The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1077: Michael Arndt | The Oscar-Winning Science of Storytelling

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Want to write a great screenplay? Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt shares secrets from Pixar, Hollywood, and a decade of script doctoring! What We Discuss with Michael Arndt: Success in screenwriting often requires extreme persistence and resilience — Michael Arndt wrote 10 screenplays over 10 years before selling Little Miss Sunshine, and even then did about 100 drafts of that script before it was ready. The best stories often create a "tilted universe" where the protagonist is a response to or antidote to the negative values of their world (like Robin Hood emerging in response to an unjust system, or The Dude's laid-back nature contrasting with an aggressive world in The Big Lebowski). Audience feedback is crucial but challenging to balance — as Michael quotes Billy Wilder: "Individually they're idiots, but collectively they're a genius." You have to respect audience intelligence while still maintaining your creative vision. Great endings often work by creating a false binary (win/lose) and then revealing a surprising third option that exceeds audience expectations — like in Little Miss Sunshine where Olive neither wins nor loses but creates something entirely unexpected. Anyone can improve their storytelling by studying great stories and breaking them down systematically — Michael's own journey shows that storytelling is a craft that can be learned through careful analysis, practice, and continual refinement of understanding how stories work. His video essays on screenwriting (available on YouTube) offer concrete tools for developing these skills. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1077 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Individually, they're idiots, but collectively, they're a genius. And I think that you have to respect the genius of your audience, right? Your audience is smarter than you. And so you have to be humble and you have to listen to the feedback you're getting. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional former cult member, arms trafficker, rocket scientist, or Russian chess grandmaster. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiations,

psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, a really fun conversation that's a little bit different since Gabriel and I actually co-host this one together, which as many of you know is quite rare. We're talking with my friend Michael Arndt, acclaimed screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3, Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Michael won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine, if you remember that smash hit back in the day, who's also nominated

for Best Adapted Screenplay for Toy Story 3. He's also the first screenwriter ever to be nominated for both the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay for his first two screenplays. That's a lot of me saying the word screenplay, but whatever. I met Michael at a dinner party in New York City. We just clicked right away. He's a great guy. He's unbelievably creative, obviously, yet totally relatable and just fun to be around and

to talk to as you will experience for yourselves here in just a minute. And he doesn't do much media at all. So we were actually quite lucky to land this interview, in my opinion. In this conversation, we dive into screenwriting and creativity, working in Hollywood, AI in the creative fields, creative career paths, and more. But even if you're not a screenwriter or you're even a creative at all, I think you're going to find value here in this conversation. All right, here we go with Michael Arndt. Do you find that creating meta content around, like, here's how I do screenwriting stuff? Does that clarify your thinking about screenwriting?

Is that kind of? Totally. Like I think that, you know, I'm doing a new thing about first acts, how to write a good first act, how to get your story started off with as much sort of emotional rooting interest as possible, how to kick things off. You know, I'll just say I had a script that I wrote years and years ago. And I sort of did three drafts and then it sort of petered out because I always knew the first act wasn't doing the work that it needed to do. I gave it to people and people were like, yeah, I'm not really into this character. You know, and it was a really short first act. First act was like 17 pages.

So I just put that script aside. And then in the process of doing this video about first acts, like I go, oh, now I know what's missing. And I went back and I rewrote the whole first act of that story. Now it works. Like, I don't know if I'm ever going to go back to that script because it was so long ago. But it is interesting how just studying, studying, studying, storytelling and story, you know, it's very humbling. And it always makes you a little bit better. There's always more stuff to learn.

Always more stuff to learn. So do I have it correct that you went back to a script you wrote years ago and fixed it? And you're just like, okay, that's done. And you just put it back on the shelf in a binder. it will never be seen again. Well, I would say that script is probably like eight or nine in line in terms of like things that I want to make. So you know what? Actually, I won't say. It's probably fifth or six. Okay. In line. Because I'm just thinking like I would never go back to like episode 500 of this podcast and go, I really need to edit this part because I didn't say that correct. It's just,

it's out there. I'm done. I'm never going to hear it again unless somebody straps me to a gurney and makes me listen to it. Yeah. I mean, I'm at the point where I have more scripts than I'm going to have time to make into movies. And it's helpful, like, I was just saying working as a script doctor. Like, I went out and they gave me the script and I read it and I was like, oh, like, based on the fact that I've been obsessing about first acts for the last couple of months, like I know exactly how to fix a script. I know exactly what to do. Tell us what a script doctor is because I think a lot of people, well, first of all, it seems like it should be self-explanatory, but I also lived in Hollywood and maybe that's not self-explanatory. Because it sounds like somebody who

fixes a script that has problems, but like most people don't understand the screenwriting process enough to know that I might write a script and someone goes, I like it. I don't love it, but I like it enough to send it to somebody who's better at this than you, and then we're going to make it into a movie. Yeah, I think that writers tend to be kind of seen as disposable. You know, you can bring different writers that have different strengths for things. After I wrote Little Miss Sunshine and then especially after Toy Story 3, I was working at Pixar and Disney feature animation was bringing scripts up to Pixar and screening them, and also some Disney live action films were being brought up to Pixar. And they would screen the films and then we'd have a big story meeting and we'd talk. And I was

very vocal. I have lots of opinions about how stories should be told. So based on that, I started getting hired to come in and do a week or two of work on a script. So script doctoring is a lot of times it's this script is about to go into production or it's you're writing reshoots. So they've already shot the script. You're going to watch the whole rough cut of the film and go, oh, this story needs to be fixed here or there. And usually you're brought in for, it can be. It can be one week, it could be two week, it could be three weeks. On Catching Fire, Catching Fire was actually a script doctoring job. So I was brought in for four weeks. So I did four weeks of work. And most of the time, you don't get any credit for it. Most of the time, you're just working kind of anonymously. And working

as a craftsman, you're taking this story, putting it up on blocks and going, what's working with this thing, what's not working with the story, how do I fix it? How do I optimize it? The movie's trying to do something. How do I make it work better? It really is just sort of just trying to optimize what the story itself is. Sometimes you'll be brought into, bunch up characters, to warm up characters, to get the audience to like a character. Sometimes you usually broaden and fix up the whole thing. Wow. So catching fire, by the way, hunger games for people who are not totally immersed in that

particular world. So they might bring you in and you might watch a scene and go, ah, yeah, you're trying to make, what's her name, Katniss Everdeen or whatever, you're trying to make her likable, but this falls flat. You actually need to reshoot this entire thing with this new dialogue where she seems more vulnerable and this other person reacts in a different way, and they'll do that. totally. I mean, usually the script is heading towards production. Usually there's a consensus that the script isn't working. Sometimes it's already in production, sometimes it's in post-production.

And I've been brought in for, you know, the longest job I did was on Hunger Games Catching Fire. That was a four-week job. The shortest was I was brought in for one day on a movie and just told to warm up the lead character a little bit in a character's introduction. And that was in post-production. They had already made the movie. You're expensive though, man, not just your fees, but like if you come in and go, hey, this scene really not working, they're like, oh, that took us like three days to shoot that and was there's all kinds of stuff in there. And it's really, you might cost them a million dollars, but it's better. Is that how it works? Yeah, I think that, I mean, a lot of times you're very cost conscious. You're just trying to figure out, like, if they're doing reshoots, what's their reshoot budget, how many days are they going to be able to reshoot? And then you're picking the choosing. You're going like big problems, medium sized problems and small problems and trying to like address the big problems or not. So. And then I'll just say that I won't name the film, but I always brought in one time there was a film, big budget film. It had a full cast, full crew. They had rendered the sound stages. They were just ready to start going. And the studio was not completely happy with the script. I thought the script could be streamlined a little bit. And the director said to me, he said, we're spending $3 million a week not to make this movie. Oh, God. Wow. You know, I come in and I'm just like cut 15 or 20 pages out of the script, but cutting 15 or 20 pages out of the script is like cutting $15 or $20 million out of the budget. Wow. You're always trying to be cost-conscious. You're always trying to find very efficient ways to make the script better. But a lot of times what you're just doing is it can't be cost-conscious if you're just, you know, making a script better. My joke is that there's nothing more expensive than bad writing and there's nothing cheaper than good writing. Right, because if you make a movie and it fails, that's much more expensive than just spending the extra $2 million to reshoot the scene on the train or whatever. Totally. Totally. Totally. And if you can come up with a dynamite ending, I'm just telling you like four or five good jokes and that's going to get you an extra $20 million like of the box off.

office. Really? Wow, it's that sort of simple, eh? I mean, simple. It's sort of direct is what I mean. Like, I guess if you put the jokes in the trailer like a, you know, Will Smith movie and then people go see it because of those and then that was all the good jokes in the whole movie. Sorry, Will. Yeah. So, I mean, sometimes you're brought in to do a humor pass. Sometimes you're brought into do a page one rewrite, start, finish, we'll rewrite the whole thing. And then sometimes you're, you know, brought into just fix certain characters or certain scenes. So being a script doctor sounds like an incredible job, but a lot of your career has been actually writing original stories in one of your video essays where you break down the philosophy of your storytelling and all the lessons

that you've learned in your career, you say that the best metaphor you have for coming up with a story is you're trying to climb a mountain blindfolded. It's hard because you don't know where you're going. You don't know where the top is. You can see what's below you. But actually, you say the hardest part about climbing a mountain blindfolded is that you just can't find the mountain. That applies to working as a screenwriter in Hollywood as much as it does to like on entrepreneurship or parenting or discovering your purpose, really, anything in life. So how do you find the mountain? That's an excellent question, actually. I think that when I think back on the films that I've written, usually there's a single moment in a story that was the inspiration for it. And I'll give you two

examples. One was Little Miss Sunshine. And I was just looking for a good ending to the story. And I wanted to write an ending that I made videos about like an insanely great anywhere. It seems like the worst thing is about to happen and then the best possible thing happens. I spent six months just like trying to figure out what a good ending should be. And I was like, how can you engineer it? So everyone in the audience thinks the worst possible thing is going to happen. And then in one second, you flip it up and the best possible thing happens. And I was thinking like, you know, should it be a sports movie, but that's kind of a cliche? Should it be like romantic comedy? It's hard to avoid cliches with that. I couldn't figure out. And then I was watching this little child beauty pageant on TV. And there were all

these little skinny blonde girls and I just thought, God, wouldn't it be great if a little chubby girl got up there? And you totally thought she would be humiliated. It would be the worst moment of her life. And then the music came on and she just rocked the house and just blew everybody away. I was like, that's a good ending. I know that's a good ending. So that was the beginning.

And then you go, like, if that's the ending, like who is this little girl, what is this pageant? How did she get there? Who is her family? Etcetera, et cetera. There's other scripts that I've written that have been based on the inciting incident of the story. I go, oh, that's a great beginning. I know where I can go with this, because that's a great beginning. Sometimes it's like a speech that a character gives. And you go,

oh, I want to hear a character give this speech. And then you're building the rest of the story out from it. So a lot of times you're finding the spark of inspiration just in a single moment. And then you just elaborate on that universe out from that single moment. This reminds me of, I think I was watching America's Got Talent. It was in Howie Mandel's office. And one of the, there was a little girl who came on and she was very timid and she had like an Irish accent or a Scottish accent or something. And they were like, what are you going do, honey, she was really young, like 10 or 11, like sing, what kind of music do you like? I don't know. What kind of music are you going to sing? I don't know. And everyone's expecting this to just be

horrendous, right? Right, right. But then she rocks out this Janice Joplin track and just absolutely nails it and everyone's on their feet and laughing and screaming. And I think she got a golden buzzer, or at least Howie Mandel was like totally blown away. I think he might have even said something about Little Miss Sunshine at that point because it was like so dead on. And it really was shocking. What she meant by I don't know was I don't know how to classify this music, not, oh, I'm too shy to actually give you the answer. But of course, that's how everybody interpreted it. Right, right. And it's just absolutely you're right.

Like, that sort of gap between your expectations and, like, what actually happens is what makes it so, it makes you kind of like emotional, have that emotional response. I feel like the low moment before your climax is actually the centrifugal center of your story. Like, a lot of times what you're doing with your story is trying to drive your character down to the place where the worst possible thing is going to happen to them. and that becomes the focus of the rest of your story, right? You're just trying to go to the worst possible place. I'll just grab off the top of my head. An example in Fellini's eight and a half, right? Like he's trying to figure out a story that he can make into a movie,

and he's failing and failing and failing. And finally, he goes to this press conference, and they're like, what's your next movie going to be about? And he just doesn't have an answer, you know? And people are mocking him and making fun of him, and he crawls on the table and has his fantasy about shooting himself on the head. And then, God, it's such a great, that is such a great. That is such a great ending. That ending is so great. But the first two acts of that story and half of the third act is just getting your character to this lowest possible moment where they feel exposed, humiliated. The worst thing is happening. And so, yeah. And then the Houdini trick for screenwriting is to be able to turn things around in a second. And Fleini does that really, really well. Yeah, I'm working on that in my real life. It's not working out so good.

I think you're only supposed to do that in movies, folks. Don't try this at home. But it's funny because you seem to be interested in a few common themes in all of your movies, but one of them is failure. Like, Olive's family, it's on the brink of disaster in a number of ways. Woody and Toy Stories constantly at risk of losing Andy. Are you particularly fascinated by failure? Is that a Michael Earn thing?

Or is that a theme that makes every story interesting? Yeah, I think it makes every story interesting. I mean, you're looking for the worst, again, like knowing what, the worst possible thing for your hero is? What is your hero desiring and wanting and the best possible thing? But what is also the worst possible thing for your hero? It's interesting. I mean, this is something that I've thought of that that's really new is that not only do you have a low moment in your third act or a lowest possible moment in your third act, what I call a moment of despair in your third act. So it looks like at the end of your story, your character has failed, externally failed,

internally failed philosophical, just failed in every possible way and then being able to flip it around. The thing that I am talking about in this new video that I'm putting together about first acts is I think a lot of times it's really, really helpful to have a moment of despair in the first act of your story. And you see this over and over again in, well, just an example of Little Miss Sunshine is you build up all this emotional rooting interests, all of wants to go do this beauty pageant, right? And they've got to somehow get her to California. What you want to do is build up all this ahead of steam, basically. You want, like, audience emotional rooting interests that I want to see this thing happen. And then you shut the door.

So it seems like your hero is never going to get what they want. Right at the end of the first stack, there's no way forward. just cracking the door open so there's one possible way for the character to get what they want creates this sort of maximum rooting interest, this huge audience momentum in the story. So it's interesting that you can have a moment of despair in the third after your story, but having a moment of despair in the second after your story, I think is really, really important too. You once said the craft of screenwriting comes down to being aware of playing with a set of audience expectations. And there's that classical three-act storytelling thing that we were just sort of

alluding to that everybody learns in like, I don't know, probably third or sixth grade or whatever is Little Miss Sunshine, you said, is finally almost embarrassingly conservative. And I thought that was quite interesting because it seems like a lot of times you've got to be really creative, right? You got to be out of the box. You've got to make something new. People want something new, but like not really. They kind of want their expectations taken into account in really crucial ways or the movie

fails. And you can get somewhat creative like there's a movie Memento, which turns out to like be backwards or something like that. And you figure it out at the end. But you can't really do too much of that and you can't go completely off the deep end. Or people just go, what did I just watch? And it's like those, some people love these. I think his name is David Lynch.

But when I watch one, I just go, I have no idea about anything that just happened. And I'm completely lost and feel stupid. And I don't need to see any more of these. I mean, I grew up in New York going to seeing indie films and being really into David Lynch films and all that stuff. With screenplays, the stuff that I read, I think what I finally decided is that the thing that you're going for is the emotion at the end. How do you want the audience to feel when they walk out of the theater?

And I made a very deliberate decision on Lomas Sunshine that I was like, I'm going to write a happy ending, but not just an ordinary happy. I'm going to write the happiest fucking ending of all time. My goal was I'm going to drive the audience insane with happiness. And I think that what works about that is the one smart thing I'll say about Lomas Sunshine is that you're creating a false binary at the end where Olive walks out on stage. You don't want her to lose the pageant, right, because that would be horrible. But you also don't want her to win the pageant because that would be just cheesy, right? And you wouldn't really believe. it. Right. And so one of the tricks at a climax is instead of having it be the good guys win or the bad guys win, which is just a sort of thing we've seen a gazillion times before and usually the good guys win, right, is to create a third option that nobody saw coming, like a third door that you didn't even know was there. You open it up. And I see. Like in Little Miss Sunshine, it was just having Olive come out. And like she loses, like she rips her pants off and is disqualified. But that's something that you're misleading your audience to think that the only choices are two choices, winning or losing, right? And then you go, no, no, there's a third option, right?

That's going to exceed the audience's expectation. The other example is in Toy Story 3. Like, we did a lot of work to fool the audience at the end so that they thought that Woody was still in the car, in the college box. He was going to college with Andy. And there's even a few shots, P.O.V. shots from inside the box so that when Andy opens up the box to give Bonnie his twice and then finds Woody at the bottom of the box, it's a surprise, not just Andy, but it's a surprise. surprise the audience, right? And so I feel like humor is depending on surprise, like you got to catch your audience by surprise, but also emotion, like that sadness. I think one of the reasons of the end of Toy Story 3 is so emotional is because you don't expect what you to be there. You're not expecting

Andy to give them away. I feel like you can't be too clever about this stuff, though. Like, I feel like you can't sit around and play a chess game with your audience and go, oh, I'm going to miss them here and do X, Y, Z. But if you can, you just have to be aware of trying to create something new and surprising, you know, especially at the end of your story. Yeah, it seems like it would be tricky. This is smart, right? Because you can balance that original thinking with the audience expectations. So you're not just writing, like when I watch Paw Patrol with my son, there are no surprises. Everything is really obvious. It goes exactly the way you would expect. And even when I think, oh, there could be a plot twist here. They're like, this is for five-year-olds, man. There's not

going to be any twists at all. No twisting. Because my son's expectations for what needs to happen in Paw Patrol are like very basic. And if you turn it up to 11, you end up with a film that you could enjoy at a theater, David Lynch style. And I would come out and go, I need to read a whole article about what I saw and I'm still not going to understand it. And so it's like less of a draw. You really have to fall somewhere in between Paw Patrol and David Lynch, which it seems like a wide area. But, but, and yet here we are with most scripts never getting made. So what do I know? Well, it's, yeah, no, it's a balance that you have to walk. And I, you want to avoid defining expectations for the sake of defined expectations, right? You want to defy expectations in order to create

emotion. That's the goal, right? You don't want your audience to be bored. You don't want your film to be trudging towards some sort of obvious conclusion. So you want to keep things sort of up in the air and like, how is the hero going to get this thing to work? But yeah, audience's expectations, I don't know. I just don't think about it too much. I'm going for emotion. I'm trying to like figure out like what is the most emotional story I can tell. How do you manage to say something new while, I mean, you're working with a tradition, not film necessarily, but, or I guess writing, is it thousands of years old or tens of thousands of years old? It's old. There's been a lot of this. It's very old. So how do you kind of figure out something new that hasn't been done before in something that's got

that much history? That seems very difficult to me. You know what? This is something that I learned making this new video that I'm halfway through making about first acts. I talk about two things, like how to get your audience on board with a character and then how to get your audience on board with that character's story. And when I sat down, to think about like what makes a great character and what is going to make a character memorable or a character last. This was something completely new that I just sort of figured out or thought of, which is a lot of times your character in the world they live in are two sides of the same coin. So the example I always go to is Robin Hood, for example. Like you start off in Robin Hood

and King Richard is the King. It's the Fair Just universe, right? Robin Hood is actually just Robin of Locksley. He's his noble man. He lives in his castle. Like everything is cool. It's only when King John usurps the throne, takes over England, right, starts this reign of abusive taxation, right? That the world tilts, like the world becomes unjust, right? And now Robin of Locksley can either live in an unjust world or you can go screw it. Like, I'm going to rebel against King John. I'm going to go into the woods. I'm going to gather a band of merry man. I'm going to drop the rich and give poor. So the world itself, the world becoming unfair is the thing that creates the hero, right? The hero becomes the antidote to the negative values of the story.

And I think that when I started thinking about it a lot, I was just like, a lot of times what makes a hero very memorable is not the hero themselves. It's the world that they live in. And if you're describing the world and a problem in a world, that's something that makes it interesting. Jordan, this is a really good question. And so the examples that I use are, well, for example, Thelman Louise. Like in Thelman Louise, those are two, like when you start the movie, they're just kind of two ordinary women. They're going on a weekend. They're going to have fun, right?

you create this huge, like, dozy of an inciting incident, right? Which is, the almost gets raped in the parking lot and Louise comes along and kills the guy, right? Oh, right. And then they realize that they're living in this misogynistic, sexist, hostile world, that no one's going to believe them. And they go on the lamb. I think what makes that story resonant and what makes them great characters was that nobody had seen two women in a Hollywood movie fighting back against sort of this universe of sexism. and misogyny and male violence so defiantly, so sort of in your face blowing up that trucker's rig and stuff like that. And that was the thing that made the movie click with people is that

sense of like the character's defiance. Let me give one more example, which is I think that what made the graduate such a resonant film for audiences back in the 60s was not really Ben Braddock. Like Ben Braddock's a nice guy, but he's a bit of a nebish. Like he's not that interesting a character. What no one had ever seen before was the world. Like we'd never seen Mike Nichols showing us this world of sort of post-war enwee and shallowness and materialism. And so you're creating this sort of tilted universe world of post-war America and the sense of alienation and the sense of conformity. And then Ben is the person who's swimming against that tide, fighting against it.

And so when you're trying to create a character, a memorable character, one of the things, obviously, you want your character to be just interesting and be flawed in a certain interesting way. what you're also doing is creating a universe that that character is reacting to. And so in order to find something interesting to find a new story to finally get around to answering your question, one of the things you need to do is think about like the world that your character lives in and how does that world that you're showing on screen reflect the problems in the real world outside the theater in a way that feels resonant to the audience.

Does that make sense? It does. I'll never freak the graduate with Dustin Hoffman and they're throwing this big party. I'll never forget the scene where they're like, come out. I got him with this gift, it's amazing. And he comes out in like a full scuba suit. And he just sort of like totally bored and embarrassed jumps into the swimming pool and just comes up. And yeah, I'm like, man, this guy's going through his midlife crisis, but he's like 18. Yeah. It's like so, it's so depressing when you see how just bored he is and he's got this

dumb scuba thing. And he's like, whatever. Just shoot me now. Yeah. Plastic. Plastics. Yeah, plastics. Like, plastics is the line that makes you jump on board with him because he says like the very first scene in the movie, his dad comes up and talks to him. He's sort of hiding up in his bedroom. And his dad goes, what are you worried about? He goes, I'm worried about my future. I want it to be different, right? So the whole movie is this allegory of conformity and nonconformity. Like, he wants his future to be different. Then you just create this whole tilted universe of conformity, right? And then when he finds Elaine Robinson, she's the one person that he can stand to be with the one person he can stand to talk to. That's what makes it interesting and resonant.

Let me give you one more example, which is, I talked about this in my new video. Like the dude in the Big Lobowski. What makes him interesting is that, you know, he's introduced in the screenplay as being like the laziest man in L.A. County, which makes him pretty high the running for laziest man in the world. You know, he's not this traditional hero who has big dreams and big aspirations and is super competent or anything like that. He's just the dude. So why do you like this guy so much? Why is he such a beloved figure? The way you get your audience on board with a lazy bum who does nothing but smoke pot and go bowling, is that you surround them with this universe of like super competitive, stressed out men, right? You have Walter, you have the Big Lobowski himself, you have

Jesus, the pedophile bowler, you have the sheriff in Malibu. Eight-year-old dude. You create this whole universe you create this whole universe of people who are not chill, who are not laid back, right? And then the dude becomes heroic because he's so cool, he's so laid back. He's not trying to achieve anything. He's not trying to become anything different. He just abides. And that's what makes him That's what makes them like him. So it's a really interesting question of like, how do you find something new? You identify some sort of problem in the real world and then you create that kind of universe, a tilted universe in your movie. That movie's so damn funny. There's a beverage here, man. It is interesting because he on the face of it would not be a character you root for it because he doesn't seem to want very much. But as you put it, hero and world are two sides of the same coin. In your new video essay, you say that film, maybe better than any other medium gives us characters who embody new ideals for how to live one's life. Now, I don't know if the dude fits into that category, but what ideals do you think we need

to live our lives well at this moment in history? Are there any movies or characters that are embodying those values really well right now? Well, let me just, I'll bring up something, which I don't think a movie has addressed yet, right? Which is, I mean, I think one of the problems that we all are dealing with right now is screen addiction, right? Like, you walk out on the street, you walk down the sidewalks of New York, and everyone's sort of staring at their screen. And there's a way in which we live in this world of self-consciousness where we're performing our lives, right? We're performing for this invisible unseen audience. Literally in our case right here. Literally in our case right, and there's a way in which all of us are negotiating two selves. There's our digital cells and

our analog cells, right? And there's a way in which the digital self and the digital world is a very seductive thing, right? It's where a lot of work takes place. It's where you can make a ton of money. And it's all clean and frictionless. And like the thing with screens is, you know, there's no touch, there's no smell, there's no taste. Like it's just very, we have this new problem, which is like we are haunted by our digital selves and haunted by this sort of generalized other that we're performing for. I don't think I've seen a movie yet that sort of addressed that problem and turned it into a story that can be compelling and interesting. Does that answer your question? I sort of does.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you have some work to do, my friend. So get on it. But yeah, you're saying that there could be a hero who embodies the values of authenticity in a world where this digital realm is kind of, I don't know, creating an arena, but also destroying us. Yeah, rebelling, you're just swimming against the tide of like if everybody's staring at their screen, everybody's obsessed with their digital selves, right? Then you just want to create a hero's swing against that tide and is privileging the world of atoms over the world of bits, basically. And now for a sneak preview of my movie, which is a story about you buying a mattress so my kids can go to college. We'll be right back.

If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creatives every single week, it is because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six-minute networking.com. This is the circle of people that you know like and trust. I know networking is kind of a schmoozy, gross word, but this course is about improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And the course does all of that in a super easy, not cringy, very deep. down to Earthway. I'm not doing the awkward strategy thing. I don't want people to feel bad or gross doing this, and it just takes a few minutes a day. And by the way, many of the guests on the show

subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six-minute networking.com. All right, now back to Michael Arndt. I'm curious sort of the journey that your career took. I was surprised actually to learn that one of your early jobs was working as Matthew Broderick's assistant. It's war games, you know, was like, that was the thing where I was like, I need to get a computer now because I'm also going to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union or something, right? He had that phone modem thing that was just like obsessed with that. I was like, this is a gateway to another world. I want to play chess with a supercomputer. It sounds like that was kind of your big introduction to filmmaking into Hollywood,

was working with Matthew Broderick. And I wonder what you learn as someone's assistant. I mean, a lot of it's probably like, can you pick up the groceries from Target or whatever? But there's got to be some access to, like Hollywood industry stuff too, right? Totally. Totally. I think that, you know, I went to film school. I got out of film school. I want to be a screenwriter.

So I want to get jobs where I could read screenplays. And the thing that people, young people, know, I think don't appreciate is how difficult it was to find screenplays. Before the internet, screenplays were really hard to get your hands on. There were vendors in New York that would sell screenplays on the sidewalk because it was just really hard to find screenplays. Now you go on your computer and like every screenplay in the world is available. I got out. I got a job at a production company. Then I moved on. It got a job with a producer. And that producer was working at Columbia Pictures and her job was looking for material for Matthew. So after I moved on from that job, Matthew knew me and hired me to be his assistant. And it was a great job. Matthew's a nicest guy in the world. Like best boss in the world. But it was a great job because back then it was really hard to get your hands on screenplays. His agency at CIA would be sending them scripts all the time. So I and one of my jobs was just read all the scripts that came in, write coverage on them, recommend.

whether you should read them or not. And so that was great experience. Like that was really great. You see what's out there in the marketplace. You see what the agencies are sending out. You see what scripts work or not. You see how actors are responding to a piece of material or not. So it was a very, very humble position to begin with. We all have our humble beginnings. But it was great training because, again, it was really hard back in the 90s to just get access to screenplays. So it was a great job in Matthew's total sweetheart. Do people just yell Ferris Bueller quotes that, him all day when he walks down the street. I feel like that's got to happen. It's such an iconic movie that literally everybody knows, even different generations. I had been with him when people go,

hey, Ferris, is it your day off? You know, that kind of thing. He sort of resigned himself to, that's going to happen once a week, once a week for the rest of his life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, it could be worse. He wasn't like a bad guy that people didn't like or something like, right? He's just like this. Beloved character. Beloved. Exactly. Like, everybody, save Ferris. Everybody wanted to support Ferris, except for his sister and the principal. What was your childhood like? I mean, were you compelled to want to, for the movie thing, early in the game? I know you kind of grew up abroad. Did you just watch tons of movies and you're like, I want to make one of these? Yeah, not really. I think I grew up. My dad worked in the Foreign Service. I grew up as a toddler in India.

And then when I was 10, 11, 12 years old, we lived in Sri Lanka. Beyond that, we lived in suburban Virginia. And no connection. Like, the idea that you could make a live and making movies was just, it never even occurred to me that you could do that for a living. It just happened somewhere else, you know, and my dad loved comedy. He would take us to go see Mel Brooks movies. He would take us to go see every new Woody Allen film together. And I think, you know, watching your dad laugh at something is always this very, it's just great when your dad just relax and laughs at something. But I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. It was really, I was in high school. I was very unhappy. But I had always kind of loved films. I remember as soon as I found out there's this thing called film school,

I was like, well, that's what I'm going to do. That created the ladder, or at least the bottom rung of a ladder, that I could put my hand on and start climbing. So as soon as I found out there's the thing as film school, I was like, that's what I want to do. Were you thinking, I'm going to make big blockbuster movies? Or we're just like, I'm going to just do whatever and I don't care how much money it makes. That's fine. You know, it's funny that the thing that I really fell in love with with movies was I remember the moment. It was when my whole family went and saw Apoclops Now when it was first released.

And I remember that opening scene where you do a triple exposure of like the jungle, panning across the jungle, Martin Sheen's face upside down, and the ceiling fan going. And that music from the doors was playing. And I was a kid. I was like 14 and 15 years old. I'd never seen movies do something like that. And it was so lyrical and so beautiful. I was like, oh my God, this is art. Like this is art. I had been raised on multiplex fair, right? And when I saw that and that whole movie just blew my mind, it's just like still one of my favorite movies. That's when I fell in love with it. movies and I really fell in love with the poetry of movies, the visual, the cinema of movies. And I think it's a little ironic that I have ended up being this sort of story guy, because when I started out, I kind of didn't care about story. I wanted, I love beautiful, the black stallion, like these lyrical art films. But just like my first job out of film school was reading scripts and writing coverage on scripts. That's how your brain gets trained, I guess. How many scripts do you think you read in your career? About a thousand. I think about a thousand. I I think I wrote about a thousand. Wow. You know, most of them don't work. I think that, I mean,

it does get very soul-crushing to read one screenplay after another. People have devoted six months a year of their life to writing this. And it's just going to get read once and then get put on a shelf. And there's almost no field of human endeavor fraught with more disappointment and failure than screenwriting. And so, you know, when I started writing my own scripts, I was really determined that that wasn't going to happen to me. And I think that that's why I came up with this very rigorous sort of analytical approach to story. I mean, there's two sides of story telling you. You want to start, anytime you start writing, you're starting with the sort of intuitive emotional side of your brain, right? You're always connecting with something that's very, very instinctive, right? But as you go

through five drafts, ten drafts, 15, 20 drafts of your story, you're going to make this transition from the quick thinking, fast, intuitive, emotional part of your brain to the sort of more analytical part of your brain. So I think that, I mean, my training, reading a thousand, scripts taught me, yes, you need great dialogue and you need great jokes and you need all the stuff that comes from your instincts, basically. But I also feel like you can use the other part of your brain to sit down, put a story up on blocks, sort of x-ray it, you know, in formal terms and going, why is this script working or why is it not working? Right, because you said it's much easier to get your script read. And I was surprised to read you an interview where you said it's much easier even to get your script made into a movie than it is to write a really good script. Oh, my God. 99% of your effort, you said, should go into writing a good script. You wrote, what, 10 screenplays before you sold Little Miss Sunshine? And my understanding is that from the time you seriously decided to be a writer until you sold your first screenplay, it was like a decade, right? It was like 10 years. What kept you going during that time? And why does it take so long to become a really good

screenwriter? Delusional optimism was a thing that sort of kept me going. I think that the one one thing that kept me going was that I was told in film school that if you want to be a writer, if you want to break in, it's going to take 10 years. And of course, I thought, oh, I'm smarter than everyone. It'll only take me five years, you know, but it almost. Yeah, that sounds familiar. That's like running any business. Delusional optimism and then like more delusion on top of that. We're like, everyone says it's going to take a decade, but I got this. I went to college for two years. I trust me, I got this. And then also, I got to enjoy the process of writing. Like, I got to enjoy it. Like, there is an exhilaration. to come up with an idea going, oh, this is going to be really great. I will say that I had written 10

screenplays, nothing could happen with any of them. None of them were especially great. Although I had written a little bit sunshine at that point, I just hadn't quite finished it. And I was sitting down to write screenplay number 11. And I was at my 30s, like at this point. And I was just like, what am I doing with my life? Like, is there something else that I can do with my life? Because, like, this isn't working out. And the one thing I'll pat myself on the back for is that I just kept going. I sat down, I thought about it. I was like, you know, I love movies. I love being part of the community of movies. And I just want to be part of that, however it is. It was about six months later that I finally sold Little Miss Sunshine. Wow. Wow. It's hard, right? Because you want to tell people

never go up on your dream, but then you're also like, but sometimes you should because your dream is unrealistic and you should like actually get a career so that you can have a family or support yourself or you don't have to work at a job you hate to actually make money. It's a tough balance because you could have quit then, but then you wouldn't have, of course, be where you are now, wouldn't have made Little Miss Sunshine and all these other amazing movies. But then there's also like a thousand other versions of you that just like never really cracked into it and are still picking up Target groceries for Guineath Paltrow or something, right? Like that's all they do. You think Gwyneth goes to Target? I don't think so. I know. That was ridiculous. That was ridiculous. Whatever the equivalent of

Target is for Gwyneth Paltrow, they're picking stuff up from their Arawan. I thought a lot about this because I feel like when you are a young person, one of the things you're choosing is you're choosing to enter a field, and that field is going to represent your values, right? So if you want to be a Marine, you go off and join the Marines, right? And you go from being a civilian, you become a Marine, right? Or if you want to be a Buddhist monk, right, you go off and join a monastery. That institution of monastery is going to change you into the sort of the ideal of Buddhism, like, or the ideal of being a Marine or the ideal of whatever. And so when I chose to be a screenwriter, it's not just that you're trying to get movies made and make money and be success. You're also just

joining a community. And you're finding people who are, you know, share your values, share your interests. I think that if I hadn't ended up being a screenwriter, I would have been a development executive. I would have been a producer. I would have been something else. Maybe I don't know, work as an editor or something like that. I would have done something just because I love filmmaking so much. Yeah, I feel like I've been very, very lucky. And I think you have to acknowledge that luck plays an enormous role in whether you're able to break through or not. So, I mean, I was very persistent. I worked for 10 years. I failed to, a lot, you know, 10 years of failure and disappointment. But I also felt like I was very deliberate

in doing due diligence on all my screenplays and trying to figure out, like, does this work or not? And, you know, I wrote 100 drafts of Little Miss Sunshine, like trying to get it to a point where it was going to work massive and overwhelming force. Like, there was no way you can say no to the screenplay. So it's a big risk. You kind of jump off a cliff, but I also feel like I did it in a very methodical or kind of cautious way. Like, I feel like no one's going to be helped by putting another mediocre screenplay out in the world. And you've got to be hard on yourself.

Like, you've got to be hard on your own material. You've got to let it be judged by other people. And you've got to accept their judgments, right? Because if nine out of ten people don't like your screenplay, it's pretty good bet that nine out of ten people are not going to like your movie. When I first started this show, like, 18, whatever, years ago, I remember people listening and going, it's interesting stuff, but you talk way too fast. and the other person talks way too slow,

and I'm pretty sure it's you that's the problem, so you need to slow down, and the other person needs to speed up a little, but you really need to slow down. And also you have all these filler words that are distracting, and I remember being like, okay, I'm going to fix all that. And I told my friend about the criticism, and he was like, those people are just being mean,

like you shouldn't listen to that. And I was like, no, I'm pretty sure I should listen to them because multiple people have told me the exact same thing, so they're probably right. And I thought, oh, this might be the difference between people who like fix the problem. Yeah, totally. And people who go and take it personally and are like, well, screw you.

You don't like me. Like, you don't support me. I feel like screenwriting requires almost a degree of masochism. Like, it still doesn't work. It still doesn't work. You know, everyone goes, oh, it's great. It's fine. Send the script out.

You go, no, no, you're all lying to me. Like, tell me what still doesn't work. Like, you've got to really, really kick the tires on your story. And you've got to be hard on yourself. Like, you're hard on yourself. So it makes everyone else's job easier. It's going to make the actor's job easier, the director's job easier. The harder you on yourself, the better your screenplay is the easier everyone else's job is going to be.

And so you've got to just kick the tires on your story. People can be peevish. Like people can be assholes about your story, right? But you've got to suck it up. Like those are the people are going to be sitting in your audience. Billy Wilder had a great quote where he was talking about the audience and he said, individually, they're idiots, but collectively they're a genius. You know, and I think that you have to respect the genius of your audience, right?

your audience is smarter than you. And so you have to be humble and you have to listen to the feedback you're getting. That's what Pixar really taught me was being at Pixar and the big feedback mechanism they have there. I have questions about that. Massacism, Gabriel. That actually explains a lot about your personality, Gabriel. Gotta keep taking it.

It's all clear to me now. The genius of the audience thing is really interesting because Gabriel and that we look at a lot of feedback, email, DMs, there's a subreddit for the show for people who are on Reddit. that a lot of people will go, I really don't like this. But then the beauty of Reddit is people will go, actually, I really like that about it. And then 20 people will say, I like this, but I kind of don't like this other thing. And in Gabriel and I's collective brain, we have this giant, I don't know, spreadsheet of, this is kind of working and we love it, but maybe we need to tone it down 20% and see if people

still complain about the way that this sounds sometimes. There's 10 of those irons and whatever fire we have going. I'm mixing metaphors, as you can tell, I'm not a screenwriter. And those are always kind of getting fine-tuned at some level. And that's been happening for like a decade or whatever by this point. There's a certain point where you just recognize you're not going to make everybody happy. Well, that's for sure. Yeah.

There's just a certain point where you're just like, fuck it, this is a script I want to see. Or I think this joke is funny. I don't care. I'm putting it in there. Like, I think it's funny. There's a certain point where you just have to, you can't please everybody. If you try, you'd never make a movie, right? There's a certain moment of madness where you just have to jump off the cliff and go, okay, we're doing this.

Or I'm sending the script out or whatever it is. You mentioned Pixar. I got to imagine. And I feel like I've heard this as well. Working at Pixar is kind of like you mentioned the Marines before. It's like the Marines of storytelling. It sounds really intense, brutal at times. How did you end up at Pixar?

And what did you learn there? It was completely out of the blue. I had written the script for Little Miss Sunshine. It was being shot, actually, in the summer of 2005. So the movie hadn't been released yet. They hadn't even finished shooting it yet. And Pixar had gotten their hands on a copy of the script, and they read it and they really liked it. And they brought me up and interviewed me.

And they were looking for someone to work with the director Lee Uncrich on an original idea that he had. And so I met with Lee at sort of three interviews. I made it over the bar kind of each time. And they hired me. And then that was right before the merger with Disney happened. So when the Disney merger happened, that was when the Disney merger happened, that was when they sort of asked Lee to take over Toy Story 3 and do it. And my joke is that they all go into a meeting and they're like, okay, this is it? We're going to make Toy Story 3. And then at the end of the meeting, they're like,

wait a minute, we need somebody to write it. Uh, you. Yeah. What is it you do again over here? Projects assistant, get over here. You're writing the script. Target bags in hand. Exactly. The guy standing in the hallway was like, we need some, some poor schmuck to write this thing. How about you? I just got to drop off this milk. I'll be right back. Yeah, so I feel like I was really lucky to be at Pixar from Ratatouille to Toy Story 3. It was Ratatoui, Wally, up, and then Toy Story 3, and then I worked on Inside Out while Toy Story 3 was still being finished. I mean, it's just a great, great experience. They really had this great collaborative culture.

I was credited with writing Toy Story 3, but it was really a co-writers for Andrew Stan, Leon Critch, and John Lasseter, and then about 20 other people that were all helping to get that script to where it was. So it was probably 10 people for three years working full time on that script. So 10 manned years of labor for a 93-minute movie. Yeah. You call it collaborative. It sounds collaborative and loving and it also sounds absolutely brutal and unforgiving. Because with that many great storytellers in the room, it sounds like everybody is putting every story element under the microscope and pushing it to the best possible version, which would explain why Pixar movies are so good. But what is it like to be a creative in that environment. It's,

my job is that it's the greatest job in the world, except for the soul crushing anxiety that comes along with it. I remember I had been hired to do a Toy Story 3. And after like six months, I was like, hey, I wonder what the Rotten Tomatoes score for the first Toy Story movie is. So I go look it up. It's like 100%. No pressure.

And I was like, well, I wonder what the Ron tomatoes. Yeah. What's Ron Tomatoes for Toy Story 2? And it was 100%. You know, so it's just like, okay, you got your work cut. off you. Also, leading up to that, Ratatouille, Wally, and Up had all been nominated for best screenplay, and then Up had been nominated for Best Picture. Yeah. No big deal. Don't get a 98, or you have completely failed everyone here at Pixar and in the United States slash the entire planet.

Well, and if you don't freaking get on Oscar nomination for your screenplay, you're like, what a loser? The last three guys got a nomination. What's your problem? Like, this one was in the bag, pal. How did you blow this? The pressure. Yeah. How did you blow it? Listen, man, it was so much anxiety and stress for like three years. I felt like because it was also building on the first two movies. So I felt like I was the guy they sent the wide receiver down to the end zone and they threw this like Hail Mary and I'm sitting there in the end zone going, please don't drop this. Please don't drop this. You know, like, oh my God. The other thing was that like we were figuring out the story as we went along. Like it wasn't like we had this super clear idea right from the start. I mean, we had a beginning of middle and end, but there were tons of adjustments that were made along the way. It's like having. a story problem that you can't solve yet, you know the script is not working, but you don't know how to fix it. It's like having this itch that you can't scratch. It's just, it can be really, really, really, really agonizing, but also like totally exhilarating, like some of the best, happiest moments of my life, where in those Pixar story meetings where you have like 10 smart

people in a room and like the ideas are clicking along. And it just like is really, really exhilarating. I feel very, very lucky I was there, like when I was. So torturous, but exquisite in certain moments, it sounds like. I'm imagining. him winning this Oscar and everyone's like, oh my God, what are you going to do now? And he's like, I need a nap. I'm going to go take a nap. I'm quitting the business. They asked me like, do you want to write Toy Story 4? I was like, I feel like I just put on a blindfold and ran across a freeway and I didn't get killed and now like, you're going, do you want to do that again? I was like, you know what? I didn't want the time. No, thanks. Where's the nearest target,

sir? Take me there. But look, I mean, these are some of the most beloved franchises in history, Toy Story, Star Wars. I mean, I have to imagine the pressure you described is stressing me out. I didn't even have to do it. But also, you're trying to honor the history of those movies by, I imagine, offering something new and unexpected while you also take into account those audience expectations you talked about. Do you think a lot about nostalgia and honoring the past while you're pushing things forward? Is it intense to deal with the expectations of these super diehard fans? It's funny. It's very important to have fidelity to the universe. verse that you're setting up into those characters, right? And I remember every once in a while when I started working on Toy Story 3, someone would say, like, oh, that doesn't sound like Woody. Like, Woody would never say that. I mean, there's big guardrails on the story. But I think that the danger on something like Toy Story 3 is you're going to resort to

sort of cute blandness, or you're going to be sort of repeating yourself a little bit. And I remember my resolution was that I want the script to be funny, not just sort of chuckle, chuckle funny, but like really funny. And I want it to be weird also. Like, I want there to be sort of unexpected, strange things that make sense within the logic of a toy universe, right? But that you would never think of yourself. So, like, you got Lhazzo is the bad guy, big baby is the heavy, who's his enforcer. And you're trying to elaborate on what's come before, but remain consistent.

I think that it's just a balance that you're always trying to walk to remain true to the spirit of the original stuff and still expand on the universe and the characters. I read that you sometimes don't take credit on certain projects that you're hired to rewrite. I guess I'm jumping back to some of the script doctory kind of stuff. Or you use like a pseudonym, a fake name. Why is that? What's going on there? Yeah, it's, I think for asking. It's kind of a stupid thing.

But I remember, man, I worked a little Miss Sunshine for like four years to get that movie made. Major investment in my life. I wrote 100 drafts of that script. For Toy Story 3, I worked on that script for three years. And we was very happy that got my name on the movie. And it came out. And then this was at the beginning of my script doctoring career. I was hired to work on the film Oblivion as a script doctor.

And I went and I did two weeks of work. Just not expecting to get credit at all. What I did was I changed it from the opening and the ending, the script I got, made it out to be a war movie. It was like an alien invasion. You know, we fought back against them, blah, blah, blah. And when they sent me the script, I was like, this is actually a love story. This is about a guy who's haunted by dreams of a woman that he's ever met. So I rewrote the beginning, I rewrote the ending, and that changed the nature of the movie from being kind of just this war movie to being a love story.

And very surprisingly, because I only worked on that script for two weeks, the studio elected to give me credit on it. And I was just like, man, these are my characters, this is in my story. I only worked on this thing for two weeks. It just is a different kind of writing. Like Little Miss Sunshine came out of me, it came out of my personal experience. It's an expression of who I am. And I worked on it for four years, right? And then with Oblivion, I'm just coming in to somebody else's script.

I'm making little adjustments here and there. It just felt like two completely different kinds of writing. And so I thought, I'll just use a pseudonym for stuff that I'm doing. If I'm not hired to do the full screenplay, if I'm only coming in and making adjustments to someone else's work, I just want to make a distinction between the writing I do as sort of an artist and the writing I do is sort of a craftsman. It does make sense. It makes a lot of sense.

Do you think that quality, maybe humility, generosity, do you think that's helped you in the industry at all? Yeah. You know, there have been scripts, a couple of scripts. I mean, Star Wars is one of them where I was given first position in the credits. You know, when they arbitrate what the credits look like, whoever contributed the most should be in first position in the credits. And I was offered first position in the Force Awakens. I think that that final screenplay has maybe like three lines of dialogue that I wrote and the rest was rewritten by Larry and JJ. So, I mean, I think that the whole structure that we came up with is, I mean, again, like the studio decided I had contributed more. to the final script than Larry and JJ, but I thought, you know, it's, it doesn't feel like it's my story. Like, it's really theirs. It's their characters.

It's all their dialogue. So I elected just to step back and take second position in the credits. They probably appreciated that, I would say, right? Because they probably agreed with you, I would assume, right? Yeah, I'm not. I feel like I was being a credit hog to try and be in first position when the sensibility that's reflected in the final film is more, I mean, the story was what we all came up with together. but the sensibility reflecting in the final movie

is more Larry HHA than it is me. Speaking of keeping your audience on the hook and wanting more, we'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support those who make this show possible.

All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support this podcast are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also use the AI chatbot on the website, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. You can ask that thing just about anything, including promo codes.

And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, there's a problem with the code, whatever. Shoot me an email, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface those codes for you whenever I can. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Michael Arndt. One of the big conversations in the industry right now, well, every industry right now is AI, right?

What role it should play in movies and TVs freaking out everybody in L.A. right now, or at least in Hollywood. Broadly speaking, it seems like there's two camps. There's people like Justine Bateman who are like, get this technology away from our art, it's unethical, it's dehumanizing. Then there's other people saying, hey, okay, maybe, but you can't stop this technology. It's going to make our stories better. It's going to make the industry more efficient. Where do you land on the AI and Hollywood debate? It's a very sensitive subject, so I'm treading carefully here. I think that within the spectrum of

optimism and pessimism. We'll use AI to make you sound better. So whatever you say now, we'll just redo it with AI. Don't worry. Good, good, good, good. I think as a screenwriter, you kind of of have to be an optimist. Here's an argument that I'll make. And this may turn out to be not to be the case. And this may turn out to, I could be completely wrong. But I think one of the arguments that you could make is that I had a meeting with a guy who was running a generative AI company. And he said, like, production costs are going to come down like 90%, 95%. And I was just like, oh, you mean like in 10 years? He's like, no, in like two years. And I don't know if that's true. But I think that there's a lot of screenplays, including a few of my own, that don't get made because the budget doesn't make sense.

I had a script about two years ago that made it up to the top of the decision ladder at a studio, and I wanted to direct it. And they said to me, we would make this movie if it costs half of what the budget is. I see. I wrote this comedy as very dark, very spiky comedy. It's like the darkest comedy of all time. And they were like, we love this script and we want to make it. But it's just too expensive, we can't justify it. If AI can cut the cost of making movies, just even by 50%, right, it's going to allow a lot more movies to be made. And I think it's going to allow sort of fresh voices, sort of spikier or stranger stories to get made. I think it's going to give writers, actually, I'm hoping, more control. So I think that in the optimism and pessimism debate, I totally realize

that there's a dystopian alternative, right? There's a way in which like Amazon and Apple and whoever else just start cranking out the McDonald's of storytelling and you're just getting bland, homogenous product. You could argue that we're kind of already at that place. Like we're already seeing a lot of superhero movies, stuff that's not super adventurous. I think that if AI is actually going to fulfill the promise of bringing down costs, to me, what that hopefully promises is that it's going to lessen the importance of the money people, the gatekeepers, the people who are providing the money, and it's going to empower the creative people, right? If films become much, much cheaper, it's just going to take away power from the money people

and give more power to the creative people. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I was thinking earlier, you know, I wonder what he thinks it's going to take for Hollywood to stop making sequels or reboots or IP-based stories and start prioritizing original screenplays again. And the answer is make it cost 5% of what the other thing. So it doesn't have to make $98 million to break even. So it has to be like this name brand thing.

It could be like, hey, we can totally experiment with this indie offbeat designed for the Southeast Asian market thing because it's going to cost $3 million instead of $30 million. Here's the most optimistic take, right, which is I have a, let's say, a science fiction film. In the current climate, it would never get made because it's a big science fiction film that costs $150 million. If I can use AI to make that film for a fraction of that, there was a story about a guy, I won't say his name, but he made an independent film, cost $200,000. He just invested his own money into it. It was a big hit, made $100 million worldwide, and he, as a director who owned the copyright, owned the negative, made $40 million.

And I think that there is an opportunity, again, like if AI can bring down costs, Again, I recognize this is the optimistic scenario. It may not work out this way. To me, the Holy Grail is having writers and directors be empowered enough that they can make their own movies and own the copyright, right, and control it. And so we're not renting our talent out to these giant corporations that control the purse strings, right? If, A, I can bring costs down enough, it's going to, A, let a thousand flowers bloom,

like it'll be a lot easier to get movies made. And yes, there'll be a lot of mediocrity. Like, there'll be a lot of stuff like movies that shouldn't have gotten made and just got made because it was possible to get then made. But I think it's going to allow for, again, sort of spikier, otter, stranger stories to be told or movies to be made. And I think that there's a possibility, and this may be very utopian of me, but there's a possibility that by cutting costs so much, it's going to, again, disempower the money people, empower the creative people. And even the Holy Grail would be leading to artists owning their own work. Yeah, that's an interesting take, right? It's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out in every single industry.

I like the idea of disempowering the money people, especially with the Hollywood stuff, because it really, the more I learn about it, the more I'm like, it's all risk, it's all connections, and it's all, does this already make money? And it's like, that's just like the opposite of creating something new and interesting, right? I think that, I think that, listen, I know I'm afraid I'm going to get blowback because I'm being Panglossian, I'm being too optimistic about this stuff. And I totally recognize, like, there's a way in which, if things go wrong, right, there's a way in which you just have producers hitting buttons, give me a mystery thriller, give me a Superman era movie, give me whatever. And that's what we're going to get. And I think that the general, my take is rather contrary. I think most people tend to be siding on the side of pessimism. And they could be right. That could be completely wrong. Well, time will tell. Time will tell.

Or both could be right. I think that there's a case to be made for the fact that it's going to hopefully end up being a tool that empowers creative people, rather than. than disempowers that. More likely there's just going to be so much content that, yes, some of it's going to be like AI produced this entire thing. There's going to be some app for your television that's just AI created cartoons for every single age, every single language, every single genre. But most people won't want to do that. That'll be like the crap you put on when your kid is trying to fall asleep or something, right? It won't be like, I'm going to sit down and watch all this. It'll just be like crap that's out there, like junk TV. And then there'll be the good stuff, hopefully the good stuff

that actually, you know, humans have worked on in concert with AI to make it really spectacular, but not cost $150 million to get out the gate. There's already software out there where you can just, you hit a button and you go, give me a song that's mid-tempo, blah, blah, blah, with lyrics about blah, blah, blah, and you hit the button and you get that song. But I don't think people are using that. Like, people don't want to listen to just, like, bespoke songs that only they know. Part of the function of art is creating a community, right?

People want to go see Taylor Swift. they want to see her sing her own songs. They want to know that she's written her own songs that's based on her experience, her life, her human experience, right? It's going to create a community where everybody can go and sing along, right? So we all know these songs. That's what art does,

creates a community around us. And I think that there's this weird Silicon Valley thing that, like, now we're all going to get to make our own individual movies that are going to be custom made for us. But I don't think people want that. I mean, this is what happened with Barbie, right, was it became his cultural phenomenon. Like, you went to see Barbie because it was the Barbie movie,

and you are going to be able to take part in this broader cultural conversation. And I also feel like, like, Warner Brothers could have just had a synthetic Barbie and a synthetic Kent, right? They come out of a computer. People don't want that. People want to see Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling playing Barbie and Ken. They want to see human people. So I think there's a lot of panic now in sort of actors being replaced, writers being replaced

because you can just hit a button and have this stuff happen. I mean, maybe there's people out there that are just sitting there like making their own music and only listening to that. But I don't think that's the reason that people take in art. Like they want to take in something that they feel a human connection to and that also creates a community. That's true. And also, like, the more niche and hipster something is, the smaller that community is, but they are still, it's not cool if you're the only one in it, right? If you're a club, get a club, you're the only person in it.

That's no fun, right? You want some people in there. You just want to make it exclusive, and that's the trick, right? That's the before it was cool. I've heard you say that you often write the ending of a movie and then you work backward or you find a point in the story you're really excited about and you figure how you can believably get there. I'm curious, have you applied that to your career at all? I mean, and by the way, y'all like how I asked that question at the end, very meta, very mindful. Man, my career is just stumbling blindly, you know, from one obstacle to another in like a series of

near disasters and close escapes. I think that I don't know how I ended up with a career I ended up with. The goal was always to be a director. I think I have two or three scripts now that I feel like are ready to be shot. I'm hoping I'll be shooting sometime next year. You know what? The honest truth is that I feel as though I've only recently really mastered the craft of writing. And I think that I only recently felt really comfortable that I know what I'm doing just only a couple of years ago. And I think for the first 30 years of my career, I was still a student. Like, I was still figuring things out.

You know, I'd written a bunch of scripts. And it was a little bit like throwing darts to the dartboard, right? And when Little Miss Sunshine came out and was such a big success, it felt like I'd thrown a darn it hit the bull's eye, but I was like, wait a minute, how did I do that? Like, how did that happen? Because I feel like I was not, I still didn't understand stories and how storytelling worked. And I think that a lot of my career, I mean, this is what was so great about working at Pixar, was that I was still learning. I was still figuring out how stories work, watching Wally get made, watching up get made, watching all that stuff get made, and then doing it myself, and then

making these videos. Like, the videos have been helpful to me, just in sort of clarifying, articulating, like, the organic logic of a story. How do stories really work? And so the truth is maybe everyone else is smarter than me and I'm just a dumb guy. But for me, it's really hard to write the screenplay. Oh, yeah, that's definitely it, right? It's really hard to write a great screenplay that you really love. And I think that when I wrote Little Miss Sunshine, I wanted to direct it and that didn't happen. It took me a long, long time to write at another two or three original screenplays that I love as much as I love that movie.

And so I feel like I'm knock on what I'm ready to start directing those things now. but I think that what's been guiding my career up until this point is kind of the sense of like I'm still figuring this out because storytelling is so difficult and so mysterious and also powerful. Like I feel like movies have huge influence on your lives. Movies can change your life, right? I think it's an enormous responsibility also and you don't want to be putting crap out there. So I think that, you know, when I look back at my career, I could have been more bold. I could have been more what the hell I'm going to try it. But I think that I was really still invested in trying to figure out sort of how stories work.

I'll watch. My next movie, I'll direct it, and the script will be terrible. And people will go like, like, what were you thinking? You know, you wasted 30. Oh, man, should have stuck with Toy Story 4. Exactly. There's been no logic to my career or the direction of my career other than work with good people. Take the opportunities when they come along and always put yourself in a position where you feel like you're learning something.

I love that. Michael Arnd, thank you very much. this is awesome. I know we are kind of ducking and weaving between scheduling and stuff, and it's really cool to have you on. Oh, listen, thank you so, so much. And if I can just put in the plug for my screenwriting videos, like you can go on YouTube and I think just put it my name, Michael Arndt, and screenwriting videos. We'll link to it in the show notes, definitely, because we want people to check that stuff out because that's... That would be great. They're great resources. Gabriel's devouring those, probably has all of them bookmarked. And it's

cool that you make those for other people, but also sort of secretly, not so secretly for yourself so you can clarify your thinking. There really is something to creating things in clarifying your thing. I'll read a whole book by somebody and I'm like, okay, I kind of get it. And then I do the show and I'm like, oh, it hammers down every nail in that hatch. Totally, totally, totally. And also, I feel like this is, I'm making the videos that I wish I had seen when I was starting out. Like, I'm making the videos that I wish somebody had made for me, right? And I think that figuring out like the knowledge about like external stakes, internal stakes and philosophical stakes, figuring all that stuff out, took me a long,

long time. I would hate to have all that knowledge just for me to get hit by a bus and have all that knowledge disappears. So I wanted to just like just sit down and make these videos, put them out there and hopefully people can find them helpful. They're such a great resource and I'm very, very grateful for them. Thank you for making them. Thank you. And I think that I'll just say, like I'm making this new thing about how to write a good first act. It'll probably be about 60 minutes long. The examples I'm using are from the Godfather, Cinderella Tootsie and the bicycle thief. and all those first acts are just totally dynamite, totally great, and they all work in sort of the same way.

If people are wondering if I'm going to make a new video, yeah, there's one that'll be out. And I don't know, I'm very, these things take a long time, so it'll come out when it comes out. Yeah, no problem. By the way, you said you're going to direct something, is there, and I'm putting you on the spot live because this is ensuring my success here, is there any way for people to come visit film sets while something is being shot or is that super annoying and distracting and not cool at all? Because I've never seen a movie get made at all, and I'm like, I want to check

this out. You're invited, man. You're invited. If I'm making a movie, it's, hopefully we'll be shooting in New York. If you're going to be in New York while we're shooting, come by, and you can go to the craft service and get all the free food. Yeah, that's why I want free food and I want to see how a movie gets made. Brownies. Not necessarily a matter. Brownies and M&Ms. Perfect. Michael, thank you so much, man. Really good to see you. Really great to talk with you. Okay. Take care. Thanks so much. Take care of you guys. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, We talked to legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone on why the American media is partially culpable for the state of the world, interviewing Vladimir Putin and so much more.

Here's a quick bite. I went to Vietnam because, as I tried to say in the book, partly suicidal. It was a death instinct. It was like I have no place in the world. I come out of Vietnam, and I'm completely zonked, and I'm back in civilian society. I'm free. No one's telling me what to do. I don't know a soul.

So I go over to Mexico, get bombed, laid, all that stuff, get crazy few days, come back and zoned out and come back at midnight, trying to cross back the border in midnight, carrying my Vietnamese grass, which I'd smuggled back from Vietnam. Of course, I get stupidly busted. Federal smuggling charge five to 20 years. Oh, my God. Yeah, serious. That's a crazy punishment.

How much grass are we talking about? Two ounce. That's ridiculous. Maybe less. I heard you once put LSD in your dad's drink at a party. That's a bold move, man. Yeah, why not? Because he needed it.

What do you mean? His attitude on the war was fucked. I put a heavy dose of orange sunshine into his scotch. Man, I really dumped it in. And he got so fucking high. He never knew what hit him. Do you think you could make a movie like Platoon now? Do you think an American studio would touch a movie like that these days?

No, not with friendly fire and killing civilians. No, it's impossible now. National Security Cinema, read it. He goes into detail on some 800 movies the Pentagon has worked on. You have no idea the influence, how deep they've gotten. What I've said to you at this interview is important. If you think about it, listen to it again, you'll see why it's suffocation is in order here. For more, including the lesson Oliver Stone learned when he was a cab driver prior to becoming a world-famous director,

check out episode 411 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. That was a lot of fun. Co-hosting these with Gabriel is always just so fun. I love doing that. We should do more of these. I say that every time. I should probably listen to myself at some point. All things Michael aren't will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.

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