The Rich Roll Podcast - Robert McKee On The Art of Story & Why Stories Matter

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Robert McKee is a modern Aristotle of story and master of the form who wrote the definitive book on the subject, called, of course, STORY. Robert is a Fulbright scholar and the author of five books on storytelling, including Dialogue, Character, Action, and Storynomics, but he is best known as the most sought-after screenwriting teacher in the world. His students have collectively won 70 Academy Awards, 250 Emmy Awards, and 100 WGA (Writers Guild of America) Awards. My conversation with Robert centered on his philosophy of story, what stories are, why they’re important for humanity and so much more. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RichRoll  Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. Human beings are driven by stories, but what are stories? Stories are metaphors for life. Without story, life is unlivable. Well, stories can be the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves. They can be the ones we tell our friends at parties. But ultimately, stories are far more than just sheer entertainment. Stories and storytelling are actually an integral part of who we are. They are part and parcel of what it means to be human. And as such, understanding story, deconstructing

the art of storytelling, and studying its underpinning principles is an endeavor most worthy of our time and attention. And there's no one better, literally nobody on the planet, no person more expert when it comes to the subject of story than Robert McKee. Stories are equipment for living. To see the full spectrum of life beyond anything we could possibly live. By the thousands.

Robert is a modern Aristotle of story and a master of the form who wrote the definitive book on the subject called, of course, Story. For those unfamiliar, Robert is a Fulbright scholar. He is the author of five books on storytelling, including his latest, Action, but is best known as the most sought after screenwriting teacher in the world. The wonderful thing about story is it's a museum, and you can go back, you know, to the greatest of writers. It's all there waiting for you, and every one of those great works is as valid today as it was when it was written. works is as valid today as it was when it was written. His students have collectively won 70 Academy Awards, 250 Emmy Awards, and 100 WGA or Writers Guild of America Awards. And also his

student body includes notable writers, directors, and actors such as Peter Jackson, William Goldman, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time. Who else? David Bowie, Steven Pressfield, friend of the podcast, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts, Jeffrey Rush, and all of the writers at Pixar. In other words, Robert McKee is a living legend, and it was a complete and total honor

to host him here in the studio on the cusp of completing his very last teaching tour. We discussed his friendship with Steven Pressfield, who tagged along, which was really great. We talked about Robert's philosophy of teaching story, what stories are, why they're important for humanity, and so much more, including the absolutely incredible behind the scenes story of how

Succession's Brian Cox ended up portraying McKee in the Oscar nominated film Adaptation, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. And it's all coming up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources

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When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, you guys ready to go? Let's do it. But let's begin by typing interior podcast studio day into our screenwriting software document. Hit enter and enjoy this unforgettable conversation with screenwriting legend, Robert McKee. Robert, it's an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to hold you captive here today. So many questions for you. You're somebody I've revered and followed and respected from afar for a very long time.

I've got my copy of story here. As you can tell, it's been through some times here. It's well worn and faded. It looks like a first edition. I think it was 90, I don't know what year. Yeah, I think it was 97 when I got this book. I got it when it came out. First year. Yeah, and I dug it out today when I got this book. I got it when it came out. First year.

Yeah, and I dug it out today. I've read it many times. So you've rented space in my head for quite some time. And it's a pinch me moment to have you here. And we also have Steve Pressfield here as well. I love the fact that you guys are friends. That makes sense to me. It's beautiful to see you guys together. We're here on the precipice

of the conclusion of your career teaching these seminars. You've been doing this for like 50 years? 40. 40 years? You got a couple more dates and then that's a wrap? Yeah. Yeah. I started doing these 40 years ago when I was in my early 40s and it took over my life, put my life in a whole different trajectory. And this fall will be the farewell tour. This is the last time I'll do LA, New York, London. And I'm going to do Budapest. The government's invited me there, as has the Israelis. And so I'll be in Tel Aviv as well. And so that's five, three days or four days if I do genres the way we do them here in LA and New York and London.

And so I'm going out on a high note. On a high note, yeah. I mean, how are you feeling about it? Is it bittersweet? Are you excited for it to be in the rear view mirror at the end of this chapter? And what does the next chapter look like? I really can't say until it's over and I look back

and whether there'll be any regret. I don't think so. I know it's gonna be sad. I mean, without question. Half of my life has been consumed with this teaching and developing the seminars, and not just on story, but on love stories and crime stories and long-form television, etc. And now what I'm doing is I'm writing story two.

And I just published, you know, a couple weeks ago,. Yeah, the action book. A book on the action genre. Right. But the next one, they're gonna take story, which is still selling. It's amazing, but it hasn't lost a step after 25 years. But I've learned a lot in 25 years.

And so I'm going to do story two, which will be a different angle on story. And I'm going to look at it, emphasizing creative spectrums. What does that mean? Every element that a writer wrestles with can be seen on a spectrum of choices. So you can be as minimalist as you want or as maximalist as you want and every variation in between. You can tell the whole story over a kitchen table between two characters, or you can do Game of Thrones. Right. Okay. And you can be as realistic as you want or as unrealistic, non-realistic, fantasied as you wish. And you can stretch reality from the most naturalistic to the most fantastic.

And so every element of story can be imagined on a spectrum of choices, from the most to the least, from the biggest to the smallest, from the brightest to the darkest from the biggest to the smallest to the brightest to the darkest and on it goes because um what i want to convey in this in story two is choices you know i went out of my way and when i wrote story one to introduce the book and say look this is not a book on how to tell a story. This is a book on what a story is. And you need to understand all the elements of story, the relationships and how they combine to create a story and that the possibilities are endless. Well, that's not how

people often read the book. They want to be told how to. And so even though I say, I'm not going to teach you how to, they still want to think, okay. So now story two, because I understand they're desperate. It's monumental, this task of making sense out of life and to do it in a way that has insight and power and beauty and moves us emotionally and makes us laugh, it's frightening when a young writer thinks I'm going to tell a story. Sure. They want you to hold their hand and walk them through the process of the doing, right? And you being a hard-boiled son of a bitch quickly disabuses those people of that idea. That only seems to encourage them to go, yes, he's being tough, but I'm determined. And so tell me how.

So I decided in story two, I'm going to be very clear. There will still be people who will read it as a manual. And there's nothing I can do about that. If they want it to be a manual, then it's gonna be a manual for them, okay? But I'm gonna be very, very clear in story two that it's choices. And story two, like the books I've done

on character and dialogue, after story two, like the books I've done on character and dialogue, after story one, I decided I'm not going to teach for screenwriters only. I never wanted to in the first place. In fact, I had a fight with my publisher, Judith Regan, HarperCollins. Yeah, iconic. Yeah, yes. The queen of the bestsellers over the title. And she wanted me to call it screenwriting.

And I said, no, I don't want to call it screenwriting. I will use films for the most part as examples because that's what people know. And I'll put screenwriting in the subtitle. But what I want to teach is story, and I'm going to call it story. And so we did that. So story two will be for stage, page and screen. Got it.

So story two isn't an upending of the principles that are set forth in story. It is story being the what and story two being a little bit of the how, but more an expansion of the principles elaborated in story. I hope it's less of the how, but more an expansion of the principles elaborated in story. I hope it's less of the how. You see, when you say to someone, this is what it is. These are the elements. These are the relationships. They work together to create whatever.

If I was teaching music and I'd say, this is the 12note scale. These are chords, right? This is beats, this is rhythm, right? These are the components of music. You would never for a moment think that, oh, now I can compose music. Sure. Somebody explained to me the elements of music. Yeah. If you were teaching painting,

you'd say, this is the rule of thirds, this is perspective, this is the rule of thirds, this is perspective, this is the psychology of color. These are the components of anything that goes inside of a rectangle. Nobody would think, oh, now I can be an artist. But for some reason,

when you say these are the components of story, people think, oh, now I can follow that in some kind of pres story people think oh now I can follow that in some kind of prescriptive way and now I can tell story and what they discover is no they can't the mastery of these elements

and conquering this form takes years trial and error success and failure and mostly failure and it's really really difficult and that you know so they don't last. Right, the dilettantes get weeded out. Right, so story two is gonna make it even clearer

than story one, just how much variety of choices you have in every single aspect of it. And I'm also gonna use the clearest, simplest language I can create. I want that when readers read the book, that just lights go on. Story is such an interesting terrain to explore and very tricky and elusive because story operates as part of the fabric of what it means to be human. Like everybody is familiar with story. We all are on some level, some version of a storyteller.

We tell stories about ourselves and who we think we are. We tell stories to our friends. It is in so many ways, a big part of what makes us human. And yet the deconstruction of what story actually is and the elements of it are very difficult to understand. And there's a huge difference between the story you tell your friend and really mastering the form and the art of what it means to tell a great story. So I want to disabuse people of the idea that this is gonna be a conversation just for screenwriters or writers.

Like I wanna talk more broadly about how story operates in our lives and why it's important to kind of understand story and how that relates to the human condition. Stories are, first of all, metaphors for life. And and so unlike music which is only dealing with sound poetry which is dealing with feelings painting which is dealing with what you can see or imagine abstract or concrete the story is bigger than all that and And it's a metaphor for life. And so as complex and difficult as life is to understand,

naturally, story, which is trying to be expressive of life, is, needless to say, difficult to accomplish. And I've gotten to a point now where I don't think we have a story problem anymore. What do you mean by that? I mean, I see these wonderful TV series, not so many films. And I read some superb novels now. I mean, the great novels have always been around.

But I see great storytelling, especially streaming long form. And so I think I've had some effect. I think I've helped. I hope I have, but it seems to me that the quality of storytelling, certainly on television is better than ever. Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable what's happened. I mean, I don't even,

I'm reluctant to even call it television. I don't know what you call it now, streaming, whatever, long form. Because television has that, it's an old word and it has all kinds of associations. But it seems to me that the quality of storytelling is as good now or better now than it's ever been. That's not the problem.

The problem is content. How do you differentiate content from story? Meaning there's a glut of non-quality content out there that makes it difficult to find the gems. I mean, why are we so disappointed when we go to the movies these days? Yeah, the movies are not so great. They're not about anything.

Yeah. The real storytelling is in the long form where you can create so much dimension in these characters and allow a story to breathe and be told in the tempo that the story wants to be told with that space. And it's been remarkable. And like, you know, I was thinking about like how this has come to be, obviously, you know,

there's technology reasons with streaming. And there's been an increasing openness on behalf of networks and studios to explore this. I mean, the BBC was doing this for a long time before it was happening in America. I have writers that I've worked with who write for HBO, for example example and back when hbo was just beginning and developing becoming what it is you know the people at hbo realized that the

network television had captured the family and so in order to uh create an audience for hbo they had to be anti-family and so so I have friends who would go in there and pitch stories at HBO, and the note they would get over and over again is, not dark enough. Now, if you really want to get a writer excited, give them that note, not dark enough. Do you really mean that? Yes. And they did.

And out came the long form really developed first in HBO's setting the standard. The reason that long form television has become what it has, I think it's the future. I think that this century will see magnificent storytelling. And that these long form works will be the cathedrals of the 21st century. And the reason that they are so wonderful so often, there's a lot of crap too, but still. What does the audience want?

What does a reader want? What keeps them turning a page? What keeps them turning a page? What keeps them coming back episode after episode? What sustains, you know, some of the long-form series are 100 hours. 50, you know, is normal. Two things, revelation and change. And so they're fascinated. What did we just watch some wonderful series lately, Peaky Blinders.

That's fantastic. Finally got around to it and it was just great. You watch this to see who these people really are. And so you see their surface and their outer behaviors. And then episode after episode, you see their dimensions. And a dimension is a contradiction, a consistent contradiction in a character. So in one relationship, he's really kind. In another, he's incredibly cruel.

And so he's both. He's capable of being both loving and gentle and vicious and kind, right? Depending, right? Does smart, clever things and gentle and vicious and kind, right? Depending, right? Does smart, clever things and makes terrible mistakes and does stupid things, whatever. And so those contradictions create dimensions. And as you're watching the series, you see that these, in long form,

these are not three-dimensional characters. These are 10, 12, 15-dimensional characters, literally. And you sit there and study the character and you break down every single dimension within them over 50 hours, and you see that a three-dimensional character is a supporting role. Yeah.

And so people want to see that revelation. Who is this person? And so the complexity of characters, long form demands complex characters because you need to reveal who they really are over years to keep the interest and change. Is this character going to arc from where they started to where they end? And so we want them, we want to see how and why people change. Long form, in order to sustain years of series, has to have extremely complex characters, multidimensional of the extreme kind, and capable of change.

That is so satisfying. Sure. It operates like a Russian novel, you know, and capable of change. That is so satisfying. Sure, it operates like a Russian novel, you know, in the classic sense. Well, I've looked at certain novels, Russian and otherwise, and I've said, if this was a series, War and Peace, if it were a series, would be season one, and that's all.

War and Peace is just six or eight principal characters, family relationships and love relationships played out against the background of Europe in turmoil. It's War and Peace, for God's sakes, right? But it's only got enough material for one 12-episode season. of material for one 12 episode season. And so even the most huge thousand page novels

would be consumed inside of a long form series. Right. It appears to me that things started to change. The first real network show that kind of broke the mold of what episodic television could be to my mind was lost because it was telling a longer story. It took big swings. It didn't always follow through or connect properly on some of those swings, but it was taking risks and it was telling a longer story.

And because it was successful, it was signaling to the networks and the studios, oh, that this could work. And then that is sort of matured in the cable universe with the Sopranos and Breaking Bad and The Wire, David Chase and Vince Gilligan, who are telling these long stories, who understood on some level,

like that there was this broader arc and that these characters were gonna land in a very different place from where they began. But with that also came the advent of the anti-hero as the protagonist, right? Which is different from Lost and has become a staple of serious, dramatic, long form storytelling. So why do you think, like,

why have we embraced the antihero? Why has, you know, the bad guy, I don't mean that in a perfunctory way. I realize there's multi-dimensions to all of these characters, but in a sense, you know, it is a different type of character that all of us as audience members have really gravitated towards and connected with,

which feels different than prior decades. Well, the length helps and the size of the cast also helps because where an audience places their empathy is in relationship to everything that's around it. And so when an audience or a reader enters a novel or film or TV series, whatever. Instinctively, they go in search of the center of good. They want some positive glow, some positive quality in a major character that causes them to think the thought, ah, like me, she's like me, he's like me, okay? That positive glow at the center

is in relationship to everything that's around it. So like in The Sopranos, if you surround Tony with mobsters, the FBI who's lying and cheating and whatnot, if you surround him with a darker, darker world and you see that he's troubled, that he has panic attacks, and he's terrified of something he doesn't understand, the audience goes, ah, panic attack, just like me. These things, I have these moments, I have that. He's vulnerable.

He's a gangster, but he's vulnerable just like me. And so he becomes the center of good, right? Because your empathy has to go somewhere. Right. And generally these antiheroes are living by a certain code and that might not be the code that we would choose for our own lives, but they have rules. Codes are code. Yeah, and often it's family first or whatever it is. And it's very important that they not violate that code.

And within the strictures of that code, there is a certain goodness that you can identify or a humanity. Yeah, and somebody who has some code, as you say. There's something that they would risk their life for. There's some standard that they would hold. Even if it's, long before Tony Soprano, there was the Godfather.

And we're used to empathizing with gangsters in that sense. I mean, Hollywood's done that for for decades and so you paint a darker world you turn on a light in the middle of it and there's some positive quality like i have a private coat and we go yeah just like me i too have a coat and so they they empathize with some really difficult, complex, troubling characters. I think that's a huge part of it, is that the writing is so good. They know how to sculpt the positive and negative charges in a cast and create this glow at the middle. That's one thing.

But I also think since the 70s, 80s, society in general is slowly waking up to what a corrupt world we live in. And I remember the first big surprise for me for that was Chinatown. So I think that the writers who are creating these great series like The Wire and Six Feet Under, you know, is a great series of Boardwalk Empire, right? We're actually 10 years behind society. People always ask, you know, do writers lead society?

Do writers lead society? Do they create things that people then emulate? Or does society happen first in society and the writers are attuned to that? And that's my point of view. It happens first in society. Because the forces of society are so titanic that culture and the economics and the politics of things are too huge to be led anywhere

and so writers i think are people who are very sensitive to what's happening in the world and so when they when they start showing the dark side people responded positively to it because they already knew it was there and they goes yes that's life that's who we are now that's our you know whatever and that even to this day, however, that audience that is willing to admit what a corrupt world it really is, is limited. So here we are now in an era in which, you know, basically the anti-hero reigns supreme. And culturally, and I was talking to Steve the other day, chatting with him about like what we might talk about. And one of the things that he brought up that I was, I think is super interesting

and it's, you know, a big part in the new book action Action is, you know, is about the ascension of the quote unquote, for better or worse, like the bad guy. And we're in this kind of bad guy era. In many ways, you know, Trump is sort of a classic villain and the narratives that we see being spun in popular culture and in politics are, you know, about what Trump is doing and we have Putin

and all of these kinds of, you know, they're like titanic bad guys, right? And in some ways, like, how is that reflected in the writing that we're seeing? 30% of the American public thinks that Trump descended from heaven, and he's here to lead us. So what is going on? The other 70 percent are not so but there's 30 percent of americans who really believe that he is the hero not an anti-hero

yes and so but yeah the majority of people um to some degree see it for what it is um when trump was elected, I know Michael Moore was saying before the election he's going to get elected. He was calling it very early. Right. And we're both from Michigan and so is Michael Moore, right?

Yep. And I've always known this since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit. since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit. I'm sure it was the same everywhere in America, but as kids, we thought that abusive, alcoholic fathers was normal. But nobody ever said that.

Everybody worshipped the family, right? But in the subtext, we all knew that the worst time of your life is your childhood. But we denied it and denied it and denied it. The society, America is a wonderful country

that we just couldn't face it. But now, it's out there to be seen and it's so clear. And so I think storytelling has responded to society's sense that we are not who we pretend to be. And I don't know why we ever thought we were. I mean, living here in LA back when,

I used to play golf with some engineers who were working to take this military system of communication into the world that became the internet. Right. Right? And they were all excited about what they're doing. And they would talk about it constantly over lunch and whatnot, right? And it was fascinating. At one point, they asked me, you know, what do you think?

What do you think of this? I said, it's fascinating. And if what you guys are proposing actually comes true, it will be a perfect mirror of human nature. And they all smiled because these engineers had no idea what human nature is. And the internet and social media are a perfect mirror.

The pornography, the cruelty, the meanness of all kinds, crime of all kinds, and they're able to do it anonymously. And so the internet has exposed human nature for what it really is. And they can get away with it for the most part because it's anonymous. And you see how what, you know, what? Here we are. Sorry, creatures. We really are. Here we are. And my feeling is that that's got to be a good thing because the truth is coming out little by little, but the truth is coming out

and people are going to have to live in a reality that they denied throughout history for the most part. Right, so you're saying basically that gives us a chance, the opportunity to actually reckon with it and perhaps transcend it, hopefully. It's a macro version of being in denial of the alcoholic father, right? Exactly, you just have to stop pretending.

Right, This is who we are. And living in reality is in a, Freud once said, he said, it's impossible to live in reality. He said, just try it. Try for one minute to live in absolute brutal rock bottom reality for one full minute. And he said, within 20 seconds, you'll start to fantasize. He said, it's just too awful. The mind can't bear it. And this is why we write stories. Well, what is reality?

How do you define reality? We're all operating through the lens of our perception and our perception creates the epistemics, the heuristics, how we make sense of the world, right? And story really is the core functioning operating system for all of that. Like story is uniquely human. It's what makes us who we are

and gives us this framework, right? So let's go back to just defining what story is. And it's just, it's curious to me that, story and humanity cannot be, they're inextricably linked with each other. We're the one creature on earth that is really operating on story all the time. And stories are functioning in very visible ways,

but also in so many invisible ways. And all of that really dictates the decisions that we make and how we kind of function in the world. When you take an action in life at any moment, you always take an action designed to create a positive reaction that will help you get toward what you want, right? I mean, this is as old as Socrates,

that all human beings act toward the good, their perception of the good. The worst of people act toward what they perceive to be the good or the positive. When somebody gets on a school bus with a jacket of dynamite and blows up himself and all the kids on that bus, that person believes he's doing God's work. Okay? So all human beings act toward the positive. So you always take an action to create a reaction, which will somehow help you toward what you want. Even if what you want is to make somebody else feel bad. Okay?

So you insult people because it's satisfying to watch them suffer for a moment, right? Or you compliment them because you want them to whatever, right? How do you know what to do in order to cause a reaction that will get you a step toward what you want? If you only had your living experience, you wouldn't know what to do. You'd be paralyzed. You wouldn't know what to do.

And so how do you know what actions to take in life to get what you want? Because you have been told stories since you were a child. You have read stories as a child. You have seen them, counseled by the tens of thousands of stories, everything from TV commercials to crime and punishment.

That whole stockpile of story is buried in your memory and gives you a sense of, if I do this in these circumstances, that person will take an action that will help me, whatever. a sense of if I do this in these circumstances, that person will take an action that will help me, whatever. Because life without story, life is terrifying, unlivable. You wouldn't know what to do.

Right, it's giving you this framework. But I think there's also something unique about story in that it tends to, like a story well told will live rent free in your conscious or unconscious mind in perpetuity, right? Like what is it about a great story well told that can just impact us so profoundly as opposed to the imparting of the information.

Like you can say to somebody, and this is kind of like what I do here on the podcast. Like some people, they're an expert in something and they'll come in and they'll say, here are the five things you should be doing every day or something like that. And you could take that information and some people might even act on that,

but that's very different from somebody who comes in and tells an incredible story in which those tenets or principles are conveyed that will live with that person and have a much more profound effect and also more likely to actually get them to change their behavior than a listicle or some bullet points or a PowerPoint or what have you.

So, you know, from that, you know, I'm always trying to like, you know, default to storytelling over just the information. And I can't help but like wonder, like, like how did we evolve to learn in that way such that- Yeah, neuroscientists have been looking at this for at least 40 or 50 years now. And what they've come to understand

is that the mind is a story-making machine. The mind takes its experience at every moment and is narratizing everything that happens to it. And so its understanding of reality is based upon the stories that it has told itself. It's why we human beings are able to rule the world as we do is because we can take raw experience and, first of all, look into the subtext and ask the question, why?

Why did that just happen? And your mind penetrates that and says, it recognizes there must have been a force in there. There must have been a need. She wanted this. He wanted that. This business wants that. The government wants that.

There's these desires going inside and they're motivating these behaviors and these forces are hidden underneath and then they manifest themselves in a behavior. But if you track back to it, you discover the reasons why. No animal ever asks why. Only human beings ask why. And human beings are like that little annoying five-year-old who says, why, daddy? Why,

why, why, why, why? The major question out of the mouth of kids is why. They want to understand causality. They want to understand how one thing causes another, how that effect then becomes a cause, it triggers another effect. And they want to understand the interconnectedness of life. They want to understand why. Stories express why. At the end of a story, you understand, if it's well told, why these characters, these metaphors for human beings did what they did, what they wanted, why they wanted it, how they went about trying to get it. And so the story educates you

on the hows and whys of things. Perhaps most profound of the stories that impact our lives for better or worse are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. We're all walking around with some version of a locked in narrative, right? That either liberates us or imprisons us, probably imprisons us, you know,

and probably is working in disservice. But how do you think about that? Also known as self-deception. Yeah, none of these stories are true, whether they're good or bad, they're all illusions. True in the sense they're not factual. They may have a real truth in them, however, about why we did what we did.

But yes, trying to make sense out of our own life. And we go back with regret often. Why did I do that? Why didn't that work? Why did I fail at that? Or was I just lucky? I mean, we're trying to make sense out of our own life. And so we tell ourselves stories out of our memories.

And the stories that we tell ourselves are very selective. Yeah. And deceptive. So what's the story that you tell yourself about yourself? Some years ago, I was lecturing in Spain and a journalist there asked me a question nobody had ever asked me,

which was, because I'd probably, by this time I'd been lecturing for at least 25 years. And he asked me why. He said, why do you do this? Why do you travel? You know, he said, you must have made enough money by now. Why do you keep traveling the world

trying to help people compose insightful, honest stories for page, stage, and screen? Why? Why do you do this? And I had to think because I had never, until he asked me that question,

I had never really thought to ask myself that. And I said, well, very little in life, very little, is meaningful. It's random, far more random than we want to believe. But meaning is a function of choice choice you can attribute meaning meaning is something that we give to something else yeah it's it's as what i was saying was there is no intrinsic meaning to life it is a biological accident that occurred on this planet, maybe others, but there is no intrinsic meaning. That doesn't mean it's not the same thing as saying life is meaningless.

There is no intrinsic meaning, but you, as the existentialists used to teach, you have to find your project. You have to find out what gets you up in the morning what's your purpose in life you have to give your life meaning and you have to do it yourself if you wait for other people to do it you will live an invalid life it won't be your life you'll be leading other people's lives and so i i thought you know i, there's no intrinsic meaning. And so what is my meaning? Why do I do this?

And the answer that I gave him was this. There is no intrinsic meaning in reality, in life. There is, however, suffering. That's real. Human beings suffer. all living things suffer that's what it is to be alive is to suffer anything that a person can do to alleviate the suffering in others others is a good thing, a positive thing, a meaningful thing. Stories do exactly that. They make life livable. They help alleviate the suffering because great suffering comes from confusion, from just not understanding things. I don't know why. I don't know why. Why is this happening to me? Who am I, et cetera.

Those are terrifying things and you suffer in that confusion. Right, so it's providing this map of meaning that is giving you an explanation or a better understanding for your own personal struggle, but also making it a shared experience. Like if you're relating to somebody else who's gone through something analogous,

you don't feel quite alone or that your experience is unique from your fellow man. Yeah, it's not a question of stories don't tell us what we should do. There's a difference between ought and is. We ought to do things. When we have ideals, we understand we have certain standards that we want to achieve. We have ideals. And we ought to live up to our moral ideals, artistic ideals, right? We ought to.

But then there's is. There's what is. And stories, great stories, make what is clear. They don't tell you what you ought to do. Lord of the Flies is a magnificent novel about human nature, but it doesn't tell you what you ought to do. It just says, this is human nature.

This is what is. Right, right, right. And the more you understand what is, the less suffering you go through because you're living in reality, you're living in the is rather than the ought. You can still have your ideals and aspirations as long as they're not full of hope.

Right, well, extrapolating on that idea of suffering as being fundamental and a primary aspect of the you know, suffering as being fundamental and, you know, a primary aspect of the human condition. I've heard you speak many times about, you know, the idea of life being a struggle, right? You bristle at this notion that described life as a journey. I hate that word. And I want to kind of understand this a little bit better and perhaps you can indulge me in pushing back a little bit. Life is not a journey.

So let's deconstruct that a little bit. That's it. Come on. Journey is a California word. And there are many share. You just can't tell anybody anything in California. You must share it with them. Well, here we are in California.

Yes. And we're going to share some ideas on this. I mean, the way I look at it is, you know, journey, the word journey itself is a very broad word. It's also somewhat neutral, whereas struggle. No, no, no. Hold on, let me finish. It should be. It should be. You're right. It should be neutral. All right, hold on, let me finish. It should be, it should be. You're right, it should be neutral.

Journey is, it can be negative or positive, right? It doesn't exist on an extreme of the polarities. If you want to define it that way, but that's not how people use it. They use it as something aspirational. As a euphemism. Euphemisms are words to protect us from reality. We don't call it shit.

We call it number two. Okay? I got you. I follow. We use euphemisms because we can't face reality. It's too ugly. It's too awful. It's what it is.

And it's painful. And so we want to live in a, you know, like I said, denial, as psychologists have pointed out since forever, denial makes the world go round. And journey is a word that makes it possible to deny the truth. the truth. If you say life is a journey, a journey is you get on a bus in Cleveland and it takes you to Chicago and you sit there watching the countryside go by. That's a journey. Life is not like that. It's a struggle. And uphill, it's Sisyphus in that rock. Yeah. But it's also all the beautiful colors of the rainbow. Like, here's my point.

And like, hear me out. Just let me just finish this thought. So I do think journey is a broader term that, you know, struggle is very connotative and somewhat reductive in a negative sense. Like struggle of course is part of the journey. It's an essential part of it, but doesn't the word journey also make room

for the spectrum of experiences from joy to love and celebration and heartbreak and setbacks and conflict? It's all of it, right? It could be, but that's not how people use the word. Okay, I'm using it that way. They use it to avoid the realization that it's a bitch. It's not easy. It's hard. People are terrible much of the time. You have to deal with people. You know, I mean, one of the best things that come out of the pandemic is people are now working at

home and they're so pleased to be working at home. Why? Because they don't have to be around other people. It's as simple as that. Right? And so, yeah, I know. I know. But look, I teach writers.

It's very important from my point of view that writers use a truthful precise language that they do not indulge in euphemisms because if they use euphemisms in their own mind how can they possibly interpret reality in an honest

truthful way and celebrate it when it needs celebration, lament it when it doesn't, right? But if writers use words to separate themselves from reality, how in the world could they ever write anything that would bring the audience or the reader into contact with reality?

And so that's why I get, you know, peevish, I know, it get, you know, peevish. I know it's boring. No, it's not boring. I love it. I mean, it's not idle. I mean, there's a reason. I don't like the word hope much.

Hope is the denial of reality. If you really think about the possibility of me achieving what I want to achieve. What are the odds? I mean, there's a possible, you could get what you want, but the chances are you won't. But it's also the engine of tackling and overcoming obstacles, right?

You can't face dire or tragic circumstances without some, you can't get into action without some sliver of hope that you'll be able to navigate it and get to the other side. Now, there's a difference between expectation and hope, I mean, or anticipation and hope, because if people use the word hope

in the same way that they use the word anticipation or expectation, I'd be fine. Sure. Right? When people are going through hell and then somebody says, well, there's always hope. Right. No, I understand that.

That's greeting card bullshit. Yeah, right. I understand what you're saying. I mean, fundamentally what you're getting at is honesty, right? Like how can we strip away artifice and really pull the covers on reality and use writing and story as a means of elucidating the human condition

in its truth, right? And that's the core of great writing, whatever story it is you're trying to tell. See, if a writer is going to fault one way or another, I would rather that they fault toward cynicism, certainly skepticism, than fault toward optimism, hope, and everything's going to turn out all right, happy endings, right? I mean, it's not that you can't have a positive ending if the characters earn it. They have to earn it.

Yeah, that's the difference. But happy endings is a commercial imperative. Yeah. Well, any audience member knows whether they're conscious of it or not, the difference between a happy ending earned and one that's saccharine and, you know,

kind of slapped on top of it. And you leave, like, maybe you even feel good. Did you watch the series Leftovers? Oh, I made a list because I wanted to talk about my favorite long form shows. And that's up at the top. Like, I just think- And that shows and that's up at the top. Like I just think- And that ending-

It's one of the greatest. It's one of the most powerful, beautiful endings of anything I've ever experienced in my life. And those characters have earned that love in that moment. And so it's a positive ending, but it isn't a happy ending in the Hollywood sense of the word. It is a positive ending, but it isn't a happy ending in the Hollywood sense of the word. It is a positive ending.

They've reached something worthy in their lives, something of real quality in their lives, but they've been through hell to get there. And it's an honest ending, positive and honest. And so I'm not against happy endings. I'm just against the sentimentality. Who out there is really killing it? Like who in your mind

is really doing the great work right now? What have you enjoyed or consumed recently that you think really rises above? I mentioned Peaky Blinders. I just finished that. I thought that was wonderful. But that's from like five years ago, right? Well, I think the most recent season was recently this past year. Yeah, that was wonderful. But that's from like five years ago, right? Well, I think the most recent season was recently, this past year.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. You know, when people ask that question, I tell you it's a series that has stuck with me for the last year or two or whatever. And it's called Made. I don't think I've seen that. M-A-I-D, Made. And I just loved it.

And it did okay. It got some nominations and so forth. It's about a single mom and her, I don't know if they were ever actually married. I don't think they were, but they were living together, is an alcoholic and abusive. And she takes her kid, and she's never had a job.

She has almost no education, and she's thrown into the world. And she gets a job cleaning houses. And over the course of the series, grows as a human being, just figures out how things work, how she works, what her real values are. She's got a crazy mother and all the rest of it. And finally, she gets herself to college,

positive, happy ending, but she really earned it. And why does that series pop to mind when you ask that question? I can only say that it's wonderfully done, as usual, beautifully acted, but that's everything now. I mean, the actors as a community of artists are 10 years ahead of the writers.

Every time you turn on TV series, you see these wonderful performances and you say, where'd they come from? But I think the reason it got me is that's a world I don't know. Single mom, cleaning houses. The writing was so terrific, honest writing. There's some scenes in there that deal with hoarders.

I've known one hoarder in my life, a mother-in-law I had some time ago. And they decide then, some hoarder decides to clean up their house, but they can't do it themselves. I mean, they're not emotionally able, right? So they get a cleaning company. Or a house is going to be put up for sale. And so the realtor brings in a cleaning company

to make that house sparkle for the buyers. And the cleaners see what the previous owners, how they lived and how they left it. I mean, there was insights there into lower middle class, middle class, lower class, from an angle through the eyes of people

who have to clean up the mess that people leave. And at the same time, she's growing as a character and evolving based on a true story, based on a factual story. I'd never seen anything.

I've never experienced anything like that. And so I thought it was terrific. And nobody knows it. Yeah, I thought I'd seen all the great long forms out there. Well, it's not that long. I mean, it's one season. It's like eight episodes. All right.

I always hesitate over that question because you get judged by your answer. So if I like the Norseman, okay? Mayhem, right? People say, yeah, that's easy. Right, you're gonna get pigeonholed. mayhem right people say yeah you know you're going to get pigeonholed I get it I like the maid too

but I also like the Norseman so the choices are wonderful today I mean the good fight is coming back and my judgment the greatest TV series of all is Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad. All time.

All time. More than Sopranos, more than Breaking Bad, Mad Men, all of that. Of all time, of all time. Wow. Okay, no. Now I say Better Call Saul, it's the greatest TV series I've ever written, okay? And then somebody turns on episode one, my recommendation,

and they find this crazy Jimmy McGill and his mean-spirited brother and all the rest of it, and it just bores them to death, right? And they're going to say, well, who is this expert, McKee? What the hell does he know? So I just say, look, explore. Get Netflix and HBO and Prime and the usual Hulu and all the usual suspects and go looking.

And if something captures you, if it really works for you, you're going to have a quality of experience, a depth and breadth of experience in long form television that no human beings ever had prior to the 21st century. Yeah. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. This is, this is what we're creating now is breathtaking and it surpasses in its density and its complexity powers much of everything that we've ever, I mean, there's still Shakespeare and there's- Sure, sure. I mean, yeah, it's where all the talent

and the great work is happening right now, for sure. But now we are very fortunate to live in a world where the quality of insights into character, insights into society, what's right and wrong with our society are really astute. And I can't keep up with it. Yeah, there's too much.

It's too much. All the foreign language stuff too. There's amazing foreign language. Yes, if you start looking, if you're willing to read subtitles and you see all the stuff that's coming out of Denmark and Sweden. Oregon, Le Bureau from France was unbelievable.

Yeah, yeah. But anyway, let's shift gears here a little bit. I mean, when you, you know, with all of the amazing writers that you've mentored and worked with over the years, I mean, to your mind, what distinguishes good from the greats? Like when you think of William Goldman, who was a student of yours and is a friend of yours,

like what makes him that much better than someone just 10% less successful? Like what is the edge that makes the great people great? It's talent. And what is that? How does that talent translate onto the page? It has nothing to do with me. I cannot, you know, I teach what I teach.

People take it and use it as they will. And the fact that certain students of mine are really the highest water is a question of talent. You know, you can define talent. It's really simple. Talent, creative talent, is the discovery of the third thing. A talented person over on the right side of their brain,

they have a faculty, a creative IQ. Your conventional IQ is over on your left side. This is simplistic, but the creative IQ is certain people have the power to discover the hidden connection between two things that already exist, but a third thing that connects them in a way no one else has ever thought before. So what would be an example of that?

Analogical logic. An example I often give in class is that little poem that you read in junior high school, I think it is. It's called The Fog. Carl Sandburg's The Fog. And there's a phrase in there. It says, the fog, I think it's moved, I forgot. But the fog moved in on little cat's feet.

Fog is weather. Cat's feet is an animal. There is no necessary relationship between them. But Sandberg found a relationship between fog and cat's feet and when he puts it together in that simile like cat's feet a third thing is born into the world which is the relationship between fog and cat's feet

that's creativity it's analogical logic it's the discovery of the hidden connection between fog and cat's feet. That's creativity. It's analogical logic. It's the discovery of the hidden connection. It's delusional to think that you create from nothing. You cannot make something out of nothing. What artists do is they take what is and they find connections between all of what is and they fuse them into third things that are wonderful or beautiful

or enriched somehow when they do it really well. Right, and the kind of hidden piece there also is that it has to be true, right? Like that idea of the fog in the cat's feet, when you contemplate that, it not only elevates like the visceral experience of that, you know it innately like, oh yeah, that is what it is. Absolutely, and that's, you know, when someone's writing

and they're reaching for a metaphor or a metaphor comes to mind and they try it out and they go, no, that's not right. So they look for another one, another one, and out of 10, they might find one that is really fresh and true, and that's the one they use. So it's not as if these tropes of language

just fall out of the brain. Most of what falls out of the brain is worthless. So you have to have taste and judgment is to know what's- So how do you think about the idea of the muse though? Like the unseen inspiration and the mystical art of drawing down upon imagination. Steve Pressfield. I might find the tension in your perspectives here.

He wrote that wonderful book, The War of Art, and I wrote the preface to it. And his publisher asked me to write the preface to it. And I said, I think it's a wonderful book. It's a beautiful book, but I can't buy the muse. And his publisher said, good, because neither do I. I said, but there is talent and it is subconscious. And so it seems as if it's coming from outside of you, descending from above whatever metaphor you want to use, right? But of course it's coming from you. It's you. You're doing this, nobody else. And if it's a

mystery to you, it's because it's subconscious. But you know as well as anyone that many a great artist will say, I didn't create this thing. It kind of came through me. Like there's this idea of being, you know, present. Well, first of all, you have to understand. It's receiving kind of mode. You have to understand the marketing of artists. Okay. Right?

Uh-huh. They want to appear mysterious. We all know, anybody who's worked knows that if you keep 10% of what you write, it's remarkable. More likely something like five or two or whatever. It's a tiny, tiny percentage of what comes through you that you actually keep. And so they know that, you know, what is it to write?

What is it actually like? It's torturous and terrible. You sit down, a piece of paper, okay, or a screen on your computer, and he says, she says, and you knock out a scene. Takes maybe 10 minutes. Then what do you do? You read what you've written. And as you read it,

you critique it. Oh, shit, that's terrible. I shouldn't have, he wouldn't say that. And then you go back and you rewrite it. And then what do you do? You read it again.

What works, what doesn't? And most of it still doesn't work. Maybe one or two things you keep, and then you go back and you rewrite. And if you had a stopwatch at your keypad the way lawyers do, and kept track of how much time do I spend actually writing a scene,

and how much time do I spend critiquing it and playing with it and then rewriting it, the time you spend critiquing and analyzing is 10 times the time you spend writing it. Probably more than that. And probably much more than that.

I mean, we've all written one paragraph a day, right? And to come to sit down the next morning and go, a piece of shit, and out that whole paragraph that you spent a whole day on, it's gone. But if you tell people that, if the writer said, you have no idea how hard it is, man. I spent maybe 20 minutes a day creating something

that I didn't spend the next 10 hours savaging and I often just throw the whole thing out and start all over again. It's really hard work, it's gutty, it drives you crazy, your guts are in a knot all day long and that's why we drink, right? Right. If you actually said that to people, okay,

nobody wants to hear that. What they want to believe is that they were walking down the street and it just descended out of the ether and into me and through me. And it, you know. I get that. I mean, there's a workmanlike woodshedding of,

you know, that dispels the romance and the, you know, that dispels the romance and the, you know, mysticism of the whole thing. And the vast majority of writing is painful and hard and, you know, it's- And boring. Yeah, and boring, right? Not again. And lonely and all of that.

All the rest of it. But there are those moments of inspiration or temporary flow states where there's a sense of ease about it, right? Of course, of course. And you celebrate those and you go, at the end of the day, if you've got a decent pass

at whatever page that you're working on and you read it and you go, that's not bad, that's a good day. I lecture, I teach and I write for writers. And if anybody has to be honest about it, I do. I can't invite people into this world. Somebody decides I'm going to get out of college, I'm going to be a writer. They have to be willing to fail for the next 10 years.

That's 10 major works. You have to be willing to fail for the next 10 years. That's 10 major works, 10 novels, 10 films, 10 plays, 10 of whatever, at least one a year, at least one a year, for the next 10 years and nobody wants them. That's real. And I cannot pretend to my students that you're gonna have success by just following this, do that one thing or another, and it'll flow and it'll just come down to you or whatever.

Right, no, I get it. And I think that's a big piece in the success of the seminars is the fact that you tell it like it is, like this is the truth of the matter. This is a very difficult road. I'm actually restrained. Are you? Well, that's a good segue into- Well, I'm actually restrained. If I wanted to- Listen, I'm finding you to be very gentlemanly here and reserved. And that conjures the scene in adaptation, which upon seeing that made me intimidated to meet you here today,

because that iconic scene sort of precedes you. Can we talk about adaptation? Sure, of course. I mean, first of all, one of my all time favorite movies and that sequence and your persona being rendered by Brian Cox so brilliantly in that movie just, you know, lives with me. It's incredible, right? And I know there's a great backstory here.

Can you tell that story? Why Brian Cox? Is that the- Well, just, you know, how did this whole thing come together? The whole phenomenon? Yeah. Oh, God. I know you've told it a million times.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. I know you've told it a million times. Yeah, yeah. Phone rang one day, and it was a producer calling from New York, Ed Saxon. And he said, we have a problem. And I thought they wanted me to script doctor, right?

He said, we have a problem. I said, what's the problem? He said, well, we've got this writer, Charlie Kaufman, and he's written a screenplay and made you a character in it. He has freely stolen from your lectures and your book without obviously permission. And we don't know what to do. Well, you know what to do.

You knew he had to call you and get you on board. I said, I said, send me the script. So I read it. And- Was that the first, did you know Charlie Kaufman before that? No, no, no, no, no, no. So you didn't know what his particular flavor of, right. And I could see that what he wanted me to be is the villain.

He wanted me to represent Hollywood. Right. And he perceives Hollywood as the villain. And Hollywood is formulaic. And he perceived me as formulaic. An insult to his creative genius. Exactly. But I also realized he needs a villain

because otherwise the screenplay sucks. Right. It's just masturbation about how awful it is to be a writer, the stuff we were just talking about. And very importantly, the third act sucked. It was awful.

So I called Ed Saxon back and I said, I see what he's up to. And I see your concern because if you go ahead with this project, I will sue you for everything you've got. And he said, well, here's what we're going to do. One, you're going to write a redeeming scene for my character.

Two, I have to have say in the casting. And three, there has to be a whole new third act because the third act sucks and I can't be a character in a bad movie. How did it originally end? What was the difference? Oh, Susan Orleans shoots a cop. movie. How did it originally end? What was the difference? Susan Orleans shoots a cop. So it didn't have any of the meta nature of how you know, yeah, okay.

And you know, Charlie Kaufman is a fascinating guy in that, and there's many people like him, he's trying for the impossible. He wants to have a commercially successful art movie. He wants art and money.

I respect that though. And I would argue that he succeeded. He succeeded in that. I get it. I mean, some of the, not all of them, you know, I mean, it's connected. Like there's some, you know. Right. But he pretends he only wants to be an artist.

In fact, he knows how Hollywood works. He knows if he doesn't make money, he won't be working. And so it's a bit hypocritical. It's a bit, you know, pretentious. But that's okay. I said, okay. I said, but, you know, you know i said so we're gonna have to have meetings uh-huh so art imitates life imitates art yeah like what you're doing in the movie you're now doing for the movie yeah well you know before i decided to go for it, go with it. On my conditions, I talked to two people. I called William Goldman.

And I said, Bill, they want to make me a character in a movie. And he said- Let me just interject for a moment, apologies. But for people that don't know, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, wrote Butch Cassidy, All the President's Men, Marathon Man. Yeah. Go ahead, sorry.

Certainly the greatest writer of dialogue in the history of the movies. And he said, don't do it. I said, well, they're gonna give me permission on the casting. He said, well, really? Eh, eh, eh? Okay, who do you want?

I said, Gene Hackman. He said, okay, it'll be Gene Hackman with a big pink bow around his neck. He said, Bob, they're out to get you. Yeah, no matter how you slice it, you're gonna end up looking bad. They're gonna get you. If you let them, they're gonna get you.

Don't do it. So then I called my son. I said, Paul, and he said, do it. So then I called my son. I said, Paul, and he said, do it. But William Goldman says, he's a dad. You're going to be a character in a Hollywood film. In fact, I'd already been a character in one film called 20 Dates. He's going to be another character now in a major Hollywood film. He said, no matter what, you know, do it.

You'll love it. Do it. And so then I called Saxon back and I said, you know, I have to have casting, whatever.

And we have to have writers meetings with me and him. And we got to find a third act that, and the third act that they came up with, I said, okay. But I knew only half the audience would go with it. When it pivots towards his brother's version of what a good story is lifted from what he learned in your seminar,

basically. I thought it was fantastic. Well, yeah, but- I think it's one of the great third acts. Well, but- I mean, it's certainly unique and unlike anything you're ever gonna see. I'll tell you where the dividing line comes. In that moment that Meryl Streep's character, Susan Orlean says, we're going to have to kill him.

Right, that's the Rubicon where it all changes. Half the audience went on and they just didn't believe anything after that. But they're missing it. I know, I know, I agree with you. It just becomes so absurd. Yeah, yeah. And what, you know what-

But what was that like working with Spike and Charlie? They were great. They were great. They were great. And they didn't argue because I- But it was their idea to make that pivot and you just helped them craft that so that it would operate?

They wanted the ending they first sent me. And I said, no, that's out. But I sat down and I explained to them why. And they're reasonable people. And they sat there and, oh, yeah, I suppose, yeah, yeah. And they said, or you can do it without me. And if you, you know, if you put me in the, if I do not approve the last act and you put me in that,

then you will be faced with a lawsuit that I will win. So they tried to do it without my character. They sent me that draft without my character in it. And it really sucked. So then they came back and they said, yeah, well, we have to have you in the movie. And I said, well, then my conditions stand. They need to find a third act that works.

And so I sat down with them and I gave notes and they didn't argue. They were very not polite and listening. And I didn't tell them what to write. I said, this is why this doesn't work. And this doesn't work, that doesn't work, whatever. And I see what you're trying to do, but you haven't gotten there yet.

Yeah. And so anyway, but at the end of the day, it all was, you know. Right. And Brian Cox was your casting choice. Well, yeah, what happened was I said, I can't tell you who you must cast because who knows whether that actor's available. I said, but I want you to give me a list.

And what I needed to know was their casting philosophy. For all I knew, they saw for the McKee character, this could be the Dan Aykroyd, Danny DeVito school of casting, right? And so I said, send me a list. And it was the top 10 British actors of the day. So you were on the same page tonally. No, I've never imagined myself as Michael Caine. But you need that, that gravamen. Well, I saw what they were after. I saw what

they were after. And Brian Cox's name was not on the list. And I said, okay, I see what you're after, okay? I would like you to audition Brian Cox. And they said, who's Brian Cox? And I said, he's the best British actor you don't know. And so they went to London, and Dorchester come in the suite, and within two minutes, they knew he was perfect. And why Brian Cox over Michael Caine? I'll tell you. the suite and they within two minutes they knew that it was perfect and why brian cox over michael kane i'll tell you actors

wonderful actors like i mean that on that list was christopher plumber i mean you know i mean it was incredible um when they're playing a uh an antagonist, there's always this subtext of love me, love me, love me. Yes, I'm a bad guy. Yes, I do terrible things, but my heart is in the right place. A little break the fourth wall wink. They don't have to do that.

No, they're too good at that. They wouldn't wink. I'm not saying they actually would do that, but they're conveying that. There would be a certain thing going on, a certain suffering, a certain whatever. There would be the love me thing. And as wonderful as those actors are,

that for me, that would be fatal. I do not want my students to love me. I want them to respect me. I want them to learn from me, but I do not want to be loved. I don't want a bunch of people chasing me around, becoming my flock. I hate that.

You hate the word guru, right? Yeah, because it's an insult to them. It's not only an insult to me, in the ancient meaning of it just meant teacher, but guru in the modern terms is somebody who gets innocent people to fall in love with them. Yeah, it's pejorative.

Yeah. And he milks them for all the money he can get. No, I don't want that. So yeah, I hate the word guru and I don't want followers. I don't want that. That's a sick relationship, you know, the mentor-student thing. If it goes to the point where the student can't write without the mentor there approving it or whatever, I mean, how are you going to grow up and be a writer? A writer

is somebody who stands on their own. Right, and also the audience at your seminars is populated with people who've won Emmys and Oscars who return and return and return to remind themselves or to work through a particular problem that they're having. Like these are highly accomplished people that are sitting next to brand new people.

And so the word guru not only insults me as a person who's preying on people, but it insults them as fools to be preyed on. When in fact, the tremendous amount of success and talent sitting in that room, and most of my students are over 40 years old. These aren't kids. These are pros.

Yeah. And so anyway. So Brian Cox is gonna drop the hammer. Well, you see it now in succession. Yeah, it augured Logan Roy in many ways. I mean, there's a lot of similarities in that portrayal. Brian Cox is a wonderful actor who does not do that love me thing.

And I knew Brian, I met him up, he's a student of mine and we came to lecture up in Glasgow and I knew him from his performances on the stage in the West End and small movies because I lived in England for 10 years.

And so that's how I knew Brian because I'd seen him repeatedly on stage or screen. And he was a student. And I watched him in a play called Skylight, David Hare play. And I really admired that he's not asking for sympathy. And I could imagine another actor playing that character, woe is me and I'm misunderstood. And I really, I mean, I could imagine it, but he didn't.

And so anyway, that's why Brian. Yeah, iconic. I mean, were you happy with how it came out? Oh, sure. You know, I took my son, Paul, to a screening. And imagine, you know, it's one thing for me to see myself portrayed, but imagine for a son to see his father portrayed. And so after we went out to the parking lot and I said,

so what did you think? And Paul said, dad, he nailed you. There you go. Yeah. Did you ever speak with Nicolas Cage about it? No, I've never met him. Yeah. It's interesting.

I love it. I think it's fantastic. And I'm a Charlie Kaufman fan and a Spike Jonze fan. And that movie is a movie I probably revisit, you know, every year or so. But when you think about master storytellers, and I would consider both of those guys, you know, among that group,

often you hear about how they flex the rules or they're the ones that are breaking the rules. So it's back to this idea. That's a theme and adaptation, which is the structure is the bad guy and the geniuses are the ones who are operating outside of it. And I think I wanna hear your perspective on this

because there's a lot of confusion, I think around this. When you think about, whether it's Tarantino or Charlie Kaufman, they are all operating within a structure that might elude the average viewer, but in truth, they're all adhering to time tested tenets of good storytelling. Sure, but the word rule, rules,

is another word like journey and other words that I... Steve's taking off. Steve, thank you for coming. I react again. Great to see you. There is no such thing in art. There are no rules. There's a form.

And the form has a purpose. There's a painting, for example. Almost virtually all paintings are rectangular. Why?

Because if they're square or circular, it reduces everything to a symmetry. Symmetry has no tension. It's boring to the eye, all right? And so there's a form. The rectangular frame is designed to put objects in certain lines or colors or whatever you're working with

in certain positions within that rectangle to create a tension that holds the eye, moves the eye. All right? It's not a rule. Nobody says you have to paint in a rectangular frame. It's a form. It's used for a purpose. It creates tension.

It's a form. It's used for a purpose. It creates tension. And so people think that storytelling has rules, and I react against that. There are no rules. There's a form. Life goes out of balance at some point. And out of balance makes us wonder how and why will these characters, if possible,

restore the balance of life. And the story then is a struggle toward achieving that balance, positive or negative or something ironic in between. And so throwing life out of balance and the conflicts and the effort to put it back into balance is not a rule. It's a form. If life doesn't go out of balance, there's no story. It's a portrait, right? And so you can't say you have to throw the life out of balance as a rule. It's just, it's the nature of the art form. It's the rectangular frame. It's the movement from imbalance toward balance is the rectangular frame of a story told in time.

And I try to get writers to understand that. Nobody's telling you how to write. There are no rules. If you write something that is absolutely wonderful no matter what and intelligent sensitive people read it your career will be made because it's absolutely wonderful okay right and you have captured something that is um that is compelling how you do that there's a form. And for thousands of years, this is how people telling stories have shaped a story. And there's certain elements that are constant, but you could do it like the film Betrayal. You could tell the story backwards if you want to.

Betrayal is told backwards, right? And you remember Betrayal? I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I don't think I saw that. It starts with the first scene is a couple years after their affair where they were each married to somebody else or she was married.

And she says he knows. Her husband has learned about their affair. Her husband is that character's best friend. And then it works its way backwards. And then it goes backwards in time until this film ends on Boy Meets Girl. And it works its way backwards. And then it goes backwards in time until this film ends on boy meets girl. And it works beautifully. It's an exercise in dramatic irony.

At every point, we know more than the characters know. And so how will these characters react? What made this, how will they react when they find out what we already know? Got it. So you can turn it on its head. In the book I wrote on character, I explored the whole spectrum of character, including radical characters from avant-garde modernist, post-modernist plays,

films, and novels, because that's choice. If you want to, you could write like Samuel Beckett and create absolutely radical characters. And I'm gonna do the same thing in the next book on story. I'm going to show them the full spectrum, which includes absurdist. Right. On the subject of dialogue,

there are certain very talented writers who are super idiosyncratic in the way they write. Like I'm thinking of Mamet, Sorkin, again with Tarantino, dialogue that is incredibly poetic, but also dialogue that very much draws attention to itself. Right, like you know a Sorkin scene, like you know who wrote that scene when you read it or when you hear it.

But when you say you, you mean us people in the business. I suppose. But if you're in any form of cinephile. The general audience would not know the difference. There's like a trademark staccato or mammetisms or the way that Tarantino writes. The fellow writers. They are the authors of those works, very much so.

Because you don't want to suggest, Rick, that when people go to see something by Tarantino or Sorkin, that the average person watches this is saying, ah, Sorkin. Ah, Tarantino.

They're not. They're into the story. You don't think so with Tarantino, even? Yeah, even with Tarantino. That's interesting. But then, I don't know, movie fans are fans and maybe there is some of that. But the reason I call attention to that

is that I wouldn't want somebody that I'm teaching thinking that they should develop an eccentric style of dialogue that calls attention to itself. That's what I'm getting at. It's one thing if you're a master, but other than that, it feels like artifice and distraction that's being driven by ego

and a kind of look at me thing as opposed to serving the story. Yeah, if it doesn't work, it certainly does. But then the other side of that coin is bad dialogue that calls attention to itself as bad dialogue. Well, there's no shortage of that. Dialogue sucks. Like why are movies so bad, Robert?

Come on. Why have they gotten so bad? So bad right now. So bad. Yeah, I mean, August was horrific. The tectonic plates of industry and the way in which- I have a, I don't know. I don't know how long cinema will last as an art form.

I think that in some time in the future, and I don't know how distant, cinema will be like then, like ballet is today. It'll be minor, esoteric, artsy, I don't know. But it won't last. There's a lot of

reasons. Film is so expensive that they have to, they're going to spend reasons, film is so expensive that they have to, they're going to spend $200 million. It's got to make a billion to be profitable, literally.

It's got to make five times the investment to turn a profit. And so you've got to think, how can I get a billion dollars worth of people to watch this thing? So the commercial imperative is driven by the nature of things, and it's not like television or long-form streaming. You're asking people to get up out of their house,

get in their car, drive somewhere, park, go to the movies at a certain time, whether it's convenient or not. And so it's gotta be a subject matter in a genre that would be, that's why I wrote the book. This is action. That's why I wrote the book, action. It is, you know, it's a Star Wars, Marvel, Avatar universe that we're all living in

for better or worse. Yep. And the movies that are being made are movies at that massive scale that are either franchise spawning or franchise perpetuating. They're amusement park rides for the most part. Yeah. And because they cost so much,

they have to be that successful, which means they have to appeal to the largest possible demographic and they have to work in China and all of that. And, you know, look, some of these movies are, I don't mean to be completely, I love, I go see everything. I like seeing bad movies, even if it's just an exercise in trying to figure out why they're bad

or why they've made certain choices. There's some wonderful action films. I love going to the movies and I love a lot of these big movies, but it is interesting that action has been, you just came out with this book, Action. Action is the domineering genre that monopolizes most of what we see.

I don't know if it's domineering. Well, yeah, okay. There you go. Yeah. But also action merges with crime. Well, comedy now also with all these big movies. War. And so action mixes with a number of different genres.

It isn't all superheroes, but whatever. But I wrote that for people if they want to make movies, if they can master the form of action, mix it with other genres or do it in a pure form, whether realistic or fantasy to whatever. That's where it is today. And so I would hope that we would see some good action because when it's good, it's great.

I love it. Yeah, me too. But television has sucked the audience away from going to the movies to see sensitive character complex stories on the big screen. Yeah. I want to see more movies like Michael Clayton. Those movies are not going to get made for the cinema. But while the aperture is closing and constricting on what is ending up at the Cineplex on Friday night, meanwhile, in television, it's expanded beyond

in terms of the opportunities. I mean, it's basically infinite. And there is room for, I mean, would Michael Clayton be made as a six hour Netflix limited series? Maybe, but that's something I would watch too, right? But I wanna see, I like my drama serious. I don't like comedy in my sci-fi.

I want my drama serious. I don't like comedy in my sci-fi. I want my hard-boiled shit. I like stuff about, I like espionage and CIA and MI6. It's like, those are long form. They're not making, aside from Mission Impossible, like you're not gonna see that in the movie theater anymore. No, but it isn't only the movies. I mean, there's novels. Of course.

So more people think that people have stopped reading. It's just not true. More novels are read and sold today, they're sold and read today than ever. People spend more time, you know, on their computer screen reading novels than ever or listening to the audio. Two more things I wanna get into with you and then I'll release you to your life.

And one of those things is, you know, we've talked a lot about movies, the art and craft of writing, screenwriting, et cetera. Most people listening to this or watching this are not professional writers. Maybe they enjoy the movies they read, et cetera. So I guess what I want to get at is like, why should they care about story? Why is story important? Why is thinking about story and taking seriously the art of storytelling, something that is applicable to the average person. Stories, I think as we discussed earlier,

are equipment for living. So why do we go to the storyteller? Why do we read novels, go to the theater, film, television? It's to give us a deeper and deeper understanding of what is absurd and comic and right. What is tragic and dark and painful, whatever, to see the full spectrum of life beyond anything we could possibly live. You get to enter into worlds you could never ever know by the thousands. And so story expands your humanity, and it also enriches your understanding of how and why people in the world do the things they do

to equip you to live more successfully. The other is that the more you read, as you read, as you watch, when you go to the theater, try to challenge yourself as an audience or a reader to read or to experience, to be an audience to something a little higher, better in some fashion, more complex, more difficult

than what you just read or watched last month. And the wonderful thing about story is it's a museum. If you wish, you could go back and read the Odyssey or the Iliad. You could read the great plays written 2,500 years ago in Athens. And you can go back to the greatest of writers,

Mark Twain and Tolstoy, and it's all there waiting for you. And every one of those great works is as valid today as it was when it was written. But you're going to have to learn to read in that language if you're going to read mark twain you're going to have to have an ear for that lingo you know edgar allen poe you have to have an ear for a whole different um and as a result what i do today is just to save myself some time or to give myself some choices,

I just pay attention to awards. The Pulitzer Prize, the Booker, Emmys, why not? Right, you mean just as a gatekeeper to quality? To see who's, you know. And I look not for the winners, but for the nominees. You know, you can go online and see, you know, what were the 10 novels nominated for the long list for the Pulitzer, for the Booker Prize,

or for the, you know, the Whitbread and others. And it gives you some guidance otherwise it's just totally random so I do that you don't have to do that but you want to

challenge yourself to experience more and more fascinating even if it's difficult, you know. And a really good film, a really good novel, is worth seeing or reading more than once.

Just like, it's the same thing, the second time you see a really fine film, it's a whole other movie. Same thing with a novel. The second time you read a really fine novel, you can't, you can't. Well, it also depends on the phase of life you're in. We're forced to read, you know, a certain set of novels, you know, throughout high school and college. We're at a certain phase of life. Maybe we can connect with it. Maybe we can't, but,

you know, now many years later, some of those themes that seemed irrelevant to you then become highly resonant. Yes, they do. Yeah. The theater is literally a museum. What sustains the theater is we've got all these great playwrights from Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller

and Lillian Hellman and William Inge and on and on and on of the 20th century, Eugene O'Neill, and the past, Shakespeare first amongst them. And the theater keeps going, keeps alive, by bringing them back, these great plays from the past. And you see, when you watch Ibsen or Strindberg today, you watch a play like The Father and you see the ugliest marriage in the history of marriages and written in 1890.

And it's fearsome and it's shocking and funny too, right? It's always shocking to read something that's quite old and realize that it is as of the moment as anything. Because humanity doesn't change. It teaches you the lesson that everybody has to learn is that nothing changes. Human beings are human beings are human beings and they're not evolving, society is,

but human beings are not evolving. We got the same hardware. It's fascinating to me, clearly you're super intelligent and insightful and witty and you have a sort of brash confidence about you. And we didn't even get into much of your background, but you were an actor, you were a theater director and a director.

You've worked in many capacities in the industry, outside the industry. You could have, to me, it feels like you could have become successful at any of these things that you chose. You could be running a studio. You could have become a professional screenwriter, a director, a producer, et cetera.

You make this decision to make your life about story. And I'm just interested in like, why did you make that decision? I found what I do best. Yes, I could have been, I was, I directed what over 60 plays and they were very successful, you know. And so I could have directed in the theater

and then maybe moved on to film, television, whatever, and spent my life doing it. And I'm sure I would have been fine. Here's what happened. I was a busy screenwriter in Hollywood. I sold every screenplay I optioned, every screenplay I wrote. One of them I've optioned recently again for the fifth time.

It was written when? In the 80s. Wow, and it's still been re-opted. Yeah, people love it, people love it. But they don't make it. All the television that I wrote got made. And so I could see my work on screen. And I recognized that, yeah, this is of quality and it's professional and it's fine.

But it's not Ingmar Bergman. Mm-hmm. Who, in my judgment, is the greatest screenwriter in the history of the movies. But I discovered that by lecturing and writing about writing, I had insights, and I could make sense of things for people in ways others couldn't. And that if I pursue that, I love doing it. And if I pursue it, I could be the Ingmar Bergman

of writing about writing. And so I did what my instincts led me to do, which is to become the best at what I can do. And so that's why I write about writing, because I love doing it. And it matters, apparently. So I made a choice i i remembered very clearly i could pursue um screenwriting and i was making a living at a house in santa monica you know swimming pool

and all that um and you know maybe someday you know who knows, do something special. But- There was something about teaching and the interaction with the students that lit you up in a new and different way. It's really, it lifted my heart to see their faces while I'm lecturing and to see light bulbs going on as they get it,

and they literally go, they gasp at times, right? Yeah. Well, it is a performance, right? It is theater. Yeah, there's that. You're writing, you're performing, there's jokes, you know, there's an entertainment aspect to it. So, you know, it kind of pulls on all of those skillsets. Yeah, and it helps them understand what they...

I tell you, the pros who come into the lectures that are already successful. Not the least of which being people like Akiva Goldsman and like David Bowie took your class, right? Yes, yeah, he was great. That's unbelievable. David Bowie. Did you interact with him? Yeah, yeah, of course.

He was one of the best laughers that I've ever had. I mean, the lectures are, as you were pointing out, full of comedy or humor, wit. And David Bowie just belly laughs. It was incredible. He literally, his knees would come up to his chin. He'd laugh so hard. Did you see Moon Age Daydream yet?

Have you seen the documentary? No. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Bowie because that movie is a work of brilliance. You have to check it out. Is it really? Yeah, it've been thinking a lot about Bowie because that movie is a work of brilliance. You have to check it out. Is it really? Yeah, it's incredible. It's truly incredible. It's a documentary, I mean, it's Bowie's life,

but it's, I think to coin like what Brett Morgan, the filmmaker said about it, he was trying to make a movie about David Bowie if David Bowie was making a movie about his life. So it's a very surrealistic kind of sonic experience that is nonlinear in any way, but which really conveys the sensibility of this artist. Yeah, I highly recommend you check it out.

But anyway, I interrupted you. No, no, no, no. He's the perfect example of what i was talking about that that um it's it's very moving for me to see someone get it and you see it in their eyes in an instant it It's not, you know, there's this look. And writers who have been, you know, they're in their 30s and 40s, 50s or whatever, often come to me on the break or after, and they're elated.

And they say, I solved my script. I solved my novel at about 11 o'clock this morning because of, you know, and that's, yeah, I live for that. Yeah. Do you think about legacy at all as you're kind of concluding this tour? Well, there's books, you know, there's books. And all of my lectures are recorded.

And now that I've, this is the last, this is, you know, the farewell tour. So I'm not gonna do live performances anymore. And so now if people want, we've recorded everything. Right. And so all of that is out there for them. And the books, whether, you know, I've read all my books for the audio version. And you can read them or, you them or listen to them, whatever.

But every writer who writes fiction or nonfiction would like to think that what they expressed, what they had to say, will live on after them for some period of time. I mean, you know, not forever, you know, can't all be Shakespeare, but it's a form of immortality or at least temporary immortality. And so I don't, no, I don't think about my legacy because I've already taken care of that.

I wrote the books and that's my legacy. They will live on. Yeah, you know. The story is now 25 years old, the book. And it sells as much or more today than it did 25 years ago. Yeah, I'm not surprised. So if I had died right after I wrote story it would still be doing well

25 years later so I won't have any I can't say I won't have any regrets because I made a lot of mistakes in life but when I die I will die with a sense of satisfaction I did what I set out to do well I think that's a good

beautiful place to end it. Thank you, it really was an honor to spend time with you. Oh, it was great fun, it was great fun. I really enjoyed it. Best of luck with the end of this tour. I know you got a big day tomorrow. So I appreciate you taking time. Everybody should definitely pick up

"'Action, The Art of Excitement for screen page and game. And don't forget story. And five other books. Yeah, you've got dialogue, you've got character. We didn't even get into storynomics and the power of story and business and all of that. Maybe you'll come back and talk to me some more about that. But crazy respect for everything

that you've done in the world. And I think it's a great service and it was just brilliant to meet you today. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com

where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates,

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See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.