision for Beowulf was to do it really dirty, kind of like Terry Gilliams Jabberwocky. I don't know if you've ever seen Jabberwaki, but Jabberwaki is like, it shows the middle ages as just dusty and dirty, and there's just chickens in everywhere, and everybody is like half moronic, and it's funny, but it's funny because it's real. And so I had made this movie with this French producer, Samuel Hedita, also now deceased. I basically went to him and he said, oh, what about B-wolf, like you should make B-Wolf. And so we were going to set it up as a small film. I mean, small. It was huge for me. It was going to be like about a $10 million movie.

We were trying to get Vigo Mortensen at one point we went to, and he very politely turned me down. He was a really nice guy. But we were trying to make it, like, as a movie in Iceland, using various foreign co-financing and subsidy deals and like all that nonsense. And the movie was in Turnaround. Now, turnaround, it's when they decided.

I did not make your project. And if you want it back, you have to buy out all the expenses that were done on it. And what DreamWorks did is they attached, and I think every studio does this. It's common practice. They attached like every single tulip that was ever in image movers got put on that bill. Every air on chair that they bought. Like the turnaround expense was tremendous. And I decided to eat it myself.

I was like, well, I want to make this. I wanted to make this since I was a kid. the money isn't, I mean, it is important, but it's not what drives me. So I said, I'll do it. And Hedita was making me cover the turnaround expenses. So I was going to make no money on this. So I needed to earn some money. And so I took a job writing this film Silent Hill.

It's an adaptation of a video game. And I got sent to Toronto where they were prepping the movie. And suddenly I got a call from CAA. And they were like, good news. Zemachus has decided he wants to direct the movie. And I said, well, too little too late. I'm going to direct the movie. And they said, but Bob Zemicus wants to do it.

And it's like, it's going to be a big movie now. And he's going to do it as a mocap film, you know, like a performance capture movie. I was like, well, you know, it's too little too late. I'm going to be making it. And, you know, I'm getting calls from every agent. Like, you know, Jack Rapke was calling me and like this could make your career. And, you know, why? Are you working on this, like, little, you're going to make it as a foreign.

No one's going to see it when you do it. Like all the kind of fear-based dissuasion that they could possibly do, they would call me every hour. And they were like, well, he's offering you this much money. And it was like $300,000. Now, at this moment in my life, I was broke. Not broke, but I was struggling. I needed a job. And I was about to go off and make this movie where I was going to make no money.

I just needed to, like, get through this. and $300,000 was like a lot to me at that moment. Well, I said no, and I kept saying no, and I would call up Neil Gaiman and say, hey, you know, they keep coming back in every hour, and this went on for days, every hour it would go up like $100, $150,000. Every time I said no, they would come back with more money. And soon it was like in the millions. And I had this deal with Neil.

I controlled the material. And so I called Neil up and I said, listen, it's gotten into like the millions. millions of dollars, and I keep saying no, and it keeps going up, but I'm going to direct this. And to Neil's credit, and he's British, so I'm going to do a little bad British accent. He said, Roger, our deal was that you would control the picture and control the picture you do. You do what is right for the movie. Neil's a good guy. And so then I just kept saying no.

And I got to the point where CA was like, what is wrong with you? This is, you're crazy to not do this. This is an astronomical amount of money. And they kept calling, and they kept raising the money. And so finally I said, if another agent calls me, I'm firing CAA. And then he said, well, would you at least talk with the producer of the film? He wants to meet with you. Steve Bing.

I said, I'll tell you what, I'll talk with Steve. When I'm done here and I go home, and by the way, it's the holiday season like we were in just before the holidays. And when I go home, after the holidays, after I've spent the holidays, I'm going to spend the holidays skiing with my wife and kids, and then I'll meet with them. I'll meet with him in January. And they were, like, bemoaning and crying, and apparently I made one agent cry. Which, I mean, he's a nice agent. He's one of the nice ones. And so I do feel kind of bad about that. But he was really upset. I think they were like, your job is on this, you know. Why can't you get?

And Zemachus was like, I'm going to fire the agency. Why can't you get this script? Finally, I go ahead and I meet with Steve. You know Steve. He's like a giant. I don't know, koala bear. He was a giant koala bear. He's kind of six, seven, or he's very, very tall. And he kind of has a bowl haircut and kind of like lemur eyes, big hands and dresses like in t-shirts and jeans and drives like a cop car. Not a cop car, but like an undercover cop car was kind of his thing. And in the meantime, he's, you know, billionaire Steve Bing, real estate developer, but also movie producer. And he meets with me and he says, listen, I don't know what your fascination. is with this. I mean, I kind of get it. I've read the script and whatever reason, Zemachus wants to do it. He's going crazy for it. And if I don't make this movie with him now, he's going to lose attention,

he's going to find something else, I'm going to miss my moment. Just name your price. And I said, well, I don't have a price. And I'm, by the way, I had grown a beard to understand the Viking thing. And I grew my hair long and went skiing like that. And I figured out, oh, it's like an igloo. It actually like makes an igloo out of, keeps your face form. And so there's nothing you can do. There's no price. You know, I just met with you to explain to you why this can't happen. I've been wanting to do this since I was a kid. I expressed to him my passion. And he said, listen, why don't you just throw out a number and discourage me? Just try to discourage me. And I said, oh, you want to be discouraged? And I thought about it. And I said, okay, I'll discourage you.

And I, like, came up with, like, this crazy, gigantic number, this huge number, this massive, massive number. And all sorts of demands, you know, you've got to get me this and you've got to do that. Like, I, and he looked across the table from me, and he kind of looked a little sad. And then he tapped on the table and he said, that is really discouraging. But we have a deal. And I was kind of in shock. And driving home, I kind of was realizing, and it was the first time in my life I'd ever kind of accept. accepted anything for money over money over my passion. I went home and I cried, actually.

But then, you know, the check came and nothing dries tears like money. And it all seemed, you know, okay. And then Zemachus turned out to be very collaborative. He was making the movie in Carpenteria because it was like all performance capture and basically like animated, but painting over people's performances. We were inventing all sorts of new technologies, and he was very engaging, and we became very close, and he's a great guy. And he was actually the one guy, having gotten to know him from when he was developing the movie for me to direct, that I was thinking, well, I would let him do it. I had a short list of directors that, like, and Terry Gilliam was one of those people, but

nobody would work with Terry at that point. But he was on my list, and anyhow, it turned out to be a great experience. And also, it was a giant movie. It was like every day you'd go into that offices, and there's a... just like this giant table of sushi and of every kind. And another bottle of crystal. And let's go on the private plane to Comic-Con. And let's go on the private plane to Europe.

And it was just like A-plus-plus. And when you're an indie filmmaker, you don't usually, I mean, I've had good experiences before. And Steve and I became really, really good friends. And suddenly I went from having nothing to both Neil and I having these big mountains of cash, and then I was in this car accident. I'd been at a party, I had been drinking. During this period? During this period, right as the film was finished. Wow. We had premiered it in England. I came back. I went to this dinner. I paid for the dinner,

so I paid for everybody's, you know, alcohol and food. And I have to tell you, I had kind of, even though it was a positive experience, I was kind of like, who am I now as a filmmaker? Why am I doing this? What do I have to say anymore? I've got money. What does it mean, though? And so I didn't even know who I was anymore. Yeah, because your goal was never that. It was never my goal. But suddenly you have money. And then, like, what does it mean? And it's like, another bottle of crystal. More dinner. I'll pay for everyone. Like, I'll buy a Prius. I was in my big spend. I bought a Prius. But it was like, you know, it was from going from nothing to everything.

And then I was driving home and I had bought this crazy property. in Ohio, this olive farm with big walls around it and everything. And I don't make excuses for this. What happened happened. But suffice it to say that I have a lead foot and I was going fast. And I was driving home and it was dark. It was like, oh high, dark. And another car came out and I veered away from it.

And I skid it out. And I were wheel blue. I turned into the thing. And then I turned away and then spun out and hit a pole. My passenger was killed. My wife was thrown from the vehicle. Wow. I found myself with a mouthful of glass and all my ribs broken, climbing out of my devastated car.

It was right near the fire department, so paramedics were there relatively fast. But I found myself kneeling on the asphalt. My wife, I didn't know if she was alive or dead. And I was just begging, like, the universe for just the most simple thing that there is, which is life. In any form, I'll take it. And in that moment, I knew who I was. as a filmmaker. I knew what I had to say. And she came back to life before my eyes. And she was very badly injured and there was a long recuperation. And in that moment, everyone in the world

drops you like a hot rock, except for Steve. And my friend John Langley and in Hollywood where you don't know what's real. Suddenly I knew who was real. I knew who was real. I knew who my actual friends were. Everything that I had was gone like the next day. I basically opened up my books to the family of the deceased, and they took it all. But there is no way to quantify the value of a human life. Even that's not enough. And so they took everything. And so it was like, you know, I had nothing, and then I had everything, and they had nothing. And nothing really too much had actually changed in my life. It's just that it was all gone all of a sudden. And it was like I dropped an atom bomb on my life. And I was incarcerated for a while. And then, you know, you find yourself

suddenly everything is stripped away from you. And you, and you're, you know, you're locked into a cell, and you've got Chango next door and some neo-Nazis over there, and everything is gone, and you start wondering what is real and what's not real. It's a very existential and semi-monastic experience to be locked into a cell. You really have a lot of time to reflect and to think about, like, who am I? Who am I really? I am not my things. You look inward, and you kind of make very large discoveries about yourself.

and I realized in that moment, I was sleepwalking through life before that. And the irony is, is now you suddenly have this wisdom, you know, a blessing, the root of the word, like in French, blessé means to be wounded, and ble is sweet, it's cut. A blessing is not something that is good that happens to you. It's something that wounds you. And through that you find wisdom, and that is the blessing. and my career was destroyed. I had almost killed my wife.

I had killed another person. I wake up every day even now, and I ask myself, like, what can I do? How do I honor that? And the only way I figured out to do that is to just contribute and to do what I know how to do. But it gave me a different perspective on what I was making,

on the kind of films that I was making and what I wanted to say in this world. and how it was being received, what kind of impact they have. The agenda that I had before and the agenda that I have now after are different. I don't say this lightly because it was the most horrible thing that happened to me, and I would reverse it in a second because there was a loss of life. There's nothing more precious. But I am grateful in a weird way because I see now.

Yeah. It sounds like you're describing making a deal with the devil. Oh, yeah. Well, who was once most beloved by God? You know, it's, there is a moment in Faust, the play Faust when Mephistopheles goes before Faust, he conjures Mephistopheles, the devil, who appears before him, and he starts asking him questions because he's trapped now, he's conjured him. he says, well, who are you? And we are, you know, damned to hell. And he says, well, if you are a devil and damned to hell, then how is it that you're now here before me? Why, Faust, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think you that I, who have seen the face of God and known the gifts of heaven, am condemned to hell, 10,000 hells to be deprived of it. And what Marlowe is saying, that's the Marlowe version, of Faust. What Marlowe is saying is that this is hell. So you find yourself in jail and you know, you start making, you know, I was in solitary for a while and that is an experience. You think,

I'm going to do some yoga. I can handle silence. I can get through this. When your brain is deprived of sound, in three days, you're insane. Like you go mad after a while. I started, when deprived of sound, your brain starts manufacturing sounds. I started hearing my wife whispering to me. I was making friends with insects. I was like that's in Papillon, the Steve McQueen Papillon. That's what it was like. That's exactly what it's like. You go crazy.

The lights are on 24 hours a day. You don't know if it's a day or night. You lose track of time. And the fact that what happened was accidental doesn't matter at all. No, because if you're speeding in the state of California and there's a death, it's 12 years to life. Without getting into the court case of it all and at the end of the day, the court looks at what really happened, and they look at the situation. And then I had a, you know, I had a number of friends who stepped forward, and Steve was one of them, who wrote letters of

character, because it was very outside of my character. However, I did have a lead foot. That is a historical thing of mine. I was a speeder. I sped. And in California, it doesn't matter what your blood alcohol is. If there's a death and you were speeding. And so you basically throw yourself to the mercy of the court. You accept their deal. Their deal was a year of incarceration. I looked at it and I was like, oh, it's a shit sandwich. I'm going to start eating it because I just looked at it as what is the fastest way through this process. What do I have to do? And I look at it now as there are no bad experiences. You're not defined by the good or bad that happens to in your life. You're defined by how you react to the good or bad that happens to you. And it sounds like it totally changed.

your life ultimately for the better. Yeah, and again, I don't mean to make light in any way of the terrible loss that occurred as a result of it, but yes, I mean, you can either let something destroy you or you can use it to make you better or to move you forward instead. And I looked at it and I was like, one, I have children, I have a wife, all my friends who basically stood up for me in that moment. For them, I have worked twice as hard. and did whatever I have to do. Because I'm a dual citizen with U.S. and Canada, and I took felonies.

I'm a double felon, which means that if I get one more felony in the state of California, and that can be stealing a DVD, get one more felony in the state of California, and boom, it's three strikes law. I go back to prison. So I live a very clean, lawful existence at this point. There was a time when,

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for. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at clod.a.ai slash tetra. Try it today. What makes dialogue good? When you're not trying to force a message, when you're just letting the character be, the character has to be true to who they are. And if that person says something that is unpopular in modern culture today, doesn't matter. That's who that character is. You have to, allow your pen to be what Quentin calls the antenna to God. You have to be true first to the character.

And that means letting the dialogue be what they say. If somebody uses the word retard, okay, that's not a popular thing to say anymore. And I have friends with children. and they would be very upset to hear that in a movie and actually know somebody who was upset and they ruined the whole movie for them because like, why would you have to say that? Well, I'm sorry, but... That's how that guy talks.

That's how that guy talks. And so when somebody is being true to the character, they're being true to the dialogue, that's truth that's coming out. Earlier, you cursed and you excused yourself. It seems like you're not in the habit of cursing. No, I try not to. But I wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin, and so...

That was another life, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was another life. That was another life. But you were telling a story about what someone else said to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were cursing. Yes.

Now, where's the line? How do you know I don't curse? I'm telling you a true story about the past where there was cursing. Yeah. How do I deal with that? Well, when you're a writer and you allow characters to inhabit you, it's a kind of possession. You mentioned doing a deal with the devil.

the difficult thing about writing, and I grapple with this daily now, is it is a form of possession. If you're doing it right, you're living that person inside of you. I wrote a script once about the Hotel Letesia in Paris, which is where the Gestapo moved in and they used it to torture people.

Well, when I was writing that, I had to both be the torturer and the tortured. And I can go pretty far in both directions, in my imagination. And that was one of the hardest things ever written. If you're doing it right, you have to accept the vision as it comes to you. And I actually don't write the dialogue. I listen to the dialogue, and I just try to transcribe it. Tell me more about that. So when I write, and I don't know that everybody writes like this,

because I've heard some people like, oh, I map it out. And I know these two guys, Ted and Terry, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and they just kind of like would share scenes. And they were craftsmen. But I can't write like them. I wish I could. They wrote all the pirates. So the Caribbean movies and stuff like that. When I write, I basically sit there, be it in front of with a pen and pencil, or, I mean, when I was in jail, I wrote with a golf pencils. And the same thing happened is when I sit at a keyboard. I wait for the tunnel to appear.

And there's this tunnel that appears kind of before me. And I see the movie playing. Like I watched the movie inside of the tunnel. I first have to get into an isolated place. If there's lots of distractions, it breaks your flow. If people are calling you constantly... How do you get into the state? Sometimes I'm just sitting there.

I'm looking at my blinking cursor or I'm looking at the blank page. And I'm just thinking about the project. Generally, with a movie, I know what the ending is. Like, I always know where I'm going. And I know that something has to happen in the first five pages to excite the reader. And then the rest of it is just five or six submersible modules,

each of about 20 pages. By submersible module, I mean that you can take them and they'll hold air underwater. They almost exist on their own as almost like a short film or sequences. Some people would call them acts. Are all films like this? Not all films, but I'm a big Kubrickophile, and Kubrick thought of movies this way, and his movies are kind of structured in a sort of submersible module way. And so they're just modules.

And so I kind of know where I'm going. but then I don't know what's going to happen in between. For example, Pulp Fiction. When I was working on Pulp Fiction, which was originally like separate screenplays and scenes that we eventually put together into what became Pulp Fiction. But in Pulp Fiction, the Bruce Willis part where he goes in and he sees the game,

I didn't know any of that was going to happen. Like, I knew that he was trying to escape the mob and that he had to get his stuff and he gets his stuff and then he's on his way out and he's like, I'm getting away from the mob. And then all of a sudden, and I didn't know it was going to happen, Ving Rames' character comes walking. And it wasn't Ving Rames' character. My script, I think his name was Manny or something.

He comes walking across the sidewalk and he looks over and he sees him in the car. And suddenly you're trapped. And then it's like, okay, well, what am I going to do? And I'm just, again, I'm just watching the movie in the tunnel. And he just steps on the gas to get the hell out of there because that's what the character would do. And I'm, you serve the character, I guess is ultimately what I'm getting at. So he tries to get away, but then he crashed. And next thing, I know he ran into a pawn shop.

And again, I had no idea what was in that pawn shop. I just knew that once he was in there, suddenly he's in deliverance. And I didn't know that the gimp was going to be in there. Suddenly there was the gimp. And like all this stuff just started happening. And I was just watching the movie. And I'm just writing it down as it's happening in astonishment because, you know, it's surprising me.

And the difficulty of writing like that is sometimes, you write yourself into a situation. Like suddenly your guys are tied up in chairs and they're raping one guy and they're going to rape you next and you're like trapped there and how do you get out? How do you get out?

And suddenly the tunnel dematerializes and you're left like, wait a minute, how do they get out? And you think about it for a while and you know you go away and then you have to go through the process again of materializing the tunnel that appears before your face and watching the movie again. And next thing I knew, oh, the back of the chair is just not connected to the thing.

He just slides it out and drops off. And then he goes out. And in mind, when I originally wrote it, it was a baseball bat who's a Louisville slugger. But Quentin gives him, no, it's got to be a samurai sword. Because Quentin loves samurai swords and samurai movies and stuff like that. And that is the genius of Quentin. And so that's kind of my process. Describe the tunnel more.

What does it look like? Well, it's not a full cone, but it is smaller on one end and larger by my face. And it's actually, I've never had anybody asked me that. That's an interesting, it's kind of gray. It's almost like the color of your shirt. Is it like concrete? No, it's a little more like fabric, but fabric, electric fabric. So it could be soft.

Yes. And crinkly, soft and crinkly. No, that's interesting. I actually have never really thought too much about that. But is it always the same? Yeah. Yeah. It's always the same.

Yeah, it's always the same. And then if it gets smaller at the other end. Well, that might just be perspective. How big is the image that you're watching? Well, if I take my two hands and make a circle and I put it right in front of me, it's kind of like that. And then as I'm doing it, I move into it. You don't move, but you're...

Well, I travel mentally into it. And then I see it. it more like a movie. I'm like I'm watching a movie. And how long might it take from the time you sit down until the tunnel arrives and does it always arrive? No, it doesn't always arrive and it's variable. It's variable. And I used to think that weed would help bring it and it doesn't. That actually hinders it. Maybe when I was young, so I don't like drink or do drugs or anything anymore. I used to think that maybe that would help. But then I discovered over time, It actually doesn't at all.

Does anything help? Isolation helps. Some turbulence in my life sometimes helps, to be perfectly honest. Yeah. I wrote a screenplay about Salvador Dali, and the thing about Dali is that his own autobiography was false memories. But to Dali, a false memory is as real as a real memory. Like, a dream is as real as a memory once they've both occurred. And both of them are part of the fabric of your...

subconscious and conscious mind. And so when I realized that about his work, I thought, well, whenever you make a movie about a subject, you're just miming. You're just faking it. You can never really know the truth of somebody else, but you know the truth of yourself. And so when you make a biography, what you really want to be doing is making an autobiography about yourself inside your work. And that was especially easy with Dali because he's an artist, I'm an artist. And he had a process of tapping into the subconscious mind. And what I noticed when I read about his life from others was his wife, Gala, basically tortured him. She made his life miserable.

And I realized it's this sad duty of the muse to not bring pleasure to the artist, but to bring pain. And because if you... Always? Well, maybe not always. But if you bring pleasure, you're just going to enjoy the pleasure. Like, that's not a conduit for creation necessarily. Creation is a turbulent experience for the most part. And so when I have something that's disturbing me or upsetting me

or something that I've seen that's upset me, generally it finds its way somehow, and I interpret that later, in the tunnel. I must sound crazy. But that actually is how it works for me. When's the first time you notice the tunnel? I was a cartoonist, and the way I draw is I don't pre-sketch what I'm going to draw and then fill it in. I just draw the lines because I can see the image on the blank page, and I just trace the image as I see it.

Do you see it through the tunnel? Yes. So the tunnel's been in your life. How old are you? I would first... Seven to eight to nine years old. So it's been a lifelong. It's a lifelong thing, yeah.

And it can be still images or moving images. Yeah, it's mostly moving images now for me. You know, when I try to draw now, it's still the same. I still look at basically a still projection on a page. But when I'm thinking about a movie, you know, I'm watching the movie. And there's cuts, you know, there's close-ups. I see the whole film. And it's a kind of visual grammar that I just watch.

And you hear the dialogue? Yeah, and I hear the dialogue. And the dialogue, I hear the voices. That's the other thing. Like, I hear the voices of the characters. Are the characters in what you're seeing? actors that you know, or are they... Sometimes, sometimes that happens.

I did this movie Killing Zo, and before Eric Stoltz was ever cast, I saw him in my tunnel. Yeah. And then I just happened to get him to be in the movie, which was like a blessing or a good fortune. If you were writing a description of the character, you would describe that actor in that case,

or if it was just a figure, you would describe the figure. Yeah, I would just describe what the figure looks like and who they are, and I have very little control over that. And if they swear, they swear. I guess that's what we were originally getting at. And so sometimes you have a potty-mouth guy. That's who that is. And that's who that is.

And I can't say that that's not who that is. That's who he is. And he just shows up, and that's who he is. So, you know, when I was in jail, it was very easy to travel away. Because with all the stuff going on around you that you just want to hide from, and I reconnected with pencil and paper at that. point because, well, I had started doing the Hollywood thing where you're just writing into a computer directly. And just to save time, but then when I went to jail, it was like I had

paper and I had a pencil and it cost money. It costs like four cents a page. It becomes very precious. Like just having anything is like you can sell a staple in that environment because somebody can use it as a tattoo implement, you know, with ink. can, a staple, you can make a tattoo. And so, like, anything you have is currency. And the stable currency is a bag of ramen. It's $1.00. And so that's like the, it's probably $1.20 now. Who knows what it is now. But back then, it was like that was the stable currency. And that equals so many envelopes and that equals this and da-da-da-da-da. And because we'd lost everything and my family was now struggling, I didn't like have anything. The only thing that I spent any money on

when I was there was paper and pencil. And it was very monastic. And there's nothing better than being trapped in a cloistered monastic cell with a concrete thing to sit on and a concrete slab as a desk. And you're happy to just travel away and to write. And in that environment, it was really easy. I was always falling into other worlds. Do you find ways to create that in your life now?

It's interesting. I became very existential while I was there, and I kind of realized that the whole world is a jail. The whole world is a prison. There was this TV show The Prisoner that was my favorite show when I was young. And effectively, that's the thesis statement of that show, is that it's just a larger prison. The day I got out, the first thing that happened was Steve Bing,

took me to Nobu. And I had had shit on a shingle the day before. And then next thing I know, I meant Nobu. And it was like, okay, what is this illusion called life? Because that is just the contrast of those two environments was like mind spinning. And I started looking at things afterwards. And the incarceration environment is really just like a wine reduction. of reality. And everybody's behaviors are the same as reality. And what I learned in that environment

is nothing ever happens to somebody, like nobody ever gets killed, you know, or shanked or whatever without consensus. Like all the shot callers, you know, from the various groups, sometimes there's somebody who just does something that they're not supposed to do, but he'll pay for violating the business that's going on. It's all about business. And the business, and the business, is running and the business has to run, and there's politics that you're meant to follow. And they actually call it. Is it only the prisoners, or is it the prisoners and the people working in the house? The Latino guards are with the Latino mob.

The white guards are with the white mob. The black guards are with the black mob. And the guards, for the most part, just want to go home at the end of the day. Yeah. Are there any great movies about this? Yeah. There's Eddie Bunker, who was actually in Reservoir Dogs, wrote a number of great books, and some of them were adapted into movies.

movies that are, that kind of capture the vibe. Mostly people don't get it right, but Eddie Bunker's work does. And there's some characters that are, like John Voight kind of got it in runaway train. Most of the movie doesn't take place in jail. And the jail that he was in was like, it was more like Pelican Bay, which is more of a hardcore place than where I was. I mean, for the most part, they were just trying to keep me alive. Like, we don't want to let the Pulp Fiction guy get killed.

But I saw plenty of guys get killed while I was there. Really? Oh, yeah. I saw one guy hanged by his celly. He, uh, using a sheet, he, hanged him. And I didn't see it happen, but we all knew what happened. And that just got written off like, man, those EMT guys when they showed up, they were moving in slow motion. That's what made me think, oh, that guy was supposed to get it.

And what happened was he had. They say he hanged himself, but he was getting out in four days. And some guy got sent in from another section into our tank and put with him. And then next thing, you know, and then everybody goes to yard, and he's just found dead in his cell. And then when the guy was being taken away by the guards to the hole and for questioning and stuff like that, I saw him look at the shot collar with a kind of look of, okay, I did it. You know, like he was supposed to do it. When the lights go down, the body gets to work.

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Well, under the presumption that we are in a realm, which is a prison, that none shall ever escape or very few shall escape. And those of us who are here, I mean, perhaps some souls do transcend and move into some sort of greater energy, perhaps. the vast majority of people are being tricked and fooled by dark forces to stay here so that they can just be harvested and used by parasites. And so in that respect, there are just layers of prisons around us, you know, from our own bodies, which are in some ways prisons for our consciousness outwards to the greater world and the firmament of around us and whatever this realm is. And so I do really genuinely look at it like that, and I have as much freedom now as I did then. And it took me a while to really wrap my head around that. You see all sorts of emotions of people on the inside. Mostly, they're trying to control the outside whenever they're inside.

They're on the phone with their girlfriend, and they're trying to control situations that are outside of their control. That seems to be like an obsession with people. And I've noticed that on the outside of the world, there are people who are obsessed with controlling other people. You know, Harvey Weinstein was a great example of that, of somebody who, you know, just was trying to control everybody. The amount of time that guy was spending, controlling other people and holding people down, like, imagine how that energy could have been channeled to do other things, higher things, higher callings. And so I think about him a lot. He'll be getting out soon. I had this dream where I was walking through the offices at William Morris,

and I got to this one corner office, and I could see that the door was open, and I looked into it, and all the agents were in there, like they sometimes are sitting on the backs of couches and like a whole bunch of them, and they were all talking to him about how they were going to reintroduce him. Do you always remember your dreams? I have pretty vivid dreams, and I do remember them frequently.

I went through a short, a period of my life where I was like smoking a lot of weed and my dreams went away. Do your dreams tend to be premonition? Do they tend to come true? I look at it like time that, you know, the only thing that, I mean, time itself is a kind of prison. We are sitting constantly on what we think is a moving point of existence through time. And that's what we call the third dimension. And if we go into the fourth dimension and that's that's everywhere all at once. And so I look at dreams as an escape from the constraints of time and space.

Because in the dream, sometimes you're the camera, sometimes you're the character, sometimes you're watching the scene from above. Sometimes you're different people, you know, in a dream. And it's all nonsense, but it does make sense when you're there. And it's because you're connecting to, I think it's because you're connecting to every, at that time in your mind is just trying to make sense of this kind of four-dimensional representation. And I think of everything as sort of, it's the same challenges are still there. There is politics, there's business, there's characters who want to be in charge,

there's shot callers, there's lames, you know, people who are just, every now and then, somebody would come in who's just, does not belong in that facility. You know, he has mental issues. He's just, and they're just putting him there, and he's just like half insane. There should be another place for that guy. And so there's all these different characters, but they're here on the outside as well. But I will tell you one thing, I do not take anything for granted. This cup of coffee you gave me with honey in it, like the greatest gift there is. And in fact, the other thing is I used to be very shy about this, but I realize now, Like, this existence is, it's a great gift.

And I'm so grateful to be here. And it's not said to each other enough. I love you, Rick Rubin. I love you, too. You know, it's to know you and to be able to sit here in your chapel with the rolling grass and the cool air coming in. I mean, I didn't see a tree for a year. When I got out, I looked at a cloud and I cried for the beauty of it. It was like there's that song, is it Stone Temple Pilots? Vaseline. You heard that song?

Okay, I started thinking about the lyrics of that song when I was there. And what it is is they use Vaseline on the windows in jail. And you use the Vaseline because they're fogged. And when you apply Vaseline to the fogged window, you can kind of see through it. And that song is about being on the inside in a kind of prison and using Vaseline to be able to look through the opaque, window. Tell me about your spiritual life. Not to always bring it back to Jim, but it was a pretty monumental event. When I was incarcerated, the food is terrible. Actually, I shouldn't say that. It was just very restricted, but they always gave us three hot meals a day or mostly. And so after a while, you come to be grateful just for that, because you always know that everything is relative. There's somebody else who doesn't have anything. Actually, Robert Zemicus told me a story

about, I think it's okay to say this, that he had an alcohol problem at one point. And he made that movie Flight, which is one of my favorite movies of his, about that experience. And after what happened to me happened, I was talking with him. And he said, yeah, you know, there was a story I heard in a guy whose life just got destroyed by himself. He destroyed. He destroyed. He destroyed. his life and he's sitting in his car in Oxnard. It's pouring rain and he has nowhere to go. He has no home. His family has left him. Nobody will talk to him. He's lost his job. Everything is destroyed and he's sitting in his car and he's weeping at his situation. And then there's a knock on the window and it's some other guy who doesn't have a car who's like, hey, buddy, can I sleep under your car

to get out of the rain. And so no matter where you're at, it can get worse. And they'll let you know, like, you think you have it, you know, like you're acting up in that environment. You know, you think you can't get worse. So they'll take you somewhere worse. They'll take you to the rubber room and there's even a worse one. So while I was there, the food was like, they call it shit on a shingle. That's the term.

And it's basically a piece of bread with like put on it. It's like, I don't know, chili or something. But some guys tend to like it, but it's pretty gnarly. And when I went in, I was vegetarian. I was not eating anything like that. And so I found myself trying to navigate around the food. And then it just so happened that existentialism and Buddhism, they intersect, like in a Venn diagram kind of way. And I had found on the book cart of all places a book on Buddhism.

And I'd always kind of, you know, been, how can we say, respectful of other people's beliefs, but never really what I would call a religious person. And so then I started reading this book, which I still have, I actually smuggled it out with me. And because it became very precious to me because it was like this realization of you don't own things. I mean, and also stoicism. It's funny, all these things that I had worked on, I had worked with, Admiral Stockdale on telling his story about being, and I don't mean to my experiences, cannot compare to what he went through because he was in the Hanoi Hilton.

He was shot down over Vietnam. He goes to the Hanoi Hilton. He's there for seven years eating pumpkin soup and being tortured every day. And when I was working on his life story, I asked him, how do you survive that? And he just said, you know, the only thing that they can't touch is in here. It's my consciousness. I have no control over anything else in the world. I cannot control those around me.

They can do whatever they do to my body, and that is not under my control, but here, that's what they can't touch. And so when I started reading this book on Buddhism, it took me into a kind of understanding of what is real, what is not real, what do you have control over, and what do you not have control over, which is mostly everything.

and that true freedom is by not wanting. That's how you defeat it. It tends to be the inverse of everything that's true. Like, if somebody's cruel to you, forgiveness is the path. That's the only way you can actually release them from their prison, which is a mental bunker they've created inside of their own mind, and they're just lashing out at you. But what they're really trying to do is to protect their inner child.

And so forgiveness tends to be the key. And so I learned this there and then I learned that, oh, if I'd claim Buddhism, I can get a vegetarian meal brought to me. I didn't know that for like the first couple months. For three months I was there. And so I made an appointment with the chaplain. And he eventually comes and he's like Christian chaplain. He was like, did everything he could to talk me out of it. He was like, you will regret it.

He did everything he could to dissuade me. And I've done this a million times. Nobody's happy after that. And I said, well, no, but this is what I have to do this. I'm vegetarian. And I think I even use the term hamsa at one point, you know, that I, so as to not cause harm to other living creatures. And which became very important to me. I was always, like, I always loved animals and I always loved people. But like, after these experiences, it takes that part of you and it galvanizes you. And so he went ahead, okay, I'm going to write you up, but you're going to come back and you're going to try to beg me and I'm not going to. You're stuck with this. Okay, when that first meal came, I cried because it was so good. That sounds ridiculous. But it's like when you're on an airplane and if everybody, you know, they're making 10,000, you know, meals of one kind, then you order the kosher one or the vegetarian one or something like that, they're only, you know, they're making 10,000 meals of one kind, you know, meals of one kind. Then you order the kosher one or something like that, they're only making, you know, a hundred of those. So it's made with a little bit more love. And that's what I felt at least. I cried when I got that. Like, I was so grateful for it.

And anyhow, so I get out, I kind of had always considered if I'm closest to anything, I'm closest to Buddhism. Like Buddhism, it seems cosmically correct. Okay, so then I've seen every movie ever made about Jesus. I've seen the passion of the Christ. I've seen The Passion of Christ. I've seen Zephyralli's Jesus.

I've seen King of Kings. I've seen The King of Kings, the Silent Version. I've seen them all. And I never really got it. I was incarcerated and everybody's reading the Bible because they're all like, it was all about redemption and resurrection. And I remember even asking somebody, I said, well, I can kind of, you know, get behind the teachings of the Bible.

but this resurrection part, I don't know about that. They're like, well, that's what it's all about? Like, it's got to be about the resurrection. And I realized that's what they were desperate for, was basically everybody wants resurrection of some kind. And I just kind of viewed it from an intellectual distance and hadn't really wrapped my head around it so much. I even worked with Paul Verhoven on his Jesus project.

Verhoven, I'm kind of glad that that didn't go forward because he was having trouble. Like, how do I visualize this? Like, how do these things happen? And he's a biblical scholar, actually. He's a... He's studied the life of Jesus to prove it wrong mostly.

To, like, you know, his whole thing is, oh, the Immaculate Conception was likely rape. And we think we know that it was the freed slave centurion, Pantera. And during the sacking of Sephora, that's, you know, about nine months before the birth of Jesus.

And da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And so that's where Verhoven is coming from. Of course, Verhoven is coming from a place of rape. And he's even written a book about it, about Jesus. And so I've, like, you know, had the full exposure, and I never really got it. And then there was this TV show, The Chosen, that came out. Have you heard of this show? Okay, so I'm like, well, what is this show? They're giving it away. We can watch it for free. And I had kind of become, like, saddened by television. That's the best way to put it.

Because I had slowly started to develop in my head this idea that revenge, I mean, I'm the Pulp Fiction guy with Quentin. Revenge! It's the bread and butter of cinema. Wrath and revenge. People think it's delicious to watch movies about revenge. And I started thinking, you know, revenge is easy. You can be a first-time filmmaker and make a movie about revenge.

And if he's even halfway good, they're like, you're a master. Because it's like pushes serotonin levels, I guess. But what's really hard to do, what a real master approaches and try to do, to do is forgiveness. It's the opposite of revenge. It's the antidote to wrath is forgiveness. And so I was like watching television like Game of Thrones. Okay, everybody loves Game of Thrones, it seems. There's a lot to love about it, but I started noticing a pattern as I was watching it. This is not like old television. The new television is trying to be more like a movie. And what they're doing is they're building up a character and making you love them.

And right when you love them, they kill them. And not only do they kill them, they vivisect their genitals. in some kind of horrible way. And they torture them before you. And you're like, no, they've killed so-and-so. And then that's over. And what they've done is they've pushed your serotonin levels, you know, through the roof. And you feel stimulated by it. And you're like saddened.

You're feeling all these terrible emotions. And then they start making you love somebody else. And that goes on. And then pretty soon, same thing happens. Then they kill that person in some horrible way. And it's like, what happened to the old TV where you would return? because you love the characters and to a place that's comforting.

You know, what happened to that television? Walking Dead. Same thing. You've got all these characters. You know, the Walking Dead are actually the living in that show. And they're traveling around and you're hoping that they survive and you're hoping they live.

But no, somebody comes along with a baseball bat and takes your favorite character and just smashes their head in in some horrible, horrible way. And you're like, oh, like, you know, and you're feeling something. But is it really one? worthy to feel that. And then I started looking at the world around us as it's kind of transitioned

into a more terrible place, I think, in some ways. And I'm like, okay, I used to think that there was no connection between violence in movies and television and violence in real life. And Quentin and I would still argue this, in fact, this would be something that he and I would disagree on at this point. But now I look at it and I'm like, okay, is media creating reality or is reality affecting media? Is it just reflecting reality? The older I've gotten and with the more experience that I have, I'm now looking at it and thinking, yeah, I think media, which is generally run by, you know, blizzard people, is euphemistic, is affecting reality. You're being kind. And being kind. And it's affecting reality.

and it's fucking everything up and it's making people, because people in general are monkey see monkey do. If they watch something and they see peace portrayed, if you watch Little House in the Prairie, you're going to copy Little House in the Prairie. If you watch extreme violence, you're going to copy violence. Maybe not everybody. There's really smart people.

Quentin, I think, is a super smart guy. I don't think he is affected by it, but there are a lot of people out there who are very impressionable, at least a third of the population, I would say, is highly impressionable. And we have a massive responsibility at this point. And I look at a lot of my work, which was, I was a student of Kubrick and Polansky and Ken Russell and guys like that. And, you know, when the Cinemathech did a retrospective on my work, it was called the Cinema of Cruelty after Antonin Artow, whose theater of cruelty was all about waking up the audience through shock. and things like that. And I used to kind of believe in that. Okay, so I started thinking, okay,

something is really wrong with media and with television. And this was percolating, especially during COVID. I started thinking a lot about this. And then this show came along, The Chosen, and I was like, it's free. Let's check it out. Okay. I love that TV show Rome, the John Millius, and I love John John is, I consider John a mentor. Well, the Chosen, they take ancient Judea, and you've got all the big characters, you know, you've got all the various apostles and everything and Christ and Pontius Pilate and everybody's there. But they're telling the story from a really low ground level, like a soap opera. And in fact, it's so cheap that first season. Rocks are made out of styrofoam, houses are made out of two blankets with a gourd hanging. Like, they don't

have any money to make it. But what I recognize when I watch something is passion. It doesn't matter what it is. If I see that everybody is there for the right reason and they're passionate about what they're doing, okay, I'm in. And everybody was there for the right reason on that show. And so the first episode, I'm watching it, and I'm like, I love this. And it's free. Okay, episode two, I think was called Jesus Loves the Little Children. I'm like, I don't know about this. Let's see if this holds up. Okay. Amazingly, I'm like, wow, that's a pretty good episode of television. Episode three comes along, and that's when the thesis statement hit. And it was just like there were two things in it.

One, the idea that you only need to be wanting. That's all it is to be saved. And to me, that's not a Christian idea. That's a universal idea. And I had long been wanting. So it was like from this silly, low-budget, crowd-funded TV show that is being given away the way the Gideons give away the Bible. I saw this and, bing, third eye opened up.

And I was like, I get it. And then the second part of it was that Jesus is punk rock. And I grew up, SoCal punk rock. All my friends were punk guys. I was my low, Ackerman of the descendants was, well, Theo, his brother was my friend. And I grew up right near Redondo High, so like the Black Flag guys were there. You know, it's like it was the 80s. To me, what punk rock was back then, at least in Southern California, it wasn't about, like, raging for any of the reason that you hate hypocrisy.

It's not even that you hate authority. Most of these guys like everything run properly. You know, most of them are just upset at the system. The system. Yeah. And so that was me, 100%. Like, people always think I have an authority issue. Maybe I do. Maybe I don't.

I think I'm pretty good with authority, actually. it's hypocrisy that I don't like. Like, I don't like seeing people being treated unfairly. I don't care who they are. I don't like it. I don't like seeing government graft and theft and corruption. I hate it. It makes me enraged.

It's like the one thing that I really, like the punk comes back in me. And I was like, you know, more of a geek. I was more of a film guy, but the punk's they understood film. You know, Red Cross guys were my friends. guys from Red Cross. And like, they always got it. That was my thing. And so Jesus was like punk rock. And he's sort of like, no, there are no rules. I can commit a miracle on the Sabbath. It's not that he's committing miracles that they're upset about. It's that he's doing it on the Sabbath. And so you've got all these guys who are the Pharisees and they're sort of in charge of

everybody. And by the way, the Pharisees were not part of the Exodus. They were like separate. Like, this is a separate group altogether. And they are in charge of everything. And then I looked at that show, and I was like, holy cow, what this show is doing is they're giving it away. They're violating the Pharisees of Hollywood by making this show. And they're, where are they making this show? And so I look it up, I'm thinking, is this shot in Jordan? No, it's shot in Texas.

And then I, like, Texas, what the heck is this? Because there's one guy directing every episode, this guy, Dallas Jenkins, who's like my hero right now. I think he's, because every episode he's doing is about forgiveness. And that is that, as I've established, takes a master. You know, there were two movies that came out same year. One of them, a man trapped in nature. Nature is trying to kill him, and he's trying to get back to civilization so he can commit revenge. And that movie is The Revenant.

Same year, a man, another movie, a man trapped in nature. Nature is trying to kill him. and he's trying to get back to civilization. Why? For forgiveness. And that movie's The Martian. Okay, two movies, same movie. But from different sides of the same coin.

Whenever I bring up this analogy, everybody immediately goes, oh, it's the Revenant. It's the first thing that pops into their mind that I'm talking about. Nobody ever really remembers the Martian. And in fact, the Martian is almost treated as like a little bit goofy because he's trying to grow potatoes. That's his big challenge. He's not like fighting a bear.

He's like, you know, just doing whatever he's. can to live. I think the Martian is the more sophisticated film. I think it's the more important film. It's the one that actually can better the world. It's an important movie. The revenant, easier to me. That's easy to make. It's just revenge. That's all it is. And so I saw this on the Chosen, and it was like, Bing, I get it. I get what Jesus is. Jesus is SoCal Punk Rock. And there are no rules. You don't have to listen to the rules, because they will tell you. you that you're not allowed to direct every episode of a show. But Dallas Jenkins is doing it. He's like completely violating the rules of Hollywood. He's ignoring the Pharisees and they're doing it

on their own. So anyhow, I look up Copernum Studios where they're making. I'm like, where is this? And it's in Texas. And I'm like, this is crazy. And I look on the website for it. Okay, if you took Roger Avery, the filmmaker, before all this happened, if you took me to Copernum Studios and said, this is the studio you're going to shoot out, I'd be like, get me back in the van. take me back to Dallas or Austin or wherever it's near. You know, I can't shoot here, but because he has passion and a need to do it, he doesn't need much. And everybody's bringing as much as they can. That's punk rock too.

That's which is also punk rock. And he kind of reminds me actually of Henry Rollins. Yeah. The guy, this Dallas Jenkins guy, he kind of looks like a straight edge, you know, sort of teeth gritting, intense guy. L-M-N-G. Element Electrolites. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best?

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Speed racer, the cartoon, I think, was a big one for me. But when I think about my youth, the one show that really affected me, even before I went to jail, was the prisoner with Patrick McGoen because he's a spy. And I've noticed that Patrick McGoan, I understand it was a Catholic. And he was offered to play James Bond, but he wouldn't do it because he wouldn't kiss another woman other than his wife. And so he refused to be James Bond. And I think that kind of marginalized him. And he had this show called Secret Agent, which was one of the reasons why they wanted him to be James Bond. And Secret Agent is like a James Bond TV show. Except

He's a very wound up intense, a man of extreme discipline, but he's also got a lot going on. He walked away from Secret Agent. I don't want to do it anymore. I'm done. And everybody was like, we want more. Why? Why? Why not?

And then he came back with the prisoner. And the prisoner was basically, I'm resigning. I am leaving the hypocrisy of the situation. I am part of the system. In fact, I am a functionary in this system where I am like one of the calls. that make the artifice of the world operate, which is not too unlike being a filmmaker. I'm part of the machine.

And then suddenly he's like, no, I refuse. I'm leaving. And they're like, well, you can't leave. Why are you resigning? And so while he's escaping, they take them, they nab them, they put them on the island. The island is an island with, it's got everything, it's got stores, it's got people.

you don't know who the prisoners are or who the warders are. And that's fascinating. They have a cemetery there, so presumably it's for life. And they're always trying to manipulate out of him. Why did you resign? That's all they want to know is information, information, information. That's what we want. And he's just like, you won't get it. I will not be folded, filed, stamped, briefed, index, debriefed, or numbered. my life is my own. I'm the every man. And it becomes a point of discipline with him that even in his dreams, he doesn't give away the secret of why he resigned. And we never find out. That's actually not the point. The point of the show, it's the mcuffin of the show of why it's the engine of the show. But he will never give up that information. And then there is a kind of thesis at the end because he's always trying to find out who is number one. There is a number two who runs the village. the world. I am number two. Yeah.

Who's number one? You are number six. Yeah. And then in the end, they changed the inflection. You are number six. In the very last episode, the inflection changes

from number two. And so, like, that show, I think it had a massive, massive effect on me. How old were you when you saw it? Let's see. The show originally replaced the Jackie Gleason show

on NBC, but then it re-ran on PBS. And I'm trying to think, It must have been 1979, 1980, sometime around. Early on. You were young. Early on. I was young.

How has your life changed since you came to understand Jesus through the chosen? I would probably be considered apostate by most Catholics or even Christians. And I'm still wary of organized anything. I got into an argument with the wife of the mayor of Doville in France. And her belief was children are born into sin. and through correction in Christ, they can become good. And my philosophy is, no, people are born good, are inherently good, and they become corrupt over time. And so we had two completely separate philosophies.

And so to her, I would be considered apostate, because I believe people are good. I think any individual that I ever met in the real world or even in when I was incarcerated, one-on-one, I can deal with anybody. you start getting three or more people together, and they start behaving differently. And so mobs, groups, governments, guilds, corporations, like, they start behaving in sociopathic ways. Yeah. Anything that gets big ends up becoming corrupt. Yeah. And I get nervous around large groups of people, partly because of what I went through. So I looked around the world and what television is doing, and basically like what's going on in the world today, and how. how bifurcated people have become, and how black and white, everybody likes to view everything.

You are either this or that. There used to be great latitude with discussion. Like, well, I like this about that guy. And I think Trump is a big one for people. And I'll be the first to say that there are things I like about Donald Trump. There are things I don't like also. And that's probably what other people don't like as well. But I liked that he was repatriating people who were in prison in foreign countries.

That was a big one for me. And that was one of the first things he did in his first term was taking these people who were in prison in China and here and there around the world and repatriating them and negotiating and bringing them home. Okay, that like meant a lot to me. It brought me to tears, actually. I thought, that's a good thing. And I understand that he's actually a pretty charitable guy, but he never speaks about it. There is a character persona that people don't like. And then there is a lot of media influence. And so, you know, it's not so black and white. And it used to be that there was more latitude for discussion. And now you, if I mentioned what I just said to a lot of

my California friends, they're like, I don't know if I can be your friend anymore. There's a lot of that. And that's kind of weird. Like, that's a strange thing. That goes back to what you said about knowing who your friends were when you got in trouble. Yeah. It's this kind of all or nothing vilification. Correct. Like, for example, Eli, Roth, the filmmaker. Like, I know that guy's my friend. And there's a whole bunch of people like that. I don't mean to just single him out.

But, for example, come hell or high water, that guy called up and was like, what can I do? Yeah. How can I help? A bunch of other people just gone. They were phantoms almost. So I'm watching The Chosen, and I'm thinking about movies about forgiveness and movies about revenge and the state of the world and the turbulence that's going on and how much hate there is among people when really, like, we're all in this together. We're all trapped here together.

And if we work together, so much more can come out of it. And if we just come from a place of love and sharing and forgiveness, like so much more can be done. And I think that there are dark forces out there that are trying to separate people and divide them up and keep them in their house paying subscription fees and whatever. These forces are very real and they're very dark. And I I started thinking there are, however, it manifests whatever you want to call them. One could call them demons. There are angels and demons around us all at all times. And so I thought about it, and I was like, well, you know, Jesus vanished for a good part

of his life. And some people say he went to India or into the Southeast Asia somewhere and learned a lot. He's a rabbi, basically. He's a man of learning. And he learned some things, and he just applied those tools to where he was in ancient Judea, and I'm like, okay, listen, if there's a line being drawn in the sand and you've got like demons on one side and angels on the other, I'm on the side of the angels, ultimately. That's where I want to be. Like, I know that inherently. And that's probably always been the case.

It's always been the case. It's always been the case with me. And having done wrong and having killed a person, which is the worst thing you can do, it's irreversible. There's nothing I can do to reverse it. I would do anything to reverse it. And I can't. And it was a friend. I had only just met him. I was loaning them my house. I see. And it's not anyone you read anything against. Yeah, it was a weird situation. It was like I was trying to be charitable, but then I was speeding. And then this happened. And there's nothing that I can do to stop that other than to do what I can do, which is I still make movies. I still write. I still look into the tunnel. I take care of my family. I just try to be there for other people. I try to always tell somebody when I meet them, just as I told you, I love you. Rick, like, what a gift to know you. And then reality is what we make it. It's like you can be happy in jail. Somebody gave me the Dostoevsky book. Everybody was sending me prison books. I got Servantes was in prison. Dostoevsky went to a gulag. And I got sent the house. of the dead by, I think it was my cinematographer, Robert Brinkman. And so Dostoevsky was scheduled to be

hanged for whatever offense that it was. And like literally they take them up and they're hanging people. They're like, okay, you three go up and they're hanged. And okay, next three. And they're like just hanging a bunch of people. And Dostoevsky's flipping out. And they go in there and they put the noose over his neck. And they're just about to like release the gallows. And suddenly somebody says, wait, stop. Is that Dostevsky? Zavsky, Zarr says he's not supposed to be executed. He's supposed to go to a gulag. And so he had the unique experience of having the preparation of the moment of death,

where it's all going to go dark in just a second. And then suddenly he goes to a better place, a gulag. But it's better. Arguably a better place. But it's, well, it's better than the alternative in that moment. We don't know. Well, Dostovsky knows. He writes about his experience.

experiences there. He writes what it's like, and when I'm reading this, okay, there's nothing more different. It's the 1800s. It's northern Siberia, you know, a gulag, it's Russia. It's all these things that are not where I am. And I'm reading it, and I'm like, all the behaviors are the same. You see the comedy of the situation you're in. You see people walking in circles and trying to control the outside. And you see people like angry and you see the best of people. You see the worst of people. You see both. It's not all bad, like in a movie. The movie might depict it as being just completely bad and, like, horrible, and the guys are trying to kill you all the time. No, there's actually moments of camaraderie. People find a way. In the concentration camps

in Germany, children still played. That happened. And so people are immensely adaptable. And so Justice F. He goes to this gulag, and he's there, and there's a moment where they're being moved from one place to another, and the villagers see the prisoners. And mostly, and I experienced this because they would every now and then bring, I don't know, like a tour group in or something, people would come through and they're like kids are looking through the window. They're trying to scare them straight or something, looking through the bubble window at everybody inside, and you're all like looking out at them. And mostly people look at you as you're just inhuman. But this little girl, like sees Dostiask, and she gives him something. And,

And it's just this moment, this small moment of human kindness, where she transcends the fact that he's a prisoner. She doesn't see him that way. Maybe it's because she's a child, but I think her mother is also there. And Dostoevsky weeps, and that becomes, like, maybe it's a flower, actually. He ends up holding on to it forever, like for the rest of his life because of what it meant to him, which was that somebody just showed human kindness. They didn't see him just as an abstract. They saw beyond that.

So everything is relative. And so the experience hasn't changed. Incarceration is incarceration, and that it's just perception, just different window dressing. And that happens in daily life. And I've seen people who are imprisoned by their money. I've seen people who are imprisoned by their fame. I've seen people who are imprisoned by their poverty. I've seen people who are imprisoned by their education.

And all of them in the wink of an eye can be free. It's up here. It's like James Stockdale, it's what you can control. It's the one thing that the outside doesn't really matter. Do you cry easily? Yes, especially on an airplane. I think that's a common thing, but yeah, I do. Well, I feel greatly.

Maybe that's a better way of putting it. Yeah. I do cry. You're sensitive? When I was younger, I used to be able to, I think I was always relatively sensitive, but I was able to abstract my senses, and I could come from a place of cruelty easily, never hurting anybody,

but now, after what I went through, I realize everyone in some way is undergoing a trauma of some kind, and I try to be sensitive to that. And as I look at society and culture, we're all being traumatized in what seems to me in a larger degree than when I was young. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe it's just my perception of things, but there is definitely a kind of global trauma occurring that we all need a lot of healing. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building

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My dad used to take me to movies, and he was a big movie-going guy. Not a sophisticated moviegoer, just would see everything. And so I started getting dragged to movies that I probably shouldn't have been seeing at a very, very young age. I saw Clockwork Orange on its release, and I think I was six or seven when I saw that movie. And actually, I kind of consider talking about a movie that's about violence. Clockwork Orange was the first time I understood what a director did. I mean, when we go to the movies, you're dreaming while awake. You're watching someone else's dream on screen, and you're sitting in the dark.

You're trapped in the dark next to someone you don't even know. And yet you're sitting next to them. You're dreaming while awake. You're having this ecstatic experience, almost a congregational experience. You're watching little stained glass windows, and you're learning the lessons of your myths and traditions put on screen for you. And you're sharing your bodily electricity with this person next to you. And I think that actually is the magic of movies. It's less the movie itself than it is.

The communal experience. The communal experience. It goes back to church. It goes even back to sitting around the campfire and just telling stories of your myths and traditions just to get through the dark night. And we need that. We need other people. We need to share electricity with other people. And it has a kind of unifying fabric of everything that connects us all. And it's a way to tap into that in a very ecstatic kind of way. And so, like, Like, I began as a cartoonist, but that was just visual storytelling.

And then that evolved into, this teacher I had when I was in grade school, brought out a camera, a regular eight millimeter camera, and we were doing stop motion animation. And some people were making, like, an orange, go across the floor or something like that. And I ended up doing this little cartoon about a guy who is walking down the street, and he was just one shot. He comes to a stop sign. It's don't walk, and he presses the button, and he's waiting,

and then a safe falls, and it lands on them, and then, bing, like the light turns to walk. And so that was, like, my first experience. And then I saw that, like, one of my cartoons in motion and telling a visual story. And I was like, okay, I like this. And then I moved into Claymation and working in Claymation. And then just pretty soon I was, like, with my friends making small movies, again on Super 8 by that point. And cranked out a whole bunch of, like, movies like that. And I worked on Lords of Dogtown, the surfing, skateboarding movie about Stacey Peralta's script and Tony Alva and like all those guys and Zephyr surfboards.

And my entry into that was that I had worked at this video store. And I kind of realized, you know, when you're young and there's this brick and mortar place where you've got the wise old surfboard shaper there, you gravitate towards what you love and you go hang out there. And then some of you end up working there. And then you're around because they introduced urethane wheels. And to me, that was no different than there was this video store in Manhattan Beach. I gravitated towards it because it was a friend of mine's father actually owned it. And started hanging out and then ended up sort of working there. And video was a new thing.

The idea of, I mean, those days it was beta and VHS tapes. We would watch a database of movies. You couldn't do that before. And you could just be talking about a movie and then grab it and pop it on and rewind to a scene or fast forward to a scene and show the scene and discuss the scene. And that was kind of like my film school. I went to film school, but that was my true film school. Besides Clockwork Orange, what other formative movies in your life changed you or gave you a new understanding of the world? Well, let's see.

Clark Mc Orange was a big one. Sorcercercercerer was a... Any of a sorcerer. Sorcercer is by William Friedkin, and it's about guys driving trucks full of nitrolycerin through the jungle. That movie, I think, is... It's a remake of a movie called The Wages of Fear,

and La Salle de de Perre, and it's a French film, foundational film. For some reason, I keep thinking back to The Little Prince. It was a movie that really affected me. I had read The Little Prince, but then seeing it as a movie, and, you know, Bob Fossy is in it,

dancing and stuff. And it's kind of a very 1970s movie, but it was animation and three-dimensional animation and live action. And plus, it's the voice of this innocent, the little prince who is just trying to understand the world and his little planet and the perspectives of it. And so that movie meant a lot to me.

The Sound of Music. I've seen the movie a million times, but I watched it again recently, and I had a realization about it that I hadn't seen before. Okay, I've seen the movie. When I first came to Los Angeles, I was living in Arizona with my parents. My dad's a mining engineer, and so we were like, I would go wherever there was a mine. And so we were in Arizona, and then we moved to Los Angeles. And one of the first things we did was go to the Cinerama Dome. And so I'd never been to the Cinerama Dome or seen a screen like that, and it was the sound of music.

And so it was like this magical experience to go see, you know, and I love musicals, and I love the music in that film. And I had the album, and I think I even had the book, and I was really into this. I'm still really into the sound of music. But I watched it again during the holidays. I saw several things that I had never seen before. that are maybe obvious to some people, but they weren't obvious to me. So the Von Trapp House is on the lake, and every now and then you're in the backyard, and the movie is just beautiful the way it's shot.

It's like Technicolor, and it's these deep colors and this high-resolution. The Blu-ray of it is absolutely outstanding. And, I mean, the church scene, in the end when they get married, I always cry when I watch that movie, because the moment when the von Trapps are, when Captain Von Trapp, who's all wound up, start singing Edelweiss, when you suddenly realize that this guy who is so closed off is actually really sensitive.

He's closed off for a reason. He's really sensitive inside. It's super powerful. Well, there's several things that I learned about them, that I realized about the club while watching it. One, they're in Salzburg, and they're on the lake, and you see the Alps behind, well, the position of Salzburg, it's Berchtesgarten that's behind the lake up there.

That's where Hitler's hanging out. Hitler is in that mountain right there that you're looking at, overlooking them the entire time of the movie. That was like a kind of realization that blew my mind. Secondly, I had never thought so much about the Max character. He's the theater manager who wants to make the Von Trapp family, you know, you'll perform in the festival and Max is kind of ambivalent. He's like, I'm not political. He's just a bon vivant. He loves eating the Von Traff's food. I love my rich friends because they always have the best wine and there's always croissants or whatever he's Danish is. I love being a guest of them and I'll

get you in the festival. I'll have this family in the festival. And at one point, he's like, well, you know that I'm non-political. And Captain Von Trapp, it's like, you have to be. You have to be Max. He gets really mad at Max for his ambivalence. And I had never really thought about it. Max is Jewish. Like, it's so obvious. It just never, like I just watched the movie and the music and everything. But this last time, it was like, oh, my God.

And Max is the one guy who stays behind when everybody escapes in the end. Max is doomed. Like, Max is doomed. And then the other thing is that you never see anything. You know, the postboy is just the postboy. They're talking about the ride. of Hitlerian Nazism and what's going on. But it isn't until after the intermission.

The movie breaks and there's intermission, and the first thing we see is the Nazi flag and Captain Von Trapp tears it down. While we were all taking a pee and getting candy and popcorn at the bar and just like having a cigarette or whatever in between movies, the Nazis were moving in to the movie.

That's one of the most powerful intermissions in a movie ever. Like, the use of the intermission as a device to describe our complacency is super intense. And so I saw that again, and I just, like, I think that movie is just the best. What do you think makes a movie great? Your script is what's most important, and then you cast it with the right actors. If you get the actors and the script correct, you almost don't have to do anything else. You can mess up everywhere else.

But if you get those two things right, it'll be okay. And then if you bring passion to it and a kind of obsession with your subject, then magic can happen. Can you tell from a script if a movie's going to be great? Yeah, I would say so. There are certain scripts that I've read that I'm just like, okay, that is an amazing script. The script for Sorcerer, it's one of the reasons I love the movie. Wallen Green wrote this amazing.

amazing. It's like a novel. There's very little dialogue in it. A script is just a blueprint. It's like a two-dimensional representation of a house. And I look at it just like building a house. It isn't until you go to the site and you start orienting it properly to the sun and you start realizing, oh, I need a window here. Look at the view. We need a window. And, you know, well, we're going to have to put in a header. We've got to do all this engineering to make it work. But we've got to have that window there because we now see in three mentions what it's going to be. And then you have a client who has their ideas of what they want, and they're ruining your perfect design along the way. They're like, oh, I want to have, you know, my kitchen be like this. And you're like, if only I can talk them into doing it correctly.

And then you have materials that may not show up in a budget that you're working with. And you're like, you planned copper as your rooftop and copper is going to look just right. But then by then, maybe there's a copper shortage or something, and suddenly you can't have copper, the budget gets cut, you can't have copper, what are you going to do? How are you going to make it work with tin? You've got to figure out along the way

how to take your project, and you have to work with what you don't have most of the time. You've got to take the problems that are coming your way, and you'd have to take lemons and make them into lemonade, basically. And so I've had bad experiences making a movie, I've had perfect experiences. When I did the rules of attraction, everything that could go wrong went wrong, but it went wrong in a good way.

Like 9-11 happened while we were shooting. It was a disaster. I arrive on set, and the towers are falling. And I'm like, oh, God, how am I going to keep shooting? My crew is freaking out. But because of that, this actor that we were moving, James Vanderbyke, who we were moving back and forth between his show and North Carolina, like literally we were like, would shoot with him and put him on a,

Red Eye. He would fly there and he would shoot a little bit and he would fly back. Well, it happened when he was with us and they froze all the airplanes. So it was the worst event that could possibly happen. It kind of worked in our favor. And also, the energy that came from that moment informed me how to end the movie. I changed the ending of the movie based on, I had these ideas about manifest destiny that were intellectual. And they became very visceral and real in that moment. And I realized, oh, you can change reality. And that's what I did at the end of the movie. Completely altered my screenplay.

And I thought my screenplay was perfect. There's another moment that, you know, when I read the book, Brett's book, there was a scene with the lead character, she's a girl, and there's a suicide that occurs, and somebody discovers the suicide that's happened and the blood, and it's this horrifying moment. And though it sounds a little macabre, she runs across campus screaming after. after she sees it. And somebody else sees this happening from afar.

And it's kind of funny in the book, even though it's this terrible, macabre moment. It's kind of funny. And I laughed out loud, ah, ha, ha, what I read it initially. Well, we go on set and we're shooting, and I'm shooting with Shannon Sossaman, who was a DJ. She wasn't an actress originally. So she's untrained.

And I learned pretty early on that I can't make her do something fake. but what she gave me that was real was better than faking. It was sublime. She had a kind of natural honesty. Everybody else that was working on that film, they were highly trained actors, done hundreds of hours of television.

They knew how to hit their mark and how to turn in the frame and how to do this and that. She was like a wild animal in that way. And so we're prepping the scene. I shoot the suicide. I've got the girl in the tub. I bring Shannon over and I show her the girl in the tub.

And I say, okay, now you see this and you scream. And then you run out the door. And then later tomorrow, we'll shoot the scene where you run across the campus. And she's like, oh, I can't do that. I can't scream. I'm like, why? And it's like the clock is ticking and we're about to go into Golden Hour. And it's just a quick shot.

And it was her real-life roommate who played that character. And she's like, well, she looks so beautiful there. It's not a scary image. She looks like a porcelain doll floating in the, that bloody water. Like, she looks actually rather beautiful. I can't scream. And so I was like, okay, I can't make Shannon lie.

By this point, I knew I couldn't make her lie. So instead, I said, well, let's figure it out. And so I just would take her into room and we would talk about life. We would talk about things that I actually am not allowed to talk about because it was like in confidence. But we would be crying by the end of it. And then I would, with a walkie-talkie, okay, roll camera.

And then I would just move her in. I would just walk her in. I would push her in through the door. and then we would just see what she did. And without any kind of planning, she grabbed her friend and pulled her out of the tub. And it's such an intense moment. It's such a, for me, a powerful moment

that I never would have thought of being alone in a vacuum, looking at the tunnel. I wouldn't have thought of that. It just happened. And so you have to be open to what the universe gives you. And so the thing about it is, even though I have a tunnel and I'm watching the movie,

I've made a blueprint from that. Okay, now I've got to be open to you. to go do it for real. And we have to work with actors. And the worst thing to do is to stick to a plan when the universe is telling you something else. It's alive. Hey, dummy, this is like, this is happening in front of you right now. And that's why if it rains, use the rain. I could plan you and I talking here. And I'm like, oh, my God, I see the scene so well. I'm going to lock the camera down on you and I'm going to do it on me. And then at this point in the conversation, I'm going to cut to a two shot. And I'm going to like, that's how the scene is going to go. And then, so,

you want to get up and you want to walk around. Well, maybe the language of the camera should evolve out of the language of the performance. And that way you're finding something that's true because that's what you're always seeking with an actor is truth. And so you write a script and you try to put truth into it. And then you cast somebody who feels it, but then you have to be open to whatever truth comes to them in the moment. And I think one of the best examples of that is one of my favorite biopics that was ever made is Sid and Nancy, because I love punk and Alex Cox in his movie Sid and Nancy, we know how Nancy probably died. Like, we know it was probably the dealer came back and she was kind of spicy and she got into

an argument. He probably stabbed her and everything. But over the course of making the movie, they discovered a truth that was greater than reality while making it. And they departed from the script and it turned into an almost Shakespearean moment between them that we know is false. You know, the movie was made just a couple of years after, you know, those events had occurred. And anybody who really knew punk in that moment kind of, you know, knew that's a little bit of a lie.

But it doesn't matter. It's a truth greater than a reality. It's a bigger truth. Yeah, don't let the facts get in the way. Don't let the facts get in the way. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over. time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom, not by studying words

as information, but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is known as lectio divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements, reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, a single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for instance. insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment.

Designed for modern life, it offers brief guided scriptural reflections throughout the day, to begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments. A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always.

Learn more at Lectio-365. Is there anything that you wouldn't shoot? Because even though it's true, it goes too far. Well, I was just in Cannes, and that was actually asked of me when I was in Cannes. And there was this movie, the Serbian story. I think it's what it was called a Serbian tale. And that movie is basically about just taking this baby and just torturing it and raping it. Okay, that happens. We know that that happens. We know that that happened in Serbia. we know that it's real. Does an audience need to see that?

No. No. And that movie, we would be better off without that. Like, I've seen things in movies I wish I could unsee. There's this movie Come and See that is, it's an outstanding movie. It's a magnificently made film. But even the filmmaker was like, because it was so true to what his experiences had been as a child, that it's such true horror that I don't know that, Like, the movie is a testimony to it, but, like, they machine gun this cow to death in that film, and I cry every time I see it.

I'm watching those bullets with tracers going through that cow. It haunts me to this day, and I wish I could unsee that. Why might a great B movie be better than a big budget mainstream picture? That's easy. Frequently, like, little B movies like Quentin and I did this podcast, video archives podcast, where we watch movies, and we'll watch a big movie, and then a movie. big movie that nobody saw, and then a weird little movie. And like the weird little movie would be like demonoid about a Mexican movie, about a crawling hand that's attacking people. I can't ever imagine wanting to make a movie about a crawling hand that's attacking people. But,

man, that movie is made with such passion. Yeah. And this Mexican filmmaker is bringing it. And there is nobody getting in the way of him doing what he's doing. There's no artifice of money. Sometimes money creates too much of an insulation in between you and the, the work. And sometimes you can have more freedom if nobody's looking over your shoulder. When I made rules of attraction, I needed 10 million to make it. I couldn't make it for a dime less. And then they said, we'll give you four, or else you don't make it. And it was like, well, how do I do this? It turned out I didn't want for anything. Maybe I couldn't have techno cranes. But basically, because I was making it for less, the studio left me alone. They completely left me alone.

Lionsgate was great while making that movie. They let me do what I was going to do because they knew that it was kind of covered by the foreign sales and that it was, you know, low budget enough. We're not going to get in your way. Actually, there's a good story. Matthew Vaughn, who was a producer and became a director. He did a movie called Layer Cake. And he came on to do an X-Men movie. There was some big X-Men movie. And they were like, okay, you've got this much of a budget. And then he budgeted it out and he worked on his plan and he figured out everything he wanted. And he went to them and he said, nope, the movie's going to cost, you know, 90 million. And they were like, well, we're not going to make it.

He's like, well, I can't do it. And so he left the movie. Brett Ratner comes along and says, oh, yeah, I can do it for 60. No problem. He didn't do it for 60. He did it for 90. But everybody had a good time while making it. He told him, you know, you know, he didn't create a, like, frustration in the process early on.

He didn't say it can't be done. He just came on and, hey, let's all take pictures in my booth. And let's have a party. let's make it. And the movie turns out really good. It went into overages, but nobody's, by that point, it's too late. He just kind of went with the flow. I mean, I've never made a movie that went over budget, and I've never made a movie that lost money. But that's mostly because I'm rigorous with my plan, and then I throw my plan away. I only use the plan if I don't have inspiration in the moment. Do you read a script out loud? Yes. Actually, I always read a script out loud. It

If I can, I act it with somebody, because you have a different relationship to the words when they're spoken out loud. When you're writing, do you say it out loud? No, because I'm mostly listening when I write. And then afterwards, once I've kind of got a good body of it together, I'll perform it kind of. And sometimes I'll read it out loud alone, but only after I've written it. How do films change over time? Well, when I first saw Blade Runner, I hated it. Hate it. Like on its release, opening day, I go see Blade Runner. I watched the movie and I'm like, this is awful. This is terrible. What a terrible movie. Yes, it's big. Yes, it's beautiful. Yes, it has good production design. But, man, it was just Harrison Ford. Like, bong, like plunk in that piano key and a little confused in the plot and then a stupid song at the end with a shot stolen from the shining. Awful. Just terrible movie. Like, I thought,

it was horrible. Okay, it took me a while. I've seen the movie. It's a brilliant movie. I was wrong. And that's the beautiful thing about movies. It changed. Did you change? Did you change? I changed. You go through chapters in life. Every seven years, you are genetically, biologically, a different person. The cells in your body from one to seven are different than the cells in your body. They completely are new cells. By the time, seven to 14, 14 to 21, 21 to 28, you're constantly a new person throughout your life. You're different people and you have chapters in your life. And sometimes you have something to say. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you're hearing things that you need to hear. And sometimes you're not ready. So the beautiful thing about movies is like you can hate a movie and then you can watch it

21 years later or something and like, oh my God, brilliant movie. What was I thinking? Why was I so up my ass about that movie? You know, why was I so caught up in my own thing in that moment that I couldn't see what was being told to me. Do you believe in God? Yes. Have you always? I've always believed in a, I would explain it a way as quantum reality and the way the human mind is able to perceive things.

And I look at it now like, no, there is absolutely an all-seeing, all-knowing force in the universe that we cannot understand that we will never in our bodies in this time understand fully, But I look at that as God. And so, yes, I absolutely believe in God. And actually, I believe in the power of prayer, or one might call it meditation, or one might call it visualization. My wife and I, we go for a walk every day, and we walk and we visualize. We think about what we want, where we want to be.

Just like a pitcher when he throws the ball, you've got to see where the ball is going to land before you throw it. You visualize the ball in the catcher's mitt. You see it there. The ball is there. And then you throw the ball and then the ball is there. You have to believe it and know with full certainty. And I use the spec technique. Select it, project it, expect it, collect it.

Speck. And this is like you select what you want to visualize and then you project it. Like, I want that house. Okay. Now I need to project it. I see myself in that house. I see my furniture in that house. I'm cooking dinner for my wife in that house.

I'm going to the bathroom in the toilet in that house. I'm sleeping in the bed in my bed in that bedroom in that house. I focus on it. I think about it. I project it. And then I have to believe it that it's going to happen. I expect it. And at a certain point, you have to collect it.

You have to actually physically manifest it into reality. And this is a technique that I think actually works. And one could call it prayer, or one could call it meditation of just seeing something and believing it, or one could call it visualization where you visualize something into reality. But I chose a very, that's a very material item, but I'll do the same thing with my wants for the universe. Like one could say, I select world peace. You have to project it then. And then you have to really expect it.

And I believe that a thought is a reality. and that we are capable of living multiple realities or else we wouldn't have this situation where one person is miserable and one person is happy adjacent to each other. That is two separate realities that's occurring simultaneously adjacent to each other in physical reality. And so we have to be able to believe that it's true. And some people may think that it doesn't work, but I think it's been proven throughout history that it does work.

Isn't making movies a version of that? Yeah, yeah, actually, now that you mention it, yeah, yeah, you select a project, and sometimes a project comes your way, or sometimes it's something you've wanted to do for a long time, and then you start projecting it by writing it, by, you know, and I'm not saying things happen magically in a second. You have to walk the, you have to go on a journey. And when there is a tunnel, a dark tunnel, that you know exits on the other end, and you start walking through that tunnel, you have to believe, I used to use the three P's instead of. spec, which was you have to be passionate about something. You have to show your passion because frequently, especially in Hollywood, people are jaded. They've forgotten why they're in this business. And you have to reignite it within them. Even if you have to fake it, you have to show them passion to remind them that we were like kids looking at the flicker on the screen like insects. That's why we're all here. And like, oh, and this is going to be great. And then they catch your passion.

And they want to ride it. They want to have a. be a part of it. They want to enjoy it with you. And then you have to positively visualize. You've got to, like, see where you're going to be. You have to, like, go on that journey. And then you have to be persistent. This is where most people fail. But there's plenty of talentless people in Hollywood making really good livings. And it's not because they're talented. It's because they're persistent. And so the persistent are generally the successful ones. And so if you're persistent, a persistent person will walk into a tunnel. And only on faith do you know that there's an exit on the other side of the mountain that you're going through in this tunnel?

You know that it's there, but you can't see the exit. It gets dark, and you're walking in, and it's getting darker and darker. And soon you're losing the entrance that you came in. It's like a little dot of light in the background, and you're getting nervous, and you're like, is there an exit to this tunnel? Well, the persistent will walk forward into the darkness and lose the light behind them. and on faith know that the exit is on the other side of the mountain and that that light will appear and that you will travel through. You believe it and you go and your persistence about it and you keep walking.

Most people will turn around and go back to what's comfortable. But when you're landing on the beach at Normandy, like there is no getting back in the boat and going back. Take the ant hill. That's the approach you have to have. And when you're making a movie, everyone will tell you that it's not possible. Everyone will tell you that you're wrong. Everyone will put doubt and disbelief into your mind.

You are constantly being assaulted by doubt from everyone, and you just have to believe and push forward. Sometimes people tell you, you'll never work in this town again, and believe me, I've been told that. If you believe it, then it's so. That person has then planted that seed, and if you let it grow, then it will grow. But it's not true. You create your own reality, and anything is possible in this world. First of all, there is an infinite amount of money in the world, if money is even real. There is an infinite amount of love in the world.

There is an infinite amount of everything in the world. Fame, all those things that people aspire to, it's all there, and anyone can have it. And I think that that's been proven over time that the most unlikely person is able to rise out of obscurity, to rise out of poverty, to rise out of whatever their situation is. And sometimes those struggles are the journey, and you shouldn't do without them because they make you who you are. I mean, there are plenty of people who, I guess, don't succeed. But like, you know, what is success? I mean, there are other people who have very small wants and can be very content and happy with a very simple existence and situation. And,

They are as successful as the one who seemingly has everything. And sometimes more successful. And sometimes more successful. It might sound ridiculous to some people to say that. But I think it's really true. I think it's really absolutely true that happiness can be found in any situation. And it's just up to us to look to that to find it. And also, when you want something, you can achieve it.

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