The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Water Memory: A Thriller by Daniel Pyne

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Water Memory: A Thriller by Daniel Pyne Sponsor: Restream Studio: Get $10 Credit at https://restream.io/join/chrisvoss A fast-paced, page-turning thriller that contemplates the consequences of motherhood, memory, and crime as a commodity. Black ops specialist Aubrey Sentro may be one concussion away from death. But when pirates seize the cargo ship she’s on, she must decide whether to risk her life to save her fellow passengers. Sentro’s training takes over, and she’s able to elude her captors, leaving bodies in her wake. But her problems are just getting started. Her memory lapses are getting more frequent, symptoms of serial-concussion syndrome. As she plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with the pirates, she pushes herself to survive by focusing on thoughts of her children. She’s never told them what she really does for a living, and now she might not get the chance. While her memories make her vulnerable, motherhood makes her dangerous. About Daniel Pyne Daniel Pyne was born in Chicago, raised in Colorado, educated at Stanford University, and now lives in Los Angeles and Santa Fe with his wife, brown dogs, fat cat, and an extremely sullen box turtle his grown children left in their wake. He is the author of three novels: Fifty Mice, Twentynine Palms, and A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar. A fourth, Catalina Eddy, is scheduled for publication in March of 2017. Among Pyne's film credits are the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Pacific Heights, Any Given Sunday and Fracture. His latest movie, Backstabbing for Beginners, will be released next year. Pyne's television work spans from the seminal hipster cop show Miami Vice to the new Amazon TV series Bosch. Pyne has worked as a silk screen printer, journalist, cartoonist, advertising copywriter, screenwriter, director, and occasionally teaches writing at UCLA's graduate school of film. Learn more at www.danielpyne.com.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming with an exciting new interview this is on a book that is being launched today today is is launch day, February 1st, 2021. We're going to be talking to a brilliant author on his most exceptional new book.

To see the video version of this, go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, hit the bell notification, go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss, go to facebook.com, The Chris Voss Show, and LinkedIn and Chris Voss and the Chris Voss Show on Instagram. And there's plenty of groups on Facebook and LinkedIn you can check out as well. And today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor. Restream Studio is a web-based live broadcasting solution. You can live stream a Zoom meeting or webinar to up to 30 plus social channels and platforms at the same time.

We're actually using it to do our live broadcasting. You can get $10 credit towards their services using our affiliate link at restream.io forward slash join forward slash Chris Voss. This is a new book launching today. If you're one of those people who likes to grab the latest book, the hottest thing, you want to be the first one to read it so you can tell your friends about it first before they tell you or before it gets put on the silver screen. This is going to be the interview for you. And this gentleman has written

several other books, so he's an accomplished author as well. The new book is called Water Memory, a Thriller by Daniel Pine. Go and hold it up here. You can check it out. It's a beautiful, nice, thick book. And we have Daniel with us. He's graced us with his presence today to tell us about this extraordinary new book that is available today. You can buy it on all those booksellers online or at your local bookseller if you want to wander in, wear a mask. Daniel Pine is the author, screenwriter, and director of film and television. He was born in Chicago, raised in Colorado, educated at Stanford, A Hole in the Ground, Owned by a Liar, and Catalina Eddy. His new book, Water Memory, is a fast-paced page-streaming thriller that contemplates the consequences of motherhood, memory, and crime as a commodity. Thomas and

Mercer published the novel today. His writing credits for film include Backstabbing for Beginners, I should watch that, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Pacific Heights, Any Given Sunday, and Fracture. Pines Television workspans from seminal hipster cop show Miami Vice to Amazon's hit series Bosch. Welcome to the show, Daniel. How are you, sir? I'm good today. How are you? Nice. Welcome to the show, Daniel. How are you, sir? I'm good today. How are you? Nice.

I love the Bosch series. That's a great series. It is. It is. Michael Connelly. Yeah. Great crime writer. Great stuff.

Tell us, give us your dot coms where people can find you on the interwebs, stalk you, and find out more about you. www.danielfine.com. There you go. And you can order the book anywhere. It's available today. You can pick it up and give us a reason why you wrote this book. Why did you say after four books to write another one? I spent a lot of my career as a screenwriter and a movie maker working on thrillers and working on action movies. And I had an idea. I had a character that was orphaned that was wandering around in my head. And I had a conversation with a cinematographer named Tak Fujimoto, who told me we're driving

around doing a location scout in New York. And he told me this story of how he'd gone on a cargo cruise to chill out after his last movie. And the way he described it was fascinating because seven passengers on one of those huge cargo ships with all the containers on it. And you don't really have anything to do. You can do a lot of reading. You rest and sleep, and you can talk to the other passengers. You can wander around the deck, do circles and laps around the deck. And initially, I thought, wow, what a great location for a thriller, for Die Hard on a Boat. And then I had this, I really got fascinated with the idea of

doing a that kind of an action story but with a woman as the protagonist because I was tired of of writing men so I put those two things together and put my protagonist, Aubrey Centro, on a boat and gave her some challenges like serial concussion syndrome from exposure to IEDs and two grown children that she's been disconnected from because she spent a lot of her life on missions in foreign countries. So she was not the principal caregiver. And I just went from there and saw what happened. There you go. Now, this is the first in a series, is that correct?

It turned into one, yeah. Normally, I really, when I started writing novels, my intention was never to write a series of novels. I'm always jealous of the guys who can, like Michael Connelly, who's written, what, 22 Bosch books. And it amazes me that he can go back to that character and explore new things every time. And he does. I tend to be more interested in dissecting a character in a single book and coming to a conclusion and then moving on. But in this case, when I was done with this, I had a notion of where I might take it because I had some things that were unresolved. So there you go. I'm writing the second one now. So give us a, so what you mentioned earlier,

is that a good overview of the whole book or Or do you want to give us a little more depth? I think the overview that you gave of it is right. It's basically the story of this private, this woman private contractor who's been working for security firm like Blackwater, but smaller, who discovers that she's, her memory is slipping. And she goes to the doctor and the doctor says, you've been exposed. Doctor doesn't know what she does for a living, but knows that, that she's showing these symptoms of seroconcussion syndrome, which is what football players get. And it's very misunderstood and badly understood. They really don't know what the prognosis of it is and why it affects some football players and not other football players. And I ran across that when I was doing any given Sunday, when I was working on the script for that.

So I've been having that in the back of my mind for a while. So anyway, this woman has this problem. She decides she's going to take a break. She books passage on a cargo ship. And seemingly by coincidence, pirates try to take over the ship. And of course, this is her area. So bad luck for the pirates. And unfortunately, she's a little compromised by her condition and not 100%. So it doesn't go quite the way she wanted it to. And then about halfway through, she starts to discover that this pirate hijacking that

seems so simple isn't because it's actually a business. And what's happened in the 21st century is insurance companies insure these boats and there are middlemen who broker settlements so pirates take the boats and then ask for a ransom and the insurance company negotiates and they pay the money and then the boat's released and it's just the cost of doing business well so there's a lot of people who don't want her to solve the problem. And action and conflict and stuff ensues. A thriller.

A thriller. Keep you on the edge of your seat. Does the whole book take place upon this storage boat? No, it does not. Not to give anything away, but they hijack the boat and they take it in so that they can dock it somewhere and look at what's on it and possibly portion out the cargo. So part of it takes place in this mythical little town, pirate town on the coast of South America. Wow. That's crazy. This is pretty interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a book where it's

built around this sort of premise. Would you say it's like a diehard for container ships? Yes. There you go. Yeah. Sort of. Next Christmas. But I have to say that one of the things that I enjoy about writing books, when you're in the movie business, it's a collaborative business and you make a lot of compromises and you have to write for the studio and for the director and for the

actors and for the audience. And one of the things that interests me when I'm writing books is to write it for me. So I'm very focused in the book on exploding some of the tropes and traditions and conventions of the genre. Not that I don't like Die Hard or I did some of all fears. I love those kinds of movies. But in this case, I wanted to ground it a little bit more in what the real world is. And that gave it a kind of balance that you can't do as easily in a movie. Wait, one guy taking on a whole army of terrorists in a building and

yeah and and yeah and driving the car backward off a seven-story parking structure and surviving sure yeah hollywood movies but we always remember nakatomi we always keep it in our hearts every christmas i gotta see that meme so we talked a little bit about your difference between screenwriter and novelist. Do you have a preferred medium after writing five books and doing all the screenwriting you've done? I don't. I set out when I got out of school, I thought I would be a novelist. I took creative writing and I trained under some great novelists. But I wasn't very good at it, or I was a slow learner.

And I was also fascinated by film. My father was a painter and a sculptor, so I have this kind of visual background, and I'm interested in the visual medium of film and how pictures go together. So I got sidetracked. I came to L.A LA and I got into film school and I realized that it wasn't just something that could support me while I wrote books. It was

actually a career I had to concentrate on. So I was writing in the background, but I had to focus on learning how to be a screenwriter and be a film writer, which I love. As I said, I love how visual film is and how concise your writing has to be and how you have to tell what's going on inside of a character in the way that they act and behave and interact with the world as opposed to getting inside their head the way you do in a novel do you see this maybe becoming a made for tv or made for film screen i don't know because i come at it backwards i never think that way i know a lot of novelists hope that their books get

turned into movies we've shown it i'm showing it to some people, but who knows? It's a, it's a crap shoot. Hey, it's a series. Usually series turn into stuff. Series. Yeah. Hollywood loves that and making those one, two, three, four. This was something that the pirating scenes bring to mind Tom Hanks in the film, Captain Phillips. What was some of your research into modern modern pirating for your book? I love that film, Paul greengrass i i did do

research there there are a number of books on it but i was more interested in deconstructing it my pirates are in the caribbean not in not in off of the coast of africa so it's a different it's a different kind of piracy but i I read a lot of books. I read a lot of articles. And after I saw Captain Phillips, I was sure that I wanted to do something slightly different. So my pirates aren't, they actually aren't really pirates, but we'll see. But I was interested. I was more interested in the psychological condition, who these guys are.

They tend to be really young. A lot of them are kids. They don't make a lot of money. The people who are making the money are the brokers and the handlers and the people in charge. It's very different. But I thought that world gave me a lot of latitude and the irony of here you are, you're pirates just trying to make a living and you happen to hit the wrong boat with the wrong person on it and their world blows up. There you go. Did you ever think about doing some research where you actually tried to take a boat? I thought about it. I was at the time I was writing this, I was running Bosch for a few years, so I didn't really have the time to go and i have to admit i get a

little seasick on big boats yeah so you would have been one of the pirates that you got i could have yeah on the fast boat i could have come and tried to climb they're shooting at you and stuff yeah that's the only yeah not a thing i like to do the main character aubrey Centro, is a badass black ops agent. She's also a mother struggling on how to be a good present mom and do her job the way it has to be done. Why did you, as a male writer, started to be accepted more in the late 80s into the 90s. It started to become a little bit more of a normal thing, although there's still some obstacles she overcame. I'm also interested. I'm always interested in how young people are when their military careers start at 18 a lot of the time. So in this case, she's got grown children and she's still in her 40s.

So I was just interested in exploring that kind of character. Someone who comes at the job that we know so well from movies, television books, at a different angle. She has a different attitude toward it. Have your prior books usually been male? Yeah, I write a lot of, I've written a lot of movies with strong women or primary women characters. Pacific Heights was originally about the woman character. So it's, I go back and forth.

I'm interested in characters with challenges. And in this case, it was, I felt like I could write this woman because she has specific characteristics and specific deficiencies. The spectrum of gender behavior is not black and white. So she, she feels deficient as a mom because she's been the primary breadwinner in her family. And she's been away most of the time. And how does that feel? I know some women who've done that in Hollywood, who've spent a lot of time on sets and away from their families.

And how does that affect their relationship with their children? Do they feel guilty? Do they feel guilty? Do they accept it? All those things interested me. It's definitely, it makes the characters more complex and give them more depth and make them more interesting to people like me who watch films or read books like that. You like a conflicted character who's got issues

because it just seems more real than sometimes when you watch, I don't know, I'm not bashing Marvel movies, is the depth of character really makes a difference to me. Yeah, there's definitely a thing about, we're definitely in a phase where we tend to write these idealized superhero characters, whether they're superheroes or not, and they have special skills and it's great. But for me, I don't have special skills. So I'm interested in reading about people who don't. It's like, I used as an example for this, I'm not a huge Hemingway fan, but so admire his books. And I feel like all his books are thrillers. So like, for whom the bell tolls, you have this guy who's trying to be a revolutionary in Spain and running through the woods, but he's, he has no superpowers.

He's just surviving. And that is really, I think that's relatable and gripping. And it also, it's funny. It's real life. It gets absurd. Yeah. Which life does. Let's see who's the ideal cast for the film version of this book water memory oh i don't know charlize they're on

maybe or who else viola davis someone who can play who you believe knows their way around a gun. Like you wouldn't believe that I, if I had a gun, you would know that I didn't know what to do with it, but you want somebody who you believe can handle themselves and handle it, a situation like that. Any other characters that you'd like to play other parts of the book? No, I never think that way. I don't even think that way when I'm writing movies.

It's the wildest thing. Yeah. Charlize Theron would be great. She's such a great action. She's such a great actress too. She's so clear about things or seems like it and very strong without being phony strong you know it seems like a real thing and so much that she can play like jesus all the different parts that she played that were just like oh yeah holy crap and you're just like i don't even recognize her and

and that's just with makeup and her making adjustments to herself so are you a plotter or a pantser i'm pulling this off the the q a thing so i'm not really sure what that means maybe you do from your oh oh oh yeah weird a pantser that sounds like somebody goes around a pants people and i yeah remember when when you were like 12 yeah Yeah. This is from Thomas and Marcia Q&A. I think it means seat of the pants. Like you just write as opposed to you plot. So I guess I'm a plotter. Okay.

I'm a seat of the pants plotter though. A seat of the pants plotter. It is a thriller. So that's important. Let's see. What was another question they had for us to throw? You recently worked with Michael Connelly on Amazon streaming service Bosch, a series, actually, Bosch. What comparisons would you make to storytelling via a streaming medium versus writing a novel? They're similar.

They're actually more similar than movies and novels. And we would take, on Bosch, we would take maybe two of Michael's novels and we'd interlace them. So we'd use two plots and meld them and do this double helix plotting but you each episode becomes like a chapter of a book as opposed to episodic an episodic thing or a movie which tends to resolve much quicker it tends to be more compact so it's similar and i learned i actually have learned a lot working with mich Michael because he's such a great mystery novel writer and plotter and how he solves problems and how his ideas, he'll have story ideas that he gets from his research from cops that he knows that aren't just an idea. They usually are a whole sequence. They play out. They're a story as opposed to just an idea. It was great.

It was really enjoyable working on the show with him. I really liked the series because I'm one of those people that 99% of movies, no, maybe 95% of the movies, I can watch the first five minutes and know the ending. It's not that hard. Good versus evil. Good wins at the end. And a lot of times i can figure stuff out and so i like movies or tv shows where i don't see the ending and i can't see the ending and then it frustrates me

which kind of draws me a little bit more because i'm like where is this going and so the boss series was great that way you didn't really know where things are going you had the complex plot overlays and one thing that was funny about the bosh series was i was a big destiny gamer for so many years and loved to play the game destiny by bungie and i forget the actor's name but i had heard that voice for years oh lance reddick right yes yes the police liaison for city hall or something he's the no he's the police chief is he the police chief for City Hall or something? No, he's the police chief. Is he the police chief? Yeah. Yeah.

And so first time I was watching Bosch, I heard that voice. I was like, Destiny, the game. Like, what the hell? And so watching him in the character that I'm used to seeing in Destiny, it's like really strange. But he has such a great voice. It's so rich. Yeah, his voice is great. His presence is great.

He's in the john wick movies too i haven't seen those i guess i gotta go see those no you don't have to but that's probably why i haven't seen them uh yeah he has the most amazing voice i loved writing killed it on the voice yeah yeah it's just such a rich voice but for years i played destiny like four years three years and then i saw the bosh series and it was like really messing with my brain to see him i think i think lance plays it as well because i've seen some he's posted some instagrams of him playing video games when he's off oh does he mess with people in the game like he gets on there i don't know because the in

destiny the character of zavala is like a really core character and so he's all through the game and he's always talking like that would really screw with people if he got on to party chats and started talking yeah talking yeah that would like really be messed up yeah that was a fun series to watch and and uh a nail biter usually down to the end because you're like oh no man everything's man, everything's going wrong, man. It's going right off the cliff. He's screwed. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just one of those great movies. And it all comes at the end, too, because you're like, and it comes at the very end. What was that one movie, The Dragon, whatever, with the Bond dude, where the thing went to shit to the last minute. And you're just like, and it saves itself. And you're like, oh, my God. Thankfully. Yeah, that's the goal you want to pull people along and oh yeah that's what kept it coming back yeah yeah the and he's a great character too i like the actor that plays that he's a really simple titus gets what he does and he's a really simple character he's driven relentless so i gotta ask you the question

about pacino because that's just it would be a crime against humanity if i didn't do that as an interviewer what was that like working with him or did you work with him on i didn't on i actually didn't i wrote a really early it's i i got credit but i wrote a really early draft of any given sunday which was basically about a sports doctor. It was basically the James Woods, Matthew Modine plot, which was, it was the whole plot with the guy who gets hurt and he decides to play and he could kill himself. If he keeps playing, he gets the head injury or the neck injury, and he wants to keep playing. And they're worried about he'll be paralyzed. But I have run across Al Pacino and he's a force of nature.

He's a force of nature. He's great. He's so intense. Yeah. And so focused. Yeah. He's kind of like the characters he plays. Yeah. Very bombastic.

Yeah. I've always been an Al Pacino fan since i was a kid so i had to throw that in is there any other actors that you've liked working with over the years that you want to i've worked with i've worked with denzel a few times and i love working with him he's the best yeah he's one of the actors i i enjoy working with actors i went through a period where i was a fixer. So they bring me in to fix things or they bring me in to do the work for an actor. And I went on a movie once that Denzel was doing and they brought me in to fix it for him.

So I had this meeting with him and I said, so what do you want? He said, I don't know. And I said, they've hired me to fix. He said, yeah, they're hiring you because you're good. And just write me a character. He said, don't write for me. Write me a character I can play. I don't want you to not about what his strengths and weaknesses were and which was his good side and and i've been lucky to work with actors like that michael fox was like that i worked with him a couple times sam jackson is like that they just they're actors they're yeah they do what they do they really know the craft samson jackson oh my god wow yeah just what an actor i think i think the my favorite actor though to hear do my dialogue was meryl street oh really yeah that's got to be awesome because everything she does sounds like she just thought

it up it doesn't it never sounds like a line. You could write her a horrible line and she'd make it work. That's talent. Great acting and skill and method acting and all that stuff is such a talent and underappreciated too. I wish there was more films that are designed that way. But I don't know. It's been a weird year for Hollywood with the coronavirus. It's been hard.

Titus is actually good in that way. Playing that, it's really hard to do series because you have to stay in that character season after season. But at the same time, like in a show like Bosh, you want to evolve because it dumps all at once and it's serialized and it doesn't have commercials. Yeah, they shot Bosh. I left the show this year they shot their last season and they shot during the pandemic they shot all fall and did all the

protocol wearing masks it was weird it's been a weird year it's been a really weird year hopefully we'll see this in either theaters, maybe TV adaption. There's so many different outlets now. Amazon, Netflix, Disney. I can't even keep up with all the monthly subscriptions. I'm supposed to have HBO Max. Peacock. I discovered Peacock yesterday.

Yeah, Peacock is really big. There's some good news channels on there that I like that I wish were on network TV. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like a junior league for NBC or something. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. We test these. It has sporting events. That's what I discovered. I'm always looking for where they, when they've taken something off of broadcast, I know that it's somewhere on a service that you have to pay for yeah definitely i'm always ending up doing that thing where on google you're like where does this go and who i pay for this if i want this they just got done moving some of the humphrey bogart

catalogs around i don't even know who owns them but like they got moved they're moving or got moved off of netflix and then i don't know i just found one on hbl max where they've got a couple of the classics just two or three and but i'm a big bogey fan so i'm always like hunting around for bogey movies criterion collection yeah collection has a whole channel now oh do they do you have to pay for that too now the criteria see that used to be on the criterion stuff used to be on netflix right yeah yeah and then it was on for a brief time it was on something called film rise film i don't know it was they had a different one it's t turner classic movies i think it's a offshoot from that yeah but yeah i know it's interesting because the landscape has changed in a way that movies are getting made maybe in a better way now but people have to get used to the fact

that they're not necessarily going to be a theatrical release yeah yeah i don't know there's been someone amazon put out a lot of great stuff yeah who's the other actor who did sling blade i always forget his name. Billy Bob Thornton. Billy Bob Thornton did that detective series on there. That thing was amazing, man. Yeah. Just so great.

That and Bosch were my two faves that they put out. But yeah, the Criterion Collection, I think I used to pull off a Netflix for them for all the Akira Kawasawa movies that I love. I just love those movies like you watch those movies and everything in hollywood has been taken from them oh yeah mandalorian is a kurosawa it's a kurosawa movie which one is that one based on do you know mandalorian yeah i know the star wars one is the hidden fortress yeah the hidden fortress

and i remember watching that hidden fortress and I'm like, holy mother of Judas. Yeah. At least George Lucas admits he ripped it off. But I watch it, and I'm just like, holy crap. This is like, I don't know, I'd sue for copyright infringement or something. But it was funny. Everything good gets just remade. Welcome to Hollywood.

So anything more you want to plug on this book, Daniel? No. I take the philosophy that hopefully people will buy it and like it. I can't sell it. The words speak for themselves. The book should speak for itself. If it doesn't, I apologize, but maybe not. You've written a lot of stuff, so I think we're going to be good at getting the book yeah i think you're i did what i wanted to do which is is always enjoyable that's important

if you're happy with the work so check it out guys water memory a thriller by daniel pine you can take and pick it up today at your local bookstores and there's actually a barnes and noble here local in utah it's weird i i didn't know they were still around barnes and noble yeah yeah yeah i was like amazed so you can go into your local bookstore you can go on amazon or any different places to check it out support your independent bookstore there you go support those guys they're really struggling right now with the coronavirus i know yeah order it you can call them up and order it and they'll get it and you can go pick it up it's almost like being online it's almost like being online but you get some exercise yeah and fresh air just wear your mask so order that up give us your dot com so people

can look you up and stalk you some more www.danielpine.com and i'm rebuilding it because it was hacked oh no and destroyed but there's a lot of i have a lot of old pilots that nobody's ever seen on it i have some scripts i have some details on movies that nobody knows about and all my back catalog of books are there so nice you guys can order the books and see some of the, the in-depth stuff behind the scenes and all that stuff. And, uh, great for your fans. Yeah, there you go. Uh, thanks for tuning in, go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss to see the video version of this interview. You go to facebook.com, the Chris Voss show. Uh, you can go to linkedin.com Chris Voss,

and then there's the company channel and all that, the groups that are there on Facebook and LinkedIn. You're going to also go to instagram.com for Chris Voss to, Chris Voss, and then there's the company channel and all the groups that are there on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also go to Instagram.com for Chris Voss, The Chris Voss Show, and Goodreads.com, 4-6 Chris Voss. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you next time.